Peregrine

Today, I’ve spent almost the whole day getting OpenSUSE 10.0 burned onto CDs for some students here at Guru Labs. I’ve run into one weird thing after another, all day long.

1. I burned a complete set of bad discs. It looks like the burner in that box might be bad. Retrying a couple of the discs also produced bad results. The built-into-YaST media check failed on all discs, and trying to use readcd failed. The MD5SUMS of the .iso files were all good.
2. I had Dax burn discs on his notebook (mine has no burner :( ). These (mostly) worked to complete an installation, but readcd failed at the 3rd to last sector on all three. This makes us think that SUSE may have bungled when spinning the CDs. Also, one package on CD3 could not be read (myspell-american). All other packages were good.
3. I had Dax burn another CD3. This one could not be read to install the qscintilla package, but myspell-american and all other packages were fine.
4. We burned copies of the first Dax burned CD3 (with a failing myspell-american package) and gave them to the students.

Total time for the whole process: 6.5 hours.

Ugh! There went a whole day and no time for me to get lunch, either.

Don’t get me wrong. Overall, I like SUSE distributions. Sure, there are warts, but that’s true of every distro I’ve ever used. hey, things happen; and this was just one more.

Full Disclosure: I use Fedora on my notebooks and workstations, today. I also use SUSE on my home workstation. Most of my servers are CentOS. I will be installing OpenSUSE 10.1 on my notebook and start using it heavily, but I’ll probably dual-boot that with FC5.