Installation-Notes on OpenSuSE Leap 15.6
Installation-Notes on OpenSuSE Leap 15.6
There's strictly no warranty for the correctness of this text. You use any of the information provided here at your own risk. I can not be held responsible, if you damage your system by using any of the information provided her.
These are my installation notes about the Linux distribution "OpenSuSE Leap 15.6". I installed it in October 2024.
There are also notes on my previous distribution "OpenSuSE 13.1". Here, I've only covered topics, that differ from the old installation. So if something's missing here, take a look at the previous website.
In most cases, today's PCs come with a UEFI-Bios. It seems, it
requires a separate boot partition, which is created by the SuSE
installer. There's also a feature called "Secure Boot". that has to be
disabled, to boot something else than Windows. I could boot Linux, when
setting "Secure Boot" in the Bios/UEFI to "Other OS". It may be possible, that Leap 15.6 could also handle "Secure Boot", but I haven't tried that yet.
Edit: When installing on my other PC, it was necessary to activate "Secure Boot" support in the Linux installation program. Otherwise, the PC wouldn't boot lateron, and I had to reinstall all over again.
When installing Leap 15.4 earlier, I had this problem: The installer couldn't identify my monitor, so it set a bad resolution by default, that caused unwanted lines on the screen.
On the first screen, it was possible to press "e" to configure the
boot settings of the installer program. Here, I added the word "nomodeset" to the boot line, that starts with "linux
...". This disables a feature of the kernel called "KMS". The result
here was, that a correct resolution was set, and the screen of the
installer was fine.
The installer then recognized the network as one of the first
steps. Fortunately, it could handle my Wi-Fi-hardware (which the at the
moment also recent Puppy Linux distribution "FossaPup64 9.5" couldn't).
When letting the installer fully configure the network, it started
installing package updates from internet repositories. Unfortunately,
this also installed a new kernel, that didn't work with my system at
all. So I had to restart, and then make the installer skip the
network-configuration, and install everything from DVD at first.
Even with the more recent kernel installed (that didn't work), it was
still possible though, to select the previous kernel in the boot-loader
menu of GRUB2. So the original kernel wasn't deinstalled. But that was
not, what I wanted, so I still skipped network configuration.
Partitioning: I wanted to install Leap on an external USB-hard-drive. So I selected "guided" and chose the wanted hard drive for partitioning. The default suggestions for partitioning would have installed to the Windows hard drive, so that was something to pay attention to.
From the kernel options, I took out the words "splash=silent", "nomodeset" and "quiet".
I deactivated setting up a firewall and AppArmor.
I selected to install a "Xfce4"-system. Xfce4 is a lightweight, but capable window manager.
All in all, I had to try several times, until the installer
worked and my settings were the way I wanted them, but in the end it
worked.
Edit: On my other PC, I'm using this content in the file "/etc/default/grub" at the moment:
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR= # Selection of boot-item in the menu: GRUB_DEFAULT=0 # Time before booting selected item: GRUB_TIMEOUT=5 GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="resume=/dev/disk/by-uuid/... preempt=full security=apparmor mitigations=on video=DP-1:640x480@60 video=DP-2:d video=DP-3:d" GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="" GRUB_TERMINAL="gfxterm" GRUB_GFXMODE="640x480" GRUB_BACKGROUND= GRUB_THEME= SUSE_BTRFS_SNAPSHOT_BOOTING="false" GRUB_USE_LINUXEFI="true" GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER="false" GRUB_ENABLE_CRYPTODISK="n"
"AppArmor" and Mitigation are activated. This makes the system a bit slower, but it is said that it's the better option for security reasons. "Mitigation" disables some features of the CPU, to make it less vulnerable against socalled "Spectre/Meltdown"-attacks. If performance was really a problem, it would be possible to deactivate these protections again.
The "video="-options in the kernel-line refer to the circumstances on my PC, where I'm using a standard VGA-output called "DP-1". The command "xrandr" would tell you the name of your video output. "video=" leaves "KMS" intact, that is, I'm not using "nomodeset" here (which would deactivate it). Somehow my graphics card seem to need KMS to find the screen resolutions.
On first boot, I selected "Settings / Display" from the menu to set
the screen resolution. I noticed, that the tool is part of Xfce4, not of
YaST2.
I selected the theme "Adwaita light".
Setting the resolution of the displaymanager (the program, that displays the login-screen), was a bit more tricky. In my case, the displaymanager is called "LightDM". To set its resolution, a file
/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/52-myres.conf
can be created, with this content:
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "HDMI-2"
Option "PreferredMode" "1280x720"
EndSection
This sets a "preferred resolution", that is respected by LightDM. Use the command "xrandr -q" to find out, which term you have to use for the "Identifier". It's "HDMI-2" in my case, but it may be a different term on your system, depending on the connection to your monitor.
