openSUSE 11.0 Released!

openSUSE 11.0 was released so I downloaded the install DVD and gave it a go.

The install went smoothly and it asked me if I wanted GNOME, KDE 4, KDE3, XFCE or No graphical system. I chose KDE3 as it is a lot more stable than KDE4. It automatically chose a suitable partitioning scheme and it installed in around 30 minutes.

The desktop was clean and pretty close to the last KDE release in 10.3. The graphical package manager was the same which disappointed me as I never liked the Yast Qt package manager. It included some KDE4 components which are considered stable such as KDE4 games and KDE4 Remote Desktop utilities.

It include a few proprietary components which I usually install afterwards. It included the JRE and browser plugin, Flash Player and the Fluendo Free MP3 decoder.

I wanted to try the GNOME version so I re-installed and chose GNOME. The GNOME version I liked better and the graphical package manager was very nice, much better than the Qt one. It was blazing fast, almost as fast as Fedora 9. It included most of the software I usually install afterwards apart from of course multimedia codecs and libdvdcss.

I opened the package manager and it asked me what repositories I wanted to add so I ticked the boxes for Packman and Videolan. The newer libzypp in openSUSE makes the packageing system up to 10 times faster that the older on.

It had an error when downloading some packages from the opensuse-11.0-oss repository which was a shame as it never worked again. It downloaded about half the packages then it had the error and the package manager could never download anymore packages again. If it wasn't for that problem I probably would have kept it installed as my main system.

Overall it is a great distro and has many inprovements over 10.3 and the package manager bug is probable just my computer.

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Kubuntu 8.04 is nice

I installed Kubuntu 8.04 and it is very clean and runs smoothly. It's K Menu is much more tidy that other KDE distros as it contains apps that actually may get used by someone. :-p

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PyTube Multimedia Converter

PyTube is an all-in-one internet multimedia downloader/converter that's still in beta but works OK.

It searches Youtube videos from within the app.
It downloads videos from Google Video, Myspace TV, Metacafe and Youtube.
It saved watched videos from your Firefox cache.
It generates ringtones.
Adds an audio file into a video file.
Merges videos.
Resizes and rotates videos.
Converts almost any video that ffmpeg or mencoder supports into 3GP, AVI, OGM, OGG, MP3, Animated GIF Video, MP4, AMV and WAV.
Has a nice GUI.
Totally Free!

Additions that I would like to see in PyTube is a progress bar and time remaining status for the encoding process.

I've attached a screenshot below.

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openSuSE 11.0 RC1

openSuSE 11.0 was better that the beta because the install went smoothly and didn't crash while the bootloader was being installed. It's very simple to use and has a upgraded version of Novell SLEDs "slab" menu.

Ubuntu has cleaned up some bad bugs

I tried Ubuntu 8.04 about a month ago and as I said in my previous post it was very bad. But now I tried it and after 200MBs of updates it's all good, no more crashes when playing media.

OggConvert by Tristan Brindle

OGGConvert is a great utility I found that converts almost any audio file or video file to the free OGG Theora/Vorbis format. The OGG format for audio has the same quality as MP3 but the size varies. Sometimes MP3s are smaller than OGGs but sometimes vice-versa. On the other hand, when I convert an XVID video to an OGG, the OGG is much smaller. I converted a 700MB XVID AVI to a 540MB OGG with quality to boot. I can't believe not many people know about this OGG format and since it's free, almost all Linux distributions including Ubuntu come with the codec pre-installed. I've attached a screenshot below.

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What's your free OS?

A website for selecting a free alternative to MS Windows.

www.your-free-os.co.nr