tomhudson's Journal: For those who say linux doesn't have apps ..

I finally got around to installing everything (except the debug packages) available from the openSUSE repositories. Some stats:

Disk space used, by directory (note - /home is on a separate drive, and doesn't affect these totals, 4k cluster size used - if you use larger cluster sizes, you'll need more space)

• / - 26 gigs
• /boot - 90 meg
• /srv - 514 meg
• /var - 1.5 gig

In other words, more than 28 gigs of software.

For those who don't like the command-line, and want to go clicky to run applications, here's the breakdown on application counts installed in each menu category:

• Applications: 48
• Development: 61
• Edutainment: 38
• Games: 236
• Graphics: 64
• Internet: 107
• Multimedia: 437
• Office: 107
• System: 199
• Utilities: 149

Total: 1,446

Installed web applications include:

1. ganglia-webfrontend - manage your cluster via a browser
2. horde - a very nice webmail app. In fact, I recognized it as one that my hosting provider uses ...
3. lam - a web interface to your ldap server
4. MediaWiki - we all know what that is.
5. munin - your machine stats package - very nice graphs
6. mythweb - web frontend to your myth-tv box
7. phpMyAdmin and phpPgAdmin - web administration for mysql and postgresql databases
8. squirrelmail
9. squivi2 - lets you pass file requests through virus scanners and compressors, etc.
10. svnmanager, usvn - web interfaces to subversion repositories
11. torrentportal - run your own torrent metafile index
12. webalizer - server log stats
13. webdot - for generating graphics for your server from .dot files

Some caveats:

1. YaST2: If you're going to try duplicating this crazy "install everything" task, make sure you have enough ram and/or swap. yast2update will take over a gig of ram when it loads everything, including your now-overstuffed database of installed software and dependencies ...
2. KDE issues: The "slab" menu system takes getting used to, and if you only use the default install, its probably not worth switching. However, if you have a bazillion programs installed, its better than the conventional menu. As of tonight, KDE4 is still unusable without a lot of work ... wait for the final release.
3. Gnome issues: The menu lacks both a "run" command and a shell. Not very nice having to click all over the place just to get a terminal! Also, if you click "leave", log back in without changing your session type, and click "leave" again immediately, you'll more than likely end up in an endless loop, where clicking "leave" does nothing, and you have to exit by doing a Ctl-Alt-Backspace to kill the x session.
4. Updating: If you don't set file access permissions to "easy" in the install, you'll find that the wrapper script for the online update (/usr/sbin/zypp-checkpatches-wrapper), which should have permissions of -rwsr-xr-x, is constantly being reset to -rwxr-xr-x. Log in as root, chmod u+s, and it will be able to work temporarily. Better to disable it completely, and manage everything from the package manager.
5. Java + Browsers: There are some issues with java browser plugins if you install both the open source java package and java 1.6, so you might want to stick with only Java 1.5 (the default) for now.
6. Video: Not all systems will be detected properly. In my case, I removed 2 video cards. The negative side: back to 2 displays instead of 3. The positive side: it now recognizes both video outs on the remaining card, so I have Xinerama running properly, with one big desktop instead of one per monitor, so the second video card (256 meg ATI) will go in the old box, along with an upgrade to 1 gig of ram it will inherit from the new(er) machine ...
7. Web apps: They don't all play nicely in terms of changing script paths - you will have to edit some config files to change various file path settings if you install all of them.

Windows in a Window

There are several virtualization technologies available - if you *have* to run Windows applications (or know someone who has that problem), they can now run Windows where it belongs - in a window within linux, instead of dual-booting.

Final words:

When installing, why not enable ssh and remote desktop (yes, remote desktop isn't supposed to be as secure as ssh, but it will impress the heck out of your coworkers when you've got a few shells running in terminals AND a remote desktop display).

With some extra ram and a new hard disk, a lot of computers that are less than 5 years old will be able to run this distro very nicely. With 250-gig hard disks under $80, its certainly worth it for anyone interested in getting a few more years out of their current computer.

Besides all that...

[BrenBren]

Let's not forget other software. One of my favorite recent "finds" is Inkscape [inkscape.org], an Open Source vector graphics editor.

Re:

[tomhudson]

Its there :-) Graphics | Vector Drawing | SVG Vector Illustrator inkscape)

Maybe I should make a list of all the programs ... it would take quite a while, though.

On a side note, now that I've added plugins to Eclipse, as well as a few new apps (there are more added every day or so at the opensuse build system and the other repositories), I'm just a few hundred megs shy of the 30 gigs of installed software mark.