 
SuSE 10.2 Released
For those of you who are following my SuSE Linux exploits, this one has been delayed till they got the final
released version. The main reason I am even messing with this one, is cause, in the reviews there were claims that
it was faster. I brought down the DVD version instead of all 5 CDs and then converting them to a DVD. That was
becomming a pain. However I am grateful to Houghi for his Making a DVD from CDs script.
It has been a big help in the past when I was using the pre-released versions.
Note: It is faster!! Allllrighty now. I am going to make this, SuSE 10.2, my main system. This install will be from scratch, so to speak. The Lord was with me on this one. A lot of items were already setup after the installation finished. Usually I have to mess with a lot of configuration files in order to get my WinXP and Linux to talk to each other. Looks like it read my mind or my config files that were still out there from my 10.1 version. I didn't erase the system before the install but I did say "New Install" and not "Update". So the previous stuff should have been wiped. Anyway, it looks like I am not going to have to work as hard on this one as I have the others in the past. Good and bad. I wanted some knowledge refreshment. But ... it ain't over yet. All I have really done so far is the Install. I am writing this in Kate and I don't have VMware setup yet. This file is on one of my WinXP partions that I call WindrvE. I am in Linux, editing a Windows file on a Windows drive. I don't even have BlueFish (HTML editor) loaded yet. Surprises As mentioned below, I removed the Firefox 2.0 that was automatically installed. This appeared to cause other problems. They, SuSE, have a new way of presenting the applications menus down in the corner. The Computer Section contained Administrator Settings. The Admin Settings disappeared!! I wanted to make some other changes, after the removal of Firefox 2.0, and could not get back into YAST!!! It was gone!! How could a removal of Firefox 2.0 cause this??? Horror of horrors ... have they followed the M$ path of building Firefox into the system like M$ did with IE??? Surely they wouldn't do that. After looking around for YAST and then even trying to re-load YAST, to which it replied "It was already there", I got disgusted and shut down the system. Next day I fired up the PC and YAST was back!! Think what you want ... but it did happen. Sound is gone!! I was so happy. The install came up with the sound controller on the task bar. Now it is gone and so is the sound!! What happened??? Well it also magically came back... after that re-load attempt above. I had tried an "Update" from the DVD instead of a "New Install" hoping to get YAST re-loaded without re-doing the whole system. Latest surprise is the PC Sign On screen. I wanted to create a Christmas Music CD. Due to the fact that this was a brand new install I wanted to go over to my WinXP and use Sonic to create the CD. So, when I fired up the system I went into WinXP, setup Limewire, got some songs downloaded, and never did create the CD. However, I got interrupted and shut-down the system. This time when I fired it up the PC SignOn screen was changed!! The selection section was a slate with snow across the top and a Penguin walking on it with ice cycles hanging from it. There was also snow at the bottom of the screen and a Penguin walking across it!! Have no idea how this came up like this. Further note, it alternates between the normal dull one and the Penguin Snow one. Well, as it turns out ... it depends on whether I have left the DVD in the drive or not. Get the fancy Snow one with the DVD and the regular with the hard disk. Got to remember to remove that disk. Wellll... that is not true either. With or without the Install DVD in the drive I can get the winter scene.... sometimes. Top This all lines up properly in FireFox. As I've stated in other places, I'm using CSS
in these documents and M$ doesn't obey the rules. Sometimes, Netscape doesn't either. I guess I should make
it clear that the version of M$ I'm having problems with is version 5. Perhaps version 6 or 7 of M$ IE will
work correctly. This new SuSE 10.2 comes with Firefox 2.0 which is newer than the 1.5 that I have been using.
