Alvin's Educational Technology Blog

http://opensuse.org/

It’s been a while since I’ve played around with Linux on the desktop.  I have a couple of servers, but SSH is quite a bit different than an environment that is used to create spreadsheets or listen to music.

In the past I have used Mandrake and Red Hat on the desktop.  I have never considered either as a replacement for XP (or Windows 2000 Pro, when I used it).  Now Dell is selling machines with SUSE installed on them.  I thought I would give it another test run… and I was thoroughly disappointed.

I downloaded the five CD’s.  That wasn’t a problem.  All the ISO files are available at

http://en.opensuse.org/Released_Version

I had all the file in a couple of hours.  I burned them to CD’s and started the installation with disk one.  I used a Dell Inspiron 2650 laptop (1.7 GHz, 512 MB RAM) with a blank hard drive.  The installation went very well.  All the components (NIC, video card, sound card, etc) were properly identified and the correct drivers were loaded.  It even recognized that my display was optimized for 1024×768 and set the screen to that resolution.  At the end of the installation I was asked if I wanted to do things like setup the firewall and automatic updates.  I did the updates and everything worked as it should.

After the installation a reboot took me into the OS.  I opened a browser (Firefox) and went to my start page at ProtoPage.  It looked bad.  The fonts were all goofy and hard to read.  I looked at some other content and had mixed results.  The UF Blackboard server looked bad (like my ProtoPage site), but Digg was fine.  It must be that certain style sheets have fonts that don’t look as good.  I could live with all this.  The disappointment came when I tried to play some music. 

It was fairly easy to connect to my Windows server and get to my Music share there.  I double-clicked an MP3 file on the server.  The music player (Banshee) opened but nothing happened.  Hmmm… I dragged the MP3 over to my desktop, and that worked ok.  I then double-clicked the MP3 now on my desktop.  This time it does open with the music player, but I get an immediate playback error – you do not have a decoder installed to handle this file. Apparently the MP3 format is obscure enough that you need a special codec to play them.  You can guess what happened when I tried to play one of my WMA files.  I looked through the Banshee menus to see if there were listing of decoders.  I couldn’t find a list or anything that explained how I need to add a decoder.

I switched over to something a little more practical – OpenOffice.  I started a Calc (spreadsheet) session.  I use OpenOffice in XP, so I’m used to how things work.  I did the million test.  It’s pretty simple.  Type a one in the first cell.  In the next down create a formula A1+1.  Copy that down and over until you get the number up to 1,000,000.  In Excel the whole process takes a few seconds.  In OOo, it takes a couple of minutes (in XP).  In SUSE it managed to finish while I had lunch.

That’s the main disappointment with SUSE as a desktop OS.  It is just too slow to be useful. Maybe tomorrow I’ll try Red Hat again.

Voice over IP (VOIP) has been around for a long time.  In the late 1990’s VOIP worked a lot like a 1970’s CB radio.  I few people had them.  If you could find someone to talke to, the quality was hit or miss and also half-duplex.  That means only one person could talk.  You could either talk or listen.

Just in the last year or so a company called Skype has offered VOIP that works well.

http://www.skype.com

Skype is free.  On top of that, the quality is nearly as good as a regular telephone.  The service is full-duplex; you can talk and listen at the same time just like a regular phone.  Using Skype you can call anyone else using Skype anywhere in the world… for free.

The only problem is that some people don’t have fast connectivity.  Skype requires a broadband connection.  That leaves a lot of people out, but Skype does offer SkyOut.  Using SkyOut, a Skype user can call a regular phone number.  The rate is around a penny or two per minute even for some international numbers.

Starting today, Skype users can now call any US or Canadian regular phone number for free.