djst's nest

Thrown out 2 old CDRWs today while trying the Hoary array-3 today. It's quite clear when it fails during the installation but it could have reminded me that I formated the partition at which my GRUB would be looking for it's menu.lst (although that is quite advanced detection). If it were even more advanced it could have set up a recovery environment or a fallback to a network installation (downloading broken packages). The recovery console of the Windows XP CD is quite usefull supplying "fixmbr".

Furthermore, in someways hoary disappoints me it. today. The installer couldn't get the base system right and left me with an empty xorg.conf and frozen error dialogs about that, but that's the alpha status I guess.
I do however run in some things that will probably be missing in the final (due to the feature freeze) like:
- A decent automatic network setup without the 60 second timeout on boot while my wireless connection is available already. There is no tool to manage it it seems (since the gnome network tool doesn't influence the boot configuration)
- A clean way to sleep and hibernate in the UI (both do have a lot of problems like broken kernel modules on resume)
- No GUI to add things to your fstab to access a shared data drive (should have done it with the partioning phase in the installer) - No way to unmount my automatically mounted (thanks to HAL) ipod and freeze again when I unplugged it without the unmount.
- Unclear package management in the sense that: How will Joe Average know to add universe to his repositories and install gstreamer0.8-mad to play his MP3s without googling for it)
- Messed up audio settings everywhere (alsa muted by default, multimedia selector complains with everything but ESD, (g)xine doesn't do audio until switching to advanced and experimenting.
- Lots of apps not showing up in the (uneditable) applications module when adding them.

Please note that I do know it's alpha and I am keeping it for a while since it's still the best I had (although Slackware+Dropline wasn't that bad).

I was wondering if you have tried SuSe?
I'm currently on Suse 9.1 pro, and enjoy it, however I am wondering if I should nuke it and try out this VidaLinux?

Thanks
-Jed

Jed, I have tried SuSE 9.0 and didn't like it. You can read about the experience here: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/djst/archives/004472.html

I'm running SuSE 9.2 on my desktop and adore it. Best distro I ever tried, but I'm a KDE sort of person.

Ubuntu is running on my laptop right now, but I'm not caring for it. Apt-get seems clunky to me, and I can't find any up-to-date repositories (all of Ubuntu's give me Firefox .9.3, for example, while SuSE and YAST2 give me bleeding-edge packages).

Thanks David.
Another question. Did you go for the $30 1.1 purchase or the freebie?

Cheers
-Jed