eAction

Once things go smoothly, it is amazing how quickly I forget past troubles. I just came to check what my last blog was about, and realized that I’ve been buzzing along merrily for the past two weeks, and some of that earlier installation saga has already slipped my mind!

So if you’re going through troubles and looking for answers, I need to reassure you that better days are coming. Just patiently work at resolving your immediate problems and eventually you’ll be well installed, and enjoying the many benefits of your SUSE or Linux Operating system.

Let’s see, my Part II told of a nearly perfect install, but that I’d made a mistake in the partitioning, and had no room left for updates. So I did it again on October 7th, the Saturday of our Thanksgiving weekend.

Once more I had trouble with my computer not recognizing the Add-on CD when it wanted to make a catalogue of all it was going to install. I was able to back up, and when I could change CDs, I put in the DVD that wouldn’t boot, and lo, it was able to do the full installation from there.

Mind you, when it came to the partitioning, I had a bit of a scare. I was trying to delete the first hard drive of 10 GB, and somehow it cleared away everything on the second one (40GB) where I had put my Suse 9.3 back. Whoa!! I really hoped my backups were all good, ’cause I had not meant to do that. However, I was still able to trace back my steps and nothing had changed on my hard drives yet.

But several efforts to clear that messed up first HD got nowhere. Two partitions with 0 bytes seem to be the problem. Then it occurred to me that SUSE might just have isolated them because they had some bad infection or whatever on them. I should just leave them alone and work with the partitions I had. I was able to rename the one I had the previous time designated as / (root) and also the one designated ‘usr’. Now / had 3 GB and usr had 6GB. I set all the partitions I wanted to use for SUSE 10.1 to be reformatted, but left alone the ones where I had installed SUSE 9.3. Okay! Then I let the formating and installation begin.

My how industriously and fast the computer hummed.

When it came to doing the online update, it would not - it simply would not. However, I’d read on the OpenSuse.org site that this is a problem with this version of SUSE 10.1 so I moved on, and tried to do that when I got done and logged in. It wouldn’t right away on the first couple of tries, but when I had rebooted the next night, and come in, and tried again, from in YaST - then I got the updates.

That little Zen icon is orange all the time, but when I click it for an update, it seems to worry about writing over some file, and refuses. So now I ignore it and make a point of doing the updates manually from inside YaST on Saturday mornings when I do my weekly backups.

It took a few days to get all my settings just right for me, but in no time I was working away as I had all this past year in Suse 9.3

I had, during installation decided to accept the default screen resolution. It makes the fonts too small for me, so I spent considerable time adjusting them larger wherever I could. I noticed however, that most web sites showed up as just a portion of my screen even with larger fonts. Suddenly I had enough of this. I went into YaST then SAX2 and changed that resolution back to 800 x 600, which works very comfortably for me, and all my sites look like I designed them.

I suppose in a year or so someone might convince me that I need to upgrade again, but hey, if this works, why not just leave it and enjoy it and get my work done? Time to focus on productivity now!