SuSE on a VMware image

I finally have a real reason to use a Linux machine for work, it was going to happen sooner or later, Linux is becoming recognised as a viable alternative, more readily.

For the current project its useful to have an example of the Documentum system in order to demonstrate and exercise use case examples. The latest version of Documentum 6.5 when installed on a Windows Server with SQL Server 2005 gets really resource hungry, which can be really challenging when trying to run it in a virtual machine on a moderately well specified laptop. Fortunately the Documentum product set is now certified for install on Linux.

So for the current project I'm working on, we are using a SuSE VM to run a database (Oracle), Documentum Content Server and an Apache Tomcat application server. Playing around with Ubuntu in my home machine has proved to be a good enough intro for me to get to grips with this SuSE image.

Like Ubuntu, SuSe is available with the Gnome or KDE desktop, because its lighter we are using Gnome. The main differences I'm noticing is that the SuSE distribution uses a different method of managing the application packages, different configuration tools, and a different menu system for starting desktop applications.

The SuSE Gnome desktop is configured differently from Ubuntu, has a different menu system, showing just a few apps initially then showing the rest in a separate window after you click on the more applications button. The only real change necessary was to move the toolbar to the top of the window, as that’s more convenient when viewing a virtual machine in a small console window with scroll bars. Because its working offline there is a window that continually pops up with an error, something to do with software update checking, I guess. Occasionally that little window hangs and cannot be closed so I added the little toolbar applet that lets you kill applications, so I can easily get rid of it when it happens (this would be handy in XP too). I also added an exit button applet as on SuSE this is hidden in the menu system like on XP.

Red Hat and SuSE (Novell) both use Yast (yet another setup tool), this pulls all the admin tools into one framework. Yast has proved to be quite useful in setting the OS up to fit our requirements. Yast was also useful to stop and start services as our image did not always (read often) manage to start the Documentum content server service.

So do I like SuSE? Well it works OK and seems fairly robust, no unexpected crashes despite a lot of fiddling about with system settings. As I’m not downloading standard packaged applications on SuSE, I can’t really comment on the relative merits of the RPM (Redhat package manager) versus the Debian apt package tools. I prefer the configuration choices for Gnome that Ubuntu uses to those of the SuSE distribution though.

Fixing the sound in Ubuntu on VMware

Installing Ubuntu on VMware went OK, the only thing was, there was no sound. When clicking on the sound icon to turn on the sound the OS reported that there was no sound hardware.

Investigating the issue, I found that the virtual machine configuration that VMware server supplied for Ubuntu had no reference to sound devices. This was quickly fixed by adding the following two lines into the .vmx file holding the machine definition.

sound.present = "TRUE"
sound.virtualDev = "es1371"

These lines were added just after the definition for the Ethernet device. On rebooting the virtual machine the sound was enabled.

My guess is that VMware defaults are designed for serious server use rather than playing with desktops, hence the lack of a default sound card in the configuration.

Where to run Linux?

Ok I've decided to have a go with Linux, but where should I install it and what options are there, bearing in mind that I don't really want to burn all my bridges with windows (yet)?

There are a number of options:

• Run Linux from a Live CD (leaves your Windows machine untouched)
  
• Install on a second separate machine (make mine a Linux)
  
• Make my machine a dual boot machine
• Run inside Windows

I'm having a punt at all of these so I'll note a bit more on each option

Live CD
This straight forward enough as long as the machine's BIOS is set to boot from a CD-ROM before its hard drive. If it doesn't work straight off, most live CDs appear to offer you some command line options to try to get it to work. Based on a couple of runs at this I've found that the main draw back with the live CD is if your hardware is not a good match with the default configuration on the CD, you cant get full use of the system. For instance I could not get the full screen resolution running a live CD. Also may of the live CDs do not have the codecs for MP3 (since the mp3 codecs are not truly open source), so you cant listen to music. Some time in the future I might have a go at the run from memory stick thing to see if that will overcome this limitation.

Install on a separate machine
This may be the simplest safest option initially, until you get comfortable with Linux. Not only do you not risk your Windows machine, you also have the option of using your windows machine to browse the internet for support if you break Linux.

Dual Boot machine
If you have enough space on your hard drive or can add in a second one, this may be the best option. Ubuntu installer holds your hand very well when making a machine into a dual boot machine. More about this in a later post.

