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Showing posts with label opensuse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label opensuse. Show all posts

Wednesday, 1 February 2017

Introduction

It has been a long time since I last reviewed openSUSE. I don't think it is quite as long as the numbering system suggests but it has been about 3 years.

There are 2 versions of openSUSE available via their website:
  • Leap
  • Tumbleweed
The Tumbleweed version is a rolling release distribution whereas the Leap version follows a frequent 6 monthly release schedule.

Today I will be reviewing openSUSE Leap 42.2.

How To Get openSUSE

The openSUSE website can be found at https://www.opensuse.org/


To get the Leap version click on the "install" button below the word "Leap".


There are two options available. You can download the entire 4.7 gigabytes or you can download the network installer ISO.

There are no official live DVDs or USBs easily available from the openSUSE website but they do link to community ISOs which provide live versions.

If you want to try a live DVD visit https://en.opensuse.org/Derivatives

I went for the full 4.7 gigabytes download. (I made the most of the superfast broadband in the hotel I am staying in).


The openSUSE Installer

It has to be said that this is my least favourite part of openSUSE. 

I think the best I can say about this installer is that if you are installing openSUSE as the sole operating system then it is adequate however if you want to dual boot with another distribution or Windows it isn't very intuitive and it is very easy to accidentally overwrite the other system.

As a guide I find this one quite useful: http://opensuse-guide.org/installation.php or indeed there is this guide that I wrote for Lifewire.com last year.


First Impressions


During the installation you get the choice of the GNOME or KDE desktop environments. I chose to install the GNOME desktop as that is my personal favourite.

GNOME is GNOME is GNOME. It doesn't matter whether you install Fedora, Debian or openSUSE, the look and feel of GNOME is the same in each of them. The real value is added by each distribution in turn and later on I will show you the value that openSUSE offers.

For beginners to Linux the GNOME desktop has a single panel at the top with an "Activities" link in the top left corner and system icons in the top right.

Clicking on the system icons in the top allows you to do things like adjust the audio, change the language, set up bluetooth and connect to the internet.

The "Activiies" link when clicked brings up the screen below:


GNOME is very keyboard centric and so as well as clicking on icons you can find your way around much more easily by using one of the special keyboard shortcuts.

The above screen provides a list of applications you are likely to use quite often such as the Firefox web browser, Evolution mail client, Empathy chat client, GNOME music player, Shotwell photo manager, LibreOffice, the file manager and the documents folder.

On the right side of the screen is a list of workspaces. You can open a new workspace by clicking on it. The keyboard shortcuts are invaluable in this regard.

At the bottom of the list of icons is a grid of dots and when this is clicked you will see the screen below:


This screen shows a list of applications and you can see subsequent pages by clicking on the dots to the right of the screen. You can also switch between frequently used applications and all applications.

The search bar is useful for finding the application by name or description.

Connecting To The Internet


To connect to the internet click in the top right corner and choose "Select network". A list of available networks will appear.

Click on the network you wish to connect to and enter the required security key.

Setting Up Audio

By default openSUSE doesn't have all the multimedia codecs installed. 

It is a good idea when using openSUSE to bookmark http://opensuse-guide.org/

This site tells you all you need to know. For instance you can mess around getting the multimedia codecs to work by adding the relevant repositories and installing the correct software or you can visit http://opensuse-guide.org/codecs.php and click the one-click install link.

Software

I installed from the full DVD so I appear to have a great deal of software installed by default. By default because I have installed the GNOME desktop I have all the regulars which are as follows:

  • Firefox - Web Browser
  • Evolution - Email Client
  • Empathy - Chat
  • GNOME Music - Audio Player
  • Totem - Video Player
  • Shotwell - Photo Manager
  • Nautilus - File Manager
Other software that is included is the LibreOffice office suite, GIMP image editor, Brasero disk creator, Cheese webcam viewer, Liferea RSS reader, GNOME Maps and GNOME Weather.

There are loads of other applications and tools included such as a remote desktop client, disk management tools and other clever little utilities.

GNOME Music


The GNOME Music player is very basic. Import the songs and then play them. Sure you can filter by albums, artists and songs and there are some simple playlists which let you play your favourite songs, most played tunes, never played songs, recently added and recently played. You can add your own playlists as well by clicking on a song and selecting add to new playlist.

It is straight forward and it works, although I would say it has bombed out on me a couple of times with no error messages.

Shotwell




























GNOME provides a fairly generic set of tools and the Shotwell photo manager is an example of this. As with GNOME music it is very basic. You basically import your photos and then you can view them and do fairly basic other stuff with them such as tag them, open them in external editor or set a rating. For more involved editing features you would use GIMP.

GNOME Video Player






















The GNOME video player allows you to watch videos which are stored on your computer or from the web. 

There are two headings at the top of the screen:

  • Videos
  • Channels
Under the Channels there is one option which is Raj.tv. I don't know how many people watch this and why it is particularly included. It seems fairly random.

GNOME Maps

GNOME now comes with a nice desktop mapping tool. Simply enter your location and you can view directions and view a satellite image. 




GNOME Weather

GNOME weather shows you the weather forecast in your current location or indeed any destination of your choosing.

You can view the weather by specific time slots during the day and you get a nice 5 day forecast.








GNOME Software

GNOME software is the tool you are supposed to use to install software when using the GNOME desktop environment.

However it is about as useful as trying to eat soup with a fork.

Everything appears to be there. You have nice categories, you can click into the categories and software appears and you can install software.

It all seems to look good, except that it never shows anything good and the search tool never seems to find anything.

There is a much better application for finding and installing software within openSUSE and I am coming to that shortly.

YAST Control Center

So earlier on in the review I said I would let you know what else openSUSE provides above and beyond the standard GNOME desktop environment and pre-installed software.

The YAST Control Center is the best thing about openSUSE and it is superb.

From here you can do literally anything.




The YAST control center is broken down into the following categories:

  • Software
  • Hardware
  • System
  • Network services
  • Security and users
  • Virtualisation
  • Support
  • Miscellaneous
From this tool you can see why openSUSE is a professional choice and a key reason for using it as your desktop operating system.

Let us start with the software section. From here you can choose "Add-on products" or indeed "Software repositories" and they both lead you to the same place.






















By default openSUSE is deployed with software repositories offering only free software. However using the Add-on Products tool you can add further repositories such as the non-oss software repo. You can also add the NVidia repository for installing NVidia drivers or the Libdvdcss repository so that you can play DVDs.

Where the Add-on products lets you add repositories the Software Repositories option lets you manage the repositories you have installed.

To install software you can use the "Software Management" tool which comes as part of the control center. 


























This tool isn't as pretty as the GNOME Software tool but it packs more punch. You can find all the good stuff such as Steam, Dropbox and other such gems.

Chrome isn't available via the repositories but you can install it via the Chrome website. Here is a good guide for installing Chrome.

Other items within the YAST Control Center under software include the media checking tool for checking the validity of ISO images and discs. You can also perform an online update to keep your system up to date.

Under the hardware setting you can setup printers and it works really well. You can also set up scanners, audio devices and set keyboard layouts.

The system settings has the options to manage the boot loader, manage disks, kernel settings, network settings, fonts, date and time and services.

The network settings lets you change the hostname and set up a mail server. 

The security and roles section is for managing users and groups, setting up a firewall and managing the sudo settings.

Basically this part of openSUSE is really useful. 

Issues

I haven't really experienced any issues in the past couple of weeks. There is a bit of extra searching around for stuff as I am not overly familiar with openSUSE however I have most things set up now and it feels very stable.

The only blips I have had are with GNOME Music which for some reason has crashed without notice on the odd occasion.

Summary

So here is the deal. If as the Everyday Linux User you are going to use openSUSE then you have to stick with it and in reality it should be the only operating system on your machine. Trying to dual boot will probably tie you up in knots.

After you have installed it and you have the most important non-free packages installed (Google Chrome being the main one) then you are likely to find openSUSE and GNOME a joy.

GNOME is really easy to use. It really is point and click and if you can get a handle on those keyboard shortcuts then life will be very easy indeed.

openSUSE is stable and it won't let you down with odd quirks that some other distributions have. It really is a case of taking that bit more time to get used to than you may have to with a Linux Mint for instance.

The good news is that there is a lot of documentation available and most things you will try have been tried before and there is usually a straight forward guide to follow to get to where you want to be.

All in all a positive experience.


An Everyday Linux User Review Of OpenSUSE Leap 42

Introduction

It has been a long time since I last reviewed openSUSE. I don't think it is quite as long as the numbering system suggests but it has been about 3 years.

There are 2 versions of openSUSE available via their website:
  • Leap
  • Tumbleweed
The Tumbleweed version is a rolling release distribution whereas the Leap version follows a frequent 6 monthly release schedule.

Today I will be reviewing openSUSE Leap 42.2.

How To Get openSUSE

The openSUSE website can be found at https://www.opensuse.org/


To get the Leap version click on the "install" button below the word "Leap".


There are two options available. You can download the entire 4.7 gigabytes or you can download the network installer ISO.

There are no official live DVDs or USBs easily available from the openSUSE website but they do link to community ISOs which provide live versions.

If you want to try a live DVD visit https://en.opensuse.org/Derivatives

I went for the full 4.7 gigabytes download. (I made the most of the superfast broadband in the hotel I am staying in).


The openSUSE Installer

It has to be said that this is my least favourite part of openSUSE. 

