tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26551856015789059582024-03-05T00:15:05.089-08:00Adventures in openSUSE LinuxThese are the chronicles of my experiences using openSUSE, and my opinions relating to it. I am an Advocate for the openSUSE project, but any opinions expressed are my own unless otherwise stated. This blog begins with 12.1 release.Rogerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06200716217216892767noreply@blogger.comBlogger30125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2655185601578905958.post-80060745913370594132018-04-21T14:20:00.000-07:002018-04-21T14:20:07.041-07:00From novice to Community Manager<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
As of March 28th, 2018, my contract as <a href="https://lopsa.org/blog/6031489">Community Manager for LOPSA</a> started. Indeed, of all the adventures I've had in openSUSE, this is the biggest yet. Many readers are probably wondering how my position in LOPSA can be considered an openSUSE adventure. In short, without openSUSE it almost certainly wouldn't have been possible.<br />
<br />
The purpose of this article is twofold. First, as thanks to the openSUSE Community. And to invite the openSUSE Community to <a href="https://lopsa.org/Join-or-Renew">join me</a>!<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRilx0-fytdatMXZkUj8NyE5oY_ZboHYfvKXjrQkuQ2gRfO1bIfz3HKlsya4nzc1egnBxiY4OeoGhNC3Anvcv34T40DeD6oN15RTcLi03XqIhBvsR1oGyD9yaYiYOuc-OZ66lRzMMy-CCW/s1600/LOPSAinvite3.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="637" data-original-width="825" height="494" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRilx0-fytdatMXZkUj8NyE5oY_ZboHYfvKXjrQkuQ2gRfO1bIfz3HKlsya4nzc1egnBxiY4OeoGhNC3Anvcv34T40DeD6oN15RTcLi03XqIhBvsR1oGyD9yaYiYOuc-OZ66lRzMMy-CCW/s640/LOPSAinvite3.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">To join, sign up at <a href="https://lopsa.org/Join-or-Renew" style="text-align: left;">https://lopsa.org/Join-or-Renew</a><span style="text-align: left;"> and apply the coupon-code '</span><b><span style="color: lime;">OPENSUSE</span></b><span style="text-align: left;">' at checkout. You can also email me directly at </span><a href="mailto:community@lopsa.org" style="text-align: left;">community@lopsa.org</a><span style="text-align: left;"> with any questions, comments, or suggestions. </span></span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<h3 style="text-align: left;">
Thank you openSUSE Community!</h3>
<div>
I could go on at great length about the numerous valuable things I learned over the years of my participation in the openSUSE project. To do so, however, is beyond the scope of this article and would lead it to be entirely too verbose. That story is for a later time.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The openSUSE Community is full of so many wonderful people, full of energy, passion, skill, and good-will. Volunteering with openSUSE has afforded me some of my best and most memorable experiences in my adult life. It's been a privilege to work with such exceptional people, and my life has certainly been enriched by it.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
To give full credits would be a long crawl, but a couple pivotal figures I feel must be mentioned. </div>
<div>
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li>Drew Adams is a long-time friend whom I first met in meat-space at a friend's Birthday. He got me involved with the openSUSE Project, showing me I didn't need to be a programmer to contribute. As a current LOPSA board member, he alerted me to the Community Manager position, which thankfully due to the involvement he engaged me in so many years ago I qualified for. </li>
<li>Bryen Yunashko was a member of the openSUSE board when I began participating in the Project. He encouraged me to represent openSUSE at the 2011 Novell Brainshare Expo in Salt Lake City. He also helped me to arrange the means to get there. At the time I remember arguing for my own lack of experience and knowledge against this. His vehement encouragement pushed me to go and showed me I had not been giving myself enough credit. </li>
</ul>
<h3 style="text-align: left;">
Join me and the LOPSA Community!</h3>
</div>
<div>
LOPSA is a great community and organization already. My appointment as their first Community Manager signals an upshift to more dynamic expansion. Besides expanding our Membership and Chapters, we are working on deals and alliances to afford more benefits to our Members. Currently, I'm negotiating a number of initiatives with the <a href="https://www.lpi.org/">Linux Professionals Institute (LPI)</a>. In conjunction with our newly revamped and relaunched <a href="http://mentor.lopsa.org/">Mentorship Program</a>, we are angling to provide learning opportunities to advance our Member's careers. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I want to invite you, my friends and peers to join me at LOPSA. Now is a very exciting time to get involved with huge developments on the horizon as we move forward to becoming a much more dynamic organization. I hope that we can inject a healthy dose of the openSUSE spirit into LOPSA and <i>have a lot of fun</i>. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
To join, sign up at <a href="https://lopsa.org/Join-or-Renew">https://lopsa.org/Join-or-Renew</a> and apply the coupon-code '<b><span style="color: lime;">OPENSUSE</span></b>' at checkout. You can also email me directly at <a href="mailto:community@lopsa.org">community@lopsa.org</a> with any questions, comments, or suggestions. </div>
</div>
Rogerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06200716217216892767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2655185601578905958.post-8442762683577274382016-02-08T00:42:00.000-08:002020-03-24T22:15:12.030-07:00Dual Boot configuration for Windows 10 and openSUSE with full UEFI and Secureboot support<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<h2 style="text-align: left;">
Questions and preamble </h2>
As has become normal, the FOSS/Linux community is peppered with anxiety over yet another major change to the tech landscape issuing forth from Redmond. With the release of Windows 10 comes a great many questions for the thoughtful, and this is especially true for our very own Linux communities. With gratitude we can recall our own past relief upon discovering that UEFI and Secureboot are not the herald of the end-times we had feared them to be. That being so does not however relieve the question of safely upgrading our dual-booting computers to Windows 10 without losing our ability to run Linux in tandem.<br />
<br />
Excitement for Windows 10 was largely absent in me. I had grown quickly comfortable to the Windows 8.1 work-flow as it shared some similarities in those key areas which I had already grown to love in the GNOME Shell. Further, Windows served a role limited to usage for proprietary software that I deemed not sensible to coax into service on a Linux OS. However it did make sense for me to upgrade for my employment as a repair technician. It seems incumbent on me to familiarize myself with the upgrade process and the general operation issues of Windows 10.<br />
<h3 style="text-align: left;">
Can I perform the upgrade safely?</h3>
<div style="text-align: left;">
In short, yes. Performing an in-place upgrade of your present Windows operating system will not overwrite your Linux partitions. However, the necessary Boot Configuration Data settings directing the UEFI firmware to use GRUB for booting will be lost. The Windows Boot Manager will be reasserted. This can be changed from within Windows using <i>bcdedit</i>.</div>
<h3 style="text-align: left;">
How about a fresh installation?</h3>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Some users prefer to make a clean installation of their operating systems instead of in-place upgrades. Unlike in older versions of Windows, you can direct Windows 8 and above to specific partitions. This means that whether you wish to install Windows first in sequence or not is inconsequential; you can now install Linux first without worrying about the Windows installer overwriting it. </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
One minor caveat however is that if you are not using a computer with UEFI firmware instead of a BIOS, GRUB will need to be installed after the Windows installation. </div>
<h4 style="text-align: left;">
Can I still get the free Windows 10 upgrade even if I want to cleanly install it? </h4>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Yes. However, you will need to initiate the in-place upgrade for Windows 10 in your already present qualifying Windows 7, or 8.1 installation. As <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/100292833634918081724" target="_blank">+How-To Geek</a> says in <a href="http://www.howtogeek.com/224342/how-to-clean-install-windows-10/" target="_blank">their article</a>, "When you upgrade a Windows 7 or 8.1 system to Windows 10, the installer confirms that you have a “genuine Windows”
system installed and activates your computer for use with Windows 10.
Note that you don’t actually get a Windows 10 product key — instead,
your computer’s hardware is registered with Microsoft’s servers. When
you install Windows 10 on that PC again in the future, it will check in
with Microsoft’s servers, confirm it’s installed on a registered PC, and
automatically activate itself."</div>
<h2 style="text-align: left;">
How to install Linux alongside Windows 10</h2>
<h3 style="text-align: left;">
Prepare your hard drive</h3>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<i>If you've performed a clean installation and installed openSUSE first in sequence, then drive preparation is irrelevant for your consideration. <b>Note:</b> if you intend to install openSUSE to a separate drive on a computer with UEFI, the /boot partition must be placed on the primary drive with the Windows partitions.</i></div>
<h4 style="text-align: left;">
Create free space</h4>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Though there are different ways this can be achieved, I advocate the following as the safest method. Creating free space should be simple if you have freshly installed Windows 10 instead of performing an in-place upgrade.<br />
<br />
In Windows, open the Disk Management module from the Control Panel. You can find this simply by searching for it from the Start Menu/Cortana. Select your Windows partition (this is probably C:\ and the largest) and right click. The context menu will show an option to "Shrink Partition." Select this, and specify the size you would like.<br />
<br />
If Windows is not allowing the amount of space you would like for your openSUSE installation, you can try clearing your temp files with a utility (I use <a href="http://www.glarysoft.com/" target="_blank">Glary Utilities</a>) and rebooting. If this still does not work, you can use an advanced utility such as <a href="http://www.raxco.com/business/solutions/server-pc-performance/pc-defrag-optimization" target="_blank">PerfectDisk by Raxco</a> which has a special mode specifically for preparing the partition for shrinking.<br />
<h4 style="text-align: left;">
Now Install</h4>
<div>
Now simply use your install media such as DVD or bootable USB to install openSUSE. I will not detail this as it is easy. See our<a href="https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Installation" target="_blank"> Installation Portal </a>for more details. </div>
<div>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
<h2 style="text-align: left;">
Post-installation configuration (critical)</h2>
<div>
Finally there are a couple things you must do to get your dualboot working properly with GRUB. If installing the latest openSUSE (LEAP 42.1) you will need to update your system completely. 42.1 contained a regression which did not chainload the Windows bootloader correctly, preventing you from using your Windows system. I prefer to update with zypper from the command line interface:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"sudo zypper up"</blockquote>
Now reboot, and you should be able to successfully boot into your Windows system. From GRUB, select the Windows entry since the next steps will need to be taken from within Windows. Though the same changes can be applied from within openSUSE, I find it much simpler to do from within Windows.<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br />
<b>Optional step necessary for a few rare systems.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Now from your Windows 10 desktop, right click the Start Menu. From the context menu that comes up, select "Command Prompt (Admin)." A black Windows Command Prompt box will come up. Now insert the following line into the command prompt:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: left;">
"bcdedit /set {bootmgr} path \EFI\opensuse\shim.efi"</blockquote>
This line will instruct the computer's firmware (EFI which is the successor to the BIOS) to use openSUSE's GRUB boot loader.<br />
<br />
And that's it. <i>Have a lot of fun!</i></div>
</div>
Rogerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06200716217216892767noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2655185601578905958.post-81289492092159137632016-02-07T23:52:00.002-08:002016-02-08T00:00:31.143-08:00Why I use openSUSE over other distributions.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<h2 style="text-align: left;">
The below is a response to a Facebook query on why we use openSUSE over Ubuntu. I was happy with how it turned out and thought it could prove helpful to a larger audience.</h2>
<br />
There are a great number of reasons why we use openSUSE. Ultimately, what one prefers boils down to personal taste. I'll tell you why <i>I</i> use openSUSE.<br />
<br />
<h3 style="text-align: left;">
1) YaST:</h3>
<div style="text-align: left;">
YaST is our system administration tool. It can be used both in graphical environment and on the command line. YaST has modules for managing an enormous number of things, such as /etc/sysconfig configuration files and systemd processes to boot loader configuration and repository management. YaST provides comfortable, safe tools for working with important parts of the system that would otherwise be difficult, confusing, and potentially dangerous.</div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://en.opensuse.org/images/3/3d/OpenSUSE_12.2_GNOME_yast.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://en.opensuse.org/images/3/3d/OpenSUSE_12.2_GNOME_yast.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<h3 style="text-align: left;">
2) zypper:</h3>
Our package manager is called zypper. It has the most advanced dependency resolution available of any package manager whether it be Linux or another operating system. What this means is that it is trivial for us to perform complex installations and configurations that would be difficult or impossible elsewhere. In my experience with Ubuntu, I've had several instances where apt resolved a problem by removing X entirely, which broke the GUI system and was difficult to repair. In openSUSE, zypper prevents this sort of thing from happening.<br />
<br />
<h3 style="text-align: left;">
3) Desktops; </h3>
On openSUSE all Desktop Environments (such as Gnome, KDE, etc.) are treated equally, and can coexist on the same installation. Installing a new desktop environment is no more complex than installing any other package. Once they are installed, they can be selected from a dropdown on the login screen. Other distributions typically rely on 'spins' for delivering alternative desktop environments, such as Ubuntu Gnome. Part of why we can do this is that zypper has superior logic, and can handle this complexity better than other package managers.<br />
<br />
<h3 style="text-align: left;">
4)Help; </h3>
The openSUSE community is famed for its responsive and competent forums. Rarely is a user left without a solution for more than a day. Competent professionals and developers answer user questions in the relevant forums. Our community is friendly and helpful.<br />
<br />
<h3 style="text-align: left;">
5)KDE and Gnome; </h3>
openSUSE is famed for having one of the most stable and well integrated KDE environments of any distribution. Less well known is our incredibly well done Gnome implementation as well, which is what I prefer and am always happy with the job our team does.<br />
<br />
<h3 style="text-align: left;">
6) OBS; </h3>
Our Open Build Service gives users and developers a common place to build and share their software with the entire community. OBS works in concert with our online software.opensuse.org portal to allow easy Direct Install (formerly One-Click) of any software built on OBS. Direct Install will automate the adding of repositories, resolution of dependencies, and installation of the software. This makes otherwise complex or time consuming tasks swift and trivial. It also allows for an ever expanding library of software, and the distribution of complex packaged solutions in the form of YaST meta-packages.<br />
<br />
In conclusion, though Ubuntu claims to be the most user-friendly, I find that claim to be unjustified. I've always found it to be more prone to breakage. And once there is a problem, it is much harder to fix than it would be in openSUSE since we have YaST and don't often need to rely on the command line or manually editing text configuration files.</div>
Rogerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06200716217216892767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2655185601578905958.post-72857363044409005092014-10-10T19:03:00.001-07:002014-10-10T19:03:50.935-07:00Netflix arrives to openSUSE without dirty tricks, yes natively.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Naturally, if it were so simple one would not need an article. There has been a lot of news floating around about <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/108673812773894715146" target="_blank">+Netflix</a> finally being available natively for <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/109995262342451767357" target="_blank">+Linux</a>. In case you are not aware, getting Netflix on Linux was a labored and complicated process requiring all sorts of WINE hacking or virtualization. <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/105221698834684244331" target="_blank">+Microsoft</a> had announced that its strategy would be changing away from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Silverlight" target="_blank">Silverlight</a> which Netflix has depended on for their <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management" target="_blank">DRM</a> content delivery. Netflix then announced they would be dropping Silverlight in favor of <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/107505091494053426676" target="_blank">+HTML5</a> once some DRM framework was developed so they could secure their licensed content. Naturally this announcement was greeted with excitement from Linux desktop users all over, excepting of course those whom are absolutely opposed to DRM.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqFzKOeRlnIkmM-9HGRIjXTzyZXeCTtoXHtPHUEIz8t86P4HawoYcmG8TOBuJugtdEI8ggq6zEewbrVYTgWCbjFBTOj9SKLoQ27wVsq1furhpwtyUJaxoHppwDXgpr2HaHJAZbDZ2yKEOC/s1600/netflix-linux-100451716-large.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqFzKOeRlnIkmM-9HGRIjXTzyZXeCTtoXHtPHUEIz8t86P4HawoYcmG8TOBuJugtdEI8ggq6zEewbrVYTgWCbjFBTOj9SKLoQ27wVsq1furhpwtyUJaxoHppwDXgpr2HaHJAZbDZ2yKEOC/s1600/netflix-linux-100451716-large.png" height="214" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
In the last couple of days, there has been a flurry of articles and tutorials on how to get Netflix to work natively. Most of these of course are claiming that it is <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/100887841569748798697" target="_blank">+Ubuntu</a> only, though this is absolutely false. The new HTML5 DRM video delivery is enabled by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Security_Services" target="_blank">Network Security Services</a> which have been around for a long time, but have only recently acquired the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encrypted_Media_Extensions" target="_blank">Encrypted Media Extensions</a> for the sort of secured DRM necessary for Netflix. While <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/104629412415657030658" target="_blank">+Android</a> and Chrome OS had Netflix, this left people wondering why not desktop Linux since the two other operating systems use the Linux kernel too. On Chrome, Google developed a special plugin to provide the DRM to allow Netflix to work, while on Android this was facilitated by an app that had the DRM built in.<br />
<br />
