On The Road with Vicky Lamburn

Ok now it’s morning and I should be leaving soon. I won’t be here for a week or so; so don’t be surprised if it goes dead silent on here.

I’ve been playing around a bit more since last night with OpenSUSE and also worked out why displaymanager-gtk was making a right dog’s dinner of matters on the current Gutsy beta–the ati driver no longer supports Xinerama or dual screens (it in fact doesn’t support XrandR 1.2 but that’s technical.) This is a bit of a bugger because without actually checking I have a feeling I was using Xinerama on Feisty for dual screens, which may be a deciding factor on whether I go up to Gutsy or not. That said, I was intending to hold out to Hardy Heron (8.04) as it’s a Long Term Support version which means three years of updates.

That said, I have played some more with OpenSUSE too. I like it, it looks be default a lot nicer than Ubuntu IMHO with it’s Oranges and Browns (like a 1970s boudoir of sorts), with its greens and blues. I haven’t tweaked the font display yet as that still looks a bit gruesome compared to my tweaked Ubuntu settings, and Windows XP/Vista’s ClearType.

I’ve also got the repositories all set up nicely and have been able to download a couple of bits without any trouble, although the front end to this isn’t exactly very inviting.

My biggest issue though is it has made a huge mess of the ThinkPad keys/Fn keys. Which strikes out its excellent aesthetic and multiple screen support in one foul swoop basically. On my ThinkPad T40; as well as many ThinkPads there are keys to turn off the LCD (Fn+F3), goto Sleep (Fn+F4) and Hibernate (Fn+F12) which seem to work. However; More usefully you also have:

• Fn + F5 : Toggle wireless on/off
• Fn + F7 : Toggle between LCD, Monitor and LCD+Monitor output
• Fn + PgUp/PgDn : Brightness

Basically these don’t work. Which essentially rules out a switch to OpenSUSE 10.3. I’m not utterly convinced by YaST either and the lack of an APT-like package management system but those judgements are very preliminary so please don’t take that verbatim; I don’t know enough to say that for certain.

What this comes down to is that there is so much OpenSUSE 10.3 is doing that is so utterly right and wonderful here, I dearly want to love it and get on with it well; it has so much going for it. But it’s fallen down on a key area and such a simple thing has ruled out using it more or less; and that is an utter crying shame.

This is where Linux acts against a new user, I’m fairly well versed but still pretty much a novice-intermediate with Linux and I love it and Ubuntu has been the best desktop/laptop operating system I have used in a long time. But the issue is that there are differences between distros as you would expect and it seems that you can have some things that work on one (with a couple of minor bugbears) and then go to another that fixes those issues and find that you have a new set of issues that the previous distro you used didn’t have!

What a shame. OpenSUSE is a great distro though in most respects and if someone know the answer to my ineptness here then I’m happy to hear from you as I am intrigued by it, something about it that Ubuntu doesn’t quite have.

In the meantime I’m saying farewell now to OpenSUSE 10.3 and going to try installing Gutsy Beta again and this time with the radeon driver; not ati and see if that fares any better; but time’s running out and I should be on the road now… Zoicks!

(Ps. I’m not writing a “Ubuntu is better than OpenSUSE” post here, I’m writing an experience post that is it. I don’t do my distro is better than your distro stuff, I just take each one on its merits and use what works best for me.)