On Mon, Dec 12, 2005 at 11:11:34AM -0700, Stuart Jansen wrote: > On Mon, 2005-12-12 at 11:01 -0700, Bart Whiteley wrote: > > Why would I have meant that? You weren't trying to build your own > > repository. > > Mostly because I'm in a bad mood at the moment. You have just > revealed an un-documented (as far as I've been able to tell) mirror > providing exactly what I want. Why the files on the apparent mirror > doesn't just appear on ftp.suse.com and why this has to wait for > mysterious "future versions" is beyond me. SUSE has a history of > being a walled garden.
I just installed SuSE 9.3 on one of my test boxen at work this week. This looks like an appropriate time to gripe. I had first installed Fedora Core 5-Test1. I left half of the space in the LVM volume group open for SuSE. The link for the net install CD boot ISO image was broken on the SuSE site. A SuSE-using co-worker pointed me to an FTP server with boot.iso. I burned that and started the installation. Then I was asked for an FTP server IP address. I searched Google for ``suse net install ftp server'' and this page came up: http://www.linuxgazette.com/node/9052 I found this link in that page: ftp://mirror.mcs.anl.gov/pub/suse/ Okay. I can handle that. It's a little silly that I have to ask Google for this sort of thing though in the middle of an install. So I manually resolved the IP address on my other box, punched in the path/to/current/ and was promptly booted out with an error that the path could not be found/did not contain image/whatever (current/ was a valid link on the server...?). Tried again, this time with path/to/9.3/, and I was in business. Why didn't the current/ link work in the first place? Maybe it pointed to 10.0/, but I really don't care whether it's 9.3 or 10.0 for that box. Well, I had a sane source for my packages, but I had to set up a logical volume (SuSE was ready to blow away my FC5-Test1 that I had just installed earlier that day). I found that the logical volume management tool interface was unintuitive, so I dropped to shell and use the lv* tools to create the partition. I could not coerce YaST into detecting the newly created logical volume. Fine; I just told YaST to create the volume anyway, and then moved on. Then YaST freaked out about the fact that the volume already existing (who woulda thunk?), but I safely ignored its complaints, and it was on its way. As a background task, installing SuSE 9.3 via the net install took two full work days to complete. And it blew away Red Hat's grub/menu.lst; I had to manually recreate the entries for the Red Hat kernel and root partition. And it SuSE-ified my grub splash screen (grrrrrr). Minor annoyances, but I eventually was up and running with a dual-boot SuSE 9.3/FC5-Test1 test box. The experience could have been improved by: - Providing a set of mirrors in the installer - Playing nice w/ existing grub configurations (rather than just blowing them away) - Re-probing the LVM info when entering the partitioning tool Mike .___________________________________________________________________. "Aristotelian ethics, Aristotelian definitions, Aristotelian logic, Aristotelian forms, Aristotelian substances, Aristotelian rhetoric, Aristotelian laughter... ha-ha, ha-ha." - Robert Pirsig
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