Author: Matthias

opensuse 11.0 to 11.1 upgrade story

I am always a bit reluctant to upgrade instead of just install because it is a much less tested use case and there is always the conflict between your own preferences and new defaults: who has precedence? But an OS should be meant to be upgradable, right? I know, most people are not confronted with the issue since Windows isn’t exactly what I would call an good example of an upgradable OS 😉 Linux users are much more confronted with the upgrade issue since most distro’s put out at least one release a year. I always give the upgrade a shot, but most of the time I also do a new install just to know how the new release was meant to be conceived. 😉

So here is my upgrade story for my laptop: it’s a Dell D830 with Nvidia Quadro NVS 140 and Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 3945ABG.

The upgrade procedure itself went smooth although I never really know if I have to enable more repositories or not when asked. The upgrade will by default only take the default suse repo’s into account. So I left it that way, but it could explain a few issues I ran into later..

Anyway, after the upgrade reboot, I don’t get a graphical login screen.. I run sax2, and this fixes the issue, but nvidia driver is not used. So I add the nvidia repo from the community repository list. I see there is now a new driver “G02” instead of the “G01” I used to use. So I mark this package for installation, but some dependencies fail.. I don’t know the exact list anymore, but one of them was related to the kernel, which surprised me as I just upgraded (but I did have the jengelh realtime kernel installed before I upgraded).

Something was odd with the package management.. and I also got an error that updates could not be found because no backend was configured. what the..? So next thing to do, was configure the online update. When I tried that, it wouldn’t work because “SSL negotation failed”. This definitely smelled like a bug, so I filed one and it has already been confirmed by a suse employee by now.

So I added the update repo manually (although I had read about the new smolt integration and would’ve loved to register my system) and configured the new updater applet (kupdateapplet, which supports packagekit) to use the zypper backend which I first had to install manually (kde4-kupdateapplet-zypp). Finally some updates were found, but the new tool failed to install the patches (have to file a bug next time patches are issued) and asked me if I wanted to use yast instead. Funny how they anticipated problems there. 🙂 Using yast, there was no problem of course. The smolt update even triggered a proper nvidia install without dependency problems.

Having updated, after I relogged on, the nvidia driver was effective and remembered its configuration from before the upgrade. Since the version was now called G02, I had high hopes that this would incorporate all the fixes NVidia addressed in their beta drivers to get rid of the KDE4 desktop effects performance problems, but alas, it seems this is still beta. I might want to install the beta driver after all, I’m tired of the bad performance. 😉 My ATI radeon 9800 PRO in my desktop performs better! Although I have to admit, even the stable nvidia drivers seem to have received a few improvements the last few months.

That’s it for now!

New google reader – render problem in opera

Whether you like the new look or not, it seems there is an issue with long feed names being wrapped at the icon position which wastes valuable space (read my problem description and support request here). The day after, I already received a fix from an Opera employee 🙂 very simple, just use the following user css file:

.scroll-tree .name {
padding-left: 0 !important;
position: relative !important;
left: 17px !important;
}

If you are unfamiliar with user css: right-click on the page and edit the site preferences. In the display tab, point the “my style sheet” to the relevant user css file. Make sure “my style sheet” usage is enabled in Preferences->content->style options->presentation modes->author mode->my style sheet (also more easy accessible through manage modes under the style mode button on the extended view bar if you use that).

Setting a process’ processor affinity in linux

Sometimes, people like me like to run stuff on a dedicated cpu instead of using all available cpu’s. The key to success here is this nifty tool: schedtool. Unfortunately, I didn’t find it anywhere in suse’s package database, nor the build service (if you know a repo or util package, please let me know).

But don’t worry, I guess nobody cares to make a separate package as it is such a small util. Just download the source from the website and make/make install (configure isn’t even needed).

Then, to run a process, in this case a dir listing, on CPU0, use:

schedtool -a 0x1 -e ls -la

-e specifies the command to execute
-a is followed by a bitmask in which each bit represents a CPU.

I have found that somehow it is best to always use the hexadecimal notation, even if your number is less than 10.

Opera 10: it’s unbelievable

Opera 10 seems to bring ground-breaking news for people using Opera Mail. It seems they finally got hold of the resources needed to implement the 2 most asked features ever! Behold:

  • Rich text email composition
  • Remove mail from server after X days

Can you believe it??!! After all these years of denial? I for one surely didn’t see that one coming. 🙂 Read the full changelog here.

Kiki the nanobot

Kiki always reminds me of a friend I know since childhood who somehow got stuck with the nickname kiki. 🙂

Anyway, kiki the nanobot is not to be confused with my friend. It is an open source 3d puzzle game, or like the author states: “basically a mixture of the games Sokoban and Kula-World“. A colleague recommended me to try it out. I was a bit reluctant as it didn’t seem to support linux, only windows and mac were mentioned on the website. Which was quite awkward as it seemed to use python and sdl.

So today I decided to find out the truth about kiki and checked out the cvs head. 🙂 I was delighted to find a linux subdir with a readme, yes, there were even makefiles! I installed the prerequisites (dev packages for python, sdl, sdl_image, sdl_mixer) and was ready to go! I did have to adjust a makefile to point to the right python headers (why not use the general /usr/lib/python instead of /usr/lib/pythonX.X?) Then, everything built just fine. Kiki’s core is in C++, levels and configurable parts are written in Python, bridged using SWIG.

Kiki the nanobot seems like a great puzzle game although it could use some polishing here and there, but given its age (6 years!) and the timeframe in which it was developed (3 months, for a contest), I think it’s quite an achievement. 🙂 You can read a dev post-mortem here.

Kiki the nanobot

AVG antivirus makes another mistake

Since AVG8 had a terrible performance on my parent’s computer, I am very glad now I moved to another AV soft as it seems AVG is suffering a major bug right now which causes your windows to stop working! Note that this problem is not affecting all versions, but guess what, Dutch is one of the affected ones!

In the meantime, I have switched to Avira Antivir, but that didn’t last long either as there came nasty popups about potential threats which scared the hell out of my mom, only because she was using the free version instead of the professional one. Also, it doesn’t have an email scanner.

So, currently, they are running Avast Home edition. It comes with a whole lot of crap (‘advanced’ antivirus shields) which you will want to disable. You might also want to disable the automatic checksumming of every file on your box, because obviously it generates a lot of I/O, especially when you don’t want it.
But it does automatically reroute pop3 and smtp connections so email traffic gets scanned automagically without any configuration (which is a relieve in comparison with AVG where you have to configure it manually if you don’t use M$ crapware like outlook). There was one catch, as it seems your free download version ‘expires’ after 30 (?) days, unless you register it. No problem, registration is free. It seems you have to reregister every year in order to be able to keep using it. Sounds fair enough to me: if you keep using the AV soft, it means you’re satisfied, so why not let them know you are using it by registering it for free.

It kinda reminds of this funny article, in which one argues Windows should become Ad-ware. 🙂 I sure woudn’t mind using an adware version, as long as I can play my games full-screen. 😉

Numa is back!

That’s right our favorite e-lebrity Gary Brolsma is back! =) Not as funny as the first one, but still, you just gotta love this guy 😉 Note, that he’s not really on a come-back, just in a day dream 😉

It’s funny though how a whole merchandise has emerged around this guy, going from ringtones to t-shirts to cartoons, the whole marketing shebang. 🙂

He also did a contest with some real hard cash prizes to win and it can be entertaining to watch the results. 🙂