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 2 of 2 I was about to write all about it then and there (this was around 2am this morning) - but then wondered if the good people at openSUSE had taken it easy when building a CD with KDE as its desktop environment - simply because they had put in all the effort when making the image for the one in which GNOME was the desktop environment. Featured Whitepaper 5 Best Practices for Smartphone Support (GNOME tends to be favoured by th Featured Whitepaper 5 Best Practices for Smartphone Support e US-based distribtions while KDE is preferred by those which are Europe-based. SUSE was once the pride of Europe but is now owned by Novell, an American company.) My reasoning proved to be correct. I spent about 15 minutes downloading the CD with GNOME as the desktop environment. I went through the installation and by 3.30am, I was looking at an installed system. Yet I'm sure that there'll be a number of people who'll tell me that this KDE-GNOME bunfight is all in my head. Sure. During this installation, once the repositories were deselected, no software was downloaded. Strange. There are a number of things about the installation procedure which seem illogical. For one, if there is no proper inbuilt mechanism to give an individual an idea of how long the installation will take, then it's better not to have one at all. I noticed wild fluctuations and in the end decided that it would end when it ended. There are some other irritants but I'll save those for a day when I'm writing about the innards of the distribution. A large number of other distributions will give you an installed system within half an hour of popping a CD into your PC. openSUSE obviously knows something we all don't and takes one through the equivalent of Chinese drip torture, ensuring that only those who persevere will get a system up and running. After the ordeal, I'm just thankful that this was only an experiment and that I don't have to use this distribution on a daily basis. Tags See All Tags Powered By Joomla Tags Please enable JavaScript in your browser to post your comment! << First page <   1 2 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

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