Bagel Belly Blog

Novell, SUSE

A couple of days ago, I received the Linux Technical Resource Kit I ordered some time back. I heard a Novell guy speaking at the OSS Watch conference, and although the guy was a bit annoying, some of Novell's big ideas still managed to leak through. With this in mind, time for another evaluation.

Obviously, I'm still a die hard mac addict, and you'll have to wrestle my Powerbook from my cold dead hands, but it doesn't hurt to keep an eye on the competition. Besides, I've got a pretty powerful intel laptop doing nothing, and at some point I do need to send the Powerbook off for repair.

Anyway. So far, the install process has been pretty smooth. Booting from DVD, the presentation is slick and most of the default options were fine. Somehow, the installation even knew I wanted to install on the spare second hard disk that only contains the backup of my music collection, and not on the live linux install on the main disk. Sweet.

One curious thing to note is that the default desktop environment being installed is KDE. I don't quite know why it's not Gnome, given all the Ximian guys now at Novell. I guess it's not a bad thing - the more people using both desktops, the more chance there is that competition will improve them both beyond what a single desktop could achieve.

Another observation: the PCMCIA wireless card I have wasn't recognised by the kernel used during installation. My guess is this means it won't work when the system is up and running, either. This is a permanent annoyance for me: the ability to drive it has been available in linux for a couple of years now, but none of the distros seem capable of getting this right. (Ok, so I only tried RedHat then Fedora, Debian, Knoppix, Xandros, Linspire, Libranet, and Progeny, but I feel reasonably justified in making broad sweeping claims now!)

So, it's rebooted. First thing to note is that grub has had a makeover, and shows a fancy progress bar before booting, instead of the dull old countdown timer. And, of course, it looks the part, in the shades of blue SUSE seem to be using now. (SuSE? SUSE? Suse?)

Booting time was less than impressive, and it seems to have dumped me back into YAST, to ask for root password and stuff. Seems straightforward, but less help text now, so newbies might get a bit lost at this point. There's a box for advanced options, which lets me pick the type of password encryption - DES, MD5, Blowfish. It claims DES is the "linux default" ... is it really? Debian seemed to encourage MD5 for at least the last few years. I can't think of any reason why SUSE wouldn't use MD5.

Interestingly, I typed in my generic password that I use for every test system, and got my wrists slapped about the poor mix of characters and numbers. "This is not good security practice. Are you sure?" Alright, I'm sorry, I'll fix it.

Network detection. Well, it lists my Linksys wireless card, and surprisingly, it's also listing my internal modem. Haven't seen that recognised and listed before. It also got the internal NIC, so full marks! Well, maybe not. Wireless configuration is screwed.

I run my wireless network with a hidden SSID (the name of the network) and using a WEP key (like a password), to prevent anyone else randomly accessing it. It's not 'secure' by any means, but it does act as a deterrent to the average user. If you'd seen some of the people I live near, you'd understand why this is a good thing ;-)

Unfortunately, SUSE's network configuration doesn't seem to give me the option to set up the SSID or WEP key. It seems to know it's a wireless device (the configuration was automatically named 'wlan-bus-pcmcia'). What's going on? I guess I'll just trust to luck for now, and continue. Hopefully there'll be better configuration tools once it's finished installing.

Now it's asking me for my user authentication method, giving me the choice of "Stand-alone machine" or "network client" (with "NIS" and "LDAP" as network authentication methods). Now I know it's talking about directory services here, saying will my users log in using usernames and passwords coming from a remote server, but I did have to think for a second. It's like Microsoft's "type in the network name or join a workgroup". A little more explanation for the user would be nice here.

At the end of configuration, you get the release notes. Probably not interesting to most people, but a couple of things caught my eye:

* the filesystem is UTF-8. Coo.

* The FHS makes direct reference to XML resources. Coo.

* Standby / Suspend is supported with ACPI. Will it work on this laptop? My bet is no.

... and we're back in device configuration again, this time graphics, sound, printers etc. As per usual, the wrong choice for my gfx card: 1024x768 instead of 1400x1050, and 3d acceleration disabled. Urgh. After a bit of fiddling around, I convinced it to run at the right resolution. Turning on 3d seems to be a simple case of clicking a checkbox - if that works, I'll be extremely impressed!

Looks like SUSE are using CUPS for printing. It'll be interesting to see if it can talk to printers attached to the powerbook ....

Ok, installation / configuration completed. Now it's switching to X ... and logging me into KDE.

First impressions: nice! I love the default theme. I have anti-aliased fonts from the start, good. The mouse is on acid and impossible to control, but easily fixed.

So, that WLAN card. It looks like everything is set up through YaST, so I started that up and went to Network Devices. I clicked on Network Card, then configure beside the Linksys. In the Advanced tab, I selected Hardware details, then Wireless Settings. I could then enter the network name (SSID), and WEP key. I then clicked on OK, Next, Next, Finish, and Close. The network is now working - hurrah! But c'mon guys, this is too difficult.

Now I'll play with the running system a bit, and see if it's truly usable or yet another linux disaster ...

Posted by savs at August 15, 2004 12:15 PM