Linux meepery

[desperance]

Meep.

I'm a Suse user. I've been using it for, I don't know, ever since I went seriously Linux: eight years? Longer? Something on that order. I like Suse, I'm comfortable with it.

There have been problems, but more moral than technical. The original company sold out to Novell, which was not good; then Novell sold a significant share to yuck-spit Bill Gates, and that wasn't good at all. I could have migrated then; I'll never have a better reason. (Damn, half the point of my coming to Linux in the first place was to get away from Bill Gates.)

At least I stopped buying Suse distributions; but I stayed with Suse and updated online, and that's where I'm at still.

Bear with me: I'm introducing a second plot-thread here.

When I installed Suse 10.0, I had the first major panic of my Linux life: went through all the installation procedure, got to the end and - black screen. Nothing. Eek.

Had no idea what to do. Happily, I have a Linux guru; he said "Chaz, don't panic. Your new hardware has an ATI Radeon card, which Suse doesn't support on account of proprietory software in the driver. All we need to do is set you up with fglrx, and you'll be fine."

And, bless him, he came round and did that. It took a bit of faffing (weirdly, I have a dual-core 32-bit chipset that insists on running 64-bit software), but he did it.

When I wanted to upgrade to 10.2, he had to come round and do it again.

Now I want to upgrade to 11.0, but he's a busy man; I really don't like asking. And I really don't like that I have to ask. I used to be a competent computer-user, even something of a power-user, but that was long ago; Windows ruined me (which is another reason I abominate Bill Gates and all his works), to the point where I've been using Linux all these years but never really learned it. I hate that about myself.

But. I downloaded the LiveCD version of Suse 11.0, burned it onto a disk, shoved it in, rebooted - and waddayaknow? No black screen. Functioning driver. Functioning Radeon driver, seemingly. Nothing spectacular - as far as I can tell, 3D's not enabled - but it works. From the LiveCD.

So. Do I dare go for a full installation? Without guru back-up? It ought logically to be the same - but you know how minds work, they sit here and writhe their bony hands together and murmur hissingly about how maybe they put a driver on the LiveCD and not on the full installation, for reasons unfathomable to mortal man...

I live in fear of the black screen of doom. Especially as this wouldn't be a clean install on a new machine, it's an upgrade with three years of work to eat if it chooses to. (And yes, I will be thoroughly backed up, but that's not the point...)

Eek. And that's before we even start thinking about how, if it works, I might none the less want to install fglrx to get the most out of the video card. By myself.

Meep!

Comments

[jeremy-m.livejournal.com]

You could be paranoid (I know it works for me...), do a block-by-block backup of the current installation (dd piped with compress over a network to your other machine (or the cats' machine if you don't have another one)), and then when Everything Goes Wrong, boot from CD to dd back to where you started.

Also, if you're looking for reasons to disapprove of Novell, consider their custom-designed super facility-with-everything in Salt Lake City, which included a whole floor with no female toilets. It was intended for the programmers, so no need, ever. Babbage would be so proud.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Also, if you're looking for reasons to disapprove of Novell, consider their custom-designed super facility-with-everything in Salt Lake City, which included a whole floor with no female toilets. It was intended for the programmers, so no need, ever. Babbage would be so proud.

Good grief. My sister went to an agricultural college where they built a new girls' hostel with no plumbing at all, but that was an oversight...

What's the Babbage connection?

[jeremy-m.livejournal.com]

Babbage = Victorian programmer, Novell = Victorian (Mormon) software company. Well, it's not a great allusion as Babbage was more of a hardware person and his programming pal Ada (Byron's daughter) was actually female. She shares with Bill Gates the achievement of having written a non-trivial program without the computer to run it on, though seems to have made less money out of it. (Though there's probably a steampunk 19th century Microsoft novel in there somewhere.)

[desperance.livejournal.com]

That's what I was thinking, that Ada was conspicuously female. And yes, of course there's a novel there! Damn! *goes off to write it*

[durham-rambler.livejournal.com]

Novell = Mormon software company. Does this mean no coffee either? How will they write those lines of code?

[jeremy-m.livejournal.com]

Indeed, and no Coke either, which makes visits awkward as there's nothing from a programmers' drinks machine to offer them. (And programmers are badly placed to supply polygyny, so there are no appropriate hospitality options.)

On the bright side, when they collapsed they flooded Salt Lake City with so many spare programmers that it was worth opening an office there just to recruit them, which led to me going there for "technical interchange", meaning lots of hanging around the ski resort from the 2002 winter olympics. Yay for pointless business trips.

[durham-rambler.livejournal.com]

You are right to be cautious. That's something I learned in 25 years as a systems programmer. Whenever our company carried out surveys of staff attitudes we always came out low on enterprise and gung-ho. Which some managers didn't like, but I just asked them if they would prefer devil-may-care systems programmers?

So we planned what we would do if/when it went wrong. And what we would do when that went wrong. Which meant it very rarely did go wrong, even when we transferred an entire megacomputer* system from Bletchley to Rochdale in the middle of a blizzard.

So plan what you will do if you get the black screen of death. Then talk it over with a fully-trained pessimist. If your route back is sound, go ahead.

*Actually it seemed mega then. Your desktop is probably more powerful now.