Author: Matthias

openSUSE fan

I have these linux habits which are hard to control and recently I discovered a new one while working on my windows box at work.

You know you’re a

  • linux fan when you type ‘ls’ every time you mean ‘dir’
  • KDE/KWin fan when you try moving/resizing windows with the alt+mouse buttons

    • and now, here it comes.. 😉

  • openSUSE fan when you type ‘net suse’ instead of ‘net use’

I needed 3 tries before I got it right! 🙂

4GB tuning

By default, on a 4GB 32-bit system, windows only gives 2GB to the application. To increase the amount of total user virtual address space, edit your boot.ini and include the /3GB option. With the /USERVA you can tweak the amount between 2 and 3 gigabyte. So you can not allocate more than 3GB for applications.

Furthermore, you must relink your application with the /LARGEADDRESSAWARE option to make use of this ‘4GT’ feature. You can also modify an existing binary by using editbin.

source: MSDN

Opera 9.5 released!

Yes, finally I will be able to use the latest flash player again in Opera on linux. 🙂
For me personally, the highlights in this release are:

  • Support for latest flashplayer
  • Even faster
  • Revamped mail backend. Might wanna reevaluate the newsfeed fetching performance. (It had become unacceptable with 50+ feeds)
  • Builtin bookmark syncing
  • HTML 5 support
  • Dragonfly: web dev tools

Read the full changelog here.

openSUSE forum

first thing one does, when getting stuck on a problem with openSUSE is google it up. If nothing turns up, check the bugtracker. No luck? Check the fora. Yes, this is where the pain starts. Until recently, there were, like, 3 fora or something where you had to look up and create an account if you wanted to add a remark, ask a question. They finally combined forces and merged them all and made them even official! That’s great news I believe. Having a single point of access for support questions is really important, even more for early adopters. With openSUSE 11 right around the corner, the timing couldn’t have been any better!

of course, you can always join the #suse IRC channel on freenode if you’re a more chattive type of person 😉

AVG 8

I have been a long time satisfied user of Grisoft’s Antivirus suite, for my parent’s computer actually. What’s important for me is a good configurable email scanner and a fast on-access scanner. Until 7.5 AVG seemed OK in those aspects. However, last week, I upgraded AVG 8 as I thought this was just a regular upgrade. Little did I know they vistafied the crap out of (or rather in) it. The interface is dumbed down so you always need to use the advanced options menu. They added some bloat features like the link scanner[1] and antispyware stuff. But worst of all: it slows down the entire system! When even my mother complains the system has slowed down since the upgrade, you can be sure it is a remarkable slowdown 😉 I am guessing this must be a bug, maybe it does not occur on all systems. I can’t believe they would make such a jump downwards. In the meanwhile, I am looking for alternatives. Avira’s Antivir seems quite okay..?

[1] fortunately, you can remove this feature through a custom installer command

why openSUSE 11

As you might have guessed by the countdown on the right, I’m anxiously awaiting the opensuse 11 release. IMO, the revamped package management system will be THE killer feature. Not only will it have the fastest dependency solver on the planet, by using lzma compression (cfr. 7zip) it will have smaller file sizes yielding even faster installs!

Even though this release will be a .0 release, I will be eagerly upgrading as every time I install new software / patches, I am reminded how fed up I am with 10.3’s package system. This is my only complaint about openSUSE 10.3! They claim it should not be a problem for average users with not much repositories. So now I know: even on linux I’m not a ‘normal’ user. 😉 (which was confirmed by a suse guy @ fosdem looking at my repository list ;))

9 days to go, mmmmm 🙂

Google Reader shared items

A few months ago I started sharing items through google reader. It saves a lot of time if you just want to share some link you obtained through some rss feed, so you don’t need to create a post for that.

Tonight I noticed Google launched some kind of integration layer for that. So from now on, you can see my recent shared items in the sidebar. 🙂 It looks like the “read more” link actually provides a separate RSS feed which you can subscribe on if you don’t use Google Reader.