Re: shell Hell

Bar wrote:
I guess I am not gonna be a SuSE guy after all.

I have been working in IT for about 25 years and Linux for almost 12 years
and Slackware has been my distro of choice.

Over the last couple days I have been fighting to get a full SuSE 10.1
installed onto an IBM ThinkPad R40 laptop - 1.5GHz Centrino 256Meg 60Gig
HD. The only downside is the 10/100 ethernet card was non-functional.

Being a Slackware guy I looked forward to how easy YaST was going to be.

I changed a couple default configurations like only using 512Meg swap
partition and the rest as /. Further, I choose ext2, not reiser. (Why
reiser?)

Reiser has some enterprise characteristics like the ability to be
resized on the fly without unmounting the filesystem. YMMV, ext2
is not used except for very small filesystem, ext3 is preferred for
larger filesystems.


WHAT A NIGHTMARE!!!

Hours and hours and hours of watching the CD drive C R A W L through the
installation up until disk 5 then all of s sudden U can't get CD 4 to
eject. I hit the [Eject] and CD 4 ejected BUT the dialog box disappeared so
I could continue the installation process. The [Abort] button did nothing.
The [Help] button provided NO HELP AT ALL!

Crawl, hours? It's possible that DMA was not setup on the drive (which
does happen on certain hardware).

Somewhat unusual to use CD 5... were you trying to install EVERYTHING?
You might want to start off with something simple at first.. you can
always add packages later.


So, what do the SuSErs do when install *** up?

Don't know exactly what happened in your case, but sometimes you just
reinstall.


I tried a bunch of key combos then I pushed every key to no avail. I had to
POWER DOWN to get it to restart.

Does sound like an interesting hardware issue.


I get back to the same dialog box after the system rebooted and this time
when I hit [OK], nothing happens. It hunts and hunts and hunts and produces
bizarre error messages about being unable to cd:///?/dev/hdc - what does
that mean?

So I skip past CD 5 and try CD 6 but the same story,

CD 6? Well... I'm lost. You mean the add-on CD? There is no
CD 6.... oh... I see below.. add-on... duh...


I continue with the configuration and get KDE loaded up. Looks good.

I hunt around and found YaST and after entering the magic password tried to
catalog CD 5 and CD 6 (Add Ons). - no joy!

I then bail out of KDE down to the root command line and start
troubleshooting and discover to my horror hundreds and hundreds of shell
scripts and tiny little config files.

ARE YOU GUYS KIDDING OR WHAT?

I am used to rc shell files and scripts and text config files but all SuSE
has gone overboard.

Actually it's very straight forward. However, it's System V-ish. If
you've worked on Solaris or HPUX, it should be familiar.


I start looking online for some hint about how the system is organized but
found absolutely nothing - it is like it is a state secret ot something.

Nothing is secret if you understand a System V style init. But, that's
probably new to you.

Just for starters, start with /etc/inittab. From there you can unravel
the whole "mystery". It's really not terribly hard... but if you're
not aware of how a System V init works... could be difficult to figure
out where to start... now you know.


The client that brought the laptop and SuSE disks left with a full fresh
Slackware current installation with all the bells and whistles he could
imagine - dvd players, video players, three music players, wireless and
ethernet (pcmcis card) bluetooth, OpenOffice, RealPlayer, Adobe Reader,
K2B, power management, games, blah blah blah... but no YaST.

Ok. Nothing wrong with slackware.


But guess what? The client has to the command line and type 'installpkg
packagenameversion.tgz <enter> and it is done in a couple seconds. Want to
upgrade an entire installation? telinit to single user and
upgradeinstall --install-new *.tgz and everything is either ugraded if
already installed or installed if new. The program will skip right by
already installed current packages and doesn't require anybody to watch.

Yup, a couple command line recipes and everything works right out of the
box.

Ok. Customer is happy, You're happy...


I won't be trying or recommending SuSE to anybody after these last two days.
The online forum reacts slowly and this newsgroup is dead.

Just my viewpoint.

Hmmm.. I find this newsgroup to be incredibly active. The forums from
Novell can be accessed via nntp as well (which I prefer)... sounds
like you might prefer. I don't expect to see you around though.
Sounds like you're sufficiently ticked-off.


Bar
.