Novell client on OpenSuse 10.3

The latest (10.3) version of OpenSuse was released a few days ago. As I use Suse as my main development environment at work, I eagerly downloaded it as soon as I could, and installed it on a virtual machine.

First impressions are very good – very quick startup time, easy 1-click installs and a bright and cheery colour scheme.

Unfortunately, I can’t switch for real as the Novell Client doesn’t work yet, and I need to client to access my shared drives at work. (Although I could use WebDAV, it doesn’t work so well). Attempting to install the Beta 2.0 version yields a single dependency error (wrong version of binutils). Satisfying the dependency results in the Novell Client loading – but not connecting at all. Seemingly, the public Beta 2.0 of the client is no longer available for download.

There was quite a wait on Suse 10.2 for a working Novell Client – which was released in beta form a couple of months ago (and it works very nicely too). I’ll eagerly await and hope that Novell release a new client soon, then I will more than happily switch to the new version.

UPDATE 29th Nov 2007

I”ve just spotted that Novell have posted a way to run the 10.2 client on 10.3, over at coolsolutions.

It has a simple step-by-step guide that just involves entering a few commands into the shell.

Removing Windows from Apple’s Bootcamp

Having tried Windows Vista on my shiny new iMac and having a few issues (stuttering sound, slower loading times), I decided to revert back to using Windows XP.

Now, Bootcamp is supposed to make this easy – you just launch the Bootcamp assistant, and click “Restore the startup disk to a single volume”. A few moments later, all seemed well, and I was prompted to reboot.

After the reboot, the Windows XP drive is still visible, and it seems nothing has happened. After trying this multiple times and getting quickly fed up, I ruled out a few other ways to delete Windows:

• I couldn’t run the Windows XP installer disk – rebooting the iMac with the disk in the drive caused a “Press any key to boot from CD…” prompt. Unfortunately, the iMac keyboard doesn’t work at that point.
• Attempting to run the XP installer from within Vista – the “Install Windows XP” option is greyed out and not selectable
• OS X’s disk utility wouldn’t let me unmount or erase the Windows parition
• I was too scared to use fdisk from the command line, just in case I nuked my OS X partition (and didn’t want to reformat the whole lot for the same reason)

So, how did I fix it in the end?

If you can’t delete Windows from your Mac’s bootcamp installation:

• Drag the Windows parition to the Trash to unmount it
• Run the Bootcamp assistant and choose “Restore the startup disk to a single volume”

Guess that’s the risk you take when you use Beta software eh?