I did finally get openSUSE 11.3 to run on my dual screens, by installing Linux Mint 9 and copying the xorg.conf file back to openSUSE. That solved one display problem, but there were more to come. Skype, which I use a lot to talk to family and friends, installed. It needed a bunch of 32-bit libraries to run. Once I got it running, it kept dropping sound or locking up the system to the point of needing to power off.\u00a0\u00a0 The sound hardware finally stopped working.<\/p>\n
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I replaced the motherboard with a Gigabyte GA-P55-USB3 board with a Intel Core i5 650 CPU running at 3.2 GHz.\u00a0 That’s the same board\/CPU in my server.\u00a0 There were still some problems with the processor maxing out when I ran Gkrellm (a system monitor) or Lbreakout2 (a game like pong).\u00a0 That turned out to be caused by the interaction of xorg, nVidia driver and the nVidia GeForce 8400 graphics adapter.\u00a0 The server was running Gkrellm without any problems.\u00a0 It uses an nVidia GeForce 7300 SE\/7200 GS graphics adapter.\u00a0 Once I replaced the graphics adapter, everything worked without problems.<\/p>\n
Gkrellm<\/a> is a system monitor which shows everything you might want to know about the system including: CPU usage, temperatures, fan speeds, disk activity, network activity and emails on a remote server.\u00a0\u00a0 It also allows me to monitor Gkrellm on a remote system.\u00a0 That way I can check on my server from my workstation.\u00a0 The built-in plasma system monitor does not show emails and takes up a lot more screen space.\u00a0 It has a global share option, but I couldn’t find out how to access it on another machine.\u00a0 Maybe in 4.5 or 4.6.<\/p>\n I have my local applications recompiled and running. Skype<\/a>, XTrackCAD <\/a>and TeamViewer <\/a>have been installed and are running. XTrackCAD is a track layout program for model railroaders.\u00a0 TeamViewer is a desktop sharing program that runs on Windows, Linux and the Mac.\u00a0 I have it installed here and on all the systems of my family and friends.\u00a0 It’s free for personal or non-commercial use.<\/p>\n My Telly<\/a> is a program that displays the current broadcast\/cable programs with descriptions. \u00a0It requires a subscription to Schedules Direct<\/a>, which cost $20\/year. Schedules Direct is also used by MythTV to display its schedules. It didn’t want to run at first, complaining about a missing Jave parent. Once I installed a Java development kit and any Java package that looked even slightly like it would help, it ran as intended.<\/p>\n Going from openSUSE 11.0 to 11.3 has been difficult for a number of reasons:<\/p>\n All in all, I happy with the system as it is now.\u00a0 I just wish the upgrade hadn’t taken so much time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I did finally get openSUSE 11.3 to run on my dual screens, by installing Linux Mint 9 and copying the xorg.conf file back to openSUSE. That solved one display problem, but there were more to come. Skype, which I use … Continue reading \n