13 November 2011

openSUSE 12.1 RC2 Part 4

Bah, can't stay away for a second. So the easier way to switch windows is the old Alt-Tab trick. I'm not quite used to using it (I prefer to click on the window/application instead), but it seems like I may have to when I'm single-screening.

Om nom nom nom! (For real this time lol)

openSUSE 12.1 RC2 Part 3

Okay, so Network Manager actually works... Weird. My hypothesis is that it didn't load right... It could also be that it came broken and an update fixed it. Hard to say. Luckily, ifup isn't horrible to use as long as you're hard-lined to the router.

Oh, so apparently, 12.1 Goldmaster was released on the 11th... So that makes it a day after I installed and tested it... So I guess I should have waited a couple days. Oh well. I'm not going to make an effort to download and burn it at this point due to the fact that it comes out Wednesday (16th).

One of the things I didn't get to talk about with 12.1 is the battery monitor. It seems a lot more accurate than the old version. Triela's battery is only really able to stay running for about an hour (and maybe fifteen minutes), which the old version of the battery applet said 3 something hours... Right...

A bug I found is when it goes to an hour, it displays 0 minutes remaining (x%)... I'm assuming it meant 60 minutes and somehow the 6 was left off... Oops. The charge and time remaining is also shown in the power settings, so if anything I can hop over there to double check if the applet isn't being truthful.

OH! I just remembered about having to turn the wireless on after every boot. Obviously, I'm not quite sure if this still applies, but I can test it after I eat dinner.

We'll see what happens in about 45 minutes.

Om nom nom nom!

10 November 2011

openSUSE 12.1 RC2 Part 2

Okay, I forgot about the favourites bar. If you hold onto the icon too long, you pretty much lose the trashcan icon. So pretty much, they made it common sense. You grab the icon and immediately head toward the bottom of the favourite bar to get the trash icon to appear. No need to do the awkward curve-ball to get rid of the icon.

I haven't gotten a chance to test out network manager, but so far I haven't been able to get it to work with eth0. When I was still plugged in, I couldn't access the internet. I had to switch to ifup to get anything done. I'll try again at some point with wireless when I'm at home to see if I can't get it to work.

Oh, so the power button puts the computer to sleep. I tested it out when I partially crashed GNOME3. So now the power button does something.

Well, there's 6 days and one more pre-release (maybe) left before the full release.

Looks like I'll just stick with this until the final release date, then I'll test that one out to see if it's something I'll be "upgrading" to.

openSUSE 12.1 RC2 Part 1

Well, downloaded it last night, installed it earlier and got everything updated. Installed VLC as well.

So a few changes. Finally can shutdown/reboot the computer without having to logout first, and VLC actually works (sadly it works better than in 11.3).

So it seems that I might move onto 12.1... as long as network manager is fixed, since it's not easy or fun to use ifup.

Haven't really seen a whole lot else changed... or at least, that's all I've noticed so far.

05 November 2011

OS Installation Counts

I got bored and thought I'd make a short post of OS installation counts.

An installation is a current installation, not the number of times I've installed (which would just get ridiculous).
  • Windows: 2 Installs (Triela and Lie-chan)
  • Mac OS X: 2 Installs (Shizuma and Momiji-chan)
  • Linux (any distro): 7 Installs (Triela:2, Lie-chan:2, Mei-Ren:1, Momiji-chan:1, Jukebox:1)
*Note that the testbed space on Triela does not count.

I would bring Triela and Lie-chan down to 1 install each, but the fact that openSUSE uses GRUB 1 bugs me. Everytime I do an install of openSUSE, the bootloader section always tells me that the boot partition doesn't entirely lie below the 128gb mark and the system might not boot. I don't know if this has something to do with GRUB 1, but it's sure annoying to see. That's really the only reason why I have an installation of Ubuntu. I read that openSUSE 12.1 is going to ship with GRUB 2 (finally!), but I need the VLC problem solved before I can migrate to it.

Hard Drive Price Hike 2

Well, so much for Samsung... Newegg raised the prices on those too. It makes sense though, if you understand the law of supply and demand. Looks like it's time to wait it out. (LOL)

03 November 2011

Gentoo 11.2 Live

It keeps giving me a firmware bug when I try it on Triela... So as far as I'm concerned, it only works on Mei Ren for now.

I was able to use it a bit, but my Wifi card wasn't on and I didn't feel like doing the reboot trick to turn it on.

The settings (at least the monitor/screen one) was different than I'm used to.... Oh yeah, that's right, it was KDE and not GNOME. KDE tends to stretch the entire wallpaper across both screens (eww) while GNOME just duplicates it... The fix is pretty easy, since all it really requires is to make the wallpaper the full size and then tile the original wallpaper in them. I couldn't find a settings thing to change the wallpaper anyway... Though I did find the wallpaper folder (~/.wallpapers).

But I think my main turn off is KDE. I don't mind it, but I honestly prefer GNOME since I think it's a bit more friendly and customizable. The little desktop thingy that stays in the top right corner annoys me, even in its translucent form.

Pretty sure there's a way to install GNOME for it, but that requires me to install Gentoo... Which I don't have any hard drive space for (if only it didn't have a problem with Triela...).

Since I wasn't really connect it to the internet, I didn't really have a whole lot of motivation to test it any further. And so I wasn't really able to test out the package manager (if there is one) or anything else.

For now, I'm just gonna give my best friend the disk and let him tinker with it if he pleases... Well, he's gonna have to find that short USB A to B cord first... (LOL)