Changes…

Right against the grain. I will no longer stay in Santiago de Chile for a job. Last Friday it was my last day at Movidreams S.A., sorry I could not say goodbye to everyone in person. These were fun three months, a lot went on in that time period and now I would like to openly thank Andres Valenzuela O., Fernando Flores B., Rene Toro Quezada, three of the most talented people I’ve ever met and worked with. You made every day a great day at the office. Of course big thanks to Humberto Lobos and Federico Saavedra, for the true oportunity to join Movidreams. Your knowledge and passion is awesome.

Now there are a couple months left in this crappy year (actually it’s not been that bad) so I’ll be traveling between Coquimbo and Vallenar very often. I need to visit Inacap for a couple reasons (sorry, not they aren’t going public at this time, heh), and also plan to meet with old friends to check if there is any job opportunity in the area. I would regret returning to Santiago right now, since I seem to be much more interested in finding a job somewhere else where life quality is better than Santiago’s. Money won’t be on the top of my list in the next 2-4 months.

Although I’ve been testing several Milestones and now the RC 2 is looking great, I will be switching to stable openSUSE 11.2 as soon as it’s out, which should be November 12th. At this point of time, KDE implementation seems to be much better than Gnome implementation. Kinda wished it was the inverse case, but that’s one of the Open Source features: you have choice. Let us wait ten more days =). I also hope to have my @opensuse.org alias once for all

That’s all one changes. Have a lot of fun!.

Wicd on openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 3

Alright. KDE4-NetworkManager does not work for my wireless card yet, so best bet at the moment is removing it and installing Wicd. After installing and configuring it to my needs I thought it’d be a good idea rebooting the system. Then it comes: I am asked for root permission in order to launch Wicd (maybe just the icon?) Anyway, one cool solution I found out at openSUSE’s Forums was:

• Start a terminal and login as root.
• Then type chkconfig wicd on.

There you go, no more root permission to start Wicd.

Qt 4.5 to be LGPL

Good news for KDE users, Qt developers, and the open source community in general. As stated by Nokia, Qt cross-platform User Interface (UI) and application framework for desktop and embedded platforms will be available under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL) version 2.1 license from the release of Qt 4.5, scheduled for March 2009. Read more about it here.

Changing computer name (openSUSE 11.1)

It seems to me openSUSE gives your computer a random name. So how to change it?.

Simple, via terminal create a new Kate session and then edit the file /etc/HOSTNAME. There you should find something like this:

RandomComputerName.site

All you need to do is replace RandomComputerName with the desired name for your machine. Of course change is not made right away so you better restart or logout in order to see the change.

openSUSE 11.1 out now! (go get it)

Finally the day has come and the new version is out now!. I’m downloading the openSUSE 11.1 right now, the DVD image so it’s going to be about 4 hours until I can do a fresh install…how exciting.

This release includes more than 230 new features, which you can check out here. Also there are improvements to YaST, major updates to GNOME, KDE, OpenOffice.org, and more freedom with a brand new license, Liberation fonts, and openJDK. This is also the first release built entirely in the openSUSE Build Service.

To find out more about this release, visit the openSUSE news page. Click here.

Have a lot of fun.

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.

Kbabel is good!

It’s been a great time since I joined the openSUSE translation (es) team. The guys have been so nice teaching me how it all works out and I can say I’m absolutely proud of being a member of this team. By the way, we are using the Verbum V2G.

To begin, days ago I chose to try the new KDE 4.1, just because of its advanced features, and today I can tell the difference. Although it takes a short time to get used to the system’s management procedures, no big problems I have found on my way. Even after screwing up the main panel! =)

Since I needed a good KDE tool for translations (and kate didn’t do), I installed Kbabel, a tool for editing and managing .po files.

So if you are thinking about joining a translation team, install Kbabel without thinking it twice.

k3b for burning music CDs from mp3 files

It’s my first time using k3b to burn music Cds from mp3 files. They are for my sweet daughter Antonia so it’s worth at all.

The task started out with the downloading of a few mp3 files from a website I can’t remember (I’d ask my gfriend but she’s not here right now) and it was no damn surprise they were compressed in a .zip file, so I found out Ark didn’t do with the GUI, or I didn’t take the time to set it up and didn’t care to read documentation on it. Then I downloaded unzip so from the command line I can have all of the required files uncompressed. That was cool since I never had done that before =) and as soon as I was done typing they were out waiting to be added to my music CD project. Almost there when another thing happened…no codecs for mp3 files support! No big deal, just did an install of k3b-codecs via YaST2. It asked me for some depedencies, I chose just to ignore them this time.

Now we have k3b working for all of our musical needs =)

openSuse 11 GNOME/KDE 4 thoughts

Well, it’s been a long since my last post. At that time, I was a happy Ubuntu user, but since the new one is soon to be released, I gave it a break and installed openSuse on my notebook. So far it’s been a pleasant experience, installed both the GNOME and the KDE desktop and to tell the truth, I didn’t like the first one at all. The KDE 4 rocks and it impressed me a lot. Still it’s hard to get used to the way it handles the system settings (of course way different from GNOME) but once you are there, you know what’s all about. On the other hand, I like GNOME’s simplicity and if I needed all those new tools it offers I’d be completely happy. Once again, as a regular user (not a developer) I don’t seem to need the new features it has, such as new IM, tracking my time better, Ekiga, and the desk bar, to mention some. One cool thing is multiple tabs for file browsing is a high point. I have to point out that openSuse’s GNOME used about 20% of memory while KDE 4 just about 10%. I’m note saying I like one desktop more than the other, but I can’t belong to only one.

As a developer, I believe Kdevelop rules and works pretty well right out of the box. Qt designer has extremely well writtend documentation and samples.

So today I’m still using openSuse KDE 4, and I think it’ll be on mi notebook until the new Ubuntu is out, or forever, it just depends on how things work out.