I’ve been happily using Linux now for over a year and thought I’d post about my experiences so far and after the what happened to me (more on that in a bit) I’ll probably be creating a new category to store useful bits as I find them (for myself & hopefully it will  be helpful to others).

Anyway other the last weekend I’ve been able to try out a new Linux distribution, opensuse 11.1. I thought I’d try it out as after starting up my laptop saturday morning I had a sudden partition not found error. So after downloading and going through the LiveCD installation process which is great & easy to use like Ubuntu’s or the many others out there everything was setup. I copied over the files from backups and was all set (or so I thought).

I’d chosen the KDE for my Desktop as it looked snazzy and I liked the idea of the plasmoids, etc.. available but it turned out to be a big hassle First I installed the nvidia drivers so I could setup my monitors correctly, this went great. Next up download some of those cool plasmoids I’d seen on the web, start compiling….. error no cmake. So I install cmake, new error (can’t remember what exactly but something else was missing). Now that was up and running I started adding my little plasmoids & setting up my desktop and everything how I wanted. Boom, screen blanks out and reappears, an alert window pops up warning me that something in KDE just crashed.

Anyway all these little things put me off trying any further. There’s nothing wrong with either openSuse or KDE, I was just unlucky & time was too short to get used to the new KDE shortcuts

So I went back to looking into what was wrong on the existing Linux install and found it out it was quite straight forward. After a bit of fooling around editing a few things in menu.lst which had somehow set themselves back to a previous copy (thus causing the problem).

Anyway I’m back now on Linux Mint which I’ve been on for a few months now, I think after all this I’ll be moving back to Ubuntu (what originally got me into Linux) when Jaunty is out in 20 or so days from now as it’s looking quite interesting.