openSUSE 11.4

SUSE/openSUSE Linux has been my favourite OS since I first started using it several years ago, and compared to the many Ubuntu derivatives out there, it doesn’t really get the recognition it deserves as a professional and highly configurable operating system. Even if there’s been some doubt over the project’s future since Novell got acquired, it still has a strong developer community behind it.

I found myself making another clean installation of openSUSE this week after having problems with a laptop, and the latest version of openSUSE (11.4) was my first choice. It’s available as a full 4GB+ download, but I decided to install and build on the much smaller KDE Live release.

Installing From the Live CD
One thing I’ve found with openSUSE is the live OS can be very sluggish, while the installed OS will run perfectly even on older systems. Of course, this means the default installer can be prohibitively slow, with all the graphics demanding most the computing resources. A good solution for this is to launch yast2 from the command line, or go straight to the installer without launching the live OS.

Changes from the Previous Version
On the surface it appears little has changed since the last version I was using, except KDE now looks more like a mix between Windows 7 and the Mac OS interface. The layout of the task manager, the Plasma desktop and the default range of software are mostly uchanged, but the developers have managed to make things slightly more ‘user friendly’ without compromising on the advanced features. OpenOffice has been replaced with LibreOffice, which has cleaner and more stable code.

openSUSE 11.4 KDE

One disadvantage could be the number of packages available from the software manager’s default repositories is still noticeably more limited than with Ubuntu, but many other repositories could be added without too much difficulty.

Also included is better support for virtualisation, and the full version of openSUSE and its repositories include Xen, VirtualBox and the Kernel Virtual Machine, along with a manual for setting up KVM. I’ve also noticed the addition of various utilities for better resource sharing and interoperability between a group of networked SUSE Linux machines, including clustering and the ability to access particular applications, desktops and files from a remote system.

Get openSUSE Linux here…

Linux Mint and the Netbook

I finally got round to trying several Linux distributions on my netbook, one of them being the Android OS that was recently ported. The process is straightforward, and I’m now trying to decide whether to install Linux Mint or openSUSE Linux.

The unetbootin Program
This should be listed in the software managers of the common Linux distributions, and I believe it’s also available for Microsoft Windows. This program provides three options: unetbootin can fetch an OS and create a boot disk, athough the ones listed are over 5 years old and definitely aren’t good for netbooks. The second option is to load a Linux kernel and some other code, but this is for developers. The third option, and the one I’ve chosen, is is to find and download an ISO file manually, and use unetbootin to install it to a spare USB drive.

Linux Mint
Linux Mint 11 was released not long ago, and it just happens the LXDE version makes a fine OS for netbooks, with a little configuration. The following should only be tried by those prepared to ditch the EEPC’s original user-friendly system for something more hackable. Familiarity with Linux and the installation process is important.

There are probably unofficial netbook editions of Linux Mint somewhere on the Internet, but I recommend using the LXDE or XFCE version of the full desktop OS. It has better hardware detection and there’ll be fewer dependency problems later on. LXDE also has the advantage of being easy for Windows XP users, and with less overhead than the Gnome desktop.

Getting the netbook to boot from the USB drive is straightforward after the BIOS is configured. On the EEPC, this involves setting the primary disk first, and then the primary boot device. The Installation option should be set to Finished and Quick Boot set to Enabled.

With some distributions the screen goes completely blank instead of showing the splash screen while loading. Pressing the ESC key will bring up a load of status messages that confirm the system hasn’t gone dead. Most of those will be error messages, as the Linux kernel determines what hardware and resources are available, and which modules to load. This is perfectly normal.

After a couple of minutes (live versions always load slower) we have the LXDE desktop and applications, which are perfectly rendered and usable on the netbook’s small screen.

Linux Mint LXDE desktop

Applications running in the LXDE desktop

The Mint Installer provides a few options, the two main ones being a standard install that formats the whole drive, and the dual boot option which theoretically sets up a partition for the OS alongside the existing one.
There are a couple of important points to consider before installing anything. The installer doesn’t show the volume names, but lists them as sda, sdb, and sdc. Users should run the disk utility to be absolutely certain which drives they refer to.
There’s also the possibility of data loss or bootloader problems after setting up a dual boot system, so make sure the data is backed up and a recovery disk is handy. The Mint Installer might set its own volume as the boot partition and configure GRUB to display a boot menu, but I haven’t checked to see if this is the case.

Dyne:Bolic 3.0: Linux for Activists

The development release of Dyne:Bolic 3.0 was made available a few weeks ago, and is the first version of the distro in a few years. It couldn’t have come at a better time, given all the talk about cybersecurity, ‘cyberwars’, Anonymous, censorship, people getting lifted for online ‘incitement’, lobbying by the media industry, etc. and the uncertainty over what that’s going to mean for the rest of us in the coming years.

The Distribution
Back in 2007, I was using the last version (2.4) a lot. Although it’s primarily a live CD, it makes a pretty good desktop installation, and it also worked nicely on 99% of other computers/laptops I was fixing at the time. The installation of the OS and extra application modules was a simple matter of copying files over.

While I can’t remember all its features, Dyne basically had two selling points. The first was it provided all the software – media creation, edting and broadcasting – to run a studio and Internet TV/radio station from anywhere, using just a live CD that could run on any computer. Apparently, some activists found this useful in setting up dissenting/independent news agencies in oppressive countries and places of conflict. That was the main concept behind Dyne:Bolic. Bypassing more advanced censorship still required some skill.
The other selling point was the encryption, which enabled the secure storage and communication of data, with a little planning. Users were able to create something called a ‘nest’, which is a large encrypted (AES256/GPG) file containing the home directory along with the user’s session data and files. This is automatically detected whenever Dyne is loaded, and can be encrypted and decrypted on any computer if the user has a Dyne CD and a USB drive with the nest. Both could be carried on portable media and easily discarded if required. Again, this should leave all computers forensically clean provided nothing was saved to hard drives. IP logs aren’t totally reliable methods of identifying people, so plausible deniability still works as long as nothing’s recovered locally. The nest system might be replaced in version 3.0 with the Tomb, which is a similar tried and tested system.

Version 3
Dyne:Bolic 3.0 is different, as it’s built from scratch using mainly Debian code. It will also include version 2 of the Gnome desktop. While those new to Linux will find Gnome the most comfortable interface (apart from LXDE), it does add a lot of overhead, both in terms of ISO size and CPU/memory resources. This accounted for the difference in ISO size between Beatrix Linux (250MB) and Damn Small Linux (47MB), although both were designed for the same thing.
The development release is over 1.6GB, which rules out older computers that can’t boot from USB or a DVD, unless enough proprietary code is scrapped to reduce the ISO size to around 700MB. One possibility here is a method of making Dyne more easily installable to USB, and tailor the distribution to activists using cheap netbooks.

http://dynebolic.org

http://dyne.org

http://jaromil.dyne.org

Dyne:Bolic Download Mirrors:

http://m5.notomorrow.de/dyne/

http://m3.notomorrow.de/dyne/