12/31/2023 0 Comments Download AutoMounter![]() There are two camps in Novell at the moment as Novell is wisely looking at what side will have the greater following for a potential corporate desktop. The NLD will probably have all of the work that Ximian has been doing (heaven knows, they’ve promised it for long enough) and will provide an option for installing both. Suse is still very much a KDE oriented distribution with little in the way of enhancements from Ximian. They probably won’t comment though as they’re too polite to say that another part of their company is lying about their products. If there are rumours that Suse Linux will become a community distribution, get it from a Suse spokesperson in first. This is just wishful thinking from those in a certain part of Novell. Suse Linux is the only Linux Desktop distribution that has ever turned a tidy profit. This isn’t going to happen any time soon. I’d applaud that, but I’m not holding my breath. There’ve beem rumors lately that Novell may adopt a community support model for the non-enterprise SUSE products, rather like Redhat did with Fedora. More likely, they’re just saying “laptop support is better!” because ACPI has moved forwards since the last version of SuSE, which as far as I can tell is what everyone else is doing. I haven’t heard that this is what SuSE is doing, but I’d be very pleased if it was. The single most useful thing a distro could do for laptops is make an effort to package *all* these disparate third party tools and do SOMETHING about making them obvious to the user either try and detect a user’s laptop model on install (or just ASK) and enable all the appropriate stuff, or make a bigass “laptop” configuration tool and build in frontends for all these tools to it.ĪFAIK, no-one’s done this yet. And then there’s also a special utility to enable most of the features of Synaptics touchpads. Other laptops aer similar – there are similar programs to enable the specific features of most manufacturers’ laptops. Mandrake includes the kernel modules, but not spicctrl as far as I’m aware, other distros are in much the same situation. Beyond THAT, you have system specific features, which tend to depend on obscure little third party tools that, in my experience, at *best* the distros simply package and don’t integrate in any way.įor example, on my sony laptop I use the sonypi and meye kernel modules to enable the Sony-specific hardware, and the spicctrl program to do things with them. But in any case this will vary hugely with hardware. My laptop is unusual in that suspend to disk doesn’t really work, but suspend to RAM works perfectly the opposite case is more usual. But whether this works depends, above all, on your hardware. after that, you have things like suspend and sleep, which are actually handled by the power management there’s also an external script for suspending to disk, called pmsuspend, which improves it in some cases. (*every* distro, AFAIK, uses the kernel APM stuff and the acpi4linux ACPI stuff). Most important is power management – which is actually done in-kernel (APM) and by the acpi4linux project (ACPI), so any distro claiming it’s ‘better’ than anyone else in this area doesn’t pass the reality test. in reality it’s a fairly nebulous area which depends on a combination things. Well, everyone’s pushing their ‘laptop support’ with recent releases (SuSE, MDK, Fedora). “I’ve heard that 9.2 has features for laptops, which linux has heretofore lacked quite distressingly.” Where that point lies depends on the skills and free time available to each person, but it will happen. But, there are only so many hours in the day, and fewer when you spend most of them earning a living and/or caring for a family.Īt some point, the scale and complexity of any project exceeds the capacity of one person. The contributions these people make is inestimable. Linux and open source has many such projects. I’m not bashing on ULB, but I also think ULB is an example of the kind of project that challenges one person’s ability to support in their free time. Each install has been a misadventure in conflicting dependencies with forced package removals necessary to complete the install. After the last install, it never got beyond the login splash screen and a spinning mouse cursor. I’ve installed it 3 times with different results each time. It is crafted and supported by James Cogley, a former SuSE employee who knows his way around that dsitribution. As an earlier post suggested, ULB-Gnome is a fine looking version of Gnome 2.8 for SuSE 9.1.
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