Kombatant's Lair

Debian and Plymouth

noreply@blogger.com (Panagiotis Vagiakos) — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 10:31:00 +0000

I've used Ubuntu for the past few years, and I've watched it become more and more bloated, to the point that it was almost unusable on my work PC (P4, 2GB RAM). So I took a friend's advice and installed Debian Squeeze, and oh boy, what a difference it has been! More snappy, and half the RAM. Anyway, since then I've been adding stuff to my installation, and Plymouth was one of them. Here are the instructions to get it installed just in case someone actually uses Debian:

0. Install v86d package.

1. /etc/default/grub
Replace GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="..."
by GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash nomodeset video=uvesafb:mode_option=1280x1024-24,mtrr=3,scroll=ywrap"
Replace #GRUB_GFXMODE=640x480
by GRUB_GFXMODE=1280x1024

Notice that grub2 supports different resolutions so you can put there a list
and grub2 will choose the first working one. (debian-edu grub background
image should be updated)

2. /etc/initramfs-tools/modules
Add a line containing: uvesafb mode_option=1280x1024-24 mtrr=3 scroll=ywrap

3. echo FRAMEBUFFER=y | sudo tee /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/splash

4. sudo update-grub2
sudo update-initramfs -u

Now you have the default setted theme.

sudo /usr/sbin/plymouth-set-default-theme --list (list available themes)
sudo /usr/sbin/plymouth-set-default-theme THEME (change theme)
sudo update-initramfs -u (apply to initramfs)

Blog entry tool

noreply@blogger.com (Panagiotis Vagiakos) — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 09:33:00 +0000

So I was looking for a tool that will enable me to blog easily from Ubuntu - Windows Live Writer is sorely missed, and unfortunately there is no way to make it run with Wine (yes, I've tried).

On the other hand, I found Gnome Blog, which is a nifty Gnome Panel applet, which connects to your blog and lets you post whatever you like easily. It supports all the popular blog platforms like Blogger and Wordpress, and it just works :) Hopefully this will enable me to blog more :p Here's the link: Gnome Blog

Late Happy New Year!

noreply@blogger.com (Panagiotis Vagiakos) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Wow, haven’t updated my blog in ages! I have promised to do so about one million times, so this one is no different :p For those of you that are interested, you can also catch me on Twitter, on http://www.twitter.com/kombatant :)

Easter holidays!!

noreply@blogger.com (Panagiotis Vagiakos) — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 16:13:00 +0000

So I am off tomorrow morning to Georgitsi, a beautiful village in the Taygetos mountain near Sparta. I’ll be heading there with some friends to have a good time, and spend the Easter holidays. So unless excessive amounts of food and alcohol take up all of my time, I plan to do some reading as well; I’ll take Dexter by Design with me, the new novel by Jeff Lindsay, to see what happens when Dexter returns from his honeymoon in Paris

I return to Athens on Monday, but I don’t plan on sticking around. I’ll probably go to Larissa on Tuesday, and then to Kavala on Thursday to meet up with the gang there. And, of course, on Saturday, 25/04 I’ll be in Thessaloniki. The reason?

Yup, one week after ASOT 400 Armin van Buuren is back in Greece, this time in Thessaloniki and I plan to be there. A night to remember for sure, as only Armin can deliver. My next blog post will probably contain lots of info about that particular event, so until then, I want to wish everyone a happy Orthodox Easter and see you soon!

Braid – one of the most original games in recent years.

noreply@blogger.com (Panagiotis Vagiakos) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 23:50:00 +0000

To be honest, it has been a while since I’ve played any game – mainly due to the fact that I got tired of them. You will of course argue that there have been many titles that deserved my attention the past year, and I fully agree. The only game that actually got some attention was NBA 2k9, and that’s because I could simply play a couple of games, leave it be for a while, and then pick it up again. It was funny, because even thought I was aware of all the new releases, I never actually played any of them; I used them for benchmarking, comparative analysis as far as IQ is concerned, but game playing? Nope. Even after I got myself lots of free time, I couldn’t find myself willing to install a game, and just play. Hence, I watched all 7 seasons of 24 in about 20 days (but that’s a different story altogether )

