[Lancaster] Hello (& The Basement)

[Dave Smith]

Evening folks,

Not a whole lot to report here either I'm afraid.

Started the new job at work which has kept me pretty busy but also gave 
me a new laptop to play with... :)

First thing I did was to remove Vista and finally cave in to Ken's 
praise and give OpenSuSE 11.0 a try - albeit the Gnome version as it's 
what I'm used to and the KDE 4 disc that I had just didn't seem polished 
enough (KDE 4.0 rather than 4.1 - not the OpenSuSE Team's fault by any 
means!).

Where to start? Well, to be honest, I won't actually say too much as I'm 
hoping to do a more thorough review of it as I'm running it on my own 
personal laptop, but from a work perspective, I'm afraid to say it 
didn't last too long.
It was very nice, extremely well polished, and detected everything I 
could hope it would 'out of the box'. However, I just couldn't settle 
with it as a work machine once I started running updates. The first 
issue I encountered was the installation of the nVidia drivers.
The installation was good, quick, and easy, and certainly enabled all 
them fancy 3D Whizz-bang graphics the kids talk about today but... it 
seemed to break my GDM. As in, I couldn't find any simple way to 
reinstate it. Even booting into terminal and trying the manual startx 
method failed. Most odd.
I also ran into some strange stability issues which, personally, I'm 
putting down to the laptop hardware being new and shiny. Occasionally 
the thing would just hang up, and the VirtualBox install had a similar 
habit.
Could I have persevered? Of couse I could. But this was a work machine 
and, frustrating as it might be I needed something I felt I could rely 
on. So I went back to what I knew and installed Ubuntu 8.04 on it. So 
far, none of the stability issues SuSE experienced but, like I say, I am 
more than happy to put that down to both my errors and the laptop 
hardware itself - I have by no means given up on SuSE, which is why I 
will write a review of it soon(tm) on my older T41.
One thing that did make me wonder is that it seemed to suffer the same 
DNS Resolultion issue that Debian did, under my home network, but worked 
ok at work. My guess is that I need to rework my dedicated Firewall / 
DNS box rather than letting my Netgear modem do it. No such issues in 
Ubuntu though... *shrug*

As to the positives about SuSE...
1) It looks GREAT. Seriously. Green is good.
2) Installation was a breeze. I didn't accept it's recommendation to 
resize my Vista partition, but it was nice to be asked.
3) Yast has come on a hell of a long way since the last time I played 
with it (SuSE 9 I think..?).
4) It was lovely to be in something with a 'proper' root user again, and 
is a solid reason why I will persevere with it on the personal laptop.

Anyway, besides that, nothing much.

Andy: As regards the Basement idea - it sounds brilliant. I'd definitely 
be happy to help contribute to such a scheme if / when it gets up and 
running. I honestly can't say at this point quite how much free time 
I'll have to get down there, but I'll do what I can!
Keep us posted on the list as to how ideas progress / anything I can 
help with - unfortunately I won't be able to make next month's meeting 
as I'm going to be on holiday, but anything I can do remotely I'm happy to!

Best,

Dave


Wayne Ward wrote:
> Hello its all quiet on here anyone been doing anything interesting
> Ive just spent a few days messing with a gentoo install with kde 4.1.2
> Worked splendid apart from it has the same bug as ubuntu studio
> when you install the accelerated nvidia drivers the machine cocks up bigtime!!
> So im back on 64studio which works a treat!!!!