Parallels 2.1 on openSUSE 10.1 (Don’t waste your time!)

Today was one of those days when i awoke and after reading an article on virtualisation, I decided to give it a go. A comment on digg saying ‘Parallels works well on my Ubuntu’ made me decide to give it a shot on my openSUSE 10.1 lappy. Everything was going well; the site
had good documentation, the packages were all available, it even proclaimed that it had been tested on SUSE 10.. all i needed was a couple of packages installed (kernel sources, c compiler, qt3-devel etc) and i was good to go.. Indeed, the rpm installed fine.. and then came the configuration [ i beleive the command was parallels-config or somin ].

This was when the hell began. See, no where did they mention that the darn thing would take over 4 hours to compile and that while it was doing so, it would basically take over ur computer as the task is extremely memory-intensive (even with 512mb ram).  All i had to tell me that my computer was working hard was a blinking activity indicator. No progress bar, only a somber ‘Compiling parallels 2.1 drivers’ statement.
That’s not all, after over 4 hours the activity indicator jst stopped blinking.. I waited a good 15
minutes and still nothing..

And so after patiently waiting from 10 am to 2 pm, my computer was stuck. What had i acheived? zilch.
I calmly hit the power button, restarted and promptly removed any traces of the shitty prog.
I’m not blaming my beloved suse, i’m blaming the shitty parallels guys that dont give even the slightest
indication as to how long the bloody thing will take and that even after following their immaculate instructions, it will bloop on you.

I wonder if the windows .exe does the same thing.. or the mac’s installer.. i wouldn’t be in the least surprised if they took under 30 min to install.. I’m really sick of software vendors and some hardware manufacturers that victimise us linux users. There’s millions of us ffs and opensource is not goin anywhere so wake up and smell the coffee $#@!

There ends my rant . On a lighter note, at least amarok 1.4.1 managed to sync my ipod nano with no problems whatsoever.. ( 1.4 would hang sometimes or corrupt the itunesDB.. )