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Image via WikipediaSeeing as I've been using a lot of Ubuntu at home and RHEL at work, I thought it would be a good time to try something else for a change.
Just about every geek has tried Ubuntu at this stage, and up to now I've tried the Hardy Heron, Mental Monkey, Jaunty Jackalope, Rabid Rabbit and the Lucid Lynx (OK, I made some of those up). I wasn't really moved to try the much raved about Mint and gOS either, seeing as they are just based on Ubuntu, and older versions at that.
Not having used openSuse since the grand old days of v10, and so often having bored people senseless with the fact that YaST2 was the best package management and system configuration tool available in the whole wide world of Linux, I thought it was about time I brought myself up to date - so I went to opensuse.org and downloaded myself a 64-bit openSuse 11.2 network install iso.
Installing Ubuntu or Windows in VirtualBox on either a Windows or an Ubuntu host is trivial. Pretty much everything will work straight away, and it's just a case of mounting the VBox Guest Additions iso, running the script (or exe), and away you go. You might think that openSuse, priding itself on both usability and power would present you with no problems here, but you'd be every bit as wrong as I turned out to be.
With some excitement (I know, I shouldn't be getting excited about things like this), I selected the 64-bit openSuse net install iso in VirtualBox and fired up the VM. The first time I tried to install, I was told that I was running 32-bit hardware, and therefore couldn't install a 64-bit OS on it. Hmm. Obviously no-one thought to tell my 64-bit Windows 7 or 64-bit Ubuntu 10.04 that they weren't running on 64-bit hardware. Strange. Rather than fighting with the hardware checker, I decided to just go and download the 32-bit version instead.
Second attempt. No problems with the hardware check this time, so went ahead and selected a GNOME desktop. Big mistake. I got into my openSuse 11.2 after a considerable length of time (which takes ages, by the way - be prepared to give up a couple of hours of your life for this), but once there I found that I had no control of either the keyboard or the touchpad. Plugging in external USB ones wouldn't work either, since I had no Guest Additions installed, and I couldn't install that without a mouse/keyboard. I hate catch-22s.
Third attempt. After searching various forums on the internets and trying a few that were supposed to work, I eventually decided to reinstall, this time selecting the KDE desktop instead (which is the default choice in the installer anyway). I'm not a massive fan of KDE, since I've always chosen Linux because I want something lightweight and uncluttered, but hearing that KDE has improved so much in these respects over the last couple of years, I thought I'd better give it a chance. After the long and laborious install process (just to be clear, I'm not putting all the blame on either openSuse or VirtualBox for this, it just seems that in combination with my hardware, they are slooow), I finally got to a usuable openSuse, running the KDE desktop - which, I have to say, looks stunning.
After taking a good look around, and trying a few of the features, I decided it was time to install VBox Guest Additions. Doing exactly what I would usually do (when working with Ubuntu, Debian or RHEL guests), I mounted the Guest Additions iso for version 3.2.6 (current version at time of writing) and ran the install script for x86 Linux. Now, I know I probably should have considered what I was going to stand to gain before I did this, since, by default, openSuse was using the full res of my laptop's display, and the VirtualBox shared drive was working, mouse integration was working. I don't really care all that much about having USB support in a virtual environment, so I hadn't actually tested that. So, I can only put it down to habit, that I proceeded to install VBox Guest Additions mindlessly.
I really wished I hadn't. Bearing in mind that I'd already spent about 4 hours messing around trying to just get openSuse 11.2 to basically work in VirtualBox on my Win7x64 host, what I really didn't want to do now was fix what wasn't broken in the first place. I certainly didn't want to go breaking it either, which is why I did just that, what with me being a total imbecile an' all. After running the script (./VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run) I got this warning:
Uncompressing VirtualBox 3.2.6 Guest Additions for Linux......... VirtualBox Guest Additions installer You appear to have a version of the VBoxGuestAdditions software on your system which was installed from a different source or using a different type of installer. If you installed it from a package from your Linux distribution or if it is a default part of the system then we strongly recommend that you cancel this installation and remove it properly before installing this version. If this is simply an older or a damaged installation you may safely proceed...
You would think I would have heeded the warning, but as this stage you can probably guess that I didn't. In my defence, I was tired. When I proceeded with the install, I was warned that the kernel dependent features had failed to install, and that it would continue the non-kernel dependent features, telling me to reboot at the end.
After coming back up from a reboot, I found that my openSuse guest had gone down from 1366x768 res (max res on my Toshiba A500) to 1024x768. I lost touchpad scrolling too, and probably the shared folder and more besides. I searched the web for a solution, and found this article on forums.opensuse.org, where the first post seemed to point me in the right direction. Following those steps seemed like the right thing to do, so I went and installed make, gcc, linux-kernel-headers, kernel-syms and kernel-source. All went well up as far as:
make oldconfig && make prepare && make scripts && make depThis returned gcc errors. After messing around some more and cursing everything within sight, I finally read a bit further down and see Index of /repositories/Virtualization:/VirtualBox/openSUSE_Factory.
Once I added this to my list of software repositories in YaST2 and ran an update, the latest openSuse VBox Guest Additions was installed, and all was well. At last.
While I'm happy that it's working, and openSuse 11.2 running KDE 4.3 is a beautiful thing to behold, I am pretty pissed about one main failing. Going right back to the time I made the stupid decision to do what I always do with every new VirtualBox guest I install, and install VBoxGuestAdditions, I can tell you two things that openSuse is really missing: proper keyboard / pointing device support for openSuse running GNOME, and dkms support.
Apart from the fact that openSuse should have worked for me from the start, when I selected GNOME as my desktop, if I'd had the option of installing dkms on the fly, as prompted by the Guest Additions installer, I'd have been up and running a whole lot sooner. These things are pretty basic as I see it. I'm not sure what was wrong with selecting GNOME, or exactly what's missing. I heat that there was no such problem in 11.1.
As for dkms, being able to dynamically build kernel modules was one of the best advances I remember since I started using Linux. It's taken so much pain away and has made it so much more convenient to install all sorts of otherwise incompatible packages.
Here's the bottom line: if I wasn't such an openSuse fanboy, I'd have given up and installed any one of the other Linux distros where they get this kind of thing right. A certain amount of this problem could have been down to my own hardware (A500 with P7459 Core2Duo, 4GB RAM, Win7 64-bit), but the rest seemed to be down to patchy openSuse support for GNOME and VirtualBox, keyboard and pointing devices (because I found lots of other threads from people with similar issues), and the lack of support for dkms. Ultimately, no matter how far we can say that Linux has come on over the years, it has to be acknowledged that there is still quite some way to go before it's going to win a significant share of the market.
So, if you're planning to install openSuse 11.2 on a VirtualBox 3.2.6 running on a 64-bit Windows7 host, bear these points in mind:
- you'll probably have to install the 32-bit version
- you'll have to use KDE (on the plus side, it's KDE 4.3, which is gorgeous)
- you'll have to add the repo for the openSuse provided VirtualBox packages (such as VBoxGuestAdditions)
I hope that knowing all that in advance will help you avoid the same trouble I ran into and that you won't scrap plans for running openSuse in favour of Ubuntu or other user friendly Ubuntu-based distros, like Mint and gOS. They are great, but seen one, seen 'em all, and openSuse is worth it if you love YaST2 as much as do.
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