InfiniteTides

In my never ending quest for making minor tweaks and small improvements to my Linux experience, I decided I should add the OpenSUSE 11.1 KDE 4 factory repository to my repo list and use it to update my install.  When I ran the online update, after “fixing” the few conflicts that popped up, I found that I had 2 GB of updates.  It’s going to take all morning to download and install these updates.  When they are done, I understand that there’s a risk that my install could possibly be messed up in some way.

So for the rest of the morning, I’ll be sipping on coffee and catching up on episodes of Stargate: Atlantis.  I can’t help but believe that in some alternate reality, some other me has something better to do.

It took some hair pulling (my own), some arm twisting (OpenSUSE’s), and some persistence, but I’ve finally got OpenSUSE 11.1 running flawlessly on my HP Pavilion.  At first my screen resolution was set to something ridiculous and sound didn’t work at all, but I found a fix for it on the OpenSUSE forums.  Right now I’m installing video codecs.

Josh will be happy to note that I’m running the KDE desktop, and I’m liking it even more than either Windows XP or Vista because it’s not a resource hog AND I can have widgets.  It’s nice to have the current weather and a graph of my wireless usage always visible.  The fact that I can resize both icons and widgets easily is also a big selling point for the KDE 4 desktop.

This is by far the best OpenSUSE experience I’ve had, and I’ve used several versions since 9.something.  If you’re like me, someone who wants to delve into Linux, but not too deeply, just enough to get your feet wet, OpenSUSE 11.1 is the one you want.

Have a lot of fun!

Something on my Linux install is breaking Thunderbird and making it crash at random times.  I’m running OpenSUSE 11.0 with the KDE 4.1 desktop.  Perhaps there is something going on in the background causing the Thunderbird crash, but I can’t figure it out.  I’m tempted to start downgrading parts of KDE, but I’m hoping someone else in the community sorts out the problem and it gets fixed soon.

In the meantime, I probably just won’t open Thunderbird to check my email.  Logical?  No.  Easy?  Yes.

Yesterday afternoon, I successfully upgraded my OpenSUSE 10.3 install to 11.  The upgrade went very smoothly once I realized that I needed the full DVD instead of the live CD that I had accidentally downloaded due to OpenSUSES’s craptastic download page.

Since I was already using KDE 4, I haven’t really noticed any big changes.  In fact, everything pretty much looks and feels the same on my desktop.  The only glitch, and it’s a minor one, was that VLC player somehow got uninstalled, or at least could not be found.  One nice change is in the software management/update screen in Yast.  It now shows the progress in scanning the repositories.

On the negative side, the upgrade installed the OpenSUSE build of Amarok.  This version is somewhat crippled, and I had a lot of problem while trying to listent o podcasts with it.  They sounded fine for about 10 minutes, but then turned to pure static with no obvious errors reported.  So I installed the Packman version, and have not had any problems since.