Wifi and keyboard layouts in openSUSE 11.0

I used this guide again for openSUSE and it worked absolutely perfectly.
The only problem I had was that after the first reboot, openSUSE only picked up my neighbours wifi and not mine (which is about 100 times stronger). But after another reboot, we got over that.
As usual, I tried to insert the keyboard layout icon in the upper panel but had some problems. I've detailed everything, and how I solved it, in this post to openSUSE forums.

openSUSE 11.0 on the MacBook

Just starting to get openSUSE 11.0 setup on the Mac.
Actually, I find that, particularly with openSUSE, I start clicking around and installing all sorts of unnecessary crap just to get something working -- when I may regret some of the stuff I installed later.
This is particularly the case with getting media players working particularly the codecs.
For the future, I would strongly recommend just installing the repos shown in this guide (although there are quite a lot).
To get the right codecs, I believe I can avoid a lot of needless flailing around just with this command:

sudo zypper in libdvdcss libxine1 w32codec-all k3b-codecs

Nevertheless, even after the correct installs, I couldn't get Amarok to play without a reboot. (I really don't know how many times a reboot in Linux has miraculously resurrected a dying computer)
Things that are working fine in this new install are:
AWN
Fusion-icon (need to symlink to ~/.kde4/Autostart)
Yakuake
Opera 9.52
Gmail Notifier (symlinked to ~/.kde4/Autostart)

Media players working are Amarok (1.4) and Banshee1
However, I was unable to compile Amarok 2 beta. Also, I posted to openSUSE forums about how to install Amarok 2 (which works fine in KuruminNG) but have no replies up to now which is ominous.

On the question of sound, I came across this excellent thread on sound problem troubleshooting in openSUSE (actually, it's a tutorial). Worth keeping in mind, should I have problems in the future.

openSUSE setup problems on Mac

I have always found openSUSE to be a little strange compared to other Linux OSes in particular as regards getting it setup and operating normally.
Now, I'm once again involved with this task on the MacBook and have, so far, seen these difficulties:

1. Once it was installed (11.0), I tried to update it. A total of 34 updates were available, including 21 security updates. However, all of my attempts to update were greeted with an error message which seemed to indicate difficulty in connecting to a server. As this went on for more than 24 hours, I started to install the updates one-by-one, then two-by-two until eventually all were installed with no error message. Now this is difficult to explain but at least everything is now up to date.
2. The initial screen resolution was 800x600 as seen from Configure Display. To correct this I had to Configure X11, set the display to 1200x800 for 16.7 mi and reboot.
3. Although I enabled Desktop Effects and set up CCSM as I like it (desktop cube, rotate cube), Windows Decoration with "emerald --replace", I can't get the emerald themes on my windows. Decorator is set to Emerald but emerald is not showing.

openSUSE 11.0 installed on MacBook

Downloaded the 32-bit i386 DVD from here. With the new faster Internet speeds, it's nice to be able to d/l a 4.3 GB DVD in less than 2 hours.
No problems with the install, went very smoothly.
Just doing the update now.

NXserver in openSUSE

As VNC worked but gave a disappointing quality of remote screen in the client, I had a look at NXserver in openSUSE.
After some experimentation, I found the best way to install a functioning was to use the NoMachine documentation and this Howto.

The steps are:
1. Download nxclient-3.2.0-14.i386.rpm to the Desktop
2. Download nxnode-3.2.0-11.i386.rpm to the Desktop
3. Download nxserver-3.2.0-13.i386.rpm to the Desktop
4. sudo rpm -i nxclient-3.2.0-14.i386.rpm
5. sudo rpm -i nxnode-3.2.0-11.i386.rpm
6. sudo rpm -i nxserver-3.2.0-13.i386.rpm
7. sudo gedit /usr/NX/etc/server.cfg
uncomment the line
#EnableUserDB = "0"
and change to
EnableUserDB = "1"
Similarly, change the line
EnablePasswordDB = "0"
to
EnablePasswordDB = "1"
8. sudo /usr/NX/bin/nxserver --useradd "YourUserName" --administrator
You will now be asked for a password
9. On the server, type
sudo nxserver --restart
10. On the client, type
/usr/NX/bin/nxclient
Add the host (IP of server), leave port at 22, select the Desktop Manager and login

Now you should see the remote screen appear on the client screen. Certainly, the NXserver performance is considerably smoother and more pleasing than VNC. However, whereas VNC actually displays the very same screen that is now showing on the server, NXserver shows a new server screen. Also, while in VNC, the client mouse moved around both screens in unison, in NX, the client screen moves only on the remote screen on the client.
Based on my very limited experience so far, I would always opt for NXserver over VNC by a long shot.

