SuSE Installation Sample Writeup
Prof. Greg Newby

Overview
SuSE (pronounced "soose") is a Linux distribution based primarily in Germany. They, like RedHat, focus on being easy to install and administer. They pride themselves on being current, especially with adding new hardware drivers for new equipment (drives, mouses, monitors, video cards, etc.).

This document describes my process of installing SuSE version 6.0 from CDROM to a system already running RedHat Linux 5.2.

The system
The system running 5.2 is an experimental system I keep at home. It has a (recently acquired) 10GB hard drive, but only a 90Mhz Pentium processor and 32M of RAM, with a 2x CDROM. In other words, it's not too modern or blazing fast. The system is configured to recognize my Zip drive, CD, modem (with PPP dialin to an ISP). It also had a username 'gbnewby' set up, and various utilities such as sudo.

One key question about installing SuSE is whether it would overwrite much (or most) of the existing configuration and software, or leave customizations alone. It turns out that it mostly overwrites everything it can find, except for usernames and user directories.

The process

1. Backup the old system -- just my personal files and the network configuration for dial-in PPP. Everything else can be rebuilt easily enough, even if a total re-install and re-formatting is needed. The backup was made to a Zip disk, which I could read on another system if needed.

2. Mount the SuSE CDROM (acquired for about $2.00US from Linux Central, read the README file (the English version -- my German isn't up to the task).

3. Per the README file, make a boot disk using the same sort of technique as RedHat (e.g., insert a floppy and use the "dd" command to create a disk image).
   Problem: 2 floppy disks in a row failed the "dd" command. Maybe they were bad disks (they weren't new), but I hope this doesn't mean the floppy drive is failing. Luckily, the 3rd disk worked.

   At this point, I made just the one "boot" diskette. Note that SuSE proudly enables a full install from a DOS or Windows system (e.g., to another partition), but I didn't try this since I have only a minimal DOS installation on this system and didn't have the CDROM configured for DOS.

4. Boot to the floppy disk. I'm greeted with a nice colorful (choice of mono or color) English (choice of several languages) menu-driven installation menu. Unfortunately, it's not too obvious what to try. After experimenting, the solution was to configure and mount the CDROM.
   Problem: My CDROM (Soundblaster) was not recognized. I needed to reboot back to the old Linux, remount the SuSE CDROM, and make a 2nd diskette with the "modules" image.

5. Back to boot from the floppy disk, and insert the "modules" diskette when prompted to configure the CD.

6. After the CDROM was recognized, the installation program (which I believe is actually YaST, but it didn't actually say so) loaded in some information about packages etc.

7. I chose to "update" (not install) SuSE. It was obvious from the choice screen that it was OK to work with from a different Linux.

8. The installation procedure was easy, but without a lot of options. Essentially, SuSE wanted to install everything it knew about (everything on the CD), and the only choice I was given was whether to overwrite all existing packages, or only those that were newer on the CD.

   I chose to only install the newer packages, which might have been a bad move because I think some of the (newer?) RedHat packages were somehow incompatible.

   Problem: The installation process bombed out with a package called ge (emacs). I rebooted from floppy and did the same thing, and it bombed out again.

9. I went ahead and booted to the regular on-disk Linux system, and was prompted to provide a (new) root password. A few more automated scripts ran and I eventually logged in. and logged in as root (my 'gbnewby' username was still there). At this point, I was able to login, but knew the process wasn't completed.

10. I knew of the SuSE administration tool, "YaST" (Yet another Setup Tool). I typed "yast" as root, then selected the option to "update" the system. The CDROM was recognized (it had been installed properly), and I was able to install the rest of the packages.

    The difference was that I first removed the CD, and rubbed some smears off it. This seemed to be the problem - just some dirt!

11. Many other packages were installed, and after the system rebooted I was able to login again. I saw that "sudo" was still there, with 'gbnewby' enabled, so I could use my regular "sudo" tool to become root and see how well things were working.

12. Most things I tried worked. The shell was fine, I could see the CDROM, and my old /etc/fstab file was there and I could mount the Zip drive. Commands I tried included: perl, awk, sed, uptime, w, ls, and others.
    Problem: "man" didn't work. It complained about a missing file, libgz.so -- which I didn't see on the SuSE CD, or on the old Redhat 5.2 CD.

    Problem: gcc/g++ didn't work, either. I was able to compile a program I was working on previously (part of my information retrieval system), but it wouldn't compile, complaining of a missing crtbegin.o file

13. After trying various things on the SuSE CD, I finally decided to use "rpm" to install the gcc/g++ and man packages from the RedHat 5.2 CD. These worked.

14. At this point, everything I tried was working. I needed to find xf86configurator to get X configured again, but otherwise there were no problems or surprises.

Something especially useful during this process was the virtual consoles feature of Linux. With ALT-F1 through ALT-F5, you can switch to another "console" (like having multiple terminals). A full Unix shell was available in some of these alternate consoles (others were used for error messages and status updates). I was able to do things in the shell, like run "rpm -q -a," which made my choices easier during the installation.

Overall, the SuSE process was less configurable than RedHat, but more friendly (less flexible = easier, I suppose). I am not confident that everything works properly, but most everything certainly is.

I tried SuSE partly because it is based on the new version 6 libc. However, it turns out that it still has the old 2.0 kernel -- I will update the kernel to the current version shortly.

Further info on SuSE:

• www.suse.com