Well, a week ago I decided that this was going to change. I spoke to a dear friend of mine (and Catalyst beta tester) that I know is a game-a-holic, and asked him for suggestions. He recommended several titles, and I thought I should start with Wanted – Weapons of Fate. It seemed like a good choice, so I started playing, and I quite enjoyed it I must say. But then one day, I was browsing the Rage3D PC Gaming section, and one game was getting rave reviews : Braid. So I said, what the heck, I’ll try that one too, see if it’s any good. So I got it from Steam, and started playing. It was only when I looked at my watch and realised that 5 hours had passed, and it was 6am, that I knew this one was a true keeper.

For those of you not in the know, Braid is a platform/puzzle game. With a twist: you manipulate time. And that exact manipulation is what makes the puzzles brilliant, you have to manipulate things to your advantage, so that you can get all the map puzzle pieces. While you progress, you encounter even more complex puzzles, more time-manipulation variables (I am on World 4 right now, and when i go right, time goes by normally, when I jump, time freezes and when I go left, time rewinds; crazy ). Its graphics are excellent (you really need to see it in motion to appreciate it), and the music is also very atmospheric. Definitely one of the sleeper hits of the year, it’s getting rave reviews everywhere. So check it out and you will definitely get hooked, just like I am right now

Life after AMD… and a new theme!

noreply@blogger.com (Panagiotis Vagiakos) — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 12:14:00 +0000

As many of you know, I haven’t been a part of AMD PR for the past three months. The economic crisis that hit out industry took a toll in my (former) company as well, and many capable people were left without a job. So these three months served as a much-needed break from all this; after all, when your beloved subject becomes your job 24/7, sometimes you need to step back away from it all in order to fully appreciate it again. So, apart from some posts in Rage3D’s Off Topic, I stayed away from everything, on purpose.

Well, that’s about to change. I intend to start writing again, just don’t know whether it will be for a magazine, website or just post thoughts in this blog, which I have neglected the past two years. We’ll see. I do want to write a piece about the current state of the graphics card industry, so that’ll probably appear here first, and we will see where that takes me.

So all I wanted to say is that, I am back, and intend to be back :) I also updated the blog theme again, so bear with me while I customize it to my heart’s content as usual.

Yes... a refresh...

noreply@blogger.com (Panagiotis Vagiakos) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 23:38:00 +0000

After quite a while, I decided to ditch the old blog template - I like this one much better. Of course it's still largely uncustomized, so I'll update it in the following days.

... and yes, I'll try to update more often :D

Dun dun duuuun... Spider!

noreply@blogger.com (Panagiotis Vagiakos) — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 00:03:00 +0000

So, with the cat (or should I say Spider) out of the bag, here are my impressions of the whole thing. I believe that, what AMD presented in Warsaw is the beginning of a new way of thinking for many consumers. These days, believe it or not, consumers buy products based not how much performance they'll get for their €. Meaning, they decide that they have, let's say €500 to spend, and then see what's out there that can give them more performance.

Let's start from the foundation of the whole thing: the motherboard. AMD's 790FX is probably one of the best motherboards out there, bar none. It's definitely feature-packed, and it has support for several technologies that are to become mainstream soon, like PCI-e 2.0. But, the beauty of it, lies in its backwards-compatibility. So let's just say that you have an Athlon64 X2 right now, and you want to upgrade to the latest and greatest. You also don't have the money right now to get both a new CPU and a motherboard. What you do? Easy. You get a new AMD 790FX mobo, and you breath new life into your Athlon64. Better yet, initial testing show that this particular combination makes the Athlon64 overclock to heaven and back, with some impressive results hitting the net. Couple that with AMD Overclock, which is an excellent tool that will allow you to play and tweak at your heart's content, and the combination is surely promising, to say the least. Plus, if you don't want to invest in a Phenom right now, and would rather wait until AMD releases a higher-clocked version, you can.

