i should be working (but i'm fixing my computer).

I am lost in the land of perpetual beta.  Self-inflicted, since I insist upon perpetually trying stuff out.

...

I am further locked in the trichotomy of hardware/software combinations.  Oh, whatever.

Here is what I don't understand.  My two 10 year old 586 laptops are truly borked under OpenSUSE 11.2.  The Toshiba A15 I rolled back to OpSU 11.1 immediately after attempting to use 11.2, and there it shall remain until the day OpSu ceases to support 11.1, whereupon I have no idea what I will do.  (But, as I told many a prospective KDE 4 user at SCALE -- when all else fails, try a different distro!)

I held out for a long time re updating the HP ZD7000.  Seemingly, for good reason it now turns out.  It is truly strange, weird and other-worldly.  But, along with the random drivers that no longer work (broadcom wireless, Nvidia GeoForce 4 480 Go), here's the bigger problem.  When the computer goes to screen saver, the CPU ramps up a bit.  When the computer goes to sleep (screen off), the CPU goes into hyper-mode.  I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT IT IS DOING.  But, the cpu plasma monitor graph I'm running, show 60% cpu use, all for no apparent reason.

It gets stranger.  Normally what I will do is call up the system monitor (ALT+ESC) and see what is eating up the cpu. BUT HERE'S THE THING.  Sometimes the cpu ramps up for no apparent reason, even when I'm using the computer, and system monitor will only account for about 15% of the 60% usage.  What phantom process is eating up the rest of the cpu?  (And, yes, I do have system monitor set to show all processes, not just user ones.)

None of this was happening prior to Sunday when I upgraded to OpSu 11.2.  The ZD7000 was sitting quitely in the corner of the room, idling nicely with a clock display and ready to use as I needed it.

So, I have now got it running on LXDE, which is not experiencing the same problems, but then again, as far as I can tell I am running the openbox window manager and not Kwin.    But, I had to do some screensaver tweeking.  It turns out my overload was coming from GL hacks, so I got rid of a lot of the cpu usage by using a non-gl hack.  (That is what the xscreensaver author refers to them as.)  But, I need a clock.  Actually, I quite prefer the KDE screensaver clock, but as far as I know it can't be used in LXDE.

So, I use xdaliclock, but how to install it?  I am always reinventing the wheel, so I had to do so again here, seeing that I have blogged about using xdaliclock before, but never bothered to say how to implement it, as it is a standalone program.

Well, as it turns out, first you install xdaliclock from YAST (or OpenBuildService).  But then, it is a standalone program in /usr/bin.  So, you need to copy it to /usr/lib/xscreensaver (/usr/lib64/xscreensaver on 64 bit installs).  AND THEN you need to add a reference to it in the .xscreensaver file in the home directory.

Lastly, you have to track down the man pages for xdaliclock if you want any options other than a white morphing clock on a black background.  These can be implemented in the "advanced" settings in xscreensaver, which has a command line box for options (I use "xdaliclock -root -builtin2 -transparent -memory low -cycle").  And then lastly, I have xscreensaver implementing the power management rather than the personal settings from KDE 4.4

And, with all that, I have a somewhat uglier clock system, but my ZD7000 is back to useable.  The question remains whether to roll back to OpSu 11.1 and it's a lot of work, so I don't know if I will.  But, I do prefer to run KDE plasma if I can.

Meantime, let's move to another leg of the trichotomy.  Both of my X64 machines are running OpSu 11.2/KDE 4.4 admirably.  Well, sort of, but all looks nice and no power management problems.  And, if you recall our last episode of Perpetual Beta Land, I couldn't get the brightness to adjust much above "black".  But since yesterday, the Sony Vaio has decided (or OpSu has decided) that I can have full brightness on the screen after all.

Very cool, but with all of this computering around, occasionally it makes sense to actually do some work -- I mean, isn't that the reason I maintain all these computers.  Or maybe not, but anyway.

Well, I was blasting away typing a gazillion words per minute (yeah, I'm that fast) and the cursor was jumping around all over the place, landing in the header, all sorts of annoyance (and work delay, for that matter).  Yikes!  But yesterday this time I was using LXDE and observing that the cursor was being very well behaved.  So, I switched back to LXDE.

Which is the third leg of the trichotomy, actually.  I'm on LXDE, not KDE.

Now, all of this must be put in some perspective.  I do not know where the instability is coming from and I'm not going to try and figure it out.  OpSu 11.2 is released, so that should be "Stable" and KDE 4.4 is released, so that should also be "Stable."  But OpSu 11.2 is not released WITH KDE 4.4, I retrieved 4.4 out of the "Factory" repository.  So, it's impossible for me to say whether there are inherent problems in either package as officially released or not.

What is clear to me is that I can't be in Perpetual Beta Land and see all the neat new widgets UNLESS I use the Factory repositories, so-be-it.  Because the problem is that once I see a neat new something-or-other implemented, I need to have it.

Which is why my computers presently have the ICEwm, Gnome, LXDE, KDE 3.5 and KDE 4.4 desktops on them.  Every now and then, I have to do actual work.

Oh. By. The. Way.  OpSu has apparently removed the KDE 4.4 default splash screen.  In prior versions they set the splash to their own splash screen, but you could switch to KDE's.  Now you can't unless you install more themes, which I have never done successfully.  And as I have mentioned here before, the KDE art team is better than the one at OpSu (sorry, but it's my opinion and I'm staying with it.)

In fact, speaking of splash screens, I rather enjoy the GRUB splash that comes up around Christmas time, couldn't we have something cool like this all the time?