 
SuSE 10.1 alpha-4 / beta-1My appologies to those of you viewing this with IE... version 6 in particular. It just seems to interpret the CSS code differently. I personally use Netscape and/or Firefox. CSS is supposed to give us a standard but M$ forgot to read that part. 
Or I am doing something horribly wrong ... that only shows up in IE.
Beta-1 Note: I have decided to put the Beta-1 notes in here because ... there were so many areas, important to me, that didn't work
correctly in alpha-4, and I want to say whether ther were fixed ... or not. They will be marked so just jump to the area of interest and see if
I have checked anything yet. Preparing: Today is 13 Dec 05. The new 10.1 alpha-4 is due out 15 Dec 05. My plans are to set it up as a new release, not an update, and go thru all the gyrations for setting up a Linux system. So I am going to list the things that I can think of now ... and probably add more later. System Hardware Info:
Problems Discussed: Networking - Samba - VMware - USB Mouse - Zip Drive - Floppy Well, here it is, the 15th of Dec and the dir has been created on the mirror with a new date... But .. can't access it. Probably takes some time for them to get all the software up there. Later, 'bout 3:00pm Phoenix time I was able to start. Took 2 and a half hours to bring down all five files. Size Date Name Temptations hit and I booted from the first CD. Right off the bat there is a problem which I thought that they would have corrected. The mouse will not work during the install. Leastwise not my USB mouse. Believe I experienced this before and had to hook up my PS2 mouse to use in addition to the USB one. I'm gona give it a shot anyway. I looked for the test on the MD5SUMs and again it was not present. Guess they figured it was a waste of time.?. So, I aborted the Installation so that I can make sure things are ready for me to proceed. For one thing I have to move this writing to another machine for a while. Beta-1 Ok, spent a lot of hours (over 8) getting the Beta down. Made the disks and Disk #2 had MD5SUM errors. Another bad Memorex R/W disk. Other than that the download and creatin' was OK. Install was not!! It failed on CD 5 and I had to do a power off recovery. On the good side, at power up it took off from where it had died/left off and finished the install. Don't understand the problem. Praises Given: I really like this version ... even with its problems. Something about it makes me feel good about computing again. Perhaps
it is the fact that I just can't boot-up and start using it. I must correct the problems first. Or perhaps it is that once it is working
it appears to be pretty solid. I believe the mouse operations, once I get it working, are also better. There are a number of little things
that, as I think of them, I will mention here... duh ... if I don't forget. Anyway, I believe that if this path is
continued, Linux ... SuSE Linux ... is going to give M$ Windows a run for their money. My keyboard in Windows XP: This doesn't really belong here ... but, as long as I am destroying my system, at least the Linux portion I might as well see if I can determine the problem with my Northgate KB over there in WinXP. It has worked since I set this machine up originally but now all of a sudden it is misinterpreting certain keys. Some of these are relatively important. Like the dash '-', the underline '_', the at sign '@' and the apostrophe '''. It is really wierd how that all of a sudden in WinXP it is loading the wrong KB driver. Arrgg!!! I had a 'Spanish' speaking customer at work that wanted her system set up to do Spanish. Well, I was
really never approached on that before. I felt embarrased that I didn't have a good answer for her but to the best of my knowledge, all the
systems sold here in the US were in English. Well, there are some settings you can make in the
"Text Services and Input Languages". I was experimenting with these and guess what. I left them setup for Spanish!
