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:

Encuentro Linux 2009: Yes, I am going!

Yes, I am going to Encuentro Linux 2009, and so does openSUSE!. This year the most important Linux event in Chile will be held in Valparaiso and Viña del Mar at the same time. I’ll be giving a presentation on SUSE Studio (if you didn’t already know ) on Saturday 24th, 10:00 – 11:10 AM. Of course I am taking all openSUSE 11.1 DVDs I have left, and will be a great oportunity to show on my notebook what’s coming for 11.2.

More information (in spanish only) here. See you there!.

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.

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.

9 days to go for the openSUSE 11.1

That is right, if everything goes well, in 9 days we will have the new openSUSE 11.1 out. I have been waiting for that day so I can have the DVD in my hands. I hope the custom menu for GNOME is closer to the default menu in Debian or Fedora, since I don’t seem to feel like removing duplicated items from here and there. Else it’s time to give KDE 4 a seriuos try. After all it’s just a matter of GUI because I am not thinking about digging into Qt or GTK this time…it seems more like PHP+MySQL stuff.

Would you like to check what cool things the openSUSE 11.1 includes?. Check this out.

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).

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.

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.