Fortunately there is nothing unusual to report here. Installation
of SuSE 9.2 is smooth and without incident.
Jog Dial & X11
Edit /etc/modprobe.conf. Fix the following (line #175 in my file)
to remove the comma between "250" and "verbose". Note that this
is mostly cosmetic, it just bothers me that it produces an error during
the boot-up:
Old:
options
sonypi
minor=250,verbose=1
New:
options
sonypi
minor=250 verbose=1
Add the following line to /etc/init.d/boot.local
modprobe
sonypi
I don't care for the default settings of the Synaptics Touchpad.
I find that the vertical scrolling region is too large and I prefer to
disable the horizonal scrolling capabilities. In addition I often
plug in an external USB wheel mouse. So I replace the
/etc/X11/XF86Config with the following to achieve my preferences.
Note that the downside of this is that the YAST configuration tool may
not be able to parse this file correctly. XF86Config (single monitor) XF86Config (dual monitors)
Notes:
I am unable to get the CNTRL-Jog and ALT-Jog functions to change
the
display brightness and the sound volume, respectively (although these
functions are indicated in the Control Center).
The dual monitor link above is configured to use a Nokia 445Xpro
as the second monitor. The second monitor is configured to be to
the left of the laptop display. To create it I first restored the
original XF86Config, used YaST to configure two ATI Radeon 7500 cards
(must use BUS ID of 1:0:0 for this to work), then I configured Xinerama
mode, and finally edited the file to setup proper mouse devices (I just
copied them from the single monitor XF86Config).
Setup of PPTP client
I use pptp to connect to a client. The following site provides
instructions on setting this up under SuSE 9.2:
The documentation section refers to SuSE 9.2 setup directions (http://pptpclient.sourceforge.net/howto-suse-92.phtml)
that in turn give two methods. I found that the first method
(also the simplest) would not work for me as I could not connect to the
client's network. The second method works however it messes up
the YAST RPM database. Therefore I used the following modified
method to in effect "sneak" the updates into the system.
As per the documentation, download the latest versions of the following
files (all from the same location). Note that I've left off the
version numbers and provide just generic names in the list below.
As "su" install as follows (you must substitute the full rpm name as
appropriate in the below command): rpm -ivh php-pcntl.rpm
php-gtk-pcntl.rpm
Now here is the "sneak" part. The pptpconfig and pptp-linux RPMs
are installed using rpm2cpio. This gets around dependency
checking and will keep YAST silent during future updates. Do this
as follows (the below assumes that you've downloaded the rpm files to
/tmp):
su cd / rpm2cpio /tmp/pptp-linux.rpm | cpio
-idumv rpm2cpio /tmp/pptpconfig.rpm | cpio
-idumv
Note that if you ever update pptp via YOU then you will need to repeat
the above for pptp-linux.rpm.
Your PPTP client should now be ready to use. Simply follow the
instructions at http://pptpclient.sourceforge.net/
to setup a tunnel. You must be SU to start it (I like to add a
desktop shortcut that uses kdesu to invoke pptpconfig so that I can run
it from a user login).
Notes:
I found it necessary to reboot prior to running pptpconfig the
first time. There must be a share library issue or something.
The PPTP client will not work with the SuSE firewall
active. Both SuSEfirewall2_final and SuSEfirewall2_setup must be
disabled via the Runlevel Editor (SuSEfirewall2_init does not need to
be disabled).
Tips, Cautions, Etc.
Updates
There are a number of packages in SuSE 9.2 that benefit from being
updated. Amarok, ThunderBird, and Firefox come immediately to
mind (although as of this writing the later two are not available with
this method, but see below). An easy way to do this is to add a
couple of entries to the installation sources.
One such source is the SuSE KDE updates. Add this as follows:
Open YaST and click on "Change Source of Installation".
Click on the "Add" button and select "FTP".
Enter "ftp.suse.com" as the server and
"/pub/suse/i386/supplementary/KDE/update_for_9.2/yast-source/" as the
Directory. Leave "Anonymous" checked.
Click OK
Another great source is the PACKMAN archives. Add this as follows:
Open YaST and click on "Change Source of Installation".
Click on the "Add" button and select "HTTP".
Enter "packman.iu-bremen.de" as the Server Name
Enter "/suse/9.2/" as the Directory on Server
Click OK
Use the Up and Down buttons to order the entries. I put the KDE
3.3 supplementary updates first, followed by Packman, and then the DVD
(original installation media) last.
Now simply use the software installer to to update Amarok or install
other packages.
There are updated versions of various SuSE software maintained in the
"projects" area of ftp.suse.com
which is often rewarding to explore. For example both updated
versions of Firefox
and Thunderbird
are available here.
Beware
Watch out for suspend to disk. While it appears to work (in that
it does suspend, it does shutdown, and it will later resume), I've had
considerable file system corruption occur after using it. The
corruption is not immediately obvious, but within several boots after
having used it "strange things" begin to happen.
Firewire and USB storage devices sometimes muck-up SuSE 9.2. I
never had this occur with 9.1, but sometimes 9.2 seems to leave entries
for these devices in /etc/fstab and then insists on doing an fsck on
them at the next boot. If that drive is no longer present then
the fsck fails and, instead of a nice X11 welcome screen, you get a
text root-login prompt.
To fix this go ahead and login as root. Edit the /etc/fstab to
remove the offending entry. Reboot.