I think the best I can say about this installer is that if you are installing openSUSE as the sole operating system then it is adequate however if you want to dual boot with another distribution or Windows it isn't very intuitive and it is very easy to accidentally overwrite the other system.

As a guide I find this one quite useful: http://opensuse-guide.org/installation.php or indeed there is this guide that I wrote for Lifewire.com last year.


First Impressions


During the installation you get the choice of the GNOME or KDE desktop environments. I chose to install the GNOME desktop as that is my personal favourite.

GNOME is GNOME is GNOME. It doesn't matter whether you install Fedora, Debian or openSUSE, the look and feel of GNOME is the same in each of them. The real value is added by each distribution in turn and later on I will show you the value that openSUSE offers.

For beginners to Linux the GNOME desktop has a single panel at the top with an "Activities" link in the top left corner and system icons in the top right.

Clicking on the system icons in the top allows you to do things like adjust the audio, change the language, set up bluetooth and connect to the internet.

The "Activiies" link when clicked brings up the screen below:


GNOME is very keyboard centric and so as well as clicking on icons you can find your way around much more easily by using one of the special keyboard shortcuts.

The above screen provides a list of applications you are likely to use quite often such as the Firefox web browser, Evolution mail client, Empathy chat client, GNOME music player, Shotwell photo manager, LibreOffice, the file manager and the documents folder.

On the right side of the screen is a list of workspaces. You can open a new workspace by clicking on it. The keyboard shortcuts are invaluable in this regard.

At the bottom of the list of icons is a grid of dots and when this is clicked you will see the screen below:


This screen shows a list of applications and you can see subsequent pages by clicking on the dots to the right of the screen. You can also switch between frequently used applications and all applications.

The search bar is useful for finding the application by name or description.

Connecting To The Internet


To connect to the internet click in the top right corner and choose "Select network". A list of available networks will appear.

Click on the network you wish to connect to and enter the required security key.

Setting Up Audio

By default openSUSE doesn't have all the multimedia codecs installed. 

It is a good idea when using openSUSE to bookmark http://opensuse-guide.org/

This site tells you all you need to know. For instance you can mess around getting the multimedia codecs to work by adding the relevant repositories and installing the correct software or you can visit http://opensuse-guide.org/codecs.php and click the one-click install link.

Software

I installed from the full DVD so I appear to have a great deal of software installed by default. By default because I have installed the GNOME desktop I have all the regulars which are as follows:

  • Firefox - Web Browser
  • Evolution - Email Client
  • Empathy - Chat
  • GNOME Music - Audio Player
  • Totem - Video Player
  • Shotwell - Photo Manager
  • Nautilus - File Manager
Other software that is included is the LibreOffice office suite, GIMP image editor, Brasero disk creator, Cheese webcam viewer, Liferea RSS reader, GNOME Maps and GNOME Weather.

There are loads of other applications and tools included such as a remote desktop client, disk management tools and other clever little utilities.

GNOME Music


The GNOME Music player is very basic. Import the songs and then play them. Sure you can filter by albums, artists and songs and there are some simple playlists which let you play your favourite songs, most played tunes, never played songs, recently added and recently played. You can add your own playlists as well by clicking on a song and selecting add to new playlist.

It is straight forward and it works, although I would say it has bombed out on me a couple of times with no error messages.

Shotwell




























GNOME provides a fairly generic set of tools and the Shotwell photo manager is an example of this. As with GNOME music it is very basic. You basically import your photos and then you can view them and do fairly basic other stuff with them such as tag them, open them in external editor or set a rating. For more involved editing features you would use GIMP.

GNOME Video Player






















The GNOME video player allows you to watch videos which are stored on your computer or from the web. 

There are two headings at the top of the screen:

  • Videos
  • Channels
Under the Channels there is one option which is Raj.tv. I don't know how many people watch this and why it is particularly included. It seems fairly random.

GNOME Maps

GNOME now comes with a nice desktop mapping tool. Simply enter your location and you can view directions and view a satellite image. 




GNOME Weather

GNOME weather shows you the weather forecast in your current location or indeed any destination of your choosing.

You can view the weather by specific time slots during the day and you get a nice 5 day forecast.








GNOME Software

GNOME software is the tool you are supposed to use to install software when using the GNOME desktop environment.

However it is about as useful as trying to eat soup with a fork.

Everything appears to be there. You have nice categories, you can click into the categories and software appears and you can install software.

It all seems to look good, except that it never shows anything good and the search tool never seems to find anything.

There is a much better application for finding and installing software within openSUSE and I am coming to that shortly.

YAST Control Center

So earlier on in the review I said I would let you know what else openSUSE provides above and beyond the standard GNOME desktop environment and pre-installed software.

The YAST Control Center is the best thing about openSUSE and it is superb.

From here you can do literally anything.




The YAST control center is broken down into the following categories:

  • Software
  • Hardware
  • System
  • Network services
  • Security and users
  • Virtualisation
  • Support
  • Miscellaneous
From this tool you can see why openSUSE is a professional choice and a key reason for using it as your desktop operating system.

Let us start with the software section. From here you can choose "Add-on products" or indeed "Software repositories" and they both lead you to the same place.






















By default openSUSE is deployed with software repositories offering only free software. However using the Add-on Products tool you can add further repositories such as the non-oss software repo. You can also add the NVidia repository for installing NVidia drivers or the Libdvdcss repository so that you can play DVDs.

Where the Add-on products lets you add repositories the Software Repositories option lets you manage the repositories you have installed.

To install software you can use the "Software Management" tool which comes as part of the control center. 


























This tool isn't as pretty as the GNOME Software tool but it packs more punch. You can find all the good stuff such as Steam, Dropbox and other such gems.

Chrome isn't available via the repositories but you can install it via the Chrome website. Here is a good guide for installing Chrome.

Other items within the YAST Control Center under software include the media checking tool for checking the validity of ISO images and discs. You can also perform an online update to keep your system up to date.

Under the hardware setting you can setup printers and it works really well. You can also set up scanners, audio devices and set keyboard layouts.

The system settings has the options to manage the boot loader, manage disks, kernel settings, network settings, fonts, date and time and services.

The network settings lets you change the hostname and set up a mail server. 

The security and roles section is for managing users and groups, setting up a firewall and managing the sudo settings.

Basically this part of openSUSE is really useful. 

Issues

I haven't really experienced any issues in the past couple of weeks. There is a bit of extra searching around for stuff as I am not overly familiar with openSUSE however I have most things set up now and it feels very stable.

The only blips I have had are with GNOME Music which for some reason has crashed without notice on the odd occasion.

Summary

So here is the deal. If as the Everyday Linux User you are going to use openSUSE then you have to stick with it and in reality it should be the only operating system on your machine. Trying to dual boot will probably tie you up in knots.

After you have installed it and you have the most important non-free packages installed (Google Chrome being the main one) then you are likely to find openSUSE and GNOME a joy.

GNOME is really easy to use. It really is point and click and if you can get a handle on those keyboard shortcuts then life will be very easy indeed.

openSUSE is stable and it won't let you down with odd quirks that some other distributions have. It really is a case of taking that bit more time to get used to than you may have to with a Linux Mint for instance.

The good news is that there is a lot of documentation available and most things you will try have been tried before and there is usually a straight forward guide to follow to get to where you want to be.

All in all a positive experience.


4 comments
Posted at 20:18 |  by Gary Newell

Tuesday, 7 April 2015

Introduction

Last year I wrote a review of openSUSE 13.1 and I followed up the review with a series of articles looking at the applications that were released as part of the distribution:
That particular review looked at the KDE version of openSUSE. This is a review of openSUSE 13.2 and focuses on the GNOME desktop environment.

In my recent review of Fedora 21 I pointed out how far I believe the GNOME desktop has come in the past few years. I would go so far as saying that it is now so good that it is at least on a par with Unity and potentially the best desktop environment available.

The main desktop itself has excellent navigational features and keyboard shortcuts. GNOME 3 is more than just a pretty desktop. Look at this list of applications which are built to run on top of GNOME.

How To Get openSUSE 13.2

Click here for the openSUSE download page.

The initial download option on that page is 4.7 gigabytes in size. If you have a poor internet connection or a download limit that may seem extreme and to be honest you can guarantee that if you download that file then many of the applications will need to be updated after installing them anyway and you probably wouldn't use most of the software that makes up the 4.7 gigabytes.

Note that there is a link halfway down the page which reads "Click here to display these alternative versions". This option provides links to download a live GNOME and a live KDE version.

You can also .

Minimum Requirements

This page on the openSUSE website lists the following minimum requirements.

  • Pentium III 500 mhz or higher (Pentium 4 2.4 ghz or any AMD64/Intel 64 recommended)
  • 1 GB RAM (2 GB recommended)
  • 3 GB Hard Drive space (5 GB or more recommended)
  • Supports most sound and graphics cards. (minimum 800 x 600 resolution, recommended 1024 x 768 or higher)
  • USB port or DVD drive

New Features In openSUSE 13.2

  • Linux Kernel 3.16
  • btrfs is new default filesystem
  • Live images are persistent by default
  • Revamped Yast installer (which I will come to shortly)
  • New Yast is faster, more stable and better integrated with SystemD
  • Latest stable version of KDE desktop available (4.11.12)
  • Newer GNOME desktop (3.14.1)
  • HiDPI Screen Support
  • Much improved searching in GNOME shell
  • Touch screen gestures supported
  • GNOME Maps includes route mapping
  • Google Account support for GNOME Photos
  • Playlist support in GNOME Music
  • New videos interface
  • Polari - a modern IRC client
Click here for a full list of new features in openSUSE 13.2 

Installation

I recently developed a guide showing how to install openSUSE whilst replacing your current operating system.

