After long days of compiling, testing and debuging, I put on-line a large number PackMan packages for SUSE Linux 10.1 PPC. For those of you, who don't know it yet: these are the packages, which make SUSE Linux a lot more useful, but are left out from the official SUSE release mainly for legal reasons (mp3, divx, DVD support, etc.), or sometimes newer versions of included packages. More info on Packman is available at http://packman.links2linux.de

About my recompilation of Packman packages: these are maintained by different people without a standardized environment. For reproducibility I used y2pmbuild, and modified sources to compile in this strict, chrooted environment.
I had to leave out a number of packages:
- some few, special interest packages did not compile, like synfig animation studio
- requiring lot's of additional work, like haskel development environment and related packages, as it needs to be bootstrapped on PPC
- x86 binary only, like the official divx drivers, rar support, etc.

For obvious reasons, I could not sign it with SUSE private keys, so the installer complains, but installs these packages.

As I needed to modify sources and SPEC files, my packages are not yet integrated with the rest of the PackMan website, mirror system. You can download them using ftp, from:

ftp://spike.fa.gau.hu/pub/pmppc101/

Which can also be used as an installation source.

Please let me know, if you have any troubles! And of course, remember to have a lot of fun! (SUSE (tm))

CzP

terrific ! i'll browse it asap, thanks a lot !
for now i'm too busy with Suse 10.1 X86 (playing with xgl stuff etc.) but i'll switch on the PPC version pretty soon.

btw is it possible to enable the splash screen while booting the same as the X86 version ?

No, as PPC developers at SUSE don't seem to be interested. Actually I did not bug them about it, as on X86 it's the first thing I turn off, so I was happy with this situation

For this release I felt a lot more important, that the Gigabit ethernet port is now finally fixed and fully supported even in NetworkManager. My primary focus in beta testing was YaST and hardware, as openSUSE is also serves as a base for SuSE Linux Enterprise Server, and version 10 of SLES needs to support Pegasos as much as possible. And it does now! The only problematic part is partitioning, as only MSDOS partiton tables are supported. But at least I got some safety features in: it's not possible any more to accidentally destroy your Amiga partition table and your partitions with it.

CzP

of course, that's just a detail and i'm not about to bother anyone with it ! It just works on Ubuntu so i was wondering about Suse. Nevermind !
what do u mean ? i did the partition during the Suse installation (expert mode) and it worked well. Only automatic partitioning doesn't seem to work.

Of course, you can change mount points, filesystem types, etc. in expert mode. But you are not able to create or delete partitions, if an Amiga partition talbe is in use.

CzP

@SoundSquare

Do you have the automatic partitioning working? Just interested!

R&B

_________________
http://bbrv.blogspot.com

@bbrv

mmm well during the 10.1 installation the installer said that it couldn't handle the partition table on my HD, but on this HD i had already 5 linux partitions for other linux distros (pegxmac, ubuntu, gentoo). But i was able to make/deleted partitions in expert mode. It worked fine.
Now i think i remember that during a previous Suse isntallation (10.1 RC2) i could do the automatic partitionning on a blank HD. But i'll try another 10.1 installation on a blank HD this week to make sure.

Thanks. We will continue to be interested in how that goes.

R&B

_________________
http://bbrv.blogspot.com

If there is an already existing Amiga partition table, then YaST (Yet another Setup Tool, the SUSE installation and configuration tool) puts out a warning, that it can't modify the partition table. In this case, the user must use the so called 'Expert partitioner'. Here already existing partitions are listed, where the can be formatted and assigned to a mount point.

If there is no pre-existing partition table, or the HDD uses an DOS (what some people consider Denial of Service ) partition table, automatic partitioning works. YaST creates a small /boot partition for booting, /home for personal data and / for the rest. It uses some black magick to calculate sizes. It worked fine during the beta phase, I don't have an empty HDD now to test it out now, but I'll try to get one...

BTW: partitioning with 'parted' is really easy, I can write a short introduction to it, if someone finds the official documentation a bit too long

CzP

I just uploaded some new packages. 'Ekiga' is available now (formerly GnomeMeeting), and VLC (Video Lan Client) is just being compiled. 'Ekiga' is not yet well tested, as I can't talk to myself

There is a bug in the SUSE package manager, so before installing the packages, please start 'Installation sources' from YaST and use Edit/Refresh. An update to the package manager is expected to come out end of next week, as the new online update functionality was not well tested during the beta phase (there were new and new betas, but not software updates...).

CzP

Hi !

@czp : did you finally tried a 10.0 to 10.1 update ?

Those day I'm 100% on Gentoo, and I did not had time to try it.

I'm planning to do the update with the Pacman package (which looks nice but I would have like to have a bit of feedback about it if any, as my last trial (with beta) was unsuccesfull (if you remember ).

@soundsquare : I also have a partitioning problem since I've blasted my partition table while using Ubuntu Dapper beta.
Since that I was unable to resize the partitions with gparted or parted from Suse, Ubuntu or Gentoo.
As you, I have many partitions of various kind on my disk and had no problems before (PegXMac, MacOSX, YDL, Suse, Ubuntu, Freevo, AROS and now Gentoo).
I did not investigate more as I'm really busy with Gentoo those days.

I read many success reports on x86, so I assume that it works fine. I have a new hard drive to mess up, so I'll make a copy of my current 10.0 installation to that and test it myself.

BTW: once we talked about the chapter about SUSE in your book. I have now a (not so) quick start guide available for SUSE Linux 10.1 at http://en.opensuse.org/PegasosQuickStart Can you use that, or is there any other way to help you to enhance the chapter about SUSE?

CzP

Well, maybe I can use it as it is.

I have two options :
Just Adding a link on your page:
- pros : always up to date
- cons : the ebook's goal is to be read offline so one wouldn't be able to print it

Making a "snapshot" doc version of it and giving the original link at the begining of doc for extra infos. That might be better and easier to translate. What do you think ? Do you agree with that ?

Anyway, I'm waiting a 10.0 to 10.1 update if you can do it (I will do it anyway if you don't have time).
I have many many things to do : my Gentoo starts working, my Ubuntu Dapper is up to date and working !
I also have to update my Suse (pfew !).

QuickStartGuide: I think, that there is some redundant information included (I mean, not SUSE specific), like filesystems supported by firmware, booting, etc., so you can shorten it, and point readers to other pages of your book.

Update: it's a kind of slow, I started it a few hours ago, and it's still not finished. If you have some PackMan packages installed, that can mess up the update a bit. With some manual package selection work it can be solved, but I would rather suggest to remove packman packages before updating. An 'rpm -qa | grep pm' will display most of the Packman packages.

How much RAM do you have? I used the 10.1 ftp installation source (I hate burning CDs...), and that needs ~400MB of RAM to work. If you don't have that much, use 'start_shell' and turn on swap from the command line when it becomes available.

CzP

I have 512Mb of RAM.

So if I understand update seems to be working (without pm package) ? That's good news !