openSUSE is my favorite Linux distribution.  Linux in general has some usability frustrations as a desktop user, so I hope to share some of the ways they can be dealt with.  If you have questions of your own leave a comment.

Fix horrible bug that breaks buttons

GDK has a horrible debilitating bug that was not caught before release and at the time of writing the fix has not been backported as an online update.  This makes buttons in both Flash and Eclipse unresponsive to clicking.  You need to “export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=true” in order for things to work correctly.  I added this in my ~/.bashrc file:

# .bashrc

# User specific aliases and functions
alias untargz="tar zxvf"

# Environment variables
export M2_HOME=/usr/local/apache-maven/apache-maven-2.2.1
export M2=$M2_HOME/bin
export PATH=$M2:$PATH

export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=true
export PATH=/usr/local/eclipse/eclipse-3.5:$PATH

# Source global definitions
if [ -f /etc/bashrc ]; then
********. /etc/bashrc
fi

1-click installers – Setup graphics card, multimedia, and fonts

An easy way to install most of the software you need is to use a 1-click installer.  If you have an NVIDIA or ATI graphics card, then you’ll want to install the drivers using one of these installers.  I also recommend installing “Codecs pack for KDE”, “VLC Media Player”, and “Fonts with subpixel hinting enabled”.

Setup multimedia

This is a perennial setup step on Linux distributions.  We’ll install the codecs needed to watch videos on Linux.

1. YaST > “Software” > “Software Repositories”
2. Click “Add”
3. Select “Community Repositories”
4. Select “Packman Repository” if it is not already
5. YaST > “Software” > “Software Management”
6. Install libxine1-codecs.

Setup time synchronization

NTP (Network Time Protocol) can be used to synch your system’s clock to a server on the internet.

1. YaST > “System” > “Date and Time”
2. Click “Change…”
3. Select “Synchronize with NTP Server”
4. Add the server for your region from pool.ntp.org (e.g. I used 0.us.pool.ntp.org since I’m in the United States)
5. Check the “Save NTP Configuration”
6. If you hit “Configure…” you can also add backup servers (e.g. 1.us.pool.ntp.org , 2.us.pool.ntp.org , etc.)

Setup a static IP address

This step is optional and is meant for people that know what a static IP is and want to set one up.  Having a static IP address is very nice when you want to remote desktop to your server or access it in some other way without worrying about what the IP address is.  There may also need to be some configuration done on your router for this one.  Or you may prefer to investigate DHCP reservations if your router supports them.

1. YaST > “Network Devices” > “Network Settings”
2. Under Hostname/DNS, you may change your hostname and Domain Name if you prefer
3. Under Global Options, switch to “Traditional Method with ifup”
4. Under “Overview”, select your network card and click “Edit”
5. Enter your static IP (besure to also enter DNS and gateway information)
6. Hit save

Setup a network file share (NFS) using Samba

Another optional step, Samba allows you to share files on your computer with others on the network.

1. YaST > “Software” > “Software Management”
2. Install “samba”
3. YaST > “Network Services” > “Samba Server”
4. Choose “Not a domain controller”, start during boot, and tell it to unblock the firewall
5. Change sharing settings as you’d like and hit “Finish”
6. Add a user to Samba by running “smbpasswd -a username” where username is the user you’d like to create.
7. Connect from your Windows machine by right clicking “My Computer” and browsing your network.  If you have trouble connecting you might also try opening a “Run…” dialog off the start menu and typing in your IP address with two leading slashes e.g. “\\192.168.10.2″

Setup remote desktop through NX

The two main remote desktop softwares for Linux are VLC and NX.  NX is much faster and is what I would recommend.  Unfortunately, I have not been able to get desktop sharing to fully work.  If you get desktop shadowing to work properly then please let me know.  In addition to installing NX, we’ll also open the corresponding port in the firewall so that we can connect from another machine.