According to the new features list the YAST installer has been improved and in some areas this is true and in others I have a few issues.

The partitioning section is still just plain awful for the everyday user. I know it is easy to always fall back to the installers used by Ubuntu and Linux Mint but they do right what many other installers do wrong.

What is wrong with a simple "replace your current operating system with openSUSE" option which simply wipes your drive and sets up a sensible partitioning scheme?

What is wrong with a simple "install openSUSE alongside Windows" or "install openSUSE alongside your current operating system" option?

Instead, what you get is a long list of planned changes that the installer is going to make, which you have to work through and think about before moving on.

There is an option to enter a setup screen which lets you choose your hard drive and then select all partitions thereby replacing your current operating system with openSUSE but it isn't plainly in sight and even when you choose this option you are back to the big scary list showing dozens of potential partition changes.

Worse than that however, I previously had Fedora 21 on this drive which used an LVM partition. openSUSE couldn't handle replacing that with the partitioning structure I chose to set up. I ended up having to use gParted to remove the Fedora partitions and restart the installer.

There are people out there that will want all of the verbose options, giving access to every available installation option but maybe there could be a general installer and a custom installer to make it easier for the masses.

To be honest I found the openSUSE installer more difficult than the Anaconda installer that is shipped with Fedora and that has taken heaps of criticism over the years. Now I would say that the Fedora installer has greatly improved but the openSUSE installer still has some way to go.

On to the good news though, well kind of. This machine has a standard BIOS and there is no EFI in sight. The openSUSE installer actually throws up an error when installing the bootloader but there is an option to continue trying to set it up. If you choose to continue you are presented with the option to choose between GRUB 2 - EFI and plain old GRUB 2.

What this means of course is that the installer will work perfectly on older and newer computers. The GRUB 2 - EFI option even includes options for handling secure boot. Very good.

First Impressions





















The GNOME desktop is fairly typical although the choice of wallpaper for openSUSE is fairly dull.

GNOME has a panel at the top with the "Activities" option in the top left and a series of icons in the top right which provide access to power management, network settings and user settings.





















Pressing the super key or clicking on activities brings up the activities screen.

The screen basically has a search box in the top middle, a series of favourite applications icons on the left and access to virtual workspaces on the right. The workspaces hover in from the right when you move the mouse over to that section of the screen.

The favourite icons link to Firefox, Evolution, Empathy, Rhythmbox, Shotwell, LibreOffice and Files.

Pressing the super key and the A key brings up the applications view. Alternatively click on the bottom icon in the left bar.





















There are two views available which are frequent and all. Clicking the "all" option shows a grid with icons for all of your applications. As you can see from the screenshot the "frequent" option shows a handful of icons to applications used regularly.





















Navigation is particularly easy but it is worth learning all of the GNOME keyboard shortcuts.

The main thing I noticed about the openSUSE version of GNOME is that it performed much better than the Fedora version. The Fedora GNOME desktop performed better when I switched to GNOME Wayland. The trouble is that after switching to Wayland there were more errors and it was unpredictable at times. openSUSE however has performed well and has never crashed on me.



As mentioned previously the main wallpaper is fairly plain. To change the wallpaper all you have to do is right click on the desktop and choose "change background".

You are given the option to change the background for the main desktop or the lock screen.

The trouble is that there are no other wallpapers supplied with the live version of the GNOME desktop.

Luckily there was this cool invention made a while back now called the internet and an even cooler add-on to the internet called Google and after a little bit of searching you can do something like this.





















Flash and MP3

openSUSE is a community distribution (although it is backed by a larger corporation much like Ubuntu).

The upshot of this is that proprietary components such as MP3 codecs and Flash aren't installed by default.

You can install both of these options using 1 click installs. I have a guide coming up shortly showing how to do this.

Applications

I have never tried the full installation (4.7 gigabytes!) and so there maybe more applications installed by default with that version.

This review focuses on the live version with the GNOME desktop and as such the applications provided are as follows:

  • Aisleriot - solitaire card game
  • Brasero - disk burning software
  • Cheese - webcam viewer
  • Chess - chess game
  • Clocks - stopwatch, timer, world clock
  • Contacts - address book
  • Documents - pdf viewer
  • Empathy - chat client
  • Evolution - mail client
  • Files - file manager
  • Firefox - web browser
  • gedit - text editor
  • gimp - image editing tool
  • grsync - backup/syncing tool
  • lagno - game
  • k3b - disk burning software
  • libreoffice - office software (includes word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, drawing package etc)
  • liferea - RSS reader
  • lights off - game
  • Mahjongg - game
  • Maps - mapping tool
  • Midnight commander - file manager
  • Mines - game
  • Music - Gnome music player
  • Network tools
  • Notes - Note taking tool
  • Polari - chat client
  • Quadrapassel - game
  • Rhythmbox - audio player
  • Shotwell - photo manager
  • Sudoku - game
  • Swell foop - game
  • Transmission - bittorrent client
  • Totem - video player
There are quite a few applications really. There is certainly everything that the average person needs for basic homeworking and play with a full office suite, video players, audio players, photo managers, web browsers, chat clients and email clients.


I have written about Rhythmbox a number of times including a full recent review which can be found here.

I haven't however touched on the GNOME music player before which integrates nicely with the GNOME desktop.

There are a number of nice views available including by album, by artist, songs and playlists.

Creating playlists is relatively straight forward. You can either start selecting tracks and click the "Add to playlist" option or you can choose "Create a playlist" from the menu.

Whilst the interface is good it doesn't perform as well as Rhythmbox.





















The GNOME video player also integrates itself well to the GNOME desktop. There are options for playing local videos or searching online libraries such as Youtube and Vimeo.

Installing Applications

























There are a number of ways to install applications using openSUSE.

The first and most obvious way is to use the GNOME Packaging tool which can be found by typing "Software" into the search box within the activities window.

This tool is like the software centre within Ubuntu and boasts a search box, multiple categories, iconised views of applications, reviews and ratings.

The tool more commonly recognised for installing applications in openSUSE is YAST.

YAST is used for most configuration activities in openSUSE including security, setting up printers, scanners, sound and installing applications.

YAST can also set up and manage other software repositories including the non-free ones used for installing Flash and Java.

My main issue with YAST is the same as it has always been. I chose to install one application and it automatically added 300 megabytes worth of updates to the install without even warning me it was going to do so. Now I know that certain updates are important but it should be my choice when to update and at least a warning message should appear telling me that is going to happen.

The other way to install software in openSUSE is via the terminal window using a tool called zypper which is much like apt or yum.

Summary

openSUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint. There isn't much between them now in terms of usability.

The openSUSE installer could do with a user friendly option (some people are going to disagree with this as they hate dumbing down) for replacing current operating systems and basic dual booting.

The main GNOME interface is very good and the GNOME tools such as the music player, weather application and video player integrate nicely.

The applications included with openSUSE are also very good. Most users will have everything they need to get going and the package managers will help install everything else.

Installing things like Flash, Steam and Skype require using 1-click installs (for everyday users) and the method for doing this can easily be found by searching using Google.

1-click installs could be dangerous security-wise if somebody decides to integrate something malicious into one of them. Users just have to be sensible about how they source their software and use the standard repositories as much as possible.

Stability is very good within openSUSE. I haven't experienced any notifications or errors whilst running openSUSE which is in complete contrast to Fedora which ran ok under the standard GNOME desktop (albeit a bit sluggish) but on the speedy Wayland version there were a number of big bangs.

All in all openSUSE is a good alternative to Ubuntu and Linux Mint. You just need to get it installed first.

Thankyou for reading.



An Everyday Linux Review Of openSUSE 13.2

Introduction

Last year I wrote a review of openSUSE 13.1 and I followed up the review with a series of articles looking at the applications that were released as part of the distribution:
That particular review looked at the KDE version of openSUSE. This is a review of openSUSE 13.2 and focuses on the GNOME desktop environment.

In my recent review of Fedora 21 I pointed out how far I believe the GNOME desktop has come in the past few years. I would go so far as saying that it is now so good that it is at least on a par with Unity and potentially the best desktop environment available.

The main desktop itself has excellent navigational features and keyboard shortcuts. GNOME 3 is more than just a pretty desktop. Look at this list of applications which are built to run on top of GNOME.

How To Get openSUSE 13.2

Click here for the openSUSE download page.

The initial download option on that page is 4.7 gigabytes in size. If you have a poor internet connection or a download limit that may seem extreme and to be honest you can guarantee that if you download that file then many of the applications will need to be updated after installing them anyway and you probably wouldn't use most of the software that makes up the 4.7 gigabytes.

Note that there is a link halfway down the page which reads "Click here to display these alternative versions". This option provides links to download a live GNOME and a live KDE version.

You can also .

Minimum Requirements

This page on the openSUSE website lists the following minimum requirements.

  • Pentium III 500 mhz or higher (Pentium 4 2.4 ghz or any AMD64/Intel 64 recommended)
  • 1 GB RAM (2 GB recommended)
  • 3 GB Hard Drive space (5 GB or more recommended)
  • Supports most sound and graphics cards. (minimum 800 x 600 resolution, recommended 1024 x 768 or higher)
  • USB port or DVD drive

New Features In openSUSE 13.2

  • Linux Kernel 3.16
  • btrfs is new default filesystem
  • Live images are persistent by default
  • Revamped Yast installer (which I will come to shortly)
  • New Yast is faster, more stable and better integrated with SystemD
  • Latest stable version of KDE desktop available (4.11.12)
  • Newer GNOME desktop (3.14.1)
  • HiDPI Screen Support
  • Much improved searching in GNOME shell
  • Touch screen gestures supported
  • GNOME Maps includes route mapping
  • Google Account support for GNOME Photos
  • Playlist support in GNOME Music
  • New videos interface
  • Polari - a modern IRC client
Click here for a full list of new features in openSUSE 13.2 

Installation

I recently developed a guide showing how to install openSUSE whilst replacing your current operating system.

