The individual aspects changed from version to version are outlined in the following in detail. This summary indicates, for example, whether basic settings have been completely reconfigured, whether configuration files have been moved to other places, or whether common applications have been significantly changed. Significant modifications that affect the daily use of the system at either the user level or the administrator level are mentioned here.
Problems and special issues of the respective versions are published online as they are identified. See the links listed below. Important updates of individual packages can be accessed at http://www.novell.com/products/linuxprofessional/downloads/ using the YaST Online Update. For more information, see Section 3.0, Online Update.
Refer to the article Known Problems and Special Features in
SUSE Linux 10
in the SUSE Support Database at http://portal.suse.com under the keyword special
features.
By default, calling su to become root does not set the PATH for root. Either call su - to start a login shell with the complete environment for root or set ALWAYS_SET_PATH to yes in /etc/default/su if you want to change the default behavior of su.
Names