Excuse me ma'am while I whip it out

If you want to read a comparison between MS IE 6, Opera 6, and Moz .96, feel free to follow this link here. I can't say how unbiased an opinion the review has but it seems pretty close to what I would say about the three. YMMV.

Christmas Eve

It's Christmas eve and we here at the Seto Shack want to wish you and yours a happy and peaceful holiday season.

Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, our best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, non-addictive, gender neutral, celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all . . . and a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling, and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 1999, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great, (not to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country or is the only "AMERICA" in the western hemisphere), and without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith, choice of computer platform, or sexual preference of the wishee.

By accepting this greeting, you are accepting these terms. This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal. It is freely transferable with no alteration to the original greeting. It implies no promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the wishes for her/himself or others, and is void where prohibited by law. It is also revocable at the sole discretion of the wisher.

This wish is warranted to perform as expected within the usual application of good tidings for a period of one year, or until the issuance of a subsequent holiday greeting, whichever comes first, and warranty is limited to replacement of this wish or issuance of a new wish at the sole discretion of the wisher.

The wishee further agrees to hold harmless and indemnify the wisher, along with its heirs, assigns, officers, directors, shareholders...

Mele Kalikimaka and Aloha!

Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be unto all people.

For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in Swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of heavenly host praising God, and saying,

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

Sussed SuSe

My present to myself was the latest version of SuSe Linux, Personal Edition 7.3. As you may remember, I've been running version 7.2 at home and Caldera OpenLinux eDesktop 2.4 at work. I've since decided to try 7.3 at work by wiping Caldera and installing SuSe. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I first installed 7.3 on my Linux box at home (Intel 815EEA2 motherboard, Intel Celeron 850 CPU, 256MB of Crucial RAM, 6GB Maxtor 7200 IDE hard drive, Toshiba CD-ROM, TEAC floppy, Antec case and power supply). For the most part, the install went well, except for the sound. The Intel motherboard has built-in sound and even though SuSe apparently recognized it, the install did not configure it correctly. My guess is a conflict in IRQ.

My earlier impression that their manuals (three of which are included with the personal edition) do not have as good an index as they need was reconfirmed. For example, they now have a heading in the index for the Personal Firewall. But the page that talks about that says to click on the button to enable the firewall. Unfortunately, I'm not sure where this button is (I assume it has something to do with Internet access and I will let you know more as I learn more)! I searched Yast2 but have not found such a button. I did get it going by going to the security settings of Yast2 and clicking on the firewall configuration icon. In the resulting entry box, you need to enter "yes", "no", or "masq." You are left to your own guess as to what each does. This is not good. A firewall is an important part of any PC connected to the Internet and if this is how they implement one, well, good luck to Aunt Minnie.

I will try installing it on my PC at work (Dell OptiPlex GX1) and see how things go. If things don't go well, don't be surprised if you see a bright flash in the sky. That would be me rearranging the molecules of SuSe Linux Personal 7.3.

Island Images

The MorningPaper(tm) has an announcement (see it here) that the Honolulu Academy of Arts will be having an exhibition of Ansel Adams images that he took in Hawai'i during the 1950s and 1960s. The late Adams is one of the giants in photography and you better believe I will be at the opening come June 27 next year. I can't say it any better than US President Jimmy Carter did when he presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Adams:

At one with the power of the American landscape, and renowned for the patient skill and timeless beauty of his work, photographer Ansel Adams has been visionary in his efforts to preserve this country's wild and scenic areas, both on film and on Earth. Drawn to the beauty of nature's monuments, he is regarded by environmentalists as a monument himself, and by photographers as a national institution. It is through his foresight and fortitude that so much of America has been saved for future Americans.

Aloha!

Picture It!

When I picked up my copy of SuSe Linux, I also got a copy of Microsoft's Picture It! publishing program for SWMBO. She already has Print Artist and Print Shop so I figured I would get her Picture It!, so she would have something different to try.

I should have known better than to buy a Microsoft product. Not only has it page faulted several times already, but it also keeps the PC from shutting down cleanly. That's on the programming side, what about what it is intended to do? Well, that sucks too. The left panel is full of advertising. That's right, ads. In a program that you pay about $50USD for you get to have about a quarter to a third of the screen taken up by ads for MSN and other MS related stuff.

For that alone I would recommend against buying this piece of sh*t. But it gets worse, the program comes with something like 4 CDs full of clip art. The kind of clip art you can buy in books by the thousand for mere pennies. The kind of clip art that came, literally, from the 1800s. These are line engravings of farm implements, animals, and of people who no one except historians would recognize. 250,000 worthless pictures.

If you've figured out by now that no one should be buying this then maybe my communications skills aren't that bad [Hmmm. No, I'm not going to touch that one, I'm still in the Christmas spirit - ed.].

SuSe You

So there's some good news and some bad news. First, the good. I haven't tried any other recent distributions so I can't say SuSe 7.3 is the only one to really support token-ring network cards but it is the first that I've used that does. In fact, the SuSe install recognized all of the hardware: video (ATI), sound (Crystal Sound 4236B), monitor (ViewSonic VE150m) and the aforementioned IBM token-ring PCI NIC.

However, not all was flowers and sunshine. Even though it recognized all of the above, it did not correctly configure all of them. First, the install used a refresh rate outside of the acceptable range for the LCD screen so I had to quickly abort and switch to the ncurses based installed (rather than the graphical one most of you will see). Secondly, even though the install said the sound was configured, when Linux booted up there was an error message about not being able to use IRQ 0. Why it wants to use 0 instead of 5 I don't know. I've tried using YaST2 to set the parameters to 0x534, IRQ5 and DMA 1 and 3 but every time the snd-card-cs4236 module loads it tries to use IRQ 0. Until I can figure out where to change that by hand sound will be dead.

Also dead was network access. At least until I remembered that our marvelous network DHCP server gives out only IP addresses for your PC. Most others also give out the addresses for the DNS, mail, and news servers. But noooooo. We have to be different. Our network people don't want just anyone to access "their" Internet so they figure if they don't tell everyone the DNS address you can't get out. Obviously, there are ways of getting around this but it illustrates the level of thinking going on around here. So, I had two choices: either override the Linux file that keeps the DNS address or use a static IP address and DNS address. The later is what I decided to do for now. Later, I will create a file with the DNS address and copy it over the file that SuSe creates when you boot up and get my PCs address from the DHCP server.

Another strange thing during the install was the default partitioning SuSe was suggesting I use. I have two hard drives in my PC (both Maxtors, 6 and 15GB respectively). The first is partioned in to two logical MS-DOS drives for Windows 2000 Pro. The second drive is for Linux. Caldera, the previous distribution I used, had no problem with using only the second drive but SuSe wanted to delete everything on the Windows drive and use a couple of hundred megabytes from that partition, even though the second drive had 15GB free. I have no idea why it wants to delete, resize, and repartition the first drive just to take a 200MBs but I had to go into "expert" mode and change it so that SuSe used just the second drive.

At that point the install also wanted to write LILO to a floppy. While this is no doubt a conservative way of doing things (this keeps default access to the Windows partition, even though there wouldn't have been any Windows to boot to if it had deleted everything), it is also a PITA. So I had it write LILO to the MBR, which I knew should work fine because that is how Caldera did it. Be aware that SuSe uses a graphical interface to LILO so don't be surprised if you don't see the common command line prompt when you boot up.

One last strange thing, for now anyway, is printing. I don't know why but printing seems to be the last area where Linux falls short of being usable. Using YaST2, I configured SuSe for the HP LaserJet 4 Plus that I have. This is a standard workhorse in the business and government circles so the drivers for it should have been long ago cleaned-up. But I guess not. When I try to print, all of the spaces are deleted and the letters all runtogehterlikethis. Further, while there is this great utility that can import TrueType(tm) fonts, in KWord, they will display fine, but not print. StarOffice 5.2 does not seem to have this problem but things are still in the dark ages when it comes to printing and font handling.

Other than that, I'm having fun playing in the new sand box and I will say more if I find anything interesting to talk about [Interesting? Heck with the Christmas spirit, when did that ever become a criterion on what he has to say? - ed.].

Aloha!

It's Friday!

Dr. SuSe

Not. Yesterday, when I booted into SuSe, the sound magically started working. I have no idea why, unless I needed to reboot to get the settings I changed initialized? In either case, it works.

So there are two outstanding tickets to work on: getting the DNS set and getting LILO to default to Windows rather than Linux.

Not much going on here right now, but once the legislature gets going in January, things will pick up. Joy.

Have a Great Weekend Everyone - Aloha!