According to the new features list the YAST installer has been improved and in some areas this is true and in others I have a few issues.

The partitioning section is still just plain awful for the everyday user. I know it is easy to always fall back to the installers used by Ubuntu and Linux Mint but they do right what many other installers do wrong.

What is wrong with a simple "replace your current operating system with openSUSE" option which simply wipes your drive and sets up a sensible partitioning scheme?

What is wrong with a simple "install openSUSE alongside Windows" or "install openSUSE alongside your current operating system" option?

Instead, what you get is a long list of planned changes that the installer is going to make, which you have to work through and think about before moving on.

There is an option to enter a setup screen which lets you choose your hard drive and then select all partitions thereby replacing your current operating system with openSUSE but it isn't plainly in sight and even when you choose this option you are back to the big scary list showing dozens of potential partition changes.

Worse than that however, I previously had Fedora 21 on this drive which used an LVM partition. openSUSE couldn't handle replacing that with the partitioning structure I chose to set up. I ended up having to use gParted to remove the Fedora partitions and restart the installer.

There are people out there that will want all of the verbose options, giving access to every available installation option but maybe there could be a general installer and a custom installer to make it easier for the masses.

To be honest I found the openSUSE installer more difficult than the Anaconda installer that is shipped with Fedora and that has taken heaps of criticism over the years. Now I would say that the Fedora installer has greatly improved but the openSUSE installer still has some way to go.

On to the good news though, well kind of. This machine has a standard BIOS and there is no EFI in sight. The openSUSE installer actually throws up an error when installing the bootloader but there is an option to continue trying to set it up. If you choose to continue you are presented with the option to choose between GRUB 2 - EFI and plain old GRUB 2.

What this means of course is that the installer will work perfectly on older and newer computers. The GRUB 2 - EFI option even includes options for handling secure boot. Very good.

First Impressions





















The GNOME desktop is fairly typical although the choice of wallpaper for openSUSE is fairly dull.

GNOME has a panel at the top with the "Activities" option in the top left and a series of icons in the top right which provide access to power management, network settings and user settings.





















Pressing the super key or clicking on activities brings up the activities screen.

The screen basically has a search box in the top middle, a series of favourite applications icons on the left and access to virtual workspaces on the right. The workspaces hover in from the right when you move the mouse over to that section of the screen.

The favourite icons link to Firefox, Evolution, Empathy, Rhythmbox, Shotwell, LibreOffice and Files.

Pressing the super key and the A key brings up the applications view. Alternatively click on the bottom icon in the left bar.





















There are two views available which are frequent and all. Clicking the "all" option shows a grid with icons for all of your applications. As you can see from the screenshot the "frequent" option shows a handful of icons to applications used regularly.





















Navigation is particularly easy but it is worth learning all of the GNOME keyboard shortcuts.

The main thing I noticed about the openSUSE version of GNOME is that it performed much better than the Fedora version. The Fedora GNOME desktop performed better when I switched to GNOME Wayland. The trouble is that after switching to Wayland there were more errors and it was unpredictable at times. openSUSE however has performed well and has never crashed on me.



As mentioned previously the main wallpaper is fairly plain. To change the wallpaper all you have to do is right click on the desktop and choose "change background".

You are given the option to change the background for the main desktop or the lock screen.

The trouble is that there are no other wallpapers supplied with the live version of the GNOME desktop.

Luckily there was this cool invention made a while back now called the internet and an even cooler add-on to the internet called Google and after a little bit of searching you can do something like this.





















Flash and MP3

openSUSE is a community distribution (although it is backed by a larger corporation much like Ubuntu).

The upshot of this is that proprietary components such as MP3 codecs and Flash aren't installed by default.

You can install both of these options using 1 click installs. I have a guide coming up shortly showing how to do this.

Applications

I have never tried the full installation (4.7 gigabytes!) and so there maybe more applications installed by default with that version.

This review focuses on the live version with the GNOME desktop and as such the applications provided are as follows:

  • Aisleriot - solitaire card game
  • Brasero - disk burning software
  • Cheese - webcam viewer
  • Chess - chess game
  • Clocks - stopwatch, timer, world clock
  • Contacts - address book
  • Documents - pdf viewer
  • Empathy - chat client
  • Evolution - mail client
  • Files - file manager
  • Firefox - web browser
  • gedit - text editor
  • gimp - image editing tool
  • grsync - backup/syncing tool
  • lagno - game
  • k3b - disk burning software
  • libreoffice - office software (includes word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, drawing package etc)
  • liferea - RSS reader
  • lights off - game
  • Mahjongg - game
  • Maps - mapping tool
  • Midnight commander - file manager
  • Mines - game
  • Music - Gnome music player
  • Network tools
  • Notes - Note taking tool
  • Polari - chat client
  • Quadrapassel - game
  • Rhythmbox - audio player
  • Shotwell - photo manager
  • Sudoku - game
  • Swell foop - game
  • Transmission - bittorrent client
  • Totem - video player
There are quite a few applications really. There is certainly everything that the average person needs for basic homeworking and play with a full office suite, video players, audio players, photo managers, web browsers, chat clients and email clients.


I have written about Rhythmbox a number of times including a full recent review which can be found here.

I haven't however touched on the GNOME music player before which integrates nicely with the GNOME desktop.

There are a number of nice views available including by album, by artist, songs and playlists.

Creating playlists is relatively straight forward. You can either start selecting tracks and click the "Add to playlist" option or you can choose "Create a playlist" from the menu.

Whilst the interface is good it doesn't perform as well as Rhythmbox.





















The GNOME video player also integrates itself well to the GNOME desktop. There are options for playing local videos or searching online libraries such as Youtube and Vimeo.

Installing Applications

























There are a number of ways to install applications using openSUSE.

The first and most obvious way is to use the GNOME Packaging tool which can be found by typing "Software" into the search box within the activities window.

This tool is like the software centre within Ubuntu and boasts a search box, multiple categories, iconised views of applications, reviews and ratings.

The tool more commonly recognised for installing applications in openSUSE is YAST.

YAST is used for most configuration activities in openSUSE including security, setting up printers, scanners, sound and installing applications.

YAST can also set up and manage other software repositories including the non-free ones used for installing Flash and Java.

My main issue with YAST is the same as it has always been. I chose to install one application and it automatically added 300 megabytes worth of updates to the install without even warning me it was going to do so. Now I know that certain updates are important but it should be my choice when to update and at least a warning message should appear telling me that is going to happen.

The other way to install software in openSUSE is via the terminal window using a tool called zypper which is much like apt or yum.

Summary

openSUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint. There isn't much between them now in terms of usability.

The openSUSE installer could do with a user friendly option (some people are going to disagree with this as they hate dumbing down) for replacing current operating systems and basic dual booting.

The main GNOME interface is very good and the GNOME tools such as the music player, weather application and video player integrate nicely.

The applications included with openSUSE are also very good. Most users will have everything they need to get going and the package managers will help install everything else.

Installing things like Flash, Steam and Skype require using 1-click installs (for everyday users) and the method for doing this can easily be found by searching using Google.

1-click installs could be dangerous security-wise if somebody decides to integrate something malicious into one of them. Users just have to be sensible about how they source their software and use the standard repositories as much as possible.

Stability is very good within openSUSE. I haven't experienced any notifications or errors whilst running openSUSE which is in complete contrast to Fedora which ran ok under the standard GNOME desktop (albeit a bit sluggish) but on the speedy Wayland version there were a number of big bangs.

All in all openSUSE is a good alternative to Ubuntu and Linux Mint. You just need to get it installed first.

Thankyou for reading.



5 comments
Posted at 23:51 |  by Gary Newell

Monday, 7 April 2014

Introduction

In my last openSUSE based article I took a look at the KDE games that are installed by default.

I was slightly surprised that so many people still played card games such as Patience and Mahjongg.

The point of these articles is to elaborate a bit more on the software that is pre-packaged within openSUSE.

Quite often I write reviews listing the applications but without knowing how good the software is or even what the software does.

This time I will be looking at the graphics applications.

I have two confessions to make at this stage. The first is that I am to art what Corey Feldman is to music. The second confession will become all too obvious as we continue.

DNG Image Converter


I am not going to be spending long reviewing DNG Image Converter because to be honest I can't get it to do anything.

In theory clicking on the plus (+) icon allows you to pick an image file and then you can press the convert button to convert the image into another format.

In reality nothing happens.



Pressing the plus button shows an open file dialog. When I select any of the image file types allowed nothing happens.

Exposure Blending

I am afraid this review is going to start off a bit flat.

DNG Image Converter doesn't work and I have absolutely no idea what the point of the Exposure Blending tool is for.

The text on the screen says that it fuses bracketed images with different exposures to make pseudo HDR image.

There is also a link to a Wikipedia page which defines the bracketing process.

Unfortunately I know very little about photography and I really only ever use a point and click camera.

It really is a case of going back to photography school for me on this one.

