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Why openSUSE?
Well, it’s a pretty good question cause i’m an ubuntu fan. The only reason why I installed and recommend openSUSE cause it runs OUT OF THE BOX! No kidding, it does. No tweaks, no sh*t. The only thing which doesn’t work is the wifi on/off FN+F9 key. To be honest, I’ve never used that in windows, so I didn’t start crying. The most important things like brightness and volume control work perfectly there is no reason why I’d didn’t go for this distro. Unfortunately the only working version is the gnome version since stupid KDE tries to control the brightness via acpi unlike gnome which does it via HAL. (Needless to mention that HAL is the only way to control brightness in NC10.) In theory you could set KDE to use xrandr to communicate with HAL but be honest: If you every wanted to mess around with a distro you could go for ubuntu or anything else. You want it out of the box, now and here. Therefore we use openSUSE with GNOME. Ugly? Yes. Working? Utterly. And that’s what we want. (Plus we are going to give a makeover to the ugly gnome. 🙂 )Installation
OMG! No CD/DVD drive! There is no need to panic, we all have a 1gig flash drive somewhere. I tried to use my Philips mp3 player but it refused to work. Bad luck. I borrowed my sister’s 2gig flash drive and it works like a charm.
What do we need?
1gig or better flash drive.
UNetbootin
openSUSE 11.1 LiveCD GNOME
A few bottles of beer or whatever you like. (Milk is acceptable as well.)
Installation steps:
1. Open Unetbootin.
2. Click on Diskimage and find the openSUSE iso what you downloaded.
3. Make sure you are installing it on your flash drive. Mine is E: but it may differ. (Most of the times it does.) Then click on OK and let it roll.
4. When it’s done, DO NOT RESTART. For some stupid reason it won’t work.
5. Open your flash drive in explorer. Find config.isoclient and delete it. Find gnome-config.isoclient (not sure what’s the filename but this is the only other isoclient file, you’ll find it.) Rename gnome-config.isoclient to config.isoclient.
6. Restart your system and let it boot from the usb stick. (Set it up in BIOS)
7. You can mess around with your new nice LiveCD which runs on a flash drive. 🙂 But click on Install openSUSE when you’re done messing around.
8. The first two steps are straight forward, where you live, what timezone, user name and stuff. DO NOT FORGET YOUR PASSWORD! EVER!
9. CREATE PARTITION SETUP and click on your D: which is usually sda3. Resize it, my linux partition is 30gig. Set the free space (30gig) as your suse installation, no swap. And set it to be mounting point: “/” which means it will be the main partition, grub will live here as well 🙂
10. Let it roll, install.
11. You might not have this problem at all. My installation starts hanging right before installing GRUB. The screen starts blinking, asking for root login and pass. Well, first i didn’t do anything, and it died. Then I was like what the hell, entered my login and pass while it was blinking and re- and disappearing. What happened, i don’t know but it finally installed grub and finished the installation. IF YOU DO NOT HAVE SUCH PROBLEMS SKIP THIS AND GO TO #12.
12. After rebooting openSUSE will boot, no worries, you still have your windows installation but suse wants to get configured first. Finish configuring suse, run the updater in the Control Center and you have a nice new OS installed on your NC10. YAY!Other thoughts:
I will update this post with how to tweak openSUSE, what to install and such.UPDATE:
GNOME DO
Let’s hide the taskbar, cause it’s ugly. Even if you find many many themes at Gnome-look it still won’t be pretty enough. (What you are looking for is the gtk2 themes.)
You know what? We don’t really need the taskbar anymore! (No, we don’t even need a start button.) We just need our keyboard because we are going to install GNOME-DO! The install is pretty straight forward and after installing it, gnome do will sit on our taskbar waiting for us to press the windows key and space. What do we get in that small window? A launchbox! You just start typing: F, I, and I’m pretty sure the first thing will come up is FireFox. Amazing, isn’t it? Press enter and you can start browsing!Great tip, thanks a lot Szabs ! It works just fine now, I am typing this from the live-flashkey openSuse 🙂
What I’ll be looking for now is to make this live-cd flashkey “persistent”, ie with a loopback partition in a file on the key itself (or on disk), so I can go on using it by booting from USB instead of installing it, but with changes saved between sessions (WPA key, Firefox parms etc.). This is how Puppy Linux flashdrives work out of the box, but most other distros don’t provide it.
If you know of a way to do this for openSuse I’m all ears ! 🙂
Thanks,
fpLinux/Ubuntu doesn’t like me, and I don’t like it.
(No seriouisly, I booted from a live CD and once it was done, I screamed, “Where is the Start button?!?!?!?!”)
@Szabs
That’s a nice writeup,In some ways I’m a bit surprised that OpenSUSE has the working backlight controls, as the kernel patch to fix the keys not sending a release signal is still down as new in the kernel bugtracker.
I’m probably going to wait for the kernel patch to appear in Fedora as everything else works, just the backlight keys case the backlight to go to either minimum or maximum and the wireless switch.
That said I’m going to download the Gnome version of OpenSUSE and have a play around.
@Camo Yoshi
Same for me except with Windows.After a day or so with Windows… Where is the package manager and the easy to configure text based config files, argh…
[quote1232867511=Camo Yoshi]
Linux/Ubuntu doesn’t like me, and I don’t like it.(No seriouisly, I booted from a live CD and once it was done, I screamed, “Where is the Start button?!?!?!?!”)
[/quote1232867511]
Well, the first thing you have to accept, realize and acknowledge that Linux isn’t Windows just like you can’t make spagetthi bolognese with applesauce instead of tomato.
There was a computer button on the task bar, which functions almost like your good old start button. If you can’t deal with it, you are right. Linux can’t deal with you either.28-01-2009 Updated first post: Gnome do.
Since I have an external dcd drive, I downloaded openSUSE installation dvd and I am going try with that 🙂
Ah fret ye not, my friends, it works as advertised. And an extra bonus : the OSD for brightness & volume are the same.
For some reason the Ubuntu Gnome desktops have different pictures and I dislike the inconsistency – looks sloppy. Oh and let me say (and not to spoil the party, but for the interests of completeness) that euro, monitor switch, backlight, first aid (that’s fn-f7), speed (fn-f8) and wifi on/off are not working out of the box. Still, as long as the keys generate events they can be mapped, and if not we can try setkeycodes.
Something else I noticed – the screen does not go as bright as it does in Windows. What’s that all about??
[quote1232916248=JonB]Something else I noticed – the screen does not go as bright as it does in Windows. What’s that all about??[/quote1232916248]
Make sure you disable the auto brightness control in the BIOS, then during the early stages of boot set the brightness to maximum. You should be able to get maximum brightness after this.I use my nc10 with 2 bars of brightness in windows, that’s like halfway in opensuse. I don’t really mind, it’s pretty much the same for me.
Cam didn’t work for me in skype. Anyone can confirm this?Yes, you’re right, and I use 2 bars too in XP, but not if I am outside.
The other thing I noticed is I just installed it and asked it to install mplayer and it is oing a major download of every package you could think of. None of which I asked it to do. Must have automatic updates turned on.
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