• SUSE Installation Thoughts

    Partitions

    It is a good idea to partition your drive into a main partition for applications and system stuff, home driver, and swap partition. By doing this you will be able to re-install SUSE without touching your personal files.

    A swap partition is used when your computer runs our of memory then it can use the hard driver space for extra memory. I usually do a gig swap partition.

    Turn off ZMD

    I have found that there is really no way to remove ZMD after installing SUSE. You can disable ZMD, but there isn’t any real way to un-install it.

    My recommendation is to never install it. When installing SUSE simple click the software link when that screen is available and set Enterprise Software Management (ZENworks Linux Management) to Taboo by right clicking and selecting Taboo.

    If you have already installed SUSE and just want to disable it please try Improving Yast Software Management.

  • Installing KDevelop

    Recently I have begun work in C++ and decided I wanted the most up to date version of KDevelop. So I looked in YAST but it wasn’t the newest. The easiest way to get and maintain up to date version is to add a source containing KDevelop to YAST.

    Add the following source to YaST. If you are new to adding installation sources please refer to Adding YaST Installation Sources.

    http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Backports/openSUSE_10.2/x86_64

    Then goto Software Management and install KDevelope. YAST will then maintain your version by alerting you to updates and allowing you to install them with a single click.

    A good tutorial I used is: http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/tutorial/

  • The Infamous "Blue Screen Of Death"

    Recently a friend asked what BSOD meant. So I figure I would see what google thought and entered

    define: BSOD

    into google and wala there it was.

    Blue Screen Of Death.

    The last article was from WikiPedia. It talks the history of the Blue Screen and has some entertaining examples of the Blue Screen in action.

  • SUSE 10.2 Media

    I noticed that SUSE 10.2 did not come with the ability to play back many media formats, although RealPlayer was able to play some.

    I searched the web and found that it was quite simple to add the ability to play most media files.

    First add the Packman and Guru sources for YaST. If you are new to adding installation sources please refer to Adding YaST Installation Sources.

    [Guru]
    type = rpm-md
    name = Guru
    baseurl = http://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/misc/suser-guru/rpm/10.2/RPMS/
    
    [Packman]
    type = rpm-md
    name = Packman
    baseurl = http://packman.iu-bremen.de/suse/10.2/
    

    Then open Software Management and install the following packages.

    • libxine1
    • xine-ui
    • libdvdcss (I haven't since I don't have dvds to play)

    I also installed.

    • MPlayer
    • SMPlayer

    After installing the above I have been able to play all the formats I have encountered. Just as a not I use Amarok for my audio playback.

  • Improving YaST Software Management Performance

    I noticed that ZMD runs for quite a while when your machine boots. ZMD is used to manage software through YaST. SUSE has its own software that works fine and does not appear to be such a machine hog as ZMD.

    To shut of ZMD open a Konsole (ALT + F2 then type konsole) and enter the following.

    chkconfig -s novell-zmd off

    After running the command I no longer experienced the resource hogging that ZMD appears to have caused.

    If the SUSE Updater does not start after you reboot then start it manual from the menus.

    System->Desktop Applet->openSUSE Update Applet

    If you haven’t installed SUSE yet I recommend this instead.