This is a weird one.

English Install/Boot/Login
#1

I first bumpped into openSuse 11.0 from a disk in Linux magazine. I thought I would give it a try. Not having used suse for a very long time. I am/was a died in the wool Slackware user. So I put openSuse on my a30 IBM laptop. Seemed to work well and had little problems. Suse has come a long time from the last time I gave it a go. And that was way befor Novelle intered the picture.

So I set ip up on the computer I built for my mothers birthday. Drove the 1200 miles to see her and give her the computer. Got it all setup without a hitch and installed x11vnc so I could remotely admin it. Lots of joy.

I used the same dvd to setup the new intel system and it goes well. Some problems with the intel driver for xorg but I installed an nvidia card and all was right with the world.

I wanted to setup and nfs system between my desktop system and the new intel, from now on caled tvboxen, and had some problems. Well my desktop was Slackware that I had been running for a very long time. The slackware machine didn’t want to connect to the tvboxed running 11.0 with kde 3.5. So I decided to just take the plunge and change the slackware box to an opensuse box, SHows my new comitment to open suse to ditch my beloved slackware. That’s when I started getting the strangest problem. I wanted to install the kde 3.5 version. I made sure that it was the kde 3.5 version when I rechecked the software. But after loading it on my system I have the 4.0 kde. How starnge. SO I reinstalled. Doublely making sure it says that I was installing 3.5 kde. Get it all installed and I have kde 4.0. Now I’m starting to get pissed. I burn a new dvd from a downloaded iso file. Brand new disk, do the install making sure it’s kde 3.5. Let it run and do it’s thing. After it’s up I have kde 4.0

My main dislike of 4.0 is the way the do desktop icons. They need so much space around them for the little “feature” menu of what to do with the icons. Boy if that isn’t a solution to a problem that didn’t exist. Well I have done three installs on this thing and each time I wanted kde 3.5 and each time got kde 4.0. I don’t have a clue whay this is happening.

One thing that I noticed that might, for some reason totally unknown to me, be causing a problem. The drive ordering is changed in suse. My box has two ide controllers and four SATA controlers. There are two drives on the SATA and three on the IDE with one DVD. When I go to partition the drive the ordering is not the same as the bios. Suse puts the sata drive first before the ide drive. But I needed to use one of the ide drives for my root partition. So after much checking and rechecking I was sure that I had the correct drive for the root partition, a problem made a little more difficult by having all the drives of the same type and manufacture so they have the same ID. But I formated and put a new file system on the correct drive and didn’t format the ones I wanted to keep the data on. But now I have a kde 4.0 system.

What caused this problem and how do I fix it. I really dislike kde 4.0. I think it is way to much eye candy and way to little functionality. Such as getting the spacing between desktop icons closer together. You know I’m an old slackware guy. I’m really underwhelmed with all this eye candy and waste of computer power. It’s like running vista. No don’t say it I haven’t bought a copy of windows since windows 98. And I think the best windows was windows for work groups. After that it just went down hill trying to look like a cartoon interface.

SO enough ranting how do I get a kde 3.5 system on this thing??

#2

Been a while for me, but I think it goes like this:
Go to Yast in the filter use Patterns check KDE3 Desktop Environment then click Accept.

#3

It’s exactly as Sagemta says. After you install KDE 3.x, you have to select it at the login screen (look at the left lower corner, under Sessions I think it’s named); once you do that, you’ll always log in to KDE 3.x, as openSUSE always defaults to the last Desktop Environment you logged in to.

#4

If you are using the liveCD, then you get KDE 4.0, you’d have to install 3.5 afterward. Since you say you selected kde 3.5 for the install, I’m assuming you used either the DVD or the netinstall? Is so, then you must have not deselected KDE 4, it is selected by default, and it is (as said above) the default session when you login.

I am a KDE 4 fan, but I am currently running KDE 3.5. I used the netinstall and chose to install a KDE 3.5 system (note that you do not get this choice using the liveCD). I have no KDE 4.0 installed at all (though a few KDE 4.0 apps are installed with the necessary libraries).

