john.layt.net

It's that time of the year again when the openSUSE RC's are hitting the net and I can enjoy a fresh re-install.  This time round, I also had a fresh new copy of OS X Snow Leopard to upgrade to (no, I will NOT be upgrading my XP install to Win7 as well).  The plan was just to upgrade in place, but my GPT partition table was somehow corrupted and Snow Leopard was throwing a fit refusing to recognise the partition (funny, openSUSE had no such problems) so I was forced to fully wipe the drive.  This meant actually having to back stuff up (yes, I know...), and having no space left on my 5 other external drives (700Gb) I bought myself a new 2Tb external drive for the purpose.  2Tb.  On my desk.  Just sitting there not much bigger than a paperback. Man, I still remember my first ever hard drive, all of 20Mb that was, shoe-horned into my Amiga 1200.  I remember my work sending me on a training course in the mid-90's for Teradata databases (special parallel hardware required!) and wondering what could possibly need that much storage.  Fifteen years later I now know :-)  Anyway, enough of the past: Snow Leopard purred on nicely albeit rather slower than openSUSE which took almost no time at all.  Windows, well I'm not in a mood for that re-install re-boot hell quite yet...

openSUSE looks really slick, and does run a lot faster and smoother than 11.1 (but that could just have been my messed up GPT and all the residual crud from messing with stuff).  The guys have done a brilliant job with this release.  Where I'm disappointed once again is in the out-of-box hardware support for my Macbook which still falls short with few of the problems from 11.1 having been solved.  I'm still investigating if this is a universal Linux thing or just openSUSE not configuring stuff right.  The touchpad is not configured correctly (no right-click, let alone multi-touch), there's no keyboard lights, and the screen dimming appears to still only work via nvclock.  Sound now works without messing with config settings, but the heaphone socket still doesn't cut the speakers.  My biggest annoyance so far is that X doesn't correctly detect the Macbook's UK keyboard or my external Mac UK keyboard.  Instead, I have to run sax2 and hit cancel and I get the right keymap again (at least until the next reboot, I don't want to click save as it screws up my dual monitor setup).  I'm sure I'll be able to tweak the settings to get it all working eventually, but it's just annoying when I have better things to do with my time.  Perhaps I need to gift one to the openSUSE team to play with?  Just kidding, I can't afford that right now, maybe next hardware upgrade :-)  As usual, I'll update the openSUSE on Macbook wiki page with my results.  I've already cleaned up my general Linux/openSUSE on Mac notes which includes good info on partitioning and how to triple-boot Linux/OSX/Windows.

I haven't had much time to mess with Snow Leopard yet, but I did take a quick peek at the localisation options, and it looks like Apple have also been upgrading their Calendar System support by adding Coptic, Ethiopic, Indian National, Persian and Chinese.  So, game on Mr Jobs :-)