Suse & OpenSuse Tips » desktop

OpenSuse 11.2 is ready for release

admin — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 12:13:49 +0000

The much anticipated OpenSUSE 11.2 is scheduled for the final release in November. The last milestone for OpenSUSE was the OpenSUSE 11.2 Milestone 8 (M8) which features numerous bug fixes, Linux kernel 2.6.31, improved partioning, social networking clients, and new versions of packages including GNOME 2.28, says the project.

OpenSUSE which was launched in 2005 by Novell as a community version of SUSE Linux, had its last major release in June 2008 with version 11.0, which was issued in final form in June 2008. Version 11.0 featured 200 new features, a redesigned installer, KDE 4.0, GNOME 2.2.2, and the Compiz Fusion 3D window manager.

OpenSUSE 11.2 offers partitioning and filesystems enhancements, as well as the coronation of ext4 as the default file system, and early support for the Btrfs filesystem. Other OpenSUSE improvements include interface enhancements to the YaST partioner interface, improved package management and mirror handling, and Zypper command line enhancements. Besides that, OpenSUSE 11.2 also offers improved social networking clients, with GNOME’s Gwibber supporting Facebook, Twitter and Identi.ca., and KDE’s Choqok client supporting Twitter and Identi.ca.

OpenSUSE 11.2 Milestone 8 is available to download for 32 and 64 bit x86 systems as a DVD or LiveCD image, here, with the final release expected in November 2009.

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OpenSuse 11.2 is ready for release

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Short and quick tutorial for the command “touch”

admin — Wed, 06 May 2009 05:19:12 +0000

The touch command is typically used for 2 purposes, to create a new file and to modify the access and modification times of the file. If the file already exist, it will update the both the access and modification times of the file and if it does not exist, it will create a new file. The latter is probably the most common usage of the command.

For example, to update the access and modification time stamp on a file to the current time;

# touch helloworld.c

You can also use a specific time by using the –t option or just modify either the access or modification time only, using the –a and –m options respectively.

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Short and quick tutorial for the command “touch”

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Using command output with backquotes

admin — Wed, 06 May 2009 03:43:32 +0000

The backquote (`), which is quite alien to most Windows users, is the key just below the top left hand side ESC key on your keyboard. This is a useful key to use when you want to use the standard output of a UNIX/LINUX command as part of another command.

For example, if you want to output the results of an addition.

# expr 10 + 42
# 52

If you would like to make it fancier,

# echo “The sum is `expr 10 + 42`”
The sum is 52

Note the backquotes (in red).

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Using command output with backquotes

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How to create shortcuts on Gnome desktop

admin — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 01:51:28 +0000

Shortcuts on Linux is known as soft links and traditionally, this can be achieved by using the “ln –s” command and option. You can also achieve this on the Gnome desktop using the mouse only. However, unlike the Windows way to create a shortcut where you right click on the folder/file and near the bottom of the list there is the option to “Create Shortcut”.

In Gnome, the middle mouse button is used for this purposes (if you have a mouse that’s only 2 buttons, you can generally click on both to simulate the middle mouse button). As an example, OpenSuSE and SuSE both automatically mounts the Windows partition and assuming that you want to create a shortcut to these Windows partition on your desktop, you first select the Windows partition (as above).

Click (using the middle mouse button) and drag the mounted Windows directory to your desktop. Release the mouse button and select the “Link Here” option.

The shortcut to your selected Windows partition will be on your desktop.

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How to create shortcuts on Gnome desktop

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Customizing Gnome Terminal fonts and colors

admin — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 02:30:22 +0000

By default, most SuSE and OpenSuse distribution selects Gnome as the window manager, KDE being the other option. Under Gnome, the terminal application is called the Gnome Terminal which has a better look and feel than the plain Terminal application (which is also available). The default size of the terminal may be too small for some of us, especially those who are using really large screens with very fine resolution.

To change the font and color settings, go to the “Edit” menu and select “Profile Preferences”.

You can deselect the “Use the system fixed width font” and click on the font selection “Monospace | 12”, to change the font size to whatever is suitable. The changes are instant and you can actually see it when you are selecting it.

To change the color combination, select the tab “Colors” (3rd tab on top). You need to de-select the “Use colors from system theme” and my personal preference for the moment is to have bright green text on a black background.

The screen above is from a 22” wide screen LCD. By enlarging the fonts and also matching the colors makes it easier to work.

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Customizing Gnome Terminal fonts and colors

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Adding applications to “Favorites Applications”

admin — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 02:19:43 +0000

Having your regularly used applications on the Start Menu under the “Favorites Applications” section will come in handy as it will enable you to quickly launch the application. You can also create shortcuts (or technically speaking, links) on your Desktop to your favorite applications but some of us prefer a cleaner desktop.

To add an application to your “Favorite Applications” section of the start menu, select the application. You can use the “More Applications…” button on the start menu to select it.

Once you have identified the application that you regularly use, right click on the icon and select “Add to Favorites”. It’s as simple as that.

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Adding applications to “Favorites Applications”

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Short and quick tutorial for the command “find”

admin — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 06:30:15 +0000

We can learn about commands in Linux using the manpages, for example, to learn how to use the find command, we can just do

# man 1 find

However, this means we need to read the long manual and generally most of us are somewhat impatient. We will give short and quick tutorials on the common usage of the commands.

The find command is to search for files, directories, pipes, sockets, devices (anything that is defined as files in Linux) in the system. The quickest tutorial is

# find / –name

The ‘/’ tells the command to search from the root directory, another common variable here is ‘.’, which means to search from this directory onwards.

