Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Me and SUSE Linux

Nowadays there are tons of people running around saying Linux will rule the world, etc. Some of my friends suddenly got into all that stuff, so I decided to try it out on my Windows Vista PC.

Here goes then. The *nix distributive chosen was Novell SUSE Linux dunno which version. The DVD was put into the drive and booted well. I got a green background the logos and some other UI. After choosing the path and some other options (there are TONS of them, needed and unneded) with the help of my friend Ivan, who is somewhat familiar with Linux, it started installing. All went well and in an was done in hour, which has given us some time to pick up chips at a local store. 

SUSE asked for root and user passwords and I was told that password "1" is a palindrome as well as it is too short. Well, I'm okay with that - security is always good (as long as it is not the annoying UAC)

Then it showed BASH and started to boot up. Then refused to do "init 5" (graphical UI) with an error "network loading - failed". Excuse me, What does network have to do with GUI. The situation stayed the same after reboot.

So I decided to boot Vista to try and clarify the situation there. Ha! After reboot I was shown the green GRUB screen with choices of OS, clicked on my Vista and BOOM! It failed to boot. Fiddling with the VIsta DVD didnt help, so I had to use the Win98 CD to do a fix of the MBR.

Too bad my acquaintance with the penguin wasn't that nice. But looking at all this stuff I can clearly see that for a somewhat-more-than-dumb user like me Linux is very complicated and un-userfriendly. So its not yet time to predict M$ death or anyting like that :)

PS. After asking on the SUSE forums we were told that the problem was with the Radeon HD2400Pro driver that SUSE incorrectly selected and the solution was to try enter some strange bash command xorgconfig with hope you will be able to choose the right driver from there in console mode.