Windependent

what type of SuSE installation did you opt for? if you go with a bare bones minumum installation, you can get by with 500MB, but a "standard" installation requires 2.5 GB of disk space, and a portly installation would require even more. SuSE's default WM is KDE, and its a real disk hog. How much disk space do you have left on that 2.5 GB drive? FYI, here are the minimum system requirements for Suse 9.2: http://www.suse.com/us/private/products/su...of/sysreqs.html

I've got a couple of Knoppix questions that I'm hoping someone can answer. I've used the Knoppix 3.3 CD to bail me out of a number of situations when I've borked-up my linux installation. It does seem to have a couple of shortcomings, though -- or maybe I just have some shortcomings when it comes to using Knoppix... 1. how to obtain root privs? sure you can "su" as the regular knoppix user, but some features require you to have a genuine root logon, such as initializing some of the daemons to support fileshareing (lisa, samba, etc). 2. how do you get the lisa daemon to work so you can use Samba with Knoppix? when I'm in a pinch and I've boogered up my linux distro, it would be nice to be able to use Knoppix/Samba to access the shares on some of the Win boxes on the network. whenever i try to enable Samba from the GUI, I'm always told taht I have to initialize the lisa daemon at boot, and unfortunately, that requires a logon as root. any help would be sincerely appreciated.

http://www.novell.com/products/desktop/ind...e_announcement1

that sounds like an apples to oranges comparison. i'm sure that your opinion about what each distro offers would differ if you compared the 3 CD version of Mandrake to the 3 CD version of SuSE. in some respects, the comparison of SuSE to MDK is hampered by the fact that its always been an internet install or a CD purchase, and its never been available as a free ISO download... unitl very recently. lots of guys don't want to spend the time doing a SuSE net install to get the full distro, and lots of guys don't want to cough up the bucks to buy the CDs. imho, you need to have to similarly equipped installations to make a truly meaningful comparison. having had alot of experience with both, i think SuSE Pro CDs are better out of the box, especially in the area of networking. Novell seems to be paying attention in this area.

right now i'm in the midst of a Stage 1 installation, and i'm killing time during bootstrapping. yeah, an automated gentoo install script would be sort of a dream come true...

i beat my head against MNF for quite some time. it has alot of little quirks. for example, if the system clocks on the firewall and the remote administration PC are off by more than an hour... no logon. there should be some juicy MNF threads in the archives if you want to search for them.

fwiw, i had the exact same problem with SuSE 9.1 not being able to print to a W2K Pro SP4 printer share via Samba. SuSE could use Samba to find the windows PC and successfully found all of its shares (except the printer). Windows could see the SuSE box for a while, but eventually something "broke" and no matter how I tried it couldn't see the SuSE box at all. I tried using CUPS on the linux box, and every other trick imaginable. I just couldn't get YaST to successfully install the printer. I didn't even realize that W2k contained a Print Services for Unix service. D'Oh! how i wish i had know that... I finally got fed up to the point that I took SuSE off of my system and repartitioned the drive. For the heck of it, I reinstalled SuSE and all of my problems magically disappeared. I had to have really borked-up one of the components on the SuSE box. I never did figure out what it was, but a reinstall on top of the existing system didn't help. Only wiping the drive and starting over did the trick. I bet you didn't want to hear that -- it sounds like a Windows story.

it initially fell over before the list of boot options came up. presumably that was because i had configured grub but had not written all of the info into the MBR. Duh. After doing that I finally started to receive error codes, which made the problem easy to fix. There are no problems now using the option to boot into Windows. I'm still emerging gentoo onto that PC, so the other boot option isn't viable yet. thanks!

