niczsoft

It looks I can not follow the new KDE 4 style, it’s just not what I expect from OS, there is still open question (open for me) where is the old good stable and working KDE known from KDE 3 ? Having to match problems configuring sensors, clock, those basic parts of an UI at least for me I got lately inspired by http://news.opensuse.org/2011/03/28/review-opensuse-11-4-and-the-much-improved-xfce-4-8/. And now here is my freshly configured XFCE, the only thing it missed was network manager, but I got it fast solved by adding few launchers, here is my desktop:

What I’m happy about is it is extremely fast (search for kde slow or cpu bugs), but there is nice feature – my clock is my personalized clock

%H:%M:%S%n%A%n%Y-%m-%d

to set your own personalized clock read manual:

man 1 date

in previous entry(opensuse 11.2 kde 3.5) I have described how it was possible to build my distro with opensuse 11.2 and kde 3.5,

right now I’m using my new distro :) and I’m quite happy with it, it’s almost ready to be used, only few changes needed to make it reproducible

I have found tutorial which describes how to use susestudio.com

I will try to release a dump of my installed apps so anybody can build his own (kde 3.5) distro but basing on my experience in this area :)

Did you ever dreamed of you own distribution, I know some of you did like me.
Now this becomes easily accessible to everybody with some knowledge what he wants.

Returning to theme of the article while searching for opensuse 11.2 and kde 3.5 I found worth trying one of novel services: http://susestudio.com

So gathering information from around the web and my previous trials of this configuration I did added plenty of repositories, my favorite packages to my new appliance … after some tries I was able to finally build my distribution, that’s quite orginall that I could build whole distro without using anything else then my browser.
But guess how I was surprised when under my fresh build distro I found link testdrive – I dont need anything then browser not only to create an distro, I can also test it within browser.
Ofcourse there are limitations of this site:

• max 15GB can be stored
• builds older then 7 days are automatically deleted
• single testdrive can be maximally run for one hour

Does any of this limitations concern anybody? It is always possible to recreate deleted appliance, you can always launch new session of testdrive to get another hour, and 15GB – it’s a free of charge service
You can always download kiwi configuration and use it to build the distro on your machine.

Just to make it more real here is screenshot from my browser:

I’m really excited to test my new diostro on my new laptop tomorrow, probably I will write something more on it :)

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Recently I got irritated with my Gentoo installation, long story of problems I meet …

So I have decided to go back to openSUSE, the way was not easy, first I have tried to install from openSUSE 11.1 Live KDE CD, but it was not working with my BIOS raid setup. I was a bit upset, SUSE always gave me best working environment in short time, so I have tried with new development build 66.

This was good choice, installation was working perfect, I was also surprised by the improvements, the best example is partitioning screen which gave me feeling that my system knows what I want to archive, just have a look on the screen

Comparing to Gentoo SuSE is a bit slower, the best example is start time of OpenOffice writer, on Gentoo it was up and ready to work in less then 3 seconds, on openSUSE it takes 5 seconds to show document. But this is not a big issue compared to times spent in Gentoo to configure “make.conf” or just build OpenOffice.

But the most important for me now is set of configuration tools from YAST, I can configure whole system with easy to use GUIs but still have control over my system.

From interesting features I would point out Xen working with nice GUI, will try it out in few days as it should be good alternative to VMWare Server.

On the end small explanation what does build 66 stand fore it is: “openSUSE 11.2-Milestone1“, verion 11.2 is planned for November 2009, so holpfully there will come even more interesting features.

Some time ago I have writen a post about configuration of s2ram with kpowersave … now I faced the same problem with KDE4 plasmoid battery monitor, but with a bit different solution, in the file /usr/lib/pm-utils/defaults just update the line:

S2RAM_QUIRKS_SOURCE=”hal”

That should be enough to get You laptop/PC sleep without any plays with s2ram params.