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Christopher Hobbs

Network Administrator for a small municipality and openSUSE volunteer. General nerd.

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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.

Posted in Desktop, Documentation, GNOME, KDE, Network, Usability | 5 Comments »

Installing Ruby 1.9 on openSUSE 11.2

April 6th, 2010 by

It’s been a while since I’ve posted or been active in the community, so I thought I’d toss an update out there.  I’ll cross post this on my personal blog and on Cool Solutions (modified for SLEx 10).  This is a pretty rudimentary post as installation from source is pretty straightforward, but perhaps it’ll be useful to someone.

The only requirements for this build that I’m aware of at this time are make, gcc, and the openssl/openssl-devel packages.

The default Ruby distribution in 11.2 is 1.8.7, contrasting the current stable release of 1.9.1.  If you already have Ruby installed via zypper, you’ll need to uninstall it (‘sudo zypper rm ruby’), otherwise the first step is to grab the latest release from http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/.

Next, unpack your release (replacing 1.9.1-p376 with the build you downloaded):

tar xfvz ruby-1.9.1-p376.tar.gz

Change to the extracted directory and run the config script:

cd ruby-1.9.1-p376 && ./configure

Build the release:  Note that you can allow jobs to run simultaneously with the -j switch, see make (1) for further details.

make

Install the release as root:

sudo make install

To verify that 1.9 is indeed installed, issue:

ruby --version

Posted in Documentation, Miscellaneous, Usability | 1 Comment »

openSUSE-GNOME BugDay Weekend Wrapup

May 18th, 2009 by

As posted to the openSUSE-GNOME Mailing List.

Greetings!

Thanks to all who showed up to help on the bug day on
Friday, your efforts are greatly appreciated.

We started with just over 70 bugs and left the *obby
session available over the weekend.  By the end of the
weekend, we had reviewed 14 bugs (9 of which we closed).

These were all Critical and Major bugs listed for openSUSE
11.1.

I will be closing the *obby session this afternoon at about
1700 CDT.

Thanks again!
—
Christopher M. Hobbs [chobbs@siloamsprings.com]
Network Administrator, City of Siloam Springs

Posted in Desktop, Documentation, GNOME, Quality Assurance, Usability | Comments Off on openSUSE-GNOME BugDay Weekend Wrapup

openSUSE-GNOME BugDay: “Community Effort”

May 14th, 2009 by

PSA sent to opensuse-gnome@opensuse.org, opensuse-project@opensuse.org, opensuse-announce@opensuse.org

Greetings!

Please join us for the openSUSE-GNOME BugDay code named “Community Effort” tomorrow
(Friday 14 MAY 2009) at 1100EDT/1500UTC.

We’ll be squashing blocker, critical, and major bugs in 11.1 related to GNOME.

More information can be found on the wiki:
http://en.opensuse.org/GNOME/BugDays/20090514

A Gobby session will be announced at the beginning of the meeting to assign/close
bugs. Should you have any questions, feel free to ask in #openSUSE-GNOME on Freenode,
or email me directly.

We hope to see you there!
—
Christopher M. Hobbs [chobbs@siloamsprings.com]
Network Administrator, City of Siloam Springs

Posted in Desktop, Events, GNOME, Quality Assurance, Usability | Comments Off on openSUSE-GNOME BugDay: “Community Effort”

openSUSE-GNOME BugDay!

May 5th, 2009 by

Roll up those sleeves and mark your calendars, because here comes another BugDay!

During Community Week (http://en.opensuse.org/CommunityWeek), I’ll be hosting another openSUSE-GNOME BugDay on Fri, 15 MAY 2009. We’ll start promptly at 1000 CDT and will continue until 1600 CDT. I will be around very early in the day to start prep for the meeting should you have any questions.

We’ll conduct business in #opensuse-gnome on Freenode (irc.freenode.net). I will establish a Gobby session as I’ve done in the past, and we’ll work off of that.

Can’t wait to see you there!

Posted in GNOME | Comments Off on openSUSE-GNOME BugDay!

