As a result of my Linux Journal review of YellowDog Linux Champion Server 1.2, a representative from SuSE contacted me and asked if I would be interested in a copy of their distribution for my review. Naturally, I said sure ;^).
In this article, I'm going to chronicle the install on my iMac Rev B, and some initial impressions of the distribution in general.
The Package:
SuSE Linux 6.4 PowerPC Edition came to me in a standard software style box, like you'd pick up at your local computer retailer. The box held a 4CD jewel box, a nice 1" thick standard software manual, and some cute stickers to stick on your monitor or wherever. (The only thing missing was a stuffed Geeko - the SuSE mascot. That would have been cool.) There was also a small slip of paper warning me to check the CD and/or the web site for late-breaking errata. (Wouldn't you know, by the time I got around to installing, I forgot about that piece of paper, and forged on without checking. More on this later.)The Install:
I bypassed the initial part of the manual which goes into some background of Linux and SuSE and moved right into the install. The manual said that you could install via BootX or yaboot, using CD4. This seemed odd, and proved to be a typo, it was CD1. Initially I tried the BootX install on the CD, but hit my ever-present problem with the sym53c875 kernel driver throwing me into an endless loop of SCSI bus resets. (I have an iProRaid SCSI card in my iMac, and had a similar problem with YDL CS1.2 too). I knew ahead of time that I may have a problem, and even added the ncr53c8xx=safe:y stanza to my kerenel args, but no luck. The default kernel args also had root=/dev/fd0, which I deleted, as the iMac has no floppy.Forgoing BootX for the moment, I opted to boot off the CD and startup with yaboot. I shut the machine down and held down the "C" key during startup. I was greeted with the familiar green yaboot prompt and typed "install", and I was off and running. the kernel loaded, checkd out my hardware and launched YaST2, the SuSE installer. (Yet Another Sysadmin Tool).
I was given the option in YaST2 to do a text-mode or graphical install, and chose the more dangerous route - graphical. The installer started up X, displayed an attractive YaST2 graphical install screen, and asked for my preferred language, keyboard layout, and timezone.
Then I was given a choice of an auto or custom partitioner, but was forced to use the "custom" version as there were foreign (Apple) partitions on my drive. I went through the menus, selected my root and swap partitions, and moved on to package selection.
Since i've only got 1.3GB (1.3GB - I remember when I used to install Slackware from a stack of floppies!), I decided to choose individual packages to insure I installed everything I wanted to check out, without consuming all my hard drive space. Once I moved into the individual package selection, there was no "Back" button to get back to the standard install choices. There was a "Cancel", but I was afraid it would abort the whole install. The standard choices were things like "Minimal Install", "Almost Everything", and "Install Everything". Once my packages were selected the installer formatted and prepared my partitions and began the install, with the usual bar graph type status graphics showing the progress of the 479 packages I selected.
At 327 packages, the install stopped, ejected the CD, warned me it was going to boot my new system, did so, and then resumed and prompted me to insert CD2. At 458 packages it asked for CD3 and at 471 it asked for CD4.
YaST2 then moved on to configuring my network, printer and internet. For the network I selected my normal static IP address for this machine, with my server as the gateway. The printer config did not offer configuration for network printers, so I bypassed this for now. The internet configuration scanned and found my modem, but then I did not have all the dialup information at hand at the moment, so I cancelled that portion, figuring I could configure it later, once the system is up.
That wrapped up the install, and YaST2 closed down, launching into an X graphical login. Unfortunately, my keyboard mapping was scrambled, and I could not log in! I rebooted and launched back into SuSE using bootX and my own kernel, but ended up in the same boat - scrambled key map.
My first impression - I like the YaST2 installer. The SCSI problem I'm getting used to. Maybe the PPC distributions should look at the way they used to do things on x86, where you chose a root/boot disk profiled for your particular hardware. Compiling everything into 1 monolithic kernel may cover most of the bases, but in some instances, like mine, it's a show-stopper.
That's all for now, I ran out of time. When I get back to the machine and resolve the keyboard problem, I'll continue. So folks know there is new information, I'll re-date the article so it moves to the top of the article list.
OK, I'm back. Sorry for the delay, but I'm going to try to get back into PPC with a vengeance. I followed Nathan's suggestion for the keyboard issue, you can get the details . This worked quite well, and now I don't have to play hide and seek on the keyboard.
Video performance in X seems sluggish, not what I'm used to in the other distributions, plus the display is only 8 bit, so I tried the procedure outlined , to get the framebuffer configured. This did get me 16 bit video, and I used "-accel true" rather than false, but performance still seemed sluggish. Again going with Nathan's suggestions, I setup Xpmac per procedure, and now performance is OK. Take their warning seriously though, switch to a VT from X is NOT a good idea! I know, I tried it ;^). Again I slightly varied from the instructions and went to a 32bpp display.
I notice there are some errors about loading dmasound at boot, but I was able to get system sound working under KDE. By default in SuSE, although there are system sounds in the list, they are not linked to the actions, and I had to define their usage. I'm pretty sure in other distribs, that the base KDE sounds are already linked, and you just need to turn them on.
So now I've got a reasonably working SuSE system. I've still got to go back and setup my IP forwarding through my server and some printers. Aside from the keyboard issue, the install was fairly painless, and SuSE looks to have everything there that one would need. SuSE does do things slightly differently than the RedHat based distro's like LinuxPPC and YellowDog, so you may need to double check where configuration files are etc.
I hope this play-by-play was helpful, and should you try SuSE and have a problem, we at iBook/iMac Linux would be glad to try and help. I'll be keeping this SuSE install active on a seperate partition, along with CS1.2 and LinuxPPC, so drop a line with your comments on SuSE!