VNC in openSUSE 11.0

As I use KDE 4.1 in openSUSE, I used krfb to enable me to communicate with either Ubuntu or Foresight on the Dell.
krfb is available in the K-menu (the Gecko icon) and clicking on it sets krfb running and puts an icon in the panel.
Clicking on this icon opens the krfb dialog where you can create invitations.
For Ubuntu or Foresight (Dell) to connect to openSUSE (Mac), you just type (client)

vncviewer 192.168.1.x

After supplying the password, you'll be connected.
At times, however, I found that connection did not occur but gave a message that the connection was made but apparently broke.
A reboot followed by a retry gave a connection in the few times I tried this.
The quality of the connection was not good, however, in either direction as the windows on the remote desktop wouldn't move.

openSUSE 11.0 -- reinstalled to eliminate "non-existent" problem

I had upgraded to openSUSE 11.0 about a month ago and it worked fine. The only problem, as I saw it, was that it launched straight into the Desktop without asking for a password. If after getting to the Desktop I now ctr-alt-backspaced I get the login screen where I can enter my password.
So, I tried to fix this with the openSUSE 11.0 install DVD. First I tried to "repair an installed system". Actually, this did nothing for me at all.
So, I decided to re-install while still preserving my /home. However, I found out during the install that "Automatic Login" is an option that is available. So, this is the explanation for why I wasn't getting asked for a password. I refused to select that option this time, though.
When I got to ther Desktop, I installed all of the available updates. Then I rebooted (after also updating the openSUSE entry in Ubuntu's /boot/grub/menu.lst). However, just after I logged in, I got this message:

Could not start kdeinit4. Check your installation.

I looked in various places but eventually found this blogpost in Spanish that exactly solved my problem.
This involved just logging into iceWM session and typing this command

zypper up -t package

in a terminal (it also asked for the install DVD to be loaded) and letting it do it's thing.
After that I rebooted and all was well.

Finally -- Wireless in openSUSE on MacBook

My MacBook (C2D, 2.16 GHz) has a Atheros Communications Inc. AR5418 802.11abgn Wireless PCI Express Adapter card.
After I installed openSUSE 11.0 last week, I've made several attempts to get wireless working without success. The madwifi version available in Yast2 don't work for me.
I finally got it working using this guide which actually had helped me out with openSUSE 10.2 some time ago. As the guide hasn't been updated I'm going to outline in step-by-step fashion what's required to get wireless working on the MacBook.

First, make absolutely sure there is no other madwifi stuff on your computer (or more accurately on the partitions associated with openSUSE 11.0). For that do this:
1. Search Yast2 for Madwifi and uninstall everything you find.
2. Run this as root in a terminal

find / -name madwifi

and then

find / -name madwifi*

and delete everything that's found.

Now we can start the compile. Run these commands, one at a time, as root in a terminal:

svn checkout http://svn.madwifi.org/madwifi/trunk madwifi
wget http://people.freebsd.org/~sam/ath_hal-20080528.tgz
tar -xvzf ath_hal-20080528.tgz
rm -rf ./madwifi/hal/
cp ath_hal-20080528 madwifi/hal -R
cd madwifi/
make clean
make
make install

Assuming there have been no errors, you can now load up the module with

modprobe ath_pci

Now if you run iwconfig (as root), you should get something like this:

lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

wifi0 no wireless extensions.

ath0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:"essid-of-your-ap" Nickname:""
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.442 GHz Access Point: 0X:0X:CX:2X:BX:0X
Bit Rate:48 Mb/s Tx-Power:14 dBm Sensitivity=1/1
Retry:off RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key: Security mode:restricted
Power Management:off
Link Quality=77/70 Signal level=-19 dBm Noise level=-96 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:2984 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

