Prompted by Mandriva nuking its wifi configuration,I decided it was time to try out the new OpenSuse and see how easy it was to install and configure on my Asus EeePC 900.
The install itself was very easy. Easier than with 10.3 or 11.0. The only remotely complexe part of it was setting up custom partitioning (I used the while of the 4GB SSD as one partition mounted at /, and mounted the whole 16GB SSD as /home, didn't create a swap partition and formatted them both as EXT2).
Running OpenSuSe 11.1 is very easy - everything just works. I'll post more about the tweaks that I make as I go. There's only one issue that I have at the moment and that is finding a working repository for Wine Doors (a utility to manage package installations for Wine, the MS Windows compatibility library for Linux) and for some reason ... I can't find one ....
Showing posts with label openSUSE. Show all posts
Showing posts with label openSUSE. Show all posts
Sunday, 1 March 2009
Monday, 17 November 2008
Mandriva Linux on EeePC 900
I've been quite vocal about my appreciation of OpenSuSE 11.0 and how well it works (after a lot of fiddling) on my EeePC 900.
Well, the few bits that didn't work started to annoy me, along with the fact that it didn't take advantage of the faster FSB and effectively ran the access to the memory slower than the hardware was actually capable of.
So I had an idle look on www.distrowatch.com and then did a little surfing for EeePC out-of-the-box compatible distros. I saw that Mandriva have just released their 2009 version and it's supposed to be 100% compatible.
Long story short: it is.
Downloaded the .iso file and burned a DVD ROM (external usb DVD drive - very useful) this morning, and after only about 3 hours of effort, most of that waiting for things to copy, here I am blogging this, from flock, on my EeePC 900, over wireless ... you get the picture. It all just worked.
I've even gone as far as getting Compiz working fine, and was pleasantly surprised to find that the Second Life client is in the full sources set of the repositories. Installing that was quite telling: it runs a good deal faster on Mandriva than on OpenSuSE.
That's it. I'm sold. Faster AND easier? Perfect.
Well, the few bits that didn't work started to annoy me, along with the fact that it didn't take advantage of the faster FSB and effectively ran the access to the memory slower than the hardware was actually capable of.
So I had an idle look on www.distrowatch.com and then did a little surfing for EeePC out-of-the-box compatible distros. I saw that Mandriva have just released their 2009 version and it's supposed to be 100% compatible.
Long story short: it is.
Downloaded the .iso file and burned a DVD ROM (external usb DVD drive - very useful) this morning, and after only about 3 hours of effort, most of that waiting for things to copy, here I am blogging this, from flock, on my EeePC 900, over wireless ... you get the picture. It all just worked.
I've even gone as far as getting Compiz working fine, and was pleasantly surprised to find that the Second Life client is in the full sources set of the repositories. Installing that was quite telling: it runs a good deal faster on Mandriva than on OpenSuSE.
That's it. I'm sold. Faster AND easier? Perfect.
Monday, 6 October 2008
Now, that's a whole 'nother channel right there....
I contacted the people at OpenSuse with a fairly mundane request: do you have any stickers to fit on the lid of my EeePC? You know what us geeks are like about stickers. Turns out that this is an item that they just don't have.
This got me thinking about how important it is when planning the small tactics of your marketing campaign to be able to get a good fit with your existing as well as potential customers. It's your existing customers that will preach on your behalf and tell all their contacts about the quality of your product or service, and providing the right tools for them to be able to do this is key.
Whether it's providing a brochure showing the details of your clients new project, so that they can show ot off in the office, or stickers for geeks with laptops, you'll only benefit by helping your customers to sell your products for you.
Let's face it: I think OpenSuse is a superb OS. My EeePC is on my lap on a packed train for 2.5 hours a day and ends up in a good mix of meetings ... having your logo on the lid of my EeePC will give you quite wide a range of people. Now, that's a whole 'nother channel right there...
This got me thinking about how important it is when planning the small tactics of your marketing campaign to be able to get a good fit with your existing as well as potential customers. It's your existing customers that will preach on your behalf and tell all their contacts about the quality of your product or service, and providing the right tools for them to be able to do this is key.
