The To-Do & The Done
SuSE mounts all existing partitions of the Windows XP installation on my harddisk under /windows. This is extremely useful, because I can now happily listen to all the mp3-files stored on partition F: of the Windows install (F for “audio”, yes) while thinking about what still needs to be done to make this system work as it should.
The main difficulty I’m having right now is access to information about what’s installed and what not, and how to use it. Through YaST, the SuSE configuration tool, I can find out which software packages are installed. But not all of them are available via KDE’s (the graphical interface) start menu (or however it is called). So how do I find out how to start the installed programs?
At the same time, KDE has start menu entries like “KSirc” or “KCopete” or “Watzofratz”. I have no ideas what these programs do, or what they are. At the moment I’m just going through all of them, starting one after the other, hoping that no evil spirit left a “delete everything” shortcut in there for dumb newbies like myself. Surely there must be a better way to find out what does what in a Linux installation, but I haven’t found it yet.
And, yes, I did make up “Watzofratz”.
Small things: – check on how to enable scroll-wheel for mouse – something wrong with the selected keyboard; can’t access pointed brackets (easily resolved, the “Control Center” is your friend). Entering ASCII characters through alt + ASCII number doesn’t work either. Bug or feature? – slightly bigger thing: installed TrueType fonts don’t show up in OpenOffice. Maybe fiddle around with XF86Config?
Software that already works perfectly: – Mozilla 1.2.1 (perhaps update) – Mulberry 3.0.3 (mail-client) – AlsaPlayer (sound player which came with the installation perhaps there are better ones, but for the time being this one does find)
Software that still needs to be installed (or found): – SFTP client, preferably with graphical interface (FTP service doesn’t seem to be configured yet in YaST) – telnet client – since I am writing a lot in transliterated Asian languages (Sanskrit, Tibetan), I need a utility which allows to freely configure keyboard layouts, like Tavultesoft’s Keyman for Windows. Example: pressing “alt+a” should result in ā. This is actually top priority. – good text editor for programming. So far used UltraEdit32 on Windows. Need a text editor which has syntax highlighting for XML and perl (at least perl) with instant access to subroutine lists in perl, and which allows direct editing on a remote FTP server. – OCR. Skeptical about this one, but who knows. AbbyyFineReader 6.0 on Windows used to be my friend so far (and we shall probably maintain friendly relations). – Japanese language support? Something like GlobalIME on Windows available – something that allows me to switch from German to Japanese more or less instantly?
Hardware things still to be checked: – scanner (canoscan n1220nu) – digital camera (sony dsc p-5) – coffeemaker (just joking)