Mplayerplug-in and Quicktime cause Firefox to segfault

I can't remember quite when the mplayerplug-in started to kill firefox when playing Quicktime movies (doesn't affect WMV, by the way). They haven't updated the plugin for ages, so I suspect either a firefox update, new Quicktime codecs or some general SuSE 11.1-ness. Setting full debug in /etc/mplayerplug-in.conf didn't help, as it crashed before generating a single line of debugging output.
Quick fix: switched to gecko-mediaplayer, which is also a mplayer front end, according to its YaST description still under heavy development, but seems to run stable enough for now.

It had to be just the right kind of Java…

More fun with JabRef and the AWT toolkit. Starting JabRef by java -jar JabRef-2.4.2.jar got me a string of errors and no GUI:
ERROR while starting or running JabRef:
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Could not initialize class java.awt.Toolkit
The reason for this appears to be that openSuSE uses the non-proprietary OpenJDK Java runtime by default, while you need Sun's JRE for JabRef to work (available in the non-oss repo).
Check with java -version - if it says "OpenJDK" instead of "Java(TM)", you need to switch the packages in YaST or zypper.

Insufficient CD/DVD drive permissions on openSuSE 11.1

One of those "I should have known..." posts. I just could not get my flu-addled brain to google the problem and, I am ashamed to confess, watched DVDs on Vista instead.

• Audio CDs and video DVDs were displayed in Konqueror, but not played (and yes, I had all the codecs).
• K3b warned me about not having a burner.
• wodim --devices found nothing.
  

This has made the most-annoying-bug list on opensuse.org, and the developers keep bickering in the bugzilla comments. The most popular workaround seems to be to add your user to the disk group, which works, but poses an ugly security risk: disk members have raw access to all hard drives.
Pawel Stolowski on the bugzilla thread suggests changing the group ownership to cdrom for all optical drives in the udev rules:

• add your user to the cdrom group in YaST->Users and Groups.
  
• create (sudo) a file 99-my.rules in /etc/udev/rules.d/ containing this line:
  
  KERNEL=="sr*[0-9]", GROUP="cdrom", MODE="0660"
• reboot
  

Worked for me. There seems to be an upcoming hal etc. patch by Danny Kukawa, which ought to sort out the problem. Oh, and other cynical bastards like me out there might derive some guilty amusement from the troll wars in the bug thread.