Sunday, April 6, 2008

openSUSE

I'm back, as promised, albeit a little late. It's more than 11 hours since my last post.

This is the second post I'm writing from the new operating system I have installed on my computer: openSUSE (10.3) Linux. I've wanted to install some Linux distribution on my PC for nearly a year now, but I've been held back by a combination of factors.

openSUSE, which I affectionately refer to as Susie, is the second distro I've used; the first was the wonderful Fedora 7, which I used for my final year project in my college. I would've liked to install it at home too but I once left the DVD in college and someone took the term "free software" very seriously and helped themselves to it (or so I thought at the time). openSUSE 10.3, I borrowed from a friend.

This represents an attempt to free myself from control by the software firm from Redmond, Washington, USA, affectionately dubbed the "Evil Empire". It was a headache to install the video drivers and get my Internet connection working. Incidentally, to install MTNL Triband in openSUSE:

The ADSL modem must be connected to the LAN card of your PC. USB won't do. Then, switch to root user and open the /etc/resolve.conf file.
Here, replace the default nameserver setting with

nameserver 59.179.243.70
nameserver 202.159.217.198

There is also a comment at the head of the file that tells you what to do so that the value of namseerver isn't thoughtlessly changed by some other program. Follow those instructions. I'd like to thank this guy , from whose site I got this information. I've reposted it for two reasons:

1. More replications make it likelier that people will find this information more quickly

2. Someone just might stumble onto my blog

Back to business. Working with Linux is more difficult than the OS that's named after holes in walls. I only made it through because I was determined, and because I know a bit about Linux already. I'm told that Ubuntu, the most user-friendly Linux distro, is as good as that unmentionable OS. I haven't used it so I can't really judge. However, since I have just about everything I need with Susie (I even downloaded and installed codecs so I could watch video), I'm cool. And all set to become a Linux geek.

3 comments:

benji said...

No need to manually edit /etc/resolv.conf you can use yast -> network devices -> network card -> hostname and dns.

Jayraj Jog said...

fair enuf...i didn't knw that...thanks man...

Joe said...

will this advice work on openSUSE11? I can't get a network connection, and on my Ubuntu Gnome/Kubuntu KDE setup it works fine. So I know it's just a setting that's off somewhere. Thanks in advance.