I got so far with installing SuSE 10, even managing to get sound working temporarily. I believed my search for a working, professionally built distro compatible with my system may have ended.

Then, I decided to look for kjots. For the uninitiated, kjots is a very handy notebook. A place to jot down (or paste) all the small tidbits of information one comes across and organise them into books and titled pages.

Finding files on Suse seems unnecessarily complicated but eventually I found some configuration files. In Help, which usually isn't helpful, I even found a manual describing how to use kjots - which I already know. But, after looking in all places likely and unlikely, including a file search and checking the software installation tool, I have discovered the installation contains no executable named kjots (properly described in one kjots file as the programme name). Incredible but true.

I have filed an issue but for me, that's the end of any thought of using SuSE. Sad, because after Mandriva, it seems to me to be a carefully designed distro.

Check if the package kdeutils3-extra is installed, which provides kjots. Maybe you found some files that are installed with the kde documentation (which doesn't mean that the executable exists).

Finding files in SUSE is not that complicated. Sure, using 'find' is not very convenient. But if you install findutils-locate, you get a nice tool for quickly finding files on your system (the first run of updatedb takes some time, but after that, it's a matter of split-seconds). To find executables, I use 'which <command>'. Then there is the rpm query command, e.g. 'rpm -ql kdeutils3-extra | grep bin' and the tool 'pin' to search the archive of your installation medium. These are all very quick and handy tools. The way I found kjots was to use the search function of YaST.

I agree that tools exist to find things. I just mean that looking at the tree in a file browser presents quite a mess. Things which you'd expect to find together are scattered far and wide and sometimes you have to open a series of subfolders to get anywhere.

Somewhere recently, I found the command whereis - so logical and simple, who'd have thought plain English could work?

I installed SuSE 10 for 86_64 and the rpm -extra seems to be missing from the installation disk. I got it from a SuSE mirror and now have the executable kjots. kjots and kalarm are such useful programmes, I do not know how anyone manages without them.

This is what the rpm-desription tells:

I suppose that's why I'm not selling software. I just put your notes about finding things in kjots - page title "Find". Thanks for your help.