Release Notes for SUSE LINUX 9.3 These release notes cover the following areas: * General: Information that everybody should read. * Update: Changes that are not mentioned in the Administration Guide, Chapter 4. * Installation: Additional pertinent information for installation. * Technical: This section contains a number of technical changes and enhancements for the experienced user. In the Administration Guide, find information about installation and system configuration. In the User Guide, the desktop in general and the most important applications are explained. General 1. [1]OpenOffice.org (OO.o) 2. [2]XView and OpenLook Support Dropped 3. [3]KDE Online and Offline Modes 4. [4]Beagle Desktop Search Tool 5. [5]The tar Syntax is More Strict 6. [6]Indian Fonts Included 7. [7]Improving Suspend to Disk Performance 8. [8]New GeForce Graphics Cards (6200 and 6600) and the nv Driver 9. [9]WLAN Devices Are User Configurable 10. [10]Epson Kowa's Image Scan Software for Epson Scanners Update 1. [11]Switching from Heimdal to MIT Kerberos Installation 1. [12]Mounting Encrypted Partitions Technical 1. [13]SATA CD and DVD Devices (ROMs and Writers) 2. [14]JFS: Not Supported Anymore 3. [15]Loading Kernel Module "dazuko" 4. [16]Laptop and External VGA Output 5. [17]Host Name Change with KDE Auto Login 6. [18]Suspend to Disk on SMP and HT Based Machines 7. [19]Wget No Longer LFS Capable _________________________________________________________________ General OpenOffice.org (OO.o) This is a 2.0 prerelease. Once the official 2.0 release is out, we will offer an update via the YaST Online Update (YOU). * Impress has a new rendering canvas. This is not yet used for editing, but it is used for the slide show. There may be small differences between what you edit and what you see in the slide show. Verify your presentation before use. * Multimedia--Because we are missing the Java Media Framework, required for video and sound playback, OO.o will not function in this regard. The relevant menu items have been removed from the default configuration. * The old StarOffice format (5.x) is no longer supported. XView and OpenLook Support Dropped The packages "xview", "xview-devel", "xview-devel-examples", "olvwm", and "xtoolpl" were dropped. In the past, we just provided the XView (OpenLook) base system. The XView libraries are no longer provided after the system update. This may cause problems with applications installed from other sources that expect them. Even more important, OLVWM (OpenLook Virtual Window Manager) is no longer available. Choose another window manager. KDE Online and Offline Modes SUSE's KDE 3.4 has a desktopwide offline mode for use when the computer is disconnected from the network. When the desktop is offline, applications do not attempt to make network connections and work using cached data where possible. Applications that already use this feature include * Konqueror (http) * Kontact (POP and disconnected IMAP mail, SLOX and GroupWise groupware) * Kopete (GroupWise instant messaging) KInternet, the SUSE network utility, manages offline mode. You do not need to set the applications into offline mode--when a modem, ISDN, DSL, LAN or WLAN connection is present, applications detect this and work as normal. This feature is disabled by default. To enable it check "Switch KDE Network" in KInternet->Settings->Various Settings->Scripts. If this is unchecked or KInternet is not running, offline mode is disabled. Beagle Desktop Search Tool The Beagle Desktop Search Tool has not been enabled to run by default. For users who want Beagle to run automatically when starting GNOME sessions, run "touch .runbeagle" in the $HOME directory. When GNOME sessions are started with the ~/.runbeagle file present, beagled (beagle daemon) and the Beagle search utility are run automatically. Under KDE, start the Beagle daemon beagled manually then start the search utility with best (or select System->File System->Beagle Search from the menu). The Beagle search utility then appears in your system tray. To enable Beagle in Firefox, the plug-in must be installed with the Firefox extension manager for each user: Select File->Open File, select beagle.xpi (from /opt/MozillaFirefox/lib/chrome/beagle.xpi), then click Open and finally Install now. Beagle is an alpha version. It only works on file systems that are mounted with "user_xattr". It does not work with network mounted file systems like NFS. The tar Syntax is More Strict The tar usage syntax is more strict now. The tar options must come before the file or directory specifications. Appending options like --atime-preserve or --numeric-owner after the file or directory specification will make tar fail. Check your backup scripts--commands as the following will not work anymore: tar czf etc.tar.gz /etc --atime-preserve See the tar Info pages for more information. Indian Fonts Included Fonts for the following nine Indian languages are included: Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali, Kannada, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam. Select "Bengali" or "Punjabi" as a secondary language in YaST (System->Language Selection) for the indic-fonts package to be installed. Improving Suspend to Disk Performance If you are not using an ext2 or ext3 file system for the root partition, having a separate /boot partition with ext2 can greatly improve the performance of suspend to disk and the resume of the system. /boot can be very small. 