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.

BSG news flash

I was just having another look at the airing start date for Battlestar Gallactica season four and was pleased to finally see some lift-off. 🙂 But I made another shocking discovery: it seems prior to season 3 (which I am watching right now), there was a series of official short webisodes filling in the gap between season 2 and 3! Not that nothing major happens there, but you know, it’s scary to know you would actually have missed a second of battlestar’s gallacticness. 😉

Anyway, of course, when you want to view this outside of US of A, you get a nice message telling you it’s not allowed. Luckily, we can always count on a few friendly americans to share all the goodness. 🙂

Awareness test

WordPress

I’m not exactly a WordPress fan although, yes, you noticed right, this blog runs on it. 🙂 I’ve been experimenting with (and implementing) Drupal for a while now and believe it is my web platform / framework of choice, no doubt. If I would ever upgrade / reimplement my blog, it will be Drupal. Although, maybe I would not recommend it to a newbie. It remains a fact that WordPress “just works” out of the box for blogging as it was targeted for that job from the beginning (although Drupal should improve on that issue by grace of install profiles). So, if you just want to blog, wordpress is still a valid alternative and with its latest incarnation (v2.5) there’s even more charm added too it. See it for yourself.

PS: it seems my own wordpress coppermine gallery plugin is now officially deprecated 🙂 I never took time to write something up, so I should probably even better refrain from it now 😉