Parallel Python Client with matplotlib and pylab trouble

Problem: use OpenSuSE 11.1 as parallel python client with numpy, scipy and matplotlib, which starts automatically at boot time without the need to have anyone logged in.

Dual boot Windows 7 64bit and OpenSuSE 11.1 Linux - GRUB magic

After having installed OpenSuSE 11.1 on my office machine quite a long time ago and found, that Windows 7 was not bootable any more I simply repaired the boot by using the Windows 7 Installation DVD and forgot about Linux on that machine. A few days ago the necessity of having Linux as well showed up again and I wanted to integrate both systems into GRUB, which for whatever reason failed. (I guess it is due to the 64bit Version which in my case added an invisible boot partition of roughly 100 MB as first partition on the hard drive.) I finally ended up integrating GRUB into the Windows Boot Loader using mainly this entry (thanks and credits to the author!) which I will fine tune and enrich with additional information in the following:

Sooo PC now!

Nobody really likes renaming their blog. However, together with such venerable institutions as the most famous s***m whale in fiction, we are victims of the Great Online Bowdlerisation Initiative - as witnessed on the openSuSE forums (asterisks in the blog URL, yay!)
Some lame excuses for the old name:

• Really, that blog name was totally inconnuous in German!
• Did we mention our outstanding women's quota?
• We are still allowed to abuse our computers, right? (Yes, Tisiphone, talking about you, you ugly brainwashed crackpot…)
  
• People googling "bitches in latex" are in for a very educational evening
• Can't we be a bit naughty now and then?

So, Eumenides it is. The Kindly Ones. Bloody old euphemism, which hopefully won't get bowdlerised into the page-not-found-nirvana. We illustrate our newfound virtue with a picture including three semi-naked women with snakes in their hair.

And no, potter wasps are Eumeninae. With an n.

Digikam and the Marble symbol lookup error

(double posting this on the opensuse forums)
With KDE 4.4, digikam > 0.10 for quite some time crashed on startup with something like this:
digikam: symbol lookup error: digikam: undefined symbol: _ZN6Marble12MarbleWidget16staticMetaObjectE

The Marble symbol lookup error seems to be vendor related: upgrading to the KDE 4.4 Marble version requires a vendor change from openSuSE to obs://build.opensuse.org/KDE in YaST. Usually this ought to be done automatically by the dependency checker during an update to KDE 4.4 as it happens with a lot of other KDE 4.4 packages, but apparently this dependency is not registered. Find marble and marble-data in YaST, go to the Versions tab and select the 4.4 version.
With digikam 1.2, this got me at least as far as the splash screen before it crashed ("Trying to open ksycoca..." on konsole).
Digikam finally worked after downgrading to version 1.1 (from software.opensuse.org search). Well, sort of: it crashes on quitting…

Notes on replacing Tisiphone's hard disk

Yet another faulty hard disk…

1. Restoring the home partition from a gz-compressed image with the aid of an Ubuntu live CD: uncompressing the image directly onto the target partition took ages, especially as the amount of uncompressed data is the actual partition size and not what's on it.
   It was considerably faster to uncompress the image in place (even regarding the bottlenecks of booting from CD and the USB connection to the external drive), mounting it and just copying the contents. (see daWuzzz's contributions on gzipped images and image mounting)
2. Just a reminder: only copy the bare necessities using a live system. USB data throughput was about four times slower compared to copying with a system on disk.
3. Importing users from a previous installation, using the copied home partition: This is a bit tricky, as the installer DVD actually needs an existing installation to read from. Inelegant solution: first do a dummy install setting up fresh users with the same properties (easiest way in a single-user environment), then format the home partition and copy your user data, and finally install the OS again, this time importing the user from the dummy setup using your previous home directory. Alternatively, restore both your old root and home partitions before the fresh install and import the users from there (cumbersome if you had a lot of data on the root partition).
   Other variants I tried but ran into problems with: create a new user and use the old home (KWallet password fail); formatting and rewriting the home partition after the system install (ate my GRUB)
   
4. Opensuse 11.2 still reports a failure on the network connection during install despite obviously being able to download release notes
   .

Importing UNIX users into webmin

After getting CUPS to accept my username and password, I moved on to the last root-only web interface standing, i.e. webmin.
Webmin's import feature is pretty sophisticated, as you can specify permissions for subsets of modules and users via the concept of webmin groups.
This implies that you first have to create such a group before you can import UNIX users.
Groups can be defined in the  Webmin->Webmin Users module, I called mine "admins" and gave the members every permission available.
I then converted my UNIX user to webmin, checking the box "Use same password as unix user in the future" and assigned the admins group.
Apart from the "create group first" point, pretty intuitive.

How to stop CUPS from asking for the root password

CUPS has a quite restrictive allow/deny policy. Cancelling jobs requires the owner or root (OK, makes sense), for starting and stopping printers you also need root privileges. My root password is befittingly cumbersome, so I looked for some kind of CUPS sudo.
The file to look for is /etc/cups/cupsd.conf, which can be conveniently edited from the CUPS web interface's (localhost:631) Administration tab.

NY = outer space

...at least according to wetter.com, providing data for the LCD Weather plasma applet. And yes, space is actually warmer.