Installing SuSE Linux 10.1...

SuSE Linux 10.1 has been recently released and it is freely available via OpenSuSE. I opted for purchasing the DVD's, though, and I just received them earlier this week.

The only part that I really dislike about Fedora and SuSE's installation procedure is that you have to shutdown the machine for anywhere between 30 minutes and 2 hours depending on how much you are paying attention to the installation process; because of this, you'll probably see this site down an hour sometime in the upcoming couple of weeks.

Last night, I decided to upgrade one of my workstations from 10.0 to 10.1, and the process went very smoothly... until the end. At the end, it wanted to configure the on-line update and to do this, it opened up Mozilla so I could go through the registration form. After filling out the form, it said that it was successful and that was it; it did not feel very well integrated, since it did not tell me what the next step was. I assumed that it was to close the window, however, the setup program just kept on insisting to open up Mozilla and have me repeat the process, until I eventually just gave up configuring the on-line updater and clicked Cancel. This ended up being the final step, and then I logged into my machine.

I then proceeded to attempt to update my machine, however, the YaST Online Update (YOU) was quite insistent that there were no updates, to which I was a little surprised since in each SuSE release that I have installed thus far, there have always been some updates afterwards. So I decided to start playing with my machine and to figure that out later, and this is when I started noticing my problem: when I started up Thunderbird and Firefox, I got a segmentation fault, but I tend not to use the SuSE default Firefox and Thunderbird, so I initially thought it was a problem with those, so then I tried the SuSE default Firefox, only to get the same results:

• eyt@zaterdag 1$ firefox
• /usr/bin/firefox: line 159: 11151 Segmentation fault $AOSS $MOZ_PROGRAM $@

After searching, I found that there were updates, and that this was probably one of them. Installing the BASH one really did not help any, so I then shifted my efforts to getting the Online Update to work properly.

After many failed attempts, I fell onto a post which led me to resolving my problem. The deal is that with previous versions of YOU, you used to only use one source for updates, but with the new version, it works closer to how Cygwin's installer works, in that you can get put in multiple update sites for different applications. This is pretty cool, however, it is unfortunate that it does not make adding the default SuSE sites easier to set up. As such, here is what you have to do:

1. Start yast2, under Software, select Installation Source.
2. Once initialized, select Add, HTTP and enter these sites:

   Server Name	Directory on Server	Notes
   download.opensuse.org	distribution/SL-10.1/non-oss-inst-source/
   suse.cs.utah.edu	suse/update/10.1/	Or another mirror

3. Once those are added, make sure that Status and Refresh are on for these sites. If they are not, select them, and then click the appropriate button in the lower right-hand corner.
4. Next click Finish. This will take several minutes to complete, or at least it does the first time

Once that was done, the Software Updater icon turned into an orange exclamation mark, so I proceeded to tell it to update everything. After a few moments, it errored out with:

• Establishing script:libzypp-patch-zmdrestart.sh-2-1533-1.noarch[20060624-115231]
• This would invalidate script:libzypp-patch-zmdrestart.sh-2-1533-1.noarch[20060624-115231].
• Marking this resolution attempt as invalid.

Because I had manually installed a few packages in prior to this, I thought that I would try selecting packages around this problem, but to no avail. As a final attempt, I went into YaST2, and selected Online Update from Software, and after it initialized, it downloaded a bunch of patches, one of which included some updated YOU. This required YOU to be restarted, and then it continued to download a bunch of packages.

And after all that, I am now able to start Mozilla Thunderbird and Mozilla Firefox without any segmentation faults. And besides that experience, I am so far very pleased with the changes in SuSE Linux 10.1, particularly with the look and feel, but I've only been using it for a couple hours now.