USB EVDO (Alltel UM175AL) under SLED 10

February 9th, 2009 by

This was a bit of a bear, but I’ve inhereted a generic looking USB EVDO stick at the office. After some research and elbow grease, I’ve managed to get it working. In this post, I’ll detail EVDO configuration under SLED 10. I’ll leave out most of the gory technical details as others have covered that for me. I’ll link to the appropriate reference where necessary.

(more…)

Posted in Documentation, Miscellaneous, Usability | Comments Off on USB EVDO (Alltel UM175AL) under SLED 10

Registering your shiny new HP Mini-Note 2133

February 6th, 2009 by

So you just got an HP Mini-Note 2133 pre-loaded with SLED 10?  Great, right?

Well…  It’s not been so great for a lot of people.  It seems that HP simply put this laptop together, half-assed a SLED load and sent it out into the wild.  I’ve had a ton of problems with it, the two major ones being that I couldn’t register the machine with the Novell Customer Center (not even with my site license) it ships with a non-working wireless card.

My wifi fix was simple, buy a new usb wifi dongle…  Registration, however, was a little easier to fix (after some wailing, gnashing of teeth, and chat in #opensuse-GNOME… thanks captiain_magnus!).

If you attempt to use YaST to register you copy of SLED on the 2133, you’ll be re-directed to a “special” Novell Customer Center login.  It’s a little different than the normal one in that it wants an HP license, not any other SLED license you may have.  The biggest difference, however, is that it’s broke.  It simply refreshes the page when you click submit and sends nothing to Novell.

They’re pretty sneaky about hiding your license number as well.  It happens to be on your restore DVD.  It’s located on the right hand side below the HP logo and the “2133” text.  It’s in a series something like NNNNNN-XNN, where N’s are numbers and X is some letter.

To get around the registration bug, have your license number handy and fire up your terminal.  Use ‘sudo’ or just ‘su to root and issue the following command:

suse_register -n -a serial-hp=NNNNNN-XNN

Where “NNNNNN-XNN” is your registration code.  Sit back and wait, it took almost 20 minutes for this command to finish for me and you’ll receive absolutely no indication that it’s functioning.  Once it’s done, you’ll simply be returned to your prompt.  Fire up YaST or your favorite terminal emulator and check your repositories.  You should now have a Novell repository added.

Enjoy!

Posted in Base System, Distribution, Miscellaneous, Systems Management, Usability | 2 Comments »

openSUSE-GNOME Team Meeting Today (Timeshift) – 05 FEB 2009 2200 UTC

February 5th, 2009 by

Please join us for the GNOME Team meeting in #openSUSE-GNOME on
irc.freenode.net.

The current agenda can be found here:
http://en.opensuse.org/GNOME/Meetings/20090205

For time conversions, please see:
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?day=22&month=1&year=2009&hour=22&min=0&sec=0&p1=0

Thanks!

Posted in GNOME, Miscellaneous | Comments Off on openSUSE-GNOME Team Meeting Today (Timeshift) – 05 FEB 2009 2200 UTC

Thats how I roll: Installing Ruby on Rails on openSUSE

February 5th, 2009 by

There’s been some discussion about Rails on openSUSE recently, so I thought I’d add to my Ruby articles with a Rails installation guide.

Getting started with Rails on openSUSE is a breeze.  In this particular article, I’ll quickly outline installation and startup of Rails on openSUSE 11.1.  You’ll need to install Ruby, ruby-sqlite, and ruby gems.  I’ve detailed these in my previous articles on ruby.

(more…)

Posted in Documentation, Usability | 4 Comments »

Novell Teaming on SLES

January 21st, 2009 by

As per the request of Andrew Wafaa, I thought I’d set up a quick guide to how I got teaming running on SLES.  The documentation for Teaming on the administrative end was relatively sparse, but the installation guide was sufficient for most purposes.

Read on to learn more about Teaming and SLES…

(more…)

Posted in Documentation, Miscellaneous, Server | Comments Off on Novell Teaming on SLES

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