It's been sitting there all this time...
Oct. 11th, 2004 02:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pseydtonneTotal geek post, by the way. Dull dull dull. You've been warned.
A few months ago my cousin bought a Shuttle (the small computer, not the space ship nor the subway nor even the loom device). This is a decent box from about a year or two ago -- P4 Northwood 1.8Ghz 226MHz FSB DDR 512 MB RAM with all sorts of ports (three Firewire, four USB, NIC, built-in video and audio, 1 AGP & 1 PCI slot. Oh, but it's also a box about the size of a breadbox. She got a deal on it and it's significantly more modern than her regular workstation (P2 300 MHz 66 MHz FSB int13h limit so the largest a hard drive can be is 32 GB).
While her old workstation has a respectable 256 MB RAM and works well enough, it's old. The motherboard's limitations mean it has a copious amount of workaround involved. However, she hadn't wanted to transition away from it because it took too much effort. It came with XP Home on it, which we've left on there mostly to make sure something works with her wireless NIC. We had originally planned to make this a Gentoo box and had Gentoo working but never got everything else installed validly. Oy about that.
Her other Linux geek and fellow coder was partial to SuSE. She wanted to get to work on a coding project. She knew he'd be able to help if her tool set matched his and problems showed up in the future. So I bit the bullet and installed SuSE 9.1 on this box.
She'd already installed SuSE 9.0 on her laptop with her effort. She has what looks like a nice laptop and should be a nice laptop but it's often slower than my older iBook. It's a Centrino, which is far too conservative about power consumption. It claims to be 1.3 GHz but it'll say 600 MHz when you boot from the battery and I'm not kidding. It's just overhyped. It's also where she's been trying to get web work done.
I didn't like SuSE when I started this exercise this afternoon. Twelve hours later, I am less displeased but I'm not about to cheer for it. I had to travel the maze of their web site a few times before I figured out where to get a vaguely recent version from the Net (9.1 Professional; 9.2 Pro is in stores). It's Linux, after all, and I'm not paying for the distro when I've already shelled out enough money for iffy documentation. Once I got beyond the sales dept, I was able to grab a boot image disk, burn it and get going.
Everything you install or tweak in SuSE happens through the YaST interface. YaST is fine, although it makes you think it knows what it's doing and hides the "change some important stuff" buttons. It's not always clear whether I should hit the back key or the forward key. My guesses worked four times out of five.
Once it started grabbing the entire distro online, we were free to beat up other problems. In the end, we learned stuff about USB sticks and Linux, much of which comes down to "what did I do wrong? Can you fry these silly sticks?"
The installer doesn't ask you root's password until after you reboot the first time. Odd, isn't it? Oh, and it NEVER asks you to NAME the damn box or its local network, a fairly important step when you want to move files around the house. We figured out later that this was buried in an obscure section of Yast. Bah.
Anyway, several hours later we'd copied her old files by taking her old hard drive and hooking it up where the burner would normally plug in. We got her email working in milliseconds and were pleased to be done with this major transition.
Why did I surrender the entire day to this task? Part of it was getting out of the house. Another part was taking away excuses for her failure to move onto a modern computer - she can now multitask properly. A major part was the hope that, if I got this going, I could remember what I like about Linux and get myself going.
I remember now: I like Gentoo. I like having only the stuff I want and have it all work. I like having the power without the bloat. I like to build lean machines and grant them the power to be left alone.
I feel potent again. I also feel tired again. Night, y'all.
-wrapped in a fine sheen of snore, Dante
A few months ago my cousin bought a Shuttle (the small computer, not the space ship nor the subway nor even the loom device). This is a decent box from about a year or two ago -- P4 Northwood 1.8Ghz 226MHz FSB DDR 512 MB RAM with all sorts of ports (three Firewire, four USB, NIC, built-in video and audio, 1 AGP & 1 PCI slot. Oh, but it's also a box about the size of a breadbox. She got a deal on it and it's significantly more modern than her regular workstation (P2 300 MHz 66 MHz FSB int13h limit so the largest a hard drive can be is 32 GB).
While her old workstation has a respectable 256 MB RAM and works well enough, it's old. The motherboard's limitations mean it has a copious amount of workaround involved. However, she hadn't wanted to transition away from it because it took too much effort. It came with XP Home on it, which we've left on there mostly to make sure something works with her wireless NIC. We had originally planned to make this a Gentoo box and had Gentoo working but never got everything else installed validly. Oy about that.
Her other Linux geek and fellow coder was partial to SuSE. She wanted to get to work on a coding project. She knew he'd be able to help if her tool set matched his and problems showed up in the future. So I bit the bullet and installed SuSE 9.1 on this box.
She'd already installed SuSE 9.0 on her laptop with her effort. She has what looks like a nice laptop and should be a nice laptop but it's often slower than my older iBook. It's a Centrino, which is far too conservative about power consumption. It claims to be 1.3 GHz but it'll say 600 MHz when you boot from the battery and I'm not kidding. It's just overhyped. It's also where she's been trying to get web work done.
I didn't like SuSE when I started this exercise this afternoon. Twelve hours later, I am less displeased but I'm not about to cheer for it. I had to travel the maze of their web site a few times before I figured out where to get a vaguely recent version from the Net (9.1 Professional; 9.2 Pro is in stores). It's Linux, after all, and I'm not paying for the distro when I've already shelled out enough money for iffy documentation. Once I got beyond the sales dept, I was able to grab a boot image disk, burn it and get going.
Everything you install or tweak in SuSE happens through the YaST interface. YaST is fine, although it makes you think it knows what it's doing and hides the "change some important stuff" buttons. It's not always clear whether I should hit the back key or the forward key. My guesses worked four times out of five.
Once it started grabbing the entire distro online, we were free to beat up other problems. In the end, we learned stuff about USB sticks and Linux, much of which comes down to "what did I do wrong? Can you fry these silly sticks?"
The installer doesn't ask you root's password until after you reboot the first time. Odd, isn't it? Oh, and it NEVER asks you to NAME the damn box or its local network, a fairly important step when you want to move files around the house. We figured out later that this was buried in an obscure section of Yast. Bah.
Anyway, several hours later we'd copied her old files by taking her old hard drive and hooking it up where the burner would normally plug in. We got her email working in milliseconds and were pleased to be done with this major transition.
Why did I surrender the entire day to this task? Part of it was getting out of the house. Another part was taking away excuses for her failure to move onto a modern computer - she can now multitask properly. A major part was the hope that, if I got this going, I could remember what I like about Linux and get myself going.
I remember now: I like Gentoo. I like having only the stuff I want and have it all work. I like having the power without the bloat. I like to build lean machines and grant them the power to be left alone.
I feel potent again. I also feel tired again. Night, y'all.
-wrapped in a fine sheen of snore, Dante