i would now like to withdraw everything negative that i said about SuSE 9.1 Pro in my previous post. although i had one hell of a time with the live CDs (never got them to work), when i finally got the DVD from SuSE, it was simple to install and set-up. as easy if not easier than MDK. i had problems with printing to windows shares, problems with samba, problems with konqueror and firefox, but the browser problems were not specific to SuSE. after about a month of wrangling, i wiped my hard drive and resinstalled SuSE and it magically worked like a champ. EVERYTHING that had been broken before was now fully operational, including printing to windows printers. After the complete reinstall, setting up the printers was TRIVIAL. i had to have had a really borked package or two on my previous installation that made everything work so poorly. As others have mentioned, the KDE in SuSE is great. in many ways i think SuSE 9.1 is superior to windows from the user standpoint. PNGs are painfully slow, and the overall speed of execution leaves a bit to be desired on, for example, a P3-800. but as an out of the box setup, SuSE 9.1 is a great distro. i think that YaST is a bit better than Mandrake's version, as it allows a little more fine-tuning control on the part of the user. If I had to pick a distro that was easy to get up and running, both SuSE 9.1 and MDK 10 would be good choices. but the configurability of SuSE seems to go a little farther, imho.

setting the fstab problems aside, my problem was grub related -- the machine kept locking when attempting to load grub, so it wasn't even getting far enough to read the fstab file before the lockup occurred. my problem was that when following the recommended gentoo instructions in the gentoo installation handbook, grub wasn't installing itself on the MBR. i fixed this by installing grub using manual insructions instead of grub-install: Installing GRUB in the MBR: # grub (starts the grub shell) grub> root (hd0,1) (Specify where your /boot partition resides) grub> setup (hd0) (Install GRUB in the MBR) grub> quit (Exit the GRUB shell) here's the grub.conf that works for the dual-boot windows system: default 1 timeout 30 splashimage=(hd0,1)/grub/splash.xpm.gz title=Gentoo Linux # root is on the 3rd linux partition, the 4th disk partition, or (hd0,3) #since grub starts indexing at zero kernel (hd0,1)/kernel-2.6.9-gentoo-r1 root=/dev/hda4 # the next 4 lines are for dual boot windows systems # in this case, Win is located on /dev/hda1 title=Windows XP rootnoverify (hd0,0) makeactive chainloader +1

whoops. that was a typo. you're right, it should have been 9964. that's what the real partition table reads. i think that the "umask=000" statement is a valid parameter under <opts>, while the "0 0" is a valid parameter under <dump/pass>. you can't see it in my post, but those two sets of zeroes are separated by a tab delimiter. is this right? i'm checking on the rest... Thanks for your help!

I'm working on a dual boot installation with Win XP and Linux on the same physical drive. (The PC only has one hard disk). I'm running into GRUB problems, and I'm hoping that someone can help. The distro I'm using is Gentoo, which requires all of the disk partitioning, fstab and grub.conf files to be configured manually. I THINK that I've got everything configured properly, but when I try to boot the system Grub halts with the message, "Invalid Partition Table." Aargh. But everything looks right to me. So if anyone can look at the following config files and point out some silly error on my part, I'd appreciate it. Let me preface my posting the structure of the partitions with the statement that XP was already installed on the system, and Linux was added afterward. The hard disk is an 80 GB IDE drive that was partitioned with 40 GB for XP and the remainder of the disk left as unpartitioned space. The unpartitioned space was then used for Gentoo. So it seems that since XP was already occupying the first partition on the drive, linux had to go on the following partitions. Here are my configuration files: here is my disk partition info: fdisk -l /dev/hda Disk /dev/hda: 81.9 GB, 81964302336 bytes 255 heards, 63 sectors/track, 9964 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 82225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hda1 * 1 4079 32764536 c W95 FAT32 (LBA) /dev/hda2 * 4080 4084 40162+ 83 Linux /dev/hda3 4085 4147 506047+ 82 Linux Swap /dev/hda4 4148 9964 46725052+ 83 Linux fstab : # <fs> <mountpoint> <type> <opts> <dump/pass> /dev/hda1 /dev/hda1 vfat auto,noatime,users,umask=0 0 0 0 0 /dev/hda2 /boot ext2 auto,noatime 1 1 /dev/hda4 /dev/hda4 reiserfs auto,noatime,notail 0 0 /dev/hda3 none swap sw 0 0 /dev/cdroms/cdrom0 /mnt/cdrom0 auto noauto,users 0 0 /dev/cdroms/cdrom1 /mnt/cdrom1 auto noauto,users,ro 0 0 /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,users 0 0 # NOTE: The next line is critical for boot! none /proc proc defaults 0 0 none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0 and grub.conf: default 1 timeout 30 splashimage=(hd0,1)/grub/splash.xpm.gz title=Gentoo Linux 2.6.3-r1 # partition where kernal image (or OS) is located root (hd0,1) kernel /kernel-2.6.3-gentoo-r1 root=/dev/hda4 # Win is located on /dev/hda1 title=Windows XP rootnoverify (hd0,0) makeactive chainloader +1 unfortunately, i've looked at this stuff so many times that i just can't see what's wrong. any help would be greatly appreciated!

