After 8 months of work openSUSE 11.4 has been released last week!
This has been celebrated with release parties all around the world.
As usual, the new release comes with the latest kernel,
LibreOffice, Gnome and KDE packages.
In Nuremberg, we celebrated the release with a party at the Artefakt bar, and had the fabulous Ukulele Insanity playing live.
Althogh the release is considered a very good one by many press and user reviews, I had some small problems after upgrading to it and want to share with you how I solved those:
Networkmanager:
After suspending and waking up my notebook, the kde networkmanager always deactivated the network. From /var/log/NetworkManager:
NetworkManager[2960]: (wlan0): deactivating device (reason: 2).
NetworkManager[2960]: (wlan0): supplicant interface state: starting -> ready
NetworkManager[2960]: (wlan0): device state change: 2 -> 3 (reason 42)<>
I found out, that for KDE 4.5 or later it is recommended to switch from using KNetworkManager to using the Networkmanagement Plasmoid instead. This is done by:
zypper in plasmoid-networkmanagement and allowing the removal of NetworkManager-kde4
Crypto partitions:
I am using a crypted home partition since a long time, and this was configured in /etc/cryptotab and enabled during boot in /etc/init.d/boot.crypto until the upgrade.
With the recent release this changed to /etc/crypttab and gets enabled in /etc/init.d/boot.crypto-early. To convert it, I changed my old cryptotab entry:
/dev/loop /dev/sda6 /home/tom ext4 twofish256 noatime,acl,user_xattr
to
cr_sda6 /dev/sda6 none cipher=twofish-cbc-plain,size=256,hash=sha512
in /etc/crypttab and added to /etc/fstab:
/dev/mapper/cr_sda6 /home/tom ext4 noatime,acl,user_xattr
Beeping X:
I think it’s highly annoying that X makes a load beep sound when killing it by ctrl+alt+delete. To turn this off, just add a file named /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-disable-beep.conf with this content:
Section "ServerFlags" Option "ZapWarning" "off" EndSection
Iscan – udev rules change
The package iscan (Image Scan) from epson uses a deprecated syntax for it’s udev rules so that the
startup log gets spammed with lots of warnings. To fix it just run:
sudo sed -i -e “s:SYSFS:ATTRS:g” /etc/udev/rules.d/60_iscan.rules
Screen resolution:
Somehow it seems the screen of my T60p gets detected incorrectly:
xdpyinfo | grep resolution returns a resolution of 96×96 dots per inch, but for my taste everything gets rendered too small. So I helped myself by running:
xrandr --dpi 120 systemsettings - application appearance - fonts - force 120 dpi
on startup. Although I’m quite sure this is not the elegant way of solving this 