Second thing, is the processor. The Phenom is the very first true quad-core processor out there, and many were disappointed with its initial clock speeds. But, I say, just look at the big picture. Did you actually see the prices these chips were released at? Affordable quad-core for everyone - plus, together with the 790FX you have some exciting stuff like un-ganging the memory, and so on and so forth. You probably saw in the various reviews around the net that memory performance was lacking - well, the truth is that several benchmarks don't actually recognise the Phenom's new architecture, and they think they're dealing with an old Athlon. Hence the low results. As for overclockability, I can only speak for the 2.4GHz Phenoms we had in Warsaw - each of them reached 2.8GHz easily, so I doubt that would be a problem.

Last but not least, the HD3850/HD3870. It's a midrange attack from AMD - these chips are cheap to produce, consume very little power and their performance/€ ratio is excellent. Plus, you get scalable Crossfire configuration with one to four cards (in the FX mobos). We had Crossfire X systems on show, which are working already, and the drivers should be released when the new year arrives. A special surprise was on show too, with a system running HD3870 X2 cards in Crossfire, showing how scalable this architecture really is.

But let's get back to the Spider platform. The beauty of it is that these three components actually work together. Meaning you actually see performance advantages by pairing all three together. It's the first release of its kind, and I didn't see many reviews on the net stretching that fact. I believe when reviewers have more time on their hands with the new platform, they will appreciate its advantages. I will post some benchmarks and impressions too as soon as I get a Spider system here to play with.

You can find all the crappy pics I took here: http://picasaweb.google.com/kombatant/SpiderLaunchWarsaw2007

Soo... back in Athens

noreply@blogger.com (Panagiotis Vagiakos) — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 14:13:00 +0000

After five days of hard work in Warsaw, I am finally back in Athens. We put some long hours there, making sure that everything was great, and I believe the AMD team did a great job. I do have some pictures of the event, but that will have to wait until Monday - but bear in mind that I am a lousy photographer :p

Back from London!

noreply@blogger.com (Panagiotis Vagiakos) — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 03:30:00 +0000

Oh I had missed England, I'll give you that :) Two days that involved lots of work, but I believe everything worked out great. I do believe I was in hardware heaven :drool:

In a few hours I will be flying to Warsaw for more work. Five days ahead of me, that I believe will be lots of fun, I will get to see familiar faces and friends again, and, of course, will help launching some solid products.

For those of you who are interested, here's a cool wallpaper for you, at all its 2560x1600 glory, so resize accordingly :)

Windows Live Suite

noreply@blogger.com (Panagiotis Vagiakos) — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 09:07:00 +0000

One of the reasons I started posting in my blog often, believe it or not, is the new Windows Live Suite, which was released a few days ago. The Live Suite includes programs such as Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Writer, Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Gallery. Here's a snip from the report eWeed did:

Microsoft has officially taken the beta moniker off the next generation of its Windows Live services, which it launched at events in New York and Los Angeles on Nov. 6. This new generation of Windows Live will be available in 36 languages and 59 countries across the world, and is the first integrated release of the services, Brian Hall, general manager of Microsoft's Windows Live business group, told eWEEK.

Windows Live is designed to focus on three main things: putting the user at the center, providing an integrated experience across everything that Microsoft does on this front and bringing the best of the Web to Windows, he said.

In line with that strategy, this release brings enhancements to popular services such as Windows Live Hotmail, Messenger and Spaces, while introducing new services for sharing digital photos, planning and sharing events, publishing to the Web, and staying in touch with people, Hall said.

