Monzool’s Personal Publishing

LIBERATED AT LAST. No more torment and self-punishment of using Mac OS X. I finally caved and wiped the Apple operating system from my Macbook and installed Debian and KDE 4. Sweet.

For a long time I’ve been reluctant to wipe the Mac OS X. I wouldn’t just give up on Mac OS X that easy. If so many people finds it that great, why did I keep hitting shortcoming after shortcoming and stupidity after stupidity?

If I should list what I like about the Mac OS X, I could list three things: Front-row is a pretty good media center. Mac OS X boots really fast. I like the zebra wallpaper - I kept that.

As for reasons that I don’t like the Mac OS X experience I could list a few. For example: Finder sux bad and is slow as molasses and stupid. The terminal is broken. I hate when CD’s won’t eject. Its frustrating that wireless cannot reconnect after standby. Hate those stupid obscure keyboard shortcuts. Feel back at Window 2000 with software updates that requires rebooting. I loathe those giant updates to iTunes which I rarely used. The multi-workspace concept in Spaces, its borked. The hibernation support is lousy at best. Hate that stupid inefficient application task switcher. And not by fault of Apple, I’m unhappy with the endless row of bad Total Commander/Krusader clones. I’m also irritated on an almost endless row of broken macports and broken fink ports.

It actually required two attempts to get the Macbook up and running. On the first attempt I followed the directions from the Debian Macbook Wiki, which preach that Lilo must be install for a later replacement by Grub. After installing Grub it was no longer possible to boot. On the second attempt I installed Debian like normal, and chose Grub as boot manager. Then it worked. Actually in a few other occasions I got into troubles when following the guides. It seems that the Debian Macbook Wiki is somewhat outdated on certain areas, as some special “jumping though loops” measures are no longer required, but would rather get you into trouble. Installing the 915resolutions package for example, crashed my X, but was in fact not necessary to get the prober resolution anyways. However it provides many valuable informations and links, and generally ease the installation considerable.

YAST MAY BE a powerful tool, but sometimes Suse and OpenSuse still manage to screw up their configuration so not even Yast can rectified the situation. We use Suse and OpenSuse at work, and twice I’ve experienced that the network configuration cannot recover from a netcard being changed. During boot an error message “eth0 renamed to eth2″ would show, followed by another error message (after a looong timeout) “no configuration found for eth2″ and afterwards DHCP would fail. After booting I would have to run ifup-dhcp eth2 to get network up and running.

Okay. The situation is amendable and requires only two setup modifications (hacks). First an easy edit in the udev network rules, to fix that the one and only netcard was being named eth2 and not eth0.

The netcard MAC-addresses and names are associated in the udev network persistent name rule-file. /etc/udev/rules.d/30-net_persistent_names.rules

SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", SYSFS{address}=="00:0c:29:14:e6:1b", IMPORT="/lib/udev/rename_netiface %k eth0"
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", SYSFS{address}=="00:0c:29:e9:d1:b6", IMPORT="/lib/udev/rename_netiface %k eth1"
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", SYSFS{address}=="00:0c:29:32:11:fd", IMPORT="/lib/udev/rename_netiface %k eth2"

This file contained some mappings not belonging to any netcards in my current system. Ensuring that the MAC-address mached the eth2 entry, I renamed the entry and deleted the other two.

SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", SYSFS{address}=="00:0c:29:32:11:fd", IMPORT="/lib/udev/rename_netiface %k eth0"

If booting after this modification, the first error message would vanish and, as remapping now is no longer enforced, the second would now be “no configuration found for eth0“.

The missing configuration can be fixed in Yast by creating a new ethernet device called ifcfg-eth0, or as I did, by just soft-linking the existing network configuration to that name.

# ln -s /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-eth-bus-pci-0000\:02\:00.0
/etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-eth0

Yehaa. Network errors be gone, and automatic DHCP now working :-).

I’ve experienced this problem on Suse 10.0 on a fresh install where I changed a VMware virtual netcard from the computers build-in netcard to a secondary USB netcard. At that time I didn’t want to spend to much time on it and just reinstalled. We’d just upgraded to OpenSuse 10.2 and I was handed a copy of a colleagues VMware image. As his netcard did not have the same properties as mine (i.e. MAC-address) I was hurled into the same problems once again.

KDE ON VMWARE appears to be a combination of instability.

At work I’ve been running Kde on two VMware Workstation installations, one Suse 10.0 and a Debian unstable. The experience is the same for both installs where the VMware session crashes at least on time a day, but more often as much as three times a day. At work we are four colleagues that are working in a VMware environment and we are all have problems with VMware sessions suddenly crashing. No particular pattern of work seems to provoke the crashes, but experiments show that it is only the Kde + VMware constellation that causes problems. A colleague found that replacing Kde with another window manager makes all the instability issues go away. Hence we have all abandoned Kde for other window managers.

I’m a long time Kde fan and on my personal Debian unstable install, Kde has run for years and it never crashes. Could be interesting to know what Kde is doing that makes VMware spill its guts.

For replacement window manager a couple of colleagues installed Enlightenment, another installed IceWM and I installed Xfce4.4. Xfce4 actually really impresses me. Not only does it look spectacular, but also it’s so much more responsive compared to Kde. Of course I cannot work without my trusted Kde applications and tools, but luckely Xfce4 provides optional Kde and Gnome integrations. The really big bonus of Xfce4 is the awesome keyboard nagivation abilities. Xfce4 provides global shortcuts for easy window resizing, moving, maximizing, minimizing etc. Nice :-)