Today, I took delivery of SUSE Linux 9.1 Professional on DVD, from a private seller on eBay, As far
as I was concerned, SUSE was now drinking in the Last Chance Saloon v3.0 Open Source Edition!
I put the disc into my DVD-ROM drive, and rebooted the PC. The SUSE boot logo appeared, but
in pleasant shades of blue, rather than the lurid shades of green that I'd grown accustomed
to over the last week or so while trying to get the damn thing to work!
As expected (or rather as hoped) the dialog box prompting me to choose the installation type
appeared on screen. I selected the "Update an installed system" option. It went on to display
the pre-installation summary, and the first oops, claiming it could not find any packages to
update on the DVD, citing a possible "media error". It was at this point in the proceedings
that I started to utter some rather strong language that I won't be repeating here!
Anyway, I had to be somewhere else in abot half an hour, so I shutdown the system and left
it at that for the time being. I decided I'd try and work out this problem, when I return home.
Later on, I gave it another go. I put the disc in the DVD drive again, shutdown Windows 2000,
and rebooted. Again the aforementioned installation type dialog appeared. Again I choose
to update the installed system. This time, the pre-installation summary was displayed,
without the odd "media error" from earlier. And, no other errors showed up. "Could
this be a turning point?" I asked myself. I then realised that talking to oneself could
be classed as a sign of insanity, so I decided to shut up!
After accepting the default options from the next screen, the big green final confirmation
box appeared, that gives one last chance to commit to the installation, or turn back and
make any last minutes changes. I clicked on the button labelled "Yes, update", and then
waited for the automated process to take over. What surprised me was that it said it'd
only need to install about 175MB worth of packages. In all, the automated process
took about ten minutes, before it prompted me to reboot the system.
After the reboot, there was just the last step of the process of YaST checking for an
internet connection, and being prompted to download the latest updates. At this
point, I let it check for internet connectivity, by opted to postpone the online
update for later on this evening. I just wanted to find out if I now had a fully
operational SUSE Linux system installed.
I logged into KDE3.2, waited for the splash screen to go through it's startup process.
BUT, it was silent. (Oh ****!) The familar KDE startup sound did not play. (Oh ****!)
I then went straight to where all my MP3's are stored on my Windows 98 partition.
Clicked on one at random, XMMS opened, and statred to play - in total silence!
(XMMS is an open source clone of Winamp 2.x made for Linux and UNIX)
Another stream of strong language later, I right clicked on the MP3 file, and opted
to play it one of the other media players. I opted to use Kaffeine Media Player.
(After all this messing around, I certainly needed something with caffeine in!)
This particular app, at first glance, looks very similar to the older versions
of Windows Media Player that were bundled with Windows 95/98/2000.
The song played . . . in full stereo sound! Hurrah!
So it seems that XMMS is at fault, and not some strange incompatibility between
my CreativeLabs SoundBlaster PCI 128 sound card and the operating system.
Eitherway, I finally have the latest version of SUSE Linux up and running on
my PC, and my faith in this Deutschland based Linux distributor is restored!
Success at last . . . !
Now, if you'll excuse, I'm off to download the latest version of Mozilla . . . !
UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.2; Linux) (KHTML, like Gecko)
SeaMonkey = Swiss Army Knife: It's versatile, reliable, and contains useful tools.
Windows Internet Explorer = Old Swiss Cheese: Full of holes, and it stinks!
)
