Howdy all, it’s a yet-another-distro-hop post!
I had Debian/Kubuntu for more than a semester now. For the past few weeks I was on Kubuntu Hardy. Drastic changes (as expected) were taking place everyday. A couple of days ago X started crashing whenever I played a h264 video using mplayer. It was quite random. The same video would play again, randomly. Decided to resurrect my FreeBSD installation and headed over to boot it. Didn’t happen. Hardy’s grub recognised my (hd0,1,a) as jfs o_o. I even reinstalled FreeBSD (it’s always a breeze). Didn’t work. I redid it with the FreeBSD’s bootloader overwriting Kubuntu’s grub. I could boot into FreeBSD now. Fine. Let’s go back to Hardy and check newsgroups now (using KNode, keeps my unread items, read items in shape). Didn’t work. Couldn’t boot into Kubuntu now. Oh, and, I had made this terrible mistake of installing Kubuntu on JFS partitions (fsck.jfs latest version dates back to 2006). So I dug through my old CDs to get a live image so I could chroot into Kubuntu and restore the grub. First, I tried the ‘Ubuntu Server 6.06 (i386)’ CD, it couldn’t chroot into my amd64 installation >_>. Next was the Fedora rescue CD. For some reason it couldn’t mount the JFS partition (methinks it was missing JFS support in kernel). Next up was the ‘OpenSUSE 10.3 (x86_64)’ DVD. Although I could see from ‘dmesg’ that it recognised the partition as JFS, it failed to mount it.
I assumed my Kubuntu root partition was a goner and started off with a fresh OpenSUSE installation. I chose ‘minimal graphical environment’ thinking that the installation time would be small. For some reason the network didn’t work after installation. I redid it but this time chose KDE as the default desktop (and XFS root partition). Smooth. Installation is just a smooth ride. It installed most packages I would have manually installed on Kubuntu (like Adobe Flash plugin, good-looking monospace fonts, interesting console-utilities…).
OpenSUSE 10.3 has an annoying proxy related bug. Something to do with the format of the /root/.culrc file. The installation sets up:
# Changed by YaST2 module proxy 09/04/08
--proxy-user "proxyuser:proxypass"
--proxy "http://172.31.1.227:3128/"
which is supposed to look like:
# Changed by YaST2 module proxy 09/04/08
# Fixing a most-annoying-bug for 10.3
--proxy-user = "proxyuser:proxypass"
--proxy = "http://172.31.1.227:3128/"
Once this was fixed, I proceeded to disable my installation DVD as a software source and added the suse-oss, suse-non-oss and suse-update repositories using zypper. All that was left now was a zypper refresh && zypper update and a reboot. The first update was a fix for zypper (which takes care of reading the /root/.culrc properly). The subsequent updates take place after the reboot (see screenshot).
If somebody knows the equivalent of Debian/Kubuntu’s following few steps for OpenSUSE please let me know:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config, selecting the option that enables sub-pixel font-rendering and applying as a default throughout the system. Thanks!
