| |
Maintenance
SuSE discussion lists http://www.suse.com/en/support/mailinglists/
Software archives
Monitoring applications
- ntop
- top
- dstat (very cool -- just run it in a console in the background)
- gkrellm
- sensors
- munin
- gkrellm
Filesystem Hierarchy Standard
See http://www.pathname.com/fhs.
As a rule use /usr/local/' for normal freeware packages that you install
from tarball and compile yourself.
CheckInstall
This is a package that tracks your installed programs. See the review.
Here is the RPM.
Here is the home
site. This package will allow you to uninstall programs you installed
yourself, which appears to be hard to do otherwise.
Note that you may be able to uninstall a program by typing make uninstall
Fonts
Check
your browser
Manual tracking
You can also track installed files manually, using the following trick:
run find/* > CurrentState before and find/* > NewState after you
install the software, and use diff CurrentState New State > Installed
to get a list of what changed.
How to install a .bin file
Some programs, such as StarOffice, comes downloaded as a self-extracing
.bin file. To install it, open a console window and type chmod a+x <filename>.
What you're doing is changing the file to an executable.
How to manage rpm files. To find out which rpm files are installed,
use this command (substituting package name for ssh):
rpm -qa | grep ssh In this case, I get:
ssh-1.2.27-367
kssh-0.4-357
ssh-3.1.0-8
ssh-3.1.0-8 You can then uninstall these in a controlled fashion (which
you can't do in Packager if they have the same name):
rpm -e ssh-1.2.27-367 This just uninstalled, with no confirmation or errors.
rpm -e ssh-3.1.0-8 however, gave me an error: "ssh-3.1.0-8"
specifies multiple packages. So how do I remove two instances of the same
package? Like this: rpm -e --allmatches <package>
This is apparently in the man page, so that's one place to look! Well,
this still didn't work for me ("execution of ssh-3.1.0-8 script failed,
exit status 1"), but it may not be a problem. The old version at
any rate has been removed and the new one is working fine.
RPM dependency graph
"Following the spirit of the kernel schematics poster (http://slashdot.org/articles/01/02/07/1327226.shtml?tid=106),
I wrote a script that generates a diagram that depicts the rpm packages
installed in your system, along with their dependencies. You can find
more details and a download link at freshmeat (http://freshmeat.net/projects/rpmgraph/)."
How to set environment variables
How to set the windowmanager environment variable:
export WINDOWMANAGER=/usr/X11R6/bin/kde3
Expert complaints
SuSE 7.3 has several problems.
- I use a digital flat panel screen and NVidia card. Sax will not set
this up. In order to get it working, I had to manually set up the fbdev
framebuffer X server first. After getting the drivers from NVidia''s
site, I was able to switch to the accelerated nvidia driver. However,
Sax still won''t work -- it auto-detects my NV chipset and tries to
run the non-official nvidia X server, which doesn''t work with LCD screens.
It ignores the fact that X is already running with the correct server
and tries to run the incorrect server on top of it. It must be run from
the command line with the detect option turned off.
Sax should use a baseline compatible server like the one used when booting
off the CD, or like XF86Setup used to have, or leave the present working
one running.
- Every time I install new software with Yast 2, it redoes the config
and keeps changing my libGL.so links back to mesa soft. rc.config needs
to be changed by hand where it says SCRIPT_3D="switch2mesasoft"
- Someone else had the problem of Sax detecting the USB mouse, but
not writing it to the config file. Had to change it by hand. New users
would be USB-mouseless.
- Sound - artsd conflicts with things like xmms. Additionally, sometimes
Konqueror will hang if xmms is playing, as Konq tries to play a sound
or use the flash plugin, which requires /dev/dsp, locked by xmms There
are just too many sound conflicts, which someone new to Linux wouldn''t
know how to resolve. artsd should be off by default.
- Personal firewall - stops all incoming traffic by default while online.
Games like Quake won''t work. Turning it off didn''t work; had to change
the config file then reboot (there''s probably a way to do it without
rebooting, but it doesn''t say how). Yast2 should have a firewall setup
option.
- Kernel source - installed 2.4.10-4GB but the kernel binary is 2.4.10-64GB-
SMP. Trying to compile things like the new ALSA (since the included
version causes some programs, like Wolf MP test 2, to crash) results
in an incorrect kernel version error. Must run make menuconfig, change
options to match the binary given, and then make dep. The source should
ALWAYS match the installed kernel.
- Old libc5 compatibility libs not installed by default. Various packages
have names changed from previous SuSEs.
- If the firewall is turned off, you''ll now find that way too many
daemons are running on your system. New users shouldn''t have to know
about atd, lpd, sshd, cron, lisa, medusa, artsd, httpd, etc. which shouldn''t
be running unless explicitly enabled. Your system is open to the world
with several daemons that allow remote connections. Hosts.allow and
deny should have some useful default values (sshd is compiled to check
these, handily) and a graphical set-up.
- Too many things still require prior Linux knowledge in order to get
a working system, making it inaccessible to newbies. These are a bunch
of little things that could easily be fixed for SuSE 7.4. (sound, old
libs, links, sax, etc.).
On the plus side, it works on a bunch of systems that older distributions
didn''t like (PnP, USB) and put a nice DVD icon on the desktop.
I''ve used SuSE for years and it''s a great system if you know what
you''re doing. SuSE 7.3 has tons of goodies and almost makes it usable
for newbies. Source.
|
|
