undertakingyou

So, I ran into an interesting issue two days ago, and it makes me wonder if the ubuntu installer is in fact broken.

Many of you know that a moved back to ubuntu after a two month stint with fedora. I kept my same home folder to keep preferences and such. So, I was a little surprised when I went to go and change some user preferences with the gui tool and my user wasn’t there, didn’t exist. What happened? Well it seems that as the ubuntu installer made my user it didn’t change permissions on my home folder to my new user of will with a uid of 1000, but kept my old user of will with a uid of 500. This caused some kind of hang up and the only thing that I could think to do was to backup and reinstall.

So, what I would expect is what both fedora and Opensuse do. They ask you, “hey, there is already a home folder by that name, should we change the permissions so it is yours?”

So, I went from Fedora to OpenSUSE on the laptop. Total, I installed OpenSuSE 3 times on the macbook pro. The last one I finally got it to go. But there are just some things that I could not get working. One of which was the keyboard never worked properly. No matter what I did I couldn’t get SuSE to figure out the right keyboard. It defaulted to saying that it was some microsoft keyboard. When I used YaST to change it to a macbookpro keyboard and restarted x, there was no keyboard. I could type and type and it would do nothing. Not even switch to another TTY or have the power button allow me to log out. The same when I tried macintosh or generic pc105. So, no keyboard for me. Next, the mouse. The default mouse configuration is really weird. And if you don’t change it to be just right there would be no mouse when x was restarted.

Aside from the issues with xorg having configuration issues. I have found that using YaST AND editing stuff manually can lead to conflicts. That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Why have a tool that doesn’t let you use other tools?

So, with the laptop I am agreeing Stephen Shaw, ubuntu seems to be best for the MacBook Pro. I really did have everything working under ubuntu. So, until Intrepid is released I think that I am going to try out Mac OS X.

Sontek and I have talked several times about SuSE, and that I should use it. I have used it, in a VM, and I have to agree when I am told that it isn’t really fair to say that using a vm is the same as having a native install. Not in para-virtualization anyway. So, I installed OpenSuSE 10.3 on my laptop just to check it out. If it can run on my laptop then it must be good, because my laptop sucks. I have an Averatec, their moto is cheap and you know it (at least that is what I think it is.)
So heres what I came up with:

Pros:

• YaST actually isn’t that bad for installing stuff. Their one click install is quite nice, and pretty convenient.
• Both ALT buttons work. I want to know how they did that because gosh, that is nice.
• Hibernate actually works, a hard feet.

Cons:

• My system as a whole runs slower than it ever has before, and zypper is the slowest install thing in the planet.
• YaST may have some convenience to install things, but it feels just bloated for everything else. I don’t understand why there is 3 places to manage repositories.
• The install has 30 or so screens, some of this could be consolidated, and really cut down on what is needed.
• During the install you agree to 4 or 5 different license agreements, and then you have to jump through a bunch of hoops (some of which are on fire) to install madwifi. And why? Because part of the HAL hook that madwifi uses has proprietary software. This is a concern but flashplayer, JRE, realplayer, and certain Novell pieces aren’t? Why not just have you agree to another license? I spent some hour and a half just getting wireless working reliably.

So, in short I actually don’t mind SuSE, and yes Sontek, zypper is usable (though slow) and YaST has some good points. But in general, my machine was faster and more usable in ubuntu or fedora. Now, I have heard that the speed issue (with both zypper and the system in general) is fixed in 11.0, and YaST has apparently gone through some remodeling and consolidation in the new version. When that gets released I will have to revisit OpenSuSE to check it out.