[CLUE-Tech] Impressive, Green One

[Nate Duehr]

On Tuesday 06 July 2004 21:44, j7s12b wrote:

> I got Novell's Technical Resource Kit (TRK) a week ago or so
> in the mail. I installed it right off.

I'm still waiting on my copy.  I'm interested in playing with Groupwise here 
at the house.  (Yeah like I'd ever get to use anything but Exchange at 
work... riiiiight.)

> I have to say, I was both surprised and impressed.
> After 6 years of Red Hat, Mandrake, Red Hat, and
> Fedora (in that order) I regret not having given Suse
> serious consideration before.

Me too.  I was a cheapskate.  This afternoon I almost bought a SuSE 
Professional box set at MicroCenter just as a "thank you" for how nicely this 
stuff works.  Of course, I have no idea if YaST has always been this 
high-quality software it appears to be today... but it's definitely working 
great on the laptop.

> The install was as nice as I have ever heard it was.

Absolutely.  I like how they autodetect everything, but if you want to you can 
click on individual areas and make changes.  Set up for laziness, but 
tinkering allowed/encouraged.  (GRIN)

> It is very usable from the start. Even updates were
> available from within the install. Sweat.

That was nice.  All OS's should have security patches available during the 
initial installation. 

> It is graphicly very pleasing and well laid out.

Agreed.  And when they do "obviously" modify something with a theme it's just 
to add a little green lizard.  I do have this odd feeling the GEICO gecko is 
staring at me from my desktop at times, however.  ;-)

> They didn't puss out on the mp3 playback issue
> like RH/Fedora. That really irked me but I bought the
> RH install cd's anyhow.

This one never bothered me, but it's a "complaint point" for a lot of newbies.  

Along the lines of stuff "not installed by default" due to various people's 
legal concerns, I did enjoy some of the stuff linked from that article - 
packman.links2linux.org to be specific - for SuSE.

> Yast rocks, I wish I had that before.

It's kinda what I always envisioned RHN to be trying to be.  Not trying to be 
negative about RHN, but it's just more polished.  An example, I 
force-installed a couple of libraries after fixing some symbolic links by 
hand, and YaST complains the first time you run the online updater, but like 
most user interfaces nowadays you get a nice warning, a clickbox for more 
details on what it thinks is wrong, a checkbox for "don't warn me about these 
packages in the future", and the ability to keep going without just bombing 
out completely -- the error handling just seems more robust than the RHN 
stuff... (No offense to the pythoneers here, but watching RHN and up2date 
barf out "Traceback innermost last" just always struck me as very "amateur" 
on RedHat's part... at least wrap the error handler in something that will 
display it to the user in a nicer fashion!)

I'll always be a died-in-the-wool fan of dselect/apt for servers, but YaST is 
pretty darn nice for a desktop machine.

> The version the TRK shipped with has a very nice
> complement of packages.

TRK?

> There are a lot of other good points. I have a few not
> so good points too. Im sure there are simple fixes for
> these but I haven't had the time yet.

What have you run into.  Here's my (very small) whine-list:
- Hardware autodetection always asks me about my manually configured monitor 
X/Y size values during every reboot.  (It's offering to let me "set them 
manually" but they're already set, in a way that X is happy with this 
widescreen LCD and it works.  This is one of the only dialog boxes where I do 
NOT have a "ignore this error and don't tell me about it again" checkbox, and 
would like one.
- ALSA/Sound was borked up until a minute ago.  Now it's great.  Sounds nice 
too... the speakers in this cheap laptop really aren't bad at all!
- No one has written up any docs on running Linux on this laptop (eMachines 
M2105) anywhere I can find.  (Heh, I guess that would be MY problem to solve 
now, wouldn't it, if I'm going to be a good member of the community.)
- Kmail's default keyboard commands (so my hands don't have to leave the 
keyboard) are different from every other GUI-mailer I use... so I either have 
to dork around with it and change it to match or get used to it... or wimp 
out and keep reaching for the touchpad.
- Synaptics touchpad is a bit squirrelly in X where it's not in Windows.  I 
hear there's a kernel patch for the 2.6 series for this problem, but haven't 
hunted further.  (This makes the Kmail thing more than a minor annoyance when 
the cursor decides to have a mind of its own.  It appears to be related to 
the kernel message that says this model of Synaptics supports multiple 
finger-presses.  I can hardly cram one fat finger on to this thing... who out 
there is using two fingers on a touchpad?!)

> The network fails to start on boot (cable modem/comcast)
> I have to issue "/etc/init.d/network start" to get it up.

For this laptop I set the network NOT to start eth0 at all during boot, and to 
only start wlan0 if the card is detected by hotplug.  I was impressed that 
the "use hotplug" was available as a simple checkbox and it required no 
manual tweaking of config files anywhere.

Then if I do need the wired ethernet I just issue an ifup eth0 command either 
for DHCP (by default) or a I go twiddle with the settings.  Linux in general 
still really needs work here... WinXP's ability to just figure out whatever 
networks are available and offer to use them is at least one magnitude better 
than any Linux distro manages to do "out of the box"... yes, I know there's 
good stuff out there that can be added that will do this... it's just "not 
there yet" for out of the box installs on Linux, and probably should be.

> On-board sound is still a pain in the rear. I have to re-adjust
> the levels in the alsa mixer after a logout or reboot to hear
> sound. I hate on board sound.

I'll have to see if my settings "get lost" during a reboot.

> Unless I stumble upon a good reason not to, Im thinkin
> of migrating all my home systems to Suse.

I will end up leaving the servers on Debian... but SuSE for the laptop/desktop 
is definitely something I would recommend to any friend who asks about 
distros at this point.  It's been a pleasant experience.

Have you played with ACPI for suspend/hibernation type stuff yet at all?  
Suspend works "out of the box" apparently so far on this laptop... but I 
haven't tested it extensively yet.

> PS.
> There is one thing that really gets under my skin. Spell
> checking under Linux. The thing that bugs the cheese and
> rice out of me is that our own dictionary don't contain
> common every day Linux terminology. WHY THE HECK
> NOT? For example, the following words in this email are
> not in [a|e|i|o|u]spell or what ever by default;
> * mp3
> * init
> * init.d
> * distro
> * alsa
> * Suse
> * Athlon
> * cdrw
> * dvdrom
> * sd ( I can see this one not being there)
> * Yast

I wouldn't want my spell checker to catch any of those, none of them are part 
of the English language!

> I guess its my own fault for noticing it but not fixing it.
> Maybe if someone collected up peoples ~/.aspell's and
> ~./ispell's we could put together a package. Call it glexicon.bz2 ...

You'd find "heh" and "Nate" in mine for sure.  ;-)