This Old Blog

In my first taste of Mono on openSUSE 11.1 I was left with a flat taste in my mouth (so to speak). So I blogged about those experiences, and then I got this response from Micheal Hutchinson: I'm sorry your MonoDevelop experience hasn't been great so far. I'm not aware of any reported crashers on 11.1, but if you get stack traces, could you please file bugs so that we can fix them? It's been a long time since MD 1.0 was released and in many ways the 2.0 alphas are more stable. I'm building MD trunk builds on the openSUSE Build Sevice, which should be relatively stable until 2.0 is formally released. There's even a 1-click install. You maybe also find that some problems are fixed by upgrading GTK# to 2.12.6 from the Mono repository. FWIW, the particular errors you've pasted in your post can safely be ignored. Various Mono debug files (.mdb) seem to be missing, but they aren't strictly needed for MD. Maybe the stock oS 11.1 has these in separate packages. ...

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Mathew 7:3, KJV Bible It seems great blood sport to report on the problems of Novell while ignoring the larger problems with those companies deemed worthier than Novell. So in the interests of "fair and balanced" reporting, lets look around the Linux world at a few of the other major players. Redhat Let's start off with Redhat. Everybody loves Redhat, and for good reason. They are the only major Linux distributor that makes a decent profit and has a good share price, even in this market. Redhat reported Q3 results of $165 million, up 22% from the same period a year ago. Redhat has shown consistent growth for years, concentrating on the server side of the market and services for the server side. It has stayed away from the desktop, having publicly walked away from the consumer Linux desktop when it stopped selling Redhat 9 five years ago and merged it w...

The Bumbling Nitwits of Boycott Novell recently wrote that Dell's pricing of Ubuntu-equipped netbooks vs. those with Windows "reeks of market distortion." The only thing that reeks is the deliberate distortion of facts, at least regarding Dell's selling of Ubuntu Linux on the Mini 9 (and Mini 12) netbook. I have no love for the netbook. Based on personal experience with the Acer and HP models at two local stores, I firmly believe that the public is better off purchasing either a different brand of netbook, or of simply bypassing netbooks and buying a low cost notebook in the same price range. But when I read the Blithering Narcoleptics tale of nefarious marketing by Dell, I just had to go and see for myself. And I'm glad I did. First, a screen shot of Dell's offerings on the Dell Mini 9 ( http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/laptop-inspiron-9?cs=19&s=dhs&ref=homepg ). And then the Dell Mini 12 ( http://www.dell.com/content/products/...

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Boycott Novell continues its tireless tattling against Novell. While I was out working for a living the Bloviating Neanderthals selectively quoted a benchmark published by the Phoronixians comparing the execution of openSUSE 11.1 and three additional distributions on an Atom-based motherboard, creating yet another false and distorted story [sic] supporting their twisted ideological crusade. The Atom processor seems to be the current darling of the Free Software Mob. Many electrons have been spilled extolling its virtues, because of all those Atom-based netbooks shipping with various poorly hacked Linux-based distributions. If it's shipping with Linux then it's gotta be good, right? Intel released the Atom to counter ARM-based devices in the highly mobile computing space. ARM-based devices provide a reasonable trade off between functionality and very low power consumption. For a very low amount of power consumed in a very compact device weighing mere ounces, you get roughly 70%...

So I went off to the KDevelop site and per its instructions checked out a copy of the KDevelop supporting development platform as well as KDevelop 4 itself from subversion. After installing more development packages (cmake, kdelib4 devel, etc) and then running the basic cmake setup command (cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/work/kde4 ../) I was informed that my installed version of kdelibs were "too old" (ERROR: the installed kdelibs version 4.1.3 is too old, at least version 4.1.85 is required). Ahhh... So now I'm debating whether to install KDE 4.2 beta from the repositories (http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/KDE4:/UNSTABLE:/Desktop/openSUSE_11.1). It would be interesting to run with the latest KDE 4, but so far I'm hesitant to mess with what works rather well for the moment. There are other applications and tools in the current installation to keep me occupied, and it's Christmas, and I can certainly afford to wait until 2009. Especially considering ...

Watching the Bourne Ultimatum, I fired up System Monitor to see what type of impact playback was having on europa. I love the way that System Monitor lays out the process table, and the built-in graphics bars on CPU load and Memory are a nice touch. I really am beginning to like this release of openSUSE. In spite of europa's age openSUSE 11.1 runs quite efficiently. But then, I'm not trying to run on degraded hardware like a 'modern' netbook.

