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The so-called "Vista Killer" may not be ready for prime time -- but your customers may want it anyway. Here's how to be prepared.
November 06, 2006
URL:http://www.drdobbs.com/open-source/turning-sled10-linux-into-a-practical-us/193501936
SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop version 10 (SLED10 for short) is sufficiently well known that any system builder who sells Linux boxes can be expected to know about it. In fact, SLED10 is so well known, clients who specifically want Linux computers are likely to ask for it by name.
In my recent tests, I found SLED10 to be more reliable, stable and secure than I expected. But buying into the hype of SLED10 being a "Vista killer"—at least in its current stage of development—is wishing thinking. Why? Well, for starters, the distro has several usability issues. Also, availability outside of the usual office productivity software and programmer-oriented applications is problematic. For these reasons, SLED10, in my opinion, is not worth even its $50 price tag.
But what if your clients demand it all the same? In this recipe, I'll show you how to turn SLED10 into a usable desktop.
Technically speaking, SLED is the Novell proprietary client distribution optimized for desktop users, as opposed to SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (or SLES). It is derived from SuSE version 10. This Recipe is based on the downloadable evaluation version of the enterprise desktop client Novell's SuSE-based SLED10, which is available from the company's evaluation page.
Basic Desktop Functionality: If a workstation can't do at least what's in the following list, it's probably useless. SLED10 doesn't do all of this out-of-the box, but a few easy upgrade steps will fix this:
Cost: A no-support SLED10 license costs $50 per workstation.
System Installation: In general, unless there's something radically unusual about your system, any modern Linux distro can be expected to install on your desktop without any issues—or only minor ones. Just accept the installation defaults unless there's a reason to do otherwise.
During my installation, the installer stopped and told me it wouldn't support my LCD monitor's 1168x1024 native resolution. I resolved this by changing the screen resolution to 1024x768, and the installation started.
Next, I was invited to install a printer for my USB printer, a Canon PIXMA iP3000. My USB wireless G122 B1 using the Ralink RT2570 chip set was not noticed during the installation, except by the printer setup, which apparently thought it was another USB printer. This is annoying, to be sure. But it's not dangerous, since there's enough information in the installation screen to make it obvious which is the printer and which is the wireless chip.
Below, here's a look at the SLED10 Desktop:
After Installation
The screenshot below depicts the applications browser that comes up when you click "More Applications" on the main menu. I couldn't get a Main Menu image, because the screenshot utility will not show an open menu.
SLED10 is slick, clean looking, and even pretty, and has two very nice features: automated RPM installation including dependencies; and Beagle file search.
I've got mixed feelings about the main menu, however. While the scrolling menu "More Applications" page makes things easy to find, it also takes up most of the available screen real estate. Unfortunately, I can't show you what it looks like, as the default screenshot utility turns off open menus when one tries to take a screenshot.
The following depicts the Main Menu Crash—which is definitely something you do not want to see:
The menu also crashed after a few hours of operation, though it reloaded promptly when I pressed the reload button. The button's existence may tell you how often Novell expects a user to see it. My guess is that the reload button was a workaround they found satisfactory. But it seems to demonstrate that Novell knows their main menu program is unstable and buggy.
The default desktop is based on the Gnome window manager. There's a v2.+ version Novell-branded OpenOffice. I discovered that it only has a limited choice of fonts: Even plain old Arial was unavailable.
For various reasons, involving legacy configuration, I mounted a drive for SUSE/RHEL as had (it's actually had 1-6), leaving my regular workstation drive as hdb, which I externally mounted afterwards.
Wrong: # mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb1 /mnt/workstation "ext3 not recognized file type"
Right: # mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt/workstation
Support: Simply stated, support comes from the Novell Knowledge Base—and whatever you can find with Google. Remember that the Google search engine can also see into the Knowledge Base. So you might want try Google first. I've also had good luck with enclosing a few words from an error message in quotes and using that as a search string.
If you want to ask questions, try the public Novell SLED user forums. You can access them via the Web interface.
You can also get access to these forums as Usenet newsgroups, which you can access with your news client, too. Add support-forums.novell.com to your news server list on your news client to access these newsgroups. I use and recommend Pan as a news client for Linux, and you should be able to find it on your automated installer program list regardless of which Linux distribution you use. The biggest advantage I've found of doing this via Usenet: I find it easier to mark discussion threads that way, particularly the ones I've started to ask questions.
For more information on Usenet in this context, go to the Novell Usenet FAQ page. If you go the newsgroup route, search within your news client support-forums.novell.com newsgroup list for "sled" and search through or post your inquiry to the newsgroups that look most appropriate for your problem.