#5

They need so much space around them for the little “feature” menu of what to do with the icons.

As already noted above, you’ve mostly likely done something wrong with the installation. I have never heard of 4 being installed when 3 is requested, and if that was a flaw in the installation process, the forums would be flooded with complaints.

To turn off the control panel for the plasmoids, just right-click and “Lock Widgets”.

“One thing that I noticed that might, for some reason totally unknown to me, be causing a problem. The drive ordering is changed in suse. My box has two ide controllers and four SATA controlers. There are two drives on the SATA and three on the IDE with one DVD. When I go to partition the drive the ordering is not the same as the bios. Suse puts the sata drive first before the ide drive. But I needed to use one of the ide drives for my root partition. So after much checking and rechecking I was sure that I had the correct drive for the root partition, a problem made a little more difficult by having all the drives of the same type and manufacture so they have the same ID. But I formated and put a new file system on the correct drive and didn’t format the ones I wanted to keep the data on.”

You were probably using an older kernel in your Slackware. Somewhere around 2.6.18 the kernel dev’s made a major change to how disks are handled. The libata module is now used consistently along with scsi emulation, hence all drive names begin with an “s” rather than an “h” (only disks, not optical). Furthermore, the ACPI table is read for disk sequencing. bios maps have always been an issue because of inconsistencies and programming errors, and continue to cause problems. Following the libata change, openSUSE, the *buntu family, Fedora (and no doubt others) shifted from using disk device-name (sda) to either device-by-id (serial number+partition number), device-label, or UUID (filesystem superblock). E.g., this is used now in grub’s installation disk alignment file (device.map) and the menu control file (menu.lst) as well as fstab; as a result, the sequence in the table becomes largely inconsequential. The added benefit, driven by the portability of SATA, is that when users add/remove/move SATA devices fstab, etc. doesn’t get borked because the drives are being identified by a unique ID that does not change. Whatever one may think of the merits of these changes, they originate upstream with the kernel and so that’s what we have now - this is not an openSUSE thing.

I really dislike kde 4.0. I think it is way to much eye candy and way to little functionality.

Whichever DE you used with Slackware should be available with openSUSE. AFAIK all ~dozen of them are available out of the box, or near to it. Xfce is supported, has a lot of capability, and is lighter weight. There is a rather new DE named LXDE which does a good job with the aesthetics while being very light (I think it uses OpenBox under the hood), you might take a look at that (the only one not in the repo’s, a quick google will turn it up for openSUSE). Oh, and re KDE 4.0, reserve final judgment until you see 4.1.3; it’s a vast improvement.

Hope that helps.

#6

Actually I have installed opensuse now on three computers and a laptop. I used the same dvd from linux magazine and done it the same way every time. The kernel I was using with Slackware was 2.6.27. I generally stay fairly uptodate.

I didn’t have to deselect anything because nothing was selected to begin with. I just click on the radio button that say use gnome or kde4 or kde 3.5. I selected kde3.5 just as I have the three other times I did the install.

And there are bugs in the installer. I have run up against it twice now. And it is all over the forum but most people don’t know whats going on so the discriptions change. Suse does’t overwirite the mbr during the install of grub. So if there is a boot loader there already it stays there. Because suse thinks it’s slick to use kexec to reboot the new system after an install it’s not found until someone removes the dvd and tries to boot from the hard drive. At that point the boot loader in the mbr can’t load anything because the disk is now different. And to make it even more fun suse changes the drive ordering from what is in the bios, shame on you suse. Suse thinks that sata drive should be orderd first. This is fine if you have a new system and there are no hard drives that you want to save data on. But if you do you better have you head on right or you will pick the first drive from suse as your root drive. This will not be the root drive if your system has both IDE and sata drive.

I guess it’s fairly clear that nobody knows what went wrong. I am solving the problem by removing all the drives that I don’t want suse to touch. Then wiping the drive I do want touched with dd to make the drive start with all zeros. This will wipe the MBR and any partitions from the drive. Then I will install onto this drive.

