Saturday, March 25, 2006

Appreciating SUSE

I never appreciated SUSE's installer as much as I did today, when I tried to install Solaris on my test machine (I wanted to test a piece of Java software on it). It timed out while I was reading some messages and made a default selection, which meant I had to restart the install; it offered software selections which I later discovered weren't on the DVD; for a while it thought I was Chinese; it seemed to ask the same questions about software installations several times; it told me I had 0 bytes and 7698Mb free on my hard disk at the same time; it wouldn't boot into X; I couldn't find a key which would work as delete once it had booted to the console; I logged into the console and then it forgot, and went back to the login prompt...

Two days ago I installed SUSE 10.1 Beta 8 on my laptop. Except for it not installing drivers for my wireless card, everything just worked. I guess once Solaris is installed it's probably a more enterprise-ready system. Maybe I should become a qualified Solaris dude - I might be able to make money helping people to install that stuff. If I can ever figure it out in the first place.

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