When logged into the X-server afterwards, the command "xrandr -s"
can be used to manually change resolutions on the console. Also the
selection "Settings / Display" of the Xfce4 menu can be used to do that,
making the settings more permanent.
Actually, my monitor has a preferred resolution of "1920x1080". I decided to set this resolution now, and increase all fonts a lot.
The soundcard is setup automatically at startup now, so it seems, the corresponding module of YaST2 isn't used any more. It may even cause conflicts.
Everything is working with "pulseaudio" now.
"alsa" with "alsamixer" is also still available though.
To get the file "/dev/dsp", install the package "alsa-oss...rpm". Actually, also running
modprobe snd_pcm_oss
as root is needed for that. If only "/dev/dsp1" is created then, just create a symbolic link with "ln -s /dev/dsp1 /dev/dsp" as root.
I chose "Session and autostart" (German version: "Sitzung und Startverhalten / Automatisch gestartete Anwendungen") from the program menu. Everything except the printer-applet, the network-applet, the Xfce-configuration-service and the Xfce-notification-service wasn't useful to me, so I just deactivated these other services. The bluetooth-stuff may be useful, when bluetooth is used.
The "package update indicator" in the system tray of the task-bar suggested installing lots of updates (because I had installed from the original, older DVD). When I let it do the updates, after reboot the new kernel was started, and nothing worked any more. I then reinstalled the whole system from scratch once more, and deinstalled "package-update-indicator...rpm".
"aliases" can be defined in "/etc/profile.d/alias.bash". But you can also use the tradtitional file "/etc/bash.bashrc.local".
The keyboard shortcuts for Xfce4 can be edited in
/home/user/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xfce4-keyboard-shortcuts.xml
But that was actually quite painful this time. So I attach my whole file, that finally worked, here. Rename it accordingly, after making a backup of the original file.
Notice, there's also a file
/etc/xdg/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xfce4-keyboard-shortcuts.xml
If the file in the "/home"-directory doesn't exist, the file from the "/etc"-directory is copied to the "/home"-directory, which may be unexpected.
On OpenSuSE Leap 15.6, it is also possible to install and use LXDE instead of Xfce4 as the window-manager. For setting the keyboard shortcuts in LXDE, I can rely on my old notes about it.
This should set most fonts in LXDE:
To set a new size of the mouse pointer in LXDE, change this line in "/home/user/.gtkrc-2.0":
gtk-cursor-theme-size=18
There's a similar line in "/home/user/.config/lxsession/LXDE/desktop.conf":
iGtk/CursorThemeSize=18
Changing the numbers from 18 to 32 and restarting LXDE increases the size of the mouse pointer in a reasonable way (that is, not as much as you would think).
In Firefox 129, the size of the icons in the toolbar (like the icon of the "Home" button) was way too small.
To fix it, I pointed Firefox to "about:config" and searched with the term "devp" for the setting "layout.css.devPixelsPerPx". Default is "-1.0". Setting this value to "2" zoomed the whole user interface including the toolbar icons to 200%.
Now the size of the icons was fine, but the menu fonts were way too big. I went to the profile folder
/home/user/.mozilla/firefox/[somenumbers].default-release
Inside it, I created a new folder called "chrome". I changed to that folder and created a file called "userChrome.css". It had this content:
@namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul");
* {
font-size: 10pt !important;
}
It is also possible to set a certain font-family by adding for example the line
font-family: DejaVu Sans !important;
inside the curly brackets.
Then I had to make Firefox recognize the file "userChrome.css" at startup. I pointed Firefox to "about:config" and searched with the term "userprof" for the preference "toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets" and changed its value from "false" to "true".
I also changed the "Zoom" setting in the graphical Firefox preferences.
The text of websites can be changed at runtime with "Ctrl++" and "Ctrl+-".
Then I restarted Firefox. That way I finally had suitable sizes of icons and fonts, which is of importance to me.
LXDE makes use of the file manager "pcmanfm". pcmanfm is also responsible for starting applications from desktop icons or for dealing with inserted USB-devices.
If suddenly windows are popping up on the desktop with messages about these kind of processes, you can prevent this by checking the settings in "pcmanfm".
IPv6 has something to do with longer web-adresses. When IPv6-support
is enabled, it can slow down accessing websites significantly. So when I
notice, that the web-browser takes some time before it opens a website,
I disable IPv6 on my system.
On Leap 15.6, I added the following lines as root to the file "/etc/sysctl.conf":
net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6 = 1 net.ipv6.conf.default.disable_ipv6 = 1 net.ipv6.conf.lo.disable_ipv6 = 1
Then I ran the command
sysctl -p
After that, IPv6-support was disabled, and websited opened quickly again.
