I fixed some serious bugs in the SX52 command interpreter and released version 0.05 of the SX emulator.
The XGS emulator is making progress. The screenshot shows the colour bar demo (in B/W). The Starfield demo is almost working.
I began writing an SX52 emulator. Most of the commands are implemented, the subroutine functions are missing. It might already be useful if you are learning assembler on the SX52 and use a Unix OS.
SuSE Linux 9.3 was on a magazine DVD (CT), which I bought to try it out. The last time I tried SuSE a few years ago. I didn’t like YAST where it took quite a while to change the configuration settings, that was when PCs obviously where a lot slower than now and I also do not like the RPM format because of the dependency resolution.
I also tried RedHat and Mandrake and then changed to Debian. We used Debian at our university which also helped to get familiar with it. I am since recently using Linspire on my desktop machine.
Back to the SuSE DVD: I started the live version first. Strangely I couldn’t move the mouse pointer. I just have a simple PS/2 mouse attached. The mouse was working during the installation itself and in the installed system.
Installation
SuSEs installation seems unecessary complicated to me for a desktop distribution. There were a lot of options which could be changed. This might be useful for people with exotic hardware but nowadays most of the devices can be autodetected. I never had to change any hardware settings or add devices. Linspire and other distributions did everything by themselves.
SuSE also installs more software than necessary. I prefer to only have the least amount of software installed and install the rest myself.
FVWM and VNC was installed for example. Couldn’t it be a configuration option to install FVWM or KDE? FVWM and VNC could be installed manually if someone really needs it.
Another example is Juk and Amarok, they fullfill nearly the same purpose. Wouldn’t just one of them suffice?
Linspire is often criticised for using root as the default user. In SuSE I have to supply passwords for the root user and the normal user and I am even reminded that a password shorter than seven letters is unsafe. I wasn’t able to leave the password empty. What sense does that make? I am the only one who uses the PC.
After the installation I had no sound. My two sound devices were properly detected but arts refused to make any sound and I couldn’t find where to select the sound device arts uses. Even specifying “/dev/dsp” didn’t help.
Click and Run
YASTs software installation is nothing special. I searched for TvTime because I didn’t like the installed kdetv but there seemed to be no TvTime package. I haven’t installed anything but I assume it does its job.
I prefer dselect or Linspire’s Click and Run. In dselect I can use the keyboard to select everything and CNR really uses the graphical abilities. Click and Run connects to a web server and displays HTML pages with screenshots, user comments and ratings.
SuSE should not give away the OS for free and instead use its earnings to improve the usability.
I try usually not to write about links I discovered or other mundane daily stuff because I don’t think it is very interesting, but I got interested in writing lately. It boost one’s ego and also makes you think about the topic you write about. I am also improving my English this way. Last week I wrote an article for a diskmag, which will also appear on this site after it has been published.
Two of the links I found are related to programming, they are both ebooks:
- Introduction to Reverse Engineering Software – The article explains how to analyze foreign software for Linux and Windows. It also suggests the approriate software tools.
- How to be a Programmer – The text is more about the organisational part. Complimentary (real) books I found interesting are “The Pragmatic Programmer” and “Code Complete”
I also found an interesting service: del.icio.us. It is like audioscrobbler. Well, almost like audioscrobbler. It unfortunately doesn’t have a compatibility feature where you could see which persons have similiar bookmarks like you have. This service has two interesting features for me:
I can save my bookmarks there and can access them from everywhere. This is not that important to me because I already know most addresses by heart, but it surely is convenient.
The more important feature is that I can see who bookmarked a site and also see this persons bookmarks. This feature makes it possible to discover new interesting sites. Bookmarks also have a higher quality than results of search engines. They have already been valuated by the bookmarkers.
The new version contains a search function and the DEVICE directives in the source code are now used during programming. Previously you could only change the settings in the device dialog. I have not implemented all directives. Some seemed superflous like the device directive. Complain if some directive you need is missing, or send me a patch.
I added a forum to my website to improve the contact to users of my software and sitevisitors. So anyone who has anything to ask or say can open a topic (after registration).
The forum software is FUDforum. I took the first item for the search for “forum” on Freshmeat (after I sorted the results for Vitality). The installation was very simple and it has more functions than I will need. For example several languages, email notifications, a cool feature is the ability to generate a PDF document from a topic (register and try it out 
).
Software development would be such fun if there was no documenting, testing and packaging I spent the whole day to create a KTagebuch package for Linspire 5.0 .
The new version contains syntaxhighlighting. But I should really start now to program the XGS.
I bought and installed Linspire a few days ago. Previous owners get Linspire 5.0 for free if they subscribe to a Click and Run membership. I got Linspire 4.5 already for free. Promotional Codes were posted on some sites which offered a free developer version. But I also payed for an insider membership and payed altogether more than I would if I bought Windows XP.
I already have a fully functional Debian installation with KDE 3.4. Linspire only has KDE 3.3 and some other applications are not the newest version. But for that I get a “better” working system where I have less work to configure things myself.
I still had to configure the sound servers and sound applications. The KDE control panel for the sound severs, Linspire uses Arts and Jack, crashed a lot if I changed settings. I didn’t manage to use Amarok with streamed audio. On my Debian installation I use the gestreamer-arts output plugin, but I did get no sound in Linspire. Linspire should use just one sound server this would make configuration easier. I tried other applications like LSongs, Juk, and XMMS but none played streamed audio. Linspire support advised me to use KPlayer which works, but I’d rather have used AmaroK.
Everything else worked though. The desktop (icons and taskbar) looks very pretty. The fonts are more numerous and better looking than on my Debian installation (I could probably have installed it all as well on my Debian installation, but it would have taken time to collect and configure the fonts. ).
Click and Run, the software repository, is also nice. It is like dselect with screenshots. The CNR repository also contains a lot of software for developers, like all kinds of compilers and libraries. I didn’t have to use any debian packages until now.
The installation was flawless and very fast. It took about 15 minutes and every hardware was correctly detected and setup. But I use very common hardware so this is not too surprising.
The support was also good. I had two easy software questions which were answered satisfactory and fast.
I tried/worked with a lot of operating systems (Windows, OS X, Solaris, FreeBSD, the major and some minor Linux distributions)in the past and I would say I like Linspire the best. It needs not a lot of time to maintain. It looks pretty and has most of the functions I want. There is unfortunately is no instance of my ideal OS but Linspire comes the closest.
