Just a few observation/glitches…, before I get time to complete “War and Peace” … or rather "A Rambling Ramble Vols 2 and 3
I install 11.2. At first Firefox was crashing after about 5 seconds… seems to have solved itself (?)
There is an icon in panel for “widget dashboard”, this turns screen dark/transparent with another button at top, clicking on this seems to close whatever was supposed to be open. What is it and what is wrong?
I eventually managed to copy my /home/stephen folder from 11.1. I renamed the new “/home” to bakhome, and renamed the new copy to /home/stephen… fail! would not start, (?kde4init). So I went back… How should I have done this?
I would like to get my firefox profiles and bookmarks on the new install, How do I?, Also kmail setttings etc…
plasma-desktop uses 30% 40% of CPU & everything seems slowish, is this normal? Computer is not super powerful, but…
I had an awful job getting sound to work, now solved by downloading codecs from packman, and adding myself to a audio user group, is there a better way?,
Yast/zypper downloads were all foobarred, eventuallly had to rpm rebuilddb, this seems not to be very widely documented problem…
seems to be a delay before my wireless networking gets connected, so firefox tabs left open from previous session go to “not found” and weather widget times out
Having to add one’s self to group audio is unusual. If it is for certain this was needed, and if it were me, I would write a bug report on 11.2 sound component.
Download codecs from packman is standard, and takes less than 5 minutes once one is familiar with the routine. As soon as one has internet after a fresh install, the first thing I do is add packman repos to my other 3 repos (OSS, Non-OSS, and Update) and then install the necessary codecs: libffmpeg/ffmpeg (pick up codecs in their dependencies), w32codec-all, libquicktime0, and libxvidcore4 to start. I also install smplayer, vlc and libxine1 all from Packman replacing any Novell packaged versions. As noted that take a very short time and its been possible to follow that method for every openSUSE release going back a long time.
An important point IMHO is to keep one’s repositories LEAN and MEAN with only OSS, Non-OSS, Update and Packman. That avoids dependency and incompatibility hiccups. In particular do not add videolan as some of its apps are not compatible with Packman’s and cause breakage quiet often with new users.
That’s normal behaviour. The idea is that it gives you access to the plasmoid widgets only, which often cannot be seen because of other open windows. Alternatively, you can make the dashboard a separate desktop and install plasmoids there, in which case they don’t pollute the ordinary desktop at all.
As to the wireless delay and the empry Firefox tabs, I get that as well. I put it down to the improved boot-up speeds and the ability of my wireless network to keep up with openSUSE
On your /home: How did you copy it? As root? Then your new /home/stephen will be owned by root. Since all the other permissions are the same, a:
su -c 'chown stephen /home/stephen && chgrp users /home/stephen'
should make you owner of your own files again. kdeinit4 error gone.
You even better could have told the partitioner during install to use the old mountpoints. From what I read you installed 11.2 over 11.1, so what kept you from reusing your /home by simply mounting it as /home on 11.2 This would have kept ALL your settings.
Don’t know about the zypper mess. What do you mean by foobarred? IMHO you’re going for the heavy tools too fast, and then post here. Maybe asking first might keep the trouble away. We don’t know what you did exactly.
Thank-you Knurpht!, I installed a brand new fresh installl on another HDD then tried to copy my old /home/me to overwrite the new one, thus I thought taking advantage of ext4…
I will have a go with the ownership issues…
As for the foobar problem, our friend, colao had the same problem here: Can’t install using zypper - openSUSE Forums
and he explained it more clearly, I had managed to find the solution myself, I put it in the post as an observation.
plasma-desktop uses 30% 40% of CPU & everything seems slowish, is this normal? Computer is not super powerful, but…
Solution here kudos to Chrysantine:
Even then, if your old /home is on ext3, you can convert that to ext4 without risk. Search the forum for ‘ext3 to ext4’ and you’ll find out how.
You could also have copied it like this:
boot with option ‘init 3’
do: mount /dev/OLDHOMEPARTITION /mnt
cp -r -p /mnt/stephen /home
The -r option is for copying the subdirectories, the -p for preserving the permissions.
Done.
TY mate, basically what I did but I forgot about perms, I init 3 as root and cp > oldhome/me > new drive, then rename newhome/me > oldehome/bakme , then rename oldme > /home/me but as I say I forgot about perms…
D’oh!
If I get this sorted I reckon I will make the switch and go to 11.2 as my main machine, and not even bother to clone 11.1 as a keeper…
Nice work dev team!
Firefox - delays, disabled ipv6 yet? You can recover your old bookmarks either by running your old system, exporting them in ‘manage bookmarks’, then opening your new system and reimporting them, or you can just copy the files over from your firefox profile in your home folder. There must be a million guides out there if you google ‘export firefox profile linux’.
Widget layers should be featureless unless you’ve put widgets in them. It’s just an overlay, called up by a keypress, which you can put various mini applications (calculators, radios, sensor displays, RSS readers, weather gadgets, clocks…) etc in.
I believe the idea was popularised by Mac OSX - but I’d be fairly surprised if that was the first time it had ever been done.
TY Confuseling, I got FF working after a lot of googlery, My old “profile” was in fact a pointer/share to my even older profile on Win XP and the copy refused to play nice, insisted that FF was already running when it wasn’t, and giving up loads of errors about enabling environment variables etc etc and XID errors and lots of other stuff… anyway working nice now, TY.
Is ipv6 still not working? I think I have it disabled!
#3: I eventually managed to copy my /home/stephen folder from 11.1. I renamed the new “/home” to bakhome, and renamed the new copy to /home/stephen… fail! would not start, (?kde4init). So I went back… How should I have done this?
This was indeed a permissions/ownership issue (My bad!) If anyone else is in the same hole, follow Knurpht’s advice above, this will mean copying the old /home/xxxxxx again, which in my case was 49Gb, mostly of rubbish!
So as I had already a copy in the ext4 partition, just not set/named as home/xxxxxx, I did as root in runlevel 3
chown -v stephen:users home/oldxxxxxx
This gave a lovely scroll of all 49Gb being changed…
Then mv home/xxxxxx home/bakxxxxxx
Then mv home/oldxxxxxx home/xxxxxx
exit, logout and start session = hey presto! my old horribly untidy desktop, but in 11.2!
