User:Xenmaster

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Revision as of 10:51, 13 June 2006

Various instructions and considerations: Welcome

You are now at Xen Master's personal openSUSE 'making life easier' page. In here I will try to describe the configuration steps I performed, and what I did to get around limitations imposed by law. The most commonly used file format for audio playback (MP3) is not free of patents and therefore not included in openSUSE. So, you have to get it yourself, after installing openSUSE. This is not at all difficult.

I am a fan though of openSUSE. It has somewhat more of a Debian vibe to me in that it is free to download and is more or less a 'community' project. Anyway, SUSE provides a good set of configuration tools. Nevertheless, I think the SUSE ppl are not good at graphical design, just like the KDE ppl. I've done by best to get rid of the pretentious nicety that covers the desktop like a thin layer of oil, but I have failed miserably and the GNOME desktop is just (from what I've experienced with the GNOME openSUSE offers by default) a long walk from the functionality I have grown accustomed to in KDE. GNOME looks nice though; the GNOME ppl seem to understand attractiveness. But its configuration dialogs are lacking in scope while abundant with oversized icons that make you feel as if they try to hide the real options from vision. I feel disabled when I try to use them and get the looks I want. Or just nice panels and overall functionality. Too bad, in my opinion. GNOME's 'air' is better. It feels like ppl who go for purity and just overall quality. KDE, on the other hand, is a lot more like Microsoft: just boost features and a LOT of functionality, though not enough thought is spent on the 'feel' of it all, in my opinion. If it's done, and it works, great! Don't worry at the overall picture, as long as everything works together. That's KDE, to me. It's a lot different from MacOS X, for example, in that respect. It's about user experience. It's the difference between good and great. Well, perhaps I still need to try GNUstep or Blackbox (?) to get some really nice look, but I doubt I'd see the same level of functionality as in KDE. See [1] for a good discussion. But, anyway, the user interface in KDE/SUSE is generally good, a lot of features work very intuitively, the start menu tree is organized and a powerful starting point, there are good system-wide design choices such as the KNotify system. Further more, it is really nice to be able to configure individual windows to e.g. skip the taskbar and have those settings remembered and simple 'keep on top' functionality is covered as well. Session support is great, the Konsole works great although its configuration dialogs are just plain bad, the panel is nicely configurable, fonts and styles can be easily changed (although the relationship with themes is rather unclear) and Klipper is a must-have (although I still believe the Linux copy & paste system is just plain bad and confusing). AmaroK, the KDE media player, I find without any elegancy. Features are pushed right into your face, with you, the user, confused as to get what you actually wanted to get. Fonts are too big. I'll need to get used to it, if I keep on using it. Oh, one caveat: the help system SUCKS. It is not for finding information. It is for being there. KDE adepts never use it, I believe (?) :). You cannot even search it, or just browse the information of the application you requested, no, you have to see the entire help system. You better search the internet before trying the KDE help system. Well, this is it for now. More experiences and strong opinions to be added :).

This then was the introduction. Below you will find a quick tutorial on installing things and getting the most needed functionality running, if it's not done automatically by the openSUSE installation. These pages will eventually make it to my own homepage. Be free to modify this here but chances are I will roll back silly changes. Have fun, or at least a sense of lightness when you read below words.

You can reach me at suse at bart. ahum.nl but without the space. Greetings,

Bart

Installation instructions

I've written some installation instructions that make use of Apt to install new packages but hey are 'currently' outdated so to say. This is because the Apt source, gwdg.de, is not always as fast... This may or may not be the case. Anyway, using Apt is not mandatory at all, but you may still find its instructions here

This is what I did to install and configure my system.

Packages

You generally need (or may want) these extra packages, in addition to those you already installed:

• Realplayer, amarok-helix, amarok-helix-backend for mp3 playback ability
• acroread for extended Acrobat Reader PDF support. note that KPdf is also excellent and fast but may fail to print properly
• java-1_5_0-sun, java-1_5_0-sun-alsa for the newest Java runtime engines (for running java applications)
• java-1_5_0-sun-devel, java-1_5_0-sun-jdbc for developing Java applications (the J2SDK).
• java3d-re to be able to run java3d applications. Downloaded it from: http://www.blackdown.org/java-linux/java2-status/java-3d-status.html
• kernel-default-nongpl if you need wireless networking support. (it uses some code that is not licensed under the GPL, but that's not important at all). It may be good for other things as well.
• gtk-qt-engine which is a GTK-style Engine for Use with Qt Plugins and Settings: gives GTK apps (those written for GNOME) a Qt look in KDE (because you can use them in KDE as well).
• w32codecs if you want to play video files that normally do play on Windows but fail on Linux. It will give you more audio and video codecs for use by Kaffeine (Xine) and/or MPlayer (two video players; MPlayer is not distributed by openSUSE). This is normally not installable using YaST. See http://www.mplayerhq.hu/ for more details and/or http://fr2.rpmfind.net/ for a download link.
• libmpg123.so if you want to use XMMS or Rhythmbox to play mp3 files. See below for instructions.

Installation

These packages can be downloaded and installed via YaST. You may use the package y2pmsh for a command line interface to the YaST package manager.

