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...