I have been seriously considering reducing the number of computers in my life. In the good old days, I ran a fairly powerful Pentium 4 desktop for gaming and general computer work. The machine is still my central desktop, but I have found that I rarely use it these days. That said, I promised my brother that he can have the machine.

I’ve been thinking about what I want to replace the desktop with, and the more I think about it, the more certain I am that I no longer really want a desktop.

My laptop (Dell Inspiron 700m) performs the majority of the tasks that I need, has open source drivers for every piece of hardware on the machine and is also very easy to bring with me where ever I go. And from personal experience, the machine is a spectacular conference laptop. Avoiding the need synchronize the machines is very appealing.

So. Is this the way I want to go?

Maybe.

For May, my plan is to pack up the desktop, give it to my brother, and see if just using the laptop works for me. At the end of the month, I will review if this was a success or not and choose whether or not to buy a new desktop.

Although I haven’t done another major test run at openSUSE 11.0, I did have noticed that Bug 343858 (gdm packages downloaded with control-center upgrade use resolution specified for external monitor) is mostly fixed. I did hit the problem with maximized windows in metacity not filling the screen in certain circumstances. All should be well on this front.

Having xrandr extend my desktop to an external monitor is currently not possible without explicitly using the Virtual keyword in xorg.conf. I filed bug 381765, however the problem is apparently inherent with RANDR 1.2

Oh well.

I still have not grasped how the new pulseaudio stuff is supposed to let me record things from my microphone. There are too many switches to play with for my emotional well-being (or something… Anyways I haven’t learned it yet).

Testing a SD card in the 700m’s onboard reader was problematic. An icon for the card flickered on and off the desktop about 100 times with lots of pop up windows trying to let me know of deep seeded grief, and checking dmesg shows numerous IO errors. I have not filed a bug yet, but I will sometime this week.

Anyways, it seems that the system is starting to now formally stabilize; and while this release won’t meet my every wim (working nouveau? autoconf 2.62? ifolder? bongo?), I will definitely be migrating most of my machines after the release. Unless something dramatic occurs, the media server probably won’t change until support concludes from Novell for 10.3.

More later.

-Ted

My laptop is in the process of updating to the latest Factory release of openSUSE 11.0.

Certainly I have been hitting a couple major bugs:

• Bug 376742 - Wireless doesn’t work (wpa_supplicant doesn’t get run)


• Bug 343858 - gdm packages downloaded with control-center upgrade use resolution specified for external monitor

Since Alpha 2, I have been running the weekly (zypper update -t package).

Certainly things are starting to stabilize now. For instance, I have no problem using the machine as a workstation.

I have to say that the Dell 700m laptop is well supported along with a good portion of my other extraneous hardware, the majority of the core functionality works very very well.

That said, I notice that Hibernate and Suspend/Resume used to work in SUSE Linux 10.1, it doesn’t anymore. I wonder if there is a way to revert to whatever mechanism was being used before…?

Also, I am unsure if the SD Card reader works or not. By working I mean, I plug an SD card into the onboard reader and a windows pops up in GNOME and asks what it should do with it. I’ll test this again tonight; I think that the last time I looked into this was back in the 10.2 days, so things may have changed since then.

Next is the modem. I have never been able to successfully establish a dial-up connection with the modem. I am really not quite certain as to what the problem is. Again, this will be something that I will test out tonight.

I have also never tested the firewire port. Does anyone have a firewire external harddrive that they want to lend me?

Hmm, the last thing is the microphone. On the 700m there is a defect in the motherboard design that creates static on the microphone port. I have tested this a couple of years ago with a Windows XP install. There is certainly some sort of configuration problem with 11.0b1 and esd which won’t let me turn on gnome-reclevel so I can’t test this properly at the moment.

Certainly I need to do some research into the new pulseaudio stuff.

Meh.

That’s a problem for another day.

Anyways, that’s my experience with openSUSE 11.0 and my laptop.

In reviewing some of the old yahoo/microsoft news clips of the past several months, I came across this note about yahoo shareholders suing yahoo for rejecting the initial Microsoft buyout deal.

My thought is these guys are out of there minds if they think a Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo is good for them.

I simply cannot see Microsoft being capable of stewarding a transition of this type in a way that would actually work. Nevermind the completely divergent technology base and skill base. If Microsoft feels they are not able to develop their Live platform to rule the day on it own, why should anyone trust them to steward the integration of a completely different platform?

It’s not that I am against Microsoft here. AND, I don’t get that they know what is missing with their own strategy to begin with.

So I wonder what the Michigan’s Wayne County Employees’ Retirement System thinks they will get out of the Yahoo/Microsoft deal.

So autoconf 2.62 missed the boat just by a couple weeks to be included in openSUSE 11.0.

Sigh.

I have been anticipating this release for quite a while now. 2.62 has a number of enhancements that affect what I do.

openmp support, along with support additional tests for the c99 stuff are a couple changes that jump mind.

hmmm

Anyways, I guess I’ll be waiting for either SLED 11 or openSUSE 11.1.

Sorry httperf, you’ll have to make due with 2.61 for another release.

Sigh.

hahaha

Thoughts?

-Ted