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.  In the Monitor Section you need to add the following:

Option “UseEDIDDPI” “FALSE”

That’s because these TVs apparently lie to the operating system about their dimensions.  Then change the DisplaySize using the following formula:

DisplaySize = (pixels/desiredDPI)*25.4

So, if I want to run at 96 DPI and 1366×768 resolution then I would set the following in my xorg.conf:

DisplaySize 361 203

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
4. Select “openSUSE BuildService - Wine CVS Builds”
5. Under “Hostname/DNS”, enter your DNS servers and hit “Finish”

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
• sudo fdisk -l - 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

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