I gave Linux another chance. I really want to have a nice Linux install running on my machine, but I know that I need a lot of time to set it up so that it fits my needs. Well, I have a lot of time now and so I went out and bought a magazine with a CD containing a free version of Suse 9.1 personal.
I cleaned the spare harddisk I have, put in the CD and rebooted. After a couple of clicks, Suse had partionioned the disk and was copying files to it. This copying process took surprisingly long, but I didn't mind that. After it was done copying the files, I was allowed to do a few more clicks and then I needed to reboot. Suse had installed grub and I hadn't changed its configuration. So I rebooted and got: "grub geom error". That was it. I now had a completely unusable machine uttering complete nonsense. Cool.
"geom", I guess is short for geometry. Which, again, is short for "harddisk geometry", which is geek speak for "I don't know how to boot from that disk". Duh.
So I booted from the CD again. Fortunately, I am a seasoned Windows user. I'm used to clicking on "Start" when I want to stop and stuff like that. Booting from the Suse CD, I had to click "Install" when I really wanted to boot. It wasn't obvious at all, but I finally made that thing boot into my new Linux installation where I found Yast and its boot manager configuration module. I did some editing of the grub configuration, but to no avail; the machine still wouldn't boot. So I chose the option to restore the MBR of my first harddisk and then I installed grub on the second harddisk. That worked. If that would have been my first attempt at Linux, I would have been completely lost. Searching google and the Suse support db for the error message revealed that the problem was known. Unfortunately, it didn't give any clues as to how to remove the problem and make my machine boot again. All the fine tips that Suse had required a booting system when all I had to offer was "grub geom error".
Well, "never mind", I thought and started to play with the new system. It was quite nice. I was able to browse my local MS network, I was able to print with my printer, I was able to make Suse update my clock on boot, etc. All very nice.
Then I was trying to install a few more packets over FTP, when my girl friend said that she wanted to print on my printer. I knew I had to install Samba to share the printer, and I knew that I wasn't going to do that within a few seconds, so I tried to browse the her shared drive so I could open the file myself and print it. But the local MS network support had stopped working. Konqueror told me to file a bug report. A look at the boot messages told me that the smbfs service wasn't loaded ("skipped at runlevel 5") because somewhere during the boot process, someone had figured that this service was "unused". Duh.
So I asked her to mail me the file and while it printed, I did some serious googling again. Another known problem; but nobody had any clue how to use that service again. I had to give up on it and I decided that I'd install Samba and see how that would help.
But that was for later. First, I wanted to get a few developer packets. gcc, make, Python, more Perl modules, etc. They all installed pretty well, at least from what I could tell. Yast closed its Software installation module on me without any hint of a failure. Compiling "Hello, World!" in C worked too. So I fired up perl to install some modules. Strangely, LWP::UserAgent wasn't installed and lots of modules that were required by that module were also missing. Trying to install these didn't work. The CPAN shell reported errors with make. "OK", I thought (again), "this is for later".
Now, I wanted to install gnome. I'm not a big fan of KDE and I wanted to have an alternative. Again, the required packets installed just fine. But how do you get suse to offer you the choice of a desktop? I found the answer with google and was finally able to log into gnome. But all I got was icons. All the text in gnome was rendered at a font size of approximately 0 pt. Switching the screen resolution didn't help. I still couldn't see anything but icons. Duh.
Some more googling: Yet another problem that people had come across. But no solution. That's it. That's enough of Suse for me. I will have to get another distro. Although I don't know which one. I also don't know how to get one. I had Mandrake once and it wasn't bad. But downloading three iso images? No, I can't afford that bandwidth. Ordering Mandrake? Sorry, but I'm not going to pay 59 Euros either.
So I'm back on Windows, waiting for a nice Linux distro to come along.
If all of the above wasn't enough, here are some more questions I have for Suse:
When you install sofware from an ftp server, why do you get packets that suffer from bugs and security flaws? You install some packet, e.g. Opera, and the next thing you know is that "YOU" tells you that there is an update available. Well, I guess it was also available five minutes earlier. Duh.
When you log on as root, all you get is Yast. How are you supposed to administer a system without at least a shell to work with? Duh.