This caused my KB errors. Dumped the Spanish and now we are back in business. Ok, so back to the task at hand. Need to load up the latest version of SuSE 10 which is 10.1 alpha-4. Now then I am not going to do an update cause ... I want to see what is included and if I have to get any libs I will make a list of them here. This way I will know what is loaded and what is not. Can't think of anything other than these Web Pages that I need to save. So, we will just re-do the Linux. TopAllllrighty now, the first thing we find is that the USB mouse does not work. I have a PS2 mouse so I plugged it in and was able to use it. I tried to just use the Keyboard but finding the right key combo's to do things was just to hectic. So, I gave up and plugged in the other mouse. The usual preliminaries were taken care of and then we get to the install of the software. This is where I plugged in the other mouse. I wanted better and easier control over what got loaded. Mouse clicking is much easier than keyboarding. I realize that a lot of people like computer games and such but I don't think that they should be loaded automatically. I deselected the games and other stuff that I will not be using. Then I clicked on 'Install'. Ok. After the disks were read and software loaded, the system came up with a request for a root password. This was entered and then we get a screen of Network connection choices. The first on is the Firewall, which if you have read some of my past episodes you will know that I have had trouble with. Strangely enough, it is disabled. But then so is the next item in the list which is Network Interfaces. Need to investigate this one. Oooops... a mis-read. The Network is enabled ... 'Disable' is something that you can click on to disable it! We'll naturally leave it enabled. The rest of the items are for other connections which I will not be using. Clicked on accept and the Internet Connection failed. I think that it is supposed to at this time ... in this case. It failed at this point in the previous alpha versions cause they don't have the update working ... yet. We are still developing. Next we get User Authentication. There are four choices with the first being the default of /etc/passwd, which I chose. The next screen allows you to create your first user. They have two check boxes, one being 'Receive System Mail' and the other being 'Automatic Login'. I personally don't want either. After accepting this User Setup it writes the System Configuration. Then the release notes ... which there really are none. Click next. Now we get a 'Hardware Configuration' screen. It found my Graphics Card and my Sony Monitor. It also found my AC'97 sound. It is listening on CUPS for my printer. The printer is Networked. Now then, in the Graphics Card section it listed the 'Accelerated 3D' as activated. I have had trouble in the past with this. Decision..??.. do I leave it activated or not? There is a test. Be brave and test it. Wow!! It worked!! Ok so it has detected my hardware and for the most part it all works! Click on accept and it says we have configured the system... and 'Installation is Completed'. Special Note; 21 Dec 05: This version of SuSE Linux looks and appears to be great. However, it is very inconsistant on boot-ups. It is also inconsistant on what it saves properly in the configurations. I don't know how much of this is becuase of development and/or how much is on purpose. Novell may have been nice enough to place this out on open source but did so in such a way that in order to get a consistant stable version you have to 'purchase one'. I'm hoping the later is not the case. But on the other hand... they have given the source so fix it! ... if you can, Taylor. (If you are from Novell and such is not the case, e-mail me and I will remove this suspicion.) Beta I decided to try an Update instead of a full install. I had the same problems with the mouse
... annnddd.... my Network setup for eth0 did not get transferred. No Internet. This did not make me happy soooo... I am going to
try a Full install to see if that will work properly. Hope this is not a futile excursion. Oooooo... I like the new login screen. Blue is my favorite color and it looks good too. Well, so much for the excitement. Got no signon and no desktop. Got a dialog box that says 'Could not start kstartupconfig. Check your installation.' Well, I just followed all the steps ... hmmmmmm. Let's try a re-boot. Nope. Same message. This is similar to the alpha-2 startup. What is this?? The even numbered releases are failures??? Nope, you just gotta look at all the stuff on the screen. There are two buttons down at the bottom of the login screen. One is the Red System button and the other is a Blue Session Type button. I clicked on the session type button and was presented with some choices. KDE was one of them and I clicked on it. I then tried to sign in and it was successful. Don't know if I will have to pick the session type everytime or not. We'll see. (Later: You do not have to select the Type on every login. It uses the previous selection.) The Button Values or choices are:
Allllrighty now, we are presented with a green screen with a lizard on it. There is also 7 icons. Trash, SuSE, Firefox, Office, My Computer, Network Browsing and Printer. The is also an intial showing of the SuSE info screen with info about this being a preliminary 10.1 and how to get help if any is available. Shuckins... I wanted to install Bluefish but I can't. It is on my windrve which isn't showing up. Think I need to edit the fstab and possibly something else. Had the same trouble in alpha-3 version. Now what was it?? Beta-1Well, the login went ok. They got some new pictures. I always like how they get really energized with these graphics and screw everything else up. I realize that this is a large and complicated system but come on guys .. and gals .. it really shouldn't have this many faults at this stage. I'm finding it almost unusable. Top First Things First: Ok, we got to have our 'conviences'. The tools and macros that we use to make our computing more fun and easier. So, we get out the backup disk and load some items into our home page. .alias, .bashrc, .function, .xinitrc and a few other helpful commands and scripts. With these we can venture out in the world to see what it brings. Beta-1Hmmmm... I can not access my WindrvE (Windows Drive E) where I have my stuff saved and stored
for recovery and setups. Ok so we'll reas the copy on DVD. Ooooopss ... no we won't. I can't open it because it says the thing is already mounted!!