Whether it's providing a brochure showing the details of your clients new project, so that they can show ot off in the office, or stickers for geeks with laptops, you'll only benefit by helping your customers to sell your products for you.
Let's face it: I think OpenSuse is a superb OS. My EeePC is on my lap on a packed train for 2.5 hours a day and ends up in a good mix of meetings ... having your logo on the lid of my EeePC will give you quite wide a range of people. Now, that's a whole 'nother channel right there...
Tuesday, 22 July 2008
Installing OpenSUSE 11 on an EeePC 900
I've made a few posts over the few weeks about my EeePC 900 and my experiences choosing an OS to run on it.
Xandros didn't last more than a few days, and after a fair amount of trying various things out, I've settled (and been running for a few weeks now) OpenSUSE 11.0.
This is the process that I used to install it.
Before you get started, you need to download and burn to disk the OpenSUSE 11 live CD from here
You also need to put two installers required to make the Wireless networking operate on to a USB memory stick. The files you need are:
madwifi-kmp-default-ng_r3366+ar5007_2.6.25.5_1.1-1.4.i586.rpm
madwifi-ng_r3366+ar5007-1.4.i586.rpm
which can be downloaded from the Appleonkel repository here
1. Install from the OpenSUSE 11 live CD (using a USB external CD-ROM drive). The installer is very easy to use and the only things that I specifically did was to set the partitions up so that there was only a system partition on the 4GB SSD and to mount the 16GB SSD into /home. All relatively easy to do with the partitioning tool that's built into the OpenSUSE installer. Make sure you remove the swap partition - it'll help your SSD last longer (although how much longer no-one really knows).
2. Modify xorg.conf in line with the changes listed in OpenSUSE on the EeePC - openSUSE
If you (like me) have a 900, you'll need to modify the 1024x768 entries in xorg.conf to read 1024x600. You will also need to run yast from a root commandline and modify the system >> sysconfig editor >> desktop >> display manager >> displaymanager_randr_mode_auto value and change it to:
1024X600_60 48.96 1024 1064 1168 1312 600 601 604 622 -hsync -vsync
There may be another way to change this value but this is the only method I have found that works.
If you're planning to use Second Life on your EeePC, remember to turn 3D acceleration on and set to 24bit colour depth.
3. Use the USB stick with the Madwifi / Drivers RPMs and install them with the package installer. You should then be able to configure your wireless and things get easier at this point. I have to make one point here though: lock these two packages in the installer and stop them being updated. For some reason the updates break the wireless and you'll need to uninstall / reinstall with the original Appleonkel versions. Anyone knows why, then please let me know!
4. Add the Appleonkel, Seife, Schmolle 1980 and Rusjako repositories as detailed in the 10.3 wiki entry (linked above - see step 2). I also added a few others at this point: packman, vlc, mozilla, gnome stable, wine - but that's personal preference.
5. Add the eeepc packages and you should find you have a working system after the reboot.
I think a full install takes about 1.5 hours to get to this point and worked quite well. The only thing I don't have working yet is the webcam, but I'll keep you posted if I find an answer.
Xandros didn't last more than a few days, and after a fair amount of trying various things out, I've settled (and been running for a few weeks now) OpenSUSE 11.0.
This is the process that I used to install it.
Before you get started, you need to download and burn to disk the OpenSUSE 11 live CD from here
You also need to put two installers required to make the Wireless networking operate on to a USB memory stick. The files you need are:
madwifi-kmp-default-ng_r3366+ar5007_2.6.25.5_1.1-1.4.i586.rpm
madwifi-ng_r3366+ar5007-1.4.i586.rpm
which can be downloaded from the Appleonkel repository here
1. Install from the OpenSUSE 11 live CD (using a USB external CD-ROM drive). The installer is very easy to use and the only things that I specifically did was to set the partitions up so that there was only a system partition on the 4GB SSD and to mount the 16GB SSD into /home. All relatively easy to do with the partitioning tool that's built into the OpenSUSE installer. Make sure you remove the swap partition - it'll help your SSD last longer (although how much longer no-one really knows).
