I suck at writing review in the traditional sense - but I did want to post about my experience with openSUSE 11.0 after using it for a while. Many of these points may not apply to you, since they reflect my personal usage habits.

First off, I just want to say that openSUSE 11.0 is simply, hands-down, the best Linux release I’ve ever installed and used! I also think it’s one Linux distribution that could be a 100% Windows replacement for the “average user”, and I think it’s the only Linux distribution that the same “average user” could install, set up and configure without ever touching a terminal window at all. I use the console a lot, as I personally find it faster and more convenient sometimes than going through a GUI application to do the same thing. For example, I use zypper at the CLi more often than going into YaST -> Software Management, especially if I know the package name I’m looking for - it’s just faster for me.

I posted earlier that I’ve slowly become a GNOME user after years of loving KDE. It was openSUSE that helped push me in that direction. The GNOME implementation in openSUSE is hands down superior for me habits than anyone else’s. I like the layout, I like the selected default apps, I like then GNOME-Main-Menu - I like everything about it. I never felt comfortable in GNOME before, but in openSUSE, I feel right at home. As a KDE user, I always felt that GNOME was “restricted” somehow, and wasn’t as configurable as KDE. While this may be true to some extent, everything I’ve wanted to configure has been configurable. Perhaps I’m just not the ‘tweaker’ I once was!

For a long time I got myself stuck in a “distro-hopping” cycle that spawned from looking for a x86_64 distro to replace my beloved Slackware (yes, I know about SLAMD64 and BlueWhite - but I wanted something “officially supported” by the parent distro). I hopped hopelessly between Kubuntu, Fedora mostly, but then started trying out other distro’s such as Foresight (which I still think is GREAT, just not for me) and Mandriva (which was good as well, but I never could get comfy). I had tried openSUSE before version 11.0 - starting with version 10, but there was always something that turned me off. It always felt slower and more bloated than other distro’s, and I hated the thought of going into software management to install something, becuase I knew that would be an ordeal. All of that has been fixed way beyond my expectations in openSUSE 11. I would say boot-times are some of the fastest in the industry, and I haven’t “timed” package management or anything, but it no longer “feels” slow - I guess I could say it doesn’t feel like the chore it once did.

I know a lot of folks like the ‘buntu’s but I think one thing they are missing (along with the parent Debian) is a “real” installer. It doesn’t matter in ‘buntu if you download the LiveCD (listed as Desktop) or the Alternate CD, you have zero control over what packages get installed. In openSUSE’s installer, Anaconda in Red Hat/CentOS/Fedora or in Mandriva’s installer you can make it simple by clicking “Next” and get a basic, default install, but you can also drill down and pick and choose what packages get installed. One thing I really love about openSUSE’s installer is the ability to add additional repositories at install time - for example I can go ahead and add ATI’s repository and have my Radeon working, 3D enabled out of the box at the first boot!

Speaking of repositories, check out Additional YaST Repositores.There are many 3rd party and openSUSE Build Service repositores there you can add to your system to add additional functionality (such as codecs or extra packages from Packman), or cool extra packages from the GNOME (or KDE) Community repositories. You can also add the WINE, OOo or Mozilla repositories to keep all of those applications up to date on your system. I have the GNOME:Stable repo added as well to keep my GNOME up to day w/o touching my underlying base system.

There is so much flexibility and power available to users in openSUSE it’s amazing. I’m really glad I’ve finally found a distro that can replace Slackware for me, and provide everything I want. I haven’t even looked at Distrowatch since installing openSUSE, I have no desire to switch

I’ll still keep up w/ the other distro’s in the Linux community - right now in VMware I have a Mandriva, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu and CentOS virtuals set up. This is especially important to me since I’m starting to get involved in application development, and I want to make sure I can provide cross-distro compatibility. My host OS however will stay on openSUSE for now on!

Thanks to Novell, and the entire openSUSE development community for making this wonderful, free operating system available. Speaking of community, the openSUSE community seems to be 1st class. Besides one “heated” thread that was fuled by a troll on the openSUSE mailing list regarding KDE 4 (and ridiculous expectations by that said “troll” I’ve experienced nothing but respect, kindness and a willingness to help others from all of the various community channels.

