upgraded my home NEO to openSUSE Linux 10.3

I started the upgrade last night, before I went to bed. I had to get the beyond the point, where the old packages get removed and they asked me a few questions then. Afterwards it ran through the night.

This morning I had to solve a boot configuration problem, but that was solved easily by letting them suggest a fresh configuration (apparently well based on the "partition logic": "where is what").

After the 1st 'rcxdm start' no window manager was running, but 'env DISPLAY=:0 metacity &' did the job. I have done that for a while now on that box, and I would love to know, how to get rid of that ennoyance.

Well, "devilspie" (aka "Devil's Pie") (for enabling features, that the minimalistic metacity does not support itself -- you missed it? try it!!!) and "gkrellm" where not there at first. Pointing yast to its OSS and non-OSS standard online repositories and installing from there helped in these cases.

To be continued.

Google Apps -- set them up with one of my domains

Took me quite a while, to get everything right ... - Google Apps (I call them GApps for short) would like to take over an entire domain, but I cheated them to just take over a subdomain with a couple of sub-subdomains. Learned quite a few things that way. Funny: How can a subdomain of mine "host" Google Apps? You simply point its CNAME DNS entry to the right Google host FQDN and here we go! That host looks up entries in a table, that you set up before, and it fills those poor sub-subdomains of mine with a nice life. It's amazing! I'm not sure, whether the other potential domain users do enjoy Google Apps, but at least I showed them a possible way to go.

btw: for hire again!

I almost forgot to tell you: you can hire me for IT contract work, I have quite some time available right now. Give me a shout!

online with my new HorstBox, including SIP online

I got my new HorstBox ("consumer version") up and running right now, and you can call me on my Berlinian phone number, wherever I plug it into the Internet from now on -- in theory. Well the HorstBox does not support all features my last Netgear modem router offered, but still: the HorstBox time has started!

just wrote my 1st Rakefile

It took me a while to finally get going but it was worth while investing the time to dive into it. next step is http://buildr.rubyforge.org , and I am really keen on that. something capable of replacing Ant and Groovy -- amazing! Single-quoted strings as "sh" commands get displayed quite nicely, double-quoted strings get displayed on a single line, thus all line breaks are lost. That looks bad.