I’ve (finally) installed openSUSE. Since my home partition is separate, I’ve left it unmounted for now till I know whether I want to keep openSUSE- and if I need to downgrade from ext4 to ext3 on that partition (if that’s even possible).
Why try it? I’ve had several crashes recently and I’m hoping maybe openSUSE will be a bit more stable for me. Plus, openSUSE has to be the best designed distro- Jakub Steiner works for Novell doing brilliant work for openSUSE. If for no other reason, the look and feel is a pleasure to use.
Immediate goals:
- pommed for my Macbook Pro
- touchpad two finger scrolling
- ext4/ext3 question
- Gnome Do
- Tasque
- Mozilla Prism
- iSight camera
- Acer Prisa 620UT Scanner
- Flash etc.
After that, I’ll decide whether to keep openSUSE long-term. I made an image of my root partition that I can restore at anytime.
So far, the installation was a little problematic, but that was my setup, not openSUSE. Wireless seems as flaky as Ubuntu, so that’s probably my network, my card, or the same driver just being equally flaky. My initial software update seemed a little weird. Kept reporting failures to connect to repositories. Retry enough times and you’ll get through.
Shockingly easy so far. I installed pommed and added it to the Runlevel Editor (there are a lot of great configuration tools in openSuse). For touchpad gestures, everything but scrolling was already in place- for that I just added a line to my xorg.conf file based on http://en.opensuse.org/Installation_on_MacBook#Touchpad
Gnome-do provides an openSuse repository (I don’t know yet if that’s what they call them), so that was easy although I was confused for a minute by a missing icon and no plug-ins. Then I realized there was a separate package for the plugins which strangely includes the icon.
The Flash plug-in was installed by default. Tasque was too. I’m waiting on my scanner and isight until I mount the old home partition.
Unfortunately, I’m a little stuck because my home partition is ext4- that’s looking like a bad decision…
There’s no way to convert it back to ext3 of course. I tried to mount it as ext3 without luck. So I could go looking for an upgraded kernel, but that strikes me as introducing possible instability which I’m trying to avoid. But the only other option may be imaging the partition and rsyncing the data onto a fresh ext3 partition.
Hmm.
I downloaded prism directly from Mozilla at http://prism.mozilla.com and set up my web apps there.
As noted in a later post, I dodged the ext4 issue by changing all my stuff over to ext3. Insane? I’ve been called worse.
I just need to get my isight, scanner and Mighty Mouse working for base functionality.
Mighty Mouse working. Scanner working- just had to add the firmware file to the snapscan.conf file. iSight’s the only thing left. Has a strange problem with ‘BadAlloc (insufficient resources for operation)’.
(Details: serial 61 error_code 11 request_code 141 minor_code 19)
Tried to install webcam dependencies from http://wiki.suselinuxsupport.de/wikka.php?wakka=HowToSetupalogitechUsbWebcam and got:
– xawtv (and dependencies)
– libdv
– gqcam
Still no joy. Maybe on reboot?