Well…I was successful in crashing KDE on my openSUSE 10.2 computer. I’m not sure how exactly it happened but I killed KDE in my account, my wife’s account, and the root account. I found that rather odd. I have hosed a few Linux PC’s in the past but not like this. I logged in with a different windows manager and it seemed to be working just fine. KDE was just in a frozen state. I hadn’t done any updates and made very little changes the night before. Hmm…perhaps I have gremlins in my computer.

Since my openSUSE machine doubles as my main desktop and the main server in my household, I wasn’t interested in having a broken system especially since I rely on it for SSH, Samba, VNC, and screencasting Inkscape, among a handful of other server duties. So I backed up some stuff to my NAS device and formatted my Linux drive.

30 minutes later I was looking at my new desktop. Of course it wasn’t ready to go. It always seems like I have to install a gatrillion packages before I get something satisfying. Plus, I have to wade through a plethora of security updates and patches for openSUSE.

This time around I installed Compiz-Fusion since Beryl doesn’t seem to be in my repo’s anymore. It was probably time to update that anyway. I got my nVidia driver installed, Xgl, and Compiz-Fusion all working together. There is a few things that I do not understand about the new Compiz. Beryl-Manager has been replaced with CompizConfig Settings Manager (ccsm) and now emerald is a separate entity having it’s very own configuration manager. I no longer have that pretty red gem icon staring back at me in my taskbar either. As far as I can tell there is no icon for Compiz-Fusion so that one can restart it if needed.

There are many howto’s for installing Compiz-Fusion on openSUSE 10.2 but most are lacking some important details. They get you 90% there. I ended up writing my own howto (just for myself) compiling information from several sources. I like a third grade approach in any howto…you know…really dumb it down for myself. ;)  At the moment I am unable to change the default settings in ccsm. Compiz-Fusion is quite usable out of the box but I like a little more bling in certain areas. I think I have something to try but we’ll see.

The other issue that I am having is the perspective effect in Inkscape. It doesn’t work and I cannot remember how to fix it. I have pyXML, python-numeric, and python-numpy installed and I still get an error. I had always gotten an error box before but the perspective effect would still work. Now I get nothing. So that is what I’ll be working on for a while.

The good news is that my screencasted video is even sharper than it used to be with recordmydesktop’s ogg output. Plus my audio is much cleaner. Of course, for audio, I recently switched from my premium OEM microphone to a USB Linksys Headset. Perhaps all of those package updates had something to do with the better quality. I wasn’t complaining before I formatted my computer but I definitely like the results now. Maybe I’ll reserve my next screencast for openSUSE. I have yet to encode any video on my freshly formatted system…so I’ll cross my fingers when the time comes.