Cheetah

After my previous hard work with changing my Linux fonts, I had to re-install Open Suse 10 on my laptop, losing everything I already did!

I suppose it was partly my own fault, but I learned a valuable lesson anyway.

This is what I did before:
As I’m using Windows currently, I used Partition Magic to create empty partitions for my Linux installation. I then hibernated my Windows and went ahead with my Linux installation. During the Linux installation, I formatted the partitions with the Reiser file system and configured everything.

I could then switch back between Linux and Windows without any issues, until I shut-down Windows for the first time after my Linux installation. This broke my Linux with file system errors. The Reiser file system tried it’s best to recover from this, but with no result. The only explanation I’ve got for this is that Windows wrote some data to the Linux partitions when I shut it down. I suppose it did this because it previously knew about those partitions (which I basically changed at runtime because Windows was hibernated).

I repeated my installation, but this time I just deleted the partitions in Windows. This caused my disk to just have a segment of unallocated space. I then shutdown Windows properly and installed Linux. During the installation I created and formatted the Linux partitions. After this, my Linux and Windows were happily sharing the same disk… at last!

I obviously had to re-configure my fonts (as described in my previous blog entry).

I improved my Linux installation with the following:

1. I installed my WiFi PCMCIA network card. This was surprisingly a no-brainer. I plugged the device (Gigabyte 802.11) in while Linux was running and it detected the new hardware. I just configured the SSID and WEP keys we use at our company and I could join the network. Everything seems to be working fine, except for the signal strength indicator (LED lights) on the PCMCIA card itself. It shows no signal, although I can browse the network. Wonder if this has to do with the driver? I’ll look at this again in the future. My first idea is to get it working; I’ll then make it work better ;-)
2. I installed OpenOffice 2. The default Open Suse 10 ships with some 1.9.x version of OpenOffice, but I had the installation files for 2.0, so I did not select the default installation of OpenOffice 1.9.x. I also learned an interesting RPM feature with the installation of OpenOffice. The tarball you download consist of a lot (+- 20) RPM files in the same installation folder…now where do I begin? Should I just try to install any one and try to get the dependencies right…this could prove to give you a well-deserved headache! After a bit of googling, I got the following idea: rpm -ivh *.rpm which just sorts out all the dependencies itself and install in the correct order. After this my OpenOffice was also working fine (at least from a quick glance).
3. I also installed the Exhange plugin for Evolution, which I would like to use to read my e-mail from an Exchange server at a client. I first tried to just setup the account, but there was no Exchange option as a server type. I then downloaded the plugin from the Suse site under the Gnome utilities (as Evolution is a Gnome app). After this I had the option of selecting the Exchange server, but I haven’t setup the account yet. I’ll get to this soon.

Will keep you updated with my progress..

# posted by Jaco Joubert @ 10:35 AM