To find out how this kind of support worked in practice, I requested help with respect to mounting my workstation drive, installing my printer, and installing my wireless setup. I got the right answer for mounting my drive. With respect to the printer and wireless problems, I had to figure it out through a Google search and ultimately, that ndiswrapper recommended on the Novell help forum gave me unsatisfactory results. In fairness, it should be noted that ndiswrapper might work perfectly for you, depending on your system configuration and wireless adaptor. In any event, it installed and ran intermittently with the adaptor about 18 inches from the access point. However, they may have the answers to some or all of your questions, so I still recommend them as a resource.
If you want support from an employee, it's a separate offering. You will pay for service requests on a per-incident basis at a rate of $650 each. Or you can get a lower per-incident price various subscription service plan.
The real problem with the "enterprise distributions" like this one, at least from the viewpoint of a white box builder, is that they're intended for companies big enough to have their own internal Linux support capabilities. This is unlikely to be a major part of your customer base. Companies that are the real target of this software and support can be reasonably assumed to have internal IT staff. So the problems the Novell in-house support are expected to handle are the ones professional sys admins can't handle. That's how Novell justifies the hefty price tag.
Automated Installation: YaST is the automated SuSE configure-everything tool. The software installer is zen-Installer, found on the main menu as "Software Installer." Zen-installer is neat, but the first app I installed with it, usbview, failed miserably. You'd think something from the official repository would be configured so that it knows where SuSE keeps its USB devices. That initial experience did not give me a good feeling about the installation tool.
But I was pleased to discover that YaST will automatically download and install an RPM through the zen-installer tool. (RPM is an installable package type used with SuSE or RedHat/Fedora and other distributions.) It even finds, downloads and installs dependencies—and installs them and the program one asked for in the right order for proper operation. What's more, in the case of a GUI program, it will put in a desktop icon and/or a menu entry in the right place.
Dependencies are programs or library files or library packages required for the proper operation of a program you are trying to install. This is one of the areas where I find Linux superior to Windows. If a dependency appears in a Windows program installation, you get to write down the filename, type it into Google, and hope it's out there somewhere. Then put it in the right place and try reinstalling the program.
An automated installer package like YaST or yum or apt-get gets programs for installation from distribution and installer specific repositories where programs and library files are kept. When you want to install a program, the installer program searches through the repositories listed in a configuration file residing on the your machine, which will contain the installable program set and library files.
Ordinarily, if you want a program that is not in the repositories, you're on your own. That's true not only in finding it, but also in installing it. If the program won't install because dependent files are missing, you get to look for them (including often, the right versions of those files) all by yourself. With the new zen-installer built into YaST, you can locate a program that's compatible with SuSE distribution and install it by double-clicking on a Web page. It will do the download, check for dependencies, and install everything in the right order.
Automated installation of RPMs found at random on the Net greatly expands the number of programs available for easy installation. I would expect an experienced systems builder to have run into this in Windows. That is, any files not already present on the system required for the operation of a program you're attempting to install. Unfortunately, the "success" prompt after running the tool does not guarantee that the program installed will actually work properly!
Automated installation of RPMs is a good concept. But Novell needs to do more work to ensure that applications installed this way will actually execute properly.
Printer: Trying to get my Canon IP3000 to work, the imagerunner driver suggested by the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS) installer failed. The BJC7000 driver recommended at the linuxprinting.org site a Novell user group poster pointed me at printed a test print at one-half size.
Though Canon Japan makes drivers available at their ftp site (cited in the list below), neither the CUPS project, nor Novell, integrate them into the printer setup. This means you have to figure out how to install them into CUPS.
I found SLED10 installation information for the ip3000 Canon Japan here. However, that didn't include which order to install the three packages in. You'll find installation will work if you do it in this order:
I spent two hours putting the PostScript Printer Description (or "ppd") file in different locations in the
/usr/share/cups/modeltree. I found that the printer installation program simply could not see the canonpixusip3000 driver no matter where I put it. In the end, I gave up.
I don't think it's impossible to make this work. And there is an easier alternative method for installing a working printer driver.
Turboprint is a package of proprietary, commercial printer drivers for Brother, Canon, Epson, and HP. It has drivers for many printers the ordinary CUPS setup doesn't. It also provides full printer functionality that won't be available from free Linux drivers. For instance, I can print to duplex and printable CDs via a Turboprint driver for the IP3000. The Canon Japan Linux driver can't.