Windows Live Writer in particular is a very handy application, and it's the one I use to update this blog - it works with all popular blogging sites, such as Blogger, Windows Live Spaces etc and offers an easy way to make posts. So I recommend it to those of you who don't need something fancy :)

...but before that, London!

noreply@blogger.com (Panagiotis Vagiakos) — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 15:30:00 +0000

My schedule is kinda crazy lately, I'll admit it. So it's London fist, this Friday, and then Warsaw on Friday. At least I'll get some Dr.Pepper with me back to Greece ^_^

On to Warsaw!

noreply@blogger.com (Panagiotis Vagiakos) — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 04:36:00 +0000

It's been ages since I've updated this blog; I know. But I believe this is about to change. Anyway, lots of good stuff coming up next week, plus I have a certain trip to do ;)

On a totally unrelated note, I really wanted to install Windows Home Server yesterday - I had even assembled an older PC (AthlonXP 3000+, nForce4-SLI mobo, Radeon 9700 Pro :heart:, 2GB DDR1) for that; but my 40GB Hard disk felt unloved since the OS requests 65GB on installation. A big wtf from me to MS for that :confused:

On the gaming front, I am trying really hard to like NBA Live 08. It's certainly one of the buggiest games I've ever played, that's for sure. There are various issues that infuriate me, mostly the fact that every time I load my season I have to go and change the keyboard layout and customize the camera when the game starts because for some strange reason they don't get saved! When an opposite player is at the free throw line, you can forget getting a rebound after a missed free throw because your player is glued to the floor. And other annoyances. The biggest one of all though should be the 3-pointers. I can't for the life of me score outside the 3-point line, and you are talking to a guy who had mastered the run-and-gun style of play, with pick-and-rolls to get the free player etc. So now it's more of an inside game for me. Plus, the game seems easier for some reason now, the CPU is less of a challenge; I've played 10 season games with the Phoenix Suns, I have a 10-0 record so far (I am playing on Superstar) and the usual wins are by 15+ points difference. I really hope they'll fix the obvious stuff with a patch, but I am not holding my breath :bleh:

Back from Tunis!

noreply@blogger.com (Panagiotis Vagiakos) — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 12:22:00 +0000

AMD's X2000 launch in Tunis was a success in my opinion, and here I am, back in Greece. Now the difficult part begins, where I have to be in constant contact with everyone before the NDA lifts, but it's fun :)

Once the NDA lifts I am going to post pictures and several other stuff, but until then, hold on to your horses!

So, on to work!

noreply@blogger.com (Panagiotis Vagiakos) — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 13:51:00 +0000

I was in Munich from Monday to Wednesday, and it was a fun trip - I met up with Lars Weinand and we discussed strategies, where AMD currently has the upper hand and what we need to do to commute that to the press and the public. It's an exciting thing for me, basically because times are continually changing and with a position like mine, I have to constantly adapt to new challenges. I believe I can handle it though :) I loved the trip for one more reason: I hadn't spoken any Deutsch for about seven years, and this was a perfect opportunity for me to see whether I remember anything. Well, to be honest, the first day was hilarious because I could understand maybe 10% of what I heard, but the second day was much better, with the percentage rising to 60%! That actually made me hopeful that I'll be able to converse in German again very soon, which is good.

As an added bonus, I met up with Terry Makedon on Tuesday night and we went out for some dinner (thanks again Almut for the recommendation!). I hadn't seen him for over eight months, so it was catch up time mostly. Oh, and I also fell in love with the waitress that served us :heart:

Apart from all that, it's business as usual. I went to see the progress of my car today, and I am hopeful that by early next week the comrad shall be mine again :)

Whoops...

noreply@blogger.com (Panagiotis Vagiakos) — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 14:16:00 +0000

Counter was not working. Fixt :)

I am also going to Muenchen for the first time tomorrow afternoon. It'll be an excellent opportunity to remember my Deutsch, for which my vocabulary is non-existent these days. But I trust that it'll all come back to me eventually :)

New month, new challenges!

noreply@blogger.com (Panagiotis Vagiakos) — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 10:22:00 +0000

March! Winter is behind us (although I do wonder what kind of winter this was; it seemed more like a prolonged Autumn here in Greece) and it's the time to start something new. As I blogged last week, as of today I no longer work for Siemens. Instead I will be helping out a little company called Advanced Micro Devices, or AMD in short. I don't believe in karma and stuff like that, but I find it a strange turn of events that I will be able to work with the company I have been a supporter since I first got a computer - just the fact that in my 15 years of owning a PC, I've only owned three non-AMD processors (and trust me, I have upgraded more than three times :p) should tell all. I will be helping out as a Technical PR Manager for European Online Media, a far cry from the C++ programming I did for Siemens the past year.

