openSUSE 11.1

I put off upgrading my primary laptop, until yesterday. I finally upgraded to openSUSE 11.1. It is a triple-booted machine, so the upgrade include installing Simply Mephis 8.0 and Ubuntu 8.10. I really wanted to install Debian 5.0, Mandriva 2009, and openSUSE, but had a few problems. I did discover a new trick.

On ancient Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop, I have two DVD drives. The original one no longer reads DVDs, but still reads CDs. I purchased a new DVD drive from eBay, and it went in the front slot to replace the floppy. The BIOS has no problem with two drives, and it boots a DVD from the new drive.

It booted the Debian install disk without a problem. Everything was fine until I got to the install. Then Debian got confused and said it couldn’t mount the install disk. I went into the manual mode, and it didn’t show either drive. I didn’t have time to fiddle with it, so I switched to Ubuntu 8.10. I know the is a new version out, but I do not have the DVD. Besides, I can upgrade to it.

Next on the list was Mandriva 2009. When it came to the install portion, the script asked me which drive to use. The install ran for awhile, and then just stopped, with no messages. It litterally froze waiting for something. Even copy the CD to the hard drive didn’t work. Another problem for another day, and it was replaced with Simply Mephis 8.0. The install worked just fine, no problems.

When I got to openSUSE, I realized that I had made a mistake in space allocation. Plus, I wanted to have the partition with /home as he last partition. I used GParted to pre-allocate the partitions, one swap, three for each distro, and one for /home. Except for the swap partition, all were formatted to EXT3. Then I reinstalled everything in order.

openSUSE has the best install procedure by far. No other distro comes even close. It is the only distro that correctly identified the other distos, and correctly setup GRUB to boot those distros. No manual fixing required.

I actually installed openSUSE twice, and not because I love doing installs. The first install I made XFCE the primary desktop. I also installed KDE4 as I need some of the KDE applictions. It didn’t work, as none of the KDE applications appeared in the menu. Plus, I left Network Manager as the applet to manage networks. It didn’t even appear on the XFCE screen. If it weren’t for the lack of critical KDE applications, I would have re-installed using the traditional method.

On the second install, I just installed KDE4.1. The install went great. KDE does use about a 100 megabytes more of memory than XFCE. I kept the eye-candy to a minimum, which helped. There is no question that openSUSE is still my favorite distro.