[huskerlug] Speaking of Knoppix and things related....
- From: GreyGeek <Jkreps@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: huskerlug@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2005 09:00:49 -0600
The last two weeks of my life have been a wild, exhilarating adventure!
I was running SUSE Pro 9.0. For a variety of reasons, some of them being
peeved at what appeared to be Novel's 'new' license policy, which has cleared
up and isn't a radical change afterall, I looked at the current state of
Linux distros.
I considered Gentoo but Jim, IIRC, concured with my estimate that it would
take at least a week to install and tweak. Nope. DItto's for
LinuxFromScratch.
I decided to try the new Knoppix 3.7. Using Lisa's advice it installed
beautifully. I immediately did the update,upgrade,autoclean steps and 400MB
later Knoppix was 'up to date'. Apt-get was such a pleasure to use I began
installing programs with abandon. I found that KPackage was even more so
because one could find packages easier than using apt-cache.
Bibletime, always a paint to install, was no longer. Maxima was easy. MPlayer
was easy. Everything was easy, including the nVidia install. I had 3D for
the first time in a year. Replacing my nVidia card last month helped a lot.
Then, trouble appeared. I don't remember now which package I was installing
but the dialog returned with something like "install 1, upgrade 4, 563 held
back", or some such thing. I saw that message too many times to pay any
attention to it. I typed 'y' and off apt-get went to do its thing.
Suddenly, startling messages began appearing on the screen telling me that
specific KDE packages were being removed and I watched as, one by one, my KDE
installation was wiped off my HD. I decided against breaking the process.
When it was done I entered "apt-get install kde" and hit the Enter key.
In about the same amount of time that it took to delete KDE apt-get put it
right back on, except that it was the latest version, 3.3.1, not the version
Knoppix installed. I restarted the xserver to give the new KDE a clean
environment, but in doing so, I was dropped to console with the message that
xserver couldn't find a valid screen. Inspection showed that the
XF86Config-4 file hadn't changed. ???
The xserver problem led me to the dark side of the Knoppix force... the
realization that its config tools were ancient. xf86cfg is a trip five
years back in time. Limited database, hard to use, unresponsive. I ended up
setting the freqs, modlines, etc. by hand. Didn't help. No xserver. So, I
jumped back on the time machine and went back another 5 years to xf86config,
the first xserver tool I used in 1998, and it was long in the tooth then.
But it worked. I had KDE back. A mall manual adjustment brought the
mousewheel back. Knoppix did that ininstall-reinstall trip a second time the
next day. Plus, I quickly grew tied of the haphazard menu structure. They
must have labled darts with the names of apps and threw them all at once at a
blank menu tree posted on a wall somewhere.
I had tried XANDROS a week earlier and was impressed with its install and
admin tools. In fact, VERY impressed, but I didn't like the attempt to lock
the user into their mirror$. If I had to buy a commercial Linux XANDROS
would be among my top candidates. But, I still like the Debian Social
Contract so I decided to try some other Debian spin offs. I also tried
Ubantu but quickly dropped that 'social contract' which, while nice, wasn't
the contract I was looking for.
I tried Kannotix, a Knoppix knockoff. (Say that five times as quick as you
can! :-) The differences were insignificant, but the apt-get problems were
identical. I have LibraNet 2.8.1 on my wife's box, so I tried it on mine.
On my wife's box it installed nVidia 3D automatically, but not on mine.
Apt-get quickly fixed that, however. LibraNet has better admin tools than
Knoppix but when I hit the same KDE recycle it's xserver admin tool couldn't
fix the problem.... back to looking at another Debian clone.
SimlyMEPIS was nice running as a LiveCD. Using locate I quickly found the
installer app and gave the command to install it. The MEPIS install was
cleaner than Knoppix or Kannotix. No 3D, however, and apt-get couldn't help
this time. The admin programs in MEPIS are nicer than that other Debian
clones, but not as nice as XANDROS. About the same as LibraNet, but more
polish. However, apt-get was rasing it ugly side again, but not with KDE. I
was finding that some apps would die during install and leave apt-get in a
broken mode. The two clean up commands didn't always clean up. One had to
research which apps were loaded before the app which crashed apt-get and
remove them. On one occassion that amounted to 45 or so apps. This
occurred in Knoppix and Kannotix too, but it was quickly getting tiresome.
It was becoming as much trouble as an rpm dependency chain. I also noticed,
IIRC, that MEPIS used sever experimental mirrors in its sources.list. I
disabled those and stuck to the stable mirrors but that didn't seem to help
too much. I was beginning to think that Sarge may not be stable enough for
release, even if they had changed to documentation to read Sarge as the
stable release.
I have the MDK 10.1 DVD power set. I installed it. My ATI-Wonder TV card
wasn't recognized. I have a DVD+RW and a CD+RW drive. K3B couldn't
recognize the CD+RW. I switched to the 2.4 kernel and then it could, but
the TV card was still unknown. And, strangely, it wouldn't recognize the
ncr53c810 card. ??? That won't do.
So, I decided to try Debian itself. I had downloaded all 15 CDs in November.
I put the first one in my CDROM and rebooted. It hung trying to decipher the
ncr53c810 SCSI card connected to my scanner. I tried a second set of 15 CDs
I had downloaded a couple of weeks ago. It did the same thing. I tried two
different versions of the Sarge internet installer iso. Same thing. I
went back to my most recent CD set of Debian and in the Linux prompt during
bootup I turned off the SCSI detection. It booted into the install and I was
able to get to the point of the installation process where it asked me to
install the ethernet cards. I have a via-rhine chip but Debian INSISTED that
the ncr53c810 was the only ethernet card I had. it would not recognize the
rhine chip and, of course, then failed to give me a network connection.
I had that set of SUSE Pro 9.2 disks. Well, I told myself, that's the distro
we are going to use at work to replace the Novell servers and many of the
desktops with. So, why not use it. I installed it. WOW! There is huge
difference between SUSE 9.0 and SUSE Pro 9.2. YAST has been much improved.
The menu structure is awesome. I've always been biased toward SUSE in the
past, I'll admit, but this release of SUSE is worth the purchase! (You'll
recall in an earlier msg that I mentioned I had purchased SUSE box sets 22
times in the past!)
FireFox, Adobe Reader, Flash, RealPlayer10, and Sun's Java are preinstalled.
The link from the java gcc32 _ijo.so plugin in
the /opt/MozillaFireFox/plugin directory has be made manually to get java to
work in FireFox. SUSE blocks playing of DVD of ANY kind, protected or not,
with its media players, which begs the question as to why they have the
"Video Players" option unless it is to play files taken homemade movies and
downloaded files? The select of codecs is limited too. Adding the two
'special files' for DVD playing didn't help. The interception is coded into
the players themselves. The download of the mplayer rpm for SUSE 9.2 failed
with some dependency problems, as did the VLC player, so as of now I cannot
watch even my unprotected videos.
My son was running MDK 10.1 DVD PowerPack on his Compaq presario 1500 laptop
but it wouldn't recognize the PS/2 wheelmouse plugged into the back. He now
going to install SUSE Pro 9.2 on his laptop. He's the Oracle DBA at work and
wants Oracle on his laptop too. Oracle supports SUSE Enterprise, there
probably won't be any problems putting Oracle 9i and/or 10 on a SUSE Pro 9.2.
--
GreyGeek
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