So now we have working DRM thanks to Google, Mozilla, and many other parties. Firstly, you need NSS 3.16.2 or greater and the <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/100585555255542998765" target="_blank">+Google Chrome</a> browser version 37 or higher. You will need to go into your Netflix settings and tell it you'd prefer the HTML5 player. Upto very recently you'd need to have your browser falsely identify itself as another browser to get it to work, but this is no longer necessary. At present Chromium and Firefox cannot run Netflix. <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/107964393728911462914" target="_blank">+Mozilla Firefox</a> will be getting support as well, but it'll be reliant on a proprietary Content Decryption Module or CDM from <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/115209321914160323553" target="_blank">+Adobe</a> beyond their more conservative approach with a greater focus on privacy and security. This module would most likely be delivered in the same fashion as the <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/103624913700741966828" target="_blank">+Adobe Flash Player</a>.</div>
Rogerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06200716217216892767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2655185601578905958.post-42489144982972264232014-10-07T19:24:00.001-07:002014-10-07T19:24:05.454-07:00Sneak peek at openSUSE 13.2; hands on with beta 1<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I've been running the beta 1 of 13.2 for a few days now, and there are lots of interesting and welcome changes. Overall it is surprisingly bug free, and I anticipate it will be a very smooth release (at least on <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/108054458791366257368" target="_blank">+GNOME</a> since I don't use KDE). Now, if you want to know what versions of packages are included you may take a look at <a href="https://news.opensuse.org/2014/09/22/opensuse-13-2-is-coming-first-beta-has-arrived/" target="_blank">this post</a>. I on the other hand want to introduce you to the things that you may NOT know, and that are particularly interesting.<br />
<br />
So we have long heard that btrfs would be replacing EXT4 as the default file-system in <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/110312141834246266844" target="_blank">+openSUSE</a> and many other distributions eventually. Generally it is ready and eventually will outstrip EXT4 and other file-systems for speed as well as it's many other compelling features. However as of yet it still suffers from being a bit too slow. Thus, if you use a separate /home partition you'll notice XFS is being proposed as the default. For some of you this makes sense, but if you are like me it came as quite a surprise. Last I knew XFS was recommended for ridiculously huge volumes and suffered performance issues that made it impractical for domestic use. Naturally I wanted to get to the bottom of this. <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/103463304798163421615" target="_blank">+Greg Freemyer</a> offered the following explanation:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #2e3436; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: Monospace; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;">XFS was designed for high-end systems including supercomputers.The</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #2e3436; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: Monospace; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"> design is 20 years old, so many of the features it incorporates work</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #2e3436; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: Monospace; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"> well on current multi-core laptops and PCs.</span><br style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: #2e3436; font-family: Monospace; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;" /><br style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: #2e3436; font-family: Monospace; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;" /><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #2e3436; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: Monospace; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;">During the decade from 2000-2010, XFS had a well deserved reputation</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #2e3436; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: Monospace; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"> of working very inefficiently with small files. In the 2010/2011</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #2e3436; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: Monospace; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"> timeframe XFS received major improvements related to metadata</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #2e3436; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: Monospace; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"> handling. This had a huge positive impact on how well XFS works with</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #2e3436; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: Monospace; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"> small files. The key concept is that journal is now maintained</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #2e3436; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: Monospace; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"> initially in RAM. Prior to streaming a large junk of journal</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #2e3436; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: Monospace; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"> information to the disk journal, it is now elevator sorted.</span><br style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: #2e3436; font-family: Monospace; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;" /><br style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: #2e3436; font-family: Monospace; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;" /><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #2e3436; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: Monospace; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;">That means when the actual on disk updates are done by applying the</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #2e3436; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: Monospace; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"> journal, the disk head will follow a series of disk seeks all in the</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #2e3436; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: Monospace; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"> same direction. This drastically cut down on long disk head seeks</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #2e3436; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: Monospace; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"> when working applying the journal. The end result was drastically</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #2e3436; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: Monospace; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"> faster speeds when working with small files on rotating media.</span><br style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: #2e3436; font-family: Monospace; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;" /><br style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: #2e3436; font-family: Monospace; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;" /><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #2e3436; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: Monospace; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;">ext4 on the other hand was designed for previous generation</span><br style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: #2e3436; font-family: Monospace; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;" /><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #2e3436; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: Monospace; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;">computers. Although it can scale to the sizes needed today, it simply</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #2e3436; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: Monospace; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"> was not designed to handle that heavy workloads and massive scaling</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #2e3436; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: Monospace; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"> that modern laptops and desktops can demand. As such, ext4 is rapidly</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #2e3436; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: Monospace; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"> approaching end of life.</span><br style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: #2e3436; font-family: Monospace; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;" /><br style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: #2e3436; font-family: Monospace; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;" /><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #2e3436; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: Monospace; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;">The envisioned replacement for ext4 for the last several years has</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #2e3436; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: Monospace; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"> been btrfs. Unfortunately, btrfs has not yet achieved the performance</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #2e3436; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: Monospace; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"> levels needed to take on heavy workloads.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #2e3436; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: Monospace; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"></span></blockquote>
Though EXT4 is being developed still, it is too old to really cope with modern use cases. In benchmarks vs. XFS newer iterations of EXT4 were nearly able to catch up to the speed of modern XFS, but with one caveat; the journal had to be disabled, which as you probably know is a horrible idea leading to corruption and fragmentation of your data. For some further reading I suggest <a href="https://www.suse.com/communities/conversations/xfs-the-file-system-of-choice/" target="_blank">this article</a> from <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/117995526672632131792" target="_blank">+SUSE</a>.<br />
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Now as you may know, <a href="http://opensuseadventures.blogspot.com/2013/06/yast-is-being-rewritten-in-ruby-geeko.html" target="_blank">YaST was recently rewritten in the Ruby language</a>. A big reason for this is that only about two people at SUSE knew the language it was written in before called the YaST Markup Language or YML. This of course made it difficult to maintain, and even harder to get community contributions for. Thankfully this has worked out and we've been seeing lots of work on YaST, cleaning up code and modernizing it; adding stability and speed improvements across the entire suite. Our installer even is a YaST module and has seen improvements thanks to the switch to Ruby as well. The improvements are obvious with quick and responsive action across all of YaST. The installer has seen benefits of this as it is quicker, smoother, and more responsive than ever across any of the cards. A new card has been added allowing network configuration (no idea if it works with wifi at all since it isn't the NetworkManager) which among other things allows you to set the hostname for your computer. The interface itself has seen a nice facelift, now with a cleaner more readable experience. In the partitioning scheme card there is a simple modifier dialog that will allow you to set non-default file-systems as well as a check box for expanding SWAP to allow suspend. GRUB2 is now not only default, but the only supported bootloader and has seen bugfixes and obvious speed improvements. Also so far as installation is concerned this has become immensely faster, completing before I can even finish a cigarette. This improvement is due to streamlining the installation process; in the past it would make a large number of mkinitrd calls, whereas now it should only make one call at the very end of the process.<br />
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Overall this is turning out to be a very exciting release. And with as good as it looks in this early beta, I anticipate raving reviews. Please consider helping test this release, and file your bugs at <a href="http://bugzilla.opensuse.org/" target="_blank">our own Bugzilla</a>.<br />
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Rogerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06200716217216892767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2655185601578905958.post-61860085165412863032014-05-10T21:25:00.000-07:002014-05-11T00:34:31.561-07:00Is Canonical planning to take out Microsoft Office with OEM Kingsoft Office?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Here is a <a href="http://kdl.cc.ksosoft.com/wps-community/kingsoft-office-9.1.0.4280-0.1.a12p4.i686.rpm" target="_blank">link to download the RPM for Kingsoft Office</a> so you can try it, and not wonder if this is vaporware... it isn't.<br />
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Lately I've been seeing more and more buzz surrounding Kingsoft Office for Linux. KSO has been gaining a rather devoted following despite it's Linux port still being in alpha and not near to release. My first familiarity with Kingsoft Office was reading about their Android offering which has had rave reviews and a devoted following. Across all platforms, people praise it for its interface and its exceptional compatibility with Microsoft Office formatted documents. So with all the buzz, rumors, and conflicting information I wanted some clear answers for myself and to share with you. On May 5th I had the opportunity to interview Jin who serves as the Chief Software Architect for <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/107059042083217371321" target="_blank">+Kingsoft Office</a> .<br />
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Before I dive right into the things we addressed in the course of our interview, I wanted to give you a brief background for Kingsoft and their office software. For brevity I'll pull from Wikipedia.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Kingsoft was founded in 1988 by the JinShan company located in Hong Kong. JinShan is a manufacturer of IBM PCs and was founded in 1973. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Kingsoft researched and developed word processors and other office applications, such as its flagship product, Word Processing System 1.0, which launched in 1989. Today, the latest version of Kingsoft Office 2013 is a freeware office suite which includes Kingsoft Writer, Kingsoft Presentation and Kingsoft Spreadsheet. Kingsoft has established collaborative relationships with Dell, Intel and IBM.</blockquote>
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Jin mentioned that Kingsoft has attempted Linux ports in the past (2003, 2007, 2009), which did not succeed. Kingsoft Office (the Chinese market version is called WPS) has over 10 million lines of code, making this porting effort very significant. Complicating the porting effort further is the matter that over 600 dialogs are written in Delphi which needs to be rewritten, including the chart feature which many users have bemoaned the lack of.<br />
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So why though is Kingsoft making such a powerful effort to port their flagship office suite to Linux? The reasons Jin gives are interesting. "Firstly, *Nix is a large family of operating systems. Making our product for Windows only is not a good strategy. We once depended on Delphi, and have paid a price for this. So now we say to not put all of our eggs in one basket." Once bitten twice shy, they have come to be reticent of relying on proprietary technologies. I asked about <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/114007320955450453675" target="_blank">+OpenOffice.org</a> and <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/117919358326414513526" target="_blank">+LibreOffice</a>, "These are very powerful suites, but fall short in two major areas; the interface, and compatibility with Microsoft document formats." Elaborating on their emphasis of compatibility, he stated they had four dedicated teams working on compatibility with Microsoft formats exclusively. In response to the reports I've read saying that previous versions of Kingsoft Office were based on OpenOffice, "er... It's a rumour, KSO was never based on OpenOffice."<br />
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Though these are all philosophically sound reasons, I doubted it was so simple. Certainly we could use a better office suite (I used to work in zoning and entitlements, and wasted a lot of time trying to generate complex documents in LibreOffice) and I certainly can understand being wary of vendor lock in. Jin mentioned, "Linux deals" and I pried a bit further. "Last year, we have a deal from Canonical. They want to make a business version." Canonical whom makes the <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/100887841569748798697" target="_blank">+Ubuntu</a> distribution has purchased 5 million OEM licenses in order to do this. "They need an office similar to MS Office."<br />
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I think the implications for a KSO business version from Canonical could be huge. Clearly this means Kingsoft and Canonical are gunning for the big daddy of the office, Microsoft Office. But this could also mean Canonical is looking to move into the business and enterprise desktop market putting them in direct and formidable competition with the likes of <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/117995526672632131792" target="_blank">+SUSE</a> whom has been in this arena for a long time. Also, it may imply there could be a version for the Ubuntu Phone OS which could bring their devices into a realm of mobile business that has been largely the domain of <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/104087449469741657054" target="_blank">+BlackBerry</a>. Whatever the case is, I think it's good news for <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/109995262342451767357" target="_blank">+Linux</a> users everywhere and helps bring people who weren't able to transition to Linux due to the lack of Microsoft Office in a much better position to join us.<br />
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There has been a good amount of rumor saying that Kingsoft will release the code as open source for KSO. Considering how Kingsoft has learned to shy away from proprietary lock in, it might even seem plausible. However, when asked Jin stated "Free to use and distribute. Kingsoft Office is the only profitable product for us. Open source is a very dangerous choice for us. We will however release some source of our product such as emf support, we know the Linux community needs it also." With this in mind I asked what would happen to KSO for Linux when it's ready for official release and out of testing. "KSO for Linux is based on our Pro version, having the full set of functions. We will not change it, but the name will change to Community Version." So thankfully the Linux community will still be getting Kingsoft Office Pro without any feature regressions, and still offered as free to use and distribute.<br />
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They plan to bring important features such as charting, mail merge, and the ability to embed formulas in Writer documents. However, the challenges are significant. Besides the transition from Delphi, much of KSO relies on Microsoft APIs. "And too many thing out of our control, for example; we can't input formula in Kingsoft Writer. Why? Because we buy a formula editor on Windows Version. But they can not offer a Linux version. Mail merge is similar. We can not find a good data source on Linux."<br />
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Finally I asked how we in the Linux community can help, and if there is any message they would like to convey. "We need quality assurance." "We want to thank the Linux community for their support and enthusiasm. We are not the best yet, but we are working hard on it."<br />
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P.S. To install in <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/110312141834246266844" target="_blank">+openSUSE</a> is very simple. Simply download the RPM from their site and install as you would any RPM. In my test, everything works correctly. KSO checks for updates on launch, and will prompt you to download the newest available alpha version.</div>
Rogerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06200716217216892767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2655185601578905958.post-45930025584498469922014-05-02T18:59:00.001-07:002014-05-02T19:00:58.222-07:00GNOME 3.12 arrives to openSUSE Tumbleweed, and it is fabulous<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
