openSUSE 10.2
Sadly I’ve had to install openSUSE 10.2 on a spare machine of mine for testing purposes. But wow, the installation was very clean, and quite responsive on an old 2100+ AMD machine. In fact its running quite well on only 512MB of ram, and a very old card (32MB TNT) powering my brand new widescreen Samsung 940BW.
Dare I say, delicious?
But I haven’t used SUSE in ages, last one was 9.1, and still at that time I didn’t get into it much. Though it comes in 5 Cds, I preferred to use an Internet repository to pull any additional packages I need. Another minor point is that by default it tends to install a lot of other packages, which I might not need. Luckily you can configure it during installation, but still a lot of stuff.
There are instructions on how to set the repository up, but I suggest following the command line way. Its faster, and I believe more convenient (you can hide the terminal in the far side of the screen or something).
Taken from the site, (these commands should appear one line each):
su
rpm –import http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/guru-rpm.asc http://packman.unixheads.com/suse/10.2/gpg-pubkey-1abd1afb.asc
zypper -v sa http://ftp.skynet.be/pub/ftp.opensuse.org/opensuse/distribution/10.2/repo/oss/ suse-oss102
zypper -v sa http://ftp.skynet.be/pub/ftp.opensuse.org/opensuse/distribution/10.2/repo/non-oss/ suse-non-oss102
zypper -v sa http://ftp.skynet.be/pub/ftp.suse.com/suse/update/10.2/ update102
zypper -v sa http://ftp.skynet.be/pub/suser-guru/rpm/10.2/ guru102
zypper -v sa http://ftp.skynet.be/pub/packman/suse/10.2/ packman102
Note: For nVIDIA users, you might want to follow these instructions, which worked like a charm.
Then go fire up Yast > Software > Software Management, and search for whatever you want. I quickly pulled down Apache, MySQL, SubVersion, and alot of other things.
If you have to use openSUSE, use smart. Less overhead overall. http://susewiki.org/index.php?title=SMART_Package_Manager The GUI needs some catch up on synaptic, but the CLI and repositories are excellent, nearly on par with apt-get with ubuntu’s repositories.
Feb 26th, 2007 at 11:59 am