rpmdb errors

After trying to install Gnucash, and failing miserably, I told Yast to abort the installation. After that, rpm and apt-get failed to install or remove anything. It seems I messed up the rpm database because of that abortion.

I tried rpm --rebuilddb, but the system kept saying there was a lock on the database. So I listened to a suggestion on a forum to reboot, and then tried again. this time rpm --rebuilddb did the trick, and i could install stuff again!

BIOS update on T23

Installed Windows 98 se back on my Thinkpad and then downloaded the non-diskette versions of the bios and enhanced controller updates. Flashing the BIOS was a matter of just clicking the exe file and following the instructions, just like installing a normal Windows program, easy peasy!

Of course, there is the annoying bit that you have to have a working battery to flash the BIOS. That's why i decided to flash my BIOS now while my battery is still working.

After doing that, I installed SUSE back onto the Thinkpad. Originally win 98 took up my whole hard drive, and Suse resized the windows partition for me without a glitch. The boot loader also had no problems and allowed me to boot either operating system.

BIOS update

I just found out how hard it is to update the BIOS if I scrap windows completely from my hard drive. Without it, I need to download a bootdisk and write it to my floppy and from that boot up and flash. Not all my computers have floppy drives, and I don't have many floppies at home. Most are real old and don't work very well.

I still haven't been able to flash the BIOS of my linux laptop. Flashing my Windows XP laptop was a breeze in comparison. I downloaded an exe file and opened it from Windows, and it flashed my BIOS, just like that!

Mental note,
keep Windows, if just to ease BIOS updates. Its worth it.

superkaramba

Whoops, actually superkaramba has quite a lot of themes. I commented last time that there weren't that many because I was just looking on the superkaramba site. If you go to www.kde-look.org, and click on karamba, you'll get a long list of themes to choose from.

I managed to find the Mac OS X Tiger analogue clock, the calendar and calculator. I couldn't find a dictionary, flight tracker, translator, address book, unit convertor, tile game, etc. Darn! There are tons of themes for linux for tracking cpu temperature, ram, hard disk space, etc, but I'm don't really find those appealing.

MacOS X Dashboard

Just passed by an Apple Authorized Resller in IFC Mall today and spent a long time in there trying out iMacs. I couldn't resist the chance to use a Mac OS X, i have never gotten my hands on one before. Anyways, tried it out and asked the sales guy there plenty of questions and learned a lot about Mac OS X.

I was really impressed with the Dashboard which contains many mini-applications called widgets. Widgets can do a variety of things, from being calculators, help you translate, convert currency, or even check up flight schedules! And they look absolutely awesome! It is really good eye-candy.

When I got back home, I tried to get something like that working on Suse. Unfortunately, there is not nearly as many widgets made for linux as for Mac OS X. Well, there are quite a number of gdesklets, but I couldn't get it to work after fumbling with it for an hour, and gave up.

I had more success with Super Karamba, but the widgets there were very limited. And some of the ones that did work were not very pretty.

The ones I were pleased with only amounted to three:
the dashboard calculator, aero-aio and the xmms bar.

I do hope the linux community comes out with more to match Mac OS X. I really love the Dashboard concept!

amarok

Previously i could not get amarok 1.3 to play, because it kept asking me to select the gstreamer plugin. Well, i had amarok-gstreamet, gstreamer, and gstreamer-plugins installed, but for some reason, gstreamer was not showing up on the pull down menu of output plugins in Amarok.

I tried selected the aRTs engine instead of the Gstreamer engine, and even though I had turned aRTs off, it started playing! Weird. Anyways, it works now.

apt4suse and susewiki

Wow! Just discovered an amazing site that helps you set up apt on suse linux. It is amazing! You can get everything you need from there. I felt lots of multimedia support was missing from the vanilla installation. Just get apt4suse, and you'll find everything you'll need.
Still trying to get amarok to work tho. Its a nice program, but i can't get it to play anything at the moment!

Google for apt4suse.

Oh, and www.susewiki.org is also very useful in general.

multimedia on suse

initially couldn't get sound to work except with realplayer, which for some reason worked.
I got rid of the stock xine-lib and kaffeine, and installed binaries of xine from a website linked from the official xine site. Worked like a charm!

Suse 9.3 Linux Professional

Notes on installation

1. download the boot.iso and boot up and choose the ftp install
2. installer will ask for the ip address of the ftp site, just type in the normal ftp address
3. the installer recognizes most things
Easy peasy install.