Now that I’ve learned my way around the Suse way of doing things, I’m on the mailing-lists, Forums and IRC so I can do my little part in helping out other new users, so you’ll see me around (I’m jayson_r on Freenode).

First, I’d like to thank Ben Kevan for providing instructions for installing the MS Fonts, and thanks to Pascal Bleser for providing the Freetype packages used here. If you’ll note, on the opensuse-community.org page, it seems that there is a 1-click install, as well as a repository you can add for these Freetype2 packages, however I get an error trying to add the repo. I’ll update if this changes in the future.

Great fonts and great font rendering are especially important to both the enjoyable and comfortable use of any operating system. Linux fonts, and font rendering have definately gotten better through the years, and the font set up in openSUSE 11.0 actually looks surprisingly nice out of the box. If you are particular (as I am), I’m sure you can find some room for improvement. Most of the following instructions come from the above mentioned sites, but here you go for those that want to get it done quick ‘n dirty, along w/ some additional info from yours truly:

First, we need to install the Microsoft core fonts.
To start off with, make sure you have the package ‘cabextract’ installed by issuing the command:

su -c ‘zypper in cabextract’

Enter your root password when prompted.

If you don’t have one already, go ahead and create yourself a “download” directory under home, open up a terminal and navigate to that directory. Now to download the install script for the MS fonts, you can issue the following command in your terminal window:

wget http://download.opensuse.org/update/10.3/scripts/fetchmsttfonts.sh

(I know the script is for openSUSE 10.3, but don’t panic, it’ll work fine…I promise)

Now, we have to make sure that it’s executable with the following command:

chmod a+x fetchmsttfonts.sh

Finally, launch the install script with the following command:

su -c ’sh fetchmsttfonts.sh’ (again, entering your root password when prompted)

I also highly recommend installing Tahoma as it makes (IMHO) the best UI font. If you own a copy of Windows, you can copy tahoma.ttf and tahomabd.ttf from your Windows install.

Grab the updated Freetype2 packages from here (choose the directory for your architecture): http://opensuse-community.org/subpixel/openSUSE_11.0/

Enter the directory where you downloaded the files, and update your installed freetype packages with the command:

su -c ‘rpm –freshen -hv freetype*.rpm’

Enter your root password when prompted.

Go ahead and restart X.

I have my fonts configured like this in GNOME and Firefox respectively:

Enjoy!

I resisted Twitter…HARD! I did finally give in due to persistence by Chris Reeder and now I’m utterly addicted to getting updates from those I’m following.

On Windows, Chris recommended twhirl, which I installed, and which I was happy with. No problems.

I never could however, find a Linux based twitter client I was happy with - I mean nothing was quite the same (or at least similar enough to) twhirl to make me happy.

I just discovered through Miguel de Icaza’s blog however that Adobe has released an alpha version of Adobe AIR for Linux, so I decided to give it a download to see how well it worked. I also headed over and grabbed the latest version of twhirl and much to my delight, Firefox simply recognized the twhirl installer as an Adobe AIR install file, so I simply opened. The install was pretty much the same as on Windows, only I (obviously) had to give my root password as it was installing itself into /opt.

I’m a happy tweet!

Of course, there has to be a screenshot (I added the smudges to protect the privacy of my friends):

Moonlight 0.7 is now available!

Moonlight is my “project #2″ after C#. I have a co-worker who is very talented with Silverlight, and I’ve seen some awesome things he’s done, and it makes me want to learn Moonlight (as well as Silverlight) all the more.

Up until a couple of days ago, when I caught the themes bug, I’ve never been one from changing the theme from what the distribution ships by default.

I just posted earlier this evening about tweaking the input boxes in Darklooks, but I just discovered that now, I can’t read anything in YaST!

Therefore I have decided that the openSUSE artwork team did a great job with the revamped Gilouche, and I’m just going to go back to that!

I simply liked Darklooks too much to give up, so I started tweaking around today when I got home. I knew there had to be a way to fix those black input boxes and hard to read text in Firefox.