What I can say about the tool is that before I can even continue I need to download the "hugin" plugin. Clicking the download link takes me to this page.

I couldn't actually find a plugin that was available for install from the site. The plugin  can be installed from Yast though.


In theory and it has to be theory because I couldn't get it to do anything (but please note this is my fault and not the tool's fault) is that you press the plus (+) icon and select two images.

It says the two images have to be from the same stack. I assume to photography experts this means something.

Upon selecting two images from the same stack you press next and it does the bracketing thing that it is supposed to do.


For a good tutorial and guide about how the exposure blending tool works visit this link.

Panorama


I would like to say that this review is now going to get better but it isn't.

The next graphics application in the list is Panorama.

This application just crashes when I try and open it.


Photo Layouts Editor
























The KIPI Photo Layouts Editor is a rather crude tool for editing and laying out photos.

Basically you start off with a canvas which you define the size of and then you add images to the canvas. These are created as layers.

Each individual layer can have effects applied, borders applied, be resized and rotated.

If you are looking for a serious tool then I guess something like GIMP would be a better fit but this tool works for basic editing.

In case you are wondering the images in the picture are Loch Ness, a replica of the Knight Rider car, a Storm Trooper at the Grampian Transport Museum and Britney Spears. (Yes I like Britney Spears. Confession number 2).

I guess the Grampian Transport Museum take security fairly seriously though, hiring storm troopers.


On a more serious note the Photo Layout Editor crashed on more than one occasion, especially when trying to add the Polaroid border with text.

DigiKam/ ShowFoto


DigiKam lets you organise and edit photos. ShowFoto is used to display the images and enhance them. You can run ShowFoto on its own or it will be opened from within DigiKam when you click on a thumbnail.

When you open DigiKam for the first time you have to go through a number of screens to define your settings such as where you store your photos and how to handle thumbnails etc.

You can import photos from various sources including digital cameras, web cameras, external USB drives, Facebook, scanners and Picasa.

Once imported you can navigate through the albums and open photos for viewing or for editing.

There are lots of things you can do to photos such as add borders, text, special effects etc.


Out of all the tools I have looked at this is the one I might use as a normal everyday user. It is a good tool for brightening up images, removing red eye and doing stuff to ordinary family photos.

Unfortunately it did crash on more than one occasion.

GwenView

 
GwenView is an image viewing tool. 

You can use it to quickly browse through folders of photos or to run a slideshow.

Simply navigate to a folder of photos using the file manager and right click.

Under the actions will be an option to open with GwenView.





Summary

My attempts at using the graphic tools within openSUSE weren't particularly successful.

Some tools just wouldn't start and those that did had their fair share of crashes.

As someone with very little artistic talent (if any), there are some useful tools,most notably DigiKam, ShowFoto and GwenView.

The other tools are more for specialists if indeed they can get them working.

I would be interested to hear from people who are keen photographers to find out which Linux applications they use and what their experience is of such applications.

In the next article in this series I will be back to territory that I am more comfortable with as I will be dealing with the Internet and chat applications.

Thankyou for reading.
 




















The KDE picture editing software applications included with openSUSE

Introduction

In my last openSUSE based article I took a look at the KDE games that are installed by default.

I was slightly surprised that so many people still played card games such as Patience and Mahjongg.

The point of these articles is to elaborate a bit more on the software that is pre-packaged within openSUSE.

Quite often I write reviews listing the applications but without knowing how good the software is or even what the software does.

This time I will be looking at the graphics applications.

I have two confessions to make at this stage. The first is that I am to art what Corey Feldman is to music. The second confession will become all too obvious as we continue.

DNG Image Converter


I am not going to be spending long reviewing DNG Image Converter because to be honest I can't get it to do anything.

In theory clicking on the plus (+) icon allows you to pick an image file and then you can press the convert button to convert the image into another format.

In reality nothing happens.



Pressing the plus button shows an open file dialog. When I select any of the image file types allowed nothing happens.

Exposure Blending

I am afraid this review is going to start off a bit flat.

DNG Image Converter doesn't work and I have absolutely no idea what the point of the Exposure Blending tool is for.

The text on the screen says that it fuses bracketed images with different exposures to make pseudo HDR image.

There is also a link to a Wikipedia page which defines the bracketing process.

Unfortunately I know very little about photography and I really only ever use a point and click camera.

It really is a case of going back to photography school for me on this one.

What I can say about the tool is that before I can even continue I need to download the "hugin" plugin. Clicking the download link takes me to this page.

I couldn't actually find a plugin that was available for install from the site. The plugin  can be installed from Yast though.


In theory and it has to be theory because I couldn't get it to do anything (but please note this is my fault and not the tool's fault) is that you press the plus (+) icon and select two images.

It says the two images have to be from the same stack. I assume to photography experts this means something.

Upon selecting two images from the same stack you press next and it does the bracketing thing that it is supposed to do.


For a good tutorial and guide about how the exposure blending tool works visit this link.

Panorama


I would like to say that this review is now going to get better but it isn't.

The next graphics application in the list is Panorama.

This application just crashes when I try and open it.


Photo Layouts Editor
























The KIPI Photo Layouts Editor is a rather crude tool for editing and laying out photos.

Basically you start off with a canvas which you define the size of and then you add images to the canvas. These are created as layers.

Each individual layer can have effects applied, borders applied, be resized and rotated.

If you are looking for a serious tool then I guess something like GIMP would be a better fit but this tool works for basic editing.

In case you are wondering the images in the picture are Loch Ness, a replica of the Knight Rider car, a Storm Trooper at the Grampian Transport Museum and Britney Spears. (Yes I like Britney Spears. Confession number 2).

I guess the Grampian Transport Museum take security fairly seriously though, hiring storm troopers.


On a more serious note the Photo Layout Editor crashed on more than one occasion, especially when trying to add the Polaroid border with text.

DigiKam/ ShowFoto


DigiKam lets you organise and edit photos. ShowFoto is used to display the images and enhance them. You can run ShowFoto on its own or it will be opened from within DigiKam when you click on a thumbnail.

When you open DigiKam for the first time you have to go through a number of screens to define your settings such as where you store your photos and how to handle thumbnails etc.

You can import photos from various sources including digital cameras, web cameras, external USB drives, Facebook, scanners and Picasa.

Once imported you can navigate through the albums and open photos for viewing or for editing.

There are lots of things you can do to photos such as add borders, text, special effects etc.


Out of all the tools I have looked at this is the one I might use as a normal everyday user. It is a good tool for brightening up images, removing red eye and doing stuff to ordinary family photos.

Unfortunately it did crash on more than one occasion.

GwenView

 
GwenView is an image viewing tool. 

You can use it to quickly browse through folders of photos or to run a slideshow.

Simply navigate to a folder of photos using the file manager and right click.

Under the actions will be an option to open with GwenView.





Summary

My attempts at using the graphic tools within openSUSE weren't particularly successful.

Some tools just wouldn't start and those that did had their fair share of crashes.

As someone with very little artistic talent (if any), there are some useful tools,most notably DigiKam, ShowFoto and GwenView.

The other tools are more for specialists if indeed they can get them working.

I would be interested to hear from people who are keen photographers to find out which Linux applications they use and what their experience is of such applications.

In the next article in this series I will be back to territory that I am more comfortable with as I will be dealing with the Internet and chat applications.

Thankyou for reading.
 




















11 comments
Posted at 07:00 |  by Gary Newell

Monday, 31 March 2014

Introduction

A couple of weeks ago I reviewed openSUSE 13.1. In that review I listed all the applications which came pre-installed with the KDE live DVD.

I mentioned at the time that simply listing the applications doesn't particularly help, especially if you don't know what those applications are and what they do.

I have been using openSUSE non-stop over the past 2 weeks and I have been trying out the applications.

In this article I will be looking at the games that come pre-installed with the KDE desktop within openSUSE.

Who plays these games?

There are five games that come pre-installed with the KDE desktop within openSUSE 13.1:
  • KMahjongg
  • KReversi
  • KMines
  • KPatience
  • KSudoku 
When I was younger (a lot younger, maybe 10, 11 or 12) my parents used to take me on a summer holiday. Invariably the holiday would be to the Isle of Wight, which is a small island to the south of Portsmouth in England, or to Devon in the south west of England.

One year we went to a place called Teignmouth in Devon and we stayed in a small hotel (can't remember its name) but lets just say that Teignmouth isn't far away from Torquay and Torquay was the setting for the BBC comedy series Fawlty Towers.

The owner of the hotel in Teignmouth clearly used videos of Fawlty Towers as a training video.

The first year we went to the hotel it was fine. We were treated well and we had a great holiday. The hotel owners were very hospitable and they even had one of those long play records that had horse races on it. You could check the betting guide and make small bets and then the owner would play the record and the pot was split between the winners.

The second year was completely different. The rooms were horrible, the food had gone completely bonkers. No porridge for breakfast only Special K and one night we were told the pudding would be "Pear surprise". When we asked what "Pear surprise" was the reply came "It is peaches". (That reminded me of the episode of Fawlty Towers where Cybill said "Well it is a bit tricky, it does mean chef will have to open another tin".

The hotel that year also had a number of German guests. (which is of course one of the classic Fawlty Towers episodes).

Why am I telling you all this you may ask and why are we not talking about games? The point is coming I promise.

There was no entertainment in the hotel and the weather was terrible. There is absolutely nothing to do in Teignmouth when it is raining. Nothing except for playing board games.