Because of that, I had to resign from my SuperModerator status in both Rage3D and Driverheaven, which was kind of awkward because up until a month ago I never saw myself doing a thing like that. I also had to stop being a freelancer for PC Magazine here in Greece, for the same reasons, which are pretty self-explanatory I believe.

So, as I said, new month, new challenges ahead - hopefully all will go well :)

P.S Wonder if I should start dropping hints on future AMD products in order to increase my blog's visibility now :sherlock:

Everything that has a beginning, has an end...

noreply@blogger.com (Panagiotis Vagiakos) — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 17:56:00 +0000

An era comes to an end when this month closes. The reason is simple: I quit my job over at Siemens. It was a great year, in which I learned many new things, and hopefully I helped my colleagues and the company I currently work for. But, I can hear you ask, what are you going to do? Well, the reason I quit is because I got a job offer I simply could not refuse. Obviously some people who talk to me privately already know what this is all about, but I'd rather not reveal what I am going to do yet.

Stay tuned next week for updates; same Bat-time, same Bat-blog :D

And yes, an update!

noreply@blogger.com (Panagiotis Vagiakos) — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 22:29:00 +0000

I haven't updated this blog in ages, and there's proper reason for that: too much work these days. I think I'll start hating C++ (yes, that bad). Anyway, apart from that, I decided to stick with openSUSE for now, and not only that, but I've completed the configuration of my OS just the way I like it. Yes, I kept notes too, which simply means that the second part of last month's OpenSource Journal is on the way.

Not much else really... the next post will probably be the Journal entry, I'll try to finish it within the upcoming weekend. Click on to see how my current desktop looks like:

New functionality added

noreply@blogger.com (Panagiotis Vagiakos) — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 00:41:00 +0000

Usually I don't have time to hack stuff, but tonight I started looking for hacks for the new Blogger, and I found many - it seems many people are already hacking their code into the new Blogger, and that's definitely a good thing. I've had the tabs for a while now, and they are very convenient to navigate the blog, as it gets larger. Well, today I added two more: as you can probably see, the larger posts have a Read More... link, which expands when clicked to show the full post. Other than that, I added link preview functionality via Snap.com, which is also pretty cool to look at.

I've also looked around to see what Wordpress can do, and I must say, some of the plugins that exist are too cool - of course you need a proper host to have all that, but nevermind. It feels like a whole new world to explore to me, and since I've been toying with the idea of starting a site of my own, I think I'll do just that :) Here are some of the blogs I've found that deal with Blogger hacks:

Hoctro's Place
Hackosphere
Beautiful Beta
Blogger Hacked

To sum up this post, I wanted to introduce you lot to Windows Live Writer. Yes, it's from Microsoft, and it's a mini-word processor especially for blogs. And yes, apart from Windows Live Spaces, it also works with Blogger. As a matter of fact, this very post is made with WLW. Here is the website where you can get it from: http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/

Edit: I modified the top graphic a bit with the help of The Gimp, and also finished modifying a script a while ago, that allows me to use the most common Rage3D smileys over here. Here's an example: :) ;) :( :D :p :cool: :drool: :bleh: :evil: :wtf: :lol: :mad: :wave: :confused: :rolleyes: :Pics:

...and a Happy New Year!

noreply@blogger.com (Panagiotis Vagiakos) — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 00:12:00 +0000

So... 2007 is upon us eh. First of all, may I wish a very merry Happy New Year to whomever reads these lines and actually cares what's up in the Kombatant Lair these days. The past week was rather uneventful, which is definitely a good thing - not much happening at work, 15min drive to get there (gotta love it when Athens is empty due to vacations :)), heaven I tell you!

