Hate KDE Plasma5 on openSUSE Leap 42.1? Me, too.
After severely breaking my well-oiled openSUSE 13.2 installation, and wasting a couple hours trying to fix it (unbootable), I finally bit the bullet and just did an in-place upgrade to Leap 42.1.
Of course, the first thing I noticed was that my display driver was incorrect (max res 1024x768). The second thing was that the desktop was all but unusable.
My first assumption at that point was that it was just the resolution, and that I was indeed missing something which was somewhere off-screen. However, after installing the proper radeon driver, I was left with the same, barely usable desktop. What happened?
Apparently, the openSUSE team decided to switch to KDE's Plasma5 from KDE4 as the default desktop. Not only is Plasma5 unfinished (unfinished=still missing some expected functionality and components common to KDE4), but it seemed (for me) to leak memory badly and do a number of other not-very-nice things when moving windows and such. In addition, the kicker was awkward to use, cluttered to read, and decidedly non-SuSE in appearance.
I tried a few new themes, thinking that perhaps it was just the rather unbranded, default KDE theme which was at fault, but alas, nothing would help.
I stumbled upon this thread in the openSUSE forums, which provided some great links.
Once I got KDE4 back (as well as my old familiar desktop selector menu at login), I discovered that my Apper widget was missing from my panel. I fixed that by downgrading to Apper from plasma5-pk-updater, then uninstalling plasma5-pk-updater and friends (breaking the pattern to satisfy the dep solver), and then marking Apper as locked and plasma5-pk-updater (and friends) as taboo (never install).
Perhaps at some point I'll provide a detailed set of instructions for all of this, but for now, my heartfelt thanks to Wolfgang Bauer (wolfi323) for his wonderful repo and build of plasma5-session (which allows switching back and forth between desktops).
Still more PHP 5.3 fixes for Joomla! 1.5
When you're on a roll, you're on a roll...
Almost done patching this particular old rowboat. This installment deals with quieting this bit of error log noise:
PHP Deprecated: Function eregi() is deprecated in blahblah\components\com_htmlmap\views\htmlmap\tmpl\default_map.php on line 20
Updating the TCPDF library in Joomla! 1.5
TCPDF is an excellent PHP class for creating PDFs from dynamic (or static, for that matter) web content. Unfortunately, the version of TCPDF bundled with Joomla! 1.5 (all 1.5 releases after at least 1.5.8 - someone please correct me if I am wrong - was version 2.6.000_PHP4, dated March 7, 2008. It's also not very PHP 5.3-friendly (there are other parts of Joomla! 1.5 which are not fully compatible with PHP 5.3, but this article will focus on TCPDF). Time to freshen up, methinks.
How not to update the BIOS on a newer (post 2009) Intel desktop board
Still in the thick of the system migration involving the virtualization of the previous W2K install. I procured the hardware to build the new workstation, which is based on an Intel DZ77GAL-70K desktop board and an i5-3570K CPU. (I won't go into detail here concerning my choice of the K series CPU and the matched desktop board, but I will provide some references below 1.)
- Intel: About Intel® Processor Numbers
Corsair Blog: A look at Intel® K Series Unlocked Processors ↩
In the “What are They Smoking” Dept: Staying centered – The Official Microsoft Blog
Wow...
It appears that some analysts have compared Windy 8 to New Coke (or Pepsi Blue, according to this article in The Motley Fool). Frank X. Shaw seems to think that touting the "selling [of] 100 million copies" of the ill-conceived (IMO) OS is some great achievement; however, what he doesn't break out is the percentage of those sales which are forced on consumers simply by nature of the fact that the OS comes pre-installed on a new device, and that Windy 8 runs on both tablets and PCs (so we can't even tell how many PCs ended up with 8 on them, or how many people opted to then "downgrade" to 7 upon delivery). Typical nonsense from Redmond, and as an OS/2 user who recalls when the "NT" in "Windows NT" stood for "Not There," it seems to me I've heard this song before. 
Read the full response from the link below:
Staying centered - The Official Microsoft Blog - Site Home - TechNet Blogs.
A Little Windows 8 Humor
Sorry, I just couldn't resist. The following was linked from Windows 8 ads hit US screens: Death Metal, exploding laptops and I just had to share it. Those of you who think as I should truly enjoy it, and for everyone else, please take it as good natured fun:
New upgrade (yet again)
Well, with all of the hullabaloo over WP 3.4, I decided to wait until 3.4.1. The auto-upgrade didn't, so I had to do things the old fashioned way. Luckily, when local to the server and with good backups, it wasn't too terrible.
Anyway, as always, if you find something which isn't working quite right, please use the contact form to drop me a note.
Enjoy.
PS - I'll have a couple new posts coming soon related to policy routing in Linux using iproute2 and tying that into Squid. Be sure to watch for them.