After flirting with tech from 1989 onwards, Sam Varghese began to experiment with Linux in 1998. A couple of years later, he began using the Debian distribution as a single-boot system for his personal use. From that point onwards his interest grew and he has since written widely about free and open source software, with a great deal of his writings based on his own experiences, rather than anecdotal evidence. Open Sauce will focus on a genre of software that is present everywhere but rarely acknowledged; a genre that has little eye-candy but does most of the heavy lifting; a genre that is designed and written by people whose accomplishments are only occasionally recognised. Above all this blog will follow the KISS principle - Keep It Simple, Stupid.

openSUSE 10.3: one step forward, two steps back

by Sam Varghese

Tuesday, 09 October 2007

Page 1 of 2 These days when you download a Linux distribution and burn it to CD, you would expect that it would not take too much of an effort to have a look at it. Unless, of course, it's one of three distributions which are aimed at so-called geeks - Gentoo, Debian and Slackware. Featured Whitepaper 5 Best Practices for Smartphone Support But in the case of openSUSE, Novell's community version of its SUSE distrbution, this isn't the case. No, you are set for quite an ordeal and if you don't have some background in using Linux and don't know some of the politics within the community, you won't be able to have a look at it. Last night, I noticed that openSUSE 10.3 had been released and decided to have a look at it. I noticed a flashy headline which read "Novell Pumps Up Sound, Graphics in New OpenSuse 10.3" at a site called LinuxInsider and decided to head over to the openSUSE site and take a look. There was a choice of downloads and I chose the CD which had KDE as its desktop environment; KDE is one of the two main desktop environments for Linux users, the other being GNOME. The download appeared to be a full CD, coming in at around 690MB. Normally, when one downloads a full CD one expects that it can be used on its own to effect a full installation. I noticed an Add-ons CD, but since this was said to contain software which was licensed under terms other than those of the General Public Licence, I reasoned that this wasn't really necessary. After booting up, one of the first things one has to do is to agree to a long licence. This is reminiscent of that other system called Windows - maybe Novell's deal with Microsoft has been influential in this design. After a few more screens, online repositories start getting downloaded. This took me by surprise; with a full CD, I did not think that I needed anything more from the worldwide web. I did not expect that the choice of downloading repositories would be selected by default. I expected there would be fair warning - something like "do you want to add other software from online repositories?" or "do you want to download security updates?" But these minor courtesies appear to be unimportant for the openSUSE people so a few minutes went by with lists being downloaded. Then up came a list of software which had been selected for installation - a total of 2.2 GB! Does one really need all that software? Anyway, I went on and after some software had been installed from the CD which I had created, the downloading began. It took around half an hour in all for the software installation to end - and then up flashed a screen which informed me "some packages failed to install." Clicking OK on this took me back to a screen which is part of the old SUSE text install. I started all over again from this point and, this time, deselected all the online repositories. Wonder of wonders, despite this a few packages were still downloaded. A total of 1.5 GB was installed and when it came to the end, up sprang that annoying message again: "Some packages failed to install." I tried using the "rescue system" option but this again brought me back to the installation procedure. It's annoying to say the least. << First page <   1 2 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

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