Jenga, Chess, Draughts, Risk, they were all there. I spent a whole week learning how to play each game and I had a good time. I remember playing a couple of the German lads at Risk and lets just say they re-wrote history on more than one occasion.

The truth is that I haven't played any of these games in a long long time with the exception of Risk. The same can be said of the games within openSUSE.

KMines is a copy of the game minesweeper that I first played in Windows 3.1. I remember when I was at IBM I had a competition with another guy in the IT department to see who could complete each level of minesweeper in the quickest time. I managed 7 seconds for the small one. As for Solitaire I remember playing it when I got my first desktop computer but I have never really played it since.

I never turn on my computer and think "oh, I must have a game of Reversi". There is just too much other stuff available to even consider playing that game. It isn't that Reversi is a bad game it just doesn't feel relevant anymore.

So my questions to you are as follows:-

Do you ever play the games that come pre-installed with a desktop environment or distribution? Would you miss them if they weren't there?

KMahjongg






















Mahjongg is a bit like the card game pairs.

If you have young children I am sure you have played a card game where you flip a pack of cards over and each of you takes it in turn to flip 2 cards over. If the 2 cards match then you put them to one side and have another go. The winner is the person with the most pairs.

Mahjongg is a similar game but for one person. The cards are laid out similarly to the image above.

The cards are spread out across the board and stacked. The idea is to match the pairs. There are certain rules however. You can only pick cards at the edge or on top of stacks. You can't leave cards orphaned so that they are on their own.

You win the game when there are no cards left but lose if there are no more moves available.

The game itself is well written and there are lots of settings. For instance, you can change the layout of the cards, the tiles that are used and the background.

KReversi






















KReversi is an incredibly simple game. It is actually the sort of game you can play with your kids if you are travelling on a train. All you really need is a piece of paper and a pen.

Again the computer game version is well polished and works very well.

The rules of the game are simple yet the game takes tactical skill in order to win. The game starts with 2 black and 2 white markers in the centre of the grid laid out black, white, white black.

The player always gets to go first and is in control of the black markers. To make a move the player has to place a black marker in a place to make a line. For instance the horizontal line might be black, white. The player would place the marker at the end to make it black, white, black. This would then turn the whole line black.

The computer then makes its move and places a white marker on the board to form a line and this would turn all markers in that line white.

The player with the most markers on the board when the board is full wins the game.

Believe me, it isn't as easy as it sounds.

The game itself hasn't got as many customisable features as KMahjongg but you can change the markers to be different colours and you can define the difficulty setting.

KMines

I used to really like Minesweeper and playing this the other day was actually a blast from the past. I am a very competitive person and I wasted far more time playing this than I had initially wanted to.

The board starts out as a grid of squares. Clicking on one of the squares opens the grid up with numbers defining how many mines there are in the vicinity. Based on the numbers given you can eliminate the squares that don't have mines by clicking on them.

If you manage to clear all the good squares then you win the game. If you hit a mine then you lose.

There are three difficulty levels and a custom setting. Difficulty is defined by the size of the board.


There are various other settings available including different themes including a graveyard theme.

KSudoku 

 
Sudoku has become a gaming phenomenon and now regularly appears in the puzzles column of most newspapers alongside the classic crossword.

The idea is to place each of the 9 numbers in each little square so that they appear only once. You also need to make sure that each row only contains the numbers 1 to 9 so that they appear once and the same for each column.

I have to admit to doing the Sudoku on the train every night. There are 3 puzzles in the local paper with different skill levels, easy, medium and challenging. 

The KSudoku version has 6 levels, very easy, easy, medium, hard, diabolical and unlimited. The diabolical and unlimited levels are fairly pointless as there is a lot of guesswork.

The KSudoku version also lets you play with the dynamics of the game. For example you can make it a 4 x 4 grid (good for kids) or you can do a 3 dimensional puzzle (a cube). Personally I am a traditionalist and prefer the original game. 

I was slightly disappointed with the controls for KSudoku. You pick the number on the left and click into the cell in the grid. I would prefer just to be able to use the keyboard.

It is also possible to change the style of the grid and various other cosmetic settings to make it the way you want it.

KPatience


Patience is a series of card games that you play whilst you are on your own. The KPatience  game is actually very good.


There are lots of different games but I must admit that some I didn't get even after reading the rules. Aces Up for instance seemed to be a case of randomly clicking cards.

The game that most people will recognise is Klondike.



The idea in Klondike is to build up 4 sets of cards in suit order. So pile 1 would be Ace of Hearts, 2 of hearts and onwards until the King of Hearts. Pile 2 would be clubs, then diamonds and then spades.

To fill up the piles you have to move cards around by mixing suits so that the cards are in descending number order, for instance 10 clubs, 9 diamonds, 8 spades, 7 hearts etc. 

When an ace is revealed it will be moved into position automatically. You can then begin to add each card in turn.

If you run out of moves you can click on the pack in the top left corner to reveal more cards.

There are a number of difficulty settings and you can determine whether to only play winnable games.

The whole KPatience game has loads of different games, settings and themes.

Summary

The games are definitely well written and are arguably better than the Windows equivalents.

The question has to be asked though whether they are still relevant. 

Do you play these games? Are they still popular?

Do you fancy a challenge?. Why not play KMines and post a link here to an image showing your fastest time. 

Thankyou for reading.






 

 


KDE Games - Does anybody play them?

Introduction

A couple of weeks ago I reviewed openSUSE 13.1. In that review I listed all the applications which came pre-installed with the KDE live DVD.

I mentioned at the time that simply listing the applications doesn't particularly help, especially if you don't know what those applications are and what they do.

I have been using openSUSE non-stop over the past 2 weeks and I have been trying out the applications.

In this article I will be looking at the games that come pre-installed with the KDE desktop within openSUSE.

Who plays these games?

There are five games that come pre-installed with the KDE desktop within openSUSE 13.1:
  • KMahjongg
  • KReversi
  • KMines
  • KPatience
  • KSudoku 
When I was younger (a lot younger, maybe 10, 11 or 12) my parents used to take me on a summer holiday. Invariably the holiday would be to the Isle of Wight, which is a small island to the south of Portsmouth in England, or to Devon in the south west of England.

One year we went to a place called Teignmouth in Devon and we stayed in a small hotel (can't remember its name) but lets just say that Teignmouth isn't far away from Torquay and Torquay was the setting for the BBC comedy series Fawlty Towers.

The owner of the hotel in Teignmouth clearly used videos of Fawlty Towers as a training video.

The first year we went to the hotel it was fine. We were treated well and we had a great holiday. The hotel owners were very hospitable and they even had one of those long play records that had horse races on it. You could check the betting guide and make small bets and then the owner would play the record and the pot was split between the winners.

The second year was completely different. The rooms were horrible, the food had gone completely bonkers. No porridge for breakfast only Special K and one night we were told the pudding would be "Pear surprise". When we asked what "Pear surprise" was the reply came "It is peaches". (That reminded me of the episode of Fawlty Towers where Cybill said "Well it is a bit tricky, it does mean chef will have to open another tin".

The hotel that year also had a number of German guests. (which is of course one of the classic Fawlty Towers episodes).

Why am I telling you all this you may ask and why are we not talking about games? The point is coming I promise.

There was no entertainment in the hotel and the weather was terrible. There is absolutely nothing to do in Teignmouth when it is raining. Nothing except for playing board games.

Jenga, Chess, Draughts, Risk, they were all there. I spent a whole week learning how to play each game and I had a good time. I remember playing a couple of the German lads at Risk and lets just say they re-wrote history on more than one occasion.

The truth is that I haven't played any of these games in a long long time with the exception of Risk. The same can be said of the games within openSUSE.

KMines is a copy of the game minesweeper that I first played in Windows 3.1. I remember when I was at IBM I had a competition with another guy in the IT department to see who could complete each level of minesweeper in the quickest time. I managed 7 seconds for the small one. As for Solitaire I remember playing it when I got my first desktop computer but I have never really played it since.

I never turn on my computer and think "oh, I must have a game of Reversi". There is just too much other stuff available to even consider playing that game. It isn't that Reversi is a bad game it just doesn't feel relevant anymore.

So my questions to you are as follows:-

Do you ever play the games that come pre-installed with a desktop environment or distribution? Would you miss them if they weren't there?

KMahjongg






















Mahjongg is a bit like the card game pairs.

If you have young children I am sure you have played a card game where you flip a pack of cards over and each of you takes it in turn to flip 2 cards over. If the 2 cards match then you put them to one side and have another go. The winner is the person with the most pairs.

Mahjongg is a similar game but for one person. The cards are laid out similarly to the image above.

The cards are spread out across the board and stacked. The idea is to match the pairs. There are certain rules however. You can only pick cards at the edge or on top of stacks. You can't leave cards orphaned so that they are on their own.

You win the game when there are no cards left but lose if there are no more moves available.

The game itself is well written and there are lots of settings. For instance, you can change the layout of the cards, the tiles that are used and the background.

KReversi






















KReversi is an incredibly simple game. It is actually the sort of game you can play with your kids if you are travelling on a train. All you really need is a piece of paper and a pen.

Again the computer game version is well polished and works very well.

The rules of the game are simple yet the game takes tactical skill in order to win. The game starts with 2 black and 2 white markers in the centre of the grid laid out black, white, white black.

The player always gets to go first and is in control of the black markers. To make a move the player has to place a black marker in a place to make a line. For instance the horizontal line might be black, white. The player would place the marker at the end to make it black, white, black. This would then turn the whole line black.

The computer then makes its move and places a white marker on the board to form a line and this would turn all markers in that line white.