In late March 2012 I gave <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/110312141834246266844" target="_blank">+openSUSE</a> 12.1 a <a href="http://opensuseadventures.blogspot.com/2012/04/giving-121-and-gnome-3-second-chance.html" target="_blank">second chance</a> with <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/108054458791366257368" target="_blank">+GNOME</a> 3 after having a <a href="http://opensuseadventures.blogspot.com/2011/11/impressions-of-121.html" target="_blank">horrible experience</a> with the version of KDE that shipped in that version. By April 4th I was a true believer in the GNOME Shell and the new user experience paradigm that was evolving in GNOME 3. Indeed, each version of GNOME since has been more exciting than the last, bringing massive improvements in performance, stability, reliability, workflow, and aesthetics. Indeed, a true tribute to the GNOME developers is that I hadn't been so sold on an environment since I left Apple's Mac OS X behind in 2010. Each version of GNOME has shown refinements as dramatic as anything I'd seen in Mac OS X, but at a breakneck pace. The latest GNOME 3.12 is not merely an incremental improvement like previous versions, but rather a shocking advancement. In this article I will allude to some changes that happened in recent previous versions since they deserve comment.<br />
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<h3 style="text-align: left;">
Elegance</h3>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiU3V_MVWl1s4_-xZFoeat5D1FAe0zeJ-VDuKuELRxyRJjfnjskgJhxFgf8fT3xbhJhWL40epCgt7d5_yoyJWSe4RlGgnQo87DUfif1UH3piAg3puuDgcA-AC2krNfLq09s1dPfXz7N3Asz/s1600/rounding-things-out.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiU3V_MVWl1s4_-xZFoeat5D1FAe0zeJ-VDuKuELRxyRJjfnjskgJhxFgf8fT3xbhJhWL40epCgt7d5_yoyJWSe4RlGgnQo87DUfif1UH3piAg3puuDgcA-AC2krNfLq09s1dPfXz7N3Asz/s1600/rounding-things-out.jpeg" height="204" width="320" /></a></div>
I love an elegant desktop. In my days as a Mac snob, I got quite used to having a refined, elegant, and unified theme for my desktop and it's applications. Each version of GNOME 3 has shown significant improvements to it's visual appeal. 3.12 however takes this so much further with a nearly compulsive attention to refined details, resulting in an aesthetic that would make Steve Jobs swoon. The expansion of HiDPI support is very welcome and rounds out these refinements making all text and interface elements use your native resolution to maximum advantage. The clean elegance of GNOME 3.12 and it's applications is peerless. It would be surpassingly tedious to enumerate these refinements, and so I'd rather leave it to your own exploration.<br />
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<h3 style="text-align: left;">
Shell Function</h3>
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The Gnome Shell itself has seen some refinements in functionality. The all in one User Menu (in the upper right hand corner) has seen improvements, chief of which is the addition of Wired (ethernet) network settings and overall improvements to the way network connection is managed from there. Location services have also been added to this menu. GNOME upstream has added the ability for the user to create application folders in the overview. However, this feature relies on <a href="http://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/files/2014/03/gs-installed2.png" target="_blank">gnome-software</a> which is not installed by default and requires the upstream branding for packagekit. This feature should be moved into the shell itself. Another nice addition (I'll admit I may simply not have noticed it in previous versions) is that you can initiate specific actions from applications directly via context menu from the applications overview.<br />
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<h3 style="text-align: left;">
Online Accounts</h3>
<div>
I originally was going to include this in the software section below, but there is so much that has changed that it merits its own section. Firstly, the support for things it had before such as Windows Live, Google, and Facebook is rock solid compared to older versions. Of note, the automatic launch of Empathy has been removed from GNOME in a previous version, though Online Accounts still works with it. I will briefly go over the types of accounts supported and what capabilities they enable.</div>
<div>
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><b>Google</b> has not changed much, though it does seem to have gained support for Google Cloud Print. You can still access your Drive documents in the GNOME Documents application.</li>
<li><b>Windows Live</b> has seen massive improvements. You can now access your OneDrive documents through the GNOME Documents application, and it will also set up your email account (outlook.com for example) with Evolution mail. Most impressive though is that it actually works reliably and consistently.</li>
<li><b>Pocket</b> formerly known as Read it Later has also been added, though it currently does very little. So far only 'Videos' makes use of Pocket as a plugin to play your Pocket saved videos. Developers say they will add integration to Epiphany or 'Web' in a future release of the browser. </li>
<li><b>Flickr</b> is included and is used by the 'Photos' application. I read somewhere that it can be used in some special way for desktop wallpapers.</li>
<li><b>IMAP and SMTP</b> accounts can be set up directly from here for use with Evolution mail.</li>
<li>I believe the above are the only truly new notables to 3.12, I encourage you to take a look and see if you discover something new. I can revise this later.</li>
</ul>
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</div>
<h3 style="text-align: left;">
Software</h3>
<div>
GNOME 3.12 introduces some welcome changes and refinements to programs, as well as a few new ones. </div>
<div>
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><b>gnome-software</b> is the app-store style interface (PackageKit frontend) in upstream GNOME. This is not installed by default in openSUSE. Besides installing software, the new user defined application folders in the shell are set up by this program. It can be installed in openSUSE, but appears to be broken as it repeatedly asks for authentication for setting a network proxy. However, I have no need of application folders since I merely search for whatever I want and find it's package management capability massively redundant in light of YaST and our own <a href="http://software.opensuse.org/131/en" target="_blank">Software Search portal</a>. </li>
<li><b>Gedit</b> is the default GNOME text editor since time immemorial. In 3.12 it has received a massive interface overhaul following the minimalist UI philosophy of GNOME 3. Despite the minimalistic new design overhaul, it appears that none of its familiar functionality has been removed. I like it.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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</li>
<li><b>Nautilus </b>or 'Files' as it's labeled appears to have changed little, excepting that you may now connect to servers straight from the app menu on the activities bar. For me, this is a very welcome change since the last time I needed this functionality it had been entirely removed into a separate module that needed to be invoked from the CLI.</li>
<li><b>gnome-photos</b> is not installed by default in openSUSE as the default photo manager, that distinction goes to the revered Shotwell. Photos however is a simple and elegant photo manager, now with Facebook integration through the GNOME Online Accounts. Likewise it also supports Flickr via the same mechanism.</li>
<li><b>Totem </b>or 'Videos' as it is now labeled has seen a massive cosmetic makeover. Under the hood though, it sees a new plugin architecture for online video services. Notably, Online Accounts has support for Pocket and any saved videos there will be accessible in Videos.</li>
<li><b>Epiphany</b> or 'Web' as it is labeled now has seen major changes both under the hood and cosmetically. The minimalistic UI gets out of your way enabling your content. Each tab now has it's own process, and so when one page crashes the rest of the browser will not be affected. In my testing of it, I've found it to be swift and reliable like no other non-mainstream browser before. I can for once see people actually using this browser. It also enables with a quick menu option the ability to save a page as a Web App that will then be added to your applications, launchable immediately from the shell. Support for <a href="https://getpocket.com/" target="_blank">Pocket</a> should be added in a later version. When Epiphany is installed, it enables the ability to perform internet searches directly from the shell.</li>
<li><b>Polari </b>is an early 'preview' application. Polari is the new GNOME upstream default IRC client. XChat for GNOME is shipped by default in openSUSE. Polari however is a beautiful and easy to use client, which immediately became my new favorite. Polari has excellent integration with the GNOME Shell, using Online Accounts and the notification and chat frameworks allowing you to see pending private messages in the lock screen, and responding to them directly from the shell notifications.</li>
<li><b>gnome-logs</b> is a new system log viewer for GNOME. It is not shipped by default in openSUSE and is redundant since we have a YaST module for this purpose. It also appears that it does not yet work under openSUSE, likely due to wrong permissions. Though 'Logs' may not be an important application for us in openSUSE, it represents a significant step forward for less experienced users in any GNOME distribution since it makes it much easier to fulfill the request, "Ok, in order to help you I'm going to need a couple system logs."</li>
</ul>
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<div>
<a href="https://wiki.gnome.org/Gnome3CheatSheet#System_Settings" target="_blank">If you are unfamiliar with GNOME Shell, I recommend taking a look at this cheat sheet to get acquainted with how it works.</a></div>
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Rogerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06200716217216892767noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2655185601578905958.post-49752802622350145692014-05-01T16:25:00.000-07:002014-05-01T16:25:28.954-07:00Windows XP end of life, is openSUSE Linux the right choice?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<a href="http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enterprise/end-of-support.aspx" target="_blank">Since Microsoft announced Windows XP end of service</a>, <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/109995262342451767357" target="_blank">+Linux</a> and Free Software enthusiasts have been dancing a celebratory jig and promoting Linux as the preferred upgrade path. Though a user can continue to use XP, Microsoft will no longer be releasing any updates to it and it will thus gradually become more insecure than it already was. Microsoft's recommendation is to migrate to Windows 8.1 or buy a new PC. Frankly, most people running XP have computers that are running up to being a decade old seeing as Vista became available late 2006. Linux is a common solution for people wanting to squeeze more life out of an old computer, but is it the right one?<br />
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In late 2011 I began working as an independent repair technician and IT consultant. Due to my unusually low prices and geography I typically get people running older hardware. Though I will work on solving issues with various Windows versions, I do attempt to upsell <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/110312141834246266844" target="_blank">+openSUSE</a> Linux to these clients where possible. I assess the clients needs, then their hardware to assure compatibility with Linux. If all checks out and the client gives me approval I'll migrate their data then install openSUSE and configure it (which usually means checking for known bugs and applying a work around) for immediate use for a fee, including limited support for one release cycle. The point of this story, is that more than most I know the challenges of bringing users from XP to Linux.<br />
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So is Linux the right choice for people fleeing Windows XP? Yes and no. Firstly one must assess the clients needs. Many of my clients are students, whom you'd assume would be a great match for Linux. However, many classes absolutely mandate the student have and use Microsoft Office and will be failed or unable to complete a course correctly if they don't. Naturally, such a case means Linux is absolutely out of the question. Another case can be such as musicians or artists whom require specific tools, such as a DAW or <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/107616973595963133529" target="_blank">+Adobe Photoshop</a> . So these potential users are restricted by their own habits as much as availability of specific software.<br />
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Next question would be, which Linux? In the enthusiasm to bring XP users to the fold, I've heard repeatedly that they should all be on <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/100887841569748798697" target="_blank">+Ubuntu</a> . First problem with that idea is the Unity desktop itself, which has problems on older hardware and won't render correctly thus rendering the computer largely unusable. In my experience with Ubuntu, I've found it's package management to be dismal as it is the only distribution I've used where a routine patch can break X which of course means the new user would be stuck without any sort of graphical interface whatsoever.<br />
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Unity is blatantly unsuitable for a new user purely from a compatibility and resource usage standpoint. When I first began migrating users to Linux, I would set them up with <a class="g-profile" href="http://plus.google.com/105126786256705328374" target="_blank">+KDE</a> since it has a very familiar interface with a task bar and 'start menu.' However the instability, bugginess, and immense configurability (which leads to over-complexity) proved to be too much for the new user and too much for me as I was constantly having to support the installation. After dealing with this for a while I decided on GNOME (which was version 2.x then) and migrated my clients to that, which resulted in much happier clients and an almost complete cessation of support calls. Even now, I'm still putting my clients on GNOME 3 which they have trouble with initially due to it's very unfamiliar design philosophy. They quickly adjust to the GNOME Shell, and often come to love it to the point that their ranting brings me more clients. A few clients with exceptionally weak hardware have been placed on <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/109718378533730652303" target="_blank">+Xfce</a>, and this has not led to any unusual support calls. Another unexpected consequence of KDE is that it was too familiar looking, and I saw users making more attempts to install software designed for Windows or trying to install Linux software by downloading and launching it than I see when they are on other environments.<br />
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Ideally, a new user should be able to use their computer as designed without having the system become unusable after an update. A new user also shouldn't be forced into fixing things from a command line early in their experience. This is largely why I use <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/110312141834246266844" target="_blank">+openSUSE</a> , and give it to my clients.<br />
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<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zypper" target="_blank">Libzypp</a> is the backend for zypper and YaST package management. This provides (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zypper#SAT_solver_integration" target="_blank">scientifically proven</a>) superior dependency resolution, which of course greatly mitigates the potential for an update or other package operation causing damage to a working system.</li>
<li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yast" target="_blank">YaST</a> is our amazing modular setup and configuration tool. It's modular design allows it to give graphical interfaces for many system administration tasks from package management to security auditing and beyond. It also includes an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ncurses" target="_blank">ncurses</a> front end which allows the familiarity and safety of YaST to still be usable from a command line in the event that X is down. On each module it includes a help button, which will offer concise and useful information on what the module does making YaST useful as a learning tool.</li>
<li><a href="https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Snapper" target="_blank">Snapper</a> is a YaST module for use with the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs" target="_blank">btrfs</a> file system. Snapper allows you to easily check and reverse system changes that are logged and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapshot_(computer_storage)" target="_blank">snapshotted</a> as part of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs" target="_blank">btrfs. Btrfs</a> also prevents against <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_decay" target="_blank">data decay</a>. Snapper can easily save the day by swiftly rolling back any destructive changes without the end users having to concern themselves with maintaining backups. <a href="http://youtu.be/9H7e6BcI5Fo" target="_blank">See video here!</a></li>
<li>One-Click Install or Direct Install makes finding and installing software easy via our <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/114569615797299390351" target="_blank">+Open Build Service</a> <a href="http://software.opensuse.org/find" target="_blank">Package Search</a>. Simply navigate to our <a href="http://software.opensuse.org/131/en" target="_blank">software search domain</a> and with only a few clicks YaST will handle everything needed to install the program, including adding any necessary repositories. We even include a search extension for our default browser Firefox which allows you to search for software directly from your search bar.</li>
<li>The Installer itself is also a YaST module. Our installer offers a nearly unparalleled reliability and compatibility, and like other YaST modules can be used from its ncurses interface when the graphical installer won't work. Its modular design gives it a superior flexibility and capability versus the installers from other distributions, and this still holds true even in the text based ncurses interface. </li>
<li><a href="https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Tumbleweed" target="_blank">Tumbleweed</a> is our rolling release. It offers seamless upgrades to each new version of openSUSE while also giving you the latest stable desktop environment and other packages. Tumbleweed is stable enough for daily usage (especially for any ex-Windows user whom is used to things constantly failing) and will alleviate the headache of an annual release cycle as opposed to the longer release cycles of Windows.</li>
</ul>
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I think my own personal experience, and the preponderance of facts conclusively support the conclusion that openSUSE is an ideal choice for new users, including those coming from Windows XP. I would say though, for myself I won't do it without a fee since it quickly becomes too exhausting. I've also found my clients listen much better when they are paying for service. My clients were originally friends I ran out of patience to do free tech service for. </div>
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Rogerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06200716217216892767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2655185601578905958.post-42567891412079308052014-05-01T14:04:00.003-07:002014-05-02T08:51:59.963-07:00Firefox 29 coming soon with a fresh new design paradigm.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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"It’s not an interface adjustment or tweak. It’s not a bug fix. It’s a complete re-envisioning of Firefox’s user experience, and it’s been brewing for the past five years," <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/103436295949081772004" target="_blank">+Jennifer Morrow</a> says in her blog. Jennifer serves <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/107964393728911462914" target="_blank">+Mozilla Firefox</a> as the senior designer at Mozilla. This will be the biggest redesign since version 4 which brought us a much cleaner and faster Firefox experience and retired the 3.x design.
