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Turning SLED10 Linux Into a Practical User Desktop


Interesting Applications

Out of necessity, 95 percent of any two workstation-oriented distributions are going to be the same. That's because:

  • They'll be using kernel versions within one or two numbers from each other.
  • They'll include a current OpenOffice, Mozilla Firefox and the Evolution mail client (which are basically the same regardless of distro).
  • Their GNU utilities will be the same, except for ones specifically written for the distro.

Below are some programs I found in this distribution of special interest other than the automated RPM installer.

Screenshot Utility (In Main Menu): You won't see any screenshots with open menus. I couldn't find a way to make the Gnome window manager-based screenshot program work with an open menu. Unlike Ksnapshot, there isn't even a delay feature to allow it to take the screenshot a few seconds to enable open menus. Unlike the next/JP application written for use with the KDE window manager, this won't automatically come up with a sequential filename. Instead, you have to guess without being able to see what is in the directory you're saving to. It's a minor irritation, but just another item that makes me wonder why they didn't get it right.

Sure, I could have installed the KDE window manager so I could use the KDE-optimized applications. But the point of this recipe is to explain how a typical installation is going to work. If I customized it the way my own desktop is configured (KDE and a few Gnome applications), it would be of comparable use to me once I hammered the bugs out. But that wouldn't help anybody else dealing with the Gnome setup out-of-the-box, particularly if they were an inexperienced Linux user.

Beagle File Search: This is as good as Novell says it is. Open Search from the Main Menu, type in a keyword, and you're there. A problem has been reported with a lag in disk response due to the time it takes to continuously update; but it didn't show up in the 600 MB of test files I loaded onto the box. Warning: Beagle does not look at filenames—there's a separate tool for that, which makes it a bit less useful than it could be. Also, Beagle isn't unique to SUSE; there's a version in the Fedora Core 5 distribution and probably others.

Multimedia

I've seen Linux zealots try to excuse the lack of usable multimedia content by saying people don't really need it. I say, no way. Today's home and SOHO user expects multimedia content to work. The business user is likely to need business-related multimedia content in it. And the enterprise user is likely to need multimedia content delivered by the company intranet. The bottom line: If your customers don't get multimedia access through your Linux boxes, they will expect you to fix this—even by installing Windows, if need be.

Flash is installed with the distro, and it works. RealPlayer (actually, the Open Source Helix player with Real license) plays mp3s just fine. Both are available to users of almost any Linux distro. Simply download them from the company Web sites.

But Video does not work with SLED10. The main video player, Totem, is not only completely useless for the usual licensing reasons (also true of FOSS distros out of the box), but it also doesn't work even with the nonproprietary mpg format. For Novell's explanation, see their page SLED10: Multimedia Capabilities Shipped with SUSE Linux Enterprise.

Next, you'll see what the repository configuration screen you'll be looking at when you set up video that actually works:



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