Basically I went into Theme -> Customize -> Colors and under “Input Boxes” I set the Input box background color to #E6E6E6 and the Input box Text to #242424.

Also I recommend running gconf-editor and go to Apps -> notification-daemon -> theme and edit that key to the value of “standard”, and this will improve the appearance of tool tips and application notifications.

OOPS! Forgot the screenshot Notice that this DID change the window background color, but I think I like it better anyway:

I’m hoping someone can give some insight into this. I had to end up switching back to something more sane. Is there a way to “fix” Firefox controls and text boxes when running a dark theme like Darklooks?

I quickly got frustrated with many websites - I even had some I couldn’t even read. Why would applying a desktop theme (and one that’s somewhat included in GNOME itself - not some custom hack-job from gnome-look or something) render Firefox into such a usless state? There was text I couldn’t read, and the awful black text boxes - looked horrible!

Personally, I love “dark” widget themes on my desktop. I used to use a nifty little theme called Royale_Noir on my XP machines, and I’d forgotten about it until one day last week when a co-worker came to my desktop with his laptop to show me something, and he was running it. I had forgotten how much easier on the eyes it was than the awful default Blue theme of XP, and I’d just gotten a new machine fairly recently and hadn’t bothered to change, so off to google I went to get the “lost” theme.

After spending all day at work using Royale_Noir, I kinda wanted something similar for my Linux desktop at home, and I noticed Darklooks in my theme manager, which was included in the “gnome-themes-extras” package, but it looked kinda funny, and when I applied it, all was ok, until I opened a new window which looked pretty much “raw GTK”. I did some digging on-line, and I discovered that the current version of Darklooks has an error in it’s gtkrc file which causes the incorrect rendering, so here’s how to fix Darklooks:

Open ‘/usr/share/themes/Darklooks/gtk-2.0/gtkrc’ in your favorite text editor and go down to lines 181 and 182.

They should look like this:

bg[NORMAL] = @tooltip_bg_color
fg[NORMAL] = @tooltip_fg_color

Simply change them to looks like this:

bg[NORMAL] = @tooltips_bg_color
fg[NORMAL] = @tooltips_fg_color

Notice I’ve changed “tooltip” to “tooltips”.

Enjoy your groovy new dark theme.

I’ve tried “dark” themes on Linux before, and I’ve never found them to be usable long term, but Darklooks seems to hit the spot. It’s a very “dark grey” rather than “black” and white text really pops on the dark widgets - very easy on my eyes!

EDIT: See my new post - Firefox became almost unusable for me after applying this theme!

Here’s a screenie for you:

I feel really, really bad that I left Tomboy out in my post about GNOME utilities that I’m using (and loving), especially since Tomboy played a part in the creation of that post - let me tell you why.

When I installed the GNOME version of openSUSE 11.0, I noticed the little yellow “post-it note” icon for Tomboy next to my “Computer” menu, and I started to delete it, but I decided to wait and see if I would use it, and use it I did!

Tomboy is another nifty Mono developed application that is always sitting there waiting on your input. You can start new notes, add to existing notes, and everything is automatically saved. What I like most about Tomboy is that it’s neat, and out of the way. I’ve seen applications like this before but they usually required littering your “desktop” with “virtual post-it notes” which I despise about as much as “real” post-it notes stuck everywhere on my real desktop (although, I’m still guity of that to some extent ).

Not only am I now using Tomboy daily, I already have multiple “notebooks” set up. One, for example are basic outlines of thoughts that I plan to turn into blog posts. The first post I used it on was the GNOME utilities post, and I ended up forgetting about the great little utility that helped me remember everything I wanted to post!

What I have been doing is when I have a thought, I simply start a new note in my “Blog Post Notebook” with a subject, and when I have enough for a post, I’ll post! Tomboy is another great utility you should explore if you haven’t already - I’m sure you’ll find 1001 uses for it in no time flat!

First off, let me preface by saying that this post is in no way a slam on Mozilla, Firefox or any of the developers. I’m simply looking to understand some things, and a lot of folks seem to read my blog, so I’m looking forward to some constructive comments. I use Firefox every day, on both Linux and Windows XP platforms, and it is my default browser on all of the machines I use on a regular basis.

