INightmare's ideas

More than a month has passed since my last blog entry and I thought that an update to my blog would be very nice.

Linux life. Ditched Mandriva after I noticed it actually has some problems, like OS randomly not booting and getting stuck somewhere at the time to load X server. So I switched back to KUbuntu. It's a real pleasure to have that distro. It seems that I'm KUbuntu and SuSE guy. I wonder what will those distros bring in October...

Personal life. Well exam session is here. Learning lots of stuff like Psychology, Probability Theory and Mathematical Statistics, Operating Systems, Mathematical Logic, Software Engineering, Internet Technologies. Probability theory seems to be quite interesting, too bad I didn't pay enough attention to it during the semester.

So here are my simple words unleashed to the cyber-world. Back to studying.

Wish me luck and have a nice day.

Finally I received the invitation to SuSE Studio. After trying it out I was so impressed, that I want to share it with you.

SuSE studio is a web application for building custom OpenSuSE based Linux distributions.

After logging in to the page, you are presented with a choice of basic setups to aid with your custom distribution building. It has standard options that you get on CDs GNOME desktop, KDE3 and KDE4 desktops, as well as Text Only, Minimal X11 and JeOS (Just Enough to run OS) packages. But those modes are just to help you and doesn't limit you in any way, you are free to add and remove any software packages you would need.

After you're complete with package selection, you can configure various system options such as networking, splash screen, start-up runlevel, it evens allows you to import your custom MySQL dump. If you're generating VMware image it allows you to specify memory and swap sizes and finally you can enter a script to be ran after the build. Additionally you can upload your own files from your machine or specified URL in the web and place them in the directory of your choice (together with ability to run a custom script, this makes it a really powerful tool).

SuSE Studio allows you to build your distribution into HDD image, CD image or VMware appliance. And that's not all, you can 'Test drive' your built distribution right in your browser! You need Java for that to work and it also allows you to ssh into your Test drive session.

Test drive has another valuable option it's the ability to include modified files into your appliance.

I am really impressed by SuSE studio, not only it's functional, but it has a very nice and intuitive user interface, which makes building your custom distribution really easy and enjoyable.

Few days ago I installed OpenSuSE 11. There were three reasons for it:
1) My friend recommended trying it
2) It was released on my birthday
3) It had KDE4

It was out and I rushed to the faculty (they have good internet there) to download OpenSuSE 11 DVD (yes, biggy). It contained GNOME, KDE3 and KDE4 desktops and ofcourse being a modern man I chose KDE4 without much of thought.

KDE 4

I'm a big fan of KDE, but KDE 4.0 disappointed me. Looks were kinda good, but that's about it. Everytime I logged in to my desktop I got KNotify4 crash reported and KNetworkManager (though it used one from KDE3, I believe) was crashing as well (or more like: didn't start). Also it lacked one of my favourite features: the file server applet (it was something my friend Rick missed too). It misses some other small things as well.
So I decided KDE4 is not ready for my desktop and there I was looking at the screen suggesting one of these: GNOME, KDE3, KDE4. This time I chose KDE3.

P.S. I heard that KDE 4.1 is more stable and usable.

KDE 3

KDE 3.5 desktop was wonderfull as always. OpenSuSE has a nice (heard other oppinions as well) modification to the KMenu, whick makes it look more like the one found in KDE4.



It came with standard KNetworkManager, which I like a bit less than the one that comes with KUbuntu, but it has all the needed features.

Drivers

I installed OpenSuSE on my laptop and devices like memory card reader, soundcard (I will talk a bit about it later), network card, BlueTooth worked out of the box.
Video: OpenSuSE allows adding special repository that has packages for ATI video drivers.
Wireless: I have an Atheros chipset, so I added madwifi repository and all worked fine.
Conclusion. It would have been nice, if adding repositories and installing drivers had bin done for me. (For example in Ubuntu you get notified about restricted (proprietary) driver use, but they get installed).
Things like screen brightness adjustment and ACPI worked well too.
Now Touchpad was another problem as horizontal scroll area occupied bottom 50% of the touchpad and I had to manually edit Xorg.conf to fix this.

Drivers: Sound

Well sound is a Linux problem. It seams that ALSA doesn't love Realtek HD audio and doesn't allow muting internal laptop speakers, so I use OSS (Open Sound System) instead.

Packages

It's called YaST. It works good.
OpenSuSE's wiki has links to lots of repositories, so you won't need to compile much. Also it comes with zypper console utility (similar to apt-get or yum).
Updating is very fast as OpenSuSE uses xdelta packages, which contain only the differences between new and old package versions.
One disappointing thing is that YaST can not resume package downloads. If your PC crashes during package download, next time you have to start it all over. But this is not a problem for broadband owners.

Overall impression

It's nice and fast. After all the configurations are done, it works really well. YaST2 makes configuring system settings easy. So if you're planning to switch to another Linux distribution, OpenSuSE is really worth a try.