I downloaded the turboprint driver rpm package. It installed as an RPM automatically via the zen-installer YaST component. I clicked turboprint-setup after the setup/configuration icons appeared on the desktop. Then I added the printer from within the setup application. Voila! the printer started running immediately in demo mode.
The demo prints the turboprint logo over a large enough chunk of text to make it useless as a general printer. If it prints with the printer you're trying to install, then I recommend buying the license key for $37. This is the general solution for any distro for when your Brother, Canon, Epson or HP printer isn't available in the driver list. If this doesn't work, Google your printer model number. With luck, you'll find an Open Source driver project. If you can't find one readily, the only choice may be to buy a printer that is supported.
Scanner: I tried running my Canon LIDE30 USB scanner, but the version of xsane (front end for the sane Linux scanner interface program) bundled with it did not recognize my scanner at first. Later, I accidentally found the scanner hardware configuration in the control panel. Ordinarily, one configures this either from the desktop UI or the command line. Once I told it to install the scanner and picked the driver from a list, the scanner was installed immediately.
Network (Ethernet): The YaST network interface component found my card and, with only minor encouragement, set it up correctly with no problems. The next image lists the available SLED10 preconfigured wireless drivers.
Network (Wireless): I have a D-Link G122B / Ralink RT2570 chip set. The network installer didn't see the chip, though the scanner interface did.
I found and installed the wireless driver package, wlan-kmp-default in YaST. I then discovered that it supports only Prism chipset devices. The mass-market wireless chipsets you're most likely to find are Atheros, Broadcom, and Ralink, among others. Novell Open Source developers are trying to find out how to build drivers for any available chipset. So I recommend Googling for a wireless driver suitable for SLED10 before trying ndiswrapper.
Ndiswrapper is a Linux utility that permits use of Windows wireless drivers from the vendors with the Linux OS. Though this works for some, my experiences with it haven't been good.
On a message board entry I found here, the words "SuSE 10.1 does not contain any of the Ralink drivers. Support was dropped due to kernel version conflicts." After that, I gave up on downloading and installing those drivers and tried ndiswrapper for use with the Windows wireless drivers I had.
I installed ndiswrapper based on the instructions I found on a Novell site. It ran, but not consistently enough to make it really useful, even less than 18 inches from an access point.
The Wireless-tools diagnostics utility package which I hoped to troubleshoot the wireless connection with, is not available even by repository. So downloading and then building the tools from source didn't seem worth the trouble, given that wireless network connectivity doesn't seem to be a Novell priority. So I gave up. Instead, I used the Ethernet cable to connect.
If you must have wireless with SLED (that is, you're working on a laptop), then I suggest you get one of the devices listed on the Prism Project hardware compatibility list. Good luck.
Next, you'll see the SLED10 PDA setup screen:
PDA Applications: To my surprise, when I plugged in my PDA, as soon as I hit sync from the PDA side, a setup window came up. Ordinarily, configuring a PDA is something of a nuisance even after opening one of the Linux PDA desktop interface programs.
If the Pilot-settings screen does not automatically enable, enable it in Control Panel > Removable Drives & Media Preferences. I hit it again after going through the wizard you see above, and I heard the tones that indicate successful sync. I was even more surprised to find that there doesn't seem to be a PDA desktop application like Jpilot to provide access to the backup files now stored somewhere or other on the hard drive. While I didn't see Jpilot in the SLED10 repository when I wrote this article, it may be available now. Otherwise, you can try to find it in an OpenSuSE software site. Interesting Applications
Out of necessity, 95 percent of any two workstation-oriented distributions are going to be the same. That's because:
Below are some programs I found in this distribution of special interest other than the automated RPM installer.
Screenshot Utility (In Main Menu): You won't see any screenshots with open menus. I couldn't find a way to make the Gnome window manager-based screenshot program work with an open menu. Unlike Ksnapshot, there isn't even a delay feature to allow it to take the screenshot a few seconds to enable open menus. Unlike the next/JP application written for use with the KDE window manager, this won't automatically come up with a sequential filename. Instead, you have to guess without being able to see what is in the directory you're saving to. It's a minor irritation, but just another item that makes me wonder why they didn't get it right.
Sure, I could have installed the KDE window manager so I could use the KDE-optimized applications. But the point of this recipe is to explain how a typical installation is going to work. If I customized it the way my own desktop is configured (KDE and a few Gnome applications), it would be of comparable use to me once I hammered the bugs out. But that wouldn't help anybody else dealing with the Gnome setup out-of-the-box, particularly if they were an inexperienced Linux user.
