Yamaha SY85 Keyboard For Sale

I've just listed a Yamaha SY85 Workstation Keyboard for sale on ebay. Want it? Go and bid huge amounts for it then, so I can afford to buy a big rock for my fiancée to be!

Hello Planet SUSE

I'm now syndicated on Planet KDE and Planet SUSE - the second person to appear on both planets. Does that make me an interplanetary blogger or something? Anyway, I thought it was about time another KDE user appeared on Planet SUSE, since it was starting to look a bit like Planet Gnome/Ubuntu recently! I'm currently downloading the third beta of openSUSE which should be done by the end of the weekend. I've had a few more of my bug reports fixed since the last beta, so it should be one of the easiest distros to install on my laptop by the time I'm finished with it.

openSUSE beta 2

Two and a half days of bittorrenting, and I have the five installation CDs for openSUSE beta 2. Very pleased to see a whole slew of my bug reports have been closed since beta 1 - including extra animation in various splash screens which helps you know the computer hasn't crashed when it's sitting there looking like it's doing nothing. And KDE is now listed first in the choice between KDE and Gnome, which is an improvement, although if my Dad were installing openSUSE he would probably still phone me up at that point because he wouldn't know which one is the right one to choose.

The wireless card still didn't work - the typo I found in the ifup script is still there, despite being reported as fixed in bugzilla. Perhaps they didn't fix it in time for the new beta. And I found another typo which caused my WEP key to be ignored. (I have to use WEP so my Symbol Pocket PC will work on the network).

But now it's all up and running and it's very nice. Looks like it'll be enough to keep me sticking with SUSE for another few years. I mean, there's not a lot different from old SUSE on the surface - some nicer graphics and stuff like that. But I think there is some hardware configuration that goes on differently, since I have everything working on my laptop now and I only had to fiddle with the wireless. And on the final version even that should work. And their version of KDE is close enough to a clean install to not annoy me.

(What's up with blogger and planet KDE? If I post a message I get slashes and chevrons at the end of my paragraphs. So I'm having to use the Edit HTML version of the story poster. Which is also rubbish, because if I leave blank lines it adds extra paragraph tags to my html code. Yuk!)

When Linux Is Mainstream

I had a horrible thought the other day: If Linux becomes a mainstream desktop operating system, will people like Canon and Nokia start producing horrible skinned featurelight applications for Linux to work with their hardware? And when they start doing that, will the Linux hackers stop making nice integrated solutions because there are alreay solutions which just about do the job?

And then I had a nice thought: Perhaps third party vendors will start producing nice integrated KDE applications which do things the KDE way. Which would be very nice.

openSUSE

I downloaded openSUSE a couple of nights ago - set my work machine to download on our new two megabit line overnight, and had four ISOs ready and waiting in the morning. Last night I swapped out my laptop harddrive and installed openSUSE on the spare. I love the new graphics during boot and install, but the most of the install process doesn't seem to have changed that much - except for offering KDE and Gnome as choices, instead of defaulting to KDE. It didn't explain to a newbie what the difference was though, and why they really should choose KDE rather than Gnome (evil grin).

During the installation I made a list of eleven bugs, usability issues or enhancement suggestions which I duly entered into bugzilla, and was impressed to see that rate at which those bug reports are being resolved.

Once it was installed I tried to get my wireless card to work. I got ndiswrapper working fine, but openSUSE's network scripts were faulty, so I didn't manage to get connected to the internet. And at that point it was one in the morning, so I swapped the drives back and went to bed.

Once installed there wasn't much visibly different from SuSE 9.2, mainly due to both using KDE 3.4.2, so I expect most differences would come in things like hardware support, and up-to-dateness of the core packages. And things like hal and dbus. I expect it would be a good platform for me to use when developing KDE 4, since I won't have to spend half my time trying to update things. And if I can develop KDE 4 on openSUSE, I can make sure the two work together really well. Which would be nice.

Sticking with SUSE

I've decided to stick with SUSE after all. Since I have years of experience with its idiosyncratic ways of doing things. I mean, I love learning new things, but it's a shame to waste the knowledge I've already acquired. And now, with openSUSE in the wild, maybe I'll see if I can help SUSE continue to be the best distribution for KDE.

Developing

I thought that since I'm now on PlanetKDE I'd better get working on KDE again. So I've just fixed a few bits of KMix which didn't work properly on my twinview setup. And you know what? It was really easy - and that inspires me to do more coding. I'm going to find other irritating twinview problems and fix them before 3.5 comes out, since I'm going to be stuck using it for quite a while until 4 arrives, so it'd be nice for it to work well.