OpenSUSE
Flashing the BIOS from Linux (OpenSUSE 11.0)
I’ve been a bit quiet here recently because I’ve mainly been working with my business laptop currently running Windows 7. You can see more about this on my other blog – [Much Ado about IT][1]. However, the power supply on that died recently so I’m back to my trusty desktop which runs OpenSUSE 11.0 24×7. I managed to get hold of an upgraded CPU for this a while back but I’ve not really had an incentive to upgrade till now.
Bridged networking in OpenSUSE 10.3 & 11.0 (For VirtualBox)
I prefer to use VirtualBox rather than VMware as it seems to be rather faster and less resource hungry than VMware Server (the only free version of VMware with a GUI). Also VirtualBox seems to have better Linux host support (sound, etc.). However, there is one thing that VMware is better at – setting up the guest network on the same network as the host. Under VirtualBox this is called “Host Interface Networking” and, with a Linux host anyway, is a right royal pain to set up.
Enabling VirtualBox access to USB ports (OpenSUSE 11.0)
By default, OpenSUSE 10 & 11 come preconfigured WITHOUT usbfs active. Unlike Ubuntu, everything is ready to go but the fstab setting is “noauto” so it doesn’t seem to get loaded even when VirtualBox wants it. The fix for this is simple and is listed in the [VirtualBox User FAQ][1]. In “/etc/fstab” change the line for usbfs to: usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs auto,busgid=XXX,busmode=0775,devgid=XXX,devmode=0664 0 0 Where XXX is the group id of the vboxusers group which can be discovered in YAST or from the command line: grep vboxusers /etc/group That’s it, no other changes should be needed.
Thoughts on OpenSUSE 11.0
Here are my experiences installing OpenSUSE 11.0 on my desktop PC (I had already successfully installed it on a VM). I opted for a KDE 3 desktop – I don’t like Gnome especially and KDE 4 is not ready for day-to-day use as far as I am concerned. <span style="font-weight: bold;">UPDATE 2008-07-17</span>: This may, in the end, have been a hardware issue – I reseated the cables and everything is stable at the moment However, it is easy if you follow the instructions in my previous blog entry.
What did I install? (For OpenSUSE)
One thing that I didn’t get around to doing since I moved from Ubuntu was to work out how to make a note of what has been installed. This is slightly complicated by the fact that you can install stuff straight from an RPM file as well as through YAST (from the repositories or 1-click links). Well, I finally got round to working it out and here is a summary. To see what you have done with the YAST installers, just look at the log!
