New blog, so hello world!

This is goig to be my official blog now on. tonight I decided to check out this WordPress thing and it comes to be neat to me, well I kind of like it better than Blogger so here I am, and will be.

-Ricardo V.

openSUSE 11 KDE 4.1 tip: faster graphics

Having an old ATI Radeon 7200 is not much fun, but for the price is good.

I installed KDE 4.1 on the T42 and after updating everything it felt so damn slow, just because of the desktop’s theme (at least what I noticed after trying all of them). So searching the web, I found a great fix for this in the openSUSE website:

1- Edit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
2- Right there, blacklist the ‘fglrx’ driver.

To read more about this, visit this link and check out the Performance issues part.

openSUSE 11 on my new used IBM Thinkpad T42

Yeah, that is right. Last night I got to install the openSUSE 11 on my notebook. It’s a used one I bought directly from IBM Chile. It took about 4 days to get here (my house) and so far it has had a good performance. Battery is new and the machine is very light. Of course it does not have all the fancy devices newer laptops have, but I don’t need them anyway.

On the first stage and after installing Debian 4 and openSUSE 11 from CD media just for the joy of testing distros (actually checking which one of them runs faster and smoother under the same desktop environment: GNOME), I obviously choose the last one. Many reasons behind my choice. I can say that the Debian default install leaves me with a strange feeling, it is kind of disappointing to me that its desktop looks just the same than a year ago, same default wallpaper, same desktop applets, it does not look like it has evolved (which has been happening of course) for the end user. Then it does not recognize sound card nor wireless card out of the box, and I don’t feel like downloading and looking up for the right way to set them up this time. On the other hand I have openSUSE, really cool graphics, nice live installer, recognizes sound and wireless card, display device looks good for an ATI one, and YaST2 works as good as Debian’s package manager system.

openSUSE‘s default GNOME desktop does not look like any GNOME I have used before, so it is time to hack a bit around, which is not hard at all by the way. Just a matter of removing this and that from this panel, adding a new panel and the right application launchers so it looks like the traditional GNOME desktop environment. Nice.

Next step for me is installig software. For this time, development tools such as mono, postgresql, mysql, and anjuta. Of course more software of development is going to be installed as soon as I can.

Much more about my openSUSE adventure coming soon! so don’t go away (for long at least).