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.

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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).

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.

Since installing Ubuntu on my MacBook Pro I have been stuck (when I’m away from my wireless Mighty Mouse which works flawlessly by the way) with clicking F12 to get the context, or right-click, menu. This is very lame. So a couple days ago I took a minute and checked how to at least get CTRL+click working.

To my joy, I found an even better solution in the Ubuntu wiki. You just have to put the following file in /etc/hal/fdi/policy/

macbook_touchpad.fdi

To right-click, tap two fingers. Also supported are two finger dragging to scroll as well as a few other things.