2. Modify xorg.conf in line with the changes listed in OpenSUSE on the EeePC - openSUSE
If you (like me) have a 900, you'll need to modify the 1024x768 entries in xorg.conf to read 1024x600. You will also need to run yast from a root commandline and modify the system >> sysconfig editor >> desktop >> display manager >> displaymanager_randr_mode_auto value and change it to:
1024X600_60 48.96 1024 1064 1168 1312 600 601 604 622 -hsync -vsync
There may be another way to change this value but this is the only method I have found that works.
If you're planning to use Second Life on your EeePC, remember to turn 3D acceleration on and set to 24bit colour depth.
3. Use the USB stick with the Madwifi / Drivers RPMs and install them with the package installer. You should then be able to configure your wireless and things get easier at this point. I have to make one point here though: lock these two packages in the installer and stop them being updated. For some reason the updates break the wireless and you'll need to uninstall / reinstall with the original Appleonkel versions. Anyone knows why, then please let me know!
4. Add the Appleonkel, Seife, Schmolle 1980 and Rusjako repositories as detailed in the 10.3 wiki entry (linked above - see step 2). I also added a few others at this point: packman, vlc, mozilla, gnome stable, wine - but that's personal preference.
5. Add the eeepc packages and you should find you have a working system after the reboot.
I think a full install takes about 1.5 hours to get to this point and worked quite well. The only thing I don't have working yet is the webcam, but I'll keep you posted if I find an answer.
Wednesday, 14 May 2008
Going Open Source - Part 4: The Pale Heretic Way
To put it simply: I have found a solution for Linux on my Laptop that works for me.
An important fact about me (and therefore my approach to this) is that I'm not a systems administrator, but I do have 15 years experience working with computers as a designer, new-media developer and animator. I don't use Linux in my day-to-day work. I've just had enough of MS Windows (and never got on with Macs) and want an alternative. So what I need is something that works more-or-less from the point where it is installed and that my limited knowledge will allow me to cope with any things that I need to configure or fix.
The laptop I use (every day) is an HP DV2130ea.
Having left Ubuntu a few weeks ago when the new version decided to forget all about my hardware, I proceeded to try out a range of distributions, quite rapidly, to see if I could find one that managed to identify my hardware (critical requirement was it had to find and configure both my Intel WIFI and Nvidia Graphics Adapter). PCLinuxOS and Dream Linux both looked interesting but failed to work for me.
As part of this I discovered a very useful site: DistroWatch. A great site that lists most of (if not all) the available distributions and provides links to reviews, community sites and download locations. They also provide a hot-list of the most viewed distributions on their site – a good rough indicator of usage / popularity.
It was from this that I found OpenSUSE. A linux distribution funded and developed by Novell.
It got my interest from more-or-less the third screen of the installer, where it correctly identified my Wifi card and Graphics adapter and also managed to cope with the fact that my laptop has a widescreen display.
The rest of the installation was exactly what I had hoped it would be: uneventful.
OpenSUSE itself is easy to work with in the same sense that any of the Linux versions you choose to install are just about similar to MS Windows that you can find the application / control panel you need. The interface is clean and the pre-installed set of applications covers most things that you'd need, with a good range of applications available from the application installer with a minimum of fuss.
The list of applications that I'm running includes Open Office, Flock, Skype, Second Life, Blender, Thunderbird , Vmware, Remote Desktop.
The installations for all of these was relatively simple, as was creating menu icons for those that didn't do this themselves (seems to be a common thing in my experience).
Even the installation and configuration of VMWare Player wasn't too tricky and made much easier by a good walkthrough that can be found on the OpenSUSE website here.
So what I now have is a laptop that works, with the software I needed and so far (on the limited sample of 2 weeks) It's been reliable to the point where I can forget about it and just work. You can see samples of the graphics that I've produced below.
An that I guess was the biggest wrench – leaving the Adobe suite of applications behind. Despite their high cost, they are a great set of applications. What is encouraging is that the open source alternatives are very good and nearly offer all the required functionality.
A brief note to the GIMP community – can we have vector objects (multiple in one layer) and layer folders please, because these are the only things that I have missed having moved from Photoshop to GIMP, and that says something right there.
Right now, I'm on a train to meet a client, and I will be demoing some bespoke MS Windows applications in a VMWare virtual machine on this laptop. That's about as good as I could have possibly hoped for.
