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