Hi Rob,
Debian should work (I'll address that in a sec), but first if you want to use Suse it shouldn't be a big problem. Installing and building everything from hand would be a total nightmare since there are around 300 software packages needed. To solve this and support non-Debian platforms, we wrote a generic back-end that abstracts all the dependency issues in a platform-independent manner. For example, the database knows that if you want to run our Bluetooth Dongle on Linux, you need Bluez, which requires x and y, which requires z, etc., and on Windows it requires other libraries.
When you completed the installation wizard, one of the options was to just to get the Wrapper Script. This is a generic shell script that call another script which is responsible for getting the software. The wrapper passes in the name of the software, where to get it, where to put it, etc. It would probably be faster and easier to just create a script that does the same for Suse than to do it by hand. Not to mention that once the script was done, any time you wanted to do a re-install, you would just let the script do it automatically rather than repeating the process by hand each time.
We'll help in any way possible since we want to support as many platforms as possible. To do this, you can do an svn checkout (see
http://plutohome.com/support/index.php?section=document&docID=101) of the directory ConfirmDependencies_Script. The Debian script is ConfirmDependencies_Debian.sh. So we would just need a script for Suse that did the same thing. It’s only 102 lines—so it’s not too bad.
Then there is the issue of the package names. I think Suse uses RPM packages, right? Hopefully the packages and names are similar. No matter what, whether you installed the packages by hand or wanted to use the script, you would need to lookup the corresponding package names for Suse. There is a link here:
http://plutohome.com/download/stdpackages.txt to all the package names in Debian. It’s just a tab delimited file, you can use in a spreadsheet or editor. If you add a column next to the Debian name with the names of the corresponding Suse packages, we’ll have someone here put those names in the database. If there are more packages, or less, just make a note, and we’ll adjust the master database accordingly. Then, on the web site there will be a ‘Suse’ platform option, which will give you a wrapper script with all the Suse files, and the Suse version of the installer. You’ll see from our ConfirmDependencies_Script that the wrapper passes in the package name, the source, the repository name, the version, etc. It also passes in the type: get from package, download as a tar, get from svn, etc. Only the ‘get from package’ (which is ConfirmDependencies_Debian.sh) will be specific to Debian. We have separate scripts to download from http/ftp, etc., that should be the same for all distros. So, if you email me back the package names in that stdpackages.txt file, and the Suse version of the ‘get package’ script (email to my username here at plutohome.com), I’ll put it on the main server and we should then have an auto-install for Suse.
NOW, back to the real issue of why Debian doesn’t work. That drive appears to be a standard ATAPI IDE drive, right? So it should work with the Debian installer. You were able to burn the Kick Start CD, correct? And it boots and you see the Debian logo and the installation starts, right? At what point does it fail? What error message do you see on the screen? We’ll see if we can figure out what went wrong.
Thanks,
Aaron
