Lord Evermore
Diamond Member
I've begun the process of installing SuSE Linux 6.4 on a new computer I just put together. I've had the OS for months now, but no computer to put it on (didn't want to attempt dual boot a 4th time). Then, I got all the parts for a computer but had to find time to put it together; it's amazing how hard it is to get a few free and quiet hours to do something like this. Finally got the basic system put together today (but I had to use one of the monitors from my dual setup; definitely need to get another monitor for the Linux box so my Windows machine can have its dually back). Only installed video card and network card, don't need to worry about sound for now.
I think I might actually have several dead video cards, but it may have been due to the system BIOS. I have a Matrox Millennium (the original) which I wanted to use, since the system doesn't have to have any major 3D power at this point, but the system wouldn't boot or even beep with that. So I grabbed an S3 Trio 32+ which had just been pulled from an older system a few months ago, and that did the same thing. So I had to use the G400 DualHead I had laying around (yes I have new AGP cards just laying around because I thought I could do better than my Viper V770 and found out that even the G400 wasn't much different). That's working okay, but I'm not sure I want to keep it in this system, as I don't know how well the support is in Linux (if I find out it's good, I'll keep using it since I may use this system as a dedicated Unreal Tournament server). I think maybe though the PCI cards weren't working because the BIOS defaults to the AGP port being the primary video, so it wasn't initializing the PCI cards. I'll have to try those later (mmmm....multiple computers with multiple monitors...)
Anyway, I got it all up and running, and then decided the 4.3GB Samsung drive wasn't going to be enough, so I pulled a WD 2.1GB drive from another plundered system (the remains of several systems are floating around my room 🙂 but not really enough to put together a good system) and tossed that in. Finally got into YaST2 (CDROM version loaded SOOOO much faster than the floppy version, plus you get the penguin icon while Linux loads). Then I spent about an hour deciding how to partition the two drives, after which my work was ignored by the install program. Despite having made partitions based on the guidelines in this manual and others (like /boot, /, /home, /usr, all at recommended sizes or larger), YaST2 seems to just be installing it all into the root partition, requiring more than 2 GB of the allocated 3.2GB. I'll see when it's done, but I didn't see anything indicating otherwise, and root had to be the same size when I was installing with just one large partition instead of several.
Of course, deciding on partition sizes and stuff has always been the longest step for me. I've tried installing various Red Hat versions a few times, and never could quite get it installed and working properly, then had horrible problems removing it.
Anyway, looks like I've got a long wait still. Somehow I've gotten 36% of the packages installed, but it's still only using 2% disk space (which it was right from the start).
I think I might actually have several dead video cards, but it may have been due to the system BIOS. I have a Matrox Millennium (the original) which I wanted to use, since the system doesn't have to have any major 3D power at this point, but the system wouldn't boot or even beep with that. So I grabbed an S3 Trio 32+ which had just been pulled from an older system a few months ago, and that did the same thing. So I had to use the G400 DualHead I had laying around (yes I have new AGP cards just laying around because I thought I could do better than my Viper V770 and found out that even the G400 wasn't much different). That's working okay, but I'm not sure I want to keep it in this system, as I don't know how well the support is in Linux (if I find out it's good, I'll keep using it since I may use this system as a dedicated Unreal Tournament server). I think maybe though the PCI cards weren't working because the BIOS defaults to the AGP port being the primary video, so it wasn't initializing the PCI cards. I'll have to try those later (mmmm....multiple computers with multiple monitors...)
Anyway, I got it all up and running, and then decided the 4.3GB Samsung drive wasn't going to be enough, so I pulled a WD 2.1GB drive from another plundered system (the remains of several systems are floating around my room 🙂 but not really enough to put together a good system) and tossed that in. Finally got into YaST2 (CDROM version loaded SOOOO much faster than the floppy version, plus you get the penguin icon while Linux loads). Then I spent about an hour deciding how to partition the two drives, after which my work was ignored by the install program. Despite having made partitions based on the guidelines in this manual and others (like /boot, /, /home, /usr, all at recommended sizes or larger), YaST2 seems to just be installing it all into the root partition, requiring more than 2 GB of the allocated 3.2GB. I'll see when it's done, but I didn't see anything indicating otherwise, and root had to be the same size when I was installing with just one large partition instead of several.
Of course, deciding on partition sizes and stuff has always been the longest step for me. I've tried installing various Red Hat versions a few times, and never could quite get it installed and working properly, then had horrible problems removing it.
Anyway, looks like I've got a long wait still. Somehow I've gotten 36% of the packages installed, but it's still only using 2% disk space (which it was right from the start).
