Danny-T.co.uk

I’ve been playing with Suse 10.1 for almost a week now. I’ve certainly had some ups and downs with it. A big part of the problem was my own lack of knowledge in the Linux department.

One of the great features of Suse is Yast2 basically a tool for managing everything. The neat part of it is the software manager. You open it you search for something E.g. “apache” it will then offer a list of modules and indicate if they are installed or not. Those that you want to install you tick then let Suse do its thing. You can add sources if your desired software isn’t in the list and it will pick them up from a url or local files.

It took me a while to get apache, mysql and php firing on all cylinders, this might be because of my initial attempt to use Xampp, then deciding I wanted a full blown setup as Xampp isn’t recommended for production use. I ended up using Yast2 to uninstall and reinstall everything and all seemed to be fine.

Overall I’m fairly happy with the experience, theres some inconsistencies and definitely a steep learning curve, I’m also not a complete convert by any means but early exploration has been reasonably satisfying.

My next venture is going to be to try and get the very sexy looking xgl setup and see how my old machine copes with it.

Whilst it may have taken two days to finally get sorted, the installation process was relatively painless. The main delay was that my first effort at suse 10.1 install hung whilst “initialising catalogues”, not knowing if it had hung or not at the time i left it overnight.

I’m not completely sure but i think this was to do with the mirror I chose to install from. I originally opted for the Kent UK mirror then after this hung, I chose the German mirror which worked fine, in fact the stage i left for 18 hours overnight only took about 3 minutes this time around!

The only thing to look out for is where they provide the mirror url’s during the install, you actually need the IP of the mirror and then the path during setup. Why they don’t just give you the details and save a lot of IP resolving and folder path copying I dont know.
I opted to do an online install to save me some CD burning time. Basically this involved downloading a boot disk ISO image from opensuse.org and burning it to CD (as a windows user with no fancy CD burning software I had to download and install ISO Recorder). Basically all that was needed was to pop in the CD and reboot my PC et voila! Linux install options ahoy.

A very thorough tutorial for performing an online install of Suse is available at opensuse.us.

In a previous post I discussed signing up for webhosting, since then I tried to sign up for some budget hosting with 1and1. I am aware of a lot of bad press for 1and1 but I didn’t have overly high requirements and I didn’t want to spend a lot. However, true to form there was a problem trying to pay them using a perfectly valid credit card.

So, instead of spending hours of my life on the phone to 1and1 I made the concerted effort to setup my own LAMP hosting environment. My old dev PC has had its day as a full time machine (I now rely mainly on my laptop) so after backing up the files I wanted to keep I selected a Linux Operating System and embarked my journey into the lands of the Linux.

The OS chosen was SUSE 10.1 this was as a result of previous reccomendation by our placement student who seems to know something about everything (which is pretty handy) and it appeared to be the choice of the developers of Red5 (more on what that is later).

My next couple of posts will be on my experiance of installing and familiarising myself with Linux SUSE 10.1 and hopefully will then get back on track with setting up the hosting environment.