In reading about some repositories I might install from, I noticed this tidbit on the GNOME page at opensuse.org. It described adding the repositories needed and then:

Then, you need to check that those repositories have a higher priority than other repositories that you have on your system. Values for priority are between 0 and 100, and a lower value means higher priority; the default value is 99. Launch the YaST Software Repositories tool and make sure it is the case. On a default openSUSE 11.1 installation, the Updates repository will likely have a priority of 20…

Maybe you already know, and if so, good for you. I’m glad to know it. :)

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I just got finished posting my first contribution to the openSUSE site at http://en.opensuse.org/Skype_HOWTO#Skype_conflicts_with_pulseaudio.3F! Happily I did not give in and just rip out pulseaudio as some people suggest. Skype was just looking for libasound_module_pcm_pulse.so which was apparently satisfied by installing alsa-plugins-pulse-32bit

I do see errors saying E: shm.c: Invalid shared memory segment size but these seem to be related to this bug on the pulseaudio site which has apparently been fixed but isn’t in openSUSE yet?

My microphone seems to capture incredibly softly, but otherwise seems to be working. “Sound In” for my Macbook Pro is HDA Intel (hw:Intel,0) for the microphone in the left speaker grille. I’m guessing that HDA Intel (hw:Intel,0) is for the line-in Audio Input port, but not having a self-powered microphone (the Macbook Pro Audio Input port provides no power), I don’t know that for sure.

Note to Skype: provide a 64-bit version. I can accept that it’s closed source, but that puts the onus on you to update your binaries and make them available for a wider variety. That said, thank you for providing a Linux version.

I know that I am a technology snob. I dislike or don’t use some things just because I don’t ‘like’ them. KDE has been one of them- although in my defense I have tried it out at various times.

I tried it out again on Saturday, thinking that this would be a good opportunity since openSUSE provides what many consider to be the best KDE implementation. I was disappointed. There were some nice edges but I found the experience similar to Vista. There may have been an overhaul of the underlying code and cosmetics but it will be some time before the apps match that and provide a clean, uniform experience. There’s also something I just don’t… like about the UI. I can’t put my finger on it.

Anyway, I was willing to leave it installed but before I knew it, KDE had become my default session. I did not appreciate that. I logged out, chose GNOME in the GDM and logged in. Still KDE. That’s right. I refuse. I uninstalled everything with a K in it.

At the office we have a file server for staff to move files like presentations and documents around. I haven’t used it much since I’m the only web guy and people usually e-mail things straight to me when I need them. But starting next Monday, I’ll have a coworker to help with the websites so I delved into setting up the Windows share.

I’m increasingly frustrated by openSUSE. It seems like so many things that should be simple just aren’t. I know I’ve done this in Ubuntu. Nautilus was unable to browse the network shares at all. mount.cifs is the program that actually ties the Windows® share to your filesystem and doesn’t allow anyone but root to run it.

So I decided to add it to my permanent shares in /etc/fstab. But I don’t want it to be mounted automatically because a) I don’t want the overhead and b) I won’t need it all the time.

After consulting several websites, I found clues here but the breakthrough was when I found this “Cool Solution”. Thanks to that article, the share is now as it should be. Except… I want it to show up in Nautilus in the sidebar to mount at will without even entering a terminal. Anyone?

I’ve had lots of trouble since migrating to openSUSE with playing video files of nearly any kind. Running it in the terminal just results in errors usually including something like x11 video output error: X11 request 141.19 failed with error code 11:
BadAlloc (insufficient resources for operation)

openSUSE is using the great radeonhd driver and at one point I understood that maybe installing the proprietary fglrx drivers from ATI would solve the problem. Don’t do this. I got slow screen fades and had to rescue my system and manually remove the RPM packages. The fact that I fixed it so easily was heartening.

But I was back to square one. No links I found provided any helpful info- they just said to turn off Compiz Desktop Effects. That is stupid. Of course it works then, but I don’t want to have to turn it off! Suddenly I remembered running into something similar in Ubuntu when I first installed 8.10 Intrepid. In that case the video flickered. But for me it turned out the same thing fixed it. Run:

gstreamer-properties

Hit the Video tab. Click the Video tab. Under Default Video Plugin select “X Window System (No Xv)”. Click Test to verify that video playback is working. The aforementioned post also provides the instructions for vlc which uses a different video mechanism.

openSUSE ships with two icons on your desktop that you can only remove with difficulty. And, I should point out, if you delete them and the package that provides them is updated, they’ll be back. Do yourself a favor and remove them the right way.

Open ‘gconf-editor’ and remove the value in /apps/nautilus/desktop/predefined_items_dir

Even though my Macbook Pro has an excellent graphics card, I still got a warning when I turned on Desktop Effects (Compiz). They work but I had (I think) more than my share of what seemed to be Compiz related crashes. But when things crash, the best thing to do is to not get upset and try to track down why it’s doing that. Compiz crashed as I was editing an OpenOffice document and for me that was the clue I needed apparently.