1. Download the NX Linux packages
2. Run “rpm -iv nxclient-3.4.0-5.x86_64.rpm”, “rpm -iv nxnode-3.4.0-5.x86_64.rpm”, and “rpm -iv nxserver-3.4.0-5.x86_64.rpm”
3. Run “/usr/NX/scripts/setup/nxserver –install”
4. Run “/usr/NX/bin/nxserver –keygen”
5. In your NX client, open “Configure…” > “General” tab > “Key …”
6. Copy the contents of “/usr/NX/share/keys/default.id_dsa.key” into the key window and save it
7. Open “/usr/NX/etc/server.cfg”
8. Uncomment ‘EnableSessionShadowingAuthorization = “1″ and change the value to “0″ which will enable you to select “Shadow” in the client under the General > Desktop if you’d like to do desktop sharing.
9. YaST > “Security and Users” > “Firewall” > “Allowed Services”
10. Allow “Secure Shell Server”

Upgrade to the ext4 file system

ext4 is the new default file system on openSUSE 11.2.  If you did a clean install, you will be running ext4 by default.  However, if you have a drive you did not reformat when installing the OS then you may be running ext3.  For example, I have two drives: 1 60 gig drive I use as my root partition and a 500 gig drive I use as my home directory.  When I installed openSUSE 11.2, I wiped the root partition and reformatted it as ext4, but I wanted to keep the data on my home directory, so I couldn’t reformat it and left it as ext3.

1. Run “df -T” to see your file system types.  For me it showed /dev/sdb1 as ext4 mounted on /home
2. Run init 1 to switch runlevels
3. Unmount the drive:  e.g. “umount /home”
4. Run e2fsck on the drive : e.g. e2fsck /dev/sdb1
5. Run tune2fs: e.g. tune2fs -O extents,uninit_bg /dev/sdb1
6. Edit /etc/fstab to change ext3 to ext4 on the drive
7. Run “mount -a” to remount the drive

Review: The Problem with Linux is Usability and Resource Allocation

openSUSE is as good a Linux desktop as you’ll find.  Unfortunately that’s not saying as much as I’d like.  There are so many broken things on the system and yet so much effort was put into developing things that average person doesn’t give a rat’s ass about. There’s a whole load of crap that comes with the system that’s a waste.  It’s incredibly frustrating to me to see so many resources go into this software that few people care about.  I don’t need Marble when the far superior Google Earth is available on Linux.  I don’t need Kaffeine when VLC is a better alternative.  Most of the games are a waste and can’t hold a candle to the hundreds of Flash games available online.   I’ve never used digiKam, but have to assume that at best it’s Picasa’s ugly stepsister.  There are dozens of programs I’d rather use than KDE PIM: GMail, Thunderbird, LinkedIn, etc.  The list goes on, and on, and on.  Why are we building this stuff?  The single biggest improvement in openSUSE 11.2 is that Firefox is now the default browser.  This took way too long, but is a welcomed change.  I wish VLC would replace Kaffeine.  Someone at Novell, Canonical, et. al. needs to do some user testing.  Any 12-year-old kid would tell you you’re crazy if you think people would rather use Marble than Google Earth.  Linux distros have done an absolutely horrifyingly awful job of picking the best software to be the default.  Instead of wasting all this time, how about we come together and decide to make an operating system that just works?  There are so many usability frustrations that I’d like to see solved instead.  Novell, Canonical, and the other leaders in this area need to step up.

