Bubbling…

Okie dokie, I haven’t posted anything for a while, mainly because I was busy AGAIN with compiling KDE 4.1 trunk.  I finally did it, successfully!  I just followed the tutorial at techbase!

Anyway, as I was waiting for this to compile, I wrote two useful scripts, each one only 60 lines.  One of them is a bash utility which you give a directory as an argument to it and then it backs up that folder and sends it over to a remote server ( the server should support sftp ).  It’s good for example if you have another computer and it supports sftp, and then you want to back up your files and send it over, but do not want to waste a whole amount of time on this!  It’s annoying when you have to back up everything.  Though, what I do is that I have a backup folder in my home directory, and then I put everything in it, and then I just run this script.  And it will replace the old version, which is good!!!

The other one is a c++ program that converts a string of characters ( a line of text ) into binary form!  This is also useful because sometimes I want to send some things in ‘code style’ ( being fancy here )!  Anyway, it was fun, at least I didn’t waste my time doing nothing

So now, the problem is: I don’t have anywhere to upload these two guys ( read: files ) so you could also use them!!  Does anyone know where can I upload them?

I was looking looking around the net when I ran across a very interesting post on why do some people use linux! People who use linux usually say because it’s secure, free, and because it’s customizable. But is that why we really use linux? Those reasons are all valid, though, but for us linux users, there is something more to linux than just security and customizability ( put the freedom concept aside ).

I personally have multiple reasons to use linux. One being that other OSs simply just don’t do things the way I want. Another on being that sometimes I’m curious about what is going on inside that program I’m using, so I check out the source code to see what is going on. I like using terminal, it’s fun!! There are many other reasons why I use linux which I can’t remember now, but I agree with every bit of this post by Vlad Dolezal.

following the planet Fedora’s race for who got the higher number, I’ll do mine too.  My numbers are nowhere close to those numbers, but it’s fun.

armin@blk-215-88-124:~> history | awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
32 cd
29 exit
19 ls
14 su
13 vncviewer
13 g++
10 sftp
7 vim
6 fluxbox-generate_menu
6 ./calc

‘calc’ is the name of a single-source-file, very simple but very handy calculator I’m working on to make life calculations easier!

This is the link if you want to see how are those Sulphuric waves doing

after a while using Fedora, I thought I would give openSUSE a try. After all it’s a popular distro and is used by many! After using it for a week now, I’m satisfied with it, so far so good.  However, there are some features I like, and some that I don’t. First I will go for what I like about it.

- SLAB menu: Ok, here it is, probably the first feature I noticed It is a very useful and easy to use and generally very nice menu. Novell has done a great job in usability research. Congratulations!! I should say one of the things that keeps me on openSUSE is this very menu. Looks nice, everything is right there, straight forward! More Applications, More Documents and More Places buttons are very useful, especially the ‘more applications’ one!

- Control Center and Yast: Good interface, though you have to look carefully for everything, but you can just type the name of what you want, in the search field. Very handy! again, quite usable and intuitive. And also, you can find almost anything in whether Yast or Control Center, which is a good point!

- Different repos are available: though it usually leads to mixed repos, but it’s a nice thing to have all the repos in one spot, so you don’t have to look for them any further than opensuse.org

- Welcome sound: hahahaha sounds funny but I really like the sound when you login and logout

for the most part, these features were the outstanding visible features. Other things would go under these sections for example the availability of configuration for everything would go under Control Center stuff. Now let’s look at the downfalls of openSUSE ( there aren’t much but still ).

- Zypper is slow: Comparing Zypper to Yum, yum is a much faster package manager than zypper. Installing the same package using these two package manager really shows how slow Zypper is. Also Zypper doesn’t have an organized output when using it in terminal, so I usually end up looking back and forward to see what has been done!

- relatively older kernel version: It’s not a big issue, but I would like to always have the latest and greatest. Kernel version in openSUSE is relatively lower than in Fedora. It’s just a matter of 2.6.22 or 2.6.24, not a big deal!

that’s it, not a whole lot of dislikes but rather likes I’d like to know about your thoughts on openSUSE, so please comment!