After beating my head against the wall with SuSE 9.1, I've decided to go back to Mandrake. Yesterday I installed the Download version of 10.0 to give it a test drive, and I've run into a couple of minor configuration problems. When playing an audio CD, KsCD isn't looking up the CD's information in CDDB. I know that the CD info is in the CDDB database, because KsCD successfully identified this CD yesterday when I had SuSE 9.1 installed on my system. When I load a CD into the DVD drive, KsCD loads spontaneously. The CD plays fine, but none of the CDDB info is accessed. When I click on the CDDB button and click on the Fetch Info button nothing happens. Any suggestions? Fwiw, k3b won't look up the CDDB info either. My firewall in MDK 10.0 is shut off, and my hardware firewall doesn't block CDDB access. Ideas?

i went to SuSE 9.1 Pro as a migration path from Mandrake 9.2. i had a tough time with it. the main problem was that on my systems, neither SuSE 9.1 nor Mandrake 9.2 did a very good job supporting a dual/triple video card system. there were always problems. my only solution was to pull all of the video cards except the one built into the motherboard. Windows 98 definitely had both distros beat in this regard. while I was fighting with the Control Center in Mandrake 9.2 (which was frought with problems) i obtained a free promo copy of SuSE 9.1 Pro from Novell as part of their Technical Resource Kit. the plan was to switch everything over to SuSE 9.1 if it worked properly. from the outset, I had problems with Konqueror misbehaving in SuSE. it never crashed, but it constantly displayed KDE crash error messages. the pop-ups were so frequent that it made web surfing a real PITA. the recommended solution, of course, is to try FireFox. I had the infamous problem in SuSE 9.1 of having FireFox spontaneously close due to segmentation errors. This was a problem with Mozilla too. So for me, there was no truly functional browser in SuSE 9.1. for me, SuSE 9.1 also had the problem of being totally unable to see an HP LaserJet shared on a Windows network, in spite of the fact that Samba Client and Server were properly configured for sharing all other resources on the Win/Linux boxes. out of the box, SuSE had problems with k3b. copying a CD took about 4 hours. in SuSE, there's no k3bsetup program, even though the popup error messages told me to use the k3bsetup program to fix the problems in k3b. it turns out that SuSE ships with a proprietary patched version of k3b. i ultimately tracked my probem with k3b down to SuSE's failing to implement DMA on the DVD and CD-R/W drives, even though the popup messages directed me elsewhere. then there's the issue of SuSE 9.1 being SLOOOOOOOOW. i got so frustrated with it that I wiped my system out yesterday and installed Mandrake 10.0. much to my delight, Konqueror works. Firefox works. Mandrake found my LaserJet, so now I can finally print. I worked with SuSE 9.1 for a period of at least 6 months, and I always had problems with it. Mandrake 10.0 download edition installed on my PC without a hitch, and I had a totally useable system on the first day. Fwiw, I really liked SuSE, I just had to do alot of manual configuring, and I still couldn't get everything to work properly. If you're interested in giving it a try, my recommendation would be to wait for the release of 9.2 next month. Hopefully they'll have alot of the problems fixed.

Fwiw, I was thorough enough to listen to the original source CD. Even so, the fact that the second generation "Normal" copy was playable seems to preclude the necessity to test the source CD. Just so that I wouldn't be the guy with his foot in his mouth after making an incorrect statement after mixing up my two second generation CDs, I tried reburning them before I read anna's post. Just like before, the Normal copy of the Audio CD was playable, and the "Clone" copy of the Audio CD was not. Fwiw, I agree with you completely -- the term "clone" appears to have been used inappropriately in this context. A very misleading use of the word, indeed. anna, am I correct in my understanding that the "clone" function should be the preferred method for Data CDs, while the "normal" function should be the preferred method for Audio CDs? Thanks everyone for your help.