My Other Writings

Some of my posts from Linux Brain Dump readers here might find interesting:

• Software Discovery of the Day : qps - cool little system monitor for Linux


• Commenting on a Simple User - my comments on the conclusions found here


• openSUSE Weclome Easter Egg


• KDE Kwickies


• Konqueror Kwickies

Beta Try

Very nice coverage of the 1 CD KDE 10.3 Beta2 of openSUSE by Linuxseekers.com. Plenty of screenshots and notes. I tried the Beta 1 and found it a really smooth experience, with barely a glitch (only a small one setting up the NTP daemon comes to mind).

Linuxseekers - Preview of the 1-CD openSUSE-10.3-Beta2-KDE-i386.

Broken Update

So I had my first broken update yesterday. Given how many different things I'm always installing, and how many different "unofficial" repositories I'm using, I would say openSUSE has done a pretty good job of maintaining its sanity. But I was trying to figure out how to check what apps I had installed that needed updating. This is one thing that Linux in general, and openSUSE in particular, have all over Windows - a central clearing point for application updates. On Windows, every vendor has their own update checker. But with the idea of central clearing spots for application updates, you don't have all this redundant checking going on.

So I wandered through YaST's Software Management to figure out how to get it to tell me what needed to be updated. It isn't obvious and every time I try to do it, I get lost. But actually, it isn't that hard. Package -> All Packages -> Update if newer version available does what I want. It shows a list of all the packages with updates. I don't generally do them all, en masse, but this time I took a chance (even despite the fact it was going to update some base KDE packages too).

All went smoothly, except for the Emacs update. For some reason, the big jump from v21 to v22 isn't available in the mostly standard places I use, but that's okay, as I'm not ready for it. My crfty old .emacs file will require some serious cleanup before it will work with v22 (I still have some v17 stuff in there!). But it did upgrade from 21.3 to 21.4, but in a very half-hearted fashion. It left /usr/bin/emacs, which was the 21.3 version and created a new /usr/bin/emacs21 (which was linked to a non-existent emacs21-nox), as well as a new emacs21-x version, which was the new 21.4. But even that didn't work too well, as it was expecting some lisp folders that weren't linked correctly. And there were some missing lisp files, like url, that I had to install. And then I needed to fix the /etc/emacs folder, as it created a nearly empty /etc/emacs21 folder. Ditto with the /usr/share/emacs and /usr/share/emacs21, where all the system wide lisp gets installed. The /usr/share/emacs21 folder was practically empty, except for the magic subdirs.el file, which I had to copy into the /usr/share/emacs folder. This files makes it so that emacs will find lisp files in subdirectories of /usr/hsare/emacs, like the url package.

So it took some tweaking to get Emacs to work again. I'm not sure what went wrong. Perhaps I grabbed the 21.4 update from a different repository, which used a different directory structure. Dunno. But Emacs is working again, so all is good with the world!

Game Linux

Yes, you can game with Linux. While many people, including myself, dual boot into Windows in order to get the latest and greatest games, there are a few interesting games that play on Linux. This group of hackers got together and created a Live (ie., bootable) CD based on ArchLinux that plays Linux games without anything being installed. What a great idea!

live.linux-gamers.net

The project live.linuX-gamers.net was founded with the idea to present Linux games at the Linuxtag exhibition in a novel way.

Collaboration

I am going to be contributing to the Linux Brain Dump blog, tossing a few posts over for James to use. I added in a little bit o' bloggage on how to restore GRUB. The Linux Brain Dump blog posts little quizzes, gives short, concise HowTos, and otherwise comments generally on the Linux world. I like the look and style, and have been looking for a blog to contribute to, so I'm glad to join up. Be sure to see James' post The 10 Commandments for New Linux Users, which has generated plenty of comments.

Linux Brain Dump

The goal of this site is to be a one stop source for Linux HowTo’s and Tutorials. While we don’t publish articles specifically targeted at any certain Linux certification test, the information available here would certainly help in attaining that level of knowledge.

Forecast for Linux

Whither the Linux kernel? Well, here's a page with your answer:

Linux Weather Forecast - The Linux Foundation

Welcome to the Linux Weather Forecast. This page is an attempt to track ongoing developments in the Linux development community that have a good chance of appearing in a mainline kernel and/or major distros sometime in the near future.

Display This

The newest version of the ATI Proprietary display driver is out, and maybe it is time to really give this a try. I guess there isn't anything too revolutionary in this release (it just went from 8.39.4 to 8.40.4), but I haven't tried this at all. I'm not really into fancy eye candy, so not begin able to run Compiz or some such isn't a big deal. And I don't worry about 3d gaming either. But I could be tempted, I guess.

ATI Proprietary Linux x86 Display Driver 8.40.4