Installing SL on Open Suse Linux!

I'm very pleased at my new install of SL running on opensuse linux. Once again I'm impressed with another Suse release, so, I'll just detail how things went.

Suse very recently (Dec 18th, 2008 I think) released their newest distro, Suse 11.1.

You can obtain the latest and greatest linux ever at http://opensuse.org

My hardware arrived as a AMD64 barebones kit + nVidia 9800 GT video card.

There are 2 basic ways to install Suse. Either download and burn the DVD image or download and burn the bootable CD image and do a network install. Although I prefer to have the entire install on 1 DVD, I don't have a DVD burner, so the network install was my only choice.

I installed the motherboard, ram, cpu and fan. Powered up the system to make sure it booted.

Installed the SATA HD and CDROM. Powered up to make sure it boot.

Disabled FDD controller in BIOS. It was crying that I didn't have a floppy drive attached.

Installed the video card and put the DVI -> VGA adapter on my monitor cable. Powered up, made sure it boot.

No image on screen. Switched the monitor cable from the top DVI header to the bottom one and it worked. (Upon closer inspection, the bottom one is labeled DVI 1, the top is DVI 2.)

Put the CD in, and rebooted. The Suse splash screen came up and I was ready to install.

Went through the time zone and keyboard setup but failed on the partitioning. Suse couldn't find my hard drive....my BIOS couldn't see it either. Opened the case to see that I forgot to hook back up the SATA cable to the motherboard after I installed the video card. lol @ me.

Restarted the install just fine.

For the package selection part, I accepted all the default packages and added the 32-bit emulation package and the LAMP package.

For my desktop, I chose KDE instead of GNOME. KDE seems more friendly to use and I was interested to see what the new version 4.1 looked like.

After my software options were selected, the install connected to the opensuse repository and the packages started downloading and installing.

My package total was about 2.8 GB and they were comming at a steady pace at about 500kbs.

Occasionally, a pop-up message would appear saying that the file could not be found and would give me the options to "retry", "skip" or "abort". I would click "retry" and it would find the file and continue normally. I just figured this was just a network hiccup. Everything went smoothly after I click "retry". This happened about 5 times.

Overall, the install went well and took about 1 1/2 hrs.

Once at my linux desktop, I opened firefox and downloaded the linux beta client from secondlife.com.

Installation was straight forward... I made a folder on my desktop and extracted the archived files.

Opened a console window at the folder and typed ./secondlife.

The client came up and I logged in and performance was REALLY bad....time to go find some drivers.

Went to nVidia website to download the drivers.

The instructions for Suse are different than other versions of linux. Suse uses it's software management tool called YaST to install the driver packages. So, you don't really download the drivers yourself, you simply point YaST to the repository that contains the packages and it selects the right drivers and installs them for you.

YaST (Yet another Setup Tool) is one of the best things about suse linux. Real easy to install and remove software packages.

So, once the driver packages were installed, I rebooted and started SL again.

All I can say is WOWEEE!!! Graphic settings on ultra and I'm flying! W00T!!!!!11

Well, thats it.....not too much drama to set up... no tinkering with config files on the command line or any such nonsense.

I may not check back on this thread too much, but if you would like to talk about suse linux any time, please message me in world! I love opensuse and am more than happy to spread the word about it!

Cheers!

zg

After trying out most of the other distros, I'm sold on opensuse. It is clearly the best.

There are a few things about the dektop that bugged me, but easily fixed.

1. No icons on the desktop. I was kinda lost for a bit, but if you right click the desktop, go into the options, and choose "Folder View" you can see more like a windoze desktop.

2. The dang clock was on the wrong side of the bottom taskbar. I'm so used to looking at the bottom right corner for the clock and the default is that the clock is next to the "start button thingy". That was driving me crazy, but you can edit the bottom panel and move anything you want around.

3. Because opensuse is totally "FREE!" any and all propitiatory video codecs are not included. Most of your DVDs and videos wont work with the "out of the box" install. So, you will have to find and install additional packages from the codec vendors. For example, to view "Flash" (tm) files, you will have to install flash player. You will have to also install codecs from MS to view .WMF files... etc. If the video codec is not 100* open source, it will not be included in the installation.

HERE HERE for opensuse!!!!!!!!!!

I found most of the proprietary stuff in the "non-oss" repo. I am missing a few codex's or the 32bit version of them still (running x86-64) so not all videos play yet. The MOV and MP4 are the ones buggerin me up still. But my next venture will be learning compiling and trying to make SL just use the 64bit stuff (this will be tons of fun for me )

Oh, and for suse install, what a snap now adays. I was without a good pc for awhile when my opensuse 10.2 pc died. So now that I have a good pc running. I have my Vista play around OS, with all the beta releases on it. Opensuse 11.1 for my return to the love of Nix OS's. And then XP sp3, the backup OS to boot from when I really mess something up(I had a disc from my sister that was no longer in use, seemed like a good backup plan to me).

I had to do a new install of my Linux cos SuSE 10 started going wonky, and the upgrade to 10.2 did not help much (Grub kept losing windows etc...) so I installed 11.1 from scratch, from DVD.

I guess my computer deserved it - as you may see from the sig, I am not on AMD any more, I have a new graphic card and (not in the sig) the disc is SATA not PATA now. I would have been delighted if it had all worked with automatic repair, but also a bit surprised...

A bonus: The crash on TP that I had on the old system, and that I STILL have on the Windows XP system (admittedly not a new install despite the hardware changes) are almost TOTALLY gone!

I will post in that thread too, but it seems it is not a Hot Modem / Provider / Bad Line etc problem. It does seem to be software, somehow...

I am still on SuSE, though the quality of 10.2 was not what I would have liked. 11.1 seems okay though. I ALMOST left SuSE for Kubuntu.... ALMOST

---- EDIT ----

I have to correct "almost TOTALLY gone" to "almost gone" - they still happen, but far less often...

----- 2nd Edit ----

I can't post to the Disconnect on TP thread because it seems to have been routed to /dev/null