Oh, I got myself a new toy, as you can probably see in the image that accompanies this post. Yup, I am back to Nokia, and this time I got myself a proper Symbian phone, the N80 (black edition of course). This thing has practically everything + the kitchen sink, and it should keep me occupied for quite a while. I especially love the fact that it's got Wi-Fi capabilities, so I can connect easily to my wireless ADSL router here at home and browse the net without having to sit in front of my PC. Plus, I've downloaded a whole bunch of cool apps, including VNC clients, media players and so on and so forth. If only the battery would last longer (only two days)... :bleh:

By the way, I think I made up my mind about what distro I will use. OpenSUSE is nice et al, but something doesn't quite click about it. I don't know how to put it really, it's just not a distro that'll make a fan out of you. So I'll probably install Gentoo at some point (unless I chicken out and go back to Ubuntu - yeah I know, my decisiveness is mind-blowing :p)

So Happy New Year Everyone, and don't believe ALL the R600 rumours that are flying around these days ;)

P.S As you probably noticed I changed the top graphic somewhat - this comes from a great wallpaper I found over at interfacelift.com, and to be more specific, from Pacific City by Chris Fenison.

Merry Christmas!

noreply@blogger.com (Panagiotis Vagiakos) — Tue, 26 Dec 2006 18:32:00 +0000

...well, even if a bit late. Lots of alcohol, lots of food these days, I desperately need to digest all this stuff I've eaten - well, that's the true Greek spirit so I can't complain :)

I think I also recharged the batteries quite a bit this long weekend (Sat-Tue), and I needed that. Now I've got a couple of articles for PC Magazine Greece in the pipeline (I work there as a freelancer in case some of you don't know), and debating with myself whether I should stick to openSUSE or change my distro once again and go back to the world of Gentoo, which is what I had before the whole Ubuntu craze started couple of years ago.

Oh, and I work tomorrow. Hopefully it'll be nice and quiet over at Siemens DI&P HQ :D

Fix for Vista Help and Support: At last!

noreply@blogger.com (Panagiotis Vagiakos) — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 21:14:00 +0000

For quite a few days I've been getting the dreaded "Internet Explorer cannot download / from help" error whenever I wanted to open a Help file in Windows Vista. It seems our good ol' MS decided to make Windows Help and Support expect the value to be text/xml for the Content Type String Value of .xml files. Anything else breaks Vista's Help And Support.

Thankfully, the Internet is a wonderful place, and by following the instructions from Kristian Kenney's blog it is fixed once and for all (well, until it breaks again, that is).

Umm, yay, I guess...

Installing Linux : Reloaded

noreply@blogger.com (Panagiotis Vagiakos) — Sun, 10 Dec 2006 10:59:00 +0000

Many of you may remember my previous journal entry about Installing Linux - you can still find in on Driverheaven if you are curious. Well, after one and a half year that has passed, it's a good opportunity to do a part 2, since a couple of days ago I decided to reinstall my Linux partition. The reason was rather simple really; I like toying with stuff all the time, and when you do plumbing after plumbing, the poor OS at some point sits down and says "I won't take this anymore! Reinstall me!". Well, I found some time the other day, and I did; but this time, I decided after almost two years to part with my Ubuntu. Yes, it was time to venture into new grounds. So when I heard the new openSUSE 10.2 was out, the choice was easy really. What you're about to see is my experiences with openSUSE from the installation and the first few days of usage. I won't tell you right away if things have gotten better; I believe that, by the time you've finished reading this journal entry, you'll be able to make an educated guess all by yourself. Before we proceed, bear in mind that everything that will follow comes as viewed from a guy who's been using Ubuntu for the past two years, and Gentoo before that. So not everything will be "obvious" in my eyes, which, if you stop and think about it, it's good; simply because every user that has contact with openSUSE will probably go through the same things.

