/dev/zero

In my Linux life I have used exactly 3 distros: “Linux Universe” (yeah, I’d never heard of it before or since. It came with a book on Linux back about ‘94, ‘95 and was the only thing I could find that would even pretend my ATAPI CD-ROM drive existed (remember those days? When, if it wasn’t SCSI, you didn’t HAVE a CD-ROM drive?)). Red Hat (Blame my then-roomate, who had an actual boxed copy of 4.0.) And recently Mandrake. I suppose if you count Fedora, that’s 4, but Fedora Core 1 is just Red Hat 10.0.
Today I decided to give Suse a try. So I spent the last couple of days cleaning up my Windows partition on Skywise, deleting unneeded files, defraging, etc. Problem is Windows defrag will defrag files nicely. It doesn’t seem to care about defraging free space and not putting huge files at the END of the partition. I did some checking online and found a couple of utilities that said they’d take care of it for me, but none of them did. They consolidated the free space down to about 2 or 3 chunks of free space, but didn’t do didly about moving the big chunk of data from the end of the partition to be right up with the other data (and no, this was not system files or pagefile.sys which can’t be moved.)
I gave up and booted off the Suse DVD. (Eval copy direct from Novell. So much nicer than having to deal with 5 CDs. Sort of like upgrading from floppy disk to CD. Remember those days?)
Got into the partition control stuff and discover I still have a dead Mandrake install on this laptop and gee, it WILL resize NTFS partitions.
Well, sort of.
I can play around with the resize dialog, only when I click “OK” it tells me the partition is mounted and I have to unmount it first. However the only thing in the entire partitioning tool that mentions mounting is the mount POINT dialog. And if I touch that, suddenly I can’t resize. I can click on the partition and then click the “resize” button, but it does nada. Very sloppy.
So I gave up, nuked the very-defunct “recovery” partition that Winbook installed, nuked the old Mandrake partition and joined them together in an LVM that gave me a whopping 4.9G. That allowed me to install pretty much everytyhing I want from Suse.
I have to say, Suses’ installer is pretty nice. But then so is Mandrakes, and Red Hats and Fedoras.
The one thing I really like about Suse is it’s hardware support. But then, that’s the one thing Suse has been known for for years. They have drivers for EVERYTHING. Even if it isn’t on the disk (for licensing reasons) once you get the system installed and booted up the first time, you simply tag the package in Yast and it goes and gets it for you.
The one problem I had here was that during the install it detected my modem. When I went to configure the modem, it detected it was a WinModem and installed the package to support it. Very nice. But then I configured my dialup account (an Earthlink account I never use, since I have Comcast cable at home, but it could be handy on the road where I can’t get ethernet or wireless). Then in the subsequent “download patches and updates” step of the install process, it insisted on trying to dial Earthlink. Since I don’t have a phone jack to a functioning phone line in my office, and since dial-up for patching would just suck, that wasn’t going to work too well. The only way I could get it to use the ethernet connection was to go back and erase the Earthlink config. Then it was happy (though it failed to get updates for unrelated reasons.)
I’m now all booted up and it’s downloading and installing patches happily.
Next step: locate a decent modeline for a 1280×854 display and configure the wireless adapter (nicely detected my Intel Pro 2100 wireless card (aka: Centrino). Never mentioned AP or WEP settings in the install dialog. Have to track that down.

Edit:
After clicking “submit” on this entry, I looked at the laptop and discovered it’s completely locked up at 33% progress on installing an update to busybox (53% progress overall.)
Does not respond to mouse (either wireless or the trackpad) or ctrl-alt-bksp. This is not good.