Who is this stupid really?

What kind of idiot runs an Alpha version of ANY OS distribution? You're looking at him. Yesterday I decided I'd had enough of being paranoid about my music collection not being backed up, and bought a 120GB drive at Staples ($59). The intent was to move my desktop system over to that and I'd have one copy there and one copy on my fileserver.

I was going to download OpenSuSE 10.0 but for some reason didn't, and decided to use 10.1 Alpha. That was dumb.

I backed up my config from the old disk and moved it over to the fileserver, everything except my X11 config, which is a fairly large mistake in itself, and proceeded with the install.

* Network card - Works/Doesn't work, depending on its whim.

* Graphics installers (SAX2) - Doesn't really work at all, and when it did, made invalid xorg.conf files

* Sound - Untested so far, and will remain so because I have 10.0 disks sitting in front of me.

* Scary error at login with authentication. Basically at first login, it failed to authenticate me and then started working from there.

The network thing bugged me most, I can fix my xorg.conf, although having SAX write it with the monitor[] lines saves a lot of work, but SuSE now uses a Network Manager daemon which is supposed to be an intelligent service which decides for you how best to connect to t a network. It doesn't work. That machine has only one NIC, so there aren't a whole lot of options in this regard, however a lot of the time the card would just stop working. It would come back when I was in console, sometimes, or not. I ended up telling YaST to tell that thing to not manage that card, and it seemed to be somewhat better, however throughput was awful. I don't know exactly what to blame there, but a 1.5GB file should not take 30 minutes to transfer.

So tonight it's back to 10.0, which had its own set of issues on my laptop, but at least the online update is online and I can get packages for it.