Enthusiastic new suse user - odd wee problems
 

hello all
i'm new to linux and suse 9.1 personal, and am enjoying myself hugely. but i've got a couple of little newbie queries which someone might help me with

1) on startup the 'suse hardware tool' warns me that my 'monitor is not reporting its x and y sizes. do i want to manually configure?' all seems to work properly, so how do i stop this warning every bootup?

2) i've managed to install firefox and thunderbird from the .tar.gz downloads, but there are no shiny icons as i'm used to in windows. what's happened to them and can i get them back? what about shortcuts in the start menu? do those have to be created manually or did i do something wrong? and where should i have unzipped the file to? what's the convention?

3) i've done some long downloads with yast online. i've spotted the 'remove source packages after update' option, so i suspect there's a folder somewhere with all these packages, which perhaps i could save so as not to have to download them next time i install (i'm happily experimenting with various distros). where would that be?

4) my mouse (ms optical wheel, on a thinkpad x31) seems to have been detected properly, but the wheel seems to have been disabled. any ideas?

think that's it for now! many thanks
roger

Hi

1.I had the same problem with the Monitor, but it seems to have gone away so I can't help much there.

2.Re: Firefox and thunderbird.

I keep them in /usr/local/sbin. The gz does not creat icons, but they are very easy to create. Just left click your mouse -> Create New -> File -> Link to an application. It should be pretty clear what todo from there. The icons are stored in /usr/local/sbin/thunderbird/chrome/icons.

hello ,
I had the same problem with 9.1 Prof on my laptop. I fixed it by entering the dimensions manually ( say yes when it asks). I can't find where I wrote it now but I remember reading at the time that it will change from one machine to another, depending on your screen size. Might steer you in the right direction anyway.

Roger Dean. A famous name.

Though I'd be "our" rogerdean isnt "the Roger Dean" :D

I'd bet that "the Roger Dean" would pay someone to do management/admin type stuff and concentrate on his pictures etc etc. :D:D

regards

John

p.s. And yes, I have once met "the Roger Dean", who, at the time was living in "my neck of the woods" - the link show's some of the "art work", some of which was produced for bands like "Yes" and "Asia" - vvv prog' rock!

you just never know. i could be taking time out from acrylic paint and lsd :eek:

thanks for the input folks. 2 probs solved - anyone any idea on the suse yast online thing?

cheers

For the mousewheel... in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf (or XF86config file (or similar)) under "Section InputDevice" add the line:
For the YaST thing....why not search for RPM files? (If that's what YaST uses - I don't use SuSE) If they are being stored somewhere then:
should (eventually) find them.

If you get a lot of results, pipe them through to less (a paginator) to read them more easily...:

/var/lib/YaST2/you

iirc its somewhere in the you directory. do a search for *.rpm

Don't forget, rpms for SuSE aren't quite the same as for mandrake or redhat/fedora -- the optimisation's usually different.

Personally, thats one reason that I alway's go for mandrake one's for my mandrake install - I've spent many a dismal hour stuck in dependency hell!

Also, it may depend what "they" mean by source removal. Are these rpm's you refer to "source rpm's aka xxxxx.src.rpm" or are they just offering to bin the ones that are probably residing in whichever directory they are downloaded into ?

The last thing I thought of, was that if you set your system up so you have a seperate /home parition, then it doesn't matter which distro you have a play with, as long as the same packages are installed with it, into the /root directory, then you haven't lost anything (and I just mean that say you use kmail in SuSE, and then install a different distro and decide you wanna try evolution the mail file's probably aren't going to work - unless you also use Kmail with the new distro, whereby, the mail files should then work.

regards

John