Adventures in openSUSE Linux

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. 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 (v...

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/promote-use-free-software-our-schools-libre-office-gimp-gnu-cash-and-other-gpl-software-which-cost/T1xGw1fZ 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. 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...

Quite frankly, the instructions we can usually find on how to install +Skype , +Dropbox , 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. Skype Skype is stupidly simple to install. Simply navigate to their website, download 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: cd ./Downloads zypper in skype-4.1.0.20-suse.i586.rpm Boom, that is it. Dropbox The easiest way t...

One of the things I love about Gnome 3 is the clean and elegant theme throughout the system. It is unfortunate then that  +Mozilla Firefox   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 ' +GNOME   17.1' by the GNOME Integration Team. This theme not only delivers a consistent appearance like its Adwaita predecessor, but far exceeds it making +Mozilla Firefox look like a truly native application within the Gnome environment. Rather than ramble on about it though, I'll simply show you. You can get it by following this link to the Mozilla site.