Part of that Windows Bull Crap that someone is trying to put here in Linux. Have to see if I can disable it. Let's see now was that in version 9.0 or
9.1?? /dev/dvd /media/dvd subfs fs=cdfss,ro,procuid,nosuid,nodev,exec,iocharset=utf8 0 0 /dev/fd0 /media/floppy subfs fs=floppyfss,procuid,nodev,nosuid,sync 0 0and replace with: /dev/dvd /media/dvd auto ro,noauto,user,exec,iocharset=utf8 0 0 /dev/fd0 /media/floppy auto noauto,user,exec,sync 0 0This will get you back to "normal" and possibly usable mounting. Wellll... sorta. I still could not click on the CD / DVD's and mount them. Can't find this... can't find that... it's already mounted /dev/hdc doesn't exist ... etc. Then I did an ls on /media/dvdrecorder and it show ToDVD. That is the directory that I copied to the DVD for Recovery. Further checks showed that the files I am concerned with (mentioned above) are there. Hurrray! This will give some familiarity.
21 Dec 05: Well, as usual... things change. But this was a good exercise. The change in xorg.conf is not needed. Leastwise not on my system. I found that even though I made the change below I still had to get out of the current session and log back in to get my USB mouse operational. So, I decided to try the quit / re-start a session with the original xorg file. Guess, what?? Yep. The USB mouse worked after the re-login. I am leaving this for furture reference and just incase anyone else neededs it. 18 Jan 06: Today ... the USB mouse worked right off at boot up...?.? Let's see now ... what was I doing last time on?
Primarily trying to get things setup so that I can access my WebPages on my local machine. Still not successful ... but it appears that I changed something that affects my USB
mouse. OR it is just another one of those... Arrggg! After the load of the system my USB mouse would still not work. In the past it would. I'll have to check out the USB stuff. It took some time but I found an answer at this Site. Even though it was for a LapTop and not SuSE, it still worked. The first item remains unchanged. Just had to change the mouse info in ther Server Layout to AlwaysCore. /etc/X11/xorg.conf Section "InputDevice" Driver "mouse" Identifier "Mouse[1]" Option "Buttons" "5" Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice" Option "Name" "KYE HP USB WHEEL MOUSE" Option "Protocol" "explorerps/2" Option "Vendor" "Sysp" Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5" EndSectionIn the ServerLayout section we need to change CorePointer to AlwaysCore. I found this info on the web but when I went back to give credit I could not find the same page. As it turns out, there are a number of pages that talk about this problem. Section "ServerLayout" Identifier "Layout[all]" InputDevice "Keyboard[0]" "CoreKeyboard" InputDevice "Mouse[1]" "AlwaysCore" Option "Clone" "off" Option "Xinerama" "off" Screen "Screen[0]" EndSectionHmmmm... all is not well. I did a session restart to get my USB mouse working and everything looked cool. I dumped the PS/2 mouse. Then later I re-booted and arrggg... the USB mouse is broke again!! Toooo frustrating. I am quiting for the night. The Next Day: Looked at the xorg.conf file to see if it had been changed back. It wasn't. Then on a Whim,
which are suggestions from the Lord,
I Quit the Current Session and then logged back in. The USB mouse worked!! Just Hate It When This Happens. Hope the Lord will show
me the problem. Static 'lectricity. More woes... My computing area is in the carpeted family room. Certain times of the year we are plauged with Static Electricity. I must wear a ground strap and also remember to put it on. If I don't, the static builds up and when I touch my keyboard I hear the static pop in the speakers. Various problems can happen but lately it is centered on my USB mouse. After I hear the static pop the mouse doesn't work anymore!! Same fix... exit current session and log back in. Strange. Beta-1Wellll... I think I already stated that this hasn't changed ... still broke. Top First we copy in the smb.conf file and then the hosts file. Re-boot to see what we broke. Well nothing broke but it doesn't start smb and nmb even though I checked the radio button in the setup to Start at Boot-Up. Now then what we have here is another situation that when I go into YAST and just configure Samba to start at boot up, then finish, it will start up Samba without me doing anything else. But when I re-boot it will not be running. Similar situation to the Zip Drive in the alpha-3 version. Now isn't this interesting. smbd and nmbd are not running BUT I was able to transfer a file, this one in fact, from
