So I decided to try OpenSUSE 13.2, or OpenSuSE as I guess I still like to write it.
I have been a user of OpenSUSE I guess back in maybe the year 2002. I don’t remember much of it. I remember writing on the wiki on a personal page of my own and getting flamed for it.
Before that I had been a SuSE 6.0 or 5.0 user (I think 6) that I got off of a collection of CDs I bought at a store in Amsterdam. Like hell we could download CDs during that time on our 56k6 modems and people actually paid money for copies of illegal software collections (for MS Windows). (And MS-DOS). The ones with CD-writers were far and wide in between and those who could get access to those illegal wares made use of that fact to charge large sums for simple copies of that stuff.
So much of a user I was not because I had only a WinModem and no money for an external modem. Had I know that before the fact, I might… but still a real modem was more expensive. So other than playing around in the shell I don’t remember much of that period. Later on I guess my next step was OpenSUSE as our home server (not installed by me) was running a version of Debian. I believe I could have used Gnome, but later on I used KDE, that was before Ubuntu entered the scene.
My experience with KDE was not so bad but I didn’t do much in it other than email, browse and chat. I believe during that period I was not doing any software development of any kind. I played music with XMMS and watched videos using Mplayer. There were actually videos that would not run in Windows but they would run in Mplayer, and its buttons for “a few seconds back” and “a few seconds forward” were invaluable. To me at least, something I have always wondered why it never made it to other players.
But it’s not like I was actively involved in anything back then, during that period. In those periods I had always dual-booted with Windows. I don’t even remember what I wanted to do with KDE/linux, I guess nothing at all. But my mind was really weak in that period (the last) and I got so frustrated with everything - the bad contrasts, the lack of good themes (plastic was still a common element, I guess, not much better than that) – the bad colours. Just as when you (in my experience) jump from Windows to Mac OS, you are shocked by the beauty (at least on the iBook I had) so too going back from Linux to Windows was bliss, or at least going from Windows impaired the eyes.
Currently I am not much happy with the Linux KDE environment I have in front of me. For some reason it must be almost the same as Kubuntu’s but it doesn’t have the same icons (that are beautiful) and the default background is not much to my liking (but that was changed). Trying to look for a better panel and the Varecia seems to be agreeable; but now I still need a darker application-window theme that agrees with Dolphin and other apps.
Unfortunately every dark theme I try makes the Dolhpin colours go haywire (or at least unreadable) so we’ll stick with Oxygen for now (or ever).
Too bad so many elements still use white as a background even with a dark theme (like the menu).
My icons became much prettier as well with Varecia :D.
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When I installed OpenSUSE I decided to have an encrypted LVM with room for another distro (like Kubuntu 15.10). I have not much space on the drive so my root is 12GB, I have 4GB for swap, 1GB for Squid, and about 21GB for home, which is not much of course. After install root still has about 6GB free which is enough. Currently the other root is empty so I can use that if space runs out.
Zypper installed Squid for me and now copying Windows setup, config, and cache dir to here. That at least is easier than in Windows ;-D. There is no default .bashrc. For root :D. And the one that exists is empty almost. Vdir now has colours :D. Time perhaps to copy some rc files from an archive… :(. There is no package for ccrypt.
Blast. And I need VPN to connect to a remote host that has it.
VPN provider provides faulty SSH tunnel address. Other host has ccrypt. Config archive decrypted and copied back. Thing uses not /etc/network/interfaces, no idea how this works. There is no syslog, not sure where OpenVPN is logging. wlan0 is called wls1. My scripts fail completely. To set up the VPN. The route command blocks because nm-dispatcher is called. Gotta love networkmanager.
Finally I’m in. nm-dispatcher causes the route add command to stall for perhaps 20 seconds. It takes like 30 seconds to add or remove the gateway that I need.
I think the end of scripting has been reached. We can no longer script anything in a Linux system because there are components that will **** everything up.
We should kill NM with a stick. A blunt, sharp stick.
NM keeps adding its default route back. Luckily it has a metric of 1024 so it doesn’t really matter, but still annoying.
I don’t really know why that software was designed or how it was envisioned to “work together” the default commands instead of “work against it”.
If I don’t add the gateway the SSH tunnel will cease working. The 1024 metric makes the thing useless so I need a direct route. Worked fabulously before NM became more intrusive. Yay. Integrated scripts into default config file for VPN. Now does not take 30 seconds but zero seconds, for some reason :D.
Something that cost me 30 minutes on Windows (only to discover that I needed an SSH tunnel) and 5 minutes after that, has already taken me like 3 hours on Linux. Yay!.
VPN’s “redirect-gateway” just won’t do anything, I don’t know why.
Pfff, Time to do Squid again. I feel like a normal computer user now who does not know how to do things.
Something to feel for, obviously. Network-manager now has 27 tun0 connections. It can add them, but it won’t delete them. Brilliance, utter brilliance ;-). Yes, I’m sarcastic.
It has wasted 3 hours of my time now. Because the devs can’t get it right. Can’t get anything right, really.
