[UFO Chicago] Enduser Journal #3

[Paul Suda]

> I'm going to have to do a piece on the difference between Suse and YDL,
> from the newbie perspective because I just think YDL is falling short
> fast in my eyes.

Yeah, I seem to remember hearing something like the guy that was
maintaining YDL got hit by a car or something last year. I don't think he
died or anything but was injured badly. For a while it wasn't being too
actively maintained, but some people say it's gotten alot better in recent
months, especially with the new version. I can't really say, my only
experience with Linux on mac hardware is Suse 7.0. It installed nicely on a
couple of imacs where I used to work.

> But I'm not bashing YDL.  I'd like to see it work, and I intend to keep
> it on my Cube until it either does or proves beyond a doubt that it
> won't.  They are only on Version 2... I'm hoping by 2.4 it'll be useable.

I've been using Suse for a while. The only thing I don't like about it is
that the yast installer is not free software, I don't think that the source
code is available for it. Or if it is, it's not freely modifiable and
redistributable. Other than that, I has served me well. Is YDL a completely
free (like debian) distribution?

> Now my questions:
> Is there actually any point to having a 256MB swap?  Would it cause any
> problems?  The kernel I'm using is 2.2.19-k if that has any sway.

I don't really know. I doubt with 640 MB you'll be cutting into your swap
space too much. With my PC with 256 MB RAM, running the 'free' command
almost always shows me that little or none of my swap space used. And
that's even with mozilla, emacs, and some other apps open. I set my
installation up with 1GB of swap, which now seems like way more than I will
ever need. This is for a PC and not a mac, but I don't think that memory
usage in linux is all that different for the two platforms.

> How would I stop a boot to change the run level?  I tried the
> "interactive" start up and even after saying  "no" to everything it still
> went to run level 5 and killed my monitor.  For now I'm fine, but it'd be
> nice to know.

When I was working with Suse on those imacs it seemed like there was
something similar to LILO, is it called SILO on the Mac versions of linux?
If you have this, you will be presented with a prompt at boot time,
where you probably type 'linux' and hit enter to start linux. As Nate said
in his response to this, If you want to enter a different run level, type
the boot label followed by the run level number, like 'linux 1' for single
user text mode, and that's it.

If none of this sounds familiar, forget I said anything. Since I havn't
done a mac install in over a year, I might be totally wrong.

Hope this helps.

 - Paul