Suse Linux 9 on Michael’s Domain

Mounting disk image files and encrypted filesystems/partitions

Sat, 26 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

To dump a disk (or a partition) into a file, you use the following command:dd if=/dev/hda3 of=file.binThis command writes the complete data on the hda3 partition into the file file.bin.To mount the filesystem that is in the file, you need to create a loopback device:losetup /dev/loop0 file.binNow you can mount the filesystem as usual:mount -r -t filesystemtype /dev/loop0 /mnt/mountpointApparently, one can combine the last two commands into one:mount -t filesystemtype -o loop ./file.bin /mnt/mountpointIf you want to encrypt the data on a file, that contains a whole filesystem, it is getting a bit more complicated:sudo mkdir /mnt/secure (create mount point for the filesystem)dd if=/dev/zero of=path/to/file bs=1k count=409600 (create an empty file with 400 MB size) sudo /sbin/losetup -e xor /dev/loop0 path/to/file/sbin/mkfs -t ext2 /dev/loop0 409600 (format the device as ext2)sudo mount -t ext2 /dev/loop0 /mnt/secure (mount the device file)cd /mnt/securechown username . (change the owner of the top level directory of the filesystem)If you want to unmount the filesystem:sudo umount /dev/loop0If you want to get rid of the filesystem, you have to un-associate it from the loop device 0: /sbin/losetup -d /dev/loop0For some reason RedHat 9 doesn’t come with DES support, so for the time being (until I patch the kernel or move to Suse Linux) I am using the faster, but much weaker xor encryption.Suse 9 comes with inbuilt strong encryption and offers already during the installation the possibility to create an encrypted partition. Suse 9 asks during booting for the passphrase to mount the encrypted filesystem. The boot process stops and waits for 2 minutes before continuing if you don’t type in the password. In order to reduce this time, you can edit the file /etc/init.d/boot.crypto. Change in the following line 120 to e.g. 10::${TIMEOUT:=120}If you have missed your chance to type in the passphrase during boot time, you can mount the encrypted partition as follows:/sbin/losetup -e twofish /dev/loop0 /dev/hda7 mount /dev/loop0 /media/confBTW: The information about encrypted filesystems resides in /etc/cryptotab.

Suse 9

Fri, 25 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I switched to Suse 9. I can’t figure out from RedHat’s announcements what they are really up to. So I better get used to an alternative right now. I also switched from Gnome to KDE and at least on Suse 9, I like KDE more than Gnome on Red Hat 9.

Installing Staden 2003b on Suse 9

Thu, 24 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Download the sources .
cd into /usr/local and become su.
tar -xvzf /home/jeltsch/Documents/staden_linux_2003.0b1.tar.gz (jeltsch is my usename, thus has to be replaced for other users!!!!)

VNC server (aka KDE Desktop Sharing) under Suse 9

Thu, 24 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Suse 9 has an inbuilt VNC server called KDE Desktop sharing (under the System -> Remote Access menu). It can be configured in the Control Center -> Internet & Network. Unlike when you start up VNC via the command line (“vncserver”) this tool doesn’t start a new X desktop, but connects to your already existing X desktop. It is possible to run in addition to the inbuilt KDE Desktop Sharing a normal vncserver that starts its own X sessions.

VNC server under Suse 9

Thu, 24 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I tried to use vncserver on Suse 9, but to my surprise upon starting up with “vncserver” and then connecting with the “vncviewer” command I only saw the grey screen and an X terminal. I tried to execute xclock and gaim and they start up nicely. However I would also like to bee able to start up KDE. So I looked into the xstartup file (in the .vnc directory in your home folder) from my old Red Hat 9 install and compared it to the one from my Suse 9 install:Suse 9:!/bin/shxrdb $HOME/.Xresourcesxsetroot -solid greyxterm -geometry 80x24+10+10 -ls -title "$VNCDESKTOP Desktop" &twm &Red Hat 9:!/bin/shRed Hat Linux VNC session startup scriptunset SESSION_MANAGERexec /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrcI figured out that twm is a window manager; thus it replaces KDE in this context. If I replace the Suse script by the Red Hat script, KDE starts up upon starting vncserver.

