/DEV/ZERO

For past few days i am trying out opensuse 11.0. It has some nice qualities like shorter and cleaner boot process, yast control center is good and it has everything prelinked and preloaded so openoffice is also somewhat faster and responsive.

BUT and thats a capital big BUT, its default package manger YaST software installer just sucks.

• It has annoying habbit of refreshing its repos every single time its invoked.
• It takes ever to start the UI.
• The ui operates in a weird "open new window for every other operation" way (this is common to all yast modules).
• The downloader status does not scale to the size of download so for big downloads you keep wondering until the download finally proceeds to 5%.
• The downloader window just does not make any sense, i have no idea what are all the lists of repos and the numbers in front of them, mean and whats more problematic is that i don't care.
• The install works like this, download one pacakge - install -download next -install wasting time between downloads.
• The big downloads almost inevetably time out, and then it waits for user to say retry, unattended big upgrades are impossible on my 256kbps dsl
• On error or next install the downloader has no cached stuff.... it will redownload from scratch next time, even if its a retry for the package in same install session so its a 1 in 50 chance that a 50mb kdelibs is downloaded intact.
• It does not store the rpms locally i can't migrate all my upgrades to a next local machine but have to redownload it there.
• Nothing that can replace apt-cacher
• The repos themselves don't have sane dependancies. All dependencies are merely to satisfy execution of the programm. But the functionality of programm is not considered while specifying deps. e.g. kscope is useless without cscope being installed, but just becuase it uses cscope binary and not a library there is no dependancy  on it. Debian has this done the RightWay(TM).

I can go on and on and on

Finally fed up i installed apt4rpm but couldn't figure out configuration in a sane time frame. So i tried yum next. Although its slower experience than apt its still leaps better. It doesn't solve few inherent problems of rpm based repos. But still makes suse tollerable.

Novell swallow the pride and just switch to apt "for linus' sake"**.

**(its a pun on "for gods sake" :D)

After long series of hanging around, watching movies, visiting in laws, hacking some useless code and many many just plain do nothing weekends; we had quite a productive sunday.

We went packing school bags. For last month or so, a local charity/volunteer group SevaSahayog has been collecting donations from various individuals/organizations in and around pune to assemble school kits (a school bag plus notebooks and writing instruments), to be distributed to various kids in slum areas who are going to schools but can't afford the proper means.

The last leg of the operation was buying the raw material and assemlbing the kits. About fifty or so people who found nothing worse to do on a sunday gathered at a hall in kothrud to do the job.

Here are some photos.

Ok my initial reaction was little harsh; KDE is not that bad, and well.... its KDE, its kool !!! So i try it once in a while when i am feeling down :D.

The one thing thats quite prominent about the kde4.1 packages in hardy is that the primary icons on the applications menu are broken for some reason. Well the likely reason is that those are missing from oxygen icon set.

So just changing the icons from appearance settings to something old fashioned (:D) will fix it. I use the normal tangerine icons for kde4.1 now.

Hope this helps few who want to take nice screen shot of the menu to show off in their blogs.

I was watching Greg K-H's webcast on linux kernel development statistics a couple of days ago. He mentioned that canonical was at around rank 300 when it came to contributing to linux kernel. They submitted like four patches in last kernel release.

So today i tried finding out how much of the distribution kernels actually end up getting submitted upstream.... or at least i tried to in case of fedora and suse.

With ubunut's hardy and interpid trees it was rather easy just add and fetch their remote branches to my local updated linux git tree and then do a git log on differences.

But to my surprise and big frustration i had no luck finding out git trees for both fedora _and_ suse. They either have no git based tree for their development or make it really hard to get to one.
What was even more shocking was that they actually do maintain a CVS repo of the added patch set. I have no words to express my anger.... its insane.

For being labeled a very bad contributor to linux i think canonical is doing wonderful job. I guess this kind of "getting the basic fundamentals right" and simple "making sense" things that make the overall ubuntu a great distro (that i find hard to part with). Kudos canonical, even if you don't contribute back to kernel directly you are contributing a lot to the community if only by virtue of example.

Just go to "about:config" from your address bar

and set browser.sessionstore.restore_after_crash to false by double clicking the value column there.

Next time you close and reopen firefox it won't ask you to restore the previous session.
The dialog is quite annoying for me sometimes.

I am going to make it short, and well, not so sweet.....

KDE4 is good but is still KDE and gnome is far ahead. I will prob stick with gnome even if KDE4 becomes stable.

Finally they are out,
and now for the firs time KDE Pim is ported to kde4 ...... YEY!!!!!

Downloading the apt debs now, watch here for a first impression and short review soon.

While exploring the site's new search feature my wife noticed that there is no mention of her anywhere :D.....
So this post all dedicated to her.... love you honey!!!!!

Gods must be crazy was one of the first movies i rented when we bought our first VCR some 15 years back.

I came across some mention of the film, which got me thinking.
Its a perfect depiction of Arther C Clark's theory "Any sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic".

Everyone probably knows how dilbert site switched to heavy flash and related frustrations etc....

But today i found a small hidden link at the bottom of the dilbert site.
For some strange reason its named 'unix/linux'.
But take a look at the link

http://www.dilbert.com/fast

Thats right ! a flashless version of your daily comic.... HURRRAAAAA!!!!

I still can't get it. Why is it named Unix/Linux? Its not like these don't have flash or something.... May be because only these platforms are worthy enough to be fast :D.