djst's nest

Pike's Great Mozilla Firebird Extensions

If you haven't visited Pike's Extensions home page, now is the time to do so. The quality and simplicity of these extensions are impressive. In fact, some of them should be included in Firebird, such as the missing Search Button for the toolbar and the Show Failed URL hack which increases the usability of the XUL error pages (which btw should be the default behavior in Firebird instead of the annoying modal alert boxes).

Personally, I'm using Bookmark Backup, Clone Window, Popup Allow and Show Failed URL.

Why You Should Use Mozilla Thunderbird

I have little free time to spare for Mozilla these days. The computer science studies at the university and the part-time job at Power consumes pretty much all of my energy . I hope things will get better next year, when things (and customers) calm down a bit.

Anyway, I found some time to write a why document for Mozilla Thunderbird the other day. Scott told me it was needed, so hopefully it will have a positive effect on Thunderbird marketing.

Keiyboard Doeisn'tr Work

My old Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro is slowly dying. I have to press really hard on the space key, and some keys randomly print more than one letter (as shown in the blog title). The real problem, however, is finding a good keyboard to replace it with.

I'm currently using a Logitech MX-700 mouse, which has a sleek silver and black colored design. Finding a keyboard that matches it seems to be impossible. Logitech doesn't even seem to be offering ergonomic keyboards sold separately anymore. The only product on their web site is a cordless set of both keyboard and mouse, but I already have one of their best mice!

The alternative is to look at what Microsoft has to offer, and they only offer one separate ergonomic keyboard, which is the Natural Multimedia Keyboard. However, that keyboard is light-gray, which doens't blend in with my mouse at all. They also offer a set of cordless mouse and keyboard (which by the way looks much better than Logitech's set), but I don't want to get rid of my MX-700. What to do? :(

Hands on SuSE Linux 9.0

You might remember that I installed Fedora Core 1 last month with some installation problems and even more usage problems. After using Fedora for a while, I came to the conclusion that it's a nice Linux distribution for people who only use their computer for stuff like surfing, mailing, some casual hacking and maybe word processing. It is not an operating system for people who listen to and download music, watch movies and stuff like that.

This week I decided to install SuSE Linux to see if it's a better alternative for a Windows geek like me. I've heard from several people that SuSE is supposed to be (one of) the best distros for Linux beginners. That sounded like a fair description of myself, but the thing that kept me from installing it previously was the fact that they do not offer ISO disc images. With my new hard drive, however, this wasn't a problem anymore.

Installing and Using

At first, I was going to try the FTP install by just burning the boot.iso CD and enter linux install=ftp://server/ in the boot console. However, that failed because it said I hadn't loaded a network module. There were no instructions on how to do that so I decided to download all files instead. After downloading all the files, I once again booted from CD and chose to install from the hard disk. The first impression from the installer was that it didn't look as professional as the Fedora (anaconda) installer.

The first major setback was when the installer would prepare the hard drive with partitions. For some obscure reason, SuSE can't use free space betweentwo partitions! It can only use continous free space at the end of the disk. I've never seen this before and appearantly no other distro that I've tried have had problems with this. I was forced to move my partitions, a process that took several hours.

After the partitions were moved, all free space was at the end of the disk and SuSE accepted it. However, neither Grub nor Lilo successfully booted the system after the installation completed (major setback #2)! I was left with a system that wouldn't boot anymore, so I had to reinstall Windows in order to fix it. I made some rearrangements on the disk, placing the / mounted partition before the /swap partition and used the Grub Text option and finally it worked. SuSE was up and running!

I was impressed that the installer actually detected my TV-card. As with Fedora Core 1, my monitor and mouse wasn't detected properly. I guess there are no good multi-button drivers for mice on Linux yet. I was not impressed by how the installer interacts with the user though. For each hardware type it tries to detect, you need to click OK or Cancel for some obscure reason. Very annoying and frankly unexplainable. Why not just detect everything silently and present me the result when done?

I admit that I put a lot of emphasis on design and the attention to details in almost every aspect of life. The most important thing for an operating system should be to be as functional and helpful to the user as possible, but it's not irrelevant how it looks like. My impression on the graphical interface of SuSE (defaulting to KDE) was that it was very crowdy and bloated. The desktop is filled with shortcuts to all sorts of things, and the start menu is a mess. While I'm impressed that it has out-of-the-box support for MP3, MPEG and AVI files (unlike Fedora), I find the graphical design disturbing. Why did they choose such an ugly logo by the way? :)

Conclusions

After spending some time with SuSE and using the automatic update feature to ensure that all packages are up to date, I've decided that I don't really like SuSE, despite it being much more helpful to me than Fedora. For some reason, I tend to look more at design and professionalism than lots of features. Software should be easy to use, but it should also look good and communicate trustworthiness.

Pros (compared to Fedora Core 1):

• Properly detected my TV-card
• Automatically mounted all my Windows partitions
• Reads NTFS partitions
• Software for watching TV included and preinstalled
• Includes support for MP3, MPEG and AVI
• Installer doesn't abort if one package isn't installed properly

Cons (compared to Fedora Core 1):

• Looks unprofessional
• Defaults to KDE, which I tend to dislike more and more (bloatware warning)
• Clumsy and unpretty installer, asking about every piece of hardware
• No ISO files, making the installation more difficult
• No optimized kernel for Ahtlon Thunderbird was available for download (Fedora downloaded this automatically)

Question: If their slogan is "Simply Change", why don't they make it simple and start offering downloadable ISO files?

The bottom line is: SuSE isn't for me. This week I also installed Mandrake 9.2. More on that later...