February 2005
These Release Notes cover the following areas:
The complete documentation that applies to this suite of products is available online at http://www.novell.com/documentation/nlsbs9/index.html.
The SLES 9 manuals are in PDF format on CD1 in the docu directory. They contain valuable information, and may answer many questions for you. Translations for YaST are also included.
Send us feedback on the documentation for the Novel Small Business Suite online using the feedback link on each page or at the Novell documentation feedback page at http://www.novell.com/documentation/feedback/feedback/data/hc7znq4j.html.
Feedback on SLES 9 documentation and translations should be e-mailed to
documentation@suse.de.
The RPM packages NVIDIA_GLX and NVIDIA_kernel for the nVidia driver with 3-D support are no longer available. To install the nVidia driver, use the nVidia driver patch in YOU (YaST Online Update). The drivers for 2-D support are still included in SLES.
Removable media are now integrated via subfs. It is not necessary to mount the media manually. A cd /media/* triggers the automatic mounting. Note that media cannot be ejected while a program is accessing them.
If you install within VMware, you should disable acceleration in VMware: Edit-> Virtual Machine Settings -> Options -> Advanced -> Disable acceleration.
We have included Lustre as the cluster-capable file system of our choice. For Novell support offerings regarding Lustre, go to http://www.suse.com/feedback.
The Globus Toolkit 2.0 was part of SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server (SLES) 8. Because of major changes in the Globus TK API and in binaries, we have decided to exclude Globus Toolkit 2.x or 3.x in SLES 9. Support for the Globus Toolkit is available through a consulting agreement. Go to http://www.suse.com/feedback for available offerings.
The CIFS shipped together with Samba is currently not supported. The current implementation is not stable enough to work in a production environment.
The network device setup has been changed. Previously the configuration of a nonexisting interface triggered initialization of the hardware. Now new hardware is searched for and initialized first, which then triggers the setup of the new network interface.
Additionally, new names are introduced for the configuration files. Because the name of a network interface is created dynamically and the use of Hot Plug devices contnues to increase, a name like ethX is no longer usable for configuration. We now use unique descriptions like the MACaddress or the PCI slot for naming interface configurations.
Note: You can use interface names when they are present. For example, ifup eth0 / ifdown eth0 still works.
The configuration for devices is found in /etc/sysconfig/hardware. The interfaces these devices provide are in /etc/sysconfig/network.
An extended Readme is available under /usr/share/doc/packages/sysconfig/README.
After an update from an older distribution, the sound cards must be reconfigured with the sound module of YaST2. Invoke YaST as user root using the command yast2 sound.
Files on file systems created by SLES 9.0 and older distributions use (when not set otherwise) non-UTF-8 encoding for their filenames. If these filenames contain non-ASCII characters, they will be garbled on SLES 9 and later versions. A fix is to use the convmv script which changes the encoding of the files to UTF-8.
The FHS now requires XML resources (DTDs, stylesheets, etc.) to be installed in /usr/share/xml. Therefore, some directories are no longer available in /usr/share/sgml. If you encounter problems, modify your scripts or makefiles or use the official catalogs (especially /etc/xml/catalog or /etc/sgml/catalog).
When mounting VFAT partitions, the parameter formerly called code= must be changed to codepage=. If mounting a VFAT partition causes problems, check if the file /etc/fstab contains the old name for the parameter.
The Apache Web server (version 1.3) has been replaced by Apache2 (version 2.0.49). A system update on a machine with an HTTP server installation will remove the Apache package. Install apache2 and you will need to adapt your setup manually; there is no automated facility avaialble.
Configuration files that were in /etc/httpd are now in /etc/apache2. Apache2 requires either package: apache2-prefork (recommended for stability) or apache2-worker.
Known issues:
In this case, either uninstall horde, or select the mod_php4 package belonging to the Apache version you want to use.
In this case, uninstall dprobes because it is not provided with SLES 9.
If you used Samba on SLES 8 with SAMBA_SAM set to LDAP in /etc/sysconfig/samba, you must migrate your Samba LDAP configuration to the new Samba 3 LDAP schema included in SLES 9. You can find additional information migrating your Samba LDAP configuration at http://www.suse.com/sles/documentation/samba/.
There have been significant changes in the implementation of raw devices. For more details, see /usr/share/doc/packages/util-linux/README.raw, which is provided in the util-linux package.
First try the Installation - ACPI Disabled option. Second, try the "Installation - Safe Settings" option.
Please report these cases via http://www.suse.com/feedback.
If you use an FTP Server to provide the CDs for installation, there is a restriction for the path you specify during the installation. Currently you can specify only relative paths. That means that every path specified starts at the login directory of the FTP Server. There is no difference whether you use personal or anonymous login.
Some CDs have to be inserted twice during the installation process. Install via network or hard disk to avoid this issue.
To support real PCI Hot Plug, the acpiphp kernel module needs to be loaded by the pci.rc script. You can enable this by setting the sysconfig variable HOTPLUG_DO_REAL_PCI_HOTPLUG=yes.
To set up an installation server for installations via NFS/FTP/HTTP, the CDs have to be copied into a special directory structure.