The new aesthetic is being called Australis, and has already been released to all platforms though as of this writing it is not yet packaged by <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/110312141834246266844" target="_blank">+openSUSE</a>, though it can be found in the Mozilla community repository.<br />
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Australis has been designed to address some idiosyncrasies and deliver a consistent user experience. Users familiar with <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/100585555255542998765" target="_blank">+Google Chrome</a> will see some strong similarities in the redesign such as the tabs and menu placement. I feel however, that's about where the similarities end. Jennifer Morrow says, "This is when user experience design is most effective: when it envisions the system as a whole. When it steps away from the trees and sees the forest holistically."<br />
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Firefox 29 is doing more than simply delivering a pretty face, and is bringing the ability to easily customize buttons and toolbars via a simple and intuitive drag and drop interface. I think however, it is clear that this release is far more about user experience and aesthetics. In my tests the workflow is negligibly different. Performance may have taken a hit though, the responsiveness is sluggish and page rendering slower.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjO2RwbfdiRd_fim21nUpMr_p01Z6YRLsuWsC_bdavXHxOWXB_4jAB4AYXdE3Iy2VEhPzfxLUK0WRbDBIYf1VuPUXaREuvpxwA_MkY3Sp-ArSlLAP6qW2j465AIMBjf5INXdJ7GNNjSCm7O/s1600/Screenshot+from+2014-05-01+18:16:55.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjO2RwbfdiRd_fim21nUpMr_p01Z6YRLsuWsC_bdavXHxOWXB_4jAB4AYXdE3Iy2VEhPzfxLUK0WRbDBIYf1VuPUXaREuvpxwA_MkY3Sp-ArSlLAP6qW2j465AIMBjf5INXdJ7GNNjSCm7O/s1600/Screenshot+from+2014-05-01+18:16:55.png" height="180" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Firefox 29</td></tr>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2uHZcTxSHd3182cvnWzKSq7BoDlAikhKUPgGYQpUQguY2-P7tAOVDa5j8GPFPOx7xZT2RFA256o3sikM8ZOT1vSo4LO17yQ2Lx68-86ztTYTmWcjCZMSnK6StjuHJEqVVeh5gZNcMr50z/s1600/Screenshot+from+2014-05-01+18:17:26.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2uHZcTxSHd3182cvnWzKSq7BoDlAikhKUPgGYQpUQguY2-P7tAOVDa5j8GPFPOx7xZT2RFA256o3sikM8ZOT1vSo4LO17yQ2Lx68-86ztTYTmWcjCZMSnK6StjuHJEqVVeh5gZNcMr50z/s1600/Screenshot+from+2014-05-01+18:17:26.png" height="180" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Firefox 29 with GNOME addons</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
There has been a good amount of backlash from users who do not like the redesign. The majority of these objections seem to be in regards to it being different, a change to the interface that has become so familiar to so many. For newer users however, I anticipate this to be a welcome change that will help bolster a positive first impression while making the browser more usable and accessible to less technically minded people. My only personal concern is in regards to how well the redesign can be themed to integrate into <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/108054458791366257368" target="_blank">+GNOME</a> Shell. Currently I'm using Firefox with themes and extensions that make it look nearly native to the GNOME Shell.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.donotlick.com/firefox-and-flux-a-new-beautiful-browser-is-coming/" target="_blank">You can read more about Firefox 29 on the blog of Jennifer Morrow.</a></div>
Rogerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06200716217216892767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2655185601578905958.post-16360262092888186802014-04-30T21:23:00.000-07:002014-04-30T21:24:54.953-07:00Microsoft may bring Office to Linux in 2014<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/106716703795367546082" target="_blank">+Michael Larabel</a> from <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/112061010007909832941" target="_blank">+Phoronix</a> brings odd tidings to the Linux world from last years <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/116797125035929339246" target="_blank">+FOSDEM</a> . In 2013 <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/111221966647232053570" target="_blank">+Microsoft</a> delivered on their announced plan to bring their Office suite to the <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/109995262342451767357" target="_blank">+Linux</a> based <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/104629412415657030658" target="_blank">+Android</a> platform. Mr. Larabel has said that his source indicates that Microsoft is taking a serious look at bringing Office to Linux, and has a full native port (not delivered via a WINE wrapper or some such means) in an unknown degree of completion that they have already in development internally. Now that 2014 is in swing, will we actually see this rumor come true? Frankly, if it were a less reputable source I wouldn't bother with this article.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiM_8EKDhBYMxkW8qF9_a168U1wBMYyVitliVV6nnIeYPFnRxkWjdCqtPNEapXHu4LRdox_IRsl7zSa7urERRjwBHNlSSA1CAcMITjYNHzeGT7_WaR3JKg9d_MXx8d1vkIepb_-VJTIBxP3/s1600/office-for-linux-640x353.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiM_8EKDhBYMxkW8qF9_a168U1wBMYyVitliVV6nnIeYPFnRxkWjdCqtPNEapXHu4LRdox_IRsl7zSa7urERRjwBHNlSSA1CAcMITjYNHzeGT7_WaR3JKg9d_MXx8d1vkIepb_-VJTIBxP3/s1600/office-for-linux-640x353.jpg" height="176" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
How likely is it? I think considering that they have<a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft.office.officehub" target="_blank"> already made a version for Android</a>, that means at the least that much of the development effort is already spent since Android runs on the Linux kernel. Also, as I understand it Android and its apps are mostly Java simply running via a mobile optimized runtime. Java in case you are not aware (you probably are) is a cross platform language that is designed to make efficient programs that can be deployed on any operating system that supports the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Runtime_Environment#Execution_environment" target="_blank">Java virtual machine</a> with none or very little modification to the application code itself. Considering how small a market the desktop Linux userbase is still, I wouldn't think Microsoft would be taking this porting effort seriously were it not for the above mentioned facts which drastically reduce any effort they'd spend specifically and exclusively on desktop Linux.<br />
<br />
For me at least, the bigger question is whether this is a good thing or not. I'm always excited to see more software become available for Linux since it increases the chance that we may get a new user whom was holding out for that application. But, of the many companies who would participate in this Microsoft is among the least trusted seeing as they are the very image of proprietary software and shady dealings; and are thus not prone to getting the support of myself or others in the Free Software movement. But also, will the Linux userbase even embrace it? Will it damage the <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/114598373874764163668" target="_blank">+Apache OpenOffice</a> or <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/117919358326414513526" target="_blank">+LibreOffice</a> projects?<br />
<br />
Very often from people I have heard something along the following, "I really like Linux, it works so well but it doesn't have this program I use most!" The most common barriers to entry I've heard has been a lack of games, and the lack of Microsoft Office applications, usually Word. Thanks to <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/110673779464308469683" target="_blank">+Valve Linux</a> and various indie game studios affiliated and not, serious gaming is swiftly coming to Linux and thus the argument of needing a "Wintendo" is becoming far less true every day. With LibreOffice we have a powerful and familiar office suite, but most business users are either set in their ways or run into various anomalies and thus find that Linux is not a viable option for their productivity. For the latter group, the option of Microsoft Office on Linux would almost entirely eliminate that barrier to entry.<br />
<br />
Ultimately I think if Microsoft delivers, this will be a good thing. Part of their dominance in the PC sector has been due to their ability to assure trials of their software is shipped from the OEM on any machine running their Windows operating systems (the other part being that they make much better office suites than they do operating systems). Since in the Linux world we don't have OEM deals this is not an issue and Microsoft has next to no ability to squeeze anybody into adoption of Office, and most major Linux distributions ship LibreOffice by default. So I think, rather than seeing a situation where LibreOffice dies we will see those smaller subset of users actually purchase Microsoft Office for Linux while those of us who don't need all that or aren't as picky will stick to Free Software. As a side note, Microsoft Office has been supporting Open Document formats and have been backporting that support to older versions of their Office applications.</div>
Rogerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06200716217216892767noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2655185601578905958.post-80274590126416270102014-02-01T14:52:00.002-08:002014-02-01T14:52:22.894-08:00Dual booting with Windows 8, not as painful as expected.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Over the last several months I've gone through a few different computers. Some of them had severe hardware flaws, such as the wretched track pad on the HP Envy, or the critically flawed WiFi on an Asus that wouldn't allow me to connect to certain secure networks. The HP Envy came with dual one terabyte hard drives, and my intention was to use one drive for <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/110312141834246266844" target="_blank">+openSUSE</a> and the other for Windows. I ultimately managed to trash the machine, and sent it back since I was unhappy with the way some of its hardware was anyway (yes, the trackpad was that awful). For many years I've been running openSUSE exclusively, and finally decided on dual boot since I wanted to play some of the amazing games I've seen. At last I settled on an excellent balance of hardware in my <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/107316151152900332757" target="_blank">+Sony</a> Vaio Fit 15.<br />
<br />
After having trashed the HP before, and reading various horror stories I was reluctant to dive right into attempting a dual boot again. This reluctance seems to have been unjustified. Fact of the matter was in my previous attempts I was trying to preempt potential problems, and wound up creating problems I would likely not have had otherwise.<br />
<br />
The skinny of the matter is that under the hood, there are massive technical differences when dual booting a system using UEFI and GPT as compared to the familiar BIOS and MBR. However, to the average user the process of installation is about as straightforward as ever. In fact, there are only a few exceptions assuming your UEFI machine isn't buggy.<br />
<br />
<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li>If you are attempting to install to two drives, that is using one for Windows and one for Linux you will have to have the Linux /boot partition on the primary drive where the Windows installation resides.</li>
<li>You will almost certainly need to shrink the Windows volume from within Windows in order to create free space for your Linux partitions. To do this effectively you will have to defrag, and then reboot. Once your system has rebooted you can shrink to a respectable size, if you try it before the shrink will be restricted by temporary files. You may like to use Perfectdisk to defrag the volume with it's special 'prep for shrink' algorithm.</li>
<li>Everything should go as expected... until you boot into Windows again. Once you do that, Windows will most likely reassert it's own boot loader. The good news with Win 8 is that it does not actually overwrite GRUB as previously would happen (yes, technically this means Win 8 is friendlier for dualboot than previous Windows versions). The following tells Windows to use GRUB as the bootloader instead of it's own.</li>
<ul>
<li>Type 'cmd' to search for the Shell. Right click and launch as administrator.</li>
<li>Enter without the quotes "bcdedit /set {bootmgr} path \EFI\opensuse\shim.efi"</li>
</ul>
</ul>
Any other problems are going to be specific to your hardware or OEM.<br />
<br />
Special thanks to <a href="https://forums.opensuse.org/member.php/49759-nrickert" target="_blank">nrickert</a> from the openSUSE forums.</div>
Rogerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06200716217216892767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2655185601578905958.post-54243875499707041122014-01-03T15:33:00.002-08:002014-01-03T15:56:13.702-08:00A new idea for the openSUSE 'app store' that simplifies and builds on the basis of our existing technologies.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
For a long time now there has been a great deal of buzz about potentially having a fully featured app store on <a class="g-profile" href="http://plus.google.com/110312141834246266844" target="_blank">+openSUSE</a> . Whether it was Bretzn or porting the <a class="g-profile" href="http://plus.google.com/100887841569748798697" target="_blank">+Ubuntu</a> Software Center, we certainly would like to have a more informative GUI for discovering and installing software. At present we do in fact have a halfway solution in our software.opensuse.org interface with it's direct install (formerly 'one-click') which is awesome, and certainly is one thing that makes my job easier when I bring new users from Windows.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3h_Cm5NnhC8/UsdI0zbh3qI/AAAAAAAAFfg/PO7rUHwkY88/s1600/appstore_details.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="221" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3h_Cm5NnhC8/UsdI0zbh3qI/AAAAAAAAFfg/PO7rUHwkY88/s320/appstore_details.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
However, there are a number of areas where this interface falls short. The most glaring can be that often the applications lack a description or have one so short as to be nearly useless. Another significant point is the lack of user reviews. Reviews help flesh out things that may be missed in a description, as well as provide tips at a glance on what the new user should expect. I believe reviews would be reasonably easy to implement in the current domain, and getting more robust descriptions should not be terribly difficult.<br />
<br />
I think using our current technologies as a base, we could easily create a simple, elegant, and easy to maintain app store.<br />
<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li>Add reviews, ratings, pictures, and robust descriptions to <a href="http://www.software.opensuse.org/">http://www.software.opensuse.org</a></li>
<li>Add a 'cart' to the domain, where a user could select multiple software packages for installation. To 'check out' with this cart would prompt the domain to generate a YMP with all the packages selected previously, installing all of them akin to our Multimedia One-Click.</li>
<li>Refine the search function to more easily search by descriptions or meta tags vs. the current search which works best for specific package names.</li>
<li>Create a small browser window (probably using <a href="http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/qwebview.html" target="_blank">QWebView</a>) which would exclusively display the domain, and allow the download and opening of a YMP.</li>
</ul>
<div>
In this solution we create an interface that would be intuitive and user friendly to any new user, without having to make any changes to our package management stack or having to maintain especially complicated software. Also, since most of the 'app store' would be running on web standard technologies it would be highly maintainable considering the massive volume of developers who have web experience and knowledge.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Of course we can later add a number of social functions such as Facebook and Google+ integrations. We may also find it useful to tie in an authentication system tied in with the social desktop. But for core functions, this is not even remotely necessary.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwSDj4s4H3wxzoYLb0wRJE51LGtSGjMr9Zc0B5lekOgA1kydfyi2uqEMdmAJe_kUV1tTm2OinuwBBCh0kIMRxVKjxl2-mV3CY8rNrztnYDOuqwfon-OJLcUViRh-vRk7vka01YBVzN4PA/s1600/AppStore.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="194" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwSDj4s4H3wxzoYLb0wRJE51LGtSGjMr9Zc0B5lekOgA1kydfyi2uqEMdmAJe_kUV1tTm2OinuwBBCh0kIMRxVKjxl2-mV3CY8rNrztnYDOuqwfon-OJLcUViRh-vRk7vka01YBVzN4PA/s320/AppStore.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Rogerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06200716217216892767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2655185601578905958.post-63404015100567042742013-06-04T19:21:00.000-07:002013-06-04T19:21:19.771-07:00YaST is being rewritten in Ruby; Geeko gets a nosejob<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