As mentioned, there are a lot of usability problems.  For example, Flash was unusable in full screen mode after install.  It turned out this was because I hadn’t yet installed my NVIDIA driver.  But this is a big problem.  How would any casual user know they had to do this?  My parents, brother, or sister would not have known to do this despite being reasonably computer savvy.  I knew because I’ve used Linux for many years, but if it requires a computer science degree to watch a YouTube video then you’ve failed.  And when I did realize I needed to install the driver, I needed to know which of three drivers I wanted.  Are you serious?  I could just imagine asking my mom what graphics card she has.  That would be a fun conversation.  It’s 2009.  And you don’t have the ability to detect my hardware?  I understand that there are licensing issues, but once I’ve said I want to install a graphics driver you should be able to tell me which one I need.  I want to get rid of the “Recently Used” option on the Kicker menu like I can with classic, but there’s no option to.  I don’t understand why YaST has a “Media Check” option.  Can’t you tell there’s no CD/DVD in my drive?  I tried to edit my network settings with YaST and it told me to use NetworkManager or change the setup method to Traditional with ifup.  How do I do either of those things?  I don’t know what NetworkManager is or how to open it.  There’s nothing in any of the menus called NetworkManager.  When I started Firefox it asked me if I wanted to use Flash, gnash, or swfdec.  But I tried gnash and swfdec and neither could play a Hulu video, so are you insane?  Of course I don’t want to use either of those.  Why are you confusing me?  Flash on Linux is a big problem.  The controls on the Hulu just stop working with frustrating frequency.  I can’t figure out why Amarok and Kaffeine are both broken.  I could go on, but you get my point.  Let’s fix these problems instead of building more crap no one asked for.  I know how much of this work has been done by volunteers and am extremely grateful for it.  I’ve contributed to several open source projects myself and know what it’s like, so I hope those reading know I am thankful to have this amazing free software.  I’m happy for what’s been done and am hoping the leaders of KDE and openSUSE will make some hard choices about what’s worth investing in and supporting, so that these projects can become successful in the mainstream world because as it stands now, even as great as it is, Linux simply isn’t ready.

I’d heard of Tonido awhile back, but was having trouble getting it to run on OpenSUSE since it’s packaged only for Ubuntu.  Tonight I sat down and figured out how to get it to run:

• Install alien via the YaST package manager
• Convert the Tonido package to an RPM by using alien (alien -r filename.deb)
• Install newly created Tonido RPM
• Install libnotify1-32bit via YaST package manager
• Open port 10001 in Firewall (Security and Users > Firewall > Allowed Services > Advanced)
• Port forward port 10001 to the machine where Tonido is installed

Yay, now you can run Tonido.  When you start it, it will open Konqueror, for which it is very buggy.  So close that window and open http://127.0.0.1:10001/ in FireFox.  Now you’re off and running.

My initial thoughts:

• This needs SSL support to really be useful since it gives access to my whole computer.
• Too bad the setup is a bit hard.  I’m sure more people would adopt it if it used UPnP.
• The WebShare app could be pretty cool in the future, but at the moment it’s mostly worthless.  You can only download one file at a time and there’s no upload.  I’d like to be able to mount my shares on my Windows machine.  I really wish it exported them via WebDav or SFTP.
• The music player needs flac support.  I can’t play any of my music collection!

Want to know how to figure out what’s running on a given port on your machine?  The following example will show you what’s running on port 80 on your Linux machine:

lsof -i -n -P | grep :80

Have you ever wanted to have content served up, but it wasn’t readable? Here’s an easy way to recursively set permissions for a web server:

find ~/www -type d -exec chmod a+x {} \;
find ~/www -exec chmod a+r {} \;

Just change ~/www to whatever directory you wish to make readable, and this command will make everything under that directory world-readable and make all directories listable.

openSUSE 11.0 was the best Linux distribution I’ve ever used.  I was hoping openSUSE 11.1 would continue the great strides of late, but it’s a bit of a mixed bag.  One of the most frustrating things for me is that support for remote access is falling by the wayside.  VNC used to be better integrated with openSUSE, but they removed integrated support in favor of KDE’s krfb, which is badly broken.  The package management in openSUSE 11.0 and 11.1 is enough to suggest upgrading if you’re using an older version – it is absolutely great, especially for those of us who have been around long enough to see the pains it’s gone through.  If you want to get up and running with openSUSE 11.1 then there are likely a few customizations you’ll want to make.

Upgrade to KDE 4.2

It’d be nice if openSUSE and KDE could sync up their release schedules a bit better.  KDE 4.2 came out a month or so after openSUSE 11.1 and you’ll likely want the upgrade.  I experienced some annoying but not critical bugs with the version that shipped.

1. YaST > “Software” > “Software Repositories”
2. Click “Add”
3. Select “Specify URL”
4. Enter: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/KDE4:/Factory:/Desktop/openSUSE_Factory/
5. Also add: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Qt/openSUSE_Factory/
6. Uncheck “Dependencies” > “Autocheck”
7. Do a search for QT and another for KDE
8. Check all the boxes where “Installed (Available)” is blue
9. Recheck “Dependencies” > “Autocheck” and resolve any dependency problems
10. Hit “Accept” to install the selected packages

Setup Multimedia

This is a perennial setup step on Linux distributions.  We’ll install the codecs needed to watch DVDs, handle MP3s, etc.