Beagle File Search: This is as good as Novell says it is. Open Search from the Main Menu, type in a keyword, and you're there. A problem has been reported with a lag in disk response due to the time it takes to continuously update; but it didn't show up in the 600 MB of test files I loaded onto the box. Warning: Beagle does not look at filenames—there's a separate tool for that, which makes it a bit less useful than it could be. Also, Beagle isn't unique to SUSE; there's a version in the Fedora Core 5 distribution and probably others.
Multimedia
I've seen Linux zealots try to excuse the lack of usable multimedia content by saying people don't really need it. I say, no way. Today's home and SOHO user expects multimedia content to work. The business user is likely to need business-related multimedia content in it. And the enterprise user is likely to need multimedia content delivered by the company intranet. The bottom line: If your customers don't get multimedia access through your Linux boxes, they will expect you to fix this—even by installing Windows, if need be.
Flash is installed with the distro, and it works. RealPlayer (actually, the Open Source Helix player with Real license) plays mp3s just fine. Both are available to users of almost any Linux distro. Simply download them from the company Web sites.
But Video does not work with SLED10. The main video player, Totem, is not only completely useless for the usual licensing reasons (also true of FOSS distros out of the box), but it also doesn't work even with the nonproprietary mpg format. For Novell's explanation, see their page SLED10: Multimedia Capabilities Shipped with SUSE Linux Enterprise.
Next, you'll see what the repository configuration screen you'll be looking at when you set up video that actually works:
Nine Steps to Running Video (and DVD Playback) with SLED10
# zen-installer(which opens the Desktop GUI as root), and open the configuration tab.
Fill in the root password when the prompt comes up. Wait a little while as the installer does its thing.
In the course of installation, I found w32codecs as a dependency and installed it, which saved me the trouble of looking for it. The license issue has to do with w32codecs, which contain proprietary codecs and are unavailable in the U.S.
As soon as it installed, I opened xine. It handled everything I threw at it, including avi, mov, mpg and wmv files.
Repository Configuration Problem
I tried adding the iu-bremen repository to make multimedia available, through Software Installer " configuration >add repository. But the prompt shown below informed me that security preferences for which programs the automated installer will install had to be changed to checksum or none for security. Try checksum; this verifies that the checksum cryptographically derived from the program matches the separate checksum listed in the file.
The following image shows the problem I had when I first tried following the steps described above from the desktop without using a terminal:
The repository setup UI is not especially well configured. The top circle-bar error message told me that to use that OpenSUSE repository, I had to change the security level preference. The bottom error message said that my attempt to access it failed. What should have happened is this: A root password prompt should have come up to ensure I had authority to make that change; then I should have gone to a screen giving me a checkbox or pulldown menu choice of the available security levels: none, checksum, or digital signature.
To set up a new repository in a GUI installer, you should not have to open a root terminal. Instead, after I found those prompts, I had to drag and drop Software installer onto the Desktop. Then I had to open Properties to find out the zen-installer program name, open a root terminal, open zen-installer from the root prompt, add the repository from within the GUI configuration, type in "checksum" for security preference into the text box, exit the program, close the terminal, and then reopen Software installer from the Main Menu. Whew!
Totem wouldn't play wmv files, but since xine works. I can't see any reason to try to fix this. What happened when I tried wmv is shown in this next screenshot:
For more detail, go to this SuSE Forum. But use the repository mentioned above, not the one the posters recommend.
Windows Emulation
Why run Windows on top of Linux? Here are four good reasons:
VMware: It works!
Win4Lin: Novell says it works with Win4Lin Pro. Since I don't recommend Win4Lin Pro, it's untested here. If you need Windows emulation and your CPU has hardware support for hardware virtualization (Intel, AMD, Pacifica) look at Xen emulation, or at VMware for earlier CPUs.
Xen: Not tested. Until my next upgrade, I won't have a CPU installed with hardware virtualization support. SLED10 is reported to run XP just fine in emulation. See screenshots and how-to link here. But getting it to work looks painful.
CONCLUSIONS
Once you get past the "enterprise-ready" and "Vista-killer" hype, SLED10 really isn't a bad distro. However, I found little a system builder could use to add $50 worth of value to a client's system. Even the slower upgrade cycle of an "enterprise" distribution might work against the home, SOHO or SMB user in this case. A faster upgrade could mean your problems will get fixed faster. The underlying SuSE free Open Source distro might be worth a look.
So what would SLED10 need to make it worth $50 to a systems builder? Here are my top suggestions:
Looking ahead, I expect SLED11 to provide more of the functionality needed in a Desktop-oriented Linux distribution. Here's hoping!
A. LIZARD is an Internet consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has been writing for technology magazines and Web sites since 1987.
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