The “Break it Down” Blog

Novell has gotten a lot of attention around their SLED 10 preview release recently. While I have Ubuntu 6.06 installed I figured I’d give it a try; honestly the whole commercialization of Linux has been the best thing that could ever happen for it. Hobby development with the help of some paid positions has helped get Linux to the 90% mark as far as competativeness goes, but it’s the last 10% of spit and polish (like ease of app installation, desktop layout and integrated technologies) that makes users go “Ohhh! I gotta get me some of that”. Luckily companies have not been afraid to step up and take the reigns, today I looked at SLED 10 preview release.

Ok so my first turn off was that there is no DVD option, you have to download 5 CD images and burn them. Not a problem persay, just annoying. So I went ahead and burned the disks and popped them in, a little back ground information on my computer:

• AMD 4800 X2
• ASUS A8N-SLI Premium
• 4GB Ram
• nVidia 7800 GTX
• 3x Seagate 250GB 7200.9

I think that is all the important specs. The key to know is that I have 3 identical hard drives, I set up HD 1 and HD 2 in a RAID 0 configuration and then placed all my documents and important information on HD 3. This way I get nice fast load times with applications from my RAID 0 configuration without the worry that everything might die some day. I would point out that my array is over a year old and have still never had a problem with it, on board SATA-RAID has finally gotten good.

Well I popped in the first disk and rebooted, upon boot up I was presented with a pretty nice install screen with the first option (finally) being “Boot from hard drive”, incase you rebooted and forgot the CD in your CD drive, that’s a nice little touch right there. I selected the second choice of “Installation” and fired it up. I had a nice screen tell me that it was scanning my system and then the most amazing thing happened. When the installation went to probe my hard drives, I got a popup telling me that it had detected HD 1 and HD 2 are in a RAID array that is actually handled by software-raid (it’s that onboard SATA RAID that is called “fake-raid” in the mailing lists because the CPU is actually doing all the work still). This has never happened before, I have never had a linux installation know about my RAID configuration and I while I always installed linux to HD 3 (on a 100GB partition I setup) I always wondered in the back of my mind just exactly how I would go about installing it on my array if I wanted it there. Well according to this incredibly helpful popup (no joke, this is awesome) it mentioned that Kernel 2.4 provided some support for software-RAID setups while Kernel 2.6 provides no support. So I guess that answered my question.

At this point I knew the partitioning step was going to be a trick as it always had been, because I wanted to install SLED on the 2nd partition on my 3rd disk… not the most straight forward thing. After the system scan was done I was presented with what boils down to an installation plan, basically a checklist of what the system is going to do now. Each section (partitioning, installation, etc.) has a sublist of all the line items it will complete. Of course you can click these heading areas and adjust what the installer is going to do. I instinctively clicked on the Partitioning portion of the screen and then looked a little closer at the suggest plan and stopped dead in my tracks. As I read through the 8-line suggested partitioning plan from the installer I noticed that it had nailed it. Because it saw HD 1 and HD 2 were in a software RAID array, it had removed them from the equation and only looked at HD 3. In addition to that, it saw that I had a Windows (NTFS) partition on HD 3 so it set that to be mounted as a Windows partition after install. In addition to all this it knew to use the last 100GB partition for Linux and setup an extended partition then broke that down further into the individual mount points it wanted. To top the whole thing off with cream and sugar it even used reiserfs for everything which is exactly the file system I typically choose as it handles tons of little files quite well. To recap, the installer read my mind, translated my wishes into a partition plan and did this all while I sat in amazement. Realizing now that the installer was smarter than I was, I simply hit Back then Install to get the show on the road.

After the installation started I was presented with a nice install screen that shows quite a bit of information about the installation taking place. My favorite by far is the Details tab. From there you can see how many CDs the installer will ask for and how much information from each one it will use in addition to how much it has already copied across. To top that all off it gives estimate times, package counts and a giant status bar on the right hand side that I think is broken down by partition even… SLICK. The first disk went through the installation steps then restarted. Upon successful reboot the installer started up again and I believe finished off all the application packages for the system where as the first one was most likely just system stuff.

After all the packages are installed the installer walks you through the remaining major wizards which are Network and Hardware Configuration. At both stages you are free to adjust any of the findings of the installer to more acurately describe your system. Fortunately the installer found all my network settings correctly but the hardware setup (dual head with different monitors) seem to throw it for a loop. When adjusting my Graphics Card settings this is where things got a little retarded. I updated my monitor to the Dell 2405FPW, which was nice to see it listed, but noticed that neither my screen size, aspect ratio or maximum resolution got updated. When I updated each one of those individually I noticed that I cannot setup a screen size bigger than 21″ according to the installer. I didn’t see a way to add my second monitor to this configuration from here as it wasn’t detected either. I hit Test Configuration, it looked good enough so I hit Save and continued on my way.

After clicking Finish I was pleased to see the system start right up and not ask for a reboot or anything like that… slick. As soon as I logged in, since I had seen some screencasts about SLED already, I knew to go right to the Control Panel then the Desktop Effects settings. From there and after a series of clicking I learned that since I skipped the Registration process during the installation I had to do that now in order to get a registered update site so I could pull down the correct video and X files to get full XGL support. So I fired up YaST and went through the registration which was painless, asked for 1 email address and completed in probably 1min. After that I fired up the Desktop Effects link again and happily saw that clicking the link to update my system to enable this feature worked… although it seemed the link to nVidia’s download server was busted (returned a 500 error code) so now I was stuck again, but not by the softwares fault. I would like to point out that when I first clicked the link to update the nvidia drivers and X I was notified that my user didn’t have permissions to perform this kind of operation, but instead of making me figure out how to admin my user account to add that kind of permissions, right there on the dialog box next to “Close” was the button “Add permissions to this user” or something to that effect. Basically saving me any hunting time, I could just click that and add the permissions directly to the account I was logged in as, no monkey business. I am loving the polish so far on SLED! Now to get XGL working…

Ok I noticed an orange ball in my system tray which seemed to indicate there were system updates available. I clicked this and applied the updates that were listed. At this point I just decided to re-run the nVidia and X updates for XGL and viola, it worked! After the wizard was done I was asked to log back in and XGL was working… damn that was easy. Unfortunately I noticed that I had a virtual desktop upon restart about 20px wider than my physical screen. I fired up the Graphic Card Configuration wizard and X locked up. I pulled a ALT-CTRL-Backspace on it and logged back in. 30 seconds into my second login I locked X up again. Ok, as sexy as XGL is (it’s definately sexy) looks like I have to turn it off. I did notice under the graphical configuration wizard that there was a checkbox for dual-head setup. Let’s disable XGL and enable that and see how easy it is to rectify my situation of only having one monitor…

After starting the desktop back up and disabling XGL no more crashes… infact I don’t even think my desktop is running at 1920×1200 as I set it up in the installation process, things look to big. After a moment of playing with the Graphic Card Configuration and enabling Xinerama dual-head display everything is working. I have two desktops, full resolution on both and I didn’t have to edit or touch a single damn configuration file.

There are a lot of reviews out there of SLED 10 that give much more detail about all the steps and tons of screenshots, my goal here is give “impressions” of the desktop. My feeling, my indiciations that it’s something to use or something to avoid. If what you want is screenshots and movies, check out the SLED site itself I linked above, it will entice you.

The second part of this I hope to give my impressions of the desktop after using it for a day. What it took for things to “just work”. Could I play movies? Was browsing unhindered? What about updates? etc. (Digg this)