The Sikh Geek

I was at the SBS Ignite Event last night in Nottingham where Julie Sherrington (Microsoft Presentation Team) and Dave Overton (Microsoft UK Head of Small Business Technology) where delivering the content. Okay, I admit it, this was my second visit to this event. Julie, who did the last presentation, is a very good presenter and coped well with the occaisional heckling from the back from Dave! I picked some new stuff up and I really must try this Windows Mobile stuff and synchronising with SBS, seeing as my background is in mobile technology! There were 6 people present with about 6 no shows which is a shame as Microsoft are trying to get around the country to talk to partners and especially Small Business Partners.

Anyway, I had a good chat with Dave at the bar afterwards, got some great tips on pitching to customers and just talked about stuff. This guy is passionate about what he does there’s no doubt about that! He’s an all round sound bloke! Nice people can’t work for Microsoft? We’re meant to hate them, despise them, think of them as the Borg? I’m beginning to like them!!

As everyone seems to be raving about Ubuntu, I thought I’d try and install Ubuntu 6.06 on my laptop. Installation was smooth enough and updating via the Synaptic Package Manager is a breeze, as you would expect with a Debian based distro. Everything was looking good until I realised I had to work using sudo for most of the administrative tasks. Okay, I understand using sudo can be safer but when I want to be “super user”, then I want that privilege, no questions asked! Also, beagle and Mono are not installed by default and that’s a pain. I installed these but I realised I would have to configure beagle manually and that for a distro that’s trying to be easy to use is not good enough. Also, the wireless did not work on the laptop, but to be fair this is an issue with openSUSE 10.1, since they decided to remove the madwifi drivers they had in 10.0. Therefore, my Atheros based wireless does not work. Talk about a step backwards!

openSUSE just works and I just selected everything and I got Gnome, KDE, beagle, Mono, F-Spot, SuperTux (to keep the kids happy), the whole works. One thing to remember is take out IPv6 in the distro as it will slow down internet access from /etc/hosts and also in Firefox type the following in the address bar about:config and select network.dns.disable.IPv6 and double click it to set to true. Configuration through YaST is still the easiest way to set up a Linux distro and I have yet to see anything come close, eventhough many people complain about this tool.

All in all this is the best Linux Desktop distro around and so easy to setup and configure. It’s FREE so go download it now at the following link