openSUSE 10.3: First Look

Please bear in mind that this is not a review; it is just a few initial observations after installing openSUSE 10.3 and using it for an hour or so. I'm not a journalist, so even after using it for a week I wouldn't be able to write a well balanced review of openSUSE 10.3. And I'm biased, because I've been using SUSE for at least seven years.

I downloaded the openSUSE 10.3 yesterday and upgraded my laptop from 10.2 in the evening. The upgrade went reasonably smoothly, with just the usual problems: the wireless network couldn't be connected during installation so it couldn't find any online repositories, so I ended up telling it to remove quite a few packages which it couldn't upgrade, and after the installation it had got my hard drives the wrong way round in grub's menu.list - but that's my fault for booting from an external USB drive, which confuses things as the drives do get renumbered on boot.

After installing, everything still worked just as it did before, which was great. They've even put the intel graphics card hack into the boot scripts now so I don't have to have it in boot.local. I switched the graphics driver from i810 to the new intel one, and the wireless driver from ipw3945 to iwl3945, and now my wireless connection comes up reliably. I used to have to connect to a neighbour's unsecured network before it would allow me to connect to my secured one.

Upon trying to play an mp3 file, a message popped up prompting me to install the mp3 codecs, so I followed the instructions, and it gave me a nice wizard which allowed me to choose a whole load of codecs and other 'restricted' stuff. It then proceeded to download it all, complain that all the files on the DVD were corrupt (thought they weren't - they installed fine later), installed the stuff which had worked, and I had mp3 playability. It was much easier than before, except for the spurious corruption messages.

The package management seems to have been overhauled considerably, but it still has the problem of not giving much feedback as to what is going on: instead of showing an overall progress bar and then working its way through all the sub tasks, it'll show a progress bar for one task, and when that has finished it'll show another progress bar. You have no way of knowing whether you have a minute left to wait or three hours. Also, if you move the dialog to the corner of the screen, when the next progress bar appears it'll be back in the default position, which is really annoying. I imagine I'll probably continue using Smart because it is so, well, smart.

The boot and login graphics are back to green, which I like because it means my computer looks different from most. And the graphics are much sharper and more professional-looking, in my mind at least. Especially the welcome graphic when you boot from DVD. I have switched my desktop wallpaper back to the openSUSE 10.1 one though, as I prefer a blue wallpaper to a green one. The icons in YaST have all changed - they don't look better though - they're all grey and nondescript.

I'd like to keep playing with openSUSE 10.3 today, but I have to go to the Grand Designs Live show now. Oh, what a hardship!

KDE4 Won't Start

I can't start KDE4 any more - it fails to start dbus. To be more exact, qdbus gives this error message when it is run:

Could not connect to D-Bus server: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.Spawn.ExecFailed: Failed to execute dbus-launch to autolaunch D-Bus session


But when I run dbus-launch it works fine. I'm sure it's probably something simple, but I'm about ready to give up.

Hibernate Logging

Have you ever tried to get hibernate to log SQL? It's quite easy, just set log4j.logger.org.hibernate.SQL=DEBUG, and hey presto, you have SQL statements logged. Except it's not too useful, as most of them are parameterised queries, with lists of question marks instead of values. So you do a search on Google and it turns up millions of entries saying you need to set log4j.logger.org.hibernate.type. But it doesn't help, because all the articles say the value should be INFO, whereas what you really want is log4j.logger.org.hibernate.type=TRACE.

So there you go. Maybe Google will turn up my blog entry instead for you.

My rpmdb is back

Thanks to everyone who told me about the rpmdb backup in /var/adm/backup/rpmdb - I restored it and now everything is working beautifully.

Oops, I lost my rpmdb

Yesterday my computer started randomly rebooting when I was trying to install packages on my computer, so I booted from a live CD and ran resierfsck on my disk, which fixed a whole bunch of things. But now when I run rpm -qa I get a list of no packages - and running rpmdb --rebuilddb doesn't help. Fortunately smart query lists everything that is installed, so I'm pretty sure there must be some way to get the rpmdb back, but I can't find it. Help!

How To Build A New Freetype

I've had several requests for my RPM for freetype2 including sub-pixel rendering for openSUSE 10.2. So here are instructions on how to build your own, including my modified SPEC file. If you're in the USA it might be illegal to download my file, so this file is only for people who live in free countries. Or at least semi-free countries, like the UK.

1. Download freetype2 source rpm from http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/SL-OSS-factory/inst-source/suse/src/ - it might be a newer version by the time you come to download this.
2. Download freetype-2.3.3.tar.bz2 and freetype-doc-2.3.3.tar.bz2 from freetype.org.
3. Download freetype2.spec if your government will let you.
4. Install the source rpm: sudo rpm -ivh freetype2-2.3.1-7.src.rpm
5. Put the tar.bz2 files in /usr/src/packages/SOURCES
6. Put the spec file in /usr/src/packages/SPECS
7. Build the rpm: rpmbuild /usr/src/packages/SPECS/freetype2.spec
8. The built rpms will be in /usr/src/packages/RPMS/i586

Note that you will need to have any required libraries and tools installed in order to build this. It should just be the basic development tools I think.

Sub-pixel Antialiasing in openSUSE 10.2

Finally, I have sub-pixel antialiasing in openSUSE 10.2. For some reason, it was turned off in the 10.2 release because of something being broken. I haven't been able to find out what. But yesterday I got tired of waiting for it to be fixed, so I downloaded the alpha freetype package from 10.3, only to find that it also has sub-pixel antialiasing turned off. No problem - I just installed the source package, replaced the tar files with version 2.3.3 ones, edited the spec file to enable sub-pixel rendering, disabled the freetype2-bitmap-foundry patch (because it wouldn't compile with it in there), rebuilt the rpm and installed it. Hey presto - sub-pixel rendering!

Last time I blogged about getting fonts to look better in 10.1, I had a load of comments telling me I should just turn of antialiasing because text looks better without it. Well, I like antialiasing, and especially sub-pixel antialiasing. On my 1900x1200 display it looks great. So there!