A few days ago I started thinking about changing the OS on my server, Maximus (which because of the loudness of the PSU and exhaust fan is seldom used) from Ubuntu to something else. The R&D branch of my customer uses Red Hat and SuSE so I thought I would give one of the open source (Fedora and OpenSuSE) versions a try. Never a fan of Red Hat, I thought I would give the German engineered SuSE a try.
I do not have a DVD burner (I really have not had the need yet) so the DVD installation option was out. Using CD's would require 5 of them (and that just appeared to be a waste, IMHO) so that option was out. I then saw that they offered a "net install" option. I have a solid broadband connection (Road Runner has been pretty good SO far) so I opted to try a "net install".
I booted to the CD and was greeted with the install screen. I noticed some defaults were already populated (all within the acceptable ranges) so I pressed enter. After a few moments I was greeted with a blank and a monitor message saying, "Out of Range". Hugh? I have an new 19 in Viewsonic flat panel monitor and the video card is an ATI 9200 (IIRC) so it should not be "out of range". I tried several more times and the same thing happened. I searched the web and found that this is/has been a problem since the last version and it still has not been fixed.
Strike One.
I change the screen settings to 1024 x 768 and try again. The detection phase begins. It runs through the normal detection and tries to set up DHCP, and it fails (no other distro has failed to set up DHCP on an install before)...forcing me to enter the values manually. No worries...I have them memorized. Now I have to put in an IP address so I can connect to (I did not have to do this with a Debian install I did a week before on the laptop) a repository someplace. The ones listed on the OpenSuSE page for the US are pretty slim and most of them fail trying to get the index files.
Strike Two.
I Google for other FTP/HTTP sites to download from. I find one close enough (Utah) and begin to download. Wow, the files are flying! In no time the config screen comes up and I give my obligatory answers to begin the download of 2 gigs of files. The process goes on for 5-10 minutes and then I get an error that it cannot download a specific file. I get the option to skip, so I do and the process stops. I start all over again but get the same results. I try another server (one that is much slower) and I get the same message on the same file.
Strike Three. I am not installing OpenSuSE today.
I go through my CD's of Linux distros and find Mandriva 2007. I realize it is based on Red Hat (not my favorite) but I am told over and over again how superior Mandriva is. I decide to give it a shot. I pop in the CD and reboot.
The install (which is actually a live CD initially) goes very quickly and smooth (I am wondering if it would have worked on the laptop with the ACX100 chip for wireless) and in just a few minutes I am greeted with a bright yellow-orange screen (what is it with yellow and orange in these distributions? I really prefer the blue shades in Mepis) and I begin to poke around. I find that it has mounted my FAT32 HDD and written it in fstab properly, which is a good thing. I poke and prod and decide to try to update the files (something that Debian distros do very well) and find the update utility. I update the OS and play around but realize that I really am a Debian "ho" :-) so I look for something else. I remember that I have a Debian 4 "Etch" net install CD that I burned a few days ago so I pop it in. If you have never installed Debian before (not Ubuntu or Mepis, but regular Debian) then you need to get a cup of coffee because it takes a while. Also you need to check on it periodically because it will ask you questions during the install that you need to answer before it will continue. I think the install took about 2 hours on a 1 ghz, 256 megs RAM machine with a fast connection.
In part two I will go into what happened after I rebooted the machine.
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