Installation

Well, we are in the DVD era, so first thing I did was to download the openSUSE DVD. My computer's configuration is as follows (you'll understand why I mention it later on)

Intel Core 2 Duo E6600
Abit AW9D-MAX (Intel 975x chipset)
ATI Radeon X1900 XTX
Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 500GB
Western Digital 3200SB 320GB
US Robotics Wireless MaxG Ethernet PCI card

The 500GB disk is formatted with NTFS, and holds my Windows Vista partition. It's also the primary disk in my SATA controller. The 320GB disk has a nice 40GB dedicated for Linux, and the rest is occupied by Windows XP, which is the NTFS partition I use whenever I want to do benchmarks and reviews (since Vista is not mainstream yet). It also has stuff I like sharing between operating systems, hence I have it labeled as "Common".

One of the reasons I am mentioning the hard disk configuration, is simply because it has caused me much grief with Linux installations in the past. When you have so many disks and partitions, you or the installation program is destined to screw up somewhere, so I've learned (the hard way, mind you) that it's better to be safe than sorry. So nowadays, what I do, is try to remove as many factors from the disaster equation as possible - which in this case means that before I installed the new Operating System I removed the Seagate hard disk, and left the 320GB disk in there. So I write the ISO to a spare DVD-RW, reboot my computer and start off from the DVD. In the meantime, since I had experience from my Ubuntu installation, I knew something would go wrong with my wireless network card (also known as, won't be recognised), so I connected a network cable to one of the on-board Ethernet ports, so as to have an Internet connection while installing the OS (and, of course, after that). The actual part of the installation went on flawlessly; YaST found everything, configured it nicely, it even proposed the correct way to partition my hard disk without me having to go and delete my Ubuntu partitions so as to create empty space. One of the most trouble-free installations I've ever had to do for a Linux installation, and I've got to give props to the SuSE guys for that. Of course, having installed Vista lately I must admit that for less experienced users, Vista's installation is much more straightforward, as it asks you even less questions. But, for a normal user, SuSE's installation is great. And yes, I chose Gnome. Yes it's better. So KDE fanboys, stop hassling me about it :p

Btw, for those of you who wonder if I tried to install Ubuntu 6.10 at all, yes I did. I was greeted with a nice black screen when I entered the X environment. I had to press Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to kill it, and then miraculously it appeared normally. Don't ask me why, I don't know, I don't care really. But I was definitely not impressed for a final product, especially since previous versions installed without a problem on the same configuration.

So this is it?
No actually. That's where it all begins. You see, installation for me is not just "pop the DVD in, install, and that's it". Installation means having a working system tailored to your needs and tastes. So we still have some work to do before we declare victory. I decided to deal with the support (or lack thereof) of my wireless NIC later on, and I proceeded to boot to the OS. Everything seems really polished, which is a good thing. SLED is there (which I've come to love even since I had Ubuntu on), Beagle integration just about everywhere (which in my book is also a good thing), so first impressions are very good. Now, time to install the ATI drivers. The upcoming 8.32 version which will be in your hands shortly has full support for the new X.Org 7.2, so you openSUSE users will be able to install the driver without any problems. So, in order to install the drivers, I followed the instructions from Rage3D's Unofficial ATI Linux Driver Wiki, and the installation went on without a hitch. One thing that separates openSUSE from Ubuntu is the integrated Compiz/Xgl support. So in theory, after I installed my drivers, I should be up and running in no time. Well, not quite:
My card isn't supported for some reason :( So I had to find a way to enable the cool Compiz effects. Now you probably start to understand the reason why I connected an Ethernet cable in the first place: I knew bad stuff would happen, and I also knew that I'd need my friend Google to find out the answers. So after a bit of searching, I saw that I had to load the terminal and issue this command as root:

# sudo gnome-xgl-switch --enable-xgl

which would force Xgl to be enabled, although my card in theory doesn't support it. I did, and it worked:

So, at last, fancy 3D accelerated effects on my desktop. So now that I've got the basic stuff, I decided to shut down my PC and add the 500GB hard disk again, so I can continue with the customisation of my OS. Experienced Linux users can probably see what's coming...

