Encuentro Linux 2009. Awesome!

I just got back from Encuentro Linux 2009 (actually after spending one day in Coquimbo with my girlfriend, daughter, and mother). Let me say that I had the Linux time of my life, and hopefuly not the last one.

I had planed to travel on thursday, but could not get there until friday night. Yes, sh*t happens. I first met German Poo and Diego Escalante (of the Gnome Foundation), on my way for the internet password at the hotel. Both were gentle .

Then I stayed at the hotel room, checking my presentation’s last details for the next morning. Shared room with Joel Iturra, nice guy. Next morning woke up early so I could be ready to leave for the University. Stomach full with milk, cereal, bread, and sugar goodies! At the check out counter I met Fernando San Martin and Fernando Valdez. Thanks for the ride, great company.

10 AM and there were only 3 people in the room. Could believe it! since last night it was pure fun out there in the city. Forget about your notebooks folks We decided to wait a bit so we could have more people in, and then I guess about 20 came in. Not bad if you think about ther other 3 talks at the same time plus the Gnome Day event taking most of the interest. My 50+ openSUSE 11.1 DVDs were not enough…by chance I had a DVD copy of 11.2 RC to pass around. Internet connection rocked and the talk went down pretty well, not the best I’ve had but it was just fine since it was my first presentation at Encuentro Linux, the most important Linux event in the country. It was an honor to be there before a very participative crowd, all interested in SUSE Studio.

Later on I headed to the Gnome Day, mainly to discover the Gnome Community and the cool PyGTK and GObject talks…of course to finally meet (yes, in person!))with Pedro Villavicencio of Ubuntu. Man, what a pleasure! Also talked with Franco Catrin and many more and it is sad I cannot remember the names, sure I’d remember your faces if I saw you again though. Bought the obligatory Gnome polo shirt XD and then by the end of the day got a red Gnome cap after asking one question on the project. Hey! I was the one who wrote “G-(ME)” and “Gnome 3 for all” on the Gnome Wall

I now thank and congratulate once again everyone involved in the Encuentro Linux and Gnome Day 2009: Sven, Horst, Priscila, Fernando, Alejandro, Pedro, all the helpers, everyone! I hope to meet you again next year, and have that much of fun over and over.

Tree pictures of myself:

Gnome-Shell on openSUSE 11.1

It’s been a while since I installed gnome-shell for the first time and tried it. Let’s say that after a few system re-installations, just because I only have one machine and stepped into the Milestones lands , now I am back to good for production 11.1 and Gnome 2.24, without those annoying system beeps at shutdown (PulseAudio?). Gnome 2.26 ad tools seemed fine, but I would just rather wait a few months or next release to check if that does not happen anymore.

openSUSE 11.2 M2 (Gnome)

Well, today I downloaded the Gnome Live CD first, and had no luck at all. That was no fun watching the busy cursor over and over again after selecting the Live Cd option from the Menu so I decided to get the DVD just to see if things went different (actually not the only reason for), and sure they were. First, I installed the KDE Desktop, not a deal through the install process. Then came the first log in and all well. Of course I chose the Ext4 file system and I can tell it feels faster than our good old Ext3 .

Then it was time for Gnome. As usual, default install took longer than KDE’s. One thing I removed from the software was Desktop Effects, since I started to believe that that could cause the problem with the Live CD Media. So on through the install process, it went down really well. Then at first log in I got alerted over GDM and Metacity. I got this:

By default, the Slab Menu Icon looks like this when Main Panel’s Size is 24 pixels:

Looks like your computer is not your computer, right? Well, I just resized Main Panel so it looks like the following picture:

I must admit that I like the default theme. Absolutely new, darkish, professional. First time I feel comfortable “out of the box”. One feature that is not workig 100% is the System Monitor. At this time I cannot switch between tabs. The rest of the system is pretty running smoothly to me. Here you have a screenshot of my desktop:

Qt4.5 repo for openSUSE 11.1

Glad to have it: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Qt45/openSUSE_11.1/
Right now it feels that my notebook runs faster with it. I have read there are some issues with plasmoids, but I only use a few of them so I am not aware of those issues, which are always welcome to be reported at the bugzilla system.

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 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.

Nice surprise

It’s good to know I am not to only guy who is involved in the computer world for a living in the family. Since I am very interested in getting another notebook, which does not need to be as powerful as the one I own nowadays (P Core 2 Duo, 1.8Ghz, 2Gb RAM 667 FSB) by chance I found out about Marcos Varas. He works for Andigraf and is boss of the informatics department. Now I have not had the chance to email him or talk via chat, and I wonder which technologies he prefers, maybe he love linux as much as I do, that would be great!.

Greetings Marcos, and for the rest of you, check out Andigraf’s website.

Meeting with the Linuxlsc LUG

Last saturday was our monthly meeting with the LinuxLSC Linux User Group. Rain was expected so it was all unclear weather the meeting would be held or not until the last minute. Meeting was originally scheduled for 4.30 pm and rain kind of stopped by then just to fall down again, too bad! (and so good at the same time cause I had the chance to spend the entire day with my so beautiful daughter and my girlfriend, played and laughed alot together!) so the meeting was canceled and re-scheduled for saturday 23th, same time and same place so I hope to meet the guys there and then. Topics are posted in our website’s wiki (www.linuxlsc.cl) so if you want to join us, come with us!

I’ll bring my OpenSuse 11 DVD copy for all of you who don’t have it. By the way, Ubuntu is running extremely well on my Vostro 1500.

See y’all there!!!

What I’ve read and what I’ve known about Ubuntu

Through this week (due to my trash icon related trouble!) I have been back to reading users’ first experience after installing and using Linux Ubuntu. Most of them complain about it’s brownish colors over and over again, like they had not checked out Gnome-Look nor even played around the Appearance menu.

First option is just a kickass website for lazy users like me, who do not feel like spending time creating new themes, after all in that website you could find all artwork you are looking for: Wallpapers, icons, splash screens, desklets, screenlets, fonts, system sounds, screensavers, themes for GTK-Metacity-Compiz-Beryl, etc. I visit it on a regular basis to see if there is something I’d like to add to my system. it’s eyecandy for your gnome desktop!

When it comes down to changing appearence settings by using resources available right out of the box, the only thing to do is checking the appearance menu. From there you’re ready to modify colors, window border, icons, etc., almost everything to get rid of that ugly brown color.

So I hope to see less and less mournings about appearance, since it’s all configurable, like many things in Ubuntu.

Hardy’s Trash does not work!

Well, yesterday I tried to delete all items from my trash can. I do that task very often and to tell the truth, I only had a couple folder there so it was not much of a waste of hard disk space but it became a waste of time to me. No matter how many times I tried, it never worked out and I really wanted to make it work that way, no terminal and commands=). I got no luck after rebooting so the only thing that did work was running the terminal as root and typing:

rm -rf .local/share/Trash/*

Good! Now trash remains empty