Advisory for newcomers to Linux-Based operating systems

Most people call Linux an operating system when it is just the Kernel of many operating systems. The Kernel is a tiny (8MB) piece of software that allocates resources to all the running processes. Calling Ubuntu "Linux" is not really correct. It's like calling Vista "NT" as that is the Kernel that Vista uses. If there is a problem in Ubuntu or openSuSE etc then you do not say Linux has problems as there is a 99% chance that it is not the "Linux" that is the problem, it's just the software included in the operating system package. Linux should not even be mentioned as part of the operating system as I have never heard people with Vista saying that their computer runs NT. That's why I don't say my computer is running Linux, I say it is running Ubuntu as that is my operating system, not "Linux". People try to call Ubuntu and openSuSE etc "Linux" because that is what they all have in common, the "Linux" Kernel but this is totally wrong calling these operating systems "Linux".

:-)

Wine 1.0 Released!

The long awaited version of Wine has been released featuring lots of bug fixes and support for Windows Server 2008 applications. This is a great feat for the Wine team and a great surprise for all the OSS supporters out there. Soon Windows may not be needed.

P.S. Windows' only purpose now is to run your Windows games. (Wine is getting there)

OGGConvert Problems

The OGGConvert issues I mentioned earlier are only in the version that comes in the Ubuntu repositories. I tried the version that comes in th Fedora repositories and it works fine. There isn't even OGGConvert in the openSuSE repositories.

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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