my wife's WinXP machine to my home dir on my Linux machine.?.? I guess I don't understand this. smbpasswd -a ctaylor to add user to password list, then smbpasswd -e ctaylor to enable user and determine the password. Created user ctaylor in Windows 2000. When I fire up VMware and then Win2000 it asks me for a password. Must be ctaylor and the correct password. Have my smb.conf file with all the proper settings for my session. 21 Dec 05: Well, this is not good. As mentioned elsewhere on this page, VMware got started at bootup BUT http didn't.!. So, I can not log into the Internet. I can't even do my local Intranet via a browser. I can see the other machines, but that just allows file transfers and looking. No HTTP. Unable to connect
Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at dusty-tr.trcomputing. * The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few moments. * If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer's network connection. * If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure that Firefox is permitted to access the Web. Hmmmmm... now isn't this interesting. Similar to my Samba problem, in the YAST screen 5 of HTTP Server Wizard Start Apache Manually is checked. In the Samba YAST screen it always comes up as start manually also. When I would check start at boot-up it would immediately start Samba BUT would not start at the next boot. Now then, apache2 had been working in my previous sessions. I am going to check the Start at boot-up and see if it follows the Samba scenario. Well, so far it is. I just checked the Start at Boot and then Finish and it started apache2. Arrggg!! I still can not access the Internet but my local one says permission not granted.!. I had this problem before and had to make changes in the httpd.conf file. Darn, thought that I had put in that fix.?. Yep, I did. So what is the problem now?? This is all too annoying and confusing. dhcp isn't running either and when I click on it in YAST it says the packages are not loaded!! Hmmmmm... thought that they were. 23 Dec 05: Can Not Bring up my Web Page Locally. HTTP did not start at this boot-up. When I
looked at 'HTTP Server Configuration' in YAST, it was marked 'Disabled'. I checked 'Enabled' and clicked finish.
httpd2-prefork was started with five more instances under it.?.
root 5604 1 0 07:47 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/httpd2-prefork -f /etc/apache2/httpd.conf wwwrun 5605 5604 0 07:47 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/httpd2-prefork -f /etc/apache2/httpd.conf wwwrun 5606 5604 0 07:47 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/httpd2-prefork -f /etc/apache2/httpd.conf wwwrun 5607 5604 0 07:47 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/httpd2-prefork -f /etc/apache2/httpd.conf wwwrun 5608 5604 0 07:47 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/httpd2-prefork -f /etc/apache2/httpd.conf wwwrun 5609 5604 0 07:47 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/httpd2-prefork -f /etc/apache2/httpd.conf CMDLINE that started the process: /usr/sbin/http2-prefork -f /etc/apache2/httpd.conf Now, when I try to start my Web Page instead of saying the server is busy or not accessable it says I don't have permissions. Brought up YAST again and the 'Disabled' button was checked again.!. Another one of those permission things again. Last time it was cause of the Firewall. I don't have that running ... or at least I told it not to run. Due to the other problems I guess I should check it. Well, according to the YAST screen, it is not running and set that it can be started Manually. So, it is not the Firewall. Access forbidden!
You don't have permission to access the requested object. It is either read-protected or not readable by the server. If you think this is a server error, please contact the webmaster. Error 403 dusty-tr.trcomputing Tue Jan 17 07:56:45 2006 Apache/2.0.55 (Linux/SUSE)
smbd and nmbd starting twice When I do a "ps -ef | grep mbd" I see two copies of smbd and nmbd running. I didn't understand why and when I couldn't find an answer in any of the documents I possed, I went out to the Web. Found the following: The original daemon forks copies of itself to do the actual servicing
of network requests as they come in, leaving the mother process
maximally free to delegate new requests promptly. It's a fairly common
thing for network daemons to do. "nfsd" does it, too. An LFS applies to a single terminal session. A daemon forks itself in order to separate itself from the controlling terminal. Once this happens, it is no longer connected to the LFS on your terminal and is now protected by LIDS. (Linux Intrusion Detection System) LIDS implements access control lists (ACLs) that will help prevent even those with access to the mighty root account from wreaking havoc on a system. These ACLs allow LIDS to protect files as well as processes. Beta-1Nope. In fact it didn't even setup my eth0. Guess I am expecting to much... from a development version. Beta-1 Top Had the problem in alpha-3 where I could not access the drive unless I had a disk in it and
then went into YAST and selected Software Management. Then just exit out of YAST and the drive would work!?!
