[CLUE-Tech] My 30-second SuSE 9.1 Review (err, whinge)

[Jed S. Baer]

The "promo" Novell disk set arrived recently, and being eager to get up to
the latest cool stuff such as the 2.6 kernel, Gimp2, the latest Mozilla,
etc., and also wanting to get a nice clean start, as opposed to chancing
what an upgrade would do to the "not quite RH anymore" system I'm
currently running, I had acquired a new HD, and planned on installing to
that, and then mounting up the old HDs and moving things around to get
"back in business". Well ...

I was surprised, when the disks arrived from Novell, that what I got was 3
DVDs. Don't know why I still expected CDs. I didn't mind too much
springing for a DVD/CD-RW combo drive.

So after rearranging disks, I booted up the DVD and fired up an install. I
pretty well liked SuSE's installer. I did find it odd that many of the
packages showed up under multiple groups, but no biggie really. The
dependency check seemed to work well -- getting those things straightened
out seemed easier than what I remember from my last RH install. As is
typical, I found myself being moderately annoyed at having to include
stuff I knew I wouldn't need or use. But the packagers build various
things with, it seems, everything including the kitchen sink enabled, and
I guess having infrared capability on the system isn't really an issue,
considering how cheap hard drive space is these days.

Partitioning the new HD was easy. (Note to self: do a little woodshedding
on the various filesystem types before trying this again.) SuSE offers all
the latest whizbang filesystems, and lets you specify various options for
each. Cool.

After the install, the system booted fine, although I rather like seeing
the various boot messages go by, as opposed to a graphical screen with
nothing but a progress bar. It seemed that the boot process took longer
than my RH8 system does (identical machine, just with HD cables swapped
around). My guess is that SuSE is doing some hardware probing -- I have
kudzu turned off on the RH system.

So, onto configuring things. Not much really to do there, since SuSE did a
great job discovering hardware. I set up my printer, and was surprised to
see it actually listed -- the RH box has a couple variants of HP LaserJet4
printers, but neither is specifically listed as being what I have (it's a
LaserJet4L). Configuring the ethernet card was equally easy and
uneventful.

User configuration ticked me off a bit. I attempted to create a group, and
YAST complained about the group number I was using. Well, hey, I'm root. I
can choose a group number, thank you. Given that I planned on mounting up
the filesystems on my existing HDs, and using some of that stuff, I wanted
to use the same user and group numbers as existed on my RH install. (Same
result when running YAST later too.) And, by the way, since I'm logged in
as root, why does YAST prompt me for the "adminstrator" password. I guess
I mistyped it, because it gave me an error about being unable to run "su".

It would have been nice if the install had specifically asked me what
screen resolution I wanted on my monitor, but that was pretty easy to fix.
I actually wound up just copying my old XF86Config file (which I had put
on a floppy before starting this little project), but it looks like I
could have used YAST easily enough. The only thing was, that I wanted to
get to a text login before messing with X. So, in an Xterm, I became root
and typed "telinit 3". Got the same logo display as during a boot ... and
the system was hung. It responded to CTRL_ALT_DEL, and there I was back at
runlevel 5 again. So I used YAST to change the default runlevel (couldn't
remember the boot param to do it).

Once I got the basics out of the way, I took a tour through the menus.
Woops. I had specifically unchecked all games during the install. I'm just
not a computer gamer. Several games were nonetheless installed on the
system. I didn't see any games come up in the dependency check, so I'm
surprised they were there. This also happens with RH. I don't know why it
should be so hard to do what the user says, when there's no good reason
not to.

OK, time for the acid test. Can I get online? I use dialup networking. I
hadn't configured the modem during the install -- just wanted to keep
things simple, I guess. Since /dev/modem doesn't exist, there's apparently
nothing to do at the modem config screen. So I go to an Xterm, create
/dev/modem, and back to YAST, and get the modem configured.

Now, how do I actually dial up my ISP? Good question. One without an
apparent answer. Logged back in as a regular user, there's nothing I can
find in any of the menus for activating the modem. The "help" icon brings
up help for Gnome. So I think maybe there's a menu update that has to be
triggered. I log out, and log back in again -- no change. Logged in as
root, there's still nothing I can find. I figure I'll try wvdial, just in
case that's what I'm supposed to use -- it complains that there isn't any
user/login information configured. So back to YAST I go to make certain
all that stuff is configured. It'd be nice if there were a "save" button.
It's not quite as obvious as it ought to be that the only way to save
changes to a sub-screen is not to go back to the main screen, but to hit
"next".

Anyway, wvdial still doesn't work, same error.

I guess this is now my litmus test for a Linux distribution. Way back at
RH5, the dialup networking GUI stuff didn't work. I wound up writing my
own dialer, which I still use, because even with RH8, their dialup GUI
doesn't work. Now with SuSE9.1, I can't even find a program to fire up the
modem. This is something that has been pretty easy to get done in Windows
since Win'95. It really disappoints me that it still isn't just as simple
in a major Linux distribution. Yeah, there are all kinds of things that
work well in Linux. But when an IT veteran such as myself, who's been
using Linux for about 6 years or so, can't get a modem connection
configured and running in under 15 minutes, that's just nuts.

So I've recabled, and I'm back to my RH8 system. Will I go back to SuSE? I
don't know. If I were building a whole new system, I'd be willing to spend
some time figuring things out, and getting used to a different distro. But
since I don't have that luxury, I might just let it sit for a while. It's
too bad, really. I just can't have my main machine be offline for how ever
long it takes to figure out how to get the modem working.

jed
-- 
http://s88369986.onlinehome.us/freedomsight/

... it is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday
facilitate a police state. -- Bruce Schneier