Rotating my screen output

or: Who ate my xorg.conf?
Oh. SuSE did, as the xorg.conf file is deprecated for newer versions of Xorg. Right.
Which posed a bit of a problem, as I needed the file to make xrandr work. Xrandr is a console app able to flip your screen by multiples of 90° (actually, it can do a lot more) via
xrandr -o left #right, inverted, normal

Samsung SCX-4200 on SuSE 11.2

First problem: Samsung Universal driver nowhere to be found, at least not in the download links for this model. Well, it's supposed to be universal, isn't it, so I got the tar archive from the SCX-4300 download page.
Installation: untar, cd to cdroot/Linux, ran sudo ./install.sh and followed the console instructions. And yes, the scx-4200 was included. What worked out of the box: Scanning, both xsane and skanlite interfaces. Printing worked for all kinds of files and apps except PDF from whichever source, which is a bit of a bummer.

console copy without overwriting

To copy an arbitrary number of files without overwritting existing ones, use:
yes n | cp -i <source> <destination>
Found here.
Note that this does not work for scp, as there is no -i option. A workaround proposed here suggests setting previously copied files read-only - which you can't do on FAT or NTFS partitions, btw.

timidity vs my USB sound card

timidity refused to play MIDI files with cryptic error messages:
can't create mcop directory
and, after I had created /tmp/ksocket-<myuser>:

sh: arts-start: command not found
Couldn't open output device

It turns out that the problem lay with my USB sound card, which I had set as the primary card in YaST to get the sound output from online flash movies etc. on it (Firefox is not handled by Phonon, so you have to do it permanently via YaST), and which I had unplugged. Setting the on-board card as the primary card again solved the issue. I suppose plugging in the USB card might also help, but I don't have it with me right now.