This is a follow-up to my last piece so at least you understand the title better.
I was able to work a little on getting openSUSE setup well-enough that I can use it as my training machine as I work toward some certifications from SUSE. It took a little work and a lot of trial-and-error, but I have a working machine going right now that will serve my needs. Here is how I’ve handled the problems I was having.
- Pidgin and Google, for whatever reason, do not seem to like it when I set an avatar within Pidgin. That’s an easy-enough fix … I just don’t set an avatar within Pidgin. I would prefer to be able to set one, but I am more interested in having access to Google Talk consistently right now. I might file a bug against this because it is quite annoying.
- VPN was only a single option away after setting all of the certificates correctly and other settings. Make sure you check the Use this connection only for resources on its network setting within the IPv4 settings of the VPN and things will work a little better. I’m not sure why I missed it in the past.
- I have Thunderbird setup with my iCloud email so that I am able to check my personal email easily. I did have work’s Google Apps account setup as well, but it was more of a pain (and IMAP + Google is still annoying) so I’ll just use the web interface for that. Not ideal, but it will work.
There really isn’t too much else to it. That will get me by for now. I still need to work out how to apply theme settings to GNOME Terminal, but that is minor.
So I’m back. While I won’t use this Lenovo ThinkPad X220 with openSUSE as my primary machine, I am happy that I have something with a proper CLI to work with again.