Occasional Thoughts

What sounds like a provocative headline has really some substance. Who fears Microsoft today?

Read more about that in Paul Grahams essay...

As I already wrote I am getting curious what is really behind this Ubuntu hype. All the time I google for some kind of problems I find plenty of information dedicated to Ubuntu. Colleagues started to use Ubuntu and are happy with it. Also the media reports more and more about it and someone could get the impression that Ubuntu is the only end user distribution that really matters.

However as a long term SuSE user I will not simply delete my openSuSE 10.2 installation and replace it by Ubuntu. Especially since openSuSE became better and better and is currently really not a bad distribution. Also as a software developer with quite some experience in the IT world, I do not believe hypes until I experienced them myself (that's why I don't use Mac OS X or Windows Vista ).

Since I like KDE better than Gnome for its configurability, I have chosen to start with Kubuntu, the KDE version of Ubuntu.

The first step of my potential Kubuntu migration is an installation on a VMware to fiddle a little bit around with Kubuntu before passing the point of hard return, which is deleting my openSUSE installation. They may be SuSE biased and sometimes wrong, as I am not yet familar with Kubuntu. On the other side this review is intended to help SuSE users to decide, wheather it is worth to switch to Kubuntu or not - so a openSUSE bias is even intended to a certain degree.

I would be very thankful, if you could leave a comment at the end to help me in case I made a statement that is caused by my lack of knowledge about Ubuntu. And if you expecting some either openSuSE or Kubuntu bashing you'll be disappointed. Finally here are my first impressions and naive findings about Kubuntu.

I proudly announce the birth of Jaclin. No, not another daughter: Jaclin, not Jacqueline.

Jaclin 0.1 is a small tool to answer some questions about a compiled Java class file:

• With which Java runtime is the class compatible?
• Are debug infos available in the compiled class?
• What kind of debug infos are compiled in?
• Is it really a Java class at all?

Please see the project page for more information and download links.

If you have questions or comments feel free to add them to this posting below.