Tonight I stumbled upon the solution to a irritating little problem I have had for a long time. I use autologin and every time I log in I get prompted for my keyring password in order to access the wireless network. I have googled for this problem numerous times in the past without any luck. All the suggested solutions had to do with Ubuntu and a tool called libpam-keyring. This does not seem to work the same on openSuSE as on Ubuntu and did not help me much. Then I found this post. Towards the bottom of the thread is the instructions that have been evading me for so long. Hope this helps someone else.

Since openSUSE 11.1 has gone gold and GroupWise 8 has been around for a while, I decided to install openSUSE 11.1 with KDE 4.1 on my laptop. I use GroupWise and when I tried to install the GroupWise rpm’s, it complained about missing dependancies. I had to install the following software in order for GroupWise 8 to work:

openmotif, openmotif22-libs and libstdc++33

Once that was installed the GroupWise rpm’s installed without any problems

Today I spent the best part of the morning to configure a SLES 10 SP2 server as a simple router. I googled quite a lot and could not find a nice and concise post on how to configure SLES 10 as a simple router, so I thought I’ll write up my experiences in the hopes that it will help someone. Although this was done on SLES 10 I am pretty sure it will apply to openSUSE as well.

My setup is as follows: Local lan is 192.168.0.0/24 and I want a private lan on 192.168.1.0/24 so that I can run stuff like DHCP and PXE without upsetting everyone on the network. I have a SLES 10 server with 2 network cards: eth1 connected to the local lan and eth0 connected to my private switch. The local lan is connected via ADSL to the Internet and I need my private network to also be able to connect to the Internet.

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I have been on leave for a couple of days and today when I booted my laptop the openSUSE updater notified me of 4 security updates. While I was watching zypper updating the system (I prefer the command line client) I wondered if it would be possible for zypper to download and install patches/programs/etc asynchronously.  To explain better: instead of downloading a patch and then installing it, why can’t zypper download the patch and then start a process/tread to install it while it immediately starts to download the next file ? I have no knowledge of the internals of zypper or yast, so I don’t know it it even feasible, but it would decrease the time needed to patch the system.

I recently became an openSUSE member and good manners dictate that I introduce myself.

My name is Johan Kotze and I work as a pre-sales engineer for Novell. I live in Paarl, South Africa – a beautiful town in the Cape winelands. I am married and have a 5 year old daugther (yes she does have her daddy wrapped around her little finger )

Like all geeks I like to play with new stuff, so my primary contribution to openSUSE is to try out all the new releases and file bug reports. I run openSUSE on all of my machines at work and at home and spread the word whenever I can.

My other interests include programming (pascal and C#) and bird watching (the feathered kind) and traveling. I’ll gladly give advice to anyone wanting travel info on Souther Africa.

I am currently running openSUSE 11 with KDE 4.1 on my primary laptop (a Lenovo T61p). It took me a while to figure out that you  to have to click on the little kidney thing in the right corner before you can move plasmoids around on the taskbar.

I will try (no promises) to blog about my experiences with openSUSE and other open source software.