Okay it was only about 2 hours. Feels like 3. This is getting long. Now, when my wls1 comes up it automatically logs me in to the wifi hotspot that I’m connected to. After that, it sets up the ssh tunnel it needs for the VPN. Then when I go to the NM applet in KDE, I can select the VPN (that I have configured in NM now) and a script gets called that sets up the direct route to the VPN gateway. Unfortunately not with VPN variables yet.
So basically it is now one button press to get wifi going, including hotspot login and ssh tunnel, and one button to get vpn going. Pretty nice. Of course, it took me about 5 hours now. The Squid version is too old for the config file I have :(. Takes him another hour to get Squid running. Finally deletes cache directories, seems to help.
None of this has been easy. So after about 5-6 hours I finally have , actually longer I think, what I had in Windows with hardly any investment at all, with the benefit that the VPN I use now is faster to connect and I don’t need to log in to my hotspot. The interface through the NetworkManager applet is also more pleasant. My scripts are in some way still useful for Debian-based systems. I have learned how journalctl[FONT=arial] works. I guess I can incorporate them a little better, but, next time.
OpenSUSE was a tough experience for me from the start. The ugly background and splash screen. A not very pretty default theme for KDE. The installer is way advanced (certainly compared to Kubuntu) but still hard to use. There’s so many options that you don’t really know what to do.
The volume groups/LVs being created in /dev/sda5 was scary because I had expected it to be something like sda5_crypt and the crypt device was nowhere to be found (except in /dev/mapper) and not mentioned. It seemed as though it had overwritten the cryptsetup with the LVM.
I a had problem with wifi for a while because the install/driver had toggled the RFKILL switch and I could not find [FONT=courier new]rfkill [FONT=arial]to turn it back on, but in the end it turned out the actual physical button on the laptop responded. Still,
…The KDE desktop is still flawed because I can’t use it to take screenshots of windows, a pretty important part of my workflow at times. For this reason I can’t really use the system for anything serious. I had just (currently) installed it because Windows was starting to crash all the time and I want to know whether it is hardware related. Currently however OpenSUSE has been rock stable. When I’m not killing all processes.
The KSnapshot utility either takes a screenshot with the blue glow around it (or I have to turn all decorations off), or it takes a screenshot without the title bar – equally useless, or even more so. So, I cannot take any meaningful screenshots of individual windows, and I don’t know how to fix that. Maybe there’s another utility…
Installing “Shutter” requires 77 new packages. … .[/FONT][/FONT][/FONT]Shutter works almost perfectly. The “send to” menu is empty (in KDE) :(. Too bad it’s so ugly and you can’t change the background on which it shows the images, and there is no way for me to open the image in anything else (GwenView, GIMP, …) except that it copies the image to the clipboard.
Just hid almost everything beneath the Places menu in Dolphin. Actually, everything. Seems to get better.
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When I had installed openSUSE I had chosen a username with a capital first, a initial cap. I had expected the actual user to be lowercase but it actually created an uppercase “Xen” user. And it is case sensitive. I just thought they’d use the upper case for visuals in the KDE etc. So I spent the first 15 minutes of my time with openSUSE getting that fixed. Renaming my user didn’t work (for KDE) ---- usermod Xen -l xen -m [FONT=arial]proved ineffective for KDE, I could have just wiped the .kde and .config directories, but chose to delete the entire user and create a new one. Which proved harder than I thought, the [FONT=courier new]adduser[FONT=arial] utility is missing and [FONT=courier new]useradd [FONT=arial]is rather primitive, and obviously I couldn’t do it from KDE. I don’t really like my “real name” to be displayed in conjunction with my username – not the whole world has to know who I am ;-).
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So to conclude for now:
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I have an encrypted LVM with 5 volumes, a (for now) entirely shared home, seeing as that Kubuntu 14.10 and my current install here are both KDE 4 it might even work out. For Kubuntu 15.10 I will need to let Kubuntu create its home in its own root fs first and then overlay it with [FONT=courier new]aufs [FONT=arial]with only the things I want shared between systems.
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the other volumes are swap and squid, squid operates a 1 GB cache for all my browsers across systems (2).
That way at least I won’t have huge .cache folders for Mozilla, Opera, Chrome, and so on. -
Squid is version 3.4, version 3.5 has better SSL hijacking support. Squid can break up an SSL connection by providing a fake signed certificate – the user has to import the fake root certificate in his browser certificate library. I am struggling to find a way that does what Windows “dir /s /a-d” does. I found
[FONT=courier new]find $dir -type f -printf "%f %s
" | sort | { while read f s; do printf "%-10s %8d
" $f $s; true $ size+= $s ]; true $ count++ ]; done; echo; echo $count files with a total of $size bytes.; } but it’s gotta be easier.
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I can’t get du to not count directory sizes (4k blocks) and I can’t get ls to show a filesize summary.
- wifi automatically logs onto a wifi hotspot and opens an ssh tunnel from the KDE interface
- VPN automatically corrects the requirement of the tunnel from the KDE interface
And I guess I’m done for now, for a bit.
My problem is that when I’m using Linux, I do nothing but configure Linux; I don’t do anything else.
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