The player with the most markers on the board when the board is full wins the game.

Believe me, it isn't as easy as it sounds.

The game itself hasn't got as many customisable features as KMahjongg but you can change the markers to be different colours and you can define the difficulty setting.

KMines

I used to really like Minesweeper and playing this the other day was actually a blast from the past. I am a very competitive person and I wasted far more time playing this than I had initially wanted to.

The board starts out as a grid of squares. Clicking on one of the squares opens the grid up with numbers defining how many mines there are in the vicinity. Based on the numbers given you can eliminate the squares that don't have mines by clicking on them.

If you manage to clear all the good squares then you win the game. If you hit a mine then you lose.

There are three difficulty levels and a custom setting. Difficulty is defined by the size of the board.


There are various other settings available including different themes including a graveyard theme.

KSudoku 

 
Sudoku has become a gaming phenomenon and now regularly appears in the puzzles column of most newspapers alongside the classic crossword.

The idea is to place each of the 9 numbers in each little square so that they appear only once. You also need to make sure that each row only contains the numbers 1 to 9 so that they appear once and the same for each column.

I have to admit to doing the Sudoku on the train every night. There are 3 puzzles in the local paper with different skill levels, easy, medium and challenging. 

The KSudoku version has 6 levels, very easy, easy, medium, hard, diabolical and unlimited. The diabolical and unlimited levels are fairly pointless as there is a lot of guesswork.

The KSudoku version also lets you play with the dynamics of the game. For example you can make it a 4 x 4 grid (good for kids) or you can do a 3 dimensional puzzle (a cube). Personally I am a traditionalist and prefer the original game. 

I was slightly disappointed with the controls for KSudoku. You pick the number on the left and click into the cell in the grid. I would prefer just to be able to use the keyboard.

It is also possible to change the style of the grid and various other cosmetic settings to make it the way you want it.

KPatience


Patience is a series of card games that you play whilst you are on your own. The KPatience  game is actually very good.


There are lots of different games but I must admit that some I didn't get even after reading the rules. Aces Up for instance seemed to be a case of randomly clicking cards.

The game that most people will recognise is Klondike.



The idea in Klondike is to build up 4 sets of cards in suit order. So pile 1 would be Ace of Hearts, 2 of hearts and onwards until the King of Hearts. Pile 2 would be clubs, then diamonds and then spades.

To fill up the piles you have to move cards around by mixing suits so that the cards are in descending number order, for instance 10 clubs, 9 diamonds, 8 spades, 7 hearts etc. 

When an ace is revealed it will be moved into position automatically. You can then begin to add each card in turn.

If you run out of moves you can click on the pack in the top left corner to reveal more cards.

There are a number of difficulty settings and you can determine whether to only play winnable games.

The whole KPatience game has loads of different games, settings and themes.

Summary

The games are definitely well written and are arguably better than the Windows equivalents.

The question has to be asked though whether they are still relevant. 

Do you play these games? Are they still popular?

Do you fancy a challenge?. Why not play KMines and post a link here to an image showing your fastest time. 

Thankyou for reading.






 

 


30 comments
Posted at 23:11 |  by Gary Newell

Friday, 21 March 2014

Introduction

I last wrote about openSUSE in April 2013 and at the time I asked whether openSUSE was a real alternative to Ubuntu.

The article sparked a number of comments by openSUSE and Ubuntu users and some people said yes, some said no.

Today I will be reviewing the latest version of openSUSE to see what has changed.

About openSUSE

According to the openSUSE WIKI page the aim of openSUSE is as follows:
The openSUSE distribution is a stable, easy to use and complete multi-purpose distribution.
It is aimed towards users and developers working on the desktop or server. It is great for beginners, experienced users and ultra geeks alike, in short, it is perfect for everybody! The latest release, openSUSE 13.1, features new and massively improved versions of all useful server and desktop applications. It comes with more than 1,000 open source applications.
The website for openSUSE can be found at http://www.opensuse.org/en/.

How to get openSUSE


To download openSUSE visit http://www.opensuse.org/en/



System Requirements

  • Pentium* III 500 MHz or higher processor (Pentium 4 2.4 GHz or higher or any AMD64 or Intel* EM64T processor recommended)
  • 512 MB physical RAM (1 GB recommended)
  • 3 GB available disk space (more recommended)
  • 800 x 600 display resolution (1024 x 768 or higher recommended)

Installation

Click here for a guide showing how to install openSUSE.

Note that you can't use UNetbootin to create a bootable USB drive. You have to either use the command line or use the Image Writer tool. To be honest as I don't use Windows I find it easier to just install using a DVD.

The installation process itself is ok but the partitioning bit could be a bit more intuitive.

I had a fairly basic setup with a root partition, home partition and swap partition from my previous Linux install yet the openSUSE installer said that it couldn't find a suitable plan. I then had to create a partition plan and choose my hard drive and jump through a couple more hoops before I was able to continue.

That was the only real hardship in the installation. Everything else is fairly obvious.

First Impressions





















openSUSE has a fairly standard looking KDE interface with one shelf in the top left corner, a panel at the bottom with a menu in the left corner and system tray style icons in the bottom right.

The icons in the system tray change depending on what you have running but the standard set include an icon for the clipboard manager, audio settings, bluetooth, network management and a clock.






















The menu consists of 5 tabs, menu options and a search bar.

If you want to find an application quickly and if it doesn't appear as a favourite, enter a search term in the search bar.

The "Favourites" tab shows the software you use most often. To add an item to the "Favourites" tab, select it from the applications tab and right click. An option will appear with the text "add to favorites".

The "applications" tab shows a list of categories and when you click on the category a list of applications appear.

The "computer" tab has options such as the Yast control center and the Yast package manager as well as the KInfoCenter, which provides information about your installation including OS version, KDE version and disk information. You can also use the "computer" tab to navigate around your system.

The "Recently" used tab shows the items you have used most recently.

The "Leave" tab has options for switching users, logging out and shutting down.

Customising the desktop

The KDE desktop is heavily customisable and can't possibly be covered in full here.

The basic premise is as follows: Each virtual workspace is called an activity. You can switch activities by clicking on the icon with three dots next to the menu icon.





The available activities will be shown and you can switch to the activity you wish to use. You can also get to this screen by selecting the desktop option in the top right corner of the screen and choosing activities.

Now an activity can be a standard desktop like the first one you see with a shelf on it or it can be a more traditional desktop with icons on it.


Other activities include a photos activity, a newspaper layout and search.





















Each shelf can have panels and widgets added. For instance you can add desktop clocks, weather widgets etc.


You can change the desktop wallpaper of each activity individually by right clicking and clicking configure.



There are only a couple of desktop images available by default but by clicking "Get new wallpapers" you are able to install more.

 

 

 

 







Simply scroll down the list and choose the images you wish to install.









Connecting to the internet


To connect to the internet click on the network settings icon in the system tray. A screen similar to the one above will appear showing available networks.

When you select a network for the first time you will be able to configure it by entering details such as the security key and whether you want to connect automatically.
 
You will now be asked to setup KWallet which will store your passwords for you. Basically every time you connect to the network it will ask for your KWallet password.

Flash and MP3

openSUSE is a community distribution and as such you have to install Flash and multimedia codecs yourself.

A great resource for helping out with this sort of thing is opensuse-guide.org and specifically this page which shows how to install browser plugins for openSUSE.


The opensuse-guide site will show you how to install Flash, Java, multimedia plugins, Silverlight and Google Voice and Chat.

You will also want to check out this chapter which shows how to get MP3s working in openSUSE.


Applications

If you obtain the full DVD then you will probably have more applications installed but I chose the KDE live DVD.

The KDE live DVD comes with the following applications:

Games

  • KMahjongg, KReversi, KSudoku, KMines and KPatience

Graphics

  • DNG image converter
  • Exposure Blending Tools
  • Panorama
  • Digikam Photo Management
  • ShowFoto Photo Viewer
  • Gwenview Image Viewer

Internet

  • Kopete instant messenger
  • Konversation IRC client
  • Choqok Microblogging Client
  • KMail Mail Client
  • Firefox Web Browser
  • Konqueror Web Browser
  • KTorrent Bittorrent
  • lftp shell (FTP)

Multimedia

  • AMZ Downloader (Amazon downloader)
  • Amarok Audio Player
  • K3B Disc Burning Tool

Office

  • LibreOffice Writer,  Impress and Drawing
  • KAddressBook - Address book
  • Kontact - Personal Information Manager
  • Korganizer - Personal Organiser
Now you may not have heard of all the tools listed or you haven't seen them in action. In the next week I will be getting to grips with them and give a run down of the applications to give more of an overview.

Installing Applications

To install applications you can either use Zypper which is a command line application along the lines of Apt or you can use Yast which is more along the lines of Synaptic.

Earlier on I linked to the opensuse-guide.org site to show how to install Flash.

You can easily install Flash by using Yast.

Yast is fairly simple to use. Enter a search term in the search box and check where to search for that term, such as the name of the application or the description.

The packages will then appear in the right pane.

As you can see searching for Flash will provide an option for Flash-player. To install the package check the box and click "Accept".

Now the first time you try and install something it may come as a bit of a shock when loads of other applications are listed.

If you haven't updated your system any file that needs to be updated will be listed , as well as dependencies for the program you have chosen. 

Now of course updating is a good idea but if you just want to install the one program you have chosen you can select "Options -> Ignore recommended packages for already installed packages".

What has changed?

