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Dec

20

SUSE Linux 9.1 Professional on the IBM R50 Thinkpad

IBM, Linux, SUSE, Thinkpad | Leave a Comment

Well, I got SUSE 9.1 Pro on my shiny new TP yesterday! Works like a charm!

I had a DVD of this distro from Novell, but since my old PC didn’t have a DVD ROM, I never got a change to have a look at this supposedly cool distro. RedHat/Fedora has been my mainstay since the bad old days of Linux 2.0.

SUSE’s installation is about as easy to use as Fedora’s, but it’s certainly more powerful. The only gripe I have is their handling of multilayered dialogs – where one dialog/preference box leads to another – leavs much room for improvement. The NTFS resizer was a joy to use! IBM’s default partitioning scheme is to use a ~4GB partition (which they call PreDesktop Area) for recovery, and use the rest as ine large C: drive. In addition, when you first boot the TP, Windows converts this FAT32 drive to NTFS. I’m glad SUSE was able to resize this so well; Fedora and the rest MUST have this feature by now!

(I’d do away with Windows XP altogether except for the fact that I’d paid good money for this copy – and IBM doesn’t provide installation CDs! GRRRR!)

The installation is simple for a newbie – if he/she sticks with the (decent) defaults, and is sufficiently flexible for a power user to tweak. I picked almost all of the packages SUSE had to offer. However, the installation itself takes a very long time – 4 GB took 2 hours to install! This is unacceptable, guys!

Once I was done, though, the most adorable little chameleon greeted me at startup! This was a welcome change from the furious cascade of kernel debug messages I was used to in Fedora. Even RHGB – Fedora’s attempt at graphical boot, although professional-looking – isn’t as pretty as this. My first virtual console was in a nice framebuffer.

OK. SUSE makes the best KDE desktop in the world. Period. No arguments about this one. I’ve tried Mandrake, RHEL and Fedora, and no one puts as much into their KDE as SUSE. I’ll put up a screenshot of their default desktop sometime soon. YAST is very nicely integrated into KDE’s Control Centre. SAX2, SUSE’s X configuration tool, rocks. The menus are well arranged, lots of applications, sensible defaults. Two great-looking wallpapers.

Gnome sucks. I hope fervently that things have improved in the 9.2 release and in Novell Linux Desktop. It’s amazing that fonts that look so great in KDE can be so unreadable in Gnome. And don’t accuse me of not tweaking enough – I’m a Gnome lover too, and know a fair bit about using and configuring it. YAST isn’t too well integrated here – and it’s difficult for a user to run a pure-Gnome SUSE desktop , because all of YAST’s modules seem to have been written using the Qt libraries. Oh, well – SUSE did always tout itself as a KDE-centric distro. Wonder how Ximian’s changed that.

SUSE’s notebook support is amazing! I’ve yet to go over this in detail, but suspend/stand-by and hibernate worked like a charm! There’s this YAST module which is a front-end to kpowersave – and it’s the most intuitive way I’ve seen to manage a mobile computer’s power-handling features. I was advised not to try ACPI, and to stick to APMd. I’ve done that. There’s this nice piece on OSNews.com about SUSE 9.2 Pro’s power handling support. Hope to upgrade to 9.2 soon, will try that out. More on this as I explore further.

The R50’s scroll feature doesn’t work yet, but there’s a program by the name of TPScroll which apparently does a good job at fixing that. I’ve dowloaded it, will try it out tonight. More later.

OK – so that’s my first experience with Linux on a Laptop – and, as you’ve probably guessed, it’s been quite appealing!




Dec

19

Say hello to my new IBM ThinkPad!

IBM, Linux, Off-Topic, Thinkpad | Leave a Comment

My IBM Thinkpad R50 has arrived:

Here are the specs:
1.) ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 64MB 128-bit DDR Video Ram Operating at 210 MHz.
2.) 14.1″ TFT Screen
3.) Trackpoint
4.) Touchpad
5.) ThinkLight at the top of the screen illuminates the screen in low light conditions.
6.) System and power status indicators:
Wireless status,
Bluetooth status,
Numeric lock,
Caps lock,
Drive in use,
Power on,
Battery status, and
Standby status.
7.) Function keys for screen brightness, full screen functionality, web browser forward and back buttons, (these are all hard-wired key functions, so their usage is not OS-dependent. However, a nice project called the TPB (ThinkPad Buttons) enables an on-screen display on Linux.
8.) Built-in microphone
9.) Volume increase/decrease/mute buttons.
10.) Centrino Mobile technology – wireless support built-in via”integrated dual diversity antenna built into the display”.
11.) 40 GB HDD
12.) DVD-ROM – no CD/RW! :-(
13.) 2 USB ports
14.) Video-out connector
15.) Agere systems AC’97 Modem
16.) PC card slot – to attach modem, data storage, network, and SCSI connector cards.
17.) Built-in Infrared port.

Right now I’m doing a bit of research regarding the best distribution for install on this new machine.

Since I’ve got a nice licenced copy of Windows XP here, I don’t want to dump this one to install Linux… but the problem is that all 40GB here on my TP has been allocated to one primary partition. So first I need a distro which can resize my Windows partition. I hear SUSE can. I have a nice SUSE 9.1 Professional DVD here which Novell shipped me free of cost sometime back… and I think it’s got Ximian Desktop included (drool!). So that’s my first choice.

If I don’t like SUSE (I doubt that!), I’m going to use their installation program to resize this partition, and install FC3 on top. But I’m tired of RedHat/Fedora and I want a change.
Let’s see how this goes.

Update (January 22nd 2005): I’ve got Novell Linux Desktop 9 on my Thinkpad now; and got rid of Windows XP altogether! Although this is a great distro, I still want to give SUSE Linux 9.2 Professional a try. I’m attempting to dload all the 5 CDs (Five! How bloated can Linux distros get anyways?), and I’ll write about it when I’ve installed the bunch.