Reboot, With Notes

OK so I had to take a little break and go lie down. After Banshee blew up my computer, I needed to reinstall anyway so I thought I would play around with some other distros.

I liked OpenSUSE at first, and noted that any computers I saw sitting on store shelves with Linux used this flavor. I liked that it tore through Udev, blasted out HAL and went from power on to a usable desktop in about the same amount of time as a really bloated XP boot. Which seems about as good as it gets for me so far!

But that was the live CD. It was like "install me! install me!" and when I did it was like "Hah! Sucker!"

First, the installer and configurator, YaST, is buggier than a damp kitchen cabinet. The installer crashed and burned, requiring a mulligan from the repartition stage - 35 minutes down the drain. After 2 laps around this, I tried downloading the full install DVD from the website and using that.

This is where I learned about the tedious process of checksums. When you download a Linux install, you can look around near the install link for an MD5 checksum. You then install a program that will inspect the file you download, return the checksum, and allow you to compare it to the one listed on the site. The number is about 200,000,000,000,000 digits long.

You can also select "media check" when you boot from the install CD. The trick is, if the checksums don't match, it may indicate errors that will cause problems later. The remedy to checksum errors is to try re-downloading the file, or to burn the ISO image at a lower speed.

The main reason for checksum errors is apparently similar to the reason witchcraft is so complex: a built in "must be ya didn't do it right" so when it doesn't work, someone can cop an attitude without actually knowing why it didn't work.

Checkitout: 2 wasted CDs, burned at a speed usually reserved for calligraphy, same for 2 wasted DVDs, same YaST crash. Then! A manufactured DVD from Linux Pro magazine ($15) had the same issue.

Turns out the reason YaST crashes when you try to install OpenSUSE on your laptop is that Linux No Likee ACPI. Turn it off. Here's how:

When you boot the DVD, you are given a menu with selections, including "Install." At the bottom of the screen, you will see a line that says "Boot:" If you type anything while this screen is up, it will appear on that line. Type "acpi=off" before selecting "install"

If that doesn't work, turn off power management on the BIOS. Use the ACPI=OFF line anyway.

Now the real Open SUSE nightmare begins.