To the Darkside

So, to recap my previous two postings (1, 2) on my search for a new desktop OS - PC-BSD was too buggy and unsupported (plus the install CD wouldn't boot), Xandros's install CD also wouldn't boot, Ubuntu behaved flaky after a few days, SimplyMEPIS didn't integrate well, and PCLinuxOS wasn't an easy dual monitor setup. Plus, the latter two also had broken virtual terminals. Ctrl-Alt-F2 would either get me to a scrambled screen or just hang the computer immediately. I like my virtual terminals, and often do root commandline stuff from one. Plus, someone mentioned adding a Ctrl-Alt-F8 display terminal (Ctrl-Alt-F7 is the normal one under Linux), which seems cool - run both GNOME & KDE!

But I was pretty happy with PCLinuxOS. It looked nice, was easy to configure, showed me my local disks and even seemed to work with my Visor. I was starting to play the usual xorg.conf games in order to get my dual monitor setup working, when my torrent of the OpenSUSE 10.2 DVD finally finished. I remembered that from before - SUSE is one gigantic distro! So I burned it to a DVD and rebooted from it.

And immediately fell in love. The install went smoothly, although I did miss the part in the advanced section where I could choose where to install the boot loader, so I had to follow these instructions to get GRUB set up correctly once I rebooted into the OS on the hard drive. But otherwise it went smoothly, and I booted up into GNOME OpenSUSE 10.2.

And the love affair continued. I was especially blown away when I was actually able to run SaX2, the SUSE X Config program, to select my dual monitor setup, tell it to use the two as a single display, and it just worked! I had to make a few adjustments to the sync rates, as my tube display (a Samsung SyncMaster 997DF) shimmies and shakes if it uses a vertical refresh of anything but 60, so I just pretend it is a standard VESA 1280x1024 60hz display and it works like a charm. Wow, how cool was that?

And the good stuff continued. I was able to sync to my Palm Pilot (actually Visor), although I haven't had as much luck since I made the move back to KDE (very easy to switch around window managers in SUSE), but then again, I haven't worked on that yet. It saw all my Windows and DOS partitions and even mounted them for me in /windows/c, d and e. It saw my BSD disks, but didn't try to do anything with them. Amarok works like a charm with my CDs, although I'm disappointed it isn't a better ripper. I start the other one (Helix) to actually do the ripping.

I was able to find an install package for Teamspeak and it works great. It seems to notice my second CD drive, but there actually looks like there is a hardware problem, as Windows is having a problem reading things on it too. I've gotten printing to work, and it easily sees my Windows network. YaST (Yet another Setup Tool) works great for software packages, with plenty of options. You do have to take the time to add the recommended repositories, as mentioned here, to get the best choices. I'm sure it is only a matter of time before my voracious software package habits start confusing it, but so far so good!

The updates seem to work pretty well, although a couple of pages suggested turning off the new ZenWorks stuff and go back to YaST, so I did that. It may have been premature in 10.2, as the new Zen stuff seems to be better. The KVM switch works well, heck even better than on Windows, as lately every time I boot into Windows, I have to reboot as the keyboard isn't recognized, and I don't have that problem with OpenSUSE. The virtual terminals work like a champ and I finally got printing to work.

So life is good and I've settled on a distro. It's funny, as I was reading this review of 10.2 on Software in Review and I couldn't disagree more with most of his complaints. He even said to remove SaX, which is ridiculous, as it's the only X config tool I've found worth anything. And he's complaining about app bloat in KDE - big deal. That's another selling point to me for SUSE - it is a complete distro out of the box and works very well. Once you start adding packages, it tends to destabilize things, so working with a basic, yet hefty, initial install is a pretty good way to go about things. Ditto with the additional YaST repositories. First he complains about too hard to keep up, and then wants more. Funny, because his Hacking OpenSUSE 10.2 is well worth the read.

Now some have problems with Novell and its fingers all over the SUSE pie and for crawling into bed with Microsoft. But to me, if that's what it takes to put together a rock solid distro, then I'm all for it. The OpenSUSE community doesn't seem to be as well knit and centralized as other distros like Ubuntu, but I'm finding my niches. Opensuseforums.net works well, as do the mailing lists. Count me in as a happy OpenSUSE camper! Notice I've changed the subtitle of the blog to searching for Open OS nirvana, a more general term.

My server will continue to be a FreeBSD box, and my comments here are likely to be of interest to both BSD and Linux folks, although it will lean more towards Linux, I'm sorry to say. Plus ça change, I guess...