Winbind or Active Directory offline troubles with OpenSuSE 11.4

Twice now it has happened that my AD account is suddenly missing at the Gnome logon screen.
Also when I try to enter it manually I get the message "The user is not known to the underlying authentication module".

I don't know exactly the cause but I found a workaround.
Normally you just have to connect to the network and then login manually (Like you do the first time when you use AD integration).
Easy when you are in reach of your network...
But I also found another way, that allows to restore everything when you are offline.
Just create a backup (as root) of your /var/lib/samba directory

tar -cvzf /var/lib/samba.tar.gz /var/lib/samba/

And when you have this problem, just unpack this backup like this (also as root)

cd /var/lib
tar --overwrite -xvzf samba.tar.gz 

So it seems like a corrupted cache but nothing in the logfiles given me any clue.
Maybe I should create a bug report but until then, this solution also works...

Another Gnome 3 fix: Nautilus hangs when opening properties

Known issue.
Delete this package using YaST: nautilus-extension-tracker-tags


There is a bug report about this: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=689447

OpenSuSE 12.1

So it seems that the next version has a roadmap and will get version number 12.1
More details here
Gold release scheduled for 10/10/11...

A better way to add YaST to Gnome Shell

Follow the link to this blog to get YaST integrated in the Gnome Shell.
This patch might be included as an update very soon in the OpenSuSE repositories...

Installing Rawstudio 2.0 from source on OpenSuSE 11.4

Rawstudio is an open-source program to read and manipulate RAW images from digital cameras. The latest version (2.0) is not yet available in the repositories so I decided to download the source version and follow the documented installation procedure.

This is the general documentation from the rawstudio website...

Installing from source

$ tar xfz rawstudio-x.y.tar.gz
$ cd rawstudio-x.y
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

The code is not complete because there are some dependencies.
Before you can compile you need a gcc compiler and the rawstudio code itself also relies on other software libraries that need to be installed. Below are the steps I followed for building it.

- Download the source package from here.
- Now open a terminal and enter the following commands.

$ sudo zypper in gcc gcc-c++ make libjpeg62-devel libtiff-devel libxml2-devel libssl-devel libcurl-devel 
$ sudo zypper in dbus-devel libgphoto2-devel gconf-devel gtk2-devel gconf2-devel lensfun-devel 
$ sudo zypper in lcms-debel lcms-devel exiv2-devel libexiv2-devel liblcms-devel 
$ sudo zypper in sqlite3-devel libopenssl-devel libopenssl-devel fftw3-devel

- Some packages are not available in the default repositories, but zypper can handle this...

$ sudo zypper in http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/network:/utilities/openSUSE_11.4/x86_64/libflickcurl0-1.21-1.1.x86_64.rpm
$ sudo zypper in http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/network:/utilities/openSUSE_11.4/x86_64/libflickcurl-devel-1.21-1.1.x86_64.rpm

$ cd $HOME/Downloads
$ tar xfz rawstudio-2.0.tar.gz
$ cd rawstudio-2.0
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install
$ sudo /sbin/ldconfig

- Now you will see the application appear in the menu's

- Time to start the digital workflow... enjoy

Gnome 3: Add YaST to the applications

Opening a run command every time and typing "gnomesu /sbin/yast2" is not very efficient.
But there is another way, you can edit the menu's using a program called "alacarte".
It's installed by default (on my installation) but not present in the menu's (how convenient...)

So, open a command prompt (ALT+F2) and type "alacarte"

When the application opens, go to the "System Tools" section and add a new item, just like the screenshot and close alacarte. (The YaST icon is located at /usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/apps/yast.png

Now you should see the YaST icon when openening the dock

Migrating from XFCE to Gnome 3 on OSS 11.4

Gnome 3 has been in the news for quite a while now.
Some people like change, others don't.
By migrating from XFCE to GNOME3 I was able to test the package management of OpenSuSE 11.4 some more.

These are the steps I followed:
- Open the website http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:GNOME_3.0
- Click on the correct "One-Click-Install" (in my case the 32-bit one)

- Make sure you also open a terminal to reboot the system properly when finished

Before installing, you can recognize the XFCE-desktop

- Just click "next" and away we go. The whole process took less than 15 minutes.

- YaST will download all packages before installing them. (Good, because at some point I lost network connection as you can see on the screenshot below.)

- Never mind the permissions errors you see, they get solved later on automatically.

- Done... now you just have to reboot and when logging in, make sure you select GNOME as session.

- You can keep both XFCE and GNOME3 on the same machine but I wanted to remove it. (testing, testing..)

- This was a little bit tricky. Go to YaST -> Software Management -> Patterns and select the XFCE (it should still be selected). You cannot uncheck it, you have to remove the xfce packages manually, resolve all dependencies and only then you will see the checkbox untagged like on the screenshot.
I did not remove ALL packages from XFCE-pattern, just the ones I know are XFCE-only. This is where the YaST tool needs some more attention...

First Impressions...
- Yast2 menu items are not present in the Applications dock, go to ALT+F2 and enter "gnomesu /sbin/yast2"
- You loose some screen space due to big status/menu bars
- install the gnome tweak utility to change the default font settings (very nice feature is that you can change all font sizes at the same time with a slider)
- No performance problems
- Very clean (no icons on the background)
- Good default keybindings
- OSX-like
- The OpenSuSE branding is not yet added (no green colors ;-) )

Some more impressions will follow but for now, I like it.