Big problems with simple solutions

Number one: KnetworkManager claims "Network Management disabled", no matter what you do in YaST. This had me triple-boot Kubuntu for a few weeks, until Kubuntu had the same problem after a botched hibernation.
This worked on both for me:
Edit /var/lib/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.state Make sure it says NetworkingEnabled=true.

Number two: With the fixed network settings in place, I did a system update including a new kernel. What came up after the boot menu: "File not found ... You need to load kernel first"
Ouch. OK … google … The Kubuntu grub has to be told about SuSE's new kernel. I bang my head on the desk a few times (can't hurt, apparently there's nothing viable in it anyway) and run sudo update-grub in Kubuntu.

Samsung SCX-4200 on Kubuntu 10.04

Short summary: Don't use Samsung's Unified Driver (which worked OK on SuSE). The scanner works plug-and-play with Skanlite (not in Kubuntu default install, btw), and the printer works after adding it in CUPS without proprietary drivers.

Murphy's law - or triple boot using a thumb drive

The good: Windows 7's partitioner is great.
The bad: I did some update on Saturday afternoon which completely fried my KNetworkManager (it keeps claiming "Network management disabled", no matter what I do) - which is not good, considering that the unstable university wireless keeps kicking me out and I have to run YaST's network settings every time to reconnect. Also, for some reason, 11.3's suspend to RAM feature which I had really liked before in terms of shutdown/wake-up speed, froze my system several times. Not exactly good, either.

OpenSuSE 11.3 - less fun on a Samsung P35 - ATI woes continued

After the tremendously positive testing results of avocadohead with Tisiphone, I tried my luck some days ago with 11.3 on Thukydides, a Samsung P35 notebook, not the newest hardware and unfortunately with an ATI graphic card.

Why it's a bad time to buy a laptop right now

Tisiphone is getting old and slightly cracked around the edges, so I thought it might be time for a replacement. After all, two major reasons to move to the US are cheap clothes (girls) and hardware (guys).
I don't want to indulge in product placement but the Asus U30Jc looked quite sexy to me: a moderately fast i3 processor, 13 inch, not too heavy, widescreen, 8-10 hours battery life, at least a partial aluminium case, hybrid graphics and significantly cheaper than a comparable MacBook Pro (and before daWuzzzz starts a war in the comments section: the hardware-optimised OS on the Mac is no good if you intend to run Linux...)
Ay, there's the rub: hybrid graphics on Linux is still in early development, and apparently the Nvidia Optimus technology (check out this Nvidia whitepaper for specs) would need a major Xorg makeover to function.
I'd consider just getting the machine and waiting for Xorg/driver updates, if I could at least use the Nvidia chip all the time or manually switch with a server reboot, but apparently one is confined to the Intel-on-board chip right now. Nvidia blames Xorg and has better things to do than work towards a solution and the Linux hybrid graphics hackers concentrate more on getting the conventional switching setup to work.
I really don't like settling on an older model just for compatibility reasons and I have forsworn ATI forever (don't start me on driver issues), so I'll see what transpires and in any case wait for the USB3-capable chipsets to become standard.
I think I'll have to go on a major frustration shopping spree now - in this town, it should be easy to spend the equivalent of a quite high-end notebook on shoes and handbags.
Update (7/26): There seems to be slight progress on the vga_switcheroo front with the nouveau drivers on an Asus N61 with an Optimus card according to the hybrid-graphics mailing list - they didn't specify the exact model (hopefully the N61Jq, it's the only one with Optimus).

ntfsclone - a nice tool for dealing with ntfs partitions

Again another crashed harddrive... (maybe we should start a counter on this blog how many crashed harddrives we already got through?)

By chance, I fell over a tool called ntfsclone using gparted, because in the error analysis of the damaged harddrive showed up a tool tip to use ntfsclone to get an image of the partition before doing anything else.

Lilypond fails at ghostscript PDF conversion

openSuSE 11.3 came with the new ghostscript 8.70, which lilypond wasn't quite ready for yet. On my system, gs consistently threw a "failed (256)" error when called by lilypond - just copying and pasting the gs code from the lilypond log into a shell worked, btw.
Quoting Graham Percival on the Lilypond mailing list:

Ghostscript was bumped to something.70, and a bunch of extra patches we apply to ghostscript changed. We'll look into it.

He has already posted an apparently patched development version here, but I haven't seen a linux x86 version there. Anyway, for all x86 users and people who'd rather stick to the stable release, there is the simple solution of downgrading to ghostscript < 8.70 - I used openSuSE 11.2's ghostscript-library 8.64, which worked fine, at least with LaTeX and lilypond.

Really, openSuSE!

Touchpad control - great!
Improved wireless handling - impressive!
No desktop effects without kernel tweaking - priceless.

The 11.3 installation report: