Udo's Techblog

Every year or so I decide to try out Linux on the desktop, so I figured, it's this time of the year again...

The situation: my work PC would be a good candidate for Linux. I'm not using anything Windows-specific on it anyway - with one exception: the Corel Suite. But I figure I'll get it to run somehow under Wine or maybe with some of the virtualization options available under Linux.

The installation (obstacle 1): downloading and burning the OpenSuse 10.2 DVD wasn't a problem. After restarting the PC, the DVD installer boots as expected. However, it then decides that no install DVD is present and promptly aborts the process. After tweaking around a little, I succeed with the following approach: put DVD ISO image on Linux fileserver, mount the image in the apache webserver directory so its files can be accessed via HTTP, boot the PC from the DVD but select "HTTP" install medium on startup, enter the HTTP server's addess and directory. Works like a charm!

The installer itself (once running) is quite pleasant. I go with the standard KDE setup for now, 'cause I can always add stuff later.

The graphics adapters (obstacles 2 and 3): I admit I'm a problem customer for Linux, cause I always use a 3 screen multihead setup. In this special case, there's a fairly new NVidia GeForce AGP powering 2 screens and a quite old Mach64 PCI taking care of the 3rd screen. I fully recognize that most people only have to take one screen into account and there should be no problems with that setup. However, multihead on Linux hasn't worked for me since... well, always.

When the (graphical!) installer comes to the part where the graphics drivers should be configured it just exits with a general error message. That's it, installation complete, but my system can only boot into text mode. After tweaking with the useless Sax2 configuration tool, I come to the following conclusion: the Mach64 card won't ever work in this setup. After downloading the latest driver from NVidia, I can get the GeForce to at least boot KDE on a single screen. However, Sax2 doesn't recognize neither the second monitor nor the card's dual head capability. Only after editing the xorg.conf file and thereby tricking Sax2 into believing there could be more than one screen, it shows options for both the second screen and a special settings dialog for the dual head mode of the card.

I'm not going to waste your time wondering why there is both an option to configure the second display separately and a dedicated "enable dual head mode" checkbox on the config page for the first display. It's a waste of time anyway, since trying to configure the second display separately will result in a horrible crash of the XServer. So enabling the dual head mode on the first display is the way to go. However, it will treat both displays as one single big display. There is no way to make it stop and it's really annoying 'cause windows always get smeared over the entire width available when they open. But hey, at least I got 2 out of 3 screens working after just one hour of fiddling!

Accessing SMB shares: (obstacles 4 and 5) So I use a fileserver. Admittedly, again, not the typical usage scenario. But not that uncommon either. Well, not so fast cowboy. While you can access SMB shares by clicking on the inviting "Add a Network Folder" it only connects by using an "smb://" URL. That's no good, because such a share cannot be mounted into the filesystem. (Once again, Apple shows us how to do that right by mounting network shares under the /Volumes folder.)

In my special case, this would have been important, because KDESvn (KDE's subversion client) doesn't recognize those SMB URLs and hence can't update or commit source code on such a share. But, no problem, you can always use "mount -t smbfs", right? Wrong! "smbfs filesystem not supported by the kernel" is the message you get when you try that. First: why the fuck does an smbfs (or any other) filesystem driver need kernel support? Second: what the heck have they been thinking when they disabled that in OpenSuse? That accessing SMB shares is something you probably don't need anyway? Of course, the error message refers you to the manual page that, not surprisingly, fails to offer any details about the problem at hand.

Usability: (let's count that as one big obstacle) I simply don't know where to begin. These are just a few points in no particular order:

• Konqueror really, really sucks. On the filebrowser's toolbar, there is not one but three dropdown buttons for changing the current view mode. And of course, they're all mutually exclusive! And why on earth do I need buttons that shrink or grow the size of the file icons on the toolbar? And while we're talking about clutter, can someone explain to me the deeper reasoning behind putting all those location icons on the left-side vertical toolbar? And could someone at KDE or SuSE please remove about 50% of all buttons and icons from the entire UI? Or at least grey out things that don't work anyway...


• If you're intention is to use the top-right search field of the filebrowser window in the hope of either finding something somewhere in the filesystem or maybe even to look for something in the currently displayed folder, well... think again! Search results are totally random and won't get you anything you're actually looking for. And when I read "Beagle" I think of the annoying Windows search dog. No, wait, that's not fair. The windows search dog occasionally found something. And really, I'm way past the age where I need to get a chuckle out of cutely named apps while part of me is wondering what that piece of software is actually supposed to do.


• When using the infamous dual head mode, windows routinely get plastered over both screens. Maximizing will of course have the same effect. Ha, but KDE does recognize physical screen boundaries, since it snaps windows to screen edges when you move them. It just decided that you wouldn't want windows to adhere to screen boundaries.


• How the fuck is a "normal" user supposed to configure this thing? Why do I still have to fiddle around with config files manually? Why is everything so painful?


• Konqueror's view profiles suck. Not only are they confusing and often times wrong (who thought it was a good idea to view NTFS drives using the "Web Browsing" profile, by the way?), they're painful to manage. See, when you save your current view configuration in a profile, it also stores the current location in that profile. So when you're later browsing around somewhere else and decide to view that with the same settings you already saved, you're in for quite a surprise since the view will unexpectly jump to whereever you were when you saved the profile.

Phew, what now? One year later, essentially nothing has been accomplished. I recognize that installing Linux on a single-screen Laptop or Desktop PC is probably the optimal usage scenario, provided it's done by a technical person and the intended end user is either freighteningly normal (just doing web browsing, office documents, listening to music) or a real geek who doesn't mind to fiddle with everything for days (and who's satisfied with the occasional "that's not possible" or "it's designed to [not] work like that, silly"). *sigh*

If you're a KDE developer of some sort or maybe even a SuSE employee, I wouldn't mind you sharing your opinion about this here or privately via email.