Running Inside Windows
There are a number of ways to approach this. The two key options here are running inside a virtual machine or running a distribution designed to run inside a running windows installation. From what I've been able to make out the distributions designed to run within windows are modified versions of Linux where the Linux kernel is run within a windows service and the storage is all held in a big file in the windows storage. I've decided to use VMware to run a linux virtual machine to play with this idea. I'm going to avoid the 'modified for windows' distributions as they are not standard (if there is such a thing with Linux) and I want to learn about the OS in as real a situation as I can. I've chosen VMware as I'm familiar with VMware from Running Windows Server in it, VMware also appears to be the best option if the host OS is Windows, and last but not least its free.

My first practical use of Linux

While looking into whether Linux could read NTFS file systems (don't ask why, I sometimes just get really curious about stuff like that) I came across Trinity Rescue Kit, which is a Linux Live-CD that has a whole bunch of tools for sorting out dead PCs and getting the data off them. A free tool set like this seems too good an offer to pass up, so I downloaded an iso disk image for version 3.2 (the latest stable release) and burnt a disk, on the basis that I might find a use for it some day, as people are often asking me to sort out their dead PCs.

As it happens I had occasion to use it within a couple of days. I had to set up a demo system at a remote site, which entailed setting up VMware, installing a couple of virtual machines and ensuring all the clients were configured. Because the training room where all this was to run, was unexpectedly not available in the morning, all I had to work with was a windows server standalone from the network. This should have been no problem all, I needed to do to get under way was copy the software and vm images onto the machine from a USB drive. However Windows refused to talk to my USB drive, I tried a number of things to fix it but really needed to get started. At this point I remembered the Trinity Rescue Disk, its NTFS support would enable me to do this. Sure enough it booted first time enabled me to mount all the drives with read/write access, including the USB hard drive, with a single 'mountallfs -g' command. After which I was able to move all the stuff across relatively quickly with the Linux cp command.

So that was my fist practical use of Linux, it saved me a couple of hours of hanging around waiting for a network connection so that was pretty good.

Venture Into Linux - Why am I doing this?

There's a whole bunch of reasons that have pushed me to looking into Linux in a little more depth. Whilst doing this I will Blog my experience for the following reasons:

• Writing it down will consolidate my knowledge
• Enable others to use my experience to ease their Introduction to Linux
• Give something back to the Linux community, albeit in a small way (its the least I can do they're giving me all this free software)
  

As an IT professional for the last 13 years of so, I've watched Linux come more to the fore, it seems to me that its reaching a critical mass where there is a need for me to understand it in more depth to remain credible. It's no longer just a hobby horse for the command line UNIX jocks (no offense intended, but I guess they're not likely to be reading this), Linux distributions are now being mentioned along side Windows and Unix in the supported platforms for serious software.

At home, I seem to be doing increasing IT service work supplying and maintaining computers for the kids. And teenage daughters are demanding clients. Through using excellent open source and free software, I've managed to rain in the permanently infected Windows PC to a manageable solution to date. I've even managed to persuade them to use OpenOffice for their homework, despite the schools having an almost Microsoft only stance.

So I'm kicking off several projects to get my head around Linux, the idea being a gentle introduction through using Desktops on the home PCs then progressing to playing with server stuff and some more serious applications. With this in mind I've a number of projects to kick off this learning curve.

1. Old PC with limited resources (Celeron 800Mhz and 128mb of RAM). Now the youngest is of an age where she'll need a computer and the machine I have to hand is a bit old, runs XP like a dog, so lets try a Linux desktop.
2. Dual core AMD machine 2GB of memory and some bells & whistles. This is my son's machine, he's seen pictures of high end Linux on YouTube and wants his XP machine to do that too. So we're making it dual boot.
3. Linux Live CD tools. Live CDs will boot up and run Linux without messing up your current install. This should let me play with a bunch of different Distributions of Linux.
4. Linux running in VMware on XP. I use VMware, which can allow an operating system to run inside another by creating virtual PCs. This will give me a playground to try out stuff without investing in any more hardware.

So that's the start point. This Blog is a little late starting as I've been looking into this for a couple of weekends now, so there'll be a bunch of initial catch up posts to follow this up.