Diary of a Wolfeman

Well now, that’s better.

Here I am in SuSE 9.2 Pro on the laptop, successfully dual-booted with only a minor flaw that can be understood, and was frankly expected.

It turns out that there is a flaw in the original FTP 1.0 code that couldn’t see anything over 2 GB in size, and that is more than likely what caused the screwup with the first download. I was able to work around it by going through an Italian mirror that had handily chopped the iso into two parts, then stitched them back together before burning. (They thankfully gave me over 200 kb/s speeds for download)

After that, installation was basically just clicking “OK” at every question. I tweaked it to use LILO instead of Grub, but otherwise all the default selections were fine, including initial package selection. The only problem was, again, expected, in that it hasn’t figured out my wifi card yet. This is par for the course in Linux, since very few card makers and even fewer distros talk to each other for drivers. Stupid, I know. How to best get Linux into the workplace? Make it so that EVERY SINGLE piece of hardware gets auto-detected and works without user tweaks.

I know, I’m dreaming again.

Other than that though, all I did was install a current version of Firefox. SuSE includes one, but it’s out-of-date.

That’s going to have to be the end of the review for now though – it’s bedtime.

In this modern world, there are still some things that you simply have to wait for, regardless of how much technology you throw at them.

Comcast recently upped my download speeds to a whopping 4 Megabits per second. I have a relatively high-speed processor, hard drive, and half a gig of RAM. This, however, all means nothing when the server you are downloading from lets you top out at 25 Kilobits per second. What does all that mean? It means it took me a full 24 hours to download the latest release from SuSE Linux.

Of course, it was a 3 Gigabyte DVD ISO image.

With those speeds, however, one wonders if the other method for the free version of their distro has ever actually worked for anyone. They offer the option of an FTP install, where you download just the installation program and do the rest on-line, only downloading what you need, instead of getting the whole shebang like I did. Call me crazy, but I’m not too keen on spending the next 6 hours waiting to complete an install, when a dropped connection could possibly mean having to wait and start again from scratch. Ewww.

So, I will now attempt to dual-boot the laptop here with SuSE. Cross your fingers…
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Well, fuckity. Apparently, I grabbed the wrong file or it downloaded incorrectly, because the package list isn’t there. I suppose I’ll try again.