The most helpful information I found about openSUSE 13.1 can be found at https://news.opensuse.org/2013/11/19/opensuse-13-1-ready-for-action/.


Summary

Many of the things that I mentioned in the openSUSE 12.3 review are the same in openSUSE 13.1.

Now that I have got used to the way openSUSE works though I find that things that bothered me last time don't bother me so much.

For instance the fact that YAST wants to update all my packages when I try to install one package could be seen as a good thing whereas before I found it to be an annoyance.

Apparently there is better support for Android devices with the file manager and Amarok. Amarok is a great audio player and I am aware I didn't really touch on it in this article but that is for another day.

Not many applications are included in the live DVD and I am surprised there is no LibreOffice Calc when all the other LibreOffice tools are installed. The Yast installer is only a menu option away so this isn't a major issue.

I think new users would definitely benefit from visiting the opensuse-guide.org website. It certainly helped me out.

In my opinion the installer could do with a little bit of tweaking with regards to partitioning but I am aware that it is hard to make this sort of thing easier to use without dumbing it down and losing crucial functionality.

KDE has come on leaps and bounds over the past couple of years and I would now rather use KDE than Gnome.

I'm not sure that openSUSE is for everyone. I think that if you haven't tried Linux before then you might get frustrated by some of the hoops you have to jump through when you first get started. 

Once you get used to it though openSUSE is certainly stable and everything is there that you could possibly need. 

Overall it was a decent enough experience but I'm not sure I prefer it over Kubuntu.

During the course of the next week I will be looking more closely at the KDE applications installed within openSUSE.

Thankyou for reading.







openSUSE 13.1 KDE Review

Introduction

I last wrote about openSUSE in April 2013 and at the time I asked whether openSUSE was a real alternative to Ubuntu.

The article sparked a number of comments by openSUSE and Ubuntu users and some people said yes, some said no.

Today I will be reviewing the latest version of openSUSE to see what has changed.

About openSUSE

According to the openSUSE WIKI page the aim of openSUSE is as follows:
The openSUSE distribution is a stable, easy to use and complete multi-purpose distribution.
It is aimed towards users and developers working on the desktop or server. It is great for beginners, experienced users and ultra geeks alike, in short, it is perfect for everybody! The latest release, openSUSE 13.1, features new and massively improved versions of all useful server and desktop applications. It comes with more than 1,000 open source applications.
The website for openSUSE can be found at http://www.opensuse.org/en/.

How to get openSUSE


To download openSUSE visit http://www.opensuse.org/en/



System Requirements

  • Pentium* III 500 MHz or higher processor (Pentium 4 2.4 GHz or higher or any AMD64 or Intel* EM64T processor recommended)
  • 512 MB physical RAM (1 GB recommended)
  • 3 GB available disk space (more recommended)
  • 800 x 600 display resolution (1024 x 768 or higher recommended)

Installation

Click here for a guide showing how to install openSUSE.

Note that you can't use UNetbootin to create a bootable USB drive. You have to either use the command line or use the Image Writer tool. To be honest as I don't use Windows I find it easier to just install using a DVD.

The installation process itself is ok but the partitioning bit could be a bit more intuitive.

I had a fairly basic setup with a root partition, home partition and swap partition from my previous Linux install yet the openSUSE installer said that it couldn't find a suitable plan. I then had to create a partition plan and choose my hard drive and jump through a couple more hoops before I was able to continue.

That was the only real hardship in the installation. Everything else is fairly obvious.

First Impressions





















openSUSE has a fairly standard looking KDE interface with one shelf in the top left corner, a panel at the bottom with a menu in the left corner and system tray style icons in the bottom right.

The icons in the system tray change depending on what you have running but the standard set include an icon for the clipboard manager, audio settings, bluetooth, network management and a clock.






















The menu consists of 5 tabs, menu options and a search bar.

If you want to find an application quickly and if it doesn't appear as a favourite, enter a search term in the search bar.

The "Favourites" tab shows the software you use most often. To add an item to the "Favourites" tab, select it from the applications tab and right click. An option will appear with the text "add to favorites".

The "applications" tab shows a list of categories and when you click on the category a list of applications appear.

The "computer" tab has options such as the Yast control center and the Yast package manager as well as the KInfoCenter, which provides information about your installation including OS version, KDE version and disk information. You can also use the "computer" tab to navigate around your system.

The "Recently" used tab shows the items you have used most recently.

The "Leave" tab has options for switching users, logging out and shutting down.

Customising the desktop

The KDE desktop is heavily customisable and can't possibly be covered in full here.

The basic premise is as follows: Each virtual workspace is called an activity. You can switch activities by clicking on the icon with three dots next to the menu icon.





The available activities will be shown and you can switch to the activity you wish to use. You can also get to this screen by selecting the desktop option in the top right corner of the screen and choosing activities.

Now an activity can be a standard desktop like the first one you see with a shelf on it or it can be a more traditional desktop with icons on it.


Other activities include a photos activity, a newspaper layout and search.





















Each shelf can have panels and widgets added. For instance you can add desktop clocks, weather widgets etc.


You can change the desktop wallpaper of each activity individually by right clicking and clicking configure.



There are only a couple of desktop images available by default but by clicking "Get new wallpapers" you are able to install more.

 

 

 

 







Simply scroll down the list and choose the images you wish to install.









Connecting to the internet


To connect to the internet click on the network settings icon in the system tray. A screen similar to the one above will appear showing available networks.

When you select a network for the first time you will be able to configure it by entering details such as the security key and whether you want to connect automatically.
 
You will now be asked to setup KWallet which will store your passwords for you. Basically every time you connect to the network it will ask for your KWallet password.

Flash and MP3

openSUSE is a community distribution and as such you have to install Flash and multimedia codecs yourself.

A great resource for helping out with this sort of thing is opensuse-guide.org and specifically this page which shows how to install browser plugins for openSUSE.


The opensuse-guide site will show you how to install Flash, Java, multimedia plugins, Silverlight and Google Voice and Chat.

You will also want to check out this chapter which shows how to get MP3s working in openSUSE.


Applications

If you obtain the full DVD then you will probably have more applications installed but I chose the KDE live DVD.

The KDE live DVD comes with the following applications:

Games

  • KMahjongg, KReversi, KSudoku, KMines and KPatience

Graphics

  • DNG image converter
  • Exposure Blending Tools
  • Panorama
  • Digikam Photo Management
  • ShowFoto Photo Viewer
  • Gwenview Image Viewer

Internet

  • Kopete instant messenger
  • Konversation IRC client
  • Choqok Microblogging Client
  • KMail Mail Client
  • Firefox Web Browser
  • Konqueror Web Browser
  • KTorrent Bittorrent
  • lftp shell (FTP)

Multimedia

  • AMZ Downloader (Amazon downloader)
  • Amarok Audio Player
  • K3B Disc Burning Tool

Office

  • LibreOffice Writer,  Impress and Drawing
  • KAddressBook - Address book
  • Kontact - Personal Information Manager
  • Korganizer - Personal Organiser
Now you may not have heard of all the tools listed or you haven't seen them in action. In the next week I will be getting to grips with them and give a run down of the applications to give more of an overview.

Installing Applications

To install applications you can either use Zypper which is a command line application along the lines of Apt or you can use Yast which is more along the lines of Synaptic.

Earlier on I linked to the opensuse-guide.org site to show how to install Flash.

You can easily install Flash by using Yast.

Yast is fairly simple to use. Enter a search term in the search box and check where to search for that term, such as the name of the application or the description.

The packages will then appear in the right pane.

As you can see searching for Flash will provide an option for Flash-player. To install the package check the box and click "Accept".

Now the first time you try and install something it may come as a bit of a shock when loads of other applications are listed.

If you haven't updated your system any file that needs to be updated will be listed , as well as dependencies for the program you have chosen. 

Now of course updating is a good idea but if you just want to install the one program you have chosen you can select "Options -> Ignore recommended packages for already installed packages".

What has changed?

The most helpful information I found about openSUSE 13.1 can be found at https://news.opensuse.org/2013/11/19/opensuse-13-1-ready-for-action/.


Summary

Many of the things that I mentioned in the openSUSE 12.3 review are the same in openSUSE 13.1.

Now that I have got used to the way openSUSE works though I find that things that bothered me last time don't bother me so much.

For instance the fact that YAST wants to update all my packages when I try to install one package could be seen as a good thing whereas before I found it to be an annoyance.

Apparently there is better support for Android devices with the file manager and Amarok. Amarok is a great audio player and I am aware I didn't really touch on it in this article but that is for another day.

Not many applications are included in the live DVD and I am surprised there is no LibreOffice Calc when all the other LibreOffice tools are installed. The Yast installer is only a menu option away so this isn't a major issue.

I think new users would definitely benefit from visiting the opensuse-guide.org website. It certainly helped me out.

In my opinion the installer could do with a little bit of tweaking with regards to partitioning but I am aware that it is hard to make this sort of thing easier to use without dumbing it down and losing crucial functionality.

KDE has come on leaps and bounds over the past couple of years and I would now rather use KDE than Gnome.

I'm not sure that openSUSE is for everyone. I think that if you haven't tried Linux before then you might get frustrated by some of the hoops you have to jump through when you first get started. 

Once you get used to it though openSUSE is certainly stable and everything is there that you could possibly need. 

Overall it was a decent enough experience but I'm not sure I prefer it over Kubuntu.

During the course of the next week I will be looking more closely at the KDE applications installed within openSUSE.

Thankyou for reading.







5 comments
Posted at 21:57 |  by Gary Newell
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