Adding a Suse 9 to a Red Hat 9 (two different distros on the same computer)

Wed, 23 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Red Hat 9 is installed and the following partitioning is present:hdd1 /boot (ext3) 100MBhdd2 /home (reiserfs) 7.8GBhdd3 / (ext3) 7.8GBhdd4 EXThdd5 swap 1GBhdd6 /mnt/documents (reiserfs) 12GBhdd7 /mnt/music (reiserfs) 90GBThe task is to add a second Linux OS (Suse 9) onto this hard disk without destroying anything. The root partition of this system should be 10 GB. Additionally I want to put all user-created files on one partition (now they are on three different partitions: hdd2, hdd6 and hdd7). First I got a 200 MB external USB2/firewire hard drive (Maxtor, mounted as /mnt/sdb1) and copied the data from hdd1, hdd2, hdd6 and hdd7 onto it with “cp -ax /home /mnt/sdb1”, etc. Then I rebooted using the Knoppix 3.3 CD and from a root terminal executed partimage. I tried to save the image of the root partition directly to my external usb drive, but without success: everytime the program halted somewhere during the process. I then saved the image on /mnt/music and that succeeded. I rebooted into Red Hat 9 and copied the image manually from /mnt/music to the usb drive (/mnt/sdb1). Because I didn’t trust the partimage program, I additionally copied the filesystem manually to the usb drive using the following commands: mkdir /mnt/sdb1/redhat_root cd / find . -xdev -print | cpio -padm /mnt/sdb1/redhat_root Apparently this copies everything including special files, mount points, etc. preserving all the file meta data. After this I disconnected the external usb drive (to be on the safe side), rebooted into Knoppix and wanted to try out QTParted. It should be able to resize partitions. From a root terminal: “qtparted”. However, I was not able to resize anything (the options were greyed out). I could delete and recreate though (which didn’t help much). So I decided to go for a clean sweep, popped the Suse 9 CD into the drive and rebooted into the Suse 9 installer. I choose expert partitioning and deleted all partitions that were present and recreated the following partitions. I made sure to use exactly the same amount of blocks (1019) for hdb3 as had been used for hdd3 because I knew that partimage can only restore images onto partitions that have exactly the same size or are bigger:/dev/hdb1 1 8 64228+ 83 Linux (ext3) /boot/dev/hdb2 9 1314 10490445 83 Linux (reiserfs) //dev/hdb3 1315 2333 8185117+ 83 Linux (reiserfs) /redhat/dev/hdb4 2334 14945 101305890 f Win95 Ext'd (LBA)/dev/hdb5 2334 2464 1052226 82 Linux swap/dev/hdb6 2465 14945 100253601 83 Linux (reiserfs) /homeAfter the install had finished, I rebooted into Knoppix and tried to restore the Red Hat root partition onto hdb3. Partimage told me that the partition was smaller than the image, thus a restore was not possible. So rebooted into Suse 9 and manually copied the Red Hat 9 root system back to hdb3 (with the same command sequnce that was used to copy it manually to the usb drive). Then I changed /redhat/etc/fstab to reflect the new partitioning and copied all the files from /boot (but not the subdirectories from /boot) onto the new boot partition (except those files that had already equivalents in /boot). Then I modified /boot/grub/menu.lst by adding a line for the Red Hat install:title Red Hat 9 Linuxroot (hd1,0)kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.20-19.9 root=/dev/hdb3initrd /initrd-2.4.20-19.9.imgI also create the two user folders in the /home directory (which used to be the mount point for the /home partition). But I copy all the hidden files and directories (those starting with a .) into the userfolders.Then I tried to reboot into Red Hat 9. Without success. Kernel panic. No init found. Try passing init=option to the kernel. Actually the file system check of hdb3 failed (no superblock found). There are several error messages and the important ones come first and fast (and you don’t see them) and the bad, misleading error messages come late. Something like that you should manually repair the partition. And that root is mounted read-only. And that you can make it read-write by “mount -n -o remount,rw /”. And that only with Ctrl-D one can reboot into this state. Obviously that’s what I am going to do. However there is no hint about what command to use. Several attempts to do anything while having mounted from hdb failed (if reiserfs is read-only it cannot be repaired, if it is read-write it cannot be checked). So I reboot into Knoppix and do the repair from there: fsck (which executes reiserfsck) doesn’t do the job: it only checks, but doesn’t do any repairs. I figured that flagging reiserfsck –rebuild-sb /dev/hdb3 does repair the superblock. Still no go, so I do the slow complete rebuild of the filesystem from scratch with reiserfsck –rebuild-tree /dev/hdb3. It still doesn’t boot into RH9. Then I get the idea: the RH9 kernel might not support reiserfs (or the module is not loaded). Or (alternatively) copying some special files from a ext3 partition to a reiserfs partition might simply not work. So I delete (from Knoppix) the whole hdb3 and recreate it as ext3. Copy back all the data (QTParted still complains about too small size). And it finally works. I create two directories for the two users on the /home partitons and manually copy into them the non-hidden files of the old userfolders. I don’t copy the hidden files. There are many that would screw up Suse and make it impossible to log in (I had tried that out before). I log into Suse 9 as root and create the two users with exactly the same name as on RH9. There is a warning that the directory exists and that all its content will be owned by the new user. That is OK of course.