Looks good so far. Ok, Uncle. Later I accepted one of Firefox's updates and it put me back to 2.0. This time my mouse wheel scrolling works. So I am back at Firefox 2.0, Thank You. Top Preparing for 10.2 Released Today is 12 Dec 06. System Hardware Info:
Problems Discussed: Networking - Samba - VMware - USB Mouse - Zip Drive - Floppy Praises Given: I was able to download the DVD version and it worked fine in my initial test, which was to install version 10.2 inside version 10.1 via VMware. So with that initial test in mind I am going to install this as a New Install and NOT an Update. It appears that they have this one ready. I really like the New look of the destop and I like the new menu/panel that you get when you click on the Lizard in the bottom left corner. I believe that this is a new KDE thing. The version that comes with this install is "KDE 3.5.5 release 45". Well, I was gona do an Update cause I thought that I still had everything that I wanted, loaded up and working. How-some-ever, I could not Network with my wife's PC. I was going to copy this file over to her machine so that I could still edit it whilst I was updating here. Sooooo, since things are not the way I thought I am going to do an install. Make it all brand new so I can get all my Networking and all back working properly. Haven't done all that for a while so this will be a good refresher. (The reason I couldn't transfer the file was cause the IP addresses had changed. Even though I don't have them as static, they normally don't change. But ... once in a while they do and I forgot that. Needed the New Install anyway.) At boot-up you get a pretty Blue screen with some choices of what to do and one of them is Installation. Which I chose. Mouse is NOT working on this screen. I moved to the selection with the cursor keys and then hit Enter. It comes up with another pretty blue screen in higher resolution but really says nothing. I like to see what is going on so I hit the ESC key and verbage is displayed. Then we get to our first setup screen and we select our Language. English. Annnnddd my USB Mouse is working!! Huray!! Next we get a license screen and in order to continue you must agree to the terms. Makes sense. It flashes out some analyzation checks. Finally we get to Installation Mode. Here is where you decide on Update or New Install. I am choosing New Install. I also checked include add-on media. It says on separate media but in this case it will be the same disk. Wonder how that is gona work?? Well it works this way. The installation presents you with a blank add-on screen. You click on add and you get choices of where it is. I chose DVD and it then asked me which one. (I have two DVD drives.) After telling it, it went out and loaded the add-ons. Or I thought it was. Since I already have them out there, it said so. Not sure it realizes that I am over-writting this mess. We'll see. Now we get a choice on our desktop and I am choosing KDE. Next is the Network Configuration. Here they have automatically enabled the Firewall and blocked the SSH port. In the past this Firewall has played hell with my Networking between my systems. Mainly between the Win2K in VMware and the Linux on the same box. For now I am going to kill the Firewall and that automatically unblocks the SSH port. I want this to work right off if it will. I will experiment with the Firewall later ... maybe. Because of my system setup I don't believe that I need it. I have a hardware Firewall through my Router. I don't even have it enabled to let me login from the outside world let alone anyone else.
Well, I am going to be updated to PHP version 5 whether I want to or not. Most of the deleted files had php4 in the name. That statement came from the previous version but it also applies to this one. TopThe new login screen had what looked like snow falling with a dialog box for entering my USERID and PassWord. I entered them and got to a default destop. Now then, I like to have root as one of the choices at login. Soooo, I exited my curent session and logged back in as root. After fumbling around, trying to find what was right in front of my face, I set things up to show root or my USERID as a choice on the log in screen. Then later when I wanted to show my wife the snowy log in screen it was not there. Guess I wiped it out. Have to check that out later. Whooaa!! Just took a break and this went into a screen saver ... a falling snow flake screen saver which put up a dialog box asking for a password!! Didn't realize the default settings had this screen saver setup. This is what happens when you don't pay attention to what you are doing. Very embarrassing. Don't know how I got out of synch ... other than it is Christmas and I just got out of the hospital. Now then, it is a blessing and a curse to install over a previously installed system. I'm not so sure that the Update and New Install are all that separated. Course they may have done better on the initial investigation too. This system has found things that I have not yet told it exists ... yet. Stuff that I have had to enter before on a New Install is already there. The question is ... did it find these on its own or did it read my old configuration files?? Also, it has setup this screen saver and I didn't ask for that either. I have to decide if this screen saver is good ... or not. The way it was setup before was, the power for the screen quit after a time period. Now this may be what I want cause of the florescent tubes. These LCD screens need to get their light from somewhere and in this ones case it is some florescents. In order to see the graphics of a screen saver. they tubes need to stay lit. Good or Bad??? Well it is a mute point. I get the power off later after the screen saver has shown off for a bit. In reality this is what I wanted anyway. For some reason I could not get it to work that way in the previous version. So ... another improvement. This part, like a lot of the rest of this file, is from my 10.1 version. I just copied it over and am making the appropriate changes to the text where needed. I like the new login screen. Blue is my favorite color and it looks good too. There are two items down at the bottom of the login screen. One is System button and the other is Type. I clicked on session type 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. You do not have to select the Type on every login. It uses the previous selection. The Values or choices are:
Conviences: We all have our ways of doing things and I have mine. I re-installed my .alias, .function and .xintrc so that I can operate my way. Just some little short cuts to the long arguments for ls and others. I also like nedit. They don't include it anymore but I have my own copy that I install on every new release. So far it has continued to work. Just installed it here in 10.2 and it appears to work. 10.2 Released - This was a New Install. The conviences will have to be re-loaded. Put in my own DIR_COLORS. Because of my backgrounds in some of the terminal windows things didn't show up properly. So ... I changed them. I will include the file with a ref to it ... later. Does work at Installation Screen.... hurray.