Verdict: not so tasty I grabbed all the Mono packages via YaST and installed them without problems. I then fired up monodevelop in a terminal so I could watch for warnings and errors. I'm glad I did. I won't bore you with screen shots of creating a simple 'Hello world' application. I will say that monodevelop is crashy. For example, without having created anything, I attempted to see what the Classes tab on the left side of the IDE would produce if opened. Normally it should be blank; that's what every other IDE in the known universe shows. Instead MonoDevelop crashed and exited. Hmmm... After the second startup I created the simple 'Hello World' project as a console program with Gtk# extensions. I didn't add any other code. I then had the project build and run within the IDE. During that entire time I got a stream of error messages, such as the following sample: ERROR [2008-12-22 10:49:57Z]: Mono.CompilerServices.SymbolWriter.MonoSymbolFileException: Ca...

Whilst playing around with NetBeans 6.5 and JRuby on my shiny new openSUSE 11.1 installation, I decided to create a new Rails project. It's been quite a while since I last played with Ruby on Rails, so I decided to start from scratch. One of the choices I made in the new project's creation was the selection of JavaDB (a.k.a. Derby) as the database. I also choose to use JRuby 1.1.6, which was released 17 December, instead of the built-in NetBeans version, 1.1.4. JRuby 1.1.6 is installed external to the NetBean's installation location. While attempting to run (for the first time) the project, it stopped with an error in the output window (see below). The error was that it could not establish a connection with Derby and that I needed to install the Derby adapter gem; 'gem install activerecord-derby-adapter'. The problem is there is no gem with that name. Instead you need to type 'gem install activerecord-jdbcderby-adapter'. There is a reporting bug within conne...

The Solution If you haven't already then install the "restricted" multimedia formats . Then, using YaST2, install VLC. That's because trying to play back DVDs with Kaffeine results in an annoying popup dialog that says: "This version of Xine (used by Kaffeine) has only a reduced set of supported codecs. It is not able to play DVDs. Read http://en.opensuse.org/XINE for further details." Which, if you do go to the site, says you should install the "restricted" codecs. The problem is that the version of Kaffeine that is installed with the public LiveCD is hard coded to display the dialog and ignore the codecs you install. Thus installing the codecs still won't allow you to play back DVDs with Kaffeine. Start YaST (on Kickstart's Computer tab at the very top). When the 'Run as root...' dialog asks for root's password give it your login password. That's right, openSUSE 11.1 behaves like Ubuntu with regards to rootly powers. There...

I hadn't received my openSUSE 11.1 boxed set yet, in spite of pre-ordering it December 9th, and it looks like it won't ship until January 5th. No matter. The downloadable ISOs are available and I just grabbed the official release versions and re-installed. Installation from the LiveCD was super simple. In fact it may have been too simple. I missed the part where I could specify the system name, and I never caught it. Instead the system name wound up being 'linux-0dg5' which I have no idea how it was derived. In the end I grepped for the system name in files located under /etc, and changed (with vi) it to 'europa' in just about every file where it seemed to matter (/etc/postfix/main.cf, /etc/hosts.YaST2save, /etc/HOSTNAME, and /etc/hosts). There are a set of files under /etc/ssh that still have the older system name, but I'll deal with them at a later time. The screen shot above is the recently released NetBeans 6.5 running with the latest Java, version 1.6.0...

Back on December 10th Monsieur Béranger called it quits on Linux and moved back to the comfort and higher productivity of Windows XP. His frustration and motivation are summed up rather nicely towards the middle of his post: I had enough of struggling with Linux's structural flaws. Despite what the fanboys believe, updating or upgrading a Linux system can break it much more often than applying the official patches to a Windows system. The quality of Linux has severely decreased in the last couple of years, and there is no sign that this is going to improve anytime soon. While Mr. Béranger is far more critical of Linux than I am, I can't help but agree with his basic premise that the quality of Linux has severely decreased, at least since 2007. The last really good distributions (from my perspective) from openSUSE and Ubuntu were 10.2 and 7.04 respectively. They came out in the spring of 2007. You can go back and click on my Suse and Ubuntu tags to get a pretty good idea of ho...

Went out on a spending spree tonight and dropped USD$59 on a pre-order of openSUSE 11.1 . It's due to be released/shipped on December 18th. Yeah. Give money to teh openSUSE, raise Roy's blood pressure. Priceless. Oh. And I have to learn to spell it 'openSUSE', not 'OpenSUSE'. See box above.