This means everything is ready for your wireless connection.
So, unplug your ethernet cable and start connecting wirelessly through NetworkManager

Wireless (MacBook) in openSUSE 11.0

Spent a lot of time today trying to get wireless working in openSUSE with, up to now, a complete lck of success.
I installed madwifi from Yast2 but this didn't seem to recognise my card.
Then I tried both madwifi-0.9.4 and madwifi-0.9.3.3 (from here) but neither worked also. Even though "modprobe ath_pci" works without error, "iwconfig" doesn't see any ath0.
Then I remembered having success with this guide for openSUSE 10.3. However, it hasn't been updated. However I tried it although it didn't work there are quite a few options to try yet.
Some errors in the guide are:
1. The svn line should be

svn checkout http://svn.madwifi.org/madwifi/trunk madwifi-ng

2. In these two lines

cp ath_hal-20070428 madwifi/hal -R
cd madwifi/

madwifi needs to be changed to madwifi-ng as this is what I'm using.
A useful site here that provides some further madwifi options.

I'll try again tomorrow.

Still some minor start-up problems in openSUSE

I've described these three, relatively minor and easily overcome, problems in this post to openSUSE forums. No replies yet but almost certainly will be.

Somehting to be aware of when using openSUSE 11.0 is that a CD/DVD will only be ejected by going into Dolphin and choosing Eject from the context menu for the CD. Doing this in Yast>Computer doesn't eject it for me on the MacBook.

openSUSE 11.0 continuing improvements

Three interesting developments today:

1. Amarok now plays .wma files. I achieved this by installing amarok-xine from Yast2 and changing the engine from yauap to xine.
2. I had another look at VLC today and, yes, it's a lot better than I thought. You can playlist all of my music files. Plus there a huge selection of radio stations available. Looks good but doesn't have Last.Fm although I read that it will be available in version 0.9.0 while I have version 0.8.6
3. Discovered a nice little app (command-not-found) that gives a lot more helpful information than just "command not found". Had a little trouble getting it installed because something was broken but it's fine now.
Install it as described here. More detail here in the developers blog.

openSUSE 11.0 starting to look good.

As is normal, after a few days of going through alternating bouts of despair and elation, what I'm working on starts to look at things my way.
Unfortunately, it's not always clear to me what caused the transformation in fortunes as is the situation here.
In any event, I've found out that
i) there doesn't seem to be any way to get the Lizard icon back to the panel. So, I had to re-install yet again
ii) Autostart in KDE4 is in ~/.kde4/ rather than ~/.kde/ which is where I created it yesterday.

The re-installed openSUSE 11.0 with KDE4 works better than before in that the Alt key functions as it should. That is Alt-F2 opens a run box, Ctl-Alt-Backspace (hit twice) restarts X and rotates the cube.
Strangely though, the Alt key gives the same Serial and keycode (33/64) that it did yesterday. So, I don't know what's changed as I didn't change the keyboard designation although I am using a IE keyboard layout.

Also, I upgraded my KDE from 0.4 to 1 by following the instructions here. This went smoothly although I'm not sure I've seen any huge difference so far although some of the panel and desktop icons changed.

A problem I'm having now is that Amarok after installing the codecs (see here) still won't play .wma files although VLC does. I've posted to the forum on this so I'll see if anybody helps me out.

openSUSE 11.0 -- other events

Installed AWN (+extras), fusion-icon, yakuake and kcheckgmail all from the repos. But still can't figure out how to autostart these. Some start without going into ~/.kde/Autostart (kcheckgmail and AWN). But I put yakuake and fusion-icon into Autostart but only yakuake starts. I posted on this here but haven't got any replies yet.

For some reason I deleted the desktop panel. So, I re-installed the panel and added clock, stop buttons and system tray. But, now, kcheckgmail doesn't show up in the panel any more even though it does seem to start. More important is that there is no longer the kmenu which makes it difficult to start apps. I posted on this here but, once again, no replies up to this.

Edit: (5-07-08)
Actually, I was totally wrong about not being able to get ALL the default icons back on the KDE4 panel if it's lost. First, the "lizard" (actually, geeko) icon is called the Application Launcher. Also, here's a very thorough forum post on the very issue.

openSUSE -- progress with cube rotate

Today I re-installed openSUSE 11.0 but this time I chose KDE4 as the DE.
The consistency I had expected in the bindings required to get the cube rotating didn't materialise. I posted on this in this thread so all the details are there.
In summary, I'm now using Shift-Ctl-Button1 to get the cube to rotate.

Error during Opera install

When I tried to install Opera 9.50 in openSUSE 11.0 today, I got this error:

error while loading shared libraries: libqt-mt.so.3: cannot open > shared object file: No such file or directory

Then I found this reference to that error here which, in summary, says

This error message means that you have downloaded a package which is dynamically linked to Qt, and either your system lacks the correct Qt version, or you haven't set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable correctly.


If you download an Opera package with Qt statically linked instead, you won't have to worry about this.

You can get the statically-linked Opera versions here.
I tried it and it works fine.
Strangely, I had always used the shared version but can't remember having had this problem before.

No desktop cube rotate in openSUSE 11.0

I mentioned that I had noticed this in my new install three posts back.
So, today I posted to the openSUSE forums about it. Got quite a few replies but nothing worked. Still have wobbly windows, compiz is the window manager, emerald decorator but the cube just won't rotate.
So, I thought maybe it was due to my chosen DE (KDE4). So, I installed again but this time with KDE 3.5. Same thing, wobbly windows but no desktop rotate.
Finally, I tried Gnome 2.22 and got the very same result.
It had been my intention to install openSUSE 10.3 but the DVD check gave errors so I didn't try it.
This is very puzzling.

Edit (30-06-08):
Then, just by chance I happened to drag one of my wobbly windows to the edge and was surprised to find that it moved to another face of the cube. So, the cube was really there!
Perhaps the problem was the Alt key which, after all seemed to be giving trouble in the Alt-F2 and Ctl-Alt-BackSpace commands.
So, I changed the binding for Rotate Cube from to . Now, it worked! My cube rotated.
Now, I had chosen the keyboard layout US for the install. So, now I changed it to Irl, UK or BR. For ALL of them the key binding worked for cube rotation. So did Alt-F2 but, Ctl-Alt-BackSpace stubbornly refused to work.

Getting music to play in openSUSE

First I installed the codecs from here but Amarok only seemed to play .mp3 and not .wma files even though part of what I installed was w32codec.
However, seems to be some problem with Amarok in KDE (and not in Gnome even though Amarok is a KDE app).
Mplayer plays .wma files but really Mplayer is crap compared to Amarok. Fine if you just want to play files individually but to play a complete album I haven't figured out yet.

Getting kwrite to work as root in openSUSE

When I tried

sudo kwrite /etc/fstab

I got a message saying "cannot connect to x server".
So, I tried the old

# cp /home/paul/.Xauthority /root

but this didn't work.
Next I tried

# ln -s /home/paul/.Xauthority /root/.Xauthority

and this too didn't work.
I next came across a post saying to use "xhost +"
Running this gave me

access control disabled, clients can connect from any host

but yet again this did nothing.
So, did a bit of googling and found out that the correct command to use is

su -

So tried it and, sure enough, this allowed me to use kwrite as root.

Install openSUSE 11 on Mac

I installed this today on the Mac without any problems.
I chose KDE4 as the session manager and this also gave no problems.
Only real problem I've had up to now is that, although I have wobbly windows, I can't get the cube to rotate.
I've also installed Yakuake 2.9.2 and opera 9.5 and both work well

Number of partitions on sata HDs limited to 15 by libATA

Well, I learnt something today.
The older Pata HDs apparently could be divided into unlimited partitions but the newer (and soon to be exclusive) Sata drives limit you to a maximum of 15 partitions.
Yes, I knew about the 15 partition stuff but didn't know that there are still some distros that support non-libATA stuff and therefore let you go higher than 15 in the number of partitions.
From what I can see, openSUSE 10.3 and Mandriva 2008-1 are in this group.
It is suggested by ardent multibooters that you should put swap partition and the / and /home for all distros that use libATA on the first 15 partitions. Then put the non-libATA OSes on the higher number slices.
I learnt a lot from this thread and, indeed, this seems a useful forum for multibooters although the few threads I read involved some heavy detailed stuff.