I had some difficulties with the USB opertions. This was involved with my good friend VMware. The two, SuSE Linux and VMware did not agree on locations. I found this tid-bit of info on the Web. I direct you to there now. If this page is not, or becomes, unavailable I will put my copy of it up here. Till then you have to visit them at: Legacy USB Support in SuSE 10.2 Top Networking - Samba smb & nmb and apache: This again is from the previous 10.1 version. I am leaving it untill I know that the 10.2 version works. I do have this to say. I can look at the disk drives in my WinXP partition. That is why I think that it either investigates better than previous versions or it read my previous config files. Don't forget to set the darn passwd correctly. Use smbpasswd in root: A look at My Network. My problem with Networking was viewing my Web Pages locally. This seems to be the most aggravating item in each update. For some reason I keep losing the localness. Must be that some config files get replaced and not just updated during the conversion. I'll have to check. Well, it took a while but I finally found the fix. I was correct in stating that it was something in a config file. Actually it was something missing in a config file. On the SuSE Forum is where the answer was found. User Lytse Flap suggested putting "Include /etc/apache2/mod_userdir.conf" in the httpd.conf file. I did and it fixed my problem. Why wasn't it included in the first place??? Also added: "Include /etc/apache2/extra/httpd-userdir.conf" They have changed the permissions to NONE since 9.3, I believe is what they said. I believe that you are supposed to use vhosts but right at the moment I am not going to mess with that. I will later. Right now I have things kludged so that I can run my WebPages locally... ie; on my own PC. All this security is a big pain in the %#&@. Also, had a problem with SymLinksIfOwnerMatch. The way the default came up, root is the owner of the WinXP files on windrve. Naturally ctaylor is the owner in my own dir. So I remove the SymLinksIfOwnerMatch. TopWell, this is here cause when I tried to access my WinXP drive E from within Win2K in VMware I got Permission denied. Once again I can access my wife's PC but not my own files.?!? This turned out to be the lack of the smbpasswd setting... mentioned above. Top Printer worked!! Wellll... after setting it up in YAST. Printer Configuration
Top Yep. I can hear it... in the 10.2 version. However, if I have Firefox going and I use the sound, I will then get a complaint from Win2K in VMware that the dsp device is busy and it can't use it. If I exit Firefox, it is then ok. ??? Desktop sounds for Linux can be found at /opt/kde3/share/sounds. I changed the sign on sound to the one from SuSE 7.3. TopYeah!! Worked just fine... in the 10.2 version. Top FireFox 2.0 is installed by default and apparently worked fine. Well, almost. I had some trouble
with Adobe acroread. Not true in this one. It uses kpdf. Oooops, we have a problem. Scrolling in a DIV again. Looks like they broke in Firefox version 2.0!! I looked for a fix and could not find one. So I removed Firefox 2.0 and re-installed version 1.5.0.8. I like my scroll in the DIVs. Top This may be part of my local Network problem. I can not run my Web Pages
locally on my machine. In this version of SuSE, PHP has been changed from version 4 to version 5. I have not performed a full compile ... yet. TopThis still needs to be checked out in version 10.2... Well it is, more or less. You can jump over to my VMware on 10.2 page and check it out there. In 10.1, had to re-config and this time only needed to do:
Yep. This worked right off. Well it did after I installed it. Since I had to reinstall it I went out to the Net and got the latest copy. I had 1.0.4 and I found it is up to 1.0.6. So I brought down the latest and installed it... and it works. Top This is here cause it is important. I have a customer database and ... shame on me, I never
got it loaded in version 10.1. I am going to set it up now here in 10.2. References are: /var/lib/mysql/TRcustomers/ Top Nope. Could not launch. Probably will have to re-install. Yep. That's what it was.
