Adventures in installing SuSE

I was feeling a bit self-destructive last night and decided to upgrade from SuSE 8.2 to SuSE 9.1. That in spite of the fact that even when I was a little kid my mother always said that you shouldn't upgrade an operating system while the current one is still working fine. I think she is right, but sometimes I just can't resist. Maybe should join some OS Upgraders Anonymous. "Hi, I am Vera, and my internal peace is always severely disturbed by the release of a new SuSE."

First I tried to do an online update from YaST, in order to preserve whatever configurations I had. I think I did something wrong, because in the end I had a truckload of new software and no working kernel, and the new kernel sources did not want to compile with the tools I had. After doing some things that do not bear mentioning I said "bugger it" and stuck a 9.1 Personal Edition installation CD into the DVD drive. You know, nowadays they distribute the Personal Edition installation CDs right on the net, just burn your own and install. Very convenient. Except that the fucking thing did not work.

You could boot from it. It gave you a normal-looking YaST menu. It even did the base system installation, and the machine even booted after that. But unlike all previous, and, as it turned out, subsequent SuSE installation CDs, it never returned to any configuration menus, and the base system it had installed was, well, too base to run any self-respecting config program from there. If I were a woman with a spirit or the situation were an emergency I could have configured it from there, but it was 3 am already: too late for a spirit and too early for an emergency.

I found my weapon number two, a boot CD which can install from the net, and, after a short bit of disagreement as to where on the net the installation source was located it started installing. Installed everything, including the kernel, quite uneventfully. I chose to install the default system since I wanted to see the results of my handiwork fairly fast and was not sure how long it would take. Turned out to be quite fast, too almost as fast as from a CD.

Installed, booted, configured. The only thing that did not get configured properly was the X server, because for some reason the system decided to take a wild guess and guessed that my monitor has a resolution and a refresh rate that would make even ancient Romans cry. I tried to correct it by editing the config file and then realized with horror that the default installation of SuSE 9.1 does not include emacs. SaX did not want to work either. After a bit of howling I managed to get SaX to work and fixed the refresh rate, after which I beheld the ugliest and most difficultly readable instance of KDE ever seen by human eyes. Fixing it, however, was pretty easy, and after a bit of fucking with YaST I installed emacs and then started installing everything else. Hope it's done by now.

The whole process made me unbelievably horny, too, which probably makes me a pervert. 3 years ago I had a serious sexual fixation on compiling and installing new Linux kernels, but I am a bit better now.