[Lancaster] Hello (& The Basement)

[Ken Hough]

On Monday 20 October 2008 21:35, Dave Smith wrote:
> 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... :)

And it's not yet Christmas!

>
> 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!).

I opted to use the stable KDE3.5 rather than the newer KDE4.

>
> 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.

Ouch!

> 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

Funny, I had stability issues with Ubuntu 8.04.

> 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*

Can't comment on this, except to say that my PCs access that internet via a 
Netgear DG834GT ADSL/ethernet/wifi router without any problems. Most of my 
PCs use the DHCP service of the Netgear box.

>
> 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,

I will be very interested to hear about your experiences of 'shrinking' your 
Vista partition. On my new PC, using the Vista disk management tools, I was 
unable to reduce this below approx 360GB, ie half of the total disc capacity 
of 750GB!

> 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..?).

Oh yes!!!

> 4) It was lovely to be in something with a 'proper' root user again,

That's one of the reasons that I don't like Ubuntu.


> 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.

Agreed, but not living locally, I doubt that I could provide much support.

> 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!

Holiday already? That must be a great jog that you have found.   :-)

Ken

>
> 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!!!!
>
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