Opensuse convert - what a breath of fresh air!

[stargateuser]

I have been a Mandrake/Mandriva/Mageia user since Redhat forked to Mandrake all those years ago. I have dabbled with Ubuntu and a few others along the way but always gone back to Man*.

I installed Mageia 2 with full disk encryption (LVM) as I travel a lot. I got it all set up nicely as I like it and then it updated itself (auto update). Now this has NEVER been an issue before. But guess what? It hosed the installation. Only emergency login. WTF????

Hmmmmmmmmmm lots of search engine stuff - I'm not the only one this has happened to. So I spend 4 hours trying to fix it. No go.

Ok, it must have been me, I'll re-install and try it again. Guess what?? Same again. Totally screwed after the update.

Right, I'm pee'd off now. Tried to install Arch from net boot and cd. Ha what a joke. I hate Ubuntu, so I thought ok, lets try OpenSuse (64bit), I have pc controlled radio (PCR 1000) and only Debian and OpenSuse support it. So, I burned a netboot disk, and away we went. Guessed my way through the install process, it wasn't that difficult.

Now I have full disk encryption, BTRFS all working sweetly. Updates DON'T kill it.

BTRFS is brilliant. Need to resize your partitions on the fly - simples! Sorted out the 2 finger scrolling (I prefer 1 finger to the side), back to classic menu, hostname set so it shows on the console, the fonts are ALL readable (unlike Man*)

So I'm afraid it's goodbye to Mageia for good. It has been a long time from Mandrake to here, but the divorce is full and final It is just not trustworthy, and hello to Opensuse.

Give it a try, you just might like it

[Nuke]

I too started with Mandrake (after briefly experimenting with Red Hat), and got my taste for KDE that way. I left it for Kubuntu about when it became Mandriva because everyone said it was going down the pan. Then Debian with KDE, but the FSF "correctness" was excruciating - they had hacked (and I thought somewhat crippled) Firefox and called it "Iceweasel" because something about Firefox offended them. I tried Gnome (v2) but it was a bit Fisher-Price.

I have always preferred a distro which had KDE as its first choice GUI, and OpenSuse is said to be the best, and I used it for a year until about 6 months ago. It does unfortunately have some of the FSF correctness, though not as bad as Debian.

For example in OpenSuse you get the open source "nouveau" driver for nVidia graphics cards, leaving you on your own to find and install nVidia's superior proprietary ones. Ditto media support. Then when I tried the upgrade to 12.2 (which did not work properly) I realised I needed to go through all that pain again, so I decided to try Mepis which is a Debian/Kde distro but claims to be "simple". That had put me off, thinking it meant "dumb" and I am not a fan of "simple " [simple for whom, I always ask, maker or user?], but Mepis is a full blown traditional desktop that is "simply" a breeze to install. You might like it.

[el chapulín]

I installed Mageia 2 with full disk encryption (LVM) as I travel a lot. I got it all set up nicely as I like it and then it updated itself (auto update). Now this has NEVER been an issue before. But guess what? It hosed the installation. Only emergency login. WTF????

Define "emergency login"- never heard of it.

Ok, it must have been me, I'll re-install and try it again. Guess what?? Same again. Totally screwed after the update.

Well yes, as a general rule doing the same thing twice will yield the same result.

Right, I'm pee'd off now. Tried to install Arch from net boot and cd. Ha what a joke.

Care to elaborate?

I hate Ubuntu

?

[stargateuser]

Hi Nuke,

I did try Mepis a couple of years ago. I think (foggy memory) that it was only 32bit back then. I'm one of those people that when I found I had a 64bit cpu I just had to go 64 bit hahahaha. That was years before Win x64 stuff

With regards to the Nvidia etc.. yep, I agree. I couldn't work out how to change the driver in Yast so I downloaded from Nvidias site the .sh file and once I remembered * telinit 3 * it was a breeze. Luckily my previous learning curve from Mandrake with CLI and adding all the missing deps paid off So within a short time it was up and running.

I might give Mepis a whizz in virtualbox and let you know.

[el chapulín]

Then Debian with KDE, but the FSF "correctness" was excruciating - they had hacked (and I thought somewhat crippled) Firefox and called it "Iceweasel" because something about Firefox offended them.

There is no "FSF correctness". Debian have their own DFSG and are not listed on the GNU or FSF pages as approved distributions. Free and non-free are software are in separate repositories and firmware is removed from Debian's kernels and packaged separately (it takes all of about 60 seconds to download and install).

Iceweasel is a rebranded Firefox. The reason for this is that the Mozilla corp would not allow Debian to patch the firefox in their stable releases and call it "firefox" and use the trademarked logos - the Debian project were expected to just package Mozilla's firefox releases unmodified and distribute them. That's simply not how Debian works and almost every package in a Debian stable release has backported bug and security fixes - no one notices this or complains about it, they complain about iceweasel and the spread this FUD simply because of the changed branding. It makes a large and easy target.

