Spanspek

After installing Opensuse 11.2 and experiencing the loss of Vmware, I decided to play around with desktop settings. I wasn't seeing the nice olive green background that advance pictures and the Live CD version showed. I suppose that was the result of my upgrade rather than a clean install.

So while looking for the background picture setting (still haven't found it), I decided to change the appearance of the windows. The default "theme" is called Ozone. I looked at the preview of Plastik and changed it. Immediately, the computer froze.

Well, now I know I can hold the power key and the computer will shut down, (however inelegantly). But before that the only way to do it was to pull it off my port expander and disconnect the battery.

Upon startup, it froze half way through the KDE start-up. I did a few system repairs off the install DVD, had a few gos at re-installing (e.g. KDE). Nothing worked.

With thanks to those nice people on the Opensuse Forums, I simply deleted the KDE prefs at ~/.kde4 and all was well. Oh, and since that restores defaults, I got the nice background too.

I just Opensuse 11.2 and installed it. Wouldn't you know it? Vmware Server 2.0.2 doesn't work with a 32-bit install (which mine is).

Fortunately, because Google is my friend, I discovered an install script. Instead of using the rpm, it uses the gzipped source and builds the server.

It worked faultlessly.

A while ago, I installed Vmware on my laptop so I could run Windows.

This has proved to be very useful, as I also bought (and rather like) Office 2007. But I also used it at the Music Festival held at my institution last year. We had the use of two Digidesign digital mixing consoles, a Profile and an SC48. I was able to take the basic patch and program each show using the stand-alone DShow software.

Just recently, Vmware stopped working. The web interface works fine, but when I tried to open a console to see and work with the Windows virtual machine, there'd be no response.

Well, thanks to a lot of clever people whose posts had been indexed by Google, I found out that the Vmware Firefox plug-in doesn't work with Firefox 3.6. Moving back to 3.5.8 fixed the problem. But this is a pain, as I like 3.6.

Once again, the boffins came to the rescue. You can take that plug-in and use it to launch a stand-alone console without the browser. It presents you with a login screen as well.

Now, logging into the Web UI on "localhost" requires the URL http://127.0.0.1:8222 for an insecure connection and https://127.0.0.1:8333 for a secure connection. When typing the URL into the stand-alone console's login dialog, no http is required, presumably because http is not being used. But only port 8333 works, for reasons that aren't apparent.

Still, it's a minor inconvenience. I have Firefox 3.6 and a Windows VM working again. I just wish the login dialog would save the URL so I didn't have to type it every time. Perhaps if I could write a shell script, I could figure out a way of doing that.

With my upgrade to Opensuse 11 and KDE4, basic filesystem operations using a GUI has become a pain in the arse.

Unless you want to get down and dirty on the command line, you either use Dolphin or Konqueror. I'm sure there are others, but these are the defaults and they're what most newcomers would use.

I just want to be able to move and copy files. When I click on a directory's name, the directory is opened and presented to me. That's not so unexpected. But when I click on a file's name, it launches whatever app handles that file by default or user setting. For any regular users of Windows or OSX, that's very unexpected.

As yet, I cannot find an easy way of selecting a single file. If I click and then drag on a file's name, I select multiple items. I actually have to right-click and bring up a contextual menu then escape to select the file. Then I can try to drag it.

Then comes the next problem. If I want to drag it to a folder in the same directory, I may have to drag beyond the bounds of directory view to get the view to scroll to where the folder's name is. However, in Konqueror this doesn't work. If I drag too far, I get the circle/slash icon. If I drag just over the border, the view scrolls about 1 pixel every five seconds.

I tried copying and pasting, or cutting and pasting. This doesn't work either. If I cut or copy the file and then navigate to the directory where I want it, the Paste command is greyed out, even if I have ownership of the file and the destination directory. WTF?

Some of this used to be possible in KDE3. Konqueror and Dolphin are seriously broken. Listen, Linux and KDE developers: if you want people to adopt Linux, you'd better make it sufficiently similar to Windows and OSX and make basic operations easy, or you're dead in the water.