oti0sus

Shortly after completing the last post, a number of new Linux distos came out. Also, I wanted to experiment with the Gnome desktop. It should have worked with Mandrake 10.1, and had in the past, but this time my computer froze when I tried to start Gnome. I'd also thought about re-sizing my HDD partitions to give less space to windows - all the excuse I needed for some tinkering.

I downloaded the Gnome oriented Ubuntu 5.1 and burned it onto a CD RW. It was easy to install, but didn't recognize my sound card. (No Linux Distro yet has done this.) The TV-Out didn't work either. There was no support for MP3, and strangely, my other hard drive was not recognized. I had to sleuth around the net to learn about editing the fstab file and mount the slave disk. Installing the various codecs was no problem. None of the newer distros include these codecs, but they're easy to find. I was never satisfied with the audio players that supposedly work with Gnome. There were at least two, and they were extremely buggy. Asian language support is lacking and I never really got used to the Nautilus file system interface, though it's more attractive than KDE's Konqueror. The Evolution email program was a pleasure and I was sorry to see it go.

I gave Mepis 3.1 another try. The nice thing about this distro is that it's uniquely a Live CD with an option to install. (In something like 20 minutes.) Unfortunately it doesn't work reliably. I remember using it at some point in the past year. It was satisfactory, save for it's lack of Asian character support, and I used it until X11 crashed when I'd tried to change the KDE background image to a painting by James Ensor. This time I left the background as it was but ran into trouble trying to de-interlace the Xine media player so that it would display on my TV. It did work at some points, but there was obviously a bug that I wasn't about to fix. I also struggled without success to change my local time zone from the default New York City. Time to move along so I downloaded Suse 10.0, and burnt it to a DVD RW.

Installation went smoothly until the very end when my monitor went blank. After another attempt, I had the same result. I went back to Mepis and downloaded another newly released distro, the 3 CD Mandriva 2006, successor to the Mandrake 10.1 that I had used for most of the previous year. I was ready to settle into this distro but it didn't display anything on my TV. I'd tried to address this issue in the past with other distros and had been led to alter the XF86Config file. It had been a frustrating experience and nothing seemed to work. By chance really, I noticed the booting dialogue of the Knoppix live CD as it flashed by referring to the vesa video driver. When I use Windows, I configure the Nvidia card for "TwinView" but I was stumped when it came to Linux. The Knoppix distro, like Mepis and Mandrake 10.1, does a nice job at TV-Out so I went into Mandriva's control panel and found such an option for the video driver. It worked, I had successfully got the TV display, but there were intermitent crashes after that.

I went back to Suse 10.0 and a more careful installation showed my error. In the final step, the installation wizard suggests a screen resolution that was too great for my monitor and I had to scale it back to 1024X800. I settled for the KDE desktop and went to the XF86Config and switched the driver to "vesa". I had to do this with the Vim editor, by the way, while Mandriva 2006 offered a convenient wizard. My little changes worked and no crashing either, giving quite a feeling of accomplishment. Note, however that since selecting this option, I cannot play demanding action games like GL-117. Either way, I've been using the Suse 10.0 distro ever since. The only problems I've had with it is the occasional crashing of the Amarok audio player, and that Foxfire slows down to a standstill when it is asked to download even a tiny .torrent file. There were a few other anomalies with Foxfire and I experimented with Konquorer and Mozilla, which both out-performed Foxfire, until I settled on Opera 8.5 which seems to be capable of all that I've got used to in Foxfire.

There was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing over a couple of weeks, but most of these distros can be installed on my system while I make and eat supper. I should confess that it seems the only time I learn anything about Linux is after installation when it's time to make it work as I want. Suse 10.0 is a nice distro and I doubt I'll change anytime soos.