A PhD in horribleness

Dr Horribles's sing-along blog

Dr Horrible’s sing-along blog; a new short released online seems to be popular on planet gnome (a release of tomboy was even named after it), considering this I was surprised to see that it was only downloadable via iTunes (though you could watch it online). I though that this would be an excellent opportunity to try the recently released Wine 1.0. I have previously attempted to run several games and iTunes in previous versions of wine with mixed levels of sucess; I found that while most older games (AOE 2 and AOE 1) ran almost perfectly, newer application seemed to be possible to get running but didn’t work for me.

Wine 1.0 is an amazing step forward in functionality, all I needed to do as install Wine from the repos with YaST or the command

su -c ‘zypper in wine’

then I could run the 32bit Windows installer (http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/) just as I would on Windows (except it took less than a tenth of the time) then I then I had a working copy of iTunes.

iTunes main window

It was nearly fully functional, it allows you to play music and use the online store; however there were a few small problems:

• It runs much slower than a native application; this is most notable when scrolling.
• Unless you launch winecfg and set it to disallow the window manager to control wine windows some buttons won’t work.
• It causes to screen to do black for a few seconds when starting.
• It is a bit prone to crashing.

Overall great job to the Wine developers and keep up the good work. When I had installed iTunes I discovered that the download was only available in the USA. I still feel that Banshee is a much better music player than iTunes but it is nice to know that Linux users now have another option.

Package management with zypper

While openSUSE using YaST for graphical packagement it also has an excelent commandline tool called zypper which has similar functionality to Ubuntu’s apt-get but some extra tools which can be really usefull.

To launch zypper in shell mode (all future commands will be passed to zypper as options, so instead of typing zypper in you only need to type in):

zypper shell

or

zypper sh

zypper shell

Some basic tips for using zypper:

• To search for programs use search or se
• To install programs use install or in
• To remove programs use remove or rm
• To refresh repos use refresh
• To specify the type use -t <type> (e.g. pattern )
• Use + or - on the end of an install or remove to do 2 actions in one action (e.g. in emacs -vim to simultaneously install emacs and remove vim)
• Use source-install or si to install the source of a package and all build dependencies (si -d for build dependencies only or si -D for source only)
• To list any updates use list-updates or lu and update or up to install them
• Use exit to leave the shell

For more help on the zypper command use:

man zypper

or look here:

http://en.opensuse.org/Zypper/Usage