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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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.

Crackling USB sound card

Short note: My laptop's new USB sound card made annoying crackling noises at high CPU load (simple check: swipe mouse over buttons in task bar with full plasma desktop effects :-) ) . Apparently this is due to the USB bus not supplying enough power, because I got rid of this by using an externally powered hub.
Hm. Simple solution, but dire consequences: lugging around a fat hub and its power supply? Or get a Y adaptor (like this one) and let it block two of my precious USB ports? Not amused.

Oh, those sneaky Apple people…

…still trying valiantly to keep us from procrastinating. Apparently they now deny apple.com/trailers access to all non-Quicktime users, which is more or less the Linux community. Hey, and I always thought we stood all united against Microsoft.
Several workarounds have been proposed.