I last had a look at Linux with SUSE 8 and couldn’t get to grips with it so thought it was about time I tried again and downloaded the SUSE 11 live CD version but can’t get it to do anything much, I have been through a lot of stuff on the forums and tried every terminal command etc. I can find but can’t even get it to access the hard disk on the PC I tried it on - or is this not possible with a live CD version ? the HD shows up in the system details but I cannot find any way of getting the file manager to recognise it.
I also find it incredibly slow, 8 mins to start, I don’t think there is any problem with my CD drive (x40 speed), is it any better when installed on a hard drive.
Are you talking about accessing an NTFS drive on your PC? (I assume yes)
I haven’t tried that from openSUSE, but many distros intentionally ship with additional configuration required to mount NTFS drives/partitions due (I suppose) to the past problems with NTFS writes by Linux, or maybe just to keep it from being too easy for a newbie to accidentally delete things and screw up a hypothetical windows install on that drive.
I’ll let the openSUSE experts help you along with that, my experience manually mounting NTFS partitions is minimal.
However, regarding the speed, I’m a little surprised that it takes 8 minutes to boot off of a live CD, but this could depend on more than just the speed of your CDROM drive, and if the rest of your hardware is pretty old it’s going to have an impact.
Having said that – for any given machine, it’s going to be WAY faster after being installed to the hdd than running off of a LiveCD. When using a LiveCD to evaluate a distribution, you have to do it with two things in mind –
- It’s going to be slow(er).
- Of course you lose any customizations or changes you make, so it makes it difficult and/or frustrating if you want to try different or updated software compared to what shipped with the disc.
Good luck!
Hey fella,
if you really want to know what goes under the skin of you computer OS then try Linux and absolutely of the best, opensuse.
You need to spend some time to customize it a lil for your box, but as soon as you have done this, all will work with excellent perfomance and pace, compare to windows.
Regards.
It is an NTFS drive I was trying to access, I found this info HowTo Mount NTFS Filesystem Partition Read Write Access in openSUSE 10, 11 but nothing seemed to work.
As it is free I can’t complain but if it is aimed at the average user I would think a good idea would be to have drives mounted automatically.
I also tried an eSATA drive (ntfs format) which it did not recognise either.
I don’t recall any problems like this when I tried SUSE 8, I think it was lack of drivers that stumped me then.
The PC is based on an AMD dual core 4800 processor with 4 meg RAM which I imagined was a reasonable spec for SUSE to run on.
Somebody will hang me for suggesting this, especially on the openSuSE forum, but I reckon you should give Ubuntu a shot. Great things about Ubuntu are, it’s easy to install, it’s mostly autconfigure granted some things like wireless network can be a pain to setup on any distro. It only includes software that you need and doesn’t double up unnecessarily. The package manager is a piece of cake that a monkey could drive. And there’s a large community out there, so if you are having a problem, gauranteed somebody else is having the same problem. Ubuntu really is the newbies gateway to linux. It was my gateway to linux at least and I was a newbie, therefore my conclusion :D.
Of course, after a few months of Ubuntu, you are bound to get tired of it, at which point you are most likely ready to take on openSUSE, a REAL linux distro (I should say traditional, because Ubuntu is technically linux too).
All you need to figure out in openSUSE after using Ubuntu is SAX2 and YAST2. After that hurdle, the rest is a breeze.
Thanks for all that, I’ll give it a go, I had decided there must be something about my system that Linux couldn’t cope with as nothing seems to work for getting access to the hard drive with SUSE.
One thing useful to know about openSUSE is it is openSUSE. By “open” it means it tries more than most distributions to follow the free software opensource philosophy. Hence openSUSE will not package proprietary drivers that many Linux distributions will package. There are 3rd party sites that one can go to in order to setup the OS with those drivers, but many newbies who are struggling with basic concepts, struggle with having to go to a 3rd party site as well.
Reference NTFS compatibility, this is a proprietary microsoft format. The openSouce community has had to hack at this to try and read and write to the format. For years there was an openSource “NTFS” driver for Linux that could read, but only write with very (crippled) capabilities. Some developers seized this as an opportunity to try and make money, and offered drivers for NTFS at a price, which the distributions would not pay, and hence those drivers were not included. In the mean time, the openSouce NTFS driver (because there was nothing for free that was better), was integrated into most distributions, despite its major limitation in write capability.
Subsequently (2 years ago I think) there was a software fork, and a new free opensource driver called the “NTFS-3G” (3G for 3rd generation) was written. This new driver provided excellent read/write capabilities on NTFS partitions. But, like often happens with a software fork, there was bad feeling over the software fork amongst some of the developers, and for a variety of reasons, the NTFS-3G driver has been very slow in being accepted by many distributions. Which means many distributions have been packaged crippled for NTFS write capabilities.
Now, IMHO (and this post is my view, NOT this forums view, nor is it the Novell/SuSE-GmbH view) the NTFS-3G driver has been slow to be implemented in openSUSE in a user friendly manner, and hence I would include openSuSE with the distributions that have been very slow to adopt the NTFS-3G driver in an unqualified manner.
Thats not to say one can not easily setup read/write to an NTFS drive, as one can. I do it regularly in seconds. But its knowledge that frankly, is beyond that of newbies, and it may be some time before you see this smoothly integrated in openSUSE. Frankly speaking, I would be very surprised if we see an seem less NTFS integration into openSUSE as the distribution is “packaged” (for both internal and hotplug mounting of external drives) before openSUSE-12. (ie I think it will take a couple more years at least for completely automatic seemless integration of read/write to all possible drives). But I tend to be pessimist.
Bye for now SUSE.
Downloaded the Ubuntu live CD at lunchtime and gave it a go with no problems at all (so far) it even allowed me to delete the flash.ocx file from a win xp install which BartPE can’t do, plus a reasonably quick boot-up.
I can appreciate the stuff about drivers and particularly “knowledge that frankly, is beyond that of newbies” as I found it a pretty steep learning curve, and a bit demoralising when nothing I tried seemed to work, I was about ready to give up on Linux but I might even do a full install of Ubuntu now.
If you need to mount a NTFS drive under a live Linux distro I suggest using Puppy Linux or Knoppix. Both will mount From the live CD, I don’t think Suse will do a mount of an NTFS drive from a live CD. At least I haven’t found a way.
Opensuse 11.x has a problem mounting ntfs drives (an error that I think is fixed in 11.1 beta5 but haven’t tested it yet. Normally it is a matter of plug in and it goes, but unfortunately that version that you tried has the bug. OpenSuSE 10.3 does mount them correctly though. 11.1 is shaping up nicely in a lot of ways but still has some major bugs in it, but that’s the way with OpenSuSE and some other distro’s too, you just don’t know what each versions pluses and minuses are going to be until you try each version. 10.3 was great, 11.0 was bad, 11.1 who knows 
But… OpenSuSE has some great features (especially for newbies) and it’s worth looking at.