The "hostname", that is the name of the computer, can be set as root just by typing it into the file "/etc/hostname".
When the error
No protocol specified
appears, when starting window-applications in the terminal, it has something to do with the user not having permission to access the X-server's "display". The error can be fixed, by running the following command as an ordinary user (it's the ordinary user, who is owner of his display):
xhost +local:[hostname or ip]
The hostname can be found in "/etc/hostname" or by running the command "hostname". Just "xhost +" would make the display accessible to everyone (on the internet), so it's better to use the more secure command mentioned above.
Before running the command, it took a very long time to startup Firefox. Afterwards, I didn't get the "No protocol specified"-message any more, and Firefox started quickly again.
On OpenSuSE Leap, some video players on websites may not work by default. While Youtube worked in Firefox, I had problems with some other players on websites like "tagesschau.de", "ardmediathek.de" or "tele5.de". The problems occurred only with Firefox, not with Google Chrome. The reason were missing "H.264"-codecs, as explained here.
So I added the Packman repository (which only supports SuSE distributions), and gave it a priority of 90. Then I used YaST2 to install the following packages from Packman: "libavcodec.., libavformat.. and libavdevice..", each followed by several numbers like 56 and 60.
After that, the other video players also worked in Firefox.
Some packages, that I consider important, are not installed by default. I installed them lateron:
These, I also installed:
Some major applications weren't also installed by default and had to be added:
"xfce-terminal" is a very nice terminal program:
/home/user/.config/xfce4/terminal
There, you can also restore the menu, if it's turned off.
So that's all pretty nice and made me leave "xterm" behind after having used it for decades.
For some reason, I wanted to use WLAN (WiFi) with my SuSE-PC. So I bought a cheap, modern WLAN-USB-stick called "T-Link TL-WN823N (Realtek RTL8192EU)".
At first, it seemed it couldn't get a connection to my router though.
The stick showed up in "lsusb", "iwconfig".
nmcli dev wifi list
showed the available networks. But it still wouldn't connect.
It turned out, the default driver module "rtl8xxxu" isn't sufficient.
A better driver module for this stick called "8192eu" has been
written. The source code is available, but compiling may not be that
easy.
I found precompiled binaries in a repository of a user named Sauerland. I thought, they wouldn't work, because the file versions didn't seem to correspond directly to the version number of my 15.5 default kernel, and installing new kernel modules is always a delicate process anyway. But to my surprise, it worked with the rpms there, which were called:
rtl8192eu-blacklist-rtl8xxxu-5.11.2.1.git20230622-lp154.2.9.x86_64.rpm rtl8192eu-kmp-default-5.11.2.1.git20230622_k5.14.21_15.500.24.69-lp154.2.9.x86_64.rpm rtl8192eu-ueficert-5.11.2.1.git20230622-lp154.2.9.x86_64.rpm
(At some point, I had to use "rpm -i ... --nodeps" to make them install.)
After a reboot, the blacklisting of the "rtl8xxxu"-module took effect, so it wasn't loaded. When I did
modprobe 8192eu
it succeded, and after that, the stick finally connected.
With the cheap WiFi-stick "TL-W823N" mentioned above, WLAN (WiFI)
worked in general, but was rather slow, because it didn't support the
newer, faster WiFi-protocols.
So I bought another stick called "TP-Link AC600 (Archer T2U)" (also for less than 20,- EUR).
It seems, there can be different kind of chips built into this stick. "lsusb" showed this ID for my stick:
2357:011f
It is said, that this ID refers to the Realtek chip "RTL8821AU".
Again, there are precompiled binaries for OpenSuSE Leap 15.5 in Sauerland's repository. The binaries are compiled from driver-source-code written by "morrownr". The rpm-files in the repository are called:
rtl8821au-kmp-default-20230812_k5.14.21_15.500.22-lp154.9.1.x86_64.rpm rtl8821au-ueficert-20230812-lp154.9.1.x86_64.rpm
After installing them with "rpm -i ....rpm" and doing a "depmod" as root, I could install the driver with
modprobe 8821au
Then, the WiFi-USB-stick worked, and its performance was alright.
Some options of the boot-loader GRUB2 (like for example the look and the resolution of the boot menu) can be changed by editing the file
/etc/default/grub
as 'root'. The changes can then be applied to the system by running the command
update-bootloader
(In the past, the command "grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg" had to be executed for this step.)
The settings are also taken into account by an installation that uses UEFI.
Instructions from here.
If not, consider creating a pulseaudio loopback device.
If "convert" doesn't let you convert pdfs to jpgs, add this line to the file "/etc/ImageMagick-7/policy.xml":
<policy domain="coder" rights="read | write" pattern="PDF" />