Compiling master documents in Kile

Kile has no special "build project" tool for building LaTeX master files (which irritates former TeXnicCenter users like me).
To handle LaTeX master files, e.g. a thesis with chapter input from \include{file} statements, define a Kile project and add all .tex files irrespective of master and child status.
Check the master file in the project options, usually the auto-detect option works (I assume Kile searches all files for \begin{document}/\end{document}). All normal build tools shold now apply only to the master file, no matter which document you are just editing.

Another issue: Using BibTeX in a Kile project. For this you need the QuickBuild tool. PDFLaTeX+BibTeX isn't preconfigured (at least with my Kile version) and has to be added by hand in Settings->Configure Kile…->Tools->Build:
PDFLaTeX
BibTeX
PDFLaTeX
PDFLaTeX
After that, you can run everything from inside Kile with the QuickBuild button.
If you are using a Kile project with a master document, you have to specify the appropriate QuickBuild configuration in the Project->Project Options dialog. (Actually, if you include a BibTeX bibliography in a .tex file, Kile seems to run BibTeX and 3 times LaTeX automatically. Still, it's good to have the QuickBuild handy). Also, there was a bug removing duplicate entries like "PDFLaTeX PDFLaTeX" in the Quickbuild configuration of Kile/KDE4 (fixed by now).

Blank Java windows with compiz

Java apps (e.g. my favourite BibTeX editor, JabRef) have a habit of coming up as persistently blank windows with compiz and several recent Java versions. According to this thread this is due to Java expecting your window manager to re-parent the window which compiz doesn't (I'm so not a WM expert...). The following workaround did OK for me. Override the Java VM's default AWT Toolkit, e. g. calling JabRef:
export AWT_TOOLKIT=MToolkit
java -jar JabRef-2.3.1.jar
If you use Java apps a lot, it might be a good idea to add the export statement to your ~/.bashrc - or write the two lines above in a shell script in /usr/bin or similar.

UPDATE (2010): My days of compiz are long past, but I didn't change my ~/.bashrc despite several new SuSE installations. Running Jabref 2.5 with Sun's Java 1.6.0_17 on SuSE 11.2 (KDE 4.4β) produced a segfault citing a problematic frame in libc.so.6. Unsetting the AWT_TOOLKIT variable solved it.

Samsung P35: openSuSE 11 and Compiz

After I had completely f**ked up my X-Server by trying different fglrx drivers in order to get a reasonable compiz 3d-Acceleration, I finally decided to throw away my openSuSE 10.3 and install openSuSE 11 on my Samsung P35 XVM 1600 II, graphics card ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 series. Installation went smooth, apart from the interesting suggestion of the setup program not to just mount my home partition, but format it (yes, you should be careful about that as well - I don't want to lose all my settings just because openSuSE thinks that might be a good idea).

After the reboot, I was more than impressed... Compiz was running out of the box, without even the need to use the ati fglrx driver. This is the proof, with the radeon driver included in the XServer version of openSuSE 11 the card definitely runs AIGLX - by the way also without the well known "freeze after ending an x-session" error. Video playback of embedded flash movies in firefox unfortunately flickers a little bit. But if you use fusion-icon, you can switch back to Kwin as window manager temporarily for viewing (add the openSuSE Build: Xgl/Xorg repo to Yast in order to find fusion-icon). On the other hand, playing movies with Kaffeine doesn't show flicker at all.

The hotkeys don't work out of the box, but it is sufficient to look for acerhk in Yast after adding the standard repos and choose the appropriate rpm for your kernel flavor (which you can also get by opening Konqueror and typing sysinfo:/ into the adress bar). After the necessary reboot all the (important) hotkeys work.

miktex-tools don't compile on openSuSE 11...

...because they included a newer gcc version (4.3.1 rc1). Typical make error: "expected ‘;’ before ‘<’ token". This is a known bug (see this discussion), and there is a patch - there are just some include statements missing.
Download the patch file mpm-2.7.3107-gcc-4.3.patch and run
patch -p0 < mpm-2.7.3107-gcc-4.3.patch
in the directory where you untarred the sources.
If your patch fails, try patching manually (read the patch file), it's just one or two lines each in less than 10 files. Mpm should compile OK now (HowTo).
A nice diff and patch intro can be found at linuxforums.org.
Considering the easy fix, I suppose they'll dispose of this bug soon ;-)