Kiba-Dock working well in OpenSUSE 11.1 Gnome

Didn't make any progess in understanding why couldn't get anything to install in my new OpenSUSE 11.1 install on the EeePC 901. And got no answers at all to the posts I made to the EeePC-Users and OpenSUSE forums.
While it's always tempting to conclude that lack of answers to your posts pleading for help is due to the readers being ignorant, lazy bastards who who have no interest in lending a hand the truth is much more likely to be that nobody knows what's wrong due to your problem being specific to your setup.
So with this chastening thought in mind, I downloaded the iso again and re-burned the liveusb with Unetbootin. This time the install and subsequent automatic configuration step seemed to go well without any problems.
Now I could boot into OpenSUSE without issues and even call up Install Software. Nevertheless, I still sometimes get the "YaST2 is locked" message. However, using the "sudo zypper install xxxxxx" command has, up to now always managed to get what I want installed. This includes Opera 10 Snapshot and Yakuake.
Still puzzled about what's going on with the Install Software which still gives a dialog box which is occasionally just about visible off the top of the screen.
I should mention here that apart from the mysterious problem with the package management system, everything else (wireless, webcam) seems to work fine in OpenSUSE on the EeePC 901.
Even getting Kiba-Dock to work was not difficult. What I did was:
1. Use Alien (in Ubuntu) to convert the Kiba-dock deb to rpm
2. In OpenSUSE, install the rpm with Install Software
3. Install dependencies python-gnome-extras, glitz and glitz-devel (don't know for sure if this latter is necessary)
4. From LinuxMint, where Kiba-Dock is working perfectly, I created a .tgz file of everything under ~/.gconf/apps/kiba/options (called options.tgz) which I then moved to ~/.gconf/apps/kiba/ in OpenSUSE and untarred. Note that to get the "no dock" effect (where the launcher icons are floating at the bottom of the screen with no visible background), it's necessary to have the special ***.png file in ~ in OpenSUSE.
Another necessity, of course, is that Desktop Effects are enabled.