You never know

As promised in the last post, this post is just to describe my experience with the no CD install for openSUSE 10.3.

The reference that I used was from suse wiki and can be found here. Although, there exist yet another page which is general for any distro.

The suse wiki link was fairly accurate except that I had some hard time to figure out the real-no-CD-but-USB-disk way.

To iterate the steps I had followed:

1. Download miniboot.iso from suse’s official site or some of it mirror. For openSUSE, I downloaded it from here. Just choose Network install as the Installation medium and then click on Mini CD.
2. Note down the installation repository in the download page vis-a-vis this and this.
3. Download the latest version of syslinux from kernel.org.
4. Then follow the steps detailed in ‘Install without CD/DVD……’ section of the suse wiki link. I shall copy them verbatim here as well just for reference. I won’t be updating them according to my experience (E: means the USB drive…translate according to your env):
   1. Extract miniboot.iso to E: with WinRar such that E:\boot exists
   2. Move E:\boot\x86_64\loader\* to E:\ (The directory x86_64 might be something like i586)
   3. Delete E:\isolinux.bin
   4. Rename E:\isolinux.cfg to E:\syslinux.cfg
   5. Extract syslinux-
   6. CD to c:\syslinux\syslinux
   7. Run syslinux E:(What had worked for me was syslinux -m -e E:).
5. Boot from the USB stick.
6. I don’t remember the initial instructions on booting up but they were pretty easy to follow.
7. The only special thing that you need to do is select Network as the installation media and configure the above-noted repositories. The repository type is HTTP. You would need to type in the IP address of the server and the remaining part of the URL (from ‘/distribution’ to the last ‘/’) as directory.
   • To find the IP just switch to another terminal (press Alt+F2), you should have a shell. Type in ping download.opensuse.org. Find the IP in ‘[]‘. Get back to install screen by Alt+F1.
   • You might have to configure the network manually if DHCP is not configured properly on your network.
8. From then on the installation is like the normal installation, just a little more time consuming as all the packages were travelling over the wire.
9. Be sure to not to include your USB disk in the partitioning info. For me it confused the GRUB and I had to manually edit grub’s config to boot up the system.

Hope that would be helpful and spreads the word.

Centuries ago, I had tried Fedora on my laptop and wondered if they are really ready for the desktop. SuSE was my rescue at that time.
Time flew and I had to get rid of Linux, cause I couldn’t sustain the vpn-ized wireless connection to connect into the corporate LAN even when I was inside the company.

Anyways, I installed Linux on my desktop. This time the choice was Ubuntu with Fiesty just out. Seriously, Ubuntu proved really nice. Beautifully done theme and home-user-lovable-click-next-to-install was amazing. It just worked out of the box. The package manager was awesome. Not only could I upgrade the packages, I could upgrade the whole distro. I moved to Gutsy and then to Hardy without even putting a CD/DVD or even wondering if that is actually and upgrade. I kept doing my work and the update manager upgraded the whole system.

Compiz was also an eye-candy.

But last week, I thought to give the other contemporary distros a fair shot. After all I was comparing the century old experience. I checked up my rack and I could only find Mandriva 2k8. So obviously, it got the first shot. Frankly speaking it still felt worse that the century old SuSE installation. I immediately got over it. I can’t explain why but this time the experience was worse than the first release of Mandriva (after the re-christening). I couldn’t stand it to even download FC9 (which was in the news at the time) live CD.

Anyways, I burned the FC CD on Windows and was all set to try FC before installing. My first impression of FC was very nice. But it was KDE that I was liking than anything specific to FC. I went for the install. But soon I realized that the usability is still a big problem in FC. So, one more distro went down the drain.

Next was the turn of my first-ever-distro. This time I thought of not to burn the CD, rather try out all-internet-no-CD installation. It was very simple to do. You just ought to be a little interested and experimental . Anyways, rest about that in some other post.

Setting up SuSE was as easy as any of the others I had tried (ohh….each of these were very easy to intsall…I was just being critical about their usability).
One thing that I liked about SuSE which none of the other offered was install-time configuration of Windows Domain Controller configuration for login. As soon as the system was up, I could just log on with corporate id. The green theme of OpenSuSE 10.3 is very nice.
But the best and most comforting thing of coming back was YaST. How, they have managed to have such a nice one stop shop for everything. It gives you almost everything that you would like to setup on your system.
And yeah, with OpenSuSE being one of the mainstream distro I could get packages/repositories for OpenSuSE right away.

I also tried KDE4, but its performance sucked big time, so for the time being I am sitting at KDE3. As SuSE gives me the tabbed main-menu and screenlets give enough options for widgets, I don’t much that KDE4 has to offer.

There are a few things that I am not able to setup and would like to get it done properly. I am still to get a boot up splash screen (not the grub one, but the one that shows up a graphical splash during boot up). Another thing that I couldn’t setup was compiz to read the configuration from my home directory. No matter what I did in ccsm (Compiz config manager), they were not respected (yes, I followed the instructions written here). As a workaround I have put up fusion-icon on my kde session startup. This works, but I can see the ghost jumping taskbar items for compiz and emerald while they are replacing the current window manager and decorator.

Anyways, current I am pretty satisfied with my current setup and am onto wine to check out if I can work out an experiment. More may come later.

As my last post told about ScribeFire (which is ‘another not-so-webby’ blogging utility), my friend just told me about Windows Live Writer. This is a desktop app for Windows and has an Office app like look-and-feel. At the first it looks pretty decent. But I have my own reservations against MS, so I might not pursue it further. Interested people can go ahead and try it. Frankly speaking MS had not really disappointed me with its Office suite and this should be in the same league.

One good point about the utility is that it supports plugins and there are lots of them available as well.

On the flip side there are a few things and I didn’t like.
It didn’t give me a view of my blog (like my previous posts, etc.). May be the functionality is there (or maybe some plugin does it), but I couldn’t find it in the initial use and it bugged me a lot.
It was a different app and I had to go to the browser quite often (after all blog are web-based). I didn’t like all the alt+tabs I had to do and scribefire’s inherent integration with firefox scores here.

Thats it for now. Although, I won’t be using it, yet would love to know about it. So, feel free to drop comments.