OpenSUSE has a new version 11 out in about 30 days. I'll let you know how the upgrade goes.
PH
An important fact about me (and therefore my approach to this) is that I'm not a systems administrator, but I do have 15 years experience working with computers as a designer, new-media developer and animator. I don't use Linux in my day-to-day work. I've just had enough of MS Windows (and never got on with Macs) and want an alternative. So what I need is something that works more-or-less from the point where it is installed and that my limited knowledge will allow me to cope with any things that I need to configure or fix.
The laptop I use (every day) is an HP DV2130ea.
Having left Ubuntu a few weeks ago when the new version decided to forget all about my hardware, I proceeded to try out a range of distributions, quite rapidly, to see if I could find one that managed to identify my hardware (critical requirement was it had to find and configure both my Intel WIFI and Nvidia Graphics Adapter). PCLinuxOS and Dream Linux both looked interesting but failed to work for me.
As part of this I discovered a very useful site: DistroWatch. A great site that lists most of (if not all) the available distributions and provides links to reviews, community sites and download locations. They also provide a hot-list of the most viewed distributions on their site – a good rough indicator of usage / popularity.
It was from this that I found OpenSUSE. A linux distribution funded and developed by Novell.
It got my interest from more-or-less the third screen of the installer, where it correctly identified my Wifi card and Graphics adapter and also managed to cope with the fact that my laptop has a widescreen display.
The rest of the installation was exactly what I had hoped it would be: uneventful.
OpenSUSE itself is easy to work with in the same sense that any of the Linux versions you choose to install are just about similar to MS Windows that you can find the application / control panel you need. The interface is clean and the pre-installed set of applications covers most things that you'd need, with a good range of applications available from the application installer with a minimum of fuss.
The list of applications that I'm running includes Open Office, Flock, Skype, Second Life, Blender, Thunderbird , Vmware, Remote Desktop.
The installations for all of these was relatively simple, as was creating menu icons for those that didn't do this themselves (seems to be a common thing in my experience).
Even the installation and configuration of VMWare Player wasn't too tricky and made much easier by a good walkthrough that can be found on the OpenSUSE website here.
So what I now have is a laptop that works, with the software I needed and so far (on the limited sample of 2 weeks) It's been reliable to the point where I can forget about it and just work. You can see samples of the graphics that I've produced below.
An that I guess was the biggest wrench – leaving the Adobe suite of applications behind. Despite their high cost, they are a great set of applications. What is encouraging is that the open source alternatives are very good and nearly offer all the required functionality.
A brief note to the GIMP community – can we have vector objects (multiple in one layer) and layer folders please, because these are the only things that I have missed having moved from Photoshop to GIMP, and that says something right there.
Right now, I'm on a train to meet a client, and I will be demoing some bespoke MS Windows applications in a VMWare virtual machine on this laptop. That's about as good as I could have possibly hoped for.
OpenSUSE has a new version 11 out in about 30 days. I'll let you know how the upgrade goes.
PH
Tuesday, 29 April 2008
Going Open Source - Part 3 update
I'm going to keep this short, because I want to go into the details in Part 4.
Ubuntu Hardy Heron proved impossible. No wireless and no graphics card driver was just enough of a problem to make it really annoying. A complete clean install didn't fix it so I decided to try some other distributions - www.dreamlinux.com.br : as slick as using a Mac, same wireless + graphics problems, www.pclinuxos.com :Even more problems. Then I tried openSUSE 10.3 www.opensuse.org Amazing stuff - everything worked first time. Wireless was working from installation onwards, NVidia make drivers for openSUSE specifically for my graphic card.
In the next part I'll run through my first week's experences, but so far? Wonderful!
Ubuntu Hardy Heron proved impossible. No wireless and no graphics card driver was just enough of a problem to make it really annoying. A complete clean install didn't fix it so I decided to try some other distributions - www.dreamlinux.com.br : as slick as using a Mac, same wireless + graphics problems, www.pclinuxos.com :Even more problems. Then I tried openSUSE 10.3 www.opensuse.org Amazing stuff - everything worked first time. Wireless was working from installation onwards, NVidia make drivers for openSUSE specifically for my graphic card.
In the next part I'll run through my first week's experences, but so far? Wonderful!
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