[Gllug] SuSe 9.1 post-installation

[Andrew Scott]

Hello glluggers,

I've just installed SuSe 9.1 Pro [from the Novell evaluation disk, thank
you Novell ;)] over Mandrake 9.1. Apart from taking far too many hours
[due to excessive selections, perhaps? and also due to the YOU updates],
and requiring a reboot to get sound working, as I had updated kernel and
mod_utils, everything went remarkably smoothly. As some may recall, I'd
kept /home on a separate partition, and had managed to back it up
eventually before install by finding a CD-RW and blanks on ebay. The
partition manager on install was indeed a little non-intuitive, however
with some careful exploration, and selection of 'advanced' and 'expert'
options, it soon became obvious what to do. I must say that overall the
SuSe installation GUI was remarkably smooth. It even allowed me to find
my mount points from mdk's /etc/fstab before installation. After install
all local files under /home were safe and available.

There are a few points left over which I'd like to bring to the group in
the hope of clearing things up.

1. I had the fanciful idea of moving fairly swiftly to upgrading to
Evolution 2.0, KDE 3,3 etc however from reading the KDE ftp mirror
readmes it became clear that while SuSe RPMs are available, SuSe are not
supporting them at this time and updates will not be available. Further
there is a disclaimer on them working at all. As this machine is our
shared family resource, I have come to the conclusion that it may be
better to wait for v9.2. Does anyone know if a 'net' upgrade would be
available?

2. SuSe 9.1 came with FireFox 0.8 which is now quite old. The main
binary was in a sensible location, /usr/bin, but I needed to upgrade. I
could not find SuSe RPMs for 0,10PRE hence had to grab the tarball,
which is now sitting unwrapped under /opt. This is bad because plugins
have to be maintained in multiple locations, and it does queasy things
to my nice neat file structure ;( Has anyone done good SuSe RPMs for
this version of FireFox?

3. Somehow while attempting to set up printing I screwed up CUPS
administration, so that all valid username/password pairs on my system
are rejected. I can correctly set up my local printer, but cannot save
the setting without 'authorisation'. Argh. Currently I have the printer
set up as a local parallel port printer through Kprinter, but I'd sooner
have CUPS back as that is what we are used to.

4. One of the reasons/excuses to install SuSe 9.1 was to get Red Carpet
working on it as I'd heard great things about it. I grabbed the 2.4.0
Ximian RPMs from Novell for rcd and red-carpet but found them somewhat
buggy. First, red-carpet won't run without unsetting LANG, which is
weird; then the app sometimes segfaults after subscribing to the default
channels and listing the available updates. This is apparently a
consequence of a failed assert() of a pointer for NULL in a GTK get_text
lib call. I never heard of a segfault from a failed assert()!
Suggestions for a more stable version?

5. My /usr partition, at 5 GB, was already cramped under Mdk 9.1. Now,
at 94% full, it's getting tight in there! I've taken on board
suggestions for using something like parted, but have no experience in
this area. What I would like to know is if it is SAFE to use parted or a
derivative to resize partitions on a live system without risk of loss of
data.

All in all I am very impressed with the new system. As expected it is
smoothly integrated: for example a Konq mouse menu gives access to
KRPMView [great app btw!] which connects to YaST for a one touch
install. Highlights are the SuSe build of OO.o, the 'switch user'
function in KDE, and YOU update checking.

Cheers, and thanks for any replies!

Andrew 

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