GRAMPS and Suse Linux 9

Wed, 23 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

At first I thought there is no way to get the GRAMPS genealogy software running on Suse 9. Apparently GNOME support by Suse sucks; the GRAMPS developers even say there are several things broken in the GNOME support of Suse. But finally there is a Suse Linux 9 RPM, that works (at least for us): http://apt.bygden.nu/SuSE/9.0-i386/RPMS.suser-rbos/gramps-0.98.0-rb1.i586.rpm . Here also my favourite way to make a graphical report from GRAMPS (you need to have the graphviz package installed):If you want to make a pdf file:

How to rescue a bad X configuration during Suse 9 install

Wed, 23 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

During my first Suse9 install I screwed up X. During the configuration of X the installer suggested to me: vesa 1600x1200@75. I thought I was smarter and went to the manual configuration and selected my Nokia 445Xi monitor from the list. Then it tried to switch into the new mode and gave me buttons to adjust the settings (centering, width, etc.). I did that and after I was satisfied continued the installation. When X was supposed to start up for the first time, my screen showed only “out of synch”. The way how to repair this is: Reboot in safe mode; change in /boot/grub/menu.lst vga=xxx into vga=normal and remove the “showopts” entry. Reboot again in safe mode, change to runlevel 3 (“init 3”) and execute sax2 –vesa 0:1024x768@75. Then I again selected my Nokia monitor but didn’t do the adjustments (I centered and sized the image only via the front panel knobs on the monitor). And everything is fine again.

Samba trouble (smb, smbadduser, smbpasswd)

Wed, 23 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

If your samba is unreliable, there can be a number of reasons. I got the impression that YAST overwrites configuration data you have manually edited (e.g. in the password and user files) when you try to change settings via the YAST samba setup procedure. Here follows a checklist in case samba is again not responding or not visible in the network neighborhood. It could be that the unreliability is due to a PDC shutting down. Maybe I should make my Linux the PDC as it is always running. Anyway even if I manage to connect from W2K (using map network drive) I couldn’t connect from W98 by clicking the visible icon of my computer in the MCBL workgroup (“network path not found”). And in MacOSX my computer was not visible at all (but I could connect via the manual command “smb://128.214.186.42/homes”). Strange…In /etc/samba/smb.conf:

The new iPod (3rd generation) and Suse Linux 9

Wed, 23 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I have bought an iPod. And it appears that the 3rd generation iPod is substantially different from the previous models. E.g. in its file system. In previous models you could convert the HFS+ file system into a FAT32 filesystem. HFS+ is the filesystem used by the new MacOS X OS. It cannot be read by Windows OS (unless you buy commerical third party software such as MacOpener or MacDrive). There are several Linux-interfaces for the iPod, but they all require that the iPod is mounted as a regular mass storage device. Suse Linux 9 luckily has support for HFS+ filesystems although it is still experimental. In order to be able to mount HFS+ formatted file systems, you have to load the hfsplus kernel module:sudo /sbin/modprobe hfsplusAfter that you can just plug in the iPod. After a while you will hear a beep meaning that it was recognized. To determine which device number it got you should check the system messages:tail -30 /var/log/messagesAs it is handles like a SCSI device it will get probably sda if it is your first usb/firewire device. If you have already usb or firewire devices connected to your computer it will get maybe sdb or sdc (and so on). Create a mount point:sudo mkdir /media/ipodThe 3rd generation iPod has apparently two partitions. The first must be for the firmware/system software (sdx1) and the second is for the data (sdx29. Funnily when I tried to mount it withsudo mount -t hfsplus /dev/sdc2 /media/ipodthe system complained that something is not OK with the device. However, when I tried:sudo mount -o umask=000 /dev/sdc2 /media/ipodeverything went smoothly. The umask option is necessary in order to give everybody read-write access. Otherwise only root can write. I installed gtkpod to move my mp3s to the iPod. There is even a Suse 9 rpm around.

Changing the host name with Yast2 (overriding the DCHP server)

Mon, 21 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I couldn’t figure out how to change the host name. The host name is e.g. displayed by default (Suse 9) in the command prompt and used by several applications. If you move your computer between different networks, this name changes as the default (Suse 9) is, that the host name is assigned by the DHCP server. But you can override these setting using Yast2: Control Center -> Yast2 modules -> Networ Devices -> Network Card -> authenticate! -> Edit already configured network cards -> Host name & Name server -> Uncheck the box “Change hostname via DHCP” and write the desired host name into the box. I presume you have to reboot for the settings to take effect. However, this doesn’t change e.g. the name of your computer that is visible on the windows network. To change this, you have to add an entry to /etc/samba/smb.conf like this: netbios name = “michael-laptop” (Is this correct?: The "" is necessary, otherwise you will only see the first part of the name (that is: michael).) This will change your name as it appears e.g. when you browse the network from a Windows NT computer. However, the samba implementation of MacOS 10.2 will still continue to display some generic name (in my case the name the DHCP server wants to give me: mcblmj-2).

Formating an mounting an external firewire reiserfs disk

Mon, 21 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I didn’t know how to format an unformatted drive under Linux. I attached a firewire case with an old 12 GB Macintosh-formatted HD to my computer. In order to format it with reiserfs, I used Yast2. I had to go to expert mode and rewrite the partition table. By this action Yast2 puts an entry into the fstab, that I modified to:/dev/sda1 /media/firewire reiserfs noauto,user 0 0since I don’t want to have it connected every time I boot up. Instead I can now mount it as a regular user manually with:mount /media/tmp/To make the drive writable to normal users (or to whomever you want to grant access) you need to change the ownership and/or permissions of the mountpoint:chmod -R a+rwx /media/firewire

Good rpm repositories for Suse Linux 9

Mon, 21 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

You can search specifically for suse 9 rpm packages under http://rpm.pbone.net/ but there are two good sites that have specialized on Suse Linux rpm packages: http://guru.linuxbe.org http://packman.links2linux.de/

Staden 1.4 and Suse 9

Mon, 21 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I installed today the new Staden package (version 1.4) to my Suse 9. I included the lines:export STADENROOT=/usr/local/staden-linux-rel-1-4 . $STADENROOT/staden.profilein my ~/.bashrc file.After this kprinter broke with the following error:kprinter: /usr/local/staden-linux-rel-1-4/lib/linux-binaries/libstdc++.so.5: no version information available (required by /opt/kde3/lib/kprinter.so)Apparently the usual file (/usr/lib/libstdc++.so.5) is not anymore used because the staden linux-binary directory is listed in the PATH variable in the very beginning and thus overrides all other entries. Thus I replaced /usr/local/staden-linux-rel-1-4/lib/linux-binaries/libstdc++.so.5 and libstdc++.so.5.0.1 by symbolic links to /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.5.0.5:cd /usr/local/staden-linux-rel-1-4/lib/linux-binariessudo ln -s /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.5.0.5 libstdc++.so.5.0.1sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.5.0.5 libstdc++.so.5So far at least printing works without error messages, but I have not tried staden yet…

VMware setup error (libpopt)

