Cisco and Windows XP Help

I’ve been resisting the geeky, and helping save the environment by not running a server in my house all day. There are two projects now that I can’t do by ssh’ing into 1and1’s servers, so it’s time to run a linux box again. I decided to run SUSE. It’s Novell’s version of linux, and though they’d like you to pay for it, there is an OpenSUSE project, which allows you to download the remote installation cd, which is always my prefered method to install linux.

The SUSE 10.1 installer is pretty easy to use, but to download the linux system using the remote installer you’ll need to know where to download the files from. This never seems to be apparent, I always need to figure it out by trial and error.

• Choose HTTP install
• the IP address for OpenSUSE’s installation repository is: 195.135.221.130
• enter this for the path: /pub/opensuse/distribution/SL-10.1/inst-source

The installer is pretty easy to use. My complaints about the installer:

1. When you change an option, it reconfigures the packages, every time. On a slow machine this takes like five minutes. I changed five options. Big waste of time.
2. The install hung up halfway through downloading the 2.5 gig I needed. There was nothing on the hard drive to boot to, and I couldn’t figure out how to convince the cdrom installer to pick up where it left off. It insisted on formatting the drive. I had to start all over. I let it download overnight, and the second time it completed.
3. The installer is pretty, but there are long periods of time with just a spinning mouse cursor. I’d like to know what it’s doing to make me wait.
4. I let it auto-detect everytime, even when I knew I had no hardware for it to detect and it worked just fine. It would be nice to have it just auto-detect without requiring user intervention.

Now the SUSE is hanging up on boot. I had to get to work, so updates tonight!

Trackback URI | Comments RSS