Leave it alone

Ok, I need to leave my SUSE 9.2 install alone. Being the geek I am I can't leave my install alone. Instead of doing homework yesterday I was messing with SUSE trying to get apt packages to work along with Synaptic, here's how if you're interested. Back to my majorly unproductive since installing linux, I don't remember being like this with my first Win95 computer back in 1996, maybe because I really didn't have anything important to do other than playin Mechwarrior II.

There are still a couple of niggles keeping me from going full linux. I still have to many instances where things don't always work the same way twice. This morning my DSL connection decided not to initialize, sometime it's my wireless intellimouse 2.0 not being found when I boot. These things really don't bother me much but I can imagine it being a pain for some users.

Package management, or installing programs for us Windows users, is very slick. It consists of finding repositories of software, which you add to a lookup table of sorts, etc/apt/sources.lst I believe, enter the URL of the repository update it with an apt-get update and your set. Say I want to install GAIM, a freeware trillian like app that combines all IM clients into one. I simply open a command line as root and enter apt-get install gaim, it doesn't get any easier than that? I still have problems with the graphical interface for apt-get called Synaptic sometimes it hangs and is unresponsive when I launch it, so I'm still using the command line. The slick thing about Synaptic is that you can browse applications by category and such, with apt-get, as far as I know, you have pretty much know what you want.

So thats why I'm unproductive with linux, it's just cool to install stuff with apt-get! It takes care of all the dependencies, other programs and libraries it needs, automagically. Unlike .rpm packages which require you to hunt for the dependencies.

I'm still having issues with the following:

Monitor Resolution
Wireless mouse (probably going to return it)
iPod syncing with Amarok
Syncing my Dell Axim Pocket PC
Belkin Bluetooth adapter

Linux thoughts...

After getting the laptop squared away with Xandros, I decided to start experimenting with my desktop.  Remember earlier in the month I was considering jumping to the MacOS, because I was tired of doing the Windows song and dance.  Linux has a couple of things going for it:

 

-          It's free

-          Excellent support

-          Free software

-          Easy to install (depending on distro)

 

I spent most Saturday and most of Sunday finding and installing various distributions of Linux.  I tired Vida, Unbuntu, Xandros and finally settled on SUSE 9.2.  If there's any advantage to Windows, it's compatibility with a majority of the hardware out there.  Linux's compatibility is nothing to sneeze at, but it's nowhere near Windows.

 

I couldn't get sound working on VidaLinux, Unbuntu would hang every other reboot at the hot-plug module.  Xandros would hang loading modules, which is weird since it was so effortless on my laptop.  I had just setup SUSE 9.1 Saturday night when I got the urge to upgrade or rather wipe it out and install SUSE 9.2.  The upgrade failed, for some reason my keyboard got screwed up during the install.

 

I'm now happily dual booting WinXP Pro SP2 with SUSE 9.2 and couldn't be happier.  I'm going to give it a trial run this week by doing all of my homework assignments on it with Open Office 1.1 to see if I can get any real work done on Linux.  It shouldn't be any problem since I have full access to Windows partitions under SUSE.