Distro Updates

I have finished configuring all my freshly installed distros. Apart from Windows XP I have added SuSE 10.0, Ubuntu, Mandriva 2006 and Debian in different partitions. Although I tried to share one /home partition among several distros it gave lot of compatibility issues. Therefore instead of sharing /home I have added it as an extra partition which is accessible from all linux varients.

SuSE10
Perhaps it was only me but the latest of SuSE gave me couple of problems in the beginning. Especially accessing mirrors to add additional reposiories was a nightmare till now. Hope this will be corrected soon. Good side of it was improvements in hardware recognition. Unlike previous versions this detected my tv card (Haupaug PVR250/350).

Mandriva 2006
Installation was smooth. Boot up speed was improved tremendously. Improvements done to software installation tool was pretty good. No more server connection errors. List of software available is amazing.

Ubuntu 5.10
So far the best distro I could hold on to. Installation was smooth and no difficulty installing new software.

Syntax highlight for VIM

Vim is a very powerful, fully featured, lightweight editor based on Vi. When I started running it on SUSE93, it was found out that the syntax highlighting feature was not available and should be configured manually. However it is very easy to activate this and if you follow the following steps you will be able to activate the feature in 1 minute.

Steps
1) ~>cd /home/user (Open the terminal and goto your home/user directory(change the "user" to relavent user name) using "cd". If you just opened the terminal you are most probably in home directory.)

2) ~>vim .vimrc (Open a new file called .vimrc(don't forget the dot))

3) press "i" to insert and add "syntax on" (without the the quotes)

4) press escape button and type :wq and press enter to save the file and escape.

When you open a programm file with Vim next time you should be able to see the syntax highlights.

Goodluck!