Go to a directory of your choice and execute the following commands:
mkdir -p installroot/sles9/CD1
Copy the contents of SLES CD1 to this directory.
mkdir -p installroot/core9/CD1
Copy the contents of SLES CD2 to this directory
mkdir -p installroot/core9/CD2
Copy the contents of SLES CD3 to this directory
mkdir -p installroot/core9/CD3
Copy the contents of SLES CD4 to this directory
mkdir -p installroot/core9/CD4
Copy the contents of SLES CD5 to this directory
mkdir -p installroot/core9/CD5
Copy the contents of SLES CD6 to this directory
ln -s sles9/CD1/boot boot
ln -s sles9/CD1/content content
ln -s sles9/CD1/control.xml control.xml
ln -s sles9/CD1/media.1 media.1
mkdir -p installroot/yast
echo "/sles9/CD1 /sles9/CD1\n/core9/CD1 /core9/CD1" > yast/instorder
echo "/sles9/CD1 /sles9/CD1\n/core9/CD1 /core9/CD1" > yast/order
If you are now asked for the installation directory specify
installroot.
If you want to set up an MS Windows system as an install server, go to the directory dosutils/install. There is a script install.bat that will create the structure and ask you for the CDs. There are also the files instorder and order that have to be copied to the directory \suseinstall\yast. Before you copy the order file, replace the variables UserAccount, PASSword and IP-Number with the respective Values of your MS Windows machine. During the installation process, you need to specify the only share suseinstall.
This is relevant only if you control an installation over a network and want to display your remote X or YaST session on your local display. On some Linux/UNIX systems, it is no longer sufficent to enter the command "xhost +" to grant access to the local X-Server. For security, the X-Server should no longer listen on port 6000. To verify whether the X-Server still listens on port 6000 enter the command:
netstat -an | grep 6000
If the line
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:6000 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN
does not show up, the server is not listening.
During installation, all blockdevice drivers for storage controllers are added to an "initial RAMdisk". This ensures accessibility for attached storage at all times.
Adding such a controller (with attached storage) will initially work as expected because of the new hot/coldplug capabilities, but may not function properly later on.
To ensure system integrity at all times, we recommend following YaST2 standards, adding the appropriate module to INITRD_MODULES in /etc/sysconfig/kernel, then running /sbin/mkinitrd again.
To upgrade MD multipathing from SLES 8 to SLES 9,
start the system with the kernel parameter
"barrier=off".
YaST will then offer the MD device for update.
During update, the multipathing volumes are recognized only as standard LVM volumes.
We recommend using EVMS, which will recognize LVM1 multipathing.
SLES 9 includes the Red Carpet daemon. To install the Red Carpet Daemon, execute the following command: /usr/sbin/inst-rcd.
New feature: linuxrc understands a new installation source, SLP. If you select install=slp at the bootloader prompt, linuxrc will send an SLP (Service Location Protocol) request for service install.suse to the network and prompt you to select an entry from the list of returned URLs. See R C 2608 and http://www.openslp.com for more information on SLP.
The gssapi support has been replaced with gssapi-with-mic to fix possible MITM (man-in-the-middle) attacks. These two versions are not compatible. This means that you cannot authenticate from older distributions by Kerberos tickets because different methods for authentication are used.
If you use FreeRADIUS, you must now link against unixODBC.
Incompatible change: the resolver library treats the .local top level domain as a link-local domain and sends multicast DNS requests instead of normal DNS requests to the multicast address 224.0.0.251 port 5353. If you already use the .local domain in your name server configuration, you will have to switch to another domain name. See http://www.multicastdns.org for more information on multicast DNS.
Some wireless LAN cards (PrismGT, Centrino, Atmel, ACX100) need firmware to operate. Due to licensing issues, we can't ship these firmware binaries. Read /usr/share/doc/packages/wireless-tools/README.firmware for information on how to obtain and install the firmware.
There is now experimental support for Intel Centrino WLAN adapters. The driver is not complete; WEP support and operation modes other than managed mode are missing.
When using remote access (notably SSH, Telnet, and RSH) between SUSE LINUX 9.1 / SLES 9(in its default configuration with UTF-8 enabled) and older systems (9.0 and earlier, where UTF-8 is not enabled by default or not supported), terminal applications might display garbled characters.
This is because OpenSSH does not forward locale settings, so system defaults are used which might not match the remote terminal settings. This affects text mode YaST and applications run remotely as non-root user. The applications run as root are affected only when users change the default locales for root (only LC_CTYPE is set by default).
SUSE LINUX 9.1 / SLES 9 features a new pthread implementation called NPTL, which is faster and better than the old implementation called linuxthreads.
If your old program is incompatible with this new threading implementation, we also provide the old one. To switch to the old version, set the environment variable LD_ASSUME_KERNEL to 2.4.21 by using export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.21 in Bash.
If problems occur with ncurses-based applications running on the text console, simply issuing unicode_stop (reverting keyboard and console from Unicode mode) usually provides a fix.
SuSEplugger now supports drive notifications and, therefore, does not poll the devices. Drives that fail to support notification might not react. A workaround is to enable polling to get back the old behavior.
For information about the changes with printing, go to http://portal.suse.com/sdb/en/2004/03/jsmeix_print-einrichten-91.html
Parameters for loadable modules have now to be placed in modprobe.conf.
At the top level of the first CD, you will find a very detailed change log.
If you encounter a SLES 9 problem, you can file a report via http://www.suse.com/feedback.
If you encounter a problem with any other suite components, you can file a report through the appropriate support chan els. For more information, go to http://support.novell.com.