Mon, 21 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The error message during VMware setup (vmware-config.pl) is due to the fact that Suse 9 has a too new package for the requested library:/usr/bin/vmware-smbpasswd.bin: error while loading shared libraries: libpopt.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directoryThe following fixes the problem:ln -s /usr/lib/libpopt.so.1 /usr/lib/libpopt.so.0

Installation and configuration of disc-cover on Suse 9.0

Sun, 20 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

libcdaudio libcdaudio-devel (for cdaudio.h) perl-audio-cd module disc-cover configuration: create all the configuration files, otherwise segmentation fault add servers to .cdserverrc ( http://www.freedb.org/modules.php?name=Sections&sop=viewarticle&artid=9 )

Making a Suse RPM for the Staden Package

Thu, 05 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

As the binaries work on all Suse distributions, I though to skip the build process and just have the binaries unpacked by rpm and then add the suse-specific files to the correct places. These additional files are mainly kde.desktop files, icons andexport STADENROOT=/usr/local/staden-linux-1-4-1and sourcing /usr/local/staden-linux-1-4-1/staden.profilein ~/.bashrc.Thus the unpacking would be justtar --extract --verbose --gzip --absolute-names --file=staden-linux-1-4-1.tar.gzandchown -R root:root /usr/local/staden-linux-1-4-1

Start netatalk as system service during bootup on Suse Linux 9

Thu, 05 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I am missing from Suse Linux 9 a nice GUI that collects ALL system services with the options “start”, “stop” and “start on every system boot”. RedHat 9 has something like that. There is Yast2, but under the services, netatalk is not even listed. To boot netatalk during system boot, I just create manually a link: cd /etc/init.d/rc5.d sudo ln -s ../atalk S22atalk After rebooting (and to my surprise) my computer froze. No Ctrl-Alt-F2, no access via ssh; the only rescue being the physical reboot button button (something I am only used to from my Macintosh times). After rebooting in safe mode and removing the link everything is fine again. When I manually start atalk, the system freezes in the same way after a couple of seconds…

Suse Linux 9.1

Thu, 05 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I bought the boxed version of Suse Linux 9.1. The update went quite smoothly. Although it reported about 1500 package conflicts, they were all just consequences of kopete 0.81 (my icq client) and vlc 0.71 (my video player). I resolved the conflicts by first unprotecting the non-Suse packages that I had installed and then risking system inconsistencies. However, after the update both kopete and vlc still functioned. On the other hand VMWare 4.0.5 broke but updating to 4.5.1 helped.

Suse Linux 9.1/9.2 and vmware

Thu, 05 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I downloaded again a VMware release to test (4.5.2). But it didn’t even wanted to be configured. Apparently Suse has screwed up the installation source directory tree structure. I found this fix: cd /usr/src/linux su make cloneconfig make prepare After this the vmware-config.pl should run ok. Before running the vmware-config.pl I also applied the vmware-any-any-update78 patch . BTW: You have to repeat this procedure everytime you update your kernel! After updating to 9.2 I had more problems. After every restart I had to execute vmware-config.pl again. This was fixed by adding for a in seq 0 9; do mknod /dev/vmnet$a c 119 $a; done to the beginning of the /etc/init.d/vmware file. After kernel updates the procedure before starting vmware-config.pl is cd /usr/src/linux make cloneconfig make modules_prepare

Using multiple mouses/trackpads simultaneously (Suse Linux 9 Yast2/SaX)

Thu, 05 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I have a laptop and used Yast2 to configure an external USB mouse. However, the trackpad became inactive. When I now restart without USB mouse I am in trouble. I used for the configuration: Control Center -> Yast2 modules -> Hardware -> Select mouse model If you want to operate both external mouse and trackpad, you need to dig deeper: Control Center -> Yast2 modules -> Hardware -> Graphics Card and Monitor -> Graphical Desktop Environment -> Change -> Component: Input Devices Here you have the possibility to add an indefinte amount of mouses. You should probably test whether you new settings work (with the test button) before you restart. The settings become only active after a restart. Meaning if you want to deactivate your trackpad (because it disturbs you) you need again a restart…

Build-in package selection during Suse Linux install (autoyast, network install)