A Few OpenSuse 10.2 Questions

[CptnObvious999]

Not to start Gentoo bashing, but the Gentoo devs have always been quick to throw half-implemented, half-tested features into the stable tree. They were one of the first distros to jump on the 2.6 kernel series, and the modular Xorg 7.0, which caused lots of havoc for people running a branch that is supposed to be stable and well tested. I have to side with Tsuroerusu, in that Gentoo really needs to make a RELEASE, and SUPPORT IT with security patches. One of my biggest gripes with Gentoo is that I can't just install it and forget about it. I have to keep upgrading core system components again and again, or my system will start to fall apart. Oh yeah, and they really need to get a better installer. You know, one that actually works and doesn't crash? Anyway, enough ranting.

Some may hate it while others like it but Gentoo is based all around Portage. The version of Gentoo you are running means almost nothing, you don't typically don't have to in 6 months download another cd and whipe everything out or go through the upgrade process that could break or is basically an automated way of whiping everything out and reinstalling and updated version. Gentoo gets flack for this but IMHO it is much better, at least in a server environment. I am not sure how you say they don't support their software though since every bug I have submited has gotten a response within 24 hours.

As far as the installer goes you are right. Although something must be said about the fact that it was all commandline yet I was able to pull it off without using the commandline barely at all beforehand. They are working on a nice GUI installer but if you are using it for the desktop simply use Sabayon, it is the finest distro I have ever used and the installer is very similar to Ubuntu.

[hellonorman]

Troels,

Thanks for the tips!

Could you explain what zmd is, what its supposed to do, and how and why it is broken?

So far I haven't seemed to have any problems with it. The blue globe turns orange when theres an update and clicking it causes updates to get installed. Have I potentially broken anything by using it?

Whats the difference between a YaST source and a YUM source? Why would you set no refresh on the oss and non-oss repos? What sort of packages are in the guru repo?


My motherboard has an onboard nvidia ck804 chip on it. This works fine except the mic port wouldn't work with skype. Probably too much interference being onboard. I kept this card active because I use the front panel port on the board. It's nice for it to sense plugged in headphones on the front panel and turn off the rear port.

So I added a sound blaster pci card so that I could just keep a headset with mic plugged in permanent for skype. At boot it loads the snd_intel8x0 driver fine but fails to load emu10k1. However restarting alsasound after boot loads both fine. So it seems it has a problem with the timing of calling alsasound during boot. Is that still something that deleting and adding the sound card would fix?


I had numerous problems with kubuntu but fonts were spot on. I changed all my sizes and settings to the same that kubuntu used and also copied the ~/.fonts.conf file. This helped a bit but there's still something not quite right...or at least not the same. Some letters just don't seem to display very well especially in firefox and thunderbird. It's that thing where some letters don't look quite complete or faded.

[Tsuroerusu]

Thanks for the tips!

No problem.

Could you explain what zmd is, what its supposed to do, and how and why it is broken?

The openSUSE wiki describes ZMD as follows:

zmd is a successor to rcd (Red Carpet Daemon) - which was from the Novell acquired Ximian company.

It is written in C# and together with libzypp & rug, forms part of the new package management system for SUSE Linux 10.1 onwards.

It's basically a management daemon that can integrate with Novell's wider ZENworks management suite, which you, as an administrator, can use for managing both Linux, Netware and Windows servers and workstations.

Here's a diagram of how it works (Or is supposed to work ):


As you can see it's made up of many many parts, kind of the same way the micro kernel idea is (And we all know how that affected GNU Hurd).
And like the micro kernel idea, the complexness of this whole thing has made it utterly broken, there's been problems all over the place. It's hard to describe why it's broken, but the big thing is the notorious synchronization that goes on between the libzypp and zmd parts. If you want to see how broken this has been, download the original release of SUSE Linux 10.1 (Not the remastered version) and install it on a text box, and stand back and watch the package management system break down when you try to add a community repository.

So far I haven't seemed to have any problems with it.

I can asure you that you will sooner or later, unless you throw it out.

The blue globe turns orange when theres an update and clicking it causes updates to get installed. Have I potentially broken anything by using it?

If you're referring to zen-updater, nope it won't break anything, it just doesn't work too well at times.

Whats the difference between a YaST source and a YUM source?

They're different!
Just kidding. I'm not a package management guru, so I can't answer it directly, but a YaST repository is more of a SUSE thing than anything else, it has a few features that YUM repos does not, SUSE has a new way of grouping packages together called Patterns, which the YaST repos offer. If you bring up YaST and go to Software Management, and once it's up and going, right over the the text "Search:" there's a box called Filter, select Patterns, and you'll see this grouping of packages.

Why would you set no refresh on the oss and non-oss repos?

Every time YaST's package manager starts up, it checks to see if the repositories have had any updates, so it kind of does "apt-get update" every time you start it up. I personally think this is stupid, because it increases the amount of time it takes to start it up, instead of just having a big fat button saying "Refresh repositories" or something. The oss and non-oss repositories are static repositories that never change, these are the frozen ones, which contains the stuff you would find on the CDs. There's absolutely no reason to check if these have changed, since we know they never change, saves you a little bit of time and system memory. You get the security- and critical bugfix updates, from the update repositories. By the way, did I mention that every SUSE Linux and openSUSE release is supported with security- and critical bugfix updates for two entire years, this is every release people!

What sort of packages are in the guru repo?

You can see that right here: http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/index.php

There's packages for the latest Amarok, lots of nice KDE styles and window decorations, ktorrent, the Democracy Player (Just recently added, by the request of yours truly!), Inkscape ..... tons of stuff!

My motherboard has an onboard nvidia ck804 chip on it. This works fine except the mic port wouldn't work with skype. Probably too much interference being onboard. I kept this card active because I use the front panel port on the board. It's nice for it to sense plugged in headphones on the front panel and turn off the rear port.

I use a Soundblaster 5.1 Live card, and have my onboard audio disabled in the BIOS. I do have front-panel audio connectors, however it's too much of a hassle to connect to the sound card (It's a lot of small pin-plugs, instead of just a single plug), and I don't mind having my headset plugged in at the back. Also, using just one sound card minimizes complexness, which UNIX has always been about.

So I added a sound blaster pci card so that I could just keep a headset with mic plugged in permanent for skype. At boot it loads the snd_intel8x0 driver fine but fails to load emu10k1. However restarting alsasound after boot loads both fine. So it seems it has a problem with the timing of calling alsasound during boot. Is that still something that deleting and adding the sound card would fix?

It might, it's definitely worth a shot.

I had numerous problems with kubuntu but fonts were spot on. I changed all my sizes and settings to the same that kubuntu used and also copied the ~/.fonts.conf file. This helped a bit but there's still something not quite right...or at least not the same. Some letters just don't seem to display very well especially in firefox and thunderbird. It's that thing where some letters don't look quite complete or faded.

Could you send me a screenshot of this, because I havn't personally experienced anything like this, and I do not use the proprietary NVIDIA driver at all, I use the free nv driver, so I don't get the benefits of improved anti-aliasing, better font rendering in general and my fonts look just fine.

You explicitly mention Firefox and Thunderbird. These are GTK (I call 'em GNOME apps) apps, so they depend on the GTK font/color settings which SUSE tries to look Qtish for the sake of consistency. Try going into the KDE Control Center --> Appearance and Themes --> GTK Styles and Fonts, the style should be set to QtCurve by default, which should be left alone, but make sure the font setting is set to "Use my KDE fonts in GTK applications" is selected, if it already is, try just clicking on the selection "dot" so that you can click Apply. This might fix it.