DRM - Daniel’s Random Mutterings

I just upgraded my main PC from SUSE Linux 10.0 to openSUSE 10.2 and I must say that I’m very pleased and very impressed.

Overall, the update went pretty smoothly. There were a few hiccups at the beginning, when the package manager complained about installation conflicts and wouldn’t go away and let me continue the installation even though the conflicts had all been resolved (all I was left with was an empty window with an “OK - Check again” button). After another reboot and restarting the upgrade procedure, this problem didn’t come up again and the installation from the DVD completed smoothly.

The most noticeable new feature, probably, is the new KDE start menu. This makes a very good first impression. Everyday work will have to show how useful it really is (or if it gets in the way a lot). The “Search” feature at the top of the menu is a huge relief. No more clicking through menus, submenus, folders, etc., looking for that elusive system tool you just know is in there somewhere. The customizable favourites menu, providing quick access to often-used applications can also speed up your day-to-day work.

As is to be expected, openSUSE 10.2 comes with a whole bunch of updated packages. A current KDE (3.5.5), OpenOffice 2.0, Firefox 2, Thunderbird 1.5.0.8, and ever so much more. They’ve updated the package management and system update system to the ZENworks system.

Post-Installation customizations

After any operating system installation, there’s a lot of fiddling until the system really fits and feels comfortable. In this way, installing a new operating system is a lot like buying a pair of new shoes.

On previous SUSE versions, I was nevery really pleased with the font rendering. Somehow it never quite looked right. After having my 10.2 running, I migrated my Windows fonts over and adjusted the font settings, following the HowTo “Optimal Use of MS TrueType Core Fonts for a KDE Desktop on SuSE” from the openSUSE site. I also adjusted the Firefox font settings in the userChrome.css underneath ~/.mozilla/firefox, adding the following configuration:

* {
font-size: 11px !important;
font-family: sans !important;
}
menubar, menubutton, menulist, menu, menuitem, textbox, toolbar, tab, tree, tooltip {
font-family: helvetica !important;
font-size: 11px !important;
}
window {
font-family: helvetica !important;
font-size: 11px !important;
}

I’ve now got crisp and clear font rendering in all my KDE applications and in Firefox. The whole system is visually very pleasing and easy on the eyes.

Adding multimedia

openSUSE comes without several proprietary third-party libraries — most noticeable is the lack of MP3 and video playback support. Following Jem’s Hacking openSUSE 10.2 guide quickly sorted that out, though. I’ve now got better multimedia support running than I previously had under SUSE 10.0. So far, every file I tried plays. AVI or MPG Movies, MP3, etc. all just work! I’ve got my little idiosyncrasies; for instance I just cannot make myself like Amarok or Kaffeine. For MP3, I still prefer XMMS and for movies I use the KDE frontend to MPlayer. Thankfully, I have that choice.

Graphics drivers

After a few failed attempts, I managed to install the nVidia drivers for my GeForce card using the “manual” installation process of downloading the driver file from www.nividia.com and doing a “sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-1.0-8776-pkg2.run“. See this Novell HowTo for a step-by-step guide. Installing and activating the RPMs via Yast2 just didn’t work. It’s probably my fault.

Going for 3D

Once I had that working and glxgears confirmed that I had the OpenGL acceleration running, I wanted to experience Xgl and the 3D desktop environment. The recommended tool for enabling Xgl support did not want to recognize my nVidia graphics adapter — it didn’t even recognize that there was 3D acceleration available and refused to enable the desired 3D desktop effects. Since I was pretty sure the nVidia drivers were working, I edited my /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager and changed the DISPLAYMANAGER_XSERVER setting to “Xgl”.

After restarting X and KDE, I’ve now got the Compiz window manager running, with neat semi-transparent window decorations. Also, 3D desktop effects are running very well and without any recognizable performance impact. Just rotating the virtual desktops on the desktop cube is a pretty cool effect. I also like the auto-switching feature, where the desktop cube automatically rotates when you drag a window against the screen border. I haven’t yet explored all the available features. I’d definitely recommend experimenting with the 3D environment, since it can be a real productivity boost for someone like me — I’ve always got lots of windows running on all my desktops. The quick zoom/switch feature is an excellent way for quickly switching between all the active application windows.

One thing I haven’t manage to get this thing to do, though, is give me more than four virtual desktops. I told the gnome-xgl-settings tool to give me six, but it ignores that setting. So for the time being I seem to be stuck with four.

What’s not to like?

I’m not yet convinced I really like the new Beagle desktop search feature. First of all, I’ve always got that niggling suspition it’s wasting huge amounts of disk space for its index. What’s worse, though, is that the Beagle indexing daemon was constantly thrashing my hard disk and was quickly becoming extremely annoying. So for the time being the mutt had to go. I’m sorry, but I just don’t want my system constantly accessing the hard disk and wasting 30% memory on an indexing activity that I don’t think I’ll really need.

What’s next?

The default Python version on openSUSE 10.2 is Python 2.5. I’m going to have to investigate how to get that back down to 2.4, since my trogger portal uses Python 2.4 and I don’t feel up to updating the hosting server, but I also don’t want to develop with another version than what’s on the production server.

After that, I think I’ll tackle Kontact, the KDE PIM suite. I used this in earlier versions and it never really grabbed me. I read somewhere, though, that the more recent versions have made a lot of improvements. With a bit of luck I can even sync it with my Nokia 6230i. Keep your fingers crossed.

Tags: opensuse; linux

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 12th, 2006 and is filed under Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.