For those not intimately familiar with <a class="g-profile" href="http://plus.google.com/117995526672632131792" target="_blank">+SUSE</a> and <a class="g-profile" href="http://plus.google.com/110312141834246266844" target="_blank">+openSUSE</a> , it bears mentioning what YaST actually is. YaST is
our administrative control panel, composed of numerous modules for
Software Management, User Management, Partitioning, and a variety of
other tasks. It has interfaces implemented with <a class="g-profile" href="http://plus.google.com/114139219146791168347" target="_blank">+GTK</a> , <a class="g-profile" href="http://plus.google.com/104580575722059274792" target="_blank">+Qt Project</a> , and a
command line interface. The command line interface is particularly
nice in the case that you are running a server without a graphical
environment, or if for some reason your graphical environment is not
working. YaST even powers our very advanced graphical installer,
providing us with power and stability during the install process that
I haven't seen any other distribution able to replicate. WebYaST brings the power of YaST to remote administration, allowing you to
remotely administer your machines from a comfortable web-based
graphical interface.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
For a couple of years now I've been
hearing rumors about YaST being switched to <a class="g-profile" href="http://plus.google.com/103356462068155467049" target="_blank">+Ruby</a> from the proprietary
YCP language. However, up to recently I haven't stumbled across any
substantiating evidence. Fact of the matter now though is that it is
happening, and the next openSUSE release may even use the new Ruby
based YaST.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Firstly though, why bother? It after
all does work, and quite well for that matter. There are numerous
reasons why this transition is being made. Firstly, YCP is a language
developed explicitly for YaST development, and thus the only people
who know it are YaST developers. This cuts out many people who would
otherwise be able to contribute to it's continued evolution and
maintenance. But why Ruby? Other similar (and inferior in my opinion)
tools are usually written in <a class="g-profile" href="http://plus.google.com/107826054989536826392" target="_blank">+Python</a> . Largely this is due to the
simple fact that SUSE has many proficient Ruby developers. But, Ruby
in it's own right is an excellent choice due to it's simplicity,
flexibility, and the rapid development it enables. Also, it bears
mentioning that WebYaST is based on Ruby, and so this would enable
tighter integration and remedy duplication of effort enabling the two
implementations to share more code.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The new Ruby implementation is being
worked on by SUSE developers in Prague. It appears they are using a
code translation scheme as the starting point similar to what <a class="g-profile" href="http://plus.google.com/101300081691995092351" target="_blank">+Xamarin</a> used when they rewrote the <a class="g-profile" href="http://plus.google.com/104629412415657030658" target="_blank">+Android</a> OS to use Mono. The new code has
already been used to effectively install and administer an
experimental build of openSUSE, and the developers feel confident of
having it ready to begin integration by Milestone 4 of our next
openSUSE release 13.1.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Personally I think this is an excellent
move, as it would allow us to do more rapid development and
innovation around YaST. Also, it would make YaST more accessible to
other projects that might be interested in using or adapting parts of
it for their own purposes. However, it should come as no surprise
that if it does make it into openSUSE 13.1 it may introduce some new
bugs that could prove a pain during installation or for new users.
Nonetheless, I feel that this is certainly the right direction and
will point us towards a promising future of innovation with YaST.</div>
</div>
Rogerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06200716217216892767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2655185601578905958.post-79583325060206373132013-05-01T12:45:00.000-07:002013-05-01T12:53:09.977-07:00Review of Fluendo Codec Pack and DVD Player in openSUSE with Gnome<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<a class="g-profile" href="http://plus.google.com/108213228493410942737" target="_blank">+Fluendo</a> aims at improving the global multimedia experience in the Free Software world by funding, developing and maintaining the <a class="g-profile" href="http://plus.google.com/110201924620994857561" target="_blank">+GStreamer</a> media framework and providing a wide range of commercial and free products on top of it.<br />
<br />
For this test I did a clean install of <a class="g-profile" href="http://plus.google.com/110312141834246266844" target="_blank">+openSUSE</a> 12.2 with the <a class="g-profile" href="http://plus.google.com/108054458791366257368" target="_blank">+GNOME</a> 3 environment. I endeavored where possible to only use the multimedia applications included as part of our Gnome 3 pattern. So for most things I've used either Totem or <a class="g-profile" href="http://plus.google.com/110444269026162604658" target="_blank">+Banshee</a> which both use the GStreamer framework, which is what the Fluendo Codec pack is for, and what their DVD Player is based on.<br />
<br />
The Fluendo codec pack promises superior playback capability with hardware acceleration. It certainly delivers an overall better multimedia experience. As I mentioned I have endeavored to keep a minimal install. Typically I have found Banshee to be glitchy and unpredictable. Though I knew Banshee was a darling media player for many, I hadn't the least idea why. However, after installing the Fluendo Codec Pack the way Banshee works is inexplicably better, and I to have become a fan. Also Totem (which is usually a steaming pile of $%!^) behaved much better with the Fluendo Codec Pack. Overall, my opinion on purchasing this would be this; whether you need it or not, the refined playback and compatibility make for a more enjoyable multimedia experience under Linux with less fuss than other means.<br />
<br />
Unlike their Codec Pack, the Fluendo DVD Player was disappointing. Now, it does play DVD's, and plays them beautifully. However, I have found a few cases where disks that should have played, simply didn't. The interface leaves much to be desired. It is not suitable to new users since in order to use this software properly you'd need to have at least an elementary understanding of how devices are depicted in the Linux filesystem. I found that most of the configuration options that were shown either were unresponsive, or broken to the point of being unintelligible. There has been an update fixing that now, though the usage of the software is still ridiculously complicated. Bottom line is this; get it if you watch a lot of DVD movies, and know how devices are shown in a Linux filesystem.<br />
<br />
Interesting sidenote: <a class="g-profile" href="http://plus.google.com/115823676160926767554" target="_blank">+Novell</a> holds a license to redistribute these. I think they were going to include them in <a class="g-profile" href="http://plus.google.com/117995526672632131792" target="_blank">+SUSE</a> Linux Enterprise Desktop, or maybe try making a home desktop.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<a alt="Complete Set of Playback Plugins" href="http://www.fluendo.com/shop/product/complete-set-of-playback-plugins/" style="background-color: white; color: #339933; cursor: pointer; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-decoration: none;" title="Complete Set of Playback Plugins"><img alt="Complete Set of Playback Plugins" src="http://www.fluendo.com/media/img/intro_complete-set-of-playback-plugins-off.jpg" style="border: 0px; cursor: pointer;" /> </a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"></span><a alt="Fluendo DVD Player" href="http://www.fluendo.com/shop/product/fluendo-dvd-player/" style="background-color: white; color: #339933; cursor: pointer; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-decoration: none;" title="Fluendo DVD Player"><img alt="Fluendo DVD Player" src="http://www.fluendo.com/media/img/intro_fluendo-dvd-player-off.jpg" style="border: 0px; cursor: pointer;" /> </a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"></span><a alt="Fluendo MP3 Decoder" href="http://www.fluendo.com/shop/product/fluendo-mp3-decoder/" style="background-color: white; color: #339933; cursor: pointer; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-decoration: none;" title="Fluendo MP3 Decoder"><img alt="Fluendo MP3 Decoder" src="http://www.fluendo.com/media/img/intro_fluendo-mp3-decoder-off.jpg" style="border: 0px; cursor: pointer;" /></a></div>
</div>
Rogerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06200716217216892767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2655185601578905958.post-86642583755872544312013-02-15T21:32:00.002-08:002013-02-15T21:32:13.411-08:00Easily install Steam for Linux in openSUSE<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Gamers and Linux enthusiasts have been all abuzz about <a class="g-profile" href="http://plus.google.com/113796640741816471268" target="_blank">+Steam</a> for <a class="g-profile" href="http://plus.google.com/109995262342451767357" target="_blank">+Linux</a> since it was announced by <a class="g-profile" href="http://plus.google.com/109939756516951661656" target="_blank">+Valve</a> . On Valentines Day <a class="g-profile" href="http://plus.google.com/110673779464308469683" target="_blank">+Valve Linux</a> celebrated its official release with an update and a spectacular sale of Linux titles at 50-75% off regular retail price. This sale is good through the 21st of February.<br />
<br />
Thanks to the hard work of our community members, our very own installer has been added to the Games community repository. This installer primarily fetches the archived binary provided by Valve and installs it transparently without any needed user interaction. It installs like any other package in openSUSE. This link will take you straight to the page in <a class="g-profile" href="http://plus.google.com/114569615797299390351" target="_blank">+Open Build Service</a> ; <a href="http://software.opensuse.org/package/steam" target="_blank">Steam for openSUSE</a>. Simply use the "One-Click Install" and get ready for an amazing gaming experience.<br />
<br />
I've been playing with the Steam client in beta for a while and had previously been unimpressed by its frequent freezes and failures to launch my games (I acquired the keys through my <a class="g-profile" href="http://plus.google.com/103555773917939181320" target="_blank">+Humble Bundle</a> purchases). However, as of the 14th (Valentines Day) the update pushed by valve fixed all these complaints, and i'm very pleasantly surprised and can see myself being a very happy Steam user for years to come. I would certainly recommend to anybody to go ahead and give Steam for Linux a try. My only complaint to date is how very few of my Linux titles I purchased (and have Steam Keys to) have been ported to Steam. I hate having a myriad of installers putting things in odd places, and would prefer to use Steam for all of my proprietary games. Hopefully this will only be a brief matter of time until it is resolved.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/GLMdfhitgW4?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
My "commercial" showing how easy it is to get Steam for openSUSE</div>
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For those of you whom are less familiar what Steam is, it is far more than a mere marketplace for games. It provides DRM (bear with me) for the games, allowing you to run the games on any device you own (I assume they are willing to allow that due to the way Steam DRM works). It also provides integrated forums, guides, and social elements making it easy to connect with your friends and find people to play with. Of course, there are also the famous Steam sales, where you can get amazing titles for a fraction of normal retail. If you are worried about the freedom implications of Steam and its games and DRM, you may be interested in <a href="http://news.techeye.net/software/richard-stallman-pours-cold-water-on-steam" target="_blank">this article with musings from Richard Stallman.</a></div>
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Rogerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06200716217216892767noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2655185601578905958.post-41501338503581266332013-01-24T19:53:00.000-08:002013-01-24T19:53:17.688-08:00Run over by a truck.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
As promised I got back in to writing, and pumped out a few articles. You might have noticed a lull in my posting recently. Well, I got hit by a truck. Seriously, not joking. On the 13th I was visiting with friends and went to go get something from the nearby grocery. I crossed one half of the street, then waited on the median to see how the traffic was so I could cross the rest of the way. As typical I step out a bit to make sure drivers can see me, and the two approaching cars slow down. I proceed to cross, and suddenly notice the SUV hasn't stopped and it was too close and too fast to react. After tumbling through the air for some while I landed on my back, in the middle of the street. Assessing the damage I realize that I wasn't too badly hurt... except for the bones protruding from my right leg.<br />
<br />
I spent a little over a week in the hospital. They implanted metal rods into the fibula and tibia as opposed to casting it. I prefer the rods since I think that'll make things more usable quicker. So now I have to be pushed around in a wheelchair, or hobble about with a walker. The latter I can't do very much of at this point. I imagine I'll be more mobile in about a week.<br />
<br />
I've had some articles brewing. Among them you can anticipate the following:<br />
<br />
How to make Gnome 3 act more like Gnome 2 simply using extensions.<br />
Crossover for Linux vs. WINE, is it worth it?<br />
Fluendo DVD player review.<br />
Fluendo Codec Pack review.<br />
Steam on Linux beta review.</div>
Rogerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06200716217216892767noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2655185601578905958.post-76494743271542371862012-12-31T17:09:00.004-08:002012-12-31T17:09:54.067-08:00openSUSE 12.2 Review: an Immaculate Conception<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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When I first updated my computer to 12.2 I wasn't all that
impressed, but that was apparently due to having used the live
upgrade via 'zypper dup.' Earlier today (December 20th) I got fed up
with some of the anomalies and accumulated mess of my system, and
decided to reinstall. Quite frankly, though the 'dup' process had
(for once) gone without any real problems, this was clearly the right
decision to get a proper impression of our latest release. In short,
I'm quite impressed.<br />
<br />
This may very well be the most polished experience I've had since
I used Macintosh OSX. Refinements and polish show all throughout the
system, from the moment you turn it on up to doing your work. For
that matter there is even a couple of notable changes to the
installation process itself. Besides the freakishly fast loading of
the installer (or live environment) enabled by the transition to
systemd, there is the nice fact that writing a DVD image to USB flash
media (via ImageWriter or using the 'dd' method on the CLI) no longer
requires you to run isohybrid on the ISO any longer. One annoyance
though, is that a bug I had experienced in 12.1 persisted into this
release also. That being where it fails to select kernel-firmware
package for installation, which is vital to the functioning of my
Broadcom WiFi card using the brcmsmac driver. If I recall though,
that is a problem with udev.<br />
<br />
Upon boot we are greeted by the much prettier interface of the new
Grub 2 bootloader, giving us the option of booting openSUSE normally
(or Windows if you dual boot) and 'advanced options' for openSUSE,
which leads to another page with the usual failsafe booting option.
