Finally settling down on this installation of openSUSE. I was debating like crazy on whether to go for Ubuntu or retain openSUSE. I had also considered installing Gentoo on the box. I still have reserved a partition for Gentoo, but the thing is, it takes a hell lot of time to compile and install and I don’t have such time at a stretch. Moreover, with the state of the power supply in Bangalore, there is no way that I can have even a continuous 24 hour power supply and I don’t know what will happen to the installation should it fail midway. So for now Gentoo is out of the question.
So, coming back to the two primary installations, I was completely set to remove openSUSE and install Ubuntu. Then I thought, why run away from this product. Everyone is mad about Ubuntu, so let me try openSUSE and get it to work the way I want. If I can contribute to the community and make the product a better one, so be it. Now I wanted to get rid of the bloated installation that I had done and I wanted to go for a new clean installation with minimal components so that I can install whatever I want later on. So I reinstalled with the XFCE desktop and minimal install. The desktop was very clean and quite good, but there was a very irritating bug. It wouldn’t let me shutdown/reboot since I was not logged in as a root user. After many many attempts, I had to reboot using a terminal logon(ya, even sudo failed). That was the end of XFCE. I had decided its fate as I was trying to reboot the damn install.
Finally, it was time for GNOME. I had ruled out KDE after the first install since it was way too bloated and there was only eye candy and nothing much else to boot. So I went on with the first re-install of Gnome. All went smooth until the reboot and there somehow the graphics was too lame and not the usual SUSE installer. Anyway, installation went on smoothly and it booted into the desktop. For some reason it never accepted my user/pass and I had to boot in as root. Got irritated after a little while and decided to reinstall again.
After two failed minimal installs, I was fed up and I decided to install gnome again, but fully-loaded, with every single package that I might want to use in the far future. Installation took about 40 mins and the update took well over an hour. Of course, before the update my trusted(???) NIC kept giving me problems and refused to be detected, forcing me to restart the PC manually a couple of time till I could get the damn NIC started up. It also involved a trip to windows and back. After the huge update with regular disconnections of the network every 5% of update progress(think some very short timeouts on the updating engine) I was all set to go. I restarted, booted into Windows and went back to sleep(was dozing off like crazy during the update).
Today I booted into gnome and I love the simple and fast desktop. Not as intuitive as KDE and I have to get used to this. Also been configuring the box to get it tuned to me working style.
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Tagged: desktop, ethernet, gnome, install, kde, Linux, nic, xfce