SUSE Linux Administration Guide

This useful guide is slightly dated but is still relevant for the modern SUSE/openSUSE system.

Read it here.

19 hours of battery life

Heheh...sweet!!! If only it was true.

Ah well it just means that my notebook is newer than openSUSE 11.3's Power Management can work with.

Gotta see if Fedora 14 or Ubuntu 10.10 will have the same weirdness.

Firefox Pegging CPU cycles in SLED

Some users of SLED 11 SP1 have complained about Firefox consuming an inordinate amount of RAM.

From URL bar of Firefox, type about:config

1. Change 'browser.cache.memory.enable' from true to false
2. Add ‘browser.cache.memory.capacity’ as an integer, and set it to 4096.
3. Close and restart Firefox.

I have not tested the above on other distros so your mileage may vary.

Also check out this site.

Canon PIXMA MP258 with openSUSE 11.3 and Ubuntu

I bought one of those fancy all-in-one printer/scanner for my father recently. As a dyed to the core Geeko acolyte, naturally I installed openSUSE 11.3 on his new Dell Inspiron.

Goggling yielded no definitive results for openSUSE and MP258. Instead I found an excellent how-to for Ubuntu, RPM-based distros and Arch Linux (32-bit) here. I tried the excellent but lengthy instructions on my Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and it worked fabulously. Note, you gotta have good and stable Internet connection for Ubuntu 10.04 as it will require getting some additional packages and accessing a git repo.

For openSUSE 11.3:

1. Install libpng12 (zypper in libpng12)
   
2. Download and install the RPMs for both the scanner and printer functions. Note that each tarball has 4 files, two each for 32 and 64 bits; choose the correct one for your platform.
   
3. Goto Yast -> Hardware -> Printers to check for correct printer installed
4. Goto Yast -> Hardware -> Scanner to select the one with the word PIXMA.
5. Good to go!

Next stop, trying it on my SLED 11 SP1 64-bit.

Eric

Speeding up/Tuning Ext3

A nice tutorial on how to tune your ext3. Though it was written with openSUSE in mind, the principles are the same across distros.

Zypper Cheat sheet

Zypper the CLI to the Zypp package manager in the openSUSE and SUSE Enterprise distros has a downloadable cheat sheet.

You can download wither the US Letter or A4 sized PDFs at http://old-en.opensuse.org/Zypper/Usage#Cheat_sheet

Packman Repo for SLE 11 SP1

Finally Packman has an "essential" (i.e. restricted stuff) repo for SLED/SLES 11 SP1.

For the SUSE world Packman has always been the repo for the sweet restricted codecs.

To add the repo:

zypper ar -f http://packman.inode.at/suse/sle_11_sp1/ Packman_SLE