If you still have doubts, please read the facts on this and don't believe the FUD and the hype.

The wikipedia article is quite accurate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_C ... an_project

[Nuke]

There is no "FSF correctness". Debian have their own DFSG and are not listed on the GNU or FSF pages as approved distributions.

By "FSF correctness I meant this sort of thing :-

http://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html

If you mean that there is no FSF correctness in Debian, I would say there is quite a bit of it. From the link above, the FSF itself comments :-

Debian conscientiously keeps nonfree software out of the official Debian system

However the FSF says that is not good enough, because it also hosts a repository of nonfree software. To be honest I had never heard of any of the distros which are approved by the FSF :-

http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html

I once read that Debian was used by RMS himself, but maybe that was wrong, even at the time. I was not trying to get at Debian for which I have huge admiration. I choose to run Mepis partly because it is based on Debian and uses its repositories, although Mepis comes with Firefox by default, not Iceweasel. I think of Debian as a reference distro, one which it is good to use as a rock solid base for others. It is certainly not a beginner's or light user's distro.

Iceweasel is a rebranded Firefox. The reason for this is that the Mozilla corp would not allow Debian to patch the firefox in their stable releases and call it "firefox" and use the trademarked logos

If you still have doubts, please read the facts on this and don't believe the FUD and the hype.

Interesting. I recall that I did had a bit of trouble with Iceweasel, but it was some time ago and I do not want to do it an injustice now.

[stargateuser]

Well I had my first boo-boo. Rebooted the laptop, hmmm no x login. Did some investigation and it appears that somehow fstab had deleted all the file systems.

Luckily for me I had done a copy of this lovely file before, so a quick cp and mount -a and we were up and running.

[guy]

I think that talking of "FSF correctness" infecting things rather loses the plot.

Debian has its own "social contract" - any correctness is all its own and nothing to do with the FSF - or GNU - or RMS - or any other TLA.

The desire for freedom and fairness sometimes overrides other considerations. Is that such a big problem? The Debian desktop defaults to the Epiphany browser and Evolution mail client, both perfectly serviceable. Personally I think it was very gracious of them not to just dump Firefox and Thunderbird after Mozilla got so nit-picky. Yet somehow they still get the blame.

Debian rocks for a reason.

[Nuke]

Debian has its own "social contract" - any correctness is all its own and nothing to do with the FSF - or GNU - or RMS - or any other TLA.

O come on! The differences are like those nuances of political nomenclature, arguments about which caused the breakdown of a left-wing mutiny against the Establishment in one of Michael Palin's "Ripping Yarns" - I think it was "Roger of the Raj"

I only introduced RMS into this to mention that I had once heard that he used Debian himself, and he is very particular on these principles. Maybe that was wrong and he does not - does anyone know?

[guy]

Debian has its own "social contract" - any correctness is all its own and nothing to do with the FSF - or GNU - or RMS - or any other TLA.

O come on! The differences are like those nuances of political nomenclature

The Debian community are not in hock to the FSF, they just see eye to eye on quite a lot of things. But not everything: for example Debian do not insist on preserving all Four Freedoms down the line and the debate about that has been very acrimonious.

Compare say the relative fates of OpenOffice vs. LibreOffice (i.e. Apache license vs. GPL) over the coming years and you may begin to see that apparent mere dickering over "correctness" can have more far-reaching practical implications than just changing the odd brand identity.

If you see Debian's views as "correctness", it is their own views you are seeing, not a derivative or pastiche of the FSF. To talk of "FSF correctness" is quite wrong - it is full-on "Debian correctness".

I only introduced RMS into this to mention that I had once heard that he used Debian himself, and he is very particular on these principles. Maybe that was wrong and he does not - does anyone know?

AIUI Debian is the only distro that tries to support not only Linux but also BSD and the HURD. But whether RMS finds the HURD build usable yet or is using Debian/GNU/Linux while he's waiting, I don't know.

[lok1950]

Still have a copy on CD of the Debian Manifesto that came with Debian 0.9.Shall I dig it out and post it


Enjoy the Choice

[greg.d]

@Nuke and Stargateuser. OpenSUSE do a 1-Click-Install for the nVidia drivers:
http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:NVIDIA_drivers

[shaddack]

Debian has its own "social contract" - any correctness is all its own and nothing to do with the FSF - or GNU - or RMS - or any other TLA.

O come on! The differences are like those nuances of political nomenclature, arguments about which caused the breakdown of a left-wing mutiny against the Establishment in one of Michael Palin's "Ripping Yarns" - I think it was "Roger of the Raj"

I only introduced RMS into this to mention that I had once heard that he used Debian himself, and he is very particular on these principles. Maybe that was wrong and he does not - does anyone know?

As far as I know he is running gNewSense which is basically Ubuntu with all proprietary/closed source blobs removed.

[shaddack]

@Nuke and Stargateuser. OpenSUSE do a 1-Click-Install for the nVidia drivers:
http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:NVIDIA_drivers

Thank you greg.d! That helped me alot!