I had to re-install it. Now it works fine. Good piece of software. can be found at:
Qps - Visual Process Manager Yep, so far it works. Came with SuSE. Works in 10.2 also. I just tried and it added a file to a rw-disk. Top Well, for version 10.2, these notes apply. It doesn't work and neither GtkZip or ZipTool
got loaded. I just installed nedit and used it to look at fstab. The zip drive is not mentioned. Nope doesn't work. I will have to find out what is missing. GtkZip was not
loaded and the old one was removed!! After getting that reloaded I still could not access my Zip Drive.
Finally had to change the fstab entry from: And for some reason it doesn't setup the sda4. I must go to root and perform
the following each boot: Note:The new PC, the HP m7480n: Well, things changed here. I had some
difficulties getting this to work. For one thing, the fstab entry had to be changed to: Ok on this one. It was like it should be. I didn't have to do anything to get it to work. I placed access to it on my desktop right next to the Zip Drive. All I have to do is place a disk in the drive and click on the Floppy symble. I like to have access to the drives via my desktop. Note:The new PC, the HP m7480n: Big change here. There is no floppy!! Seems that they don't include floppy drives on the "New Systems." Top Now then, this is real interesting. As I said before, I like to have access to my drives via my desktop. How-some-ever, I can not find access to the DVD's anywhere... UNLESS I put a DVD or CD in the drive and then the system will churn on the drive, finally asking me if I want to open it in a new window or do nothing. I chose the New Window and a Konqueror window opened showing the contents of the drive. The DVD drive also became a Selection in the Computer section of the main menu. Now then, unless you knew to look in the menu for a drive, that was previously not listed there, you would have trouble removing the DVD or CD that you just placed in the drive. It was mounted and would not let you open the drawer!! You must go into the Computer section of the Main Menu, find the drive and unmount it. Then you can remove the disk. Hmmmmmm... this is not working the way it has in the past. But I guess that is why you make changes. Neither of the DVD drives are in my fstab. I also can not find a mount point for them. The dialog that comes up after you insert a disk has a config section that will allow you to select various actions. There is an Advanced tab that has Enable HAL backend. In the media sub-dir which has the floppy and zip mount points I see the following two names: .hal-mtab .hal-mtab-lock* Could these be the invisible mount points?? Nope. I got out of sequence in my looking. Those two hal points are still there BUT there are two new mount points which appear to be the volume labels of the disks. Now then, what would happen if I assigned them mount points via the fstab?? Well, it won't work. I'm not sure what they did but right now I can't change it. They have made it convient for you. They drives get automatically mounted when you place a disk in them. Still a little tricky on the unmount and removal but we'll work on that ... later. hdc is the top drive and hdd is the bottom one. Top From Linux Magazine - SMART (ver 10.1) Boy am I late! They even have info out in the mags and I still have not gotten everyting done. Got the important stuff though, cause I am using it and I am using Win2K via VMware to write this using Homesite. But I think that even Jason's article is late. Mainly due to the writing, printing, delivery time to the readers. His claim that the ZenWorks didn't work right may have been correct at the
time but now it apparently works. Whilst trying to setup SMART I added these Installation Sources: Haven't checked all this out in this new 10.2 version yet. After going into root I fired off the first one and found that I need to add two
more pieces of software: rpm-python and python-elementtree. These were
added and then I started writing this. I will now continue with the other three. Well, it failed on the very next
one, the addons. I got:
Top Waiting for 10.3
Top 
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Get Linux 
If you have read my previous write-ups you will know that this has been an up and down item.