However, I've yet to discover how to manually enter boot options and
at this time assume that it can't be done. The YaST Bootloader module
has been refined and support for Grub 2 is fully present.<br />
<br />
Once we are past Grub 2 we are promptly greeted by Plymouth, the
elegant successor to Splashy the splash screen. An elegant green
background with the openSUSE logo superimposed in the center stand
solidly while the animated activity of white whisps meander about the
logo. These whisps gently float about drifting gradually towards the
center of the screen before suddenly converging just below the logo
into one orb of light, indicating the transition to your login screen
or desktop in the case of autologin.<br />
<br />
With autologin disabled, Plymouth gently segues us into the login
screen. Very little has changed here, excepting the slightly improved
graphical performance. Above the user selections within the window,
the openSUSE logo has been placed. I've found this looks a bit garish
on smaller displays, but is a nice touch for those with larger
displays than my little netbook provides.<br />
<br />
In similar fashion, the transition from login to desktop is gently
handled and has a more elegant temperament than previously. Gnome
shell has not changed in appearance at all, but has however become a
bit more responsive. The graphical effects, such as the transition to
the activities dashboard or the ripple effect of the upper left hand
corner are noticeably smoother. As I've used the Gnome system and its
application suite, everything feels quicker and more responsive
though there aren't too many major changes to the applications that
are immediately noticeable. One notable change to the shell however
is the inclusion of more options to set up in the 'Online Accounts.'
Now, we have Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Windows Live. Setting up
your Google account works as before, and the only functionality so
far of the other options is setting your IM accounts in the Empathy
framework. Below I shall elaborate upon the more notable changes of
the system with emphasis on the Gnome application suite and the
shell.<br />
<br /><br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Shell<br />
<ul>
<li>Identity Menu?<br />
<ul>
<li>Does not set status as online upon login. However when you
open the menu it would indicate that you actually are online. This
looks to be half a bug, with the other a deliberate design choice.
Toggling your status as unavailable then back to available fixes
this.<br />
</li>
<li>Windows Live completely broken. So there is still no MSN
access. Not a big deal to me though.<br />
</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Evolution<br />
<ul>
<li>Correctly set up by Online Accounts, whereas before it was
unstable unless Gmail was set up manually and disabled in Online
Accounts.<br />
</li>
<li>Imap noticeably faster and smoother. In fact the performance
change is dramatic.<br />
</li>
<li>Emails load faster, and are not seriously slowed by
downloading or synchronizing.<br />
</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>LibreOffice<br />
<ul>
<li>Startup is significantly faster, quick enough that I am not
annoyed by waiting anymore.<br />
</li>
<li>Overall behavior is smoother, more responsive, and more
predictable than ever. In short time, LibreOffice since forking
from OpenOffice has shown massive improvements and could reach a
level where it can contend with MS Office on purely technical
merits.<br />
</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Extensions<br />
<ul>
<li>Many extensions are deprecated by the newer shell. However,
most of them have more advanced successors. The Gnome extensions
gallery is getting quite nice.<br />
</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Kernel<br />
<ul>
<li>Performance increase<br />
<ul>
<li>The newer kernel shows off its optimizations for filesystem
I/O. One of the bigger reasons for performance increases is the
much updated compiling stack we use now.<br />
</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Improved hardware support<br />
<ul>
<li>On my netbook I have an uncommon model of touchpad, that up
until this version of openSUSE had never been identified
correctly. Thus, upto now I wasn't able to toggle things such as
“tap to click.” Also, my webcam now works with any app that
uses a webcam.<br />
</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Heating issue<br />
<ul>
<li>My netbook and another AMD laptop a client of mine had
would overheat fairly easily, shutting off. This issue has
noticeably improved as has power consumption. We now have longer
bath life.<br />
</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Nouveau<br />
<ul>
<li>Were it not for games, I would probably not have bothered
to install the NVidia proprietary drivers. The behavior of the
system running nouveau was nearly indistinguishable from the
proprietary. In fact, the desktop with its compositing was
smoother than before.<br />
</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
</div>
Rogerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06200716217216892767noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2655185601578905958.post-11088813382721148892012-12-30T19:16:00.002-08:002012-12-30T19:16:42.500-08:00Thousands of signatures still needed by January 16th to push the US government to embrace FOSS in our schools.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/promote-use-free-software-our-schools-libre-office-gimp-gnu-cash-and-other-gpl-software-which-cost/T1xGw1fZ<br />
<br />
A petition posted to the Whitehouse's website still has many signatures to go before the administration will be required to address it. Which is frankly surprising considering the size and connection of our community, and the importance of the petition.<br />
<br />
We in the Free Software communities know how important Free Software is. It is not merely an abstract freedom, but the various side effects as well. Before I became acquainted with FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) computers were still obscured to me, and esoteric mystery. Granted, I had a more advanced understanding than most, hence why I came to Linux. But it was not until I dove in that I came to really understand computers. Everything from the Object Oriented paradigm to user interface principals finally made sense. The amazing resource of learning that FOSS provides cannot be underestimated, but only underappreciated.<br />
<br />
Our schools in particular stand to benefit from FOSS. The enormous savings to taxpayers, both from the software being free of cost, and not being subject to the faults of Windows and its insecurity is staggering. Further, there is an enormous library of educational software as well as software made for the administration of learning spaces and libraries... all readily available and free of any cost. Finally, as computers continue to become pivotal to our society and the future, it behooves us to make sure that children are learning these technologies. Particularly, the availability of high grade development tools would greatly aide in making affordable programming classes for our children.<br />
<br />
In the words of the petition:<br />
<br />
"Each year our educational system wastes billions of dollars for the
purchase and support of proprietary operating systems and application
software in our schools. The software is rigid and inflexible, opaque
in its design and mysterious to our children.<br />
<br />
We advocate and
propose the gradual replacement of privately owned software with
restrictive licensing in favor of open source alternatives with GPL type
licenses. In as much as possible we should have our students using
software that complies with the definition of free software as defined
by the Free Software Foundation.<br />
<br />
The GNU/Linux operating system,
underlying source code, tools and documentation are readily available to
students already. Their use should be encouraged as the tools and code
are available cost free."<br />
<br />
<a href="https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/promote-use-free-software-our-schools-libre-office-gimp-gnu-cash-and-other-gpl-software-which-cost/T1xGw1fZ" target="_blank">I feel very strongly that we should not stand idly by, but should at the least sign and advocate this petition. </a></div>
Rogerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06200716217216892767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2655185601578905958.post-88109767289393652342012-12-25T17:10:00.001-08:002012-12-25T17:10:10.206-08:00Easily install Dropbox, Skype, and Google Music Manager in openSUSE 12.2<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Quite frankly, the instructions we can usually find on how to install <a class="g-profile" href="http://plus.google.com/115028376437754060789" target="_blank">+Skype</a>, <a class="g-profile" href="http://plus.google.com/103316200298703443962" target="_blank">+Dropbox</a>, and Google Music Manager tends to be obfuscated and unusually complicated. No clue why this is seeing as it is actually drop dead simple. The methods I show here are equally applicable to 32 bit and 64 bit openSUSE 12.2. Due to this simplicity I have decided to include all three pieces of software in one tutorial.<br />
<br />
<h2 style="text-align: left;">
Skype</h2>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Skype is stupidly simple to install. Simply navigate to their website, <a href="http://download.skype.com/linux/skype-4.1.0.20-suse.i586.rpm" target="_blank">download</a> the RPM and install. There is not a 64 bit version, just use the 32 bit one. Our package management will resolve all the dependencies. You should not have to do any prep work at all. On my systems, the PackageKit installation works fine... that is simply select the default action to Install Package from Firefox. If however this does not work, you can simply use Zypper to do the job:</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;">cd ./Downloads</span></div>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;">zypper in skype-4.1.0.20-suse.i586.rpm</span> </blockquote>
Boom, that is it.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhloFrWw0WC_LBNUW96N4eCrzKGEITLWXKbnvZiR63NSaMpvw6yhhHnYxhbXAtBgzOXmrrFoKVKalFKnEfG5sdzfptKAXkIrhfVgS-y3ORywUvRGLjfZNLMwW1L84Xd4TyeFWBYInXi92vv/s1600/Screenshot+from+2012-12-25+16:15:36.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhloFrWw0WC_LBNUW96N4eCrzKGEITLWXKbnvZiR63NSaMpvw6yhhHnYxhbXAtBgzOXmrrFoKVKalFKnEfG5sdzfptKAXkIrhfVgS-y3ORywUvRGLjfZNLMwW1L84Xd4TyeFWBYInXi92vv/s320/Screenshot+from+2012-12-25+16:15:36.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<h2 style="text-align: left;">
Dropbox</h2>
<div style="text-align: left;">
The easiest way to install <a class="g-profile" href="http://plus.google.com/103316200298703443962" target="_blank">+Dropbox</a> for <a class="g-profile" href="http://plus.google.com/108054458791366257368" target="_blank">+GNOME</a> is to use 'Direct Install' from http://www.software.opensuse.org. <a href="http://software.opensuse.org/package/nautilus-extension-dropbox" target="_blank">Here is a nice link straight to the package</a>. Though it says it is the Nautilus extension, it pulls in all of Dropbox as well.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMoKfiqPv41YmMe9Nk1f2pwaU6CLi05lhYwXFCXH8Cohz0o_-Cxmwov-0bi5KVwA5MkygTgSoT2gycVTVxvrfoEWqAAXTpwjtXsuhzIu6sb32EPQt0RPywmrFUEiBpbc8oeSP-R_vEhlA3/s1600/Screenshot+from+2012-12-25+16:45:44.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMoKfiqPv41YmMe9Nk1f2pwaU6CLi05lhYwXFCXH8Cohz0o_-Cxmwov-0bi5KVwA5MkygTgSoT2gycVTVxvrfoEWqAAXTpwjtXsuhzIu6sb32EPQt0RPywmrFUEiBpbc8oeSP-R_vEhlA3/s320/Screenshot+from+2012-12-25+16:45:44.png" width="320" /></a></div>
</div>
<h2 style="text-align: left;">
Google Music Manager</h2>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Installing Google Music Manager is slightly less straightforward, but still very simple. Due to a dependency issue we will have to use Zypper to install it. Simply follow this link to find and <a href="https://play.google.com/music/listen#manager" target="_blank">download the appropriate package for your system</a>. Save the file, do not use the PackageKit installer. Now open up a terminal and do the following.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;">cd ./Downloads</span></div>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;">sudo zypper in</span> <span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">google-musicmanager*</span></blockquote>
Zypper will complain about supposedly missing a dependency. It is not actually missing and will work anyway. Choose option 2, ignoring the problem and installing anyway:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;">Problem: nothing provides qtwebkit needed by google-musicmanager-beta-1.0.54.4672-0.x86_64<br /> Solution 1: do not install google-musicmanager-beta-1.0.54.4672-0.x86_64<br /> Solution 2: break google-musicmanager-beta-1.0.54.4672-0.x86_64 by ignoring some of its dependencies<br /><br />Choose from above solutions by number or cancel [1/2/c] (c): </span></blockquote>
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Rogerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06200716217216892767noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2655185601578905958.post-22443097371641347892012-12-25T15:12:00.000-08:002012-12-25T15:12:40.896-08:00Fully integrate Firefox with elegant new Gnome 3 theme<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
One of the things I love about Gnome 3 is the clean and elegant theme throughout the system. It is unfortunate then that <a class="g-profile" href="http://plus.google.com/107964393728911462914" target="_blank">+Mozilla Firefox</a> has not been consistently themeable to look like it belongs. In the past there was the 'Adwaita' theme for Firefox, but it lacked in a few areas and consistently wasn't updated to keep pace with the version changes of Firefox itself. Now we have ' <a class="g-profile" href="http://plus.google.com/108054458791366257368" target="_blank">+GNOME</a> 17.1' by the GNOME Integration Team. This theme not only delivers a consistent appearance like its Adwaita predecessor, but far exceeds it making <a class="g-profile" href="http://plus.google.com/107964393728911462914" target="_blank">+Mozilla Firefox</a> look like a truly native application within the Gnome environment. Rather than ramble on about it though, I'll simply show you. <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adwaita/?src=search" target="_blank">You can get it by following this link to the Mozilla site.</a><br />
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Rogerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06200716217216892767noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2655185601578905958.post-1498105989557687172012-05-13T17:49:00.001-07:002012-05-17T16:04:14.261-07:00Getting the most of your Gnome Shell with Extensions<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Its no secret that I have become something of a fan of Gnome 3. That being said however there are certainly some legitimate concerns regarding functionality. One unfortunate thing, is that in order to really understand how best to use your desktop actually requires you to do some reading... its not always immediately obvious. I personally don't find this terribly troubling, but I can certainly see how this can frustrate newer users. The other criticism is that Gnome 3 is inflexible and not extensible with applets the way Gnome 2 was. Though this is a legitimate concern it is not an entirely legitimate criticism, simply because it isn't true. On the contrary, Gnome 3 offers an elegant and easy to use extension framework that is more versatile than what applets provide. It should be noted that Gnome 3 being new may not have the extension you had hoped for, but it most probably will given enough time.<br />
<br />