1. YaST > “Software” > “Software Repositories”
2. Click “Add”
3. Select “Community Repositories”
4. Select “Packman Repository” and “VideoLan Repository”
5. YaST > “Software” > “Software Management”
6. Install libffmepg0 and libdvdcss.  Also, if you want to be able to watch ASF streams you should install mplayer-plugin.
7. Start Kaffeine and tell it to handle mms and rtsp streams when it asks

Install NVIDIA drivers

If you have an NVIDIA card, then you’ll want to install the drivers.

1. YaST > “Software” > “Software Repositories”
2. Click “Add”
3. Select “Community Repositories”
4. Select “NVIDIA Repository”
5. YaST > “Software” > “Software Management”
6. Install “nvidia-gfxGO2-kmp-default”

Install CD Ripper

For some reason, openSUSE 11.1 no longer ships with KAudioCreator installed by default.  My guess would be that it hasn’t been ported to KDE4 yet, but it’s nice to have, so we’ll go ahead and install it anyway.  We’ll also change KAudioCreator’s (stupid) default setting of not looking up CDDB information that hasn’t been cached on the local system.

1. YaST > “Software” > “Software Repositories”
2. Click “Add”
3. Select “Community Repositories”
4. Select “openSUSE BuildService – KDE:Community”
5. YaST > “Software” > “Software Management”
6. Install “kdemultimedia3-CD”
7. Open kaudiocreator
8. Select “Settings” > “Configure KAudioCreator …” > “CDDB”
9. Set lookup to “Cache and remote”

Upgrade WINE

WINE is continuing to evolve and getting closer every day to reaching maturity.  You’ll likely want the latest version instead of the one that was the latest when openSUSE shipped.

1. YaST > “Software” > “Software Repositories”
2. Click “Add”
3. Select “Community Repositories”
4. Select “openSUSE BuildService – Wine CVS Builds”
5. YaST > “Software” > “Software Management”
6. Do a search for wine and click the check mark until version upgrade is selected

Setup a static IP address

Having a static IP address is very nice when you want to remote desktop to your server or access it in some other way without worrying about what the IP address is.  There may also need to be some configuration done on your router for this one.  Or you may prefer to investigate DHCP reservations if your router supports them.

1. YaST > “Network Devices” > “Network Settings”
2. Under “Overview”, select your network card and click “Edit”
3. Enter your static IP (besure to also enter DNS and gateway information)
4. Hit save

Setup remote desktop through NX

The two main remote desktop softwares for Linux are VLC and NX.  NX is much faster, but unfortunately I’ve had some problems with desktop sharing with 11.1 vs. 11.0.  If you get 11.1 to shadow properly then please let me know.  In addition to installing NX, we’ll also open the corresponding port in the firewall so that we can connect from another machine.

1. Download the NX Linux packages
2. Run “rpm -iv nxclient-3.3.0-3.i386.rpm”, “rpm -iv nxnode-3.3.0-3.i386.rpm”, and “rpm -iv nxserver-3.3.0-3.i386.rpm”
3. Run “/usr/NX/scripts/setup/nxserver –install”
4. Run “/usr/NX/bin/nxserver –keygen”
5. In your NX client, open “Configure…” > “General” tab > “Key …”
6. Copy the contents of “/usr/NX/share/keys/default.id_dsa.key” into the key window and save it
7. Open “/usr/NX/etc/server.cfg”
8. Change line 563 from ‘EnableSessionShadowingAuthorization = “1″‘ to ‘EnableSessionShadowingAuthorization = “0″‘ which will enable you to select “Shadow” in the client under the “General” tab’s “Desktop” framebox if you’d like to do desktop sharing
9. YaST > “Security and Users” > “Firewall” > “Allowed Services”
10. Allow “Secure Shell Server”

Setup Network File Share using Samba

Samba allows you to share files on your computer with others on the network.