Leading up to the Firefox 3 release I was a very devoted beta tester as well as an excited user knowing that things were going to be much improved over Firefox 2. I ran (full-time) each development build of Firefox 3 starting with Beta 3, and I saw a lot of things get better, and a few things (that seemed to) stay the same.

Also, even though I use (and love) Firefox, from what I read, I don’t think I’m a typical Firefox user. I don’t get into all the different add-ons and extensions that are available for Firefox. I’m not a feature-hungry consumer when it comes to a web-browser, I simply want it to do one thing, and do it well, and that one thing is render web sites quickly and efficiently. Before you start sending me comments about some cool nifty add-on that will make me wonder why I lived in the dark ages for so long, let me save your fingers some energy - I probably won’t check them out, and I probably already have a stand alone application that I like, that does the same thing, and that probably does it better than any extension you can recommend. Also don’t send me recommendations of another web browser that I might like either - I’ve probably tried it, and I didn’t like it. For example, Epiphany is great, but I’m used to Firefox, and I plan to stay with it. I’m not trying to be overly blunt, I’m just stating a fact about my usage habits.

Simply put, my favorite feature of Firefox 3 really isn’t a “feature” in the traditional sense. I like using Firefox, if for no other reason is that it is a cross-platform application that I can use on either Linux or Windows and feel at home. Let’s face it, for most of us, our web browser is probably one of our most used (if not our most used) applications. This does lead into a true (new) feature of Firefox 3. I love the ability Firefox 3 now has to properly integrate itself into the environment that it’s running on. Firefox 2 pretty much looked the same, no matter what platform it was running on, which I guess isn’t necessarily a bad thing - it just looked like Firefox and you knew what to expect. The problems arose however usually within webpages themselves rather than the UI of the browser window. Often on Linux machines I noticed that buttons, as well as text boxes and radio-buttons were…well, just plain ugly. With Firefox 3, not only does the application itself look more native to the environment it’s running on, but page controls look one hundred percent better. My only negativity in this section is the fact that Linux and BSD KDE users are pretty much left out in the cold. This is understandable since Firefox 3 is Cairo/GTK based and KDE is QT based. Most KDE distributions provide tools to make GTK applications look more native, but for some distros, from my experience, Kubuntu, Debian and Slackware do not make these adjustments, and Firefox 3 sticks out like sore thumb - just as Firefox 2 did. I have ended up personally switching to GNOME for my desktop environment for other reasons, but I did want to mention this fact, although I’m not sure if this is something that can even be “fixed” due to the nature of the UI Toolkits involved.

Now, lets move on to something that worries me a bit about Firefox 3. It seemed everywhere I read leading up to the FF3 release, someone was talking about improved memory useage, and/or the fixing of various memory leaks in Firefox 3. I hate to rain on someones parade, but from what I’ve seen that still seems to be a problem, even with the final release of Firefox 3. In fact, I’ll be so bold to say, I actually see no difference at all over Firefox 2. For example, on either my computer at work (running Windows XP Pro 32-bit), or my computer at home (running openSUSE 11.0 x86_64), I can launch Firefox, check on it’s memory usage, and it will be using approximately 30 MB of memory. I can leave a single, simple page up (no additional tabs, browsing) and check back in later and it will be using around 120 MB. I’ve tried it on both machines with the exact same result. The problem seems even worse with active browsing and with multiple tabs. When actually using Firefox, rather than just let it idle, memory usage seems to get in the neighborhood of 250 MB rather quickly, and eventually starts to get unstable, and I have to close and relaunch the browser.

I’m sure the developers are still working on this, and that the memory problems of Firefox will (perhaps slowly) become a thing of the past - especially with the number of users Firefox now has.

Again, let me restate that I am not bashing Firefox. It’s a great browser and I respect all of the developers who made it happen. I have always encouraged any user that is using another browser to at least try Firefox (no pressure) and usually when I check back, they are still using Firefox because, simply put, Firefox sells itself!