OpenSUSE 10.3 Package Management and some other stuff

Well, I have been using the development versions of OpenSUSE 10.3 since alpha 5. The operating system has certain stabilized quite a bit now at Beta 3.

In one week (Sept 20) the first release candidate will be pushed out the door. I am expecting only a few changes between now and then.

One of the real big *Behind the Scenes* changes, has been with the package management system. If you have been following the development of the OS since 10.1, you will surely have heard that there have been numerous complaints with the system.

Primarily the complaints have been associated with the the integration of the red carpet technologies into the software management stack.

Essentially in 10.1 and 10.2, there were two package managers. The traditional yast stuff, and the newer red carpet stuff (zmd/rug). I personally blame a lot of the problems on the necessity to synchronize (and failure thereof) between the two technologies.

Anyways, with 10.3 looming in just under a month, the *new* package management stuff seems to have more or less hit its stride.

ZMD has been removed from the OpenSUSE distribution and the old yast and red carpet packaging stacks can finally be said to have a full grown healthy child. zypper. So far, I have no major complaints here at all, although some of the error messages are somewhat oblique.

Also in the news is that the people at AMD have released a good chunk of the specifications for the ATI R500 graphics chips. Currently the documentation (894 pages so far) mostly reflects the necessary information for implementing proper two dimensional support for applicable cards. Supposedly, the three dimensional register information will be available some point next week.

I am by no means an expert at graphics driver implementations, but from what I have read, this seems to be fairly promising. One could certainly hope that it will be possible to make the applicable cards *less evil* as time moves along.

Anyways, I won't be making any purchase in the graphics card domain for the foreseeable future.

Keep on swimming :)

My iriver clix gear - Oh the joy

So I recently gave away my iriver clix cradle because it was never really mine to begin with... Does that make sense? Anyways, whatever.

So last sunday I was moping around with no way to listen to music without an external set of speakers or headphones and feeling generally sorry for myself. To rectify it, I hopped onto eBay to search for a new cradle to call my own. Sure enough, I found someone in Canada selling one of these rare beauties and put a bid down on it. Not even a minute later, I discovered that this seller also had a matched FM Transmitter (AFT-200) up for auction as well. So I bid on it too!

Anyways, a few minutes ago, they both arrived safe and sound, and now I am relaxing with blissful tinny (is this a word?) music echoing around my apartment.

Thumbs up for the iriver clix, a great product.

Thought you should know.

-Ted

OpenSUSE 10.3 and mythTV and how to do it

I was recently passed a link as to how to install mythtv on OpenSUSE 10.3. As I migrate from my current SUSE Linux 10.1 setup to a shiny new 10.3 installation I will be submitting contributions to that page.

Come to think of it, I had better migrate to the schedules direct tv listing service pretty quickly here because I only have scheduling information left for 3 more days... eep!

-Ted