openSuSE 11.1 - cool stuff and quirks

A small list of what we like and don't like about openSuSE 11.1:

Kill and restart plasma

Though pretty slick and usable by now, KDE4 is not exactly stable all the time, especially plasma.
ToDo after a desktop crash (found here) - if you are lucky enough to still have a shell:
kbuildsycoca4
kquitapp plasma-desktop
kstart plasma-desktop (see comment by Casian, thanks!)
I added #!/bin/bash in front and copied the script to /usr/bin to have it at the ready. It's cleaner that just killall plasma-desktop & plasma-desktop, because the system configuration cache is rebuilt first and KDE handles quit and start.

For pre-KDE 4.3 users:
plasma is now plasma-desktop, so, in the code above change plasma-desktop to plasma.

SuSE 11.0 to SuSE 11.1 and back again

This is a HowTo to update from 11.0 to 11.1 - theoretically. Actually, I'm back to 11.0 again on Tisiphone and pretty pissed off - I really like compiz and a working wireless card. Additionally, I have plenty of other things to do right now, and maybe I didn't spend as much time on this issue as it deserved ;-)
Update: It got better after the third try.
Important preliminaries:
If you do a virgin install it might be a good idea to remember what you had on the old system.
rpm -qa > allpackages.txt
Backup your system and home partitions as described here. DO IT! You will probably need it.

Hotkey problems after updating openSuSE 11.0

While I recently updated my openSuSE 11.0 on my Samsung P35, I was warned that something in the hotkey-subsystem had changed, blabla... Being the normal stupid user, I told myself "oh well, don't worry". But of course, my hotkeys were broken afterwards. To recover their functionality, simply install the package "hotkey-setup" via YaST, open a root console and cast the command:

/usr/sbin/rchotkey-setup start

Life can be so easy...

Console CD burning

This was originally part of the last post, but I got stuck in an increasingly off-topic quagmire. I'm not a console zealot, but if some quick one-liner in a shell means I don't have to fire up a big GUI, I'm all for it. CD copying and ISO burning are prime candidates. You need wodim/cdrtools and cdrdao for this, which are probably installed by default as K3b depends on them. cdrtools users, replace wodim with cdrecord (see below).

K3b: "cdrecord did not exit cleanly"

Some Audio CDs K3b consistently refuses to copy, no idea why (large number of tracks in all cases, though): Image files are written, all burning media are OK...
Some kind of fix: Start the copy as usual, but don't remove the image files. K3b aborts as mentioned above.

In the temp directory shown in the burning dialog you will find all extracted audio files. Burn a new Audio CD, then remove the temp files.

PS: The hard limit set by the CD standards is 99 tracks - I had about 40 each. K3b is weird.
PPS: If you are totally fed up with K3b, try console copying.

Wacom Graphire 4 on SuSE 11

This is really nothing new, just a quick reminder that the Wacom setup for SuSE 10.3 doesn't change for 11.
Check your system for x11-input-wacom and x11-input-wacom-tools, get the tablet event-mouse identifier from /dev/input/by-id, and edit your xorg.conf as shown in my previous post.
Tested with Xanthippe's ATI Radeon X1300 and a fairly recent fglrx/AIGLX. Nvidia ought to work analogously - never had any trouble with their drivers.

Meta-Blogging: Linus Torvalds

Yesterday Linus Torvald's blog made the Blog of Note list on Blogger - nicely positioned in the usual bunch of food, photography and knitting blogs.
The mythical larger-than-life Mr. Torvalds is actually a real-life Finnish guy living in the US who blogs about books, elections, love of pets (no penguins!), dislike of tedious sports, kids and the occasional new kernel release just like your average Joe. He is not convinced yet by the whole blogging thingy and started the blog as a nice little family/friends experiment, without flashy design or special topics.
What's really funny is the flock of tech bloggers with nerdy aliases like "sauron" or "deep thought" starting reverent discussions on every entry. Sadly, for them, Mr. Torvalds answers comments only very occasionally.
Behold a Geek Icon hopelessly out-geeked.