1. YaST > “Software” > “Software Management”
2. Install “samba” if it is not already installed
3. YaST > “Network Services” > “Samba Server”
4. Tell it to unblock the firewall
5. Change sharing settings as you’d like and hit “Finish”
6. Add a user to Samba by running “smbpasswd -a username” where username is the user you’d like to create.
7. Connect from your Windows machine by right clicking “My Computer” and browsing your network.  If you have trouble connecting you might also try opening a “Run…” dialog off the start menu and typing in your IP address with two leading slashes “\\192.168.10.x”

Just a few to post for right now, but this entry may grow later.

alias ll='ls -la'           # list all directory contents in listing format
alias untargz="tar zxvf"    # unpacks a .tar.gz file
alias rd='cd `pwd -P`'      # change to the real directory if in a linked directory

I’ve connected both a Syntax Olevia and an LG TV to my openSUSE desktop.  Neither have worked well because they caused the default font size to be unusably large.  I’m talking gigantically huge, like only a few letters on the screen at any one time.  The solution is to modify your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. OpenSUSE 11.2 no longer uses an xorg.conf file by default, so you will need to creater one by running sax2.

Because these TVs apparently lie to the operating system about their dimensions, in the Monitor Section you need to add the following:

Option "UseEDIDDPI" "FALSE"

Then change the DisplaySize using the following formula:

DisplaySize = (pixels/desiredDPI)*25.4

So, if I want to run at 110 DPI and 1366×768 resolution then I would set the following in my xorg.conf:

DisplaySize 315 177

Let me start off by saying that openSUSE 11.0 is the best Linux distribution I have ever used.  There are some rough edges surrounding KDE 4, but the package management in openSUSE 11.0 makes huge strides over that offered in previous versions.  If you want to get up and running with openSUSE 11.0 then there are likely a few customizations you’ll want to make.

Setup Multimedia

This is a perennial setup step on Linux distributions.  We’ll install the codecs needed to watch DVDs, handle MP3s, etc.  We’ll also setup firefox to be able to handle Windows media streams.

1. YaST > “Software” > “Software Repositories”
2. Click “Add”
3. Select “Community Repositories”
4. Select “Packman Repository” and “VideoLan Repository”
5. YaST > “Software” > “Software Management”
6. Uninstall xine-lib and install libxine1, w32codec-all, libdvdcss, k3b-codecs, and mplayerplug-in
7. Open Firefox and type “about:config” into the address bar
8. Right Click > “New” > “String”
9. Enter “network.protocol-handler.app.mms”
10. Enter “/opt/kde3/bin/kaffeine” (output of “which kaffeine” at command line)

Install NVIDIA drivers

If you have an NVIDIA card, then you’ll want to install the drivers.

1. YaST > “Software” > “Software Repositories”
2. Click “Add”
3. Select “Community Repositories”
4. Select “NVIDIA Repository”
5. YaST > “Software” > “Software Management”
6. Install “nvidia-gfxGO1-kmp-default”

Install CD ripper and ID3 tagger

For some reason, openSUSE 11.0 no longer ships with KAudioCreator or an ID3 tagger installed by default.  My guess would be that they haven’t been ported to KDE4 yet, but they’re nice to have, so we’ll go ahead and install them anyway.  We’ll also change KAudioCreator’s (stupid) default setting of not looking up CDDB information that hasn’t been cached on the local system.

1. YaST > “Software” > “Software Repositories”
2. Click “Add”
3. Select “Community Repositories”
4. Select “openSUSE BuildService – KDE:Community”
5. YaST > “Software” > “Software Management”
6. Install “kid3″ and “kdemultimedia3-CD”
7. Open kaudiocreator
8. Select “Settings” > “Configure KAudioCreator …” > “CDDB”
9. Set lookup to “Cache and remote”

Upgrade WINE

WINE is continuing to evolve and getting closer every day to reaching maturity.  You’ll likely want the latest version instead of the one that was the latest when openSUSE shipped.

1. YaST > “Software” > “Software Repositories”
2. Click “Add”
3. Select “Community Repositories”
4. Select “openSUSE BuildService – Wine CVS Builds”
5. YaST > “Software” > “Software Management”
6. Do a search for wine and click the check mark until version upgrade is selected

Setup a static IP address

Having a static IP address is very nice when you want to remote desktop to your server or access it in some other way without worrying about what the IP address is.  There may also need to be some configuration done on your router for this one.  Or you may prefer to investigate DHCP reservations if your router supports them.

