niczsoft

As everybody knows Windows does great job during installation – makes computer start only IT :)

There are many ways to make it working again with linux, my steps were:

• boot computer from some opensuse CD (should be possible with any)
• select rescue bootmenu entry
• if asked for user enter “root”
• enter “fdisk -l” to see yours linux device – for me it was /dev/sdb3 – first one with Id 83
• prepare access to your system
  

  mount /dev/sdb3 /mnt
  mount -o bind /dev/ /mnt/dev/
  mount -o bind /proc/ /mnt/proc
  chroot /mnt/ /bin/bash
  mount /sys

• now enter “yast2 bootloader”
• select Other (Alt+e) -> Propose new configuration (Alt+p), OK (Alt+o)
• exit chroot with “exit” and restart computer with “reboot”

steps up to chroot are know and are quite similar to installation of gentoo system, but “mount /sys” is something new and is required to make “yast2 bootloader” or “yast2 disk” working in chroot environment.

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.