[snip]
>The upgrade worked so well, in fact, that I may not do a clean install, and just leave it the way it is now.
>Needless to say that I am VERY, VERY pleased with SuSE 8.0
>JLK

Well, what can I say? Computers are my hobby too, so I gave in to the urge to do a clean install of SuSE 8.0, especially since I noticed that the modular r128 driver had a tendency to crash on EnjoyMPEG and hung the system, twice. That's twice too many times.

The experience was totally different from any previous SuSE clean install experience. If I were a newbie to Linux, or prefered the "kids gloves" approach of Windows, I'd love it. I was totally insulated from technical issues. As someone who likes to get 'down and dirty' with the command line on occassions SuSE 8.0 was.... 'different'. The first problem is that as an experienced user I seldom read the installation manuals. SuSE 7.3 was a little different from previous releases, but not enough to break that habit. Experienced Linux users take note: read the SuSE 8.0 installation chapter all the way through before attempting to install it.

My favorite option: "Install almost everything" was missing. I wish they'd put it back in. Three installation options are offered: "minimal", "standard with KDE 3.0", and "standard with KDE and StarOffice". I chose the last, but planned on deleting SO5.2 and installing OpenOffice 641d.

The last option took about 15 minutes to complete. IT Techies will love it! No games. No development tools. No KOffice, no video players, etc... "FileManager (Superuser)" is not on the menu tree nor accessible from an xterm in a user account. (One can still 'xhost +localhost' and then su to root and call 'kfilemanager' from the xterm, but that is definately harder than clicking a 'Filemanager (superuser)' menu option and entering the root password.) None of the apps that techies usually take off workstations before giving them to the staff. When I opened an xterm and tried to use 'locate'... it wasn't there! Neither was 'updatedb'. Many command line utilities were not installed. ALL documentation for all applications is now accessable through the SuSE Help toolbar icon. 'man' is a thing of the past, ancient history. It now seems obvious why the LD_LIBRARY_PATH didn't have -lncurses located, so "make menuconfig" in an xterm didn't work. "make xconfig" did work but, while exploring around in the YaST2 Control Center under "Systems", I found a beautiful hires gui kernel configuration screen. I should of read the manual. In SuSE 8.0 don't even plan to use an xterm to do maintenance or kernel builds. It GUI using a rodent all the way.

So, any software installation beyond the "standard with KDE and StarOffice" has to be done in the YaST2 Control Center. YaST is still there, in an xterm under root, if you installed it.

My clean install was different from the upgrade in another way. I had configured SuSE 7.3 to have ATI r128 acceleration and scsi emulation (to setup my PleXWriter CDR) in the kernel. SuSE 8.0 saw it and installed the r128 and scsi modules, but didn't change the XConfig86 file (which held the 'load "DRI"' and 'load "GPL"' options I manually had to enter), nor my /dev/hdd, /dev/cdrecorder and /dev/cdrom permissions and links. The result was that TuxRacer and FlightGear ran under acceleration at about 20 Frames/sec - fo flicker, and I could burn CDs. A clean install didn't have those previous settings to take advantage of. I had no acceleration and my XCDRoast wouldn't 'see' a CD when it was in the drive, even though it recognized the CDR. The problem was that XCDRoast expects to see the CDR on /dev/sg0 or sg1, but my Mustek II scanner attached to an NCR53c810 scsi card was set up as sg0 and the lilo option "append = hdd=ide=scsi" in combination with a modular ide-scsi driver caused the CDR to be bound to sr0, which XCDRoast doesn't see. It expects to see a S)csi G)eneric setup. My Zip250 wouldn't install because /dev/sda4 wasn't a valid device. This was because the parport, parport_pc

So, sometime this week I am going to play with the YaST2 kernel configuration screen and tools and recompile the -18GB kernel to the config I gave my -4GB kernel.

The move away from doing things on the command line, console or xterm, has been underway for a couple of years. It was beginning to be obvious in 7.2 and more so in 7.3. In 8.0 it has hit full force. In 7.3 it was getting to the point that the only things I did in an xterm were to 'locate' some driver, or 'tar xvfz somefile.tar.gz' an app that didn't come in an RPM install configuration. I had found myself using 'ps aux' and 'kill' less and less in favor of KDE's KSystemGuard. In the past I've been very comfortable opening an xterm and doing my maintenance but while exploring SuSE 8.0's offerings I am coming to the conclusion that in the near future even an xterm may be thrown onto the junk pile of history. Even recompiling a kernel is looking like a drag&drop operation in SuSE 8.0. No more putzing with the manual choke or spark advance, or putting a turn on the fuel needle. An era has passed. If you have stock hardware.