Frescobaldi opening Kile

Today frescobaldi surprised me by opening source code references from PDF annotations in Kile. Hey, I love Kile! Still, not very practical.
Solution: open an external instance of Okular, go to Settings->Configure Okular…->Editor, choose Custom Text Editor instead of Kile (the command should read frescobaldi --smart --line %l --column %c), apply, restart frescobaldi and you should be good to go again. Apart from the fact that now your LaTeX source code annotations will be opened in frescobaldi…

Copying calendar and contacts from Kontact to an iPod with the proper encoding

Copying your personal data to an iPod is surprisingly easy:
Calendar: export your calendar as an iCal file (File->Export…) and copy it to the Calendars directory on your mounted iPod (e.g. /media/MYIPOD/Calendars)
Address book: File->Export->Export vCard…, take care to export your contact list to several files. Copy to the Contacts directory on your iPod.
It's getting a bit trickier if you have special characters in your files, as these have to be converted from Kontact's UTF-8 to the iPod's ISO_8859-15 encoding. Recoding can be done by iconv with a shell script. Run from the directory where vCards and calendar have been exported to:

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ATI woes

I had a go at installing SuSE 11.2 on Xanthippe, my slightly mercurial desktop computer (Athlon 64bit, ATI graphics, Atheros WLAN chip). The 11.0 kernel kept warring with the WLAN chip, so it was time for an upgrade.
After a normal install, the system claimed to have no working graphics during the configuration reboot (c'mon, it's only an elderly Radeon X1300) and started the console YaST.

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Amarok: Again the album art issue

Amarok doesn't handle album art well for me. They can't help some of the main issues: Amazon's API restrictions have forced the developers to switch to last.fm for automatic cover fetching, which apparently is not implemented in v2.2.0 yet. Additionally, for classically minded listeners like me it's generally difficult to get the matching cover without manual intervention (sorting out composers, artists, correct album title).
It doesn't get easier if you want to synchronise an iPod or similar and need to merge collections from different sources.

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It sort of works

First impressions of 11.2
The first one is purely aesthetical: the SuSE 11.2 installer looks like a gothicised version of Win 7's cutesy scrollwork, in a blackish-green colour scheme and without all those birdies.
The setup procedure (64-bit) was not noticeably different from 11.1: in partitioning, I fared best with importing the previous installation's partitioning and setting the root partition to be formatted to ext4 after that.

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More fun with Kernel Panic

After an update session sometimes ago (and yes, I didn't need the computer for quite a while, that's why I can't really tell you the cause). I experienced a persistent fault: "Could not find /dev/disk/by-id/blablabla-part2 - Would you like to fall back on /dev/disk/by-id/blablablabla-part2 (Y/n)?"
Regardless of the answer Medea went to everlasting sleep, um, well, till the reset button was pressed.

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Yay! Kernel panic!

It's really no reason to rejoice.
On Archimedes (a meticulously preserved SuSE 10.3) the Virtual Box update seemed to have trouble with the fact that there were apparently three kernel versions installed (no idea how they got there), so I decided to get rid of two of them with YaST. And so the catastrophe began…

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openSuSE 11.1 on an Apple MacBook Pro

Meet polyhymnia, my new Apple MacBook Pro 13'' with standard processor and 2 GB RAM. For convenience, the first thing I did was exchanging the 160 GB harddrive against a 500 GB one. While installing MacOS X I already left 60 GB free for an openSuSE installation. If you want to install openSuSE as well and didn't do that, follow the hints on OpenSUSE.org.

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