So now I present to you my personal favorite Gnome Shell extensions to address a number of these concerns. I frankly like Gnome Shell, and am thus not terribly interested in trying to alter the appearance or behavior of the environment to ape Gnome 2 or any other desktops. That being said, there are a few things that probably should have been included. You must be using Gnome 3.2 or higher to be able to use the Gnome Shell extensions.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/97/coverflow-alt-tab/" target="_blank">1.Alt-Tab switcher</a><br />
Knowing to use the Alt-Tab application switcher is a quick way to speed up your workflow. However, the switcher in Gnome Shell is just a bit counter-intuitive since it is hybridized a bit. Check the Gnome Cheat Sheet to see if you like the original. If you don't like being unable to switch between windows in the older fashion (the new fashion by default simply lists open applications, then offers what is essentially a dropdown to get to the individual windows) then this extension is for you. A plus with this one, is that switches the behavior to a slick and attractive coverflow design. <br />
<br />
<a href="https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/5/alternative-status-menu/" target="_blank">2.Alternative Status Menu, or how the hell do I reboot!?!?!</a><br />
With the Alternative Status Menu, the need for holding the Alt key is removed. Now you have access to powering off and rebooting in the normal way you would expect. <br />
<br />
<a href="https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/184/network-connections-shortcut/" target="_blank">3.Network Connections.</a><br />
So, often I have had to remove a connection in order to reconnect to a network that has changed in some way. Granted this is probably a flaw with my hardware or the router in question. Nonetheless, getting quickly to network connections isn't as obvious as it used to be. This extension fixes that by adding a shortcut in the networking menu. <br />
<br />
<a href="https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/112/remove-accesibility/" target="_blank">4.Remove the Accesibility Icon.</a><br />
Many people have no use for the accessibility options, and thus don't want the clutter in the panel. This extension removes it. <br />
<br />
<a href="https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/150/message-notifier/">5.Notifications.</a><br />
I like the new way of handling notifications, but if I step away from my computer I may miss them if I don't check that little auto-hiding tray in the lower right. This extension adds a little notifier icon to the panel to let you know you have new notifications and allows you to access them. <br />
<br />
<a href="https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/111/calculator/" target="_blank">6.Calculator.</a><br />
This isn't a lack from Gnome 2, but I like it. Simply start tapping in a math problem in the dashboard overview and see an instantly calculated result. <br />
<br />
<a href="https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/55/media-player-indicator/" target="_blank">7.Media Player Indicator.</a><br />
This extension adds an elegant little controller to your panel when there is an open media player that uses the correct interface(MPRIS2), which is most. This allows you to quickly control your media playback from such programs as Banshee or Rythymbox. <br />
<br />
<a href="https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/130/advanced-settings-in-usermenu/" target="_blank">8.Advanced Settings</a><br />
Add Advanced Settings to your status menu. This will allow you to instantly open the gnome-tweak-tool which is installed by default on openSUSE.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/8/places-status-indicator/" target="_blank">9.Places Status Indicator </a><br />
This adds your home folder into a neat drop down. Its rather like a stackfolder, or the legacy gnome menu Places. Very convenient.</div>Rogerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06200716217216892767noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2655185601578905958.post-63746211504518597052012-04-17T00:10:00.003-07:002012-04-17T00:10:51.710-07:00KDE vs. Gnome<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
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</style> For geeks like us, it can be hard not
to get caught up in the over-enthusiasm and fanboyism of our favorite
technologies. One of the biggest, and perhaps oldest in the GNU/Linux
world is the contest between KDE and Gnome. Now, back in the long
long ago KDE reigned supreme having the lion's share of usership.
Then along came KDE 4, and people ran screaming to Gnome. Now, Gnome
3 has arrived and many people have ran screaming to KDE. This can
tell us a couple of things, the most obvious being that no desktop
environment is perfect. Secondly, as so many of us have moved from
our beloved old to something different and perhaps not beloved, we
have had to come to terms with the idea that ultimately what we once
thought solid fact was really just a matter of taste.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Since I started using Linux I preferred
KDE. I started with KDE 4.0, which was bloody rough... but I saw the
potential and the beauty and stood in awe. Now with the KDE that
shipped in 12.1, I ran screaming. Now, I knew fully well that KDE is
a constantly evolving beast and I was okay with that. I found it was
stable enough to meet my needs and expectations. For me though, I ran
into so many bugs that I had to use something else if I wanted to
stay sane and productive. Not to say that KDE (I believe the version
that shipped in openSUSE 12.1 was 4.7) has gotten worse, but it isn't
unusual for me to run into an awful lot of bugs that are rare for
other people. Indeed, the reports from friends and on forums was that
our KDE was incredible and stable. It seems God thinks I should be a
QA tester.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Right now, I use Gnome 2 and 3 on my
two systems. When I upgraded my 11.4 netbook to 12.1, it was a bad
experience with KDE. I wound up rolling back my system to 11.4. Now,
I saw some serious improvements in some areas that I would certainly
miss, (especially since performance improvements are very noticeable
on a netbook) so when I rolled back, I decided to use Gnome. I
figured also, that I needed to get reacquainted with Gnome anyway in
order to be able to help others who use it instead of KDE. Also, it
had an odd power regression so I wanted the older kernel from 11.4 to
address that issue.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Recently I acquired another laptop. I
bought it off a friend who had a messed up Windows installation, and
hadn't used it in a long time. Part of why I bought it was to have a
machine I could be more risky with, to experiment more with. The
other reason is that it had a 64-bit AMD processor and an ATI Radeon
GPU. These are all unfamiliar territory, so this was a good chance to
become acquainted with AMD, ATI, and the 64 bit openSUSE. Frankly, I
didn't want to go so risky since the hardware is beefier than my
netbook so I opted to use Gnome 3 instead of the KDE that had been so
problematic for me before.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I was a bit reticent about using Gnome
3. I had tried the preview of it in openSUSE 11.4, and found it
comfortable enough to use on my netbook. In fact, it was very
comfortable on my netbook. The final clencher on it, and the
explanation for my reluctance was its trouble with resuming the
desktop environment after suspending the system to RAM. Since I had
rolled the netbook back I got pretty cozy with the Gnome way of doing
things, and figured Gnome 3 was worth another chance. I'm not going
to go too much into that since I have done so in another blog
posting. Suffice to say, I was pleasantly surprised... though not
entirely without some frustration.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
So, KDE vs. Gnome; who will win? Its
irrelevant, in my opinion. Each has their respective strengths and
weaknesses. If you want configurability, you go with KDE. If you want
your DE to get out of your way, you use Gnome 3. Honestly, I'm
personally torn between them. I love the amazing configurability and
the power and flexibility of the KDE environment and its application
ecosystem. On the other hand, I love the clean interfaces and ease of
use of Gnome. Quite frankly though, the configurability of KDE means
that I can easily recreate the Gnome 2 or 3 experience with it. So,
in essence once I feel my issues have been mostly addressed in KDE
then I will go back. But not without having learned a lot, and
picking up many fresh ideas from the world of Gnome.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
A small note. Since I have clients that
I do conversions and maintenance from Windows to openSUSE, I put them
on Gnome. Gnome tends to be a bit more predictable and solid, as well
as slightly lighter on system resources. Though the default KDE
interface looks a lot like Windows, some of its rough edges spook
users and cause me to use more time in maintenance. Plus its
complexity in the options it gives the user can be very intimidating
and confusing to someone coming fresh from Windows.</div>
</div>Rogerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06200716217216892767noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2655185601578905958.post-6820385502528249202012-04-06T22:32:00.000-07:002012-04-06T22:32:24.887-07:00openSUSE guide for Ubuntu users<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
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</style> So since the advent of
Gnome 3 and the Ubuntu spin of that – Unity – a lot of people
have been frantically seeking a familiar refuge. Now as I stated in
another blog I like Gnome 3, but it was a long time coming and I can
certainly understand the reluctance towards it... not to mention
legitimate issues pertaining to your peculiar hardware. As for Unity,
I briefly installed the newest Ubuntu. And I hated it. I can see it
may be good someday, but for now it is alpha level. Sluggish,
unresponsive, not something I would have pushed on possibly paying
users. So now a lot of people are fleeing for KDE or some other more
familiar desktop paradigm. So in this post, I want to basically give
a guideline for those who have landed in our community. One thing I
do recommend is RTFM, please read a little bit of the documentation.
You'll learn so much more quickly, and learn some nice tricks along
the way.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<ol>
<li><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Documentation; We do
of course have other sources of documentation, but these three are
more than enough to get you where you want to go. OpenSUSE is simple
enough you should be able to get along without the documentation,
but I personally would prefer to avoid any potential headaches.</div>
<ol>
<li><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
An excellent guide
for beginners is the Unofficial openSUSE Guide. This guide is KDE
oriented, but still touches on many of the important things in
openSUSE regardless of your preferred desktop environment.
<a href="http://www.opensuse-guide.org/">Www.opensuse-guide.org</a></div>
</li>
<li><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The manuals should
be installed already, and if not can be easily found in YaST. If
they are installed, you'll be able to find them in the location
<a href="">file:///usr/share/doc/manual/opensuse-manuals_en/index.html</a>
which you can simply open in your web-browser. I suggest making a
bookmark so its quickly handy when you need it. I keep mine as an
'app-tab' in Firefox.</div>
</li>
<li><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Gnome and KDE both
have help viewers. In KDE you'll be able to get to it from the
desktop link. In Gnome 3 you'll need to open the help browser from
the activities dashboard, or when on the desktop (not within a
particular application) press F1. Here you'll find plenty of tips
and information so you can get the most out of your new Gnome 3
desktop.</div>
</li>
</ol>
</li>
<li><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Installer</div>
<ol>
<li><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The Ubuntu
installer excels at simplicity... and that is part of its downfall.
That and its instability. Our installer is actually part of our
YaST graphical system utility suite. It is old, but always updated,
and offers many highly advanced options for your installation.
However, it is still simple and attractive enough for anybody with
a smidgen of experience. We have a Live CD, and a DVD for openSUSE.
The installer differs slightly on the two platforms. If you know
your hardware well, use the DVD since it has some more options you
may appreciate. <span style="text-decoration: none;">I want to point
out a few things you may miss, and that I think are particularly
nifty.</span></div>
<ol>
<li><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-decoration: none;">
Additional software and desktop environments are available when
using the DVD instead of the Live CD. On the DVD we ship four
environments easily selectable; LXDE, XFCE, KDE, and Gnome. Rumor
has it that in 12.2 we will also be offering Qt-Razor. You may
simply select one of these, or by using the software management
module you may choose to install the environments side by side. In
order to do the latter, you merely need select for example, the
XFCE 'pattern' and it will install. I will write more on how to
use YaST software management from within the installer in a later
section. If you are looking for an experience more like Gnome 2
with all its comfortable old programs, I HIGHLY recommend using
our XFCE desktop.</div>
</li>
<li><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-decoration: none;">
The partitioner in the installer is the same as used by the
openSUSE desktop itself. This is thanks to the modular design of
YaST and that the installer is itself a module of YaST. Thus, you
get all the options of a full enterprise ready partitioner so you
can cater your installation exactly. This includes such advanced
options as being able to select a variety of file systems to
format with (including btrfs), use Logical Volume Management
(LVM), or even to encrypt your partitions for security purposes
and be able to edit the fstab to graphically toggle special
features of the filesystems.</div>
</li>
<li><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-decoration: none;">
Getting into the software manager from the DVD installer is very
simple. On the final page of the installer 'Installation
Settings,' you'll see a button labeled 'change' below the textual
summary of the changes to be made for your installation. Click
there and you'll see a myriad of options, including 'Software.'
There it is that you may select other patterns and packages, as
well as other desktop environments. I personally will always
select the 'Console Tools' pattern.
</div>
</li>
</ol>
</li>
</ol>
</li>
<li><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
YaST2 is a tool for
administering and maintaining a openSUSE installation. It allows
administrators to install software, configure hardware, set up
networks and servers, and more.</div>
<ol>
<li><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I made mention that
our installer is part of something called YaST. Yet another Setup
Tool (YaST) is in my opinion the heart of what makes openSUSE
unique. Mandriva and Mageia have a similar tool, but it wasn't
built with an Enterprise distribution in mind. And though YaST was
built with the enterprise user in mind, it still manages to be
excellent even for a naïve home user. Part of that is simply the
help button. If you go clicking through the modules in YaST, you'll
always see a help button. And lo and behold it is in fact actually
helpful! It clearly explains what each module and each page of a
module does. YaST is ideal for the new user learning about Linux
due largely to this. YaST is immensely powerful despite being user
friendly, and once again I recommend reading the documentation so
that you can truly grasp the GUI goodness and power that is YaST.
What more, is that YaST gives you a graphical tool to help you
manage and fix issues that Ubuntu would always require you fiddle
on a command line terminal, which is something even I am not very
comfortable with.