Over the weekend I had the opportunity to install Fedora 10 on a Dell Latitude D630 notebook and to tweak the OpenSUSE 11.1 installation on europa. Fedora 10 Fedora 10 was installed on a spare 120GB hard drive. It was installed over Fedora 9, which I had managed to configure into a reasonable working state and had used for about five months. But it wasn't perfect. While I was able to install the Nvidia driver and enable 3D hardware acceleration, sound and wireless did not work. With Fedora 10 I now have sound, but the wireless still doesn't work. Even though I installed both Fedora 9 and 10 from DVD, I only installed the Gnome desktop under Fedora 9. With Fedora 10 I installed the Gnome, KDE, and Xfce desktops. After the installation I was only able to select between Gnome and KDE, although I could see the Xfce tools (such as Thunar ) on the Gnome menus. Both Gnome and KDE worked fine until I installed the Nvidia drivers for Fedora 10 ( kmod-nvidia ). After installation the Gno...

Looks like I hit a solid double with the post " OpenSUSE 11.1 RC and KDE 4.1 ." Both the Bobbleheads at Boycott Novell and Monsieur Béranger have responded to two of the paragraphs in that post. Let's start with Boycott Novell, since it's the longest if not the most twisted and disingenuous of the two responses. It would seem that the Honorable Roy Schestowitz of Boycott Novell is so blinded by his own self-importance and so overly sensitive to any criticism of his holy task of rooting out perceived Evil against open source, that he'll distort the facts any way he can to protect and justify his own misguided crusade. The Boycott Novell post that illustrates this most clearly is ' “Twisted Ideological Crusade” and Other Excuses ', which is his reaction to the post listed above as well as the following one, " How a Mandriva Upgrade led to me installing OpenSUSE ". The quote in the title comes from a comment I made towards the end of the first post...

I finally read today, via DistroWatch Weekly , that Adam Williamson will be laid off from Mandriva come 30 December. I find Adam's pending removal from Mandriva's payroll highly annoying. It was Adam who made me think about using Mandriva, who challenged my assumptions about what is important in a distribution, and who eventually convinced me not only to use Mandriva but to purchase a one year PowerPack subscription as well as a Mandriva pre-installed on a USB thumb drive. It was worth every penny I spent. And now I find he's being let go. For me, Adam came to represent "the voice" of Mandriva. Adam not only responded to comments and criticisms with tireless energy, professionalism and a sense of humor on regular sites such as Slashdot, DistroWatch, and OSNews, but on my little bitty blog, and I'm sure others as well. This is not to say that all other poster's comments aren't important or don't matter. They do. But Adam made Mandriva a lot more ap...

The Setup I've been so busy for the last six months I've been waiting for some free time to upgrade europa, who's been running Mandriva 2008.1 Power Pack. That free time came during the Thanksgiving break. I've been quite happy with Mandriva 2008.1. The only reason to upgrade is because Mandriva 2009.0 Power Pack is the new hotness , which makes 2008.1 the old, busted hotness. And so I pulled the 2009.0 DVD ISO and burned a copy, then hit the reboot and waited for the system to upgrade from the DVD. The Act Running the Mandriva update from the DVD was flawless. 2009.0 found the 2008.1 installation, updated the necessary packages, and otherwise prepped europa to boot into the new hotness. And so after 2009.0 Upgrade had finished it's labors I removed the DVD and waited for first boot into 2009.0. The Results While there are certainly worse things that can happen to you in life, watching a perfectly good system fail to boot after what appears to be a flawles...

The release Thursday of OpenSUSE 11.1 RC 'incited' me to download the KDE-based Open CD version and give it a spin. I've been tracking KDE 4.1 across three distributions (Mandriva 2009, Fedora 10, and OpenSUSE). I tried Kubuntu 8.10 and immediately rebooted my system and threw the CD in the trash. Kubuntu in any version is one of the worst ways to experience KDE (version 3 or version 4). Although I don't have any images of the boot process (and I never had) I can say that booting into OpenSUSE 11.1 is a smooth and polished experience. This is in stark contrast to booting into a current release of Ubuntu, in which the language selection menu is clumsily splashed across the screen. The Ubuntu first boot experience is crude and amateurish, while OpenSUSE (and Mandriva and Fedora and ... ) are far more polished and professional. The only first boot experience worse than Ubuntu is OpenSolaris and its several text menus. As usual one of the first tasks I perform after booting...