We bought Suzie a new computer last weekend, which meant that the one she was using (which was running painfully slowly under Windows XP, for reasons I could never figure out, notwithstanding a lot of effort and, in the end, a complete new install) was now available to me to more or less do with as I wished. What I wished was to see if it would run any better under a Linux distribution.
I was familiar with two — Ubuntu, which I’d originally installed on my old laptop after its hard drive failed and I had to replace it, and OpenSUSE, which I put on the same laptop after an Ubuntu upgrade resulted in the laptop not working. But it’s so boring dealing with the familiar, so I decided to download the latest version of Debian.
Debian is an older distribution of Linux, one dedicated completely to the “open source” ideal, and it has spawned a number of other distributions based on it, including Ubuntu, which is perhaps the most popular Linux distribution. From what I read, it seemed like Debian was very much a root version of Linux. Unlike Ubuntu and OpenSUSE, which in addition to releasing Linux distributions that are free and more easily accessible for Windows users, but have for-profit aspects to them (OpenSUSE, in fact, is a project of the Novell, the old owner of WordPerfect), Debian is strictly community-based and open source. So I thought, what the heck, I’ll try it.
The first new thing I had to do was to partition the hard drive, so as to keep the existing Windows XP operating system on the machine (Suzie wanted it to remain available). I’d heard that partitioning a hard drive was a mystical and dangerous thing, but I found a version of a Linux program called GParted, which booted from a CD, and which was in fact straightforward and easy to use. It allowed me to create the two new partitions necessary to house another operating system, without harming the existing Windows XP system.
Partitioning accomplished, and me at this point feeling very super-cool nerdy, I downloaded a Debian installation “iso” file and burned it to a CD. Here’s where things got off track.
Linux distributions have a particular problem with wireless devices. The variety of different hardware, firmware, and drivers for these devices — developed predominantly for Windows machines — apparently makes it difficult for wireless devices to work in an easy “plug and play” way in a Linux OS. Many older wireless cards have no Linux drivers that have been developed for them, or the Linux drivers that have been developed often don’t work. I’d struggled with this problem when installing OpenSUSE on my laptop; you have to use a program called “ndiswrapper” that allows Windows wireless drivers to work in Linux, then install the proper Windows driver in the proper location, and discovering that this is necessary takes some sleuthing through the Internet.
But knowing that, I assumed I’d be able to deal with the problem. I wasn’t. The first Debian distribution (on the CD) did not have ndiswrapper as a program you could install. And the process to locate and install ndiswrapper separately (by downloading it on another machine, then putting it on a USB thumb drive, was incredibly frustrating. I easily found the program, the Debian “package” file, for ndiswrapper, but could never figure out how to get it to install. The Debian OS didn’t seem to want to open the file with the program needed to unpack and install it. After frittering away some time on this, I decided to download a huge Debian iso file to burn to a DVD, then reinstall the system, assuming that the larger distribution would contain ndiswrapper a program which, after all, seems to be very needed.
After taking the time to download a 4+ gigabyte iso file and reinstall Debian from a DVD, it turned out that, as far as I was ever able to tell, ndiswrapper wasn’t provided. So I again spent more frustrating time trying to install the program manually. I like to think of myself as a fairly computer-savvy guy, but after fooling around with the programs on the OS and researching how to install a program manually on the Internet, I never got there. I was defeated by Debian. (Any readers who know how to do what I was trying to do, leave the answer in a comment.)
At this point, I gave up on Debian. It just wasn’t worth the effort. (It didn’t help that at the same time, Suzie’s new computer was acting up, requiring me to spend several hours to remedy her Windows 7 problems.) I knew that I had been able to get my old laptop’s wireless connection working with OpenSUSE, so I figured I could do the same with Suzie’s old PC.
But much to my surprise and amazement, I didn’t have to do much of anything. The OpenSUSE 11.3 distribution had ndiswrapper on the DVD, and I installed it, but I’m not sure whether it was necessary, as my wireless connection (a Linksys USB device) started working as soon as I went into the network manager and pointed it at our home network. On top of this, the OpenSUSE installation process was much easier and intuitive than Debian’s. Here I sit, connected to the Internet, writing this post.
The bottom line: OpenSUSE rocks. If you’re interested in a Linux distribution, I recommend it (use the KDE desktop option, cooler in my opinion). You can get it here. It’s fast and elegant and professional. And I like the name.
Categories: technology
Tags: Debian, Linux, ndiswrapper, nerd, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, wireless