Adventures in openSUSE Linux

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. 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...

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. Documentation; We do of course have other sources of documentation, but these th...

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 forums 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. 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: #!/bin/bash case $1 in hibernate) echo "Suspending to disk!"...

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. One thing I feared with Gnome 3 was losing some of the functionality and refinement of...

Edit    When this was written  +Steam  was not even announced officially yet. Now, it has fully arrived and truly delivers an excellent gamin experience for Linux. If you are unfamiliar with Steam, you should see my other article concerning it.  In the course of my upcoming review of Crossover – which is a proprietary layer on top of WINE designed for simplicity and stability – it would seem I have discovered the holy-grail of Linux gaming. Now mind you, I do not mean to say that running Windows only franchises is the way to go; but it has been in this time period that I have also discovered the rich variety of games for Linux. There is a surprising number of games available for free of course, and some of them are of exceptional quality... though admittedly few. One of the areas proprietary development models excel is in gaming. Thankfully there is a rich library of fun Linux-native titles, as well as a reasonable number of Windows titles that run nicely und...

    For all the hype around Netflix it is easy for us Linux users to forget there are alternatives. Its not that Netflix is (debateably) the best, but rather its the most widely used that causes us to neglect the numerous options that are actually available to us. In this article I want to present some of those alternatives, and how they hold up against Netflix. One caveat however is that I cannot fairly compare the variety and quality of the programming selections of each service seeing as the former is too large to parse, and the latter is inherently subjective.     First off, when we are talking about Netflix we should consider why it is that it is so dominant. The opinions will vary, but I'll present my analysis. Hands down, Netflix has the largest selection of streaming movies, but that is where its superiority ends. Though there are many services, most are either too narrow, too expensive, or lack content; thus I will not cover them since we are lo...

First, I must reiterate that this blog in no way is intended to be explicitly technical or even well organized. Rather, it is meant to be more conversational. So in this posting I'll be stating my impressions now of the recently released 12.1 and some notes to new users. Honestly I have very mixed feelings about this release. But when you consider the complexity of all the things a Linux distribution entails, with all of its technologies and software this should ultimately be no surprise. Likewise with bugs; considering the complexity there will of course be bugs. 12.1 offers a lot of new technologies, very little of which I actually care about or find personally useful. Bugs... it seems like this release is especially buggy. However I don't think that is actually the case, but rather that some of the bugs that have cropped up are just a bit more "in your face" than some other bugs that have cropped up. Some of these I ran into myself, but I certainly can't ign...