Library Web Chic

Since taking the job here at UH 9 months ago, I’ve slow but surely become more adept at doing thing with the Linux operating system. This week I got brave and decided that I would make an older home laptop dual boot between Open SUSE 10.1 and Window. I’d love to make it solely a Linux machine but I share it with my husband and he wants to use it when he’s on the road for work. I can’t seem to convince him that Linux is a perfectly acceptable subsitute for Windows. A friend of mine had originally set up the machine to dual bott between Ubuntu and Windows but I lost the Ubuntu password and we use Open SUSE at work so I decided a reformat was in order.

The first step in this process was to download the right ISO file from the OpenSUSE site and get it burned to DVD. I could have downloaded 5 CD but since I have a DVD burner the DVD option seemed much more reasonable to me. Once I had the files on my powerbook I had to figure out how to burn a ISO image to DVD on the Mac. Once I found instructions I felt pretty stupid at how easy it was to make myself an install DVD.

Once I had my installation DVD the rest was easy. I inserted the DVD into my laptop booted it up and followed the instructions. The best part was it figured out where my existing Linux partition was and installed SUSE into that leaving my Windows partition alone. Now when I boot I get presented with a choice of booting to OpenSUSE, the floppy drive, or Windows. Its great! Very simple.

All of this experimentation is a precursor to reformatting an old Dell I have and making that into a server running OpenSUSE. Hopefully, I will get to that this weekend. I still need to work out some kinks on the laptop. Getting it on the wireless network for instance. I’m having issues entering the WEP key. I’ve tried many times but can’t get the wireless card to work. SUSE seems to know what kind of wireless card it is but won’t connect to the access point. Its terribly frustrating and Googling the problem result in posts regarding upgrading the firmware and drivers for the wireless card. A scary prospect in my mind.

With the server, I’ll need to do some experimentation to get Samba shares set up so that the other computers in the house can connect to the server I’m planning on using the OpenSUSE box as for backing up data. I already am making backups on my Firewire drive but I’d feel safer with some redundancy, particularly when it comes to my digital media.

I’ve also been working on configuring a server at work to use as a “sandbx” for staff to experiment with. Its my first time doing the configuration (after the install) by myself. I spend most of today testing to makes sure that Apache, PHP, Perl and MySQL were properly installed. All of this has given me greater confidance working with Linux although compiling from source still scares me greatly. Maybe I’ll get over that sometime. Maybe I won’t. With the GUI interface and a package manager it isn’t difficult to get things installed and configured. Discovering this has helped me to realize that I don’t have to be intimidated by Linux anymore.