A Day in the Life of Dorian for 2010-04-22

  • @ddevine #Steam is coming to !Linux… So I guess there is hope I’ll get to delete my XP partition and boot into Linux to play #HL games. 🙂 #
  • @philmacfly @ddevine Here is the second hint http://ur1.ca/wgso We won’t know for sure before a formal announcement. But there is a chance. #
  • @theancientgoat No for sure, nothing is definite until you get your hands on a copy. But it would be sweet. #

A Day in the Life of Dorian for 2010-04-21

  • @khajavi Thanks for mentioning this. I was wondering why #Firefox was doing this, especially since I develop !Java web apps. Time to update. #
  • Sure I feel like I’m just plodding slowly along. But I am going forward. I’ll get ‘there’ someday. -Memoirs of a Stone Tortoise #
  • Just discovered what #LDAP is. Feeling kinda silly, like rediscovering America. But it is brilliant. #
  • Time to sip tea and clear out that inbox. #

A Day in the Life of Dorian for 2010-04-20

  • @damiga Nice… same !kde !linux distro, Mandrake 7.2 for me. Wow, has it really been 10 years already? #
  • OK, one machine setup. Time to take on some code and another setup. #
  • Catching up on all the #shotofjaq shots. When I finish one I want to grab another. Does that make me a Jaqeholic? 😉 #

A Day in the Life of Dorian for 2010-04-19

  • Time to delete the cruft and to backup the data. And then goodbye #kubuntu, hello !opensuse !linux. #
  • @seeds I’ll definitely miss the debs. Not a big RPM person. But right now, for me, the best !kde experience is most likely on !opensuse. #
  • @bigbrovar It better be. The whole distro is coloured green. 😛 #
  • Morning! Busting out the hacking music for a glorious day of coding and sysadmining. And endless coffee refills. #
  • Finally coerced sshd and nxserver to start up together at boot. Set sshd on boot first, then install nx*. I blame nxsensor. !opensuse !linux #

Migrating to openSUSE

If you’ve followed my dents on identi.ca, you may have noticed that I asked people for their recommendations for a good KDE4 Linux distribution.  Well after a bit of thought I decided that I would move away from Kubuntu to openSUSE.  Why the change?

  • KDE4 is the desktop environment that gets all the attention and polish.  Kubuntu is great and valiant effort by the community to bring the Ubuntu experience to KDE4.  However, there is a lot of polish and integration missing that openSUSE provides.
  • A system that supports my hardware. From some weird reason, the Ubuntu kernel maintainers removed a flag that cause my DVD burner not to see CDs.  This is not the case in openSUSE.  I actually tried to burn something off a LiveUSB before installing openSUSE.  Yes, I could of recompiled my kernel with the right flags.  But if I wanted to do that, I wouldn’t have moved off Gentoo to Kubuntu.
  • A system with lots of packages and community repositories. This is why I didn’t choose some of the lesser known distributions.  openSUSE (and Fedora) do a good job at this.
  • A stable system. Fedora does not do that.  The upcoming release of Kubuntu LTS et al, seems to break things.  openSUSE is extremely conservative in this manner.
  • Something I am familiar with. This was not a hyper-important point, but I do like the fact that I’ve used SuSE in the past.  So installing openSUSE is a bit like going back to an old and comfortable place.

And so far I am pleased.  The desktop looks polished, quick and a great KDE4 experience.  All that said there are somethings I don’t like:

  • Configuration is weird. I am not a huge fan of YaST.  It is good, but somehow my brain has gotten used to thinking either configuration files or KDE’s System Settings.
  • Leaving Upstart. Upstart is really, really neat way of dealing with services.  Now I’m forced to think in terms of rc.d runlevels and I’m not a happy bodkin.
  • NXServer installation breaks things. Oh yes it does.  I fought for quite a while with getting my OpenSSH server starting at boot.  It looks like the bootscript for nxsensor (nxserver’s statistics gathering engine) screws up runlevels.  Never ever had this issue in Ubuntu.
  • No DEBs. I miss DEBs,  aptitude and various DEB tool.  I’m hoping that zypper and yast manage RPM dependencies in a saner manner than what I remember from 2004-2006ish.

Somethings I look forward to trying out:

  • How easy updates work. openSUSE 11.3 is in the works, and I can hardly wait until it comes out in July.  I got a taste of KDE 4.4 via a backport  PPA in Kubuntu.  And I want that that goodness, without my system acting weirdish after the update.
  • Easy to do backups. I could not for the life of me setup a decent backup scheme under Kubuntu.  openSUSE provides a backup module right into YaST.
  • Better performance. So far openSUSE feels snappier than Kubuntu.  We’ll see what will happen once I restore all data from a backup.
  • Developing and distributing KDE and Qt with ease. This is a huge one.  I want to get into programming in Qt and enhancing the KDE experience.  I’m hoping that the tools and build system in openSUSE makes this braindead easy.

A Day in the Life of Dorian for 2010-04-16

  • Good night. Wish I could do more, but then again I am human and not a robot. #
  • Duelling with databases again. #
  • Wow. I met a !linux fan where I least expected. Awesome. #
  • Just chatting with a girl I recently met. She surprised me by saying she was a long time !linux user. Not else to see here, move along. 😀 #
  • @tiktook Yes that is right. My wording just totally sucked. 🙂 #
  • @evaryont I never understood why so few ladies use or develop !linux. Plenty of explanations. I guess all of the above contribute to this. #
  • @tiktook I’ve met a few of those too. Lucky for you they ended. You just need to keep on looking until you meet the right one. 🙂 #
  • @evaryont Now I’m starting to regret mentioning it. But at least I got to observe the reaction. #
  • @mkrenz Yeah, I don’t see why it should be a big deal. It should be a bigger deal when someone contributes code, docs, art, etc to !linux. #
  • Sympathizing with female !linux users. Some male !linux users should grow up. Their comments are a black mark on the entire community. #
  • @evaryont No worries. You didn’t mean it and I didn’t expect it. #
  • RT @morpheuz â™» @nferenc !KDE appears in TV commercial http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76gah0FC6mI #