Pictures from my recent excursion to Salerno have been published. There's also a series of pictures taken through an aircraft window going back to Amsterdam should that tickle your fancy.

Feel free to go nuts. ;)

It occured to me today that going from the Windows world to the Linux one is quite a leap in mentality for most people. Much has been said about this but I write this now to emphasize the differences I have seen myself.

Generally speaking, Windows is a playground. I used to install all kinds of software I didn't need, just to try it and see if I could use it. Sometimes I would find a use for it, sometimes I would use it no more than ~twice a year. That was a pastime at some point, accumulating software (mostly shareware) was some kind of a hobby. Of course, that wore down and I started just getting stuff I needed. But that initial need to explore software I think had much to do with the lack of opportunity given by Windows to mess around with the system. Of course you have specialized software that tweaks system settings and the registry but what fun is that when you don't know what really happens anyway? And often there's no way to tell either, you see the difference or you don't.

Stepping into linux with that attitude, there were a number of pitfalls I encountered. First of all, reading docs/manuals in linux is *not* time wasted. Reading install documents is actually preempting trouble, I learnt this only after I had tried installing the same software several times not knowing what I was doing or why. I wasn't keen to find out what exactly was going on, I just expected it would work fairly quickly so that I could mess around with it once it was running. Not so with linux, gaining a basic understanding of the install process goes a long way towards solving the problems that come up (well duh). Being a new user (still), I still find it unnatural to dive right into docs and logs but it grows on you. As it turns out, system logs are incredibly useful (who would have thought?). Often dismissed for their obscurity and lack of obvious messages understandable to dumb users, I now begin to realize their value. It is much like learning to speak a foreign language, at first it's all a blur, then you start identifying basic words and phrases. Exactly like reading logs or documentation!

Getting around the system is a big problem, at first I had no idea where to look for what. I suppose I could have read all about the philosophy behind the unix file structure but instead it just became familiar with use (slowly by steadily). Most intuitive is the problem of installing software, where do the files go? Stuff like qpkg really help a lot to track those files. Apart from location, it's also about access control. As a Windows user, I never had to think about gaining access to a file because by default I could access all files. The only exceptions where those really annoying system/driver/trojan dlls that were currently in use and locked on disk. Well linux doesn't operate on file locks, instead you surrender your access rights to the root user. And running as root I think is a very useful learning experience, cause I *really* hated getting those access denied messages all the time as a newbie. Hopefully you won't wipe your / with windows partitions mounted in the process, I have yet to do that myself.

Another thing forced on you is being a lot more intimate with your hardware. This is something I could do without because I've never been a hardware buff. But I've gotten used to it, the first order of business is identifying the hardware and googling for drivers. Sometimes getting those working can be a challenge but most of the time it's worth the effort. In the long run, better auto detection could really help make this problem go away to the casual user.

So those are 3 things learnt from linux:

1. reading docs and logs

2. file structure and permissions

3. hardware awareness

Whoa my first review.. I've been meaning to do one of these for some time but never really had time for it. The new Suse 9.1 Personal edition has been out for a couple of weeks and it makes a good test subject. The distro is, of course, free of charge, you can get the iso here. I chose Suse because it always seemed like a distro with a lot of promise. I tried v8.2 a few months ago and I was a bit disappointed with some things even though I was generally pleased with it.

The installation is a no brainer, it's Yast all the way and it looks better than it used to. It will, of course, auto detect most of your hardware, it missed my Intel Centrino 2100 wlan card but that's known to be a tricky one. The software selection dialog was a bit poor, I couldn't find gnome in there anywhere for one thing. But all in all it was a successful process and Suse was installed while I watched an episode of "Scrubs" (what else? ;)).

Ok so Suse is pretty complete, you get an office suite, the Yast control panel and a full KDE installation. You also get a selection of productivity/multimedia apps like acrobat reader, xmms, real player, cd/dvd burning tools, a tv viewer and kaffeine (a xine wrapper). The problem is installing software not already included. In fact I haven't quite figured out how to do this. When I start the Add/Remove apps dialog from Yast, I only get to browse software on the install cd, does that mean they don't want you to have anything else? One of the first things I want on a new system is mplayer but it's not found in the Yast installer so you probably have to do it yourself. I consider it a big flaw to cramp the user's freedom like that and coming from a Gentoo mindset, I have every right to.

