Linux Freedom with Proprietary Distribution, namely SuSe Linux

Linux Freedom with Proprietary Distribution, namely SuSe Linux

My story with SuSe Linux is both Love and Hate but now mostly HATE.

I was looking for a Netbook for sometime to buy but did not like all the Japanese OEMs since their hardware compatibility is tricky with Linux.

Reason for me looking for a netbook is apart from light weight in money and size was that with tablet hitting the market it would be extremely difficult to buy a new one let alone a second hand one.

I was lucky to find one in Kandy city and it had SuSe on board and it won´t boot up for any demonstration and was lying in a corner.

I had a look at it and was simply attracted by SuSe ¨my old flame¨.

Yes it won´t boot up.

I quickly figured it out that it was due to its clock and (SuSE and its YAST configuration) I let it run for nearly one hour for localization and terminated its looped script after going through many cycles from A to Z godforsaken of all the countries in the world.

Then finally it booted up without any local time but USA time.

I bought it for a reasonable price without knowing whether I can boot it up with  a Flash drive.

I kept it without registering with Novel and finally wanted to install Abiword (instead of Open Office that was available with SuSe 10 - SuSe come to 12 now and this distribution is pretty old) but I could not do that without registering with Novel.

I hated going to an automated process without any personal help.

In any case I do not need any help but problem was finding an alternative distribution that fits my need.

Web search was of no help  and for a week I went through all the Linux distributions downloaded from 2009 and none of them was comprehensive.

The I finally found Pingue Eee and booted it with a DVD and was pretty impressed by it, in about half and hour.

I resized the home partition of SuSe(100 GiB- too massive for my comfort) and installed Pingue Eee and to and my annoyance SuSe won´t boot up.

There was no way I could repair (No Install CD/DVD with the Netbook) it and took Gparted and rewrote the partition table to suit my needs and with it SuSe 10 was gone with the wind.

Good Bye my old flame!
The partition table made by SuSe or its technocrat was horrible to say the least and there was 2 GiB of NTFS partition (for what purpose I do not know) and the SWAP partition for my liking and comfort was too small.

Within half an hour I upgraded the software repository and installed the latest version of Abiword.

I left a big partition for Knoppix 7.0.4 (22 GiB is enough) once it is downloaded (may take a week or more) to Install.
I left a BIG 16 GiB of NTFS partition, in case I decided to dispense it (most unlikely scenario) one day to a Windows Guy with Linux on board.

I am free again without enterprise edition of SuSe.

Pingue has Calbre, Cheesse, Clemantine, UnetBootin, Gparted, LibreOffice and many more..

Who the hell who would beg the Enterprise for these packages from an Enterprising Technocrat?

Not me.

I will write about other Netboot crafted Linux distributions when I come out of my  laziness that was due to our nearly three months on industrial action and no work. 
I am actually enjoying it (the strike) and even Linux is of low priority for me now.