SUSE 9.1 --- let's sort it out properly

I am running SuSE 9.1 extremely happily from an ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe,
with all but the SATA working.

It is a very good and powerful distribution.

Those who can't gte it working should post their problams and have them resolved..

-Riddick

All right, mainly I think that SuSE 9.1 is a great distro.

But I'm having two seirous aggrevations.

1. the version of k3b that comes with SuSE removed k3b setup. The result is that I cannot get cd burning to work as a normal user. I keep getting an error message telling me that I need to use the non-existant k3b setup to fix this problem by telling suse what my cd burning group is. I tried chmod to change permissions for acces to the dev for the burner but that didn't solve the problem. How do I get k3b to work for normal users without k3b setup?

I was able to easily configure imwheel to use the back button on my mouse in Slackware. But in SuSE imwheel doesn't seem able to do this. Does anybody know how to get a back button to work in SuSE?

Launch k3b as root from root gui and configure. Let it set the file permissions for users. Then login as user and burn.

Bought Suse 9.1 pro. Love it. Linux Newbie as well. I do agree on the wireless cards. Bloodly pain. One small problem is that the cd-rom acts up but I don't really notice as i use a remote CD-RW drive. Just one more thing, which is more of my fault but I like to keep all of my software current and having just bought Suse 4 weeks ago I'm slowly getting all of the extra's I want. So, anyway I downloaded the KDE 3.3 and now Konqueror doesn't work. All besides that I'm really happy with Linux and Suse. Having just come from a window XP pro environment I was a little worried about the conversion. Yea, I miss some of the wizards, but Yast is such a neat program. I'm also really happy because the idea of compiling my own programs is somewhat daunting. Also Suse 9.1 pro comes with good old fashion Books. If you have a problem you just pick up the book and read. Non of this it's on the CD stuff like windows, or it's in a help file. So yes Suse 9.1 "I think" is a good linux OS

Well, I too tend to agree that USe 9.1 is really easy to use. Therea are some problems linked to both USB and subfs (which is really really beta software, why dodn't they use supermount instead?) but i solved them by updgrading with Yast and editing fstab direclly.
One strange thing remains, though. A fresh-installed Suse detected and correclty set up my 3d acceleration (nothing fancy, a Matrox G400), but as I upgraded 3d does't work anymore.
Anyone else experienced that?

Piffy

Hmm, I've been having trouble with my USB mp3 player freezing the whole system. It hooks up as an external usb HD. Those two issues together would certianly explain it.

I've also had some random freeze issues that might help as well.

I am a newbie to the whole Linux "Thing" (Gates put a spell on me), I started with Suse 8.0 on my laptop, which is a 500 MHZ and 128 Mb RAM my resolution won't go higher then 800 x 600 and I only have 6 Gig of HD space, and 8.0 was alright I eventually went back to XP because I couldn't get my network card (PCMCIA) to work I also got the text file to compile the driver but that was too much back then. Now on the same machine I have Suse 9.1 and there's no way I am going back to XP not one problem I couldn't solve my self, I did stumble upon one and two things like the updates, the servers gave me an error but use google for any updates and it gives you new options and I just tried and tried until I got it right and now I am running my 9.1 with the latest updates. My next challenge is either getting my macromedia stuff to work with wine or look at alternatives. It's like moving to another country; you can bitch about the differences or you can adjust to your new invironment (I moved from the Netherlands to South Africa two years ago).

I have heard so many complaints about SuSE 9.1 that either can be fixed fairly easily, or are related to specific hardware, it baffles me. The machine listed in my signature below runs SuSE 9.1 pro exclusively. There are a couple of things ALL SuSE users should know to help their distro run well. The first is a tip for YaST. The YaST sources SuSE 9.1 ships will suck, but thankfully that is easily fixed. The website packman.links2linux.de has been kind enough to set up their HUGE software library as a YaST source. Here is how to set that up.

Open the control center.
Click YaST modules
Click Software
Click Change Installation Source
Click Add
Select http
Put http://packman.iu-bremen.de in the site field
Put suse/9.1 in the path field
Click OK

Now simply click on Install and Remove Software and the entire packman library is now listed.

Doing this turns an Mplayer installation into a 10 second affair. Additionally, packman has binaries for just about everything else you could possibly want.

If you are brave and really want KDE 3.3 in your SuSE 9.1 distro, repeat the above instructions with the following info to add the KDE development directory to your Installation Sources.

