My Journey with Linux

Earlier this year I wrote:

• When Novell bought SuSE I switched to openSUSE and am currently using 10.3 on a 64bit box. Unfortunately it to suffers from a form of dll hell which I will call lib hell. Getting multi-media applications to run has not been easy and some still do not work. Luckily I also use VMWare and run XP to do some of the multimedia stuff. Open Office now handles the Office/Word world.
• So while it is great to have all these Linux distributions and the accompanying anarchy (which probably helped Linux get to where it is today), I would prefer far fewer distributions that mostly worked out of the box. That would in my opinion mean world domination could be realised.
• I will now probably switch to KUbuntu in the hope that it will ease my lib hell blues. In the mean time I will continue to use Emacs for the foreseeable future.
• Having said all that I have to conclude by saying that, the Linux journey has been been like a marriage that became a lasting love affair. I could not have asked for more.

Well that has happened. During the past week I have made the switch. It happened after trying the recently released openSUSE 11.0. This broke much of what I had working under openSUSE 10.3. The lost serious was wireless networking, VMWare and SOUND!!. So I called it quits and downloaded KUbuntu 8.04.

Initially I was a bit taken aback when the contents of the DVD seem to be dumped on my disk and that was it for now. Very different from the openSUSE install. Luckily I have broadband access (TelkomSA) at home. So after learning a bit about aptget, I started the process of installing what I needed. This proceeded reasonably smoothly.

There were some hic-cups namely, wireless networking, VMWare and SOUND!!. However with the help of the Internet and some helpful postings I have made steady progress and now have a system that I am mostly happy with.

With regard to the wireless this was just as broken with KUbuntu as it was it was with openSUSE. In fact, once I had the wireless network working, it would run for a while and then disconnect. This suggests that I should accept that this is a general problem with the current Linux distribution. That is rather sad as one would have hoped that the driver for the wireless network card that I use would have improved with a subsequent release rather than deteriorate.

The converse is true for my Logitech Z10 speakers. The driver for this hardware is present and can be made to work. Now if only I could get VMWare tools installed properly the speakers may even work when I forced to run a Microsoft application

So for now, the system continues to tease me rather than taunt me and so the love affair continues.

[email protected]