Tuesday, 29 November 2011

Hey guys...... sorry for the long time between drinks

been rather busy with the end of uni and stuff so haven't really had time to write anything until today because at last I am holidays and I have and afternoon to myself

Well I have been rather busy in the Linux sphere since uni finished, I have done complete rebuilds of both my Workstation and Laptop. I have put OpenSuse 12.1 on the workstation with KDE 4.7 and I have to say all that stuff about KDE 4.7 being soooooo resource hungry and slowing up machines seems to be complete codswallop. Thus far I have found it far smoother to run on the old machine than gnome 3 and it seems to be about as reactive as gnome 2 was. It also has the added bonus of the nice widgets and things which, whilst most people will say they are a waste of space, I am finding them useful both to place some pictures on my desktop and for quick access to system info. OpenSuse itself is running quite smoothly and YaST is an excellent system manager, it gives quick access to almost every configuration file I needed and did it smoothly over a GUI which was very nice. It also made the install a breeze, it detected the two linux partitions and asked if I'd like to delete them which I did and it left the windows alone (I have it their for emergencies really I think I have used it once lol) It was so intuitive and easy to use that I think my 6 month old daughter could have done it. The only gripe I really had was the package manager. Why are their two? seems a bit redundant to me, but that's alright zypper does everything I need so that's all I use.

I have also installed Linux Mint 12 on the laptop and here I think the MGSE's really shine, I have got my gnome 3 running virtually the same as I had gnome 2 under mint 11 and once you add gnome-pie pretty well the whole computer is accessible with the keyboard again. The Linux Mint team really do deserve all the praise they are getting at the moment because they have built a distro that works out of the box so well. My only gripe was that I had to go in and install nfs-common which seemed a bit weird to me as I think nfs is one of the greatest features available to linux at the moment as it is such a speedy network protocol, sure it's insecure but so long as you are only using over the local network it's great. All in all though Linux mint 12 is great and it runs so smoothly on the macbook pro. The last Linux to be on this laptop was Fedora and that was such a pain, Linux Mint 12 has been such a breath of fresh air as far as running on macs go.

I did try out macpup on the old box I use as a Server but it was just soooooo buggy, and to top it off I couldn't find any of the packages I like to have on that box. Daap? couldn't find. mp3 support, What's that? and they go on and on about how enlightment is breathing new life into old machines and all it did was bug up and give me nothing to use it was such a disappointment. So for now that box is staying as Fedora 13 with XFCE because it does everything I need it to and sure it's a bit slow but at least it's not buggy as hell.

So that really has been what I have doing for the last couple weeks I'm sorry to have been away for so long but with exams and the new bubs finding the time to do this has been a bit hard, hopefully I'll get back into it soon though.

As usual comments, suggestions and criticisms are all more than welcome.

Talk soon!

 

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