You need to add extra sources for package downloading in the "Installation Source" YaST-module, but you can also visit the links below in Konqueror and then right-click the window in some empty space and choose Actions::Add directory as YaST source. If you're using YaST directly, make sure to separate the protocol (ftp/http), the server (ftp.mirror.nl) and the path (the rest). You have to add each to its dedicated field.. These are my sources:

ftp://ftp.nl.uu.net/pub/linux/suse/i386/10.0/inst-source-extra/
ftp://ftp.belnet.be/mirror/ftp.opensuse.org/opensuse/distribution/SL-10.0-OSS/inst-source/
ftp://ftp.skynet.be/pub/ftp.opensuse.org/opensuse/distribution/SL-10.0-OSS/inst-source/
ftp://ftp.skynet.be/pub/ftp.opensuse.org/opensuse/distribution/SL-10.0-OSS/inst-source-java/

This way, you have access to the Base distribution, to Extra and to Java.

Next, enter YaST::Manage Software and search and install the packages you want.

MP3 support for XMMS

To enable MP3 support for XMMS you need to have the file libmpg123.so. It normally comes with the XMMS installation, but not with openSUSE due to legal issues. You can obtain it by downloading either

1. an XMMS RPM from http://www.xmms.org
2. http://www.osnews.com/files/xmms-mp3-fc1.tar.gz

If you do the latter, which is easy, install it like this:

1. download the file
2. execute these commands:

$ tar xvzf xmms-mp3-fc1.tar.gz
$ su (enter root passwd here)
# cp xmms-mp3-fc1/libmpg123.so /usr/lib/xmms/Input
# exit
$ rm -rf xmms-mp3-fc1/

1. done!

This will copy the libmpg123.so to your xmms plugin directory. See also [2]. An alternative way is to just download an RPM package from http://www.xmms.org.

Configuration

• run amarok and select Tools::Configure amaroK::Engine to select the Helix engine instead of the Xine engine! This way, you'll have mp3 support in amaroK.
• if you've installed Mozilla Firefox, the nice and fast webbrowser, you can make it faster (or so I've read [3]) by disabling ipv6 support in some way:

"FIREFOX Browser -- taking AGES to get to sites -- KONQUEROR was faster -- so changed setting -- go into FIREFOX browser and enter about :config in the url bar (address) go to Network and change disable ipv6 from FALSE to TRUE (right mouse click and toggle). --Note this does not stop access to IPV6 sites."

Random Tips

Ignoring Dependencies in Apt

From time to time you'll want to be able to install a package that requires certain libraries that you either don't have or you have some other version. In any case, you don't fuckin care. Apt is very stringent about depencies and installing such a package using rpm -iv --nodeps package_name.rpm will cause Apt to stop working entirely. You can get around this by editing the file /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/apt.conf. You can insert Fake-Provides statements like this in the RPM section.

RPM
{
   Fake-Provides { "libtheora.so.0(libtheora.so.1.0)"};
   Fake-Provides { "libcrypto.so.4" };
}

Notice that these are both filenames and that you need to supply the exact phrase the complaining package gives you. Of course, you would normally enter package names there instead of file names. In this case, I needed libtheora.so.0(libtheora.so.1.0) for mplayer and mplayer-gui which I downloaded from [4]. I also downloaded the latest version of libtheora and compiled it myself, but no libtheora.so.1.0 did I get. So, I said: fuck you mplayer (or: RPM), just fuckin' install yourself. And I did (using rpm -i --nodeps <packagename>), and it worked fine, but I then needed to add these and other Fake-Provides to have Apt still work.

Xenmaster

Removed a comment by AdrianSuSE 14:15, 23 Oct 2005 (MDT) because it was no longer relevant.

Dear Xenmaster, Thankyou very much for your contribution to opensuse documentation, even though you seem to think that it is someone else's job. You seem to be very well informed and it is certainly great to get help solving these problems. It is also really interesting to read you opinions and it is, for me, very helpful to here other's ideas.

I to am very disappointed about the exclusions that linux users like myself have to deal with. It does not stop at the things you just mentioned. I have often needed to learn about work-arounds because of company policies that lock people out of what are now important technologies. SUSE has not done this. In fact they have offer to me a poor student, and anyone who cares for it, a point to access their distro for free. I think this is beneficial for them from a business point of view but that does not diminish the value of opensuse or the importance of Novell's contribution.

So they need to negotiate a great deal in being a company with legal responsibilities and delivering their version of linux free of charge. A part of this is to offer the opportunity for the users of opensuse a forum where we can help each other by directing users to methods and tools that they are perhaps inhibited from referring to directly themselves. Still it is said and we can all get about our business and lives.

While I agree with many of your comments, such as that the help system could be improved, I can not help but feel offended by you writing about intelligence and pointing blame where it adds nothing. It doesn't even carry meaning since I no that even the worst of decisions in this world are made not by lack of intelligence but by other factors. I also know that you can not be considered a judge of intelligence.

Also I really appreciate your comments on gnome and kde. Please keep talking, but I dont think it is fair for you to be referring to your respondants as Mr Studid or marring, what is generally ok writing, with meaningless blame and banter.

danieljames626

Dear Daniel,

I have cleansed my writing of foul language. Thank you for your comments.