50 MB is enough. New GeForce Graphics Cards (6200 and 6600) and the nv Driver Currently, some GeForce 6200 and 6600 cards are configured with Option "XaaNoScreenToScreenCopy" in the device section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Because this setting slows down graphics output considerably, you can try to remove or comment this option. However, this locks up some systems and you must boot your computer into runlevel 3 to revert the change. We cannot distinguish automatically between graphics cards that work with acceleration and those that do not. We set this option only for cards we were able to test and suffered from this problem. Other GeForce 6200 and 6600 based boards might be affected as well. If your system locks up and you do not see this option in the device section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf, try adding it. Another option is to install the binary-only driver from nVidia, which does not seem to be affected. Use YaST Online Update (YOU) for this. WLAN Devices Are User Configurable WLAN devices are user configurable. KInternet controls them by default now. Users who want to use WLAN and standard ethernet devices for their Internet connection should switch to ifplugd to get a working default route automatically. You can change this in the network configuration (Advanced->Detailed Settings) by selecting On Cable Connection in "Device Activation". Epson Kowa's Image Scan Software for Epson Scanners The following scanners require the Image Scan front-end (iscan): Epson Perfection 1250 / 1250 PHOTO, 1260 / 1260 PHOTO, 3170 PHOTO, 4180 PHOTO, GT-7200U, GT-7300U, GT-9400, GT-F600. Other scanner front-ends, like kooka, xsane, xscanimage, and scanimage, may not work. Those scanners can be set up with YaST by activating the epkowa driver but as a side-effect the scanners cannot be recognized as "active scanners" by YaST. Update Switching from Heimdal to MIT Kerberos Kerberos is now the default for network authentication instead of heimdal. Converting an existing Heimdal configuration automatically is not always possible. During a system update, backup copies of configuration files are created in /etc with the suffix .heimdal. YaST-generated configuration settings in /etc/krb5.conf will be converted, but check whether the results match your expectations. Before starting the update to 9.3, you can decrypt an existing Heimdal database into a human-readable file with the command kadmin -l dump -d heimdal-db.txt. This way, you can create a list of available principals that you can restore one-by-one using kdc from MIT Kerberos. Find more information about setting up a KDC in the documentation in the "krb5-doc" package. To configure a Kerberos client, start the YaST Kerberos Client module and enter your values for "Standard Domain", "Standard Realm", and "KDC Server Address". Installation The installation is described in the Administration Guide. Mounting Encrypted Partitions Now the mechanism for encrypting file systems (boot.crypto) distinguishes between several "twofish" algorithms. For twofish the kernel module loop_fish2 is used. For twofish128, twofish160, twofish192 and twofish256 the kernel modules cryptoloop and twofish are used. The default for a new encrypted partitions is twofish256. If you want to mount encrypted partitions already created on previous SUSE LINUX systems on a fresh installation of SUSE LINUX 9.3, you must change the encryption type in /etc/cryptotab or /etc/fstab from twofish256 to twofish. Technical SATA CD and DVD Devices (ROMs and Writers) The Linux kernel driver support for these devices is experimental. To activate CD-ROM SATA support on the desktop remove these lines in /usr/share/hal/fdi/90defaultpolicy/storage-policy.fdi: false JFS: Not Supported Anymore Due to technical problems with JFS it is not supported anymore. The kernel file system driver is still there, but YaST will not offer partitioning with JFS. Loading Kernel Module "dazuko" If the kernel module "dazuko" (necessary for antivir) fails to load with the message "unsupported module, tainting kernel", make sure that it will be loaded before the capability module. See README.SuSE of the antivir package for more information. Laptop and External VGA Output If you have a laptop with an integrated Intel, NVIDIA, or ATI chipset, you can use the laptop profile to statically activate the external output used to connect, for example, to a beamer. It will always be driven with 60Hz and the same resolution as the internal display, which can be switched with "krandrtray" or the "resapplet" during runtime. See /usr/share/doc/packages/sax2/README.profile for more information. Host Name Change with KDE Auto Login If you use to work in different network environments with auto login enabled, host name setting problems may occur and, as a consequence, starting graphical applications fails. By default, DHCP is used to set up the host name. To avoid these race conditions, disable "earlykdm" as root with the command chkconfig -d earlykdm and restart X. Suspend to Disk on SMP and HT Based Machines Suspend to disk has problems on SMP machines and on machines using Intel Pentium 4 processors with HyperThreading technology. A workaround for the HT machines is to use the default (non-smp) kernel--but then hyperthreading is disabled. Wget No Longer LFS Capable Because the Wget CVS snapshot with LFS support has too many issues, we are forced to go back to wget 1.9.1, which is stable, but still lacks LFS support. 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