Dear me! Writing to you from work, running openSUSE. Tomorrow, as you know, I’m heading to Zaporizhzhia for five days for some unknown exam session, so I’m rushing to share my impressions from the front line. So, I finally installed SUSE on a proper real machine. What I liked: Wine was already installed there, and the SUSE disc offered to install itself via autorun, registered itself in boot.ini, and after a reboot — set itself up. It’s really great that the DVD comes packed with tons of stuff, and the KDE graphics don’t need to be compiled or pulled manually. By the way, I also installed GNOME — in my favorite Radio-T podcast the brave Mac guys bobuk and umputun praised it so much that I couldn’t resist taking a look at what it’s actually like :) On the downside — KDE is already at version 4.2 or higher, but the disc only has 4.0. I’ll look into how to update (I’ll mention in passing that so far I’m liking KDE 4). Special thanks to the German SUSE team for proper localization. The software is translated (only a few gaps noticed in YaST so far), keyboard layouts work out of the box and even switch the Windows way, which I’d already gotten unused to (Caps Lock is much more convenient). Now I need to check Bluetooth, hibernation, and graphics (the last one I can’t quite figure out how to test yet — probably install Counter-Strike under Wine). The machine has an onboard NVIDIA GPU, so everything should be fine. One unresolved question remains: the large partition on the hard drive. Since three systems will live here — Windows, openSUSE, and BSD (I’ll start with PC-BSD, which recently released version 7, and if I don’t like it — I’ll install FreeBSD) — I’ll probably have to format it as FAT32 so I can write to it from all systems (I have long and painful experience with ntfs3g). On that note, I say goodbye, shut down, and run. Coming up in future episodes: - connecting a proper monitor to X — will it detect that it got a 22"? - Russian filenames on flash drives and SD cards - burning discs from Linux - connecting a phone: Bluetooth and syncing the address/phone book - 3D in Linux — is Wine really as good as I think it is
Also coming up: installing openSUSE on my existing Toshiba Satellite L300 laptop (with Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, a webcam, blackjack, and hookers) and sharing opinions as things unfold… Until next time, dear me, my dear friends and readers, and all the other robots who have accidentally wandered in here.