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

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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.

One annoying thing following a normal disc-based install is that that disc is your base repository. Occasionally, when you’re installing software it will prompt you to insert it. This is not new- I remember the same thing when I used Suse 9 a while back.

Solve it by simply copying the contents of the disc to a folder on your computer. Then open ‘Software Repositories’ and add a ‘Local Folder’ type pointing at that directory.

Firefox was driving me crazy- I open tabs most of the time with CTRL + click and even though the option to open the tab right away isn’t checked that’s what it does. Happily, I just found this note with a tip on making Firefox open tabs in the background:

In order to force all links that open in a new window to load in a background tab, type about:config in the URL bar and change browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground to true.

I had followed a link into the Tombuntu site and by coincidence ran into this post which completely explains what to do about a problem I ran into yesterday. Yay! Looks like this site is a keeper.

For some reason, early on, when I booted up I had an error about resolvconf in the list of startup processes. I found a post about resolvconf errors that said that for some reason it gets installed without needing to be and can safely be removed.

If you some errors surrounding /etc/resolvconf (not the same as /etc/resolv.conf I think) you might think about removing it and see if that solves it. It did for me.