Two days ago I installed OpenSuSE 10.1 on a spare partition. My first impression was how fast it was. Konqueror showed me pages from internet faster than ever and Gimp sharped images faster than ever to. For me it was a better Linux experience than ever. That maked me wonder if I was competent enough to run Debian.

Then I installed OpenSuSE everything, except partitioning and language, was chosen and done by the installer. After that I had a system with lot of unnecessary applications and deamons running but still a faster OS than I have ever come close to with Debian, Sarge or Etch. I use to install really striped down systems with only things that I know I need. Maybe that is the reason why my Debian systems is slower than OpenSuSe. Maybe I have excluded some essential package. I don't now. But I think the main thing is how the system is configured. Now I'm absolutely sure that OpenSuSE's installer is more qualified than me and the Debian installer together.

At last I succeeded with my intention to run the latest kernel in the Etch repository and compile the Nvidia driver. It was not easy and I had to take the Nvidia driver from Sid to make it compile without errors. And here comes the story about the mess.

The latest kernel in Etch is 2.6.17-2 but if you chose the meta package 'linux-image-2.6-x' you get a 2.6.16-2 kernel. Don't ask me why!

And the latest Nvidia driver is 1.0.8762+1 but only as binaries and only for the 2.6.16-2 kernel. For the 2.6.17-2 kernel you have to compile it from source. That's fine with me because I'm used to do that. But the source in Etch is nvidia-kernel-legacy-source 1.0.7174-4 and that don't compile. Wherefor I had to get the nvidia-kernel-legacy-source 1.0.7182-1 from Sid.

This makes me wonder how could Debian Etch be such a mess? Don't they now that they doing? This is not that it use to be, and I'm little worried about the future of Debian.

I have trained SpamAssassin today.

To learn it what spam is direct it to a folder that include spam.
# sa-learn --spam --dir /home/magnus/Mail/Spam/cur

To learn it what is not spam direct it to a folder that include no spam.
# sa-learn --ham --dir /home/magnus/Mail/inbox/cur

Today I also found SpamPoison. It sounds fun. Create a links on your webpage what will redirect email harvesting bots to trap sites that will feed it with an almost infinite loop of dynamically generated fake email addresses. Hi,hi, it's payback time!
http://english-2163081833.spampo

Yesterdays new knowledge was that Sharpen is a better method to sharpen pictures than Unsharp Mask. During the years that I have worked with pictures I have newer heard or read about anybody who have used Sharpen. All books, magazines and manuals have always talked about Unsharp Mask as the method to sharpen pictures. But with Unsharp Mask I have never been real satisfied. Different pictures needed different settings to be good. But yesterday I found http://digikamplugins.free.fr/ImagesGallerySamples/MultipleAlbums/FilterImages/index.html
and I took a look at the basket in the pictures that shows how it looks after using Sharpen and Unsharp Mask. The basket is much sharper then using Sharpen than using Unsharp Mask. My experience have learned me that leaves and grass doesn't get any good with Unsharp Mask and that basket is the same kind of motive. Leaves and grass got blured instead of sharped. But then I tried with Sharpen everything become excellent. And with Sharpen I can use the same settings for all pictures no matter that the motive is with excellent results.

It's not fun to reports bugs to the Debian bug tracking system. The thanks you get is spam.
I have a special e-mail address that I use then I'm little afraid that it becomes public. My intention is to change that address then it collect to much spam.
But my latest contribution to the Debian bug tracking system was a big mistake. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=45480
The report you can see was a ordinary e-mail sent to the maintainer of Aptitude. He saw it as a Dpkg thing and asked me if he could send it to the public dpkg list. I said O.K. Now you can think I have to blame myself but I could never thought about that he would include my personal information, including my main e-mail address, then he send it further to the public dpkg list. But he did.