niczsoft

Recently I got irritated with my Gentoo installation, long story of problems I meet …

So I have decided to go back to openSUSE, the way was not easy, first I have tried to install from openSUSE 11.1 Live KDE CD, but it was not working with my BIOS raid setup. I was a bit upset, SUSE always gave me best working environment in short time, so I have tried with new development build 66.

This was good choice, installation was working perfect, I was also surprised by the improvements, the best example is partitioning screen which gave me feeling that my system knows what I want to archive, just have a look on the screen

Comparing to Gentoo SuSE is a bit slower, the best example is start time of OpenOffice writer, on Gentoo it was up and ready to work in less then 3 seconds, on openSUSE it takes 5 seconds to show document. But this is not a big issue compared to times spent in Gentoo to configure “make.conf” or just build OpenOffice.

But the most important for me now is set of configuration tools from YAST, I can configure whole system with easy to use GUIs but still have control over my system.

From interesting features I would point out Xen working with nice GUI, will try it out in few days as it should be good alternative to VMWare Server.

On the end small explanation what does build 66 stand fore it is: “openSUSE 11.2-Milestone1“, verion 11.2 is planned for November 2009, so holpfully there will come even more interesting features.

Even gentoo handbook says that good build kernel should work without initrd there are some cases that require it, that’s my case. I’m using build in raid from my motherboard, it contains intel ICH9 chipset, this is no true hardware raid, to work it requires software to be run. I have compiled my kernel with all required switches, but it was not seeing my root partition on raid device, so I have run this command

emerge genkernel; genkernel --dmraid ramdisk

This allowed me to boot my manually compiled kernel to run, just added generated initrd to /boot/grub/menu.lst, not sure if this was needed but I have also added option dodmraid to kernel in the same file.