Hard Drama
So I proceeded to connect the SATA cable again to my hard disk, and booted the machine. That's where the fun started. Before describing the fun, a little background reading for those of you not proficient with Linux, as simplified as possible. Hard disks are considered devices, and as such reside in the /dev directory. For SATA disks, they are called sdxy, where x is an alphabet letter and y is a number. So for instance, the first disk in your system is called sda, the second one sdb, and so on. Each disk has partitions, and they have numbers. So, for the first partition of your first hard disk, it will be sda1. So, after this small introduction, back to my ramblings. As you probably guessed, adding the hard disk wrecked some havoc. You see, my old /dev/sda drive became /dev/sdb, and so the operating system wouldn't boot. Fortunately, I expected something like that to happen, so all I had to do is get out of the graphical GRUB menu, enter the text menu, where I could edit the grub entries and update them. I then proceeded to boot, only to be greeted with the command prompt after loading a few things. Apparently, /dev/sda4 was nowhere to be found. After a few moments of thinking, I realised I had to change something else too; the entries in /etc/fstab. So I did, and yes, at last, I could boot into the OS. When I did, first thing I loaded was YaST, and I edited the boot configuration so that the changes I made earlier in grub would become permanent. For some reason I've lost the graphical grub menu since then by the way, but that's of minor importance right now. Oh, I also tried to let it auto detect my new configuration, just in case it did a good job. The result was semi-right (it found the new hard disk, the new OS, added entries, but it completely altered the entry for openSUSE for some reason) so I didn't bother with it for now. I was just glad the thing worked :)

To-Do and Epilogue(?)
So this is it for now - my system is rock solid, I said earlier, and I am quite enjoying it. Of course the whole process isn't finished by any way, and here are the things that I will have to do on the near future.

First of all, my wireless NIC, for which I knew there would be trouble, and I was not wrong. You see (small introduction to people who are not aware of the issue), kernel drivers exist for the card, which is based on the Broadcomm 43xx chipset. So the support is there. What's not there, is an essential part that keeps the driver from functioning: the firmware, which is considered as proprietary and can't be bundled with the kernel or the driver. Without it, the driver simply cannot function. So what you have to do essentially, is to "extract" the firmware from a Windows or MacOS X driver, so that the driver can use it and your card can work as advertised. For those of you that are interested, here is the relevant Bugzilla entry for details. What I must stress is that this is not an openSUSE problem alone, but it appears on every distribution out there. So all I have to do is get the firmware, store it in /lib/firmware, so that the driver can see it and my wireless network can function. A small tip: install NetworkManager. You'll thank me for it.

Second will be Beryl. Compiz is nice, but it's rather limited, and I consider Beryl to be much more advanced and customizable to my likings. So my next step will be to install just that. Bear in mind that I've already tried to install it (yes, I am impatient), and apparently I've done horribly wrong in my Xorg.conf, so at this moment X will not start :p Oh well, as I said I have a tendency for breaking stuff, so I'll fix it soon. When I do, I'll be sure to make a second How-To for openSUSE and Beryl, like the one I currently have for Ubuntu Linux.

Last but not least, I have to explore all the third-party repositories that exist for the OS. Ubuntu has me spoiled in that regard, and I imagine that there's a whole world out there for openSUSE as well, and I need to discover it. After all, if you don't try out new things, you'll never know whether there's something better than what you currently have.

So, this isn't an epilogue really, but more of the closure of part one. There will definitely be a part two; after all, I have several stuff I want to do with the OS before declaring it completely satisfactory. Hopefully that will arrive before year's end, and that will give me the time to explore the new OS some more, its tools and its way of working. So far I like what I am seeing - hopefully in part two my conclusion will be exactly the same.
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New avatar day!

noreply@blogger.com (Panagiotis Vagiakos) — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 21:23:00 +0000

Well, I practically changed my avatar in every main forum I post (and on MSN too :p). Here's the original:

As for the new sig (Pain and misery always hit the spot, Knowing you can't lose what you haven't got), many of you probably recognised it as a snip from Depeche Mode's Lillian. It's taken from some personal stuff I am going through right now.

Oh, and thanks Olga ;)