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Novell Client on openSUSE 11.2

April 20th, 2010 by

This has been covered on a couple of forums out there, but I’ve yet to find a decent comprehensive post. This is for 32bit systems, it’s easily modified for 64bit setups.

First off, search your favorite RPM repo for binutils-2.19-9.3. I like to use http://rpm.pbone.net, but at the time of writing, they happen to be down.

Get a copy of the Novell Client ISO from http://download.novell.com and mount it:

sudo mount -o loop novell-client-2.0-sp2-sle11-i586.iso /mnt

Extract the files from the RPM:

rpm2cpio binutils-2.19-9.3.i586.rpm | cpio -idv

This should create a “usr” directory in your present working directory. Go ahead and copy it’s contents to your filesystem:

sudo cp -R usr/* /usr/

Change directories to wherever you mounted your ISO (in this case “/mnt”) and run the installer:

cd /mnt && sudo ./ncl_install

As the packages attempt to install, you’ll be given options and warnings concerning libbfd and several other packages. Choose option “2” for everything (“Break dependencies”). Don’t worry about actually breaking anything, just roll with option 2.

Lastly, issue ldconfig as root and reboot:

sudo /sbin/ldconfig
sudo /sbin/reboot

That should get you up and running. You can run “ncl_tray” directly from the command line, or create a shortcut to the client. If you’re having connection issues, make sure that openSLP is configured.

The only issues I’ve had so far is the inability to browse trees, which turned out to be a DNS problem on my end. Occasionally I get warnings on login about novfs kernel modules not being properly loaded, but this appears to be benign.

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5 Responses to “Novell Client on openSUSE 11.2”

  1. Thanks for sharing!

  2. smspvdm

    Why don’t they just build a version of the novell client for their *OWN* linux distribution (openSUSE) that just installs?
    I just don’t get it.

    • smspvdm

      It’s just like Ford building a car and then offering a Ford radio that doesn’t fit.
      It will fit with a hammer and some tape though.

  3. Ludwig Nussel

    Do you really mess with your system like that? *shudder* Not
    surprising if you system breaks if you download random rpms off the
    internet and force them on the system, even bypassing rpm.

    I better don’t comment on the product itself but I can tell you
    tricks how I would probably install it if I was forced to use it.
    The libbfd requirement can be satisfied by binutils from the
    official openSUSE 11.1 repo. So use that one instead of some random
    internet search result. libbfd is required by a library that has
    RPATH set to /opt/novell/xtier/lib (lib64 on x86_64). So you can
    copy the library there. That still bypasses package management but
    doesn’t affect other parts of the system. To even fix that you could
    use mkbaselibs from the build package to repackage just the needed
    library:
    $ cat > baselibs.conf <<EOF
    arch x86_64 targets x86_64
    arch i586 targets i586

    binutils
    targetname libbfd-2_19
    +/usr/lib(64)?/libbfd-2.19.so
    EOF
    $ /usr/lib/build/mkbaselibs -c baselibs.conf binutils-2.19-9.3.*.rpm
    # rpm -Uvh /usr/src/packages/RPMS/*/libbfd-2_19-2.19-9.3.*.rpm

    In case of ncl there's also an even easier way to install the
    product itself:

    # zypper ar iso:/?iso=/space/novell-client-2.0-sp2-sle11-i586.iso ncl
    # zypper in -t pattern novell-ncl

  4. Wouter

    This may be off topic, but I use ncpfs, which is in the openSUSE distro, so no need to break dependency’s, to mount NetWare volumes. Previously I’ve used the Novell Client for Linux, but I think the only thing it ads to ncpfs is that it executes your login script. For me it’s just as easy to set up the mounts I need myself.

    I do use the -N NFS option with ncpfs. This works better for OpenOffice.