Now I did save my home partition from the slackware install. I suspect there is a hidden file I don’t know about that suse looked at and decided that the hidden file should over ride my commands to install kde3.5. Now I shouldn’t have to use kdm to select kde3.5 because I never selected any kde4 files to install. And I used the detailed view when I was selecting what software to install.

I do have some idea how linux works. The first time I installed linux was when I had a handfull of floppies and I was installing slackware. Periodically I try other distros but I always seem to endup back with slackware because it doesn’t hide crap from me. we’ll see if that happens here also.

#7

Well I pulled all the drives except root. I did a wipe with dd to get rid of lilo that the suse installer failed to do. I installed exactly the way I did before and I came up with a kde 3.5 system.

I then shutdown and inserted my other ide drive that had my swap partition and home partition. Changed fstab to reflect these changes. Opensuse didn’t like my old home directory for some reason. So I made a new user and am in the process of moving my files from one place to another. I could only copy one hidden file at a time then logout and log back in again to find what was causing me to get kde4 but that is a BUNCH of hoops I don’t really want to jump through.

And Mingus thank you for informing me that drive ordering is now down differently at the kernel level. I guess I should actually read the kernel developers mailing list. But it’s a bad idea to do that even if it’s at the kernel level. The user has no way of knowing that unless they have been following what is happening at the kernel level. All the user knows is what the bios tells them. If I wasn’t paying attension I would have wiped my home partition and another 500 gigs of data. That’s almost a terabyte of data because there is no warning that reordering has been done. It should have been told to the user on the partitioning page. Even if it comes from the ACPI you can still get the information from the bios and inform the person installing that things have changed. But alsa there is this HUGE gotcha if you aren’t following along.

In one of the experiments I did I installed 11.1 beta 5. And you are correct kde 4.1 is better but it’s still to cartoonish for my tastes. And gnome is too much like a mac for my tastes. And as time presses forward a linux distors are appealing to the great unwashed masses with eye candy I am more and more looking at Xfce.

I gave my mother a new computer for her birthday. She’s in her seventies and not really able to admin her own system. I live a thousand miles away from her so I setup x11vnc so when she has a problem I can just get in her system and change it. When I had this up in her office her grandson in law came in the room. He checked out the desktop and said “Hey this is like vista” I wanted to puke. But it is a good example of what the folks that know very litle use to judge an operating system. That is why I said that now they are appealing to the unwashed masses with eye candy.

Well in a little bit, after all my files get copied over, I will have a new opsensuse system in kde 3.5. What a pain this was.

#8

I’m sorry to hear you had so many problems. I’ve installed this distro literally hundreds of times over the last ~5 years on many different machines and not run into the headaches you have. Not that I haven’t encountered problems occasionally. Certainly the differences between Slackware and SuSE (or cousins Fedora and Mandriva) are pretty substantial, so there’s a non-trivial amount of new learning involved (I’ve used all the major distros). There’s probably been more installation glitches than I’m conscious of, just not as noticeable due to my familiarity with this particular software.

Where I have been by far bit worse than anything else is by unadvertised changes in the kernel - in every distro except for Gentoo. Sometimes the info is in the release notes, but there continue to be unexpected gotchas. I think the libata/scsi emulation change that you encountered is one of the biggest; over in Ubuntu land the users got massacred by that one.

Since you like the gui lean, take a look at LXDE. It’s very fast. Being used on one of the major new netbooks. Still a tad immature, needs some tweaking, but would be very easy for an experienced Slackware user.

Good luck.

#9

FWIW, few days ago I used a dvd from a Linux magazine to install openSuse 11 because I couldn’t find any (of the many) dvds I’ve burnt. All went well without a glitch.
The next day I did exactly the same with the same dvd in another pc. This one didn’t work that well. In fact the installation did some weird things here and there so I didn’t finish it. Burnt a new dvd and that worked without problems.
My conclusion, after seeing things like this several times:

  • If a dvd is not burnt correctly you will probably have problems. DVDs from magazines seem to have more problems than a fresh burnt dvd with your own writer doing all the integrity checks.
  • There are DVD readers more picky than others, so some cannot bypass errors in media as others do.

Maybe that’s what happened to you too.