While on vacation last week, I got the opportunity to help out a
relative who was installing OpenSUSE 11.1. (Yes, I suggested
OpenSolaris instead. He was set on trying out OpenSUSE anyway.)
Here's a summary of what I found in the process:
1. The installer includes a fairly straightforward network testing
program. It's partly a text-based NWAM (it walks through
telling you what physical interfaces it found, then what things
it found on each interface), and partly a confidence-builder.
I think we could learn from both parts. The visibility into
what was being discovered was great. It took way too long to
find out that I didn't have PPPoE (which it called "DSL"), but
it was good to know what it was doing in detail as it tried each
step. And I didn't have to click on any desktop icon to get the
information.
The confidence-building part was a trivial test that the
installer ran: after configuring the network interfaces, it
contacted a SUSE web site, downloaded a tiny test file, and let
me know the results. It was a little kludgey for my taste, but
certainly did give me confidence that the system was going to
work later on.
2. The installer forces you through software reconfiguration
(package selection) and upgrade after the first reboot. This is
actually a mostly positive experience, as the bits on the DVD
are unlikely to be as fresh or complete as the ones you can get
from the web site, and after reboot seems to be the right time
to do this.
Some downsides to the way this was done: (1) they have you do
the software configuration work when doing the DVD install, and
then again after reboot; just once after reboot would be much
better, as I don't want to spend more time in YAST than is
necessary; (2) the first reboot claimed my video display didn't
work and gave me a scary-looking CGA text mode YAST2.
3. The installer seemed to set up multiple repositories (their
system allows multiple priorities rather than just a single
"preferred" flag), but with the DVD itself being first. This
was painful. At first, I thought the system was just broken
when, after the first reboot, it tried to "upgrade" over the
network and it kept asking for the DVD back. Then I had to mess
with repositories, which is a less than intuitive experience.
Messing with repositories means having to "accept" a bunch of
random crypto keys that identify and/or secure those
repositories. It was extremely unclear what I should do when
asked a "yes/no" question about something that sensitive, but
since it looked like one of those browser-like "would you like
this to work, or should I just fall to pieces?" prompts, I just
accepted everything. (A "I don't know what I'm doing" button
would have helped somewhat.)
4. The installer defaulted to giving a marketing slide show, but
there was a tab you could click on to view "details" -- and that
showed the actual package installation progress. You could go
back to the slide show at any time.
5. They used what appeared to be gparted for configuring the disk,
and that worked reasonably well. However, the initial partition
was confusing. They called it the "current" system
configuration, but the information there was clearly not what
was on the existing disk (which was 100% dedicated to XP with
NTFS at the start), but was instead SUSE's suggested
reconfiguration of the disk, complete with shrunken Windows and
addition of Linux swap, root, and home partitions in an extended
partition. It took a while to figure out what was going on and
make sure we weren't wiping out anything.
It was tough to reconfigure as desired, as the owner of the
machine didn't want as much dedicated to Linux as SUSE wanted.
The partitioning tool won't let you resize anything, apparently
due to the use of extended partitions. I had to delete the
"helpful" suggested configuration, and redo it.
6. Watching some of the install progress was scary. For instance,
something called "msttfonts" has a script that runs at install
time, and this script pings a bunch of servers looking for the
"fastest" one from which to install bits. Why this sort of
functionality would be buried inside of a single package is
beyond me.
7. It has a fair collection of games available for it. The kids
liked the retro-look "Secret Maryo Chronicles." Many of them,
such as the apparently Python-based solitare game set, seem to
drop core a lot. We probably don't need more core files on
OpenSolaris, but having the SMC game and a few of the
educational and scientific games would be really nice.
(On the downside, having more than 70 hours in a 172M doesn't
mean you can do more than get accidentally inverted when using
FlightGear from the keyboard. ;-})
8. For the Windows crowd, they've got a nice single-user log-in-by-
default mechanism. Just like a "normal" PC, it boots right up
to a desktop without messing around with logging in. It also
has the option to log in by user icon (like a Mac) and to log in
by user name and password (old school UNIX). It may even have
the XP-like switch users thing ... but I didn't try it.
9. The installer made me choose between GNOME and KDE. As the
intended user of the system knew KDE better, I picked that. I
don't know what would have happened if I'd done otherwise, and
didn't have time to try it.
Hope some of that proves useful to someone.
--
James Carlson, Solaris Networking <james.d.carlson at sun.com>
Sun Microsystems / 35 Network Drive 71.232W Vox +1 781 442 2084
MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757 42.496N Fax +1 781 442 1677