</div>
</li>
<li><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Edit GRUB
graphically with the 'Bootloader' module. Often enough I find that
people will have problems with the splash screen, and you can
easily set the VGA mode with this module. Also, this module makes
it easy to add parameters to the bootline in GRUB. All this and
more without having to fiddle with the command line and obscure
text based utilities.</div>
</li>
<li><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Printers and
scanners can be easily and effectively configured in YaST. Frankly,
on the three platforms of openSUSE, Mac, and Windows; openSUSE's
YaST module was the only one that was clear and not a pain in the
rear to get my HP all-in-one configured. All I needed was the IP of
the printer, and I was able to get everything working perfectly.</div>
</li>
</ol>
</li>
<li><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Package management</div>
<ol>
<li><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Yet another YaST
module is our Software Management. Though it is not quite as
friendly as the Ubuntu Software Center, you'll quickly get the hang
of it; especially if you take a little time to read the
documentation. Often people mistake YaST as being merely a package
management tool, but rather that is only one of several modules...
but a notable one indeed.</div>
<ol>
<li><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Adding a new
desktop environment is easy. Simply look for the pattern for the
desktop you want, select and go! In a while, you'll have a whole
and complete new desktop environment to try out and use.</div>
</li>
<li><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
You can browse
through specific repositories in order to find new and interesting
software. I find this particularly handy with the Games community
repository.</div>
</li>
</ol>
</li>
<li><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
We also use
PackageKit to fulfill some functionality, mostly updating. You can
also use PackageKit to install new software packages you download,
such as Google Earth. PackageKit does have a couple bugs. If you
for example need to lock the package for your kernel from updating,
then you will want to deactivate the updater applet since it won't
honor those locks. It will also screw up if you use an external
device as a repo such as a USB drive or the install DVD. It also
occasionally has problems installing RPMs from sources such as
Google. If you find it doesn't work, you can use zypper on the
command line to do it. Simply 'cd' to the directory where your RPM
is, then issue 'zypper in <i>thatrpmthatpackagekitchokedon.rpm.</i><span style="font-style: normal;">'</span></div>
</li>
</ol>
</li>
<li><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Finding more
software</div>
<ol>
<li><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Community
Repositories are quickly and easily added from YaST, without
needing to drop to CLI or even needing to manually copy and paste a
URL. In YaST under Software, simply click 'Software Repositories.'
Once that is loaded, click the button 'Add.' You'll see a list of
options, select the radio button second from top that says
'community Repositories,' and click 'Next.' You'll see a listing of
popular repositories. I usually add Packman, WINE CVS, and Gnome
Extras.</div>
</li>
<li><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The openSUSE Build
Service provides a simple and central place for developers to make
software available, and use our servers to build it with so they
don't stress their home computers. Why this matters to you, is that
it also makes those packages available to you since it
automatically creates a repository and a 'One Click Install.' With
the one click install, it will download a .ymp (YaST Meta-Package)
which will be handled by YaST. This will download and install the
package, as well as subscribe you to the repository so you can get
any updates. OBS also provides packages for many distributions
besides openSUSE.</div>
</li>
</ol>
</li>
<li><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Super User and sudo</div>
<ol>
<li><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
First off, you may
quickly notice that sudo seems broken. In actuality it was
configured that way for security purposes, ones that I honestly
don't entirely understand. If sudo doesn't work, you'll need to use
'su' to drop into Super User or Root. If you just tried sudo,
simply tap in 'sudo su' since sudo will remember your
authentication briefly.</div>
<ol>
<li><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
In Gnome we use
'gnomesu' to invoke graphical applications as the root user. You
can use the hotkey of Alt=F2 to quickly launch programs, or you
may do this via a commandline (CLI) terminal such as Gnome
Terminal.</div>
</li>
<li><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
In KDE we use
'kdesu' to invoke graphical applications as the root user. All the
Gnome instructions apply equally.</div>
</li>
</ol>
</li>
</ol>
</li>
<li><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Support</div>
<ol>
<li><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Forums are the best
place to find support. The gurus stalk the forums that are their
fields of interest and specialty. Plus the more organized format of
the forums help guarantee you won't get lost in a flood of other
requests.</div>
</li>
<li><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Mailing lists are
available, but you may not get the timely help you'd hope for. Your
message can get lost in the sea of other messages. If your issue is
terribly critical, such that it prevents you from using your
computer properly then you can try the mailing list... but I'd
recommend posting to the forums first.</div>
</li>
<li><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
IRC is also
available. If you are using Konversation, the default IRC client
for KDE, it will automatically connect to the appropriate channel.
If you are in Gnome and using Xchat our channel is #suse on the
FreeNode (same as Ubuntu's channel) network. The channel is only
very active at certain hours, so once again forums are a better
choice for support.</div>
</li>
</ol>
</li>
<li><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Notes on our Gnome 3</div>
<ol>
<li><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Themeing browsers
to look native. I personally enjoy a very consistent theme across
all my applications. I like having a total environment that is
consistent and beautiful, and so I was thrilled that finally in
Gnome 3 I could make my two favorite browsers finally look like
they totally belong in my environment. Of course, if you wind up
using a custom theme, then this will not help your desire for
consistency at all.</div>
<ol>
<li><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Chrome/Chromium
requires two different extensions to look right in the Gnome 3
Adwaita environment. Besides the obvious, you'll also want the
Gnome 3 Scrollbars and may like to go into settings and set it to
use the system window titles and borders.</div>
</li>
<li><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Firefox in general
never looks as alien in either Gnome or KDE as Chrome does, but it
still isn't perfectly themed. Until now with the Adwaita Theme for
Firefox. <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adwaita/">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adwaita/</a>
</div>
</li>
</ol>
</li>
<li><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Gnome Tweak Tool,
also known as 'Advanced Settings' is included by default. This gives you access to some toggles, and the ability to change fonts, cursors, and even themes. It may take a little experimentation.</div>
</li>
<li><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I highly recommend
reading through the help browser to learn the workflow of Gnome 3.
Such things as the ability to simply type when in Activities rather
than actually having to enter the search box aren't immediately
evident.</div>
</li>
</ol>
</li>
<li><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Multimedia</div>
<ol>
<li><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Getting multimedia
to all work properly can be tricky. Thankfully there is a One Click
available to take care of your needs, including (limited) DVD
playback. I'll simply point you to the page that will help you
select the one that is right for your needs and system.
<a href="http://opensuse-community.org/Restricted_formats">http://opensuse-community.org/Restricted_formats</a>
</div>
</li>
<li><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
On Gnome the
default music player is Banshee, and the default video and DVD
player is Totem. Totem can be problematic with DVD playback, and
you may find that VLC works better for you as I did. I have had
issues with Banshee being unable to play some radio streams as
well. VLC can be installed via OBS or from the Packman repository.</div>
</li>
<li><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
In KDE the defaults
are Amarok for music, and Kaffeine for video. Amarok has had
stability problems sometimes, so the team has included Clementine
which has most of the features of Amarok but is lighter and I have
found it to be much more stable. I have never had an issue with
Kaffeine.</div>
</li>
</ol>
</li>
</ol>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
In conclusion I hope you
can see that, though we are different... we aren't lacking anything
Ubuntu had. We just go about it differently. No distribution is
perfect, as you no doubt learned. To quote a friend, “every OS
sucks.” The question is in finding one that keeps you happy, and I
hope this brief (not as concise as I'd aimed for) guide will help you
be happy as a part of our community. Welcome to openSUSE, and as we
say (its probably cooler sounding in German) “have a lot of fun!”</div>
</div>Rogerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06200716217216892767noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2655185601578905958.post-28272176536540883732012-04-05T15:23:00.002-07:002012-04-05T15:23:42.538-07:00Realtek Wireless RTL8187B fix for suspending<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Basically the problem I experience was that if I suspended this laptop and resumed it, the wireless would not be available at all. I even tried a couple tricks to kick it active again which didn't work. Finally one of the gurus on our <a href="http://forums.opensuse.org/" target="_blank">forums</a> fixed my problem. Before the fix, I would have to reboot. Which meant instead of suspending, I'd simply shutdown. Thankfully the systemd booting made that a much shorter wait than in 11.4. But now, I can use it normally and am very satisfied.<br />
<br />
As root, you need to create a file named /etc/pm/sleep.d/66_rtl8187. That is to say create a file called 66_rtl8187 without any file extension, and save it to the directory /etc/pm/sleep.d/. I did this using gedit run as root. To run gedit as root simply hit the hotkey alt+F2 and type in "gnomesu gedit". Then simply paste the following and save it to the /etc/pm/sleep.d directory. The code for the file is as follows:<br />
<br />
#!/bin/bash<br />case $1 in<br />hibernate)<br />echo "Suspending to disk!"<br />/sbin/modprobe -r rtl8187<br />;;<br />suspend)<br />echo "Suspending to RAM!"<br />/sbin/modprobe -r rtl8187<br />;;<br />thaw)<br />echo "Resuming from disk..."<br />/sbin/modprobe rtl8187<br />;;<br />resume)<br />echo "Resuming from RAM..."<br />/sbin/modprobe rtl8187<br />;;<br />*) echo "somebody is calling me totally wrong."<br />;;<br />esac<br />
<br />
If I understand the code here, it simply removes the driver on suspending, then reloads it when the system resumes. So simple its no wonder I didn't think of it! LOL.<br />
<br />
This may not work for you as it seems to be a very particular issue with my hardware, but you should be able to adapt the script. If it doesn't work that would eliminate your driver as being the cause of the issue at least. My laptop being a Gateway T1200 if I recall. But if you have similar hardware, this fix may do the trick. I hope you find it as helpful as I did!<br />
<br />
Special thanks to <a href="http://forums.opensuse.org/members/lwfinger.html" target="_blank">lwfinger, </a>our wireless forum ninja.</div>
Rogerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06200716217216892767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2655185601578905958.post-71030836661848848392012-04-04T22:09:00.000-07:002012-04-04T22:09:05.821-07:00Giving 12.1 and Gnome 3 a second chance.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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When I started this blog, I intended to
make it my step by step log of the trials and fixes experienced in
openSUSE so that it may be a benefit to others. However, when I first
tried 12.1 with KDE it was such a terrible experience that I rolled
my machines back to 11.4. But this time I went with Gnome instead of
KDE; since I had experienced some of the speed improvements in the
newer KDE I knew that rolling back would make it seem even worse than
it really was. And in any event, I needed the experience with Gnome
in order to help others. Indeed, I learned the Gnome way and it was
good. Brilliant actually, we have a FANTASTIC Gnome implementation.
But now, I have recently acquired a new (to me) laptop with which to
be a little more risky and experiment on. So, after trying a few
distros I have come back to openSUSE 12.1, but this time with Gnome
3. And I must say, it is fantastic.</div>
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<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
One thing I feared with Gnome 3 was
losing some of the functionality and refinement of Gnome 2 in
openSUSE. In our Gnome 2 we had the special start menu made by Novell
which was quite handy, giving quick and clean access to programs,
documents, and tools. Though of course that menu is not present in
12.1 with Gnome 3, the functionality is not actually lost. In fact,
it looks rather like Gnome 3 got some hints from it in its interface.
Indeed, with just three clicks I can get to YaST, and the fantastic
system monitor that was in the Novell start menu can simply be added
to favorites so I can look at my system and kill tasks that freak
out. As you may already know, that odd vertical dock in the left hand
side of the “Activities” dashboard is called “Favorites.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
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Certainly Gnome Shell takes some
getting used to. Its a very different sort of interface, and is
something of a new paradigm even. When I had tried the preview
version made available for 11.4 I found it fairly comfortable on my
netbook, but ultimately was put off by the stability issues. Now,
that is scarcely an issue. I can of course see a few issues that need
some love, but overall its more stable than KDE was when it shipped
in 12.1. Quite frankly, I recommend taking a look at the Gnome Help
so that you can get a feel for how to efficiently use the interface.
And efficient is indeed the achieved goal. At first of course, it
seems alien... but for me at least I quickly got the hang of the
workflow and found it to be very comfortable. You can quickly take
care of business, and do it in style.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Speaking of style, Gnome 3 delivers.
Elegant, responsive, simple. The latter two are of particular note.
My GPU is an older Radeon that is not supported by the fglrx driver,
and thus can have odd behavior. However, you would never know that I
wasn't running an Nvidia card. Gnome 3 has caught a lot of guff for
its window decoration having only the one button, and indeed this put
me off at first; until I realized a double click or a right click can
achieve everything I need. At that point it occurred to me that it
makes more sense considering how much of what we do on the desktop PC
is achieved by a context click... it makes more sense to extend that
paradigm to all areas.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Now so far I have sung the praises of
Gnome 3. Nonetheless there are a couple things I'd like to see
personally. First on my wish list would be to make it possible to
move the “Favorites” dock to the bottom of the screen. I like
having a good number of things on my dock, and would prefer to not
have dinky icons when I have a fairly large screen. Secondly, I'd
like to see the Gnome System Monitor accessible via the status menu
in the upper left hand corner, by system settings. Thirdly, I'd like
to be able to set more IM statuses from the status menu. Other than
that, this is a brilliant desktop that satisfies my needs, wants, and
does so in style that makes the Mac snobs jealous.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I should make clear mention that
apparently all my bad experience of 12.1 boiled down to the KDE
regressions. Under Gnome 3, I notice several subtle improvements even
over 11.4. With this computer, it has an odd issue that I can't
resume WiFI if it has been suspended, and I must reboot it in order
to reconnect. In this situation I am very thankful for systemd since
it speeds up the boot process by quite a glorious bit. Surprisingly,
Gnome 3 seems to perform just as well as Gnome 2 did. In fact, I find
it is a bit more responsive than Gnome 2 with 11.4 was. Needless to
say, that came as quite a surprise. I know some of this could be
coming from the kernel, but can tell it is as much if not more due to
the environment.
</div>
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<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
So far the only two issues that are not
necessarily hardware specific are the massive issues with Evolution.
I have fallen thoroughly in love with Evolution and am saddened to
see it become only slightly more reliable than the newest Kmail. I
hope this gets fixed. The other issue is oddity with getting my
webcam to work. It worked in Ubuntu (the only thing that worked in
Ubuntu I may add, the whole thing was one polished shit sandwich)
hence why I don't consider it hardware specific.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
If you have been spooked off of Gnome 3, read some cheat sheets and get ready to read the help thingy. You may just like it after all. </div>
</div>Rogerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06200716217216892767noreply@blogger.com14