LXDE and Compiz - urggh

I enable Compiz and Emerald on my Centos 6.2 desktop at work. Didn't know what got into me but I then decided that Compiz would be awesome on my openSUSE 12.1 LXDE. After installing the necessary packages and changed the Windows Manager to Compiz from lxsessions-edit (Desktop Sessions Settings in GUI speak) I rebooted.

Logged in OK but quickly discovered that Windows' top panels were missing and no matter what I did, I could not type anything.

Argghhh....

Well edited ~/.config/lxsession/LXDE/desktop.conf  file and changed the window_manager = line back to openbox-lxde , logged out and in and all is well now...CLI roxx!

openSUSE 12.1 - Choppy Fullscreen Flash Playback

Been a fan of openSUSE on thing that always got on my nerves was the choppy full screen Flash playback on browsers. Fedora worked fine and so does Ubuntu - I mean openSUSE is awesome all round but WTF is wrong with it?

Well to reduce its choppiness - edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and on the kernel line remove quiet and vga=0x317.

The bootspalsh will be lost but the choppiness is gone. This has only been tested in Intel 915 chipsets. Can't guarantee that it'll work on others. but it is worth a shot.

Installing LibreOffice 3.5 on openSUSE 12.1

openSUSE 12.1 does not have LibreOffice 3.5 in any compatible repos. Being a PM LibreOffice is an indispensable tool to me and this being a still MS Office dominated world, I find that LibreOffice 3.5 has a slightly better compatibility with MSO than 3.4x.

The long and short of it , if you want LibreOffice 3.5 you gotta download from http://libreoffice.org extract the tarballs and install the RPMs. It installed fine and should work but then I encountered:


error while loading shared libraries: libpng12.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I had another WTF moment until after sometime I found out from an unrelated topic that you need to do a

zypper in libpng12-0 libpng14-14

And all was fine.