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.

OpenSuSE 11.4 and Active Directory

OpenSuSE is the only major distribution that offers production-ready integration with Microsoft Active Directory.
When joining the domain you can get the following features:
- Logging in using using your Active Directory account.
- Offline login.
- When you browse to a network share using nautilus your credentials are automatically used. (You do not need to type your password again)

However,
There are some prerequisites to make it work properly:
- Use a static IP address.
- Make sure your computer name (hostname) is resolvable by all AD server (That means you have to manually register your forward and reverse pointer on the DNS server)
- Make sure your time settings are correct. A clock skew of several minutes will cause login problems.

Once you have done this, start YaST and go to "Windows Domain Membership"
Enter your domain name (FQDN) and enable the 2 options.

When you press OK, YaST will automatically install the necessary packages and ask you for an account that has the privileges to add computers to AD. (Use you pre-windows 2000 logon credentials)

Done.

To make it even better work, disable the earlyxdm service otherwise your login manager (GDM) will not always show your AD account because winbindd was not started yet.

And finally, I do not want to show my default domain when opening a terminal, so I add a setting to the [global] parameters in /etc/samba/smb.conf file:

[global]

winbind use default domain = yes

Reboot and you are done!

Quick Fix: Mouse problems when using VMware Unity

I'm a big fan of Unity mode when using VMware Player. 

This way your host and guest are becoming one since features like drag and drop work between the 2 environments. (Try it!)

My configuration is OpenSuSE 11.4 as host and Windows 7 SP1 as guest.

Since a few days I had trouble with the mouse pointer while in Unity mode.

To solve this you should remove all mouse drivers and reboot.

This only worked once but now I found that enabling "Pointer Trails" in Windows Fixes the problem.

Go to control panel - mouse settings and enable the feature...

Installing Opensuse 11.4 on a Macbook Pro 5,3 (Mid 2009)

General note: this procedure will also work with newer types of MacBooks but you might need newer newer versions of several specific packages. (Like pommed and applesmc)
There is a build site which contains all the latest versions. I did not need them, everything worked with the included versions.

I decided to completely re-install the macbook with OSS 11.4 (and not to upgrade from 11.3) because I wanted to make some partition changes.

Since Gnome is my default desktop I downloaded the live-cd to give it a try but I ran into a problem. When booting, the screen went black after a few seconds and the machine stopped responding.

I found the solution here, you have to add the "nomodeset" option to the kernel when booting.

Example screenshot.

Note: When you boot from the installation DVD your system will boot but after first reboot you might experience the same problem so always add the parameter to the kernel options.

The next problem was that the mouse pad does not work during the installer so make sure that you connect another device to move that pointer!

Luckily, those were the only problems I encountered during the installation process. 

After the initial install you need to add some packages to enable all hardware:

Macbook keys/keyboard lightsTo make all the specific macbook keys work (and the keyboard lighting) make sure you install the "pommed" package and start it at boot. 

zypper in pommed

optional: edit the configuration in /etc/pommed.conf

chkconfig pommed on

service pommed start

BCM4322 Wireless

Add the "Packman" repository to your system.

zypper addrepo --repo http://packman.inode.at/suse/11.4/packman.repo

now install the Broadcom Wireless packages:

zypper in broadcom-wl broadcom-wl-kmp-desktop

After a reboot NetworkManager should show the wireless options enabled.

NVIDIA drivers

Use the single-click install here

This will add the correct repository and install the drivers.

Enable Synaptics mousepad features
I only enable horizontal and vertical scrolling.
To do this add the package gsynaptics and configure it.
zypper in gsybnaptics
Now go to gnome Control Center and you will have an extra option called "Touchpad"

Here you can enable several options.

Remember to use 3 fingers to simulate to scroll-wheel click

DONE

My application list

 Before starting the install I made a list of all necessary software.
Just a note for myself

• Kdiff
• XMind
• Tasque
• Oracle SQL Developer
• VMware Player
• Google Chrome
• Google Picasa
• Inkscape
• Ruby
• Citrix Receiver
• Zenmap
• Audacity
• avidemux-gtk
• VLC
• Acrobat Reader
• Oracle Java
• Adobe Flash
• pdftk-qgui
• hplip
• ghex
• keepassx
• 7zip
• 32-bit firefox and java
• Google Desktop

Some more on updates

In those first few days after a release there are a lot of updates.
Because I added some repositories I also get more updates than usual.
I'm happy to say there are no problems installing them, something that wasn't always true...

Another kernel update so now i'm on 2.6.38.2-3-desktop...