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!

Although I haven’t told Stacy yet, her notebook seems to be not long for this world.  I’m afraid of what her reaction will be when I tell her that her shiny little Dell Inspiron E1405 is kaput.  It looks like her hard drive is dying.  Every time I try to re-install Windows XP, I see the dreaded BSoD.  CHKDSK can’t even complete without erroring out.

I’ve nearly given up because I can’t get past the bad sectors on her hard drive.  Even installing OpenSUSE won’t work, because of the defects on the hard drive.

My friend (jeez, did I just call her a friend?  I must not be awake yet.  I mean “co-worker”) Stacy gave me her notebook yesterday at work.  She’s been getting the BSoD (blue screen of death) out of the blue (pun intended), and wants me to take a crack at fixing it.  On my dinner break I booted up and found that she had not properly installed the video card drivers, so I did that.

Optimistically, I called her at home and told her that I thought that might have fixed the problem as I hadn’t seen the BSoD.  She was happy to hear it and asked if I would still take it home and install Linux for her.  This morning, however, the BSoD struck again while downloading an anti-virus program.  The video card drivers hadn’t fixed the problem.  Right now, I’m running CHKDSK.  It has found 2 errors (corrupt data) on the hard drive, and seems to be stuck at 66% of file data verification for the last hour.  That’s normally not a good thing.

Stacy won’t be happy to hear it, but I think her hard drive is defective.  There’s no point in trying to install OpenSUSE on it like she wanted.  She’ll need to replace the hard drive if she hopes to sell the notebook and buy a new one.  I suppose I should start pricing hard drives and notebooks for her since that will probably be the next thing she asks me to do.