On The Road with Vicky Lamburn

I’ve only ever had one migraine in my life and that was when I was 11/12 (so about 12 years ago) but last night I woke up and didn’t know what had hit me Head was and still is thumping like a bass drum beating struck (it feels a bit better now not much though.)

Oh and I’m wearing sunglasses to surf the web (I swear I was getting so annoyed in bed) in December with the curtains drawn… Does anyone have any tips for relieving a migraine that doesn’t involve drilling holes in my skull?

This might have been brought on by working under nasty flurorescent strip lighting yesterday…

*whimpers* Being ill sucks. :’-(

It’s late I know but there are a couple of things to write about before I do get to bed.

First–I’m feeling quite yuck again. And I’ve been sneezing all over the place and not nice. I thought I was getting over this lurgy but still it’s persisting. Umph.

Anyway before I do sleep tonight (and I should have done a long time ago) I decided to check out the new Gutsy beta for Ubuntu 7.10 that is due out in a little over a week. Long story short, yes looking good but I’m finding that displayconfig-gtk thing a real pain in the arse. Seems to do a very good job of just making a bloody mess of everything and Xrandr 1.2 upon doing a distribution upgrade today seemed to loose its marbles over the abilities of my plugged in monitor. So it doesn’t work and I’m not sure it will soon…

…Anyway dual screens and so forth on Ubuntu seems to be its real Achilles heel. Which is a shame as otherwise it’s a great distro, easy to use, manage and built on the friendly Debian foundation. I’ve always ‘done’ Debian based distros from Debian itself, Knoppix and now Ubuntu. For the time being I’ll stick with Feisty Fawn but there is now a competitor, OpenSUSE.

Unlike Windows or Mac OS X where there is one vendor (i.e. Microsoft and Apple) for Linux there are literally hundreds but only a few are well known and readily updated. Ubuntu is one, OpenSUSE from Novell is another. SUSE has been around for donkeys, it’s one of the old school. 1992 I think. Anyway having looked at its pretty slick looking look in Gnome which is superficially different to Ubuntu and actually turns out quite functionally different, I decided to install it on a spare hard disk.

So far it’s been alright and this is the new 10.3 version of course. I’m impressed overall but I have to say this whole YaST business is a bit confusing at first and RPMs are well, sometimes a bit odd, case in point msttcorefonts. So the jury is out but so far but I have found something it does absolutely spot on.

Dual screens. Again it doesn’t seem perfect such as it doesn’t detect what monitor is plugged in but you can select it (and the list is comprehensive, it even lists the Commodore 1950 as an option! Now that’s comprehensive!) and set the resoltution, a pictorial set of four buttons lets you choose where you extend to if you choose that and… Click Save and Test and it just works. I’ve also somehow once spannered it up and then it fired up a GUI configuration for me to correct it rather than the usual dumped at the command prompt; although BulletProofX from Ubuntu seems marginally cleaner in this respect as OpenSUSE dumps you to tty1 (that’s the default command line) with a login prompt but in fact it’s working away behind the scenes and soon Gnome Display Manager in my case flicks up into view. Not intuitive but it seems to catch things very well.

So in terms of GUI multiple screen config in OpenSUSE vs. Ubuntu…no contest. The rest of it… I’ll keep playing but so far it’s possible I might switch from Ubuntu… But I’m still ‘doing’ Linux… I’ll keep an open mind as it seems to go nuts when I change the screen brightness (the OSD does not refect the change correctly and it’s just a bit downright odd…)

We shall see.