Suse has xmms with mp3 support. It also has xine with the kaffeine wrapper but without divx codecs which is a shame. I tried playing my new "Last Samurai" dvd in xine but alas it has no support for playing dvds either. On the upside, Konqueror does have flash installed but sadly it's also the only browser available by default. I also find it curious that given your software selection during install, YOU (Yast Online Update) still "recommends" you install a bunch of stuff you'll never need. For instance, it recommends ppp and isdn tools, which I have no use for at all.

One point of flattery is the software that *is* included. Real player is a pleasant surprise, I also like the way the nvidia drivers and truetype fonts are packaged. Suse can't include them by default because of licence restrictions, so instead they prompt you to accept the licence and install the software if you want those things.

Another positive thing is the auto detection of my monitor. The refresh rates were detected and I was prompted to select the resolution I wanted. Unlike many distros, Yast gives you the option to input a custom resoluton (given that mine is a bit uncommon being 1680x1050), which means you don't have to mess with /etc/X11/XFConfig. So far, in fact, I've only had to use the command line once, that being to mount another filesystem. Speaking of mounting, Suse comes with submount, which means cd/dvd media are supermounted (to use that expression) on input.

My printer was also detected, by all means it should be, it runs on cups with broadcast so it's easy enough for others to pick up the trail but nonetheless it works fine.

One thing that still bugs me about Suse (a throwback from earlier versions), is how bigass the fonts are even though you have a respectable resolution. I set mine to 7pt Verdana in kcontrol to battle that problem. I'm thinking it's the screen resolution set too low but I can't seem to find the location to set that myself.

Although Suse is decidedly KDE biased, you do get the gimp and gtkam, both of which are quite useful so that's a plus.

To wrap this up, the new Suse has seen some improvements since the previous version and it certainly looks nicer. But the main point of criticism still stands and say what you will about licencing, users will still point it out everytime. I want a bigger selection of software, most of all I want a way to install mplayer and video codecs, because that is what I need. The point is that if you don't find everything you want among the software provided, getting that software (which is still free) is a question mark. It shouldn't be.

It's been a while now since Firefox 0.91 was released. Now I don't normally pay that much attention to the releases because I've already tried the browser a bunch of times in the past and it just doesn't cut it for me. But I was reading this article on osnews.com, comparing Opera and the new Firefox. It was shown in such a positive light that I decided to try it myself.

As it turns out, Firefox is faster than ever before. Both on loading and page rendering, but especially the latter. In fact, it's so much smoother now that I don't even need Adblock to kill flash ads because they render just as quick as images. :strong: The new default skin is improved, extensions are easier to install from a new website and it's less buggy installing themes and extensions. Much less buggy! :cool: So going by that article, I installed all the extensions the author had plus a couple of my own and I'm very satisfied. Up to the point that I've decided to switch to Firefox as my default browser. :party:

On the downside, Firefox has very limited customization settings, because they menus are bare bones. But to make up for it, the url about:config will, of course, give you all the familiar Gecko settings to play with.

Theme:

• Doodle (Plastik)

Extensions:

• Session Saver
• All-in-One Gestures
• Single Window
• Dictionary search (can't live without this now)
• Adblock

Well I finally got around to upgrading the blog. Nucleus had been released in version 3.0 since last time, mine was 2.0. Then I discovered Blog:CMS which is a clone of some kind, decided to go for it as it has a bunch of neat plugins. :party: Well maybe not, I use very few of them and the one thing I have been looking for (song of the day) is not among them. :lazy:

I also found out there would be a lot of hacking involved, mainly css, as the default skins were not all that pleasant. :wallbang: So after two days the blog looks somewhat acceptable and I don't have it in me to do anymore.

EDIT: wohoo, got a "now playing" plugin installed and working :party: