The Experiment, Days 3 & 4

Tom Opgenorth

Just a quick recap of days 3 & 4 of running with openSUSE 11 as my primary OS.  By far and large, not a lot of complaints.  As I do most of my work on a laptop, I tend to keep my VM's on external HDD's connected via USB2.  I've been doing this for a while now, under Windows.

I'm not to sure I'm a big fan of how openSUSE mounts (or tries to mount) my external HDD.  It just doesn't seem as...seamless...as how Windows XP does it.  I'm use to just plugging in my external HDD, and not worrying about it until it's time to disconnect.  openSUSE seems to get a big confused with automounting, and I always seem to have to help it along.  It's something I can live with for now.

The other thing I notice is that openSUSE doesn't seem to want to share the sound card with VMware.  I'm getting more than a few alerts from VMware that the sound card is not available and can't be used.  Again, nothing to critical - for now.

The third thing I'm noticing is that some HDD enclosures seem to work better than others.  I'm noticing that at least one HDD enclosure (a SmartDisk FireLite with a 250GB HDD inside) doesn't seem to want to consistently and reliably work.  I did have VMware (and openSUSE) complain that they could not write that particular HDD as it could no longer be found.

So far, I am pleased with how Linux is handling NTFS as well.  I remember back five or six years ago that NTFS support for Linux was pretty much read-only.  Read-write was for people who were delusionally insane or who go to the same hair stylist as Justice Grey.

A couple of lessons learned:

  • Get lots of disk space.  I'm thinking it may be time to get a 320GB HD for my laptop, and keeping my "working" VM's there.  I'd have something like a 100 GB partition for Windows XP, and then 220GB for openSUSE.
  • Backups - I'm very happy that I made copies of my VM's and worked off those. 
  • Fear not the command line.  But if you're a *nix guys, you're probably there already.