Thursday, August 18, 2005

Back in the office

I'm back from my trip to NY.

Aside from general catch-up, this afternoon I grabbed all five ISOs for SUSE 9.3 from Opensuse.org. Historically, SUSE has been available for download only as an FTP install, or as a live CD/DVD. Novell recently changed that and appears to be moving to a Red Hat/Fedora Core development model for SUSE Professional. Although the first beta of SUSE 10 is up, I'm not interested in beta software now.

I plan to upgrade the SUSE 9.2 install on my test Dell D600 at work, which is a dual boot machine also running XP Pro. A coworked is planning to setup an XP desktop box in our lab as another dual boot machine. And Bagend, my neglected-of-late homebrewed Athlon box will get updated as well.

I'm hoping that SUSE 9.3 fixes two major bugs that I encountered with 9.2, to wit:

  • On both the D600 and Bagend, I'm unable to run any of the Mozilla apps (Mozilla, Firebird, or Thunderbird) within KDE. They all segfault if launched in KDE, but work ok under Windowmaker or if I run a them from an X session exported to my iBook.
  • On the D600, K3B consistently crashes if I try to burn an ISO image to CD (which is why I'm burning the SUSE 9.3 ISOs using Nero Burning ROM on Windows XP).
I'll follow up with my impressions of the new OS after I've taken it for a spin.

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