1. YaST > “Network Devices” > “Network Settings”
2. Under “Overview”, select your network card and click “Edit”
3. Enter your static IP and save it

Setup remote desktop through NX

The two main remote desktop softwares for Linux are VLC and NX.  NX is much faster and KDE’s VLC server, KRfb, is broken openSUSE 11.0.  An NX server ships with openSUSE 11.0, but we want to install at least version 3.0 in order to do desktop sharing.  We’ll also open the SSH (NX is built on top of SSH) port in the firewall so that we can connect from another machine.

1. Download the NX Linux packages
2. Run “rpm -iv nxclient-3.1.0-2.i386.rpm”, “rpm -iv nxnode-3.1.0-3.i386.rpm”, and “rpm -iv nxserver-3.1.0-2.i386.rpm”
3. Run “/usr/NX/scripts/setup/nxserver –install”
4. Run “/usr/NX/bin/nxserver –keygen”
5. In your NX client, open “Configure…” > “General” tab > “Key …”
6. Copy the contents of “/usr/NX/share/keys/default.id_dsa.key” into the key window and save it
7. Open “/usr/NX/etc/server.cfg”
8. Change line 563 from ‘EnableSessionShadowingAuthorization = “1″‘ to ‘EnableSessionShadowingAuthorization = “0″‘ which will enable you to select “Shadow” in the client under the “General” tab’s “Desktop” framebox if you’d like to do desktop sharing
9. YaST > “Security and Users” > “Firewall” > “Allowed Services”
10. Allow “Secure Shell Server”

Setup Network File Share using Samba

Samba allows you to share files on your computer with others on the network.

1. YaST > “Software” > “Software Management”
2. Install “samba” if it is not already installed
3. YaST > “Network Services” > “Samba Server”
4. Change sharing settings as you’d like and hit “Finish”
5. Add a user to Samba by running “smbpasswd -a username” where username is the user you’d like to create.
6. YaST > “Security and Users” > “Firewall” > “Allowed Services”
7. Allow “Samba Server”

Getting started on Linux can be challenging.  Largely because the first time user won’t have any idea how to track down potential problems.  The following commands are essential to get additional information about your system when something goes wrong:

• uname -mr – Shows what kernel version and processor you are running on
• df and fdisk -l – Gives you file system info.  Can help you figure out how things are mounted
• dmesg – Useful for tracking down problems during boot
• tail -f /var/log/messages – Now run the process giving you problems and you might see helpful error messages
• top – Shows the programs which are the top memory and CPU users
• pgrep - Returns the process ids of a given program, allowing you to kill frozen programs

If you’ve got other suggestions, please feel free to comment below.  Thanks!

Wine attempts to create a Windows-compatible layer on top of Linux to allow you to run your favorite programs. Recently, Wine had its 1.0 release and has gotten quite strong when compared to earlier versions.  Quicken works reasonably well with wine-1.1.6 and later.

With wine-1.1.5 and earlier you’ll need to use a WINE override.  That is, you must tell Wine to use the native Windows version of gdiplus.dll:

• Get a copy of gdiplus.dll ensuring that you adhere to any applicable licenses and put it in ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system
• Run winecfg
• Hit “Add Application…” and browse to “drive_c/Program Files/Quicken/qw.exe”
• Under the “Libraries” tab add a native override for gdiplus

Unfortunately, Quicken still cannot access the internet and there is no workaround for this since schannel, the library which implements SSL, has not yet been implemented.

If you need better debug logs for filing bugs you can set the WINEDEBUG environment variable to get more detailed output or suppress output that is overwhelming.  For example, you can put the following in your ~/.bashrc file:

export WINEDEBUG=fixme-richedit,trace+secur32

Then run “source ~/.bashrc” to reload the file.

Also, if you’d like to see the debug output scroll by on the screen as well as save it to a file then you can run the following:

wine qw.exe 2>&1 | tee trace.log