The ‘-name ’ specifies the file that you want to look for, e.g. proposal.txt as the filename.

That’s the shortest tutorial we can think of for “find”. For more advance stuff, “man 1 find”.

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Short and quick tutorial for the command “find”

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How to install OpenOffice.org in SLES from a SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop ISO file

admin — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 02:41:02 +0000

After installing SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 (SLES 11), there are some packages that may be required that’s not on the SLES 11 DVD but is available from the SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 (SLED 11) DVD. One such example is OpenOffice.org.

If you already have the SLED DVD, you can install from it by adding the SLED DVD as a new repository. If you don’t, you can download the ISO image from Novell.

Once downloaded, you need to;

Start Yast –> Software Manager
Ctrl-R or go to Configuration –> Repositories
Click on “Add” and select “Local ISO image …”
Key in the location of the ISO image, agree to the license agreement and you will have it included in your repository
Search for “openoffice” and select “OpenOffice_org”. Click on “Accept” and it will install accordingly.
You will have it installed on your system. Go to your start menu, click on “Application”, you will find OpenOffice.org application icons.

Good luck!

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How to install OpenOffice.org in SLES from a SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop ISO file

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How to remove corrupted .gvfs directory

admin — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 07:45:37 +0000

The .gvfs directory found in home directories of users is actually the GnomeVFS (Gnome Virtual File System). This provides seamless and uniform access for the Nautilus file manager to users data no matter where and how it is stored. Data can be stored on a remote mounted file system, the local disk, a USB drive or a digital camera and from the user’s perspective, it is the same.

However, you may get a permission denied when accessing this directory (this is a bug). And even as a superuser/root, you will not be able to enter, delete or change permissions of the directory. When listing the home directory, you will get

d????????? ? ? ? ? ? .gvfs

Some applications will fail to execute and you are stuck! Well, the .gvfs is a filesystem, so you can umount it!

umount /home//.gvfs
rm –r /home//.gvfs

You may not want to remove it but once you un-mount it, this should be a safe thing to do (as long as you never had a directory by that name before) but you may want to just check on it.

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How to remove corrupted .gvfs directory

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Manually Starting and Stopping Services in Suse/OpenSuse

admin — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 11:50:32 +0000

YaST provides a extremely easy way for system administrators to manage which services run at boot. The YaST Runlevel Editor module is easy to understand and gives you important information about each service. You can choose to start or stop a process with nothing more than a mouse click.

To view what are the what services that are currently running, you can open the Runlevel Editor module from the YaST System page. It will display a list of all the available services. If you change the configuration file for a particular service, you usually have to stop and restart the service to use the new configuration. For example, when making changes to the X server, it is often worthwhile to change from Runlevel 5 to Runlevel 3 to test the changes, then switch back to re-enable the display manager. This way, if you make a mistake, you can fix it and get it right without having to reboot every time.

e.g. To stop, start, or restart any service, open a shell as the SuperUser. To see if your ALSA sound server is running, type the following:

/etc/init.d/alsasound status

The script will report its status. It should report

ALSA sound driver loaded.             running

To stop and restart the service, type

/etc/init.d/alsasound restart

and the following should appear:

Shutting down sound driver               done

Starting sound driver:  via82xx          done

Restoring the previous sound setting     done

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Manually Starting and Stopping Services in Suse/OpenSuse

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How to Burn ISO image onto CD / DVD

admin — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 12:56:29 +0000

Often you may download some applications from the Internet that is stored as ISO image file. An ISO image is an archive file (also known as a disk image) of an optical disc in a format defined by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). So here is a simple tip on how to burn ISO image onto your CD/DVD.

First, insert a blank CD/DVD into your drive, the file manager will automatically appear. Navigate in the file manager and find the ISO image file that you want to burn onto the CD/DVD. Drag and drop the image file to the blank DVD-ROM (or CD-ROM) disk.

You will be asked whether you want to “Create From Image” or “Create With File”. The “Create With File” option will basically copy the files found in the image into the CD/DVD whilst the “Create From Image” will map the whole image file onto the CD/DVD. Choose the “Create From Image”.

A new dialog box will appear, just select “Write” and let it proceed.

It will take some time to complete and once it has completed, a new message box will appear. Select “Close”. Voila!, just a few simple steps.

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How to Burn ISO image onto CD / DVD

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Open Special Locations in Nautilus with URI

admin — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 02:51:24 +0000

For Linux, the official file manager for the GNOME desktop is Nautilus. In case you wondering the origin for Nautilus, it is a play on words. By evoking the shell of a nautilus to represent an operating system shell. Nautilus replaced Midnight Commander in GNOME 1.4 and was the default from version 2.0 onwards.

There are many ways to open an application in Nautilus. However, here’s a simple tip that you might not know. You can open special locations in Nautilus by entering the URI in the location bar. An Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) is a string of characters used to identify or name a resource on the Internet. You can invoke the location bar by using the keyboard shortcut key Ctrl+L.

For example, if you would like to show Computer and lists the disk partitions, you can type in computer:///. Similarly, you can try the following special location URIs :

network:/// to show the network locations
burn:/// to see the inbuilt CD application
fonts:/// to list the fonts installed on the system
burn:/// to open the CD Writing Window.
themes:/// to list the themes available for the Gnome Desktop
system-settings:/// to give access to system settings.

These URIs can be handy and it could be a time saver indeed.

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Open Special Locations in Nautilus with URI

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