Well, after setting it all up ... it is the same problem!! The error message is: "No media in device for /media/zip" even though I have a disk in the drive. I must go into YAST, select Software Management ... I hear it access the Zip Drive, do nothing else but exit and then I can access the Zip Drive..??..? Top Printer Configuration
Top For the most part, I have not been able to get this to work properly. I need to learn more
about the sound operations in Linux. Top The Logout button on the task bar and in the main menu did not work in alpha-3 version.
Top Installed Firefox version 1.5. Only trouble I had here was it blocking Web Pages from my own site. Had to put my site in the allowed to show popups list. Installed Thunderbird version 1.0.7 for E-mail. I couldn't create individual mailboxes. I have three e-mails. Two on TRCompu and one on Cox. In Netscape I could create Accounts for each and they each had their own folder area. I could not do that in Thunderbird. However, I could import my setting from Netscape and the individual accounts were there!! Go figure. Can't create but can import. I haven't tried to create a fourth account yet to see what will happen. If and when I do I will add it to this page. Security: The main problem with security is that many times it gives trouble to a legitimate user. I recieve e-mails with links to other Web Sites. Previously, in Netscape, I could click on the HTML link and be wisked off to the site. Here in this copy of T-Bird I can not. Don't know if there is a setting that will allow me to or not. Checking. Hmmmmmm... come to think of it, in my previous load of Firefox and Thunderbird I could also do that. When I would click on the link it would bring up a copy of Firefox and go to the page. Well, as usual, as soon as I complain about something it changes. I can now click on the links and go to them from withing T-Bird. What did I do ... change..??? Nothing. But I have had this thing running for over 24 hours. A lot of the time it was just sitting doing nothing. Maybe it figured it out for itself..?.!? Top According to the test, PHP got loaded. Still couldn't access my own WebPage (index.php or index.html) on my system locally. I have to start
a lot of this stuff manually after the system boots, sooooo.... there is possibly something that I am nmissing. SuSE has made there own directories and paths. So, some
of the info that I have saved and also have found on the internet does not apply.
Top Well, it compiled. Don't know the result yet but I am assuming that it was good. Now I can try to install VMware... yep, I could install VMware version 5.5 Top Can we use VMware 3.2 in this latest?? No. It needs the LD_ASSUME_KERNEL, which will switch shared libs and in this development version they are not included. Since I got a legal copy of version 5, I am going to switch to it from now on. It was just a straigh install. No game playing. Well, that turned out to be a lie. On re-boot VMware did not rstart. I must become root and execute '/etc/init.d/vmware' in order to get it running. Will have to find out why it is not getting called up on the startup. But it will work ok after it gets started... so far. 21 Dec 05: Today... VMware started at power-on boot-up... Like it should! Do I know why?
Nope. 18 Jan 06: Installed an Updated version of VMware, 5.5.1. It has a security fix in NAT. Top I can not compile it. Keeps complaing about libgtk2 missing but it is there. It is in /opt/gnome/lib and I'm not sure if that is an unexpected location or what. I will have to investigate. Top Not running yet. /var/lib/mysql/TRcustomers/ Top Never did get around to checking this part out. Top Yep. Reinstalled it and it works fine. No problems. In fact, I used it
to help on some of the other problems ... and get some detailed info. Top Interesting... it won't work. I open "My Cpmputer" and click on the Floppy symbol and I receive
an error message: Well now. Isn't this interesting. Neither one of my DVD drives show up in this table and neither one shows up in the My Computer dialog. Could've sworn that I put them on my desktop. Perhaps it was in the previous alpha version. To many changes. Ah, ha!! I did put the DVD drives in my fstab. So that is why I have been able to use them. It looks like they got left out of the Submount scenario. Top Waiting for Beta. I will not be doing a lot more with this version. Due to the Holidays and other family stuff my time on this has been sporadic at best. Today is the 7th of January 2006. Beta is only 12 days away. I am going to set this aside work on my airplanes. Top 
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Get Linux 
... I just thought, or the Lord reminded me... When I first set this
up I had my WebPages in my home dir under public_html, like they should be. But later, I changed it to a link like I had done before. This is also where I had
problems in a previous version. Need to check that... Nope... That didn't fix it. Course the way things been going, it may require another re-boot.