Select ftp
Put 'ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/' in the site field
Put '/pub/linux/suse/ftp.suse.com/suse/i386/supplementary/KDE/update_for_9.1/yast-source
Click OK

Warning: DO NOT ATTEMPT TO UPGRADE KDE WHILE IN KDE. Use a different window manager for the update.

Now when you go to 'System-GUI-KDE' the packages to be updated are marked in blue. Simply select 'Update all in this list' from the packages menu and sit back and watch. There are many other packages in the other lists that will be blue. For maximum probability of sucess, update them all.

Restart the X server and viola, KDE 3.3

SuSE is my choice for my home desktop, due to the huge amount of package development for it, and it's overall look and feel. I came to that decision after trying 5 different distros on the machine below. While some worked fairly well (fedora for example), none worked as well as SuSE 9.1 for out-of-box hardware detection and general ease of use. Hope this helps someone out there realize SuSE's potential.

Edit: Corrected the packman path. ;-)

Wow Pcghost! This is a great hack, and it's very difficult to find out. I do more or less the same things by using apt4suse, but setting that up was definitely more complicated that this.

Thanks!

My pleasure. The addition of better YaST sources definitely does improve the SuSE user experience. Glad I could help.

Oh My God!!!!! You just made Mplayer possiable on my SuSE 9.1 personal box. I have been trying for days (As I am new to Linux) to install Mplayer, Via Tarball or APT or RPM's I just couldnt get it to work. And man you are right it took me a whole 5 mins to install using YAST. It did miss one lib that I had to find over at http://rpm.pbone.net/ but once I had that it was up and running in no time. THANK YOU!!!!!!!!! The Linux Community is a GREAT Thing!!!!!!!!!
Wavz
P.S. You all are starting to convert me, Im using my windows box less and less.

I am yet another very happy SUSE 9.1 user. I used to spend days and weeks debugging Mandrake and Redhat. I loaded 9.1 on an Intel i810 box - yes this very one I am currently on and it is flawless. Sure I had to resolve the nVidia issue but I was warned about it ahead of time. There are a few other annoyances with SUSE but they are far less and much easier to fix than many of the other distros that I have tried in the past.

Currently my wife runs SUSE 9.1 on an ASUS P4B266-C with the i845 chipset, Geforce4 FX5700 and Hp 5550 printer networked off a 2k3 server. Her box looks and acts like the Win2k box that I migrated her from. I no longer hear comments like "This #@$%$^% computer just crahsed for the nth time today. "

From my PoV SUSE is a godsend and my wife won't let me near her SUSE box now. I consider her to be the typical computer user. She only wants certain things to work like e-mail, web browsing, a few games, printing, office products, sharing files with the kids and co-workers. SUSE 9.1 is the ONLY product that she has really liked.

The trouble with many *nix distros most of the time from my experience is, it lags behind the technology curve a bit more than M$ products. If you are patient someone will either make or correct the driver issues that come with running bleeding edge hardware. The upside is I am no longer locked into that continous M$ upgrade cycle and I get much better hardware utilization from the *nix platforms, not only from performance and stability standpoints but from a longevity aspect as well.

My new workstation currently is on an ASUS P4C800-E 3.0Ghz HT which is going to run slackware 10, just because I want to play with the Linux internals a little more.

I finally broke the M$ chains officially about a year ago and life is good.

Pcghost - thanks for the tutorial. I plan on giving it a try tonight. I'll post back with the results but I'm pretty optimistic. -- J.W.

Anytime. I am now on a hunt for more YaST sources, and will post them as I find them. It is hard to find anything that Packman.links2linux.de doesn't already have covered. :-)

I recently "upgraded" from mandrake 9.1 to suse personal 9.1. The install went smoothly. I also had some monitor issues (kept giving me messages saying monitor was not reporting its dimensions or something). I was able to configure with sax2

Ok the real pain was my wireless g card from linksys. WOW that sucked! I finally got it set up after much searching on linuxquestions posts. I have a windows machine that set up its wireless card automatically! That sure beats spending 10 hours fiddling. Oh well, now its working.

I was also unable to reach many websites, I had to add a couple commands to one of the system files to get the internet to work properly. That was bizzare!

Now I have a problem with shutting down. The computer freezes when terminating the sound server. Hmmmm. Oh well, I've been using the good old hard shut off method until I figure this one out.

Other than that, it seems to run pretty well. Especially for free! It's not quite plug and play yet though. Yast seems to work better and is more logical than mandrake control center.