An update on my OpenSUSE Experiment

[Mark Foster]

Okay.



So I grabbed the latest GNOME and KDE LiveCD's from their website and used
the posted instructions on their website to burn both to a USB stick.



USB stick wouldn't boot on two separate systems I tried.



Tried unetbootin as well - this gave me OpenSUSE 11.1 instead of 11.4 - but
same issue. Also tried unetbootin for Ubuntu LTS, also no go, which
surprised me as I have an Ubuntu Netbook Remix stick which boots fine.



I then found some Blank CD's and burnt the two OpenSUSE 11.4 images.

I discovered that having them in the drive when I reboot my laptop results
in a freeze during bios POST same as the USB stick did. However, if I leave
them ejected, then press the 'boot menu' (escape) button, then select
'choose boot media', THEN close the CDROM drive and select 'expansion bay'
from the boot menu options, that the LiveCD's will boot. (Good ol' HP
Laptop hardware eh?)





So over the weekend I gave both LiveCD's a try on my HP 6730b. In brief:



- KDE is definitely more polished than Gnome in the SUSE world.

- I havn't used KDE in years. It seems vastly improved since my last
dive into KDE in the early/mid 2000's.

- The LiveCD doesn't ship with an IM tool? Suck!

- Ships with Firefox4b12 which works fine. KDE Also ships with Konq,
which I didn't actually have chance to try (but having two browsers on the
LiveCD is actually a good idea, imho)

- Actually seems to otherwise check many of the boxes.



I've had some further suggestions as to some closer-to-home software repos'
which may improve performance (something posted here earlier) but I'm not
going to be able to tinker further until I acquire the new hardware which
will host my new OpenSUSE system. That'll be next week sometime, and the HP
6730b will be returned to my employer in a few weeks so not much point in
doing further with it.



Appreciate very much some of the comments this discussion prompted, much
useful info gleaned.



Mark.

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[Daniel Reurich]

Post by Mark Foster
Okay.
So I grabbed the latest GNOME and KDE LiveCD's from their website and used
the posted instructions on their website to burn both to a USB stick.
USB stick wouldn't boot on two separate systems I tried.
Tried unetbootin as well - this gave me OpenSUSE 11.1 instead of 11.4 - but
same issue. Also tried unetbootin for Ubuntu LTS, also no go, which
surprised me as I have an Ubuntu Netbook Remix stick which boots fine.
I then found some Blank CD's and burnt the two OpenSUSE 11.4 images.
I discovered that having them in the drive when I reboot my laptop results
in a freeze during bios POST same as the USB stick did. However, if I leave
them ejected, then press the 'boot menu' (escape) button, then select
'choose boot media', THEN close the CDROM drive and select 'expansion bay'
from the boot menu options, that the LiveCD's will boot. (Good ol' HP
Laptop hardware eh?)

Yep Good old HP alright.

I found out that on my HP 6735s laptop, the hdd is tattoed with HP's
secret bits. When I tried installing a new 160GB SSd drive in it I
could install on it fine but it wouldn't recognize it as a valid system
disk. The same thing happens with hdd (mbr with partitions) formatted
flash media. (It'll boot from usb cd formated flash drives ok.)
Chances are that your employers laptop is suffering the same HP buggery
of the BIOS boot process.

If you do an install on that model of HP, then what ever you do, don't
delete the empty last partition from the harddrive as that may well
render the system unbootable until you send it back to HP to tattoo the
drive again.

(I managed to get the SSD to boot after copying across the partition
table and the first few MB of the empty ~1GB partition at the end of the
disk.)

[Vik Olliver]

Post by Mark Foster
USB stick wouldn't boot on two separate systems I tried.

A common problem is that some laptops (my Toshiba and Acer are the
examples I know) will not boot from a USB stick that was plugged in
before the PC was rebooted.

Remove the stick, turn on PC, then plug in and do your boot option thing.

Vik :v)

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[Mark Foster]

I did try this with USB too Vik. If the USB isn't present prior to
selecting the boot menu, it doesn't show me USB as a boot option.

Daniels comments about his experience with the HP are interesting. The hard
drive in mine isn't original (I got the machine second hand, and when I had
a disk failure with it some months back, caused me to discover that the
prior owner had swapped out the disk...) but it seems generally OK with our
own-brew Windows7 64bit Installation.

Not to worry. New box will be dedicated Linux. Quite looking forward to
that; first time in ages I won't have required Windows for corporate
reasons.

Mark.

-----Original Message-----
From: nzlug-***@linux.net.nz [mailto:nzlug-***@linux.net.nz] On
Behalf Of Vik Olliver
Sent: Tuesday, 2 August 2011 2:48 p.m.
To: NZLUG Mailing List
Subject: Re: [nzlug] An update on my OpenSUSE Experiment

Post by Mark Foster
USB stick wouldn't boot on two separate systems I tried.

A common problem is that some laptops (my Toshiba and Acer are the examples
I know) will not boot from a USB stick that was plugged in before the PC was
rebooted.

Remove the stick, turn on PC, then plug in and do your boot option thing.

Vik :v)

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