The system log showed that Compiz blew up inside of a file named libdecoration.so which led me to this forum post reply. The link he provides is broken (it should point here, but you can access the repository in question directly at http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/X11:/XGL/openSUSE_11.1/.

Since installing the updated Compiz packages, I haven’t had a screen lock or Compiz crash once (knock on wood).

This morning I read about a new theme being developed for openSUSE 11.2, called Sonar. It’s really easy to try it out in 11.1. You can download the files manually at this page- or you can add the repository to your list:

1. Open ‘Software Repositories’
2. Click the ‘Add’ button
3. Choose the ‘HTTP’ type and click ‘Next’
4. Enter a Nickname for the Repository- something bizarre like ‘Sonar’. The server name is download.opensuse.org and the directory on server is /repositories/home:/aaronbockover:/opensuse-refresh/openSUSE_11.1/ – just click ‘Next’ and finish off the wizard.
5. Go into ‘Install Software’ and search for ‘sonar’ and install the packages. Make sure your Murrine gtk2 engine is up to date.

It’s just beautiful. I’m someone rarely satisfied by a theme but I have to say that I have found nothing about this one that bugs me. I love it.

Shutter is the best screen capture utility for Linux. Period.

So I was dismayed to find that there is no package to just install it under openSUSE. One post on their site suggest that openSUSE didn’t want to include it because it’s essentially a bunch of scripts that leverage Perl libraries. That doesn’t seem like a real reason.

You can get it working if you’re willing to go through the pain. Download the source tarball from the Shutter site. Extract the contents and put them in /usr/local/shutter.

Fire up your terminal and run

/usr/local/shutter/bin/shutter

It will, of course, not run. Now you’re ready to go through the installation nightmare that even the developer refers to as “brutal” in openSUSE.

Install all the gnome, test, and gtk related perl packages. Even if you get all of these on the first go, you’ll need to get a lot of additional packages from cpan.org that are apparently completely unavailable in openSUSE. You should be able to get Shutter to the point where it’s asking for “Gnome2/GConf.pm” before you should stop looking for installable perl packages. At that point I had to download:

• Gnome2::GConf
• Gtk2::ImageView
• Gnome2::Wnck
• Goo::Canvas
• HTTP::Server::Simple
• HTTP::Response::Encoding
• X11::Protocol
• WWW::Mechanize

After extracting these, run the following commands one at a time:


perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
sudo make install


I ran into a couple other dependency issues which were satisfied by standard packages. Keep in mind that you need the development devel packages for the items it specifies, not just the libraries themselves. I also ignored warnings about having the wrong version of LWP.

In the end I was stopped by a bug that was saying it couldn’t connect to X11:

Connection to server failed -- (version 11.0)
No protocol specified

I found a forum post that spoke to this issue saying you need to enter xhost + before you run it, which deactivates X11′s security rules and allows Shutter to open in the display. I don’t yet understand why this is necessary. But after doing that, it ran. Screenshots work, but the ultra-nifty web snapshot feature didn’t seem to- no doubt there are other issues I need to figure out.

In the end, I’m glad it is partially working, but I find myself annoyed that a) Shutter isn’t included in openSUSE or b) that the openSUSE team could have at least provided packages for some of these things. At some point I hope I can learn to package and can offer an rpm of this.

In a previous post I offered a download of the fdi file I had to get the two finger scrolling working for the touchpad on my Macbook Pro in Ubuntu. openSUSE didn’t seem to recognize the fdi file at all. It seems that any mouse, keyboard, or monitor must be in the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file which openSUSE uses Sax2 to modify. I find Sax2 to be… inadequate. I do give it credit that it is the best X configuration tool I’ve ever used. It just isn’t as flexible as I need it to be.

Basically I took the fdi file and converted that file, which is XML, into instructions for X which I then embedded into the abovementioned xorg.conf file (after making a backup of course).

I replaced the InputDevice automatically inserted for the touchpad with:


Section "InputDevice"
Driver "synaptics"
Identifier "Touchpad"
Option "SHMConfig" "on"
Option "VertEdgeScroll" "off"
Option "HorizEdgeScroll" "off"
Option "VertTwoFingerScroll" "on"
Option "HorizTwoFingerScroll" "on"
Option "RTCornerButton" "off"
Option "RBCornerButton" "off"
Option "LBCornerButton" "off"
Option "LTCornerButton" "off"
Option "TapButton2" "3"
Option "TapButton3" "2"
Option "PalmDetect" "1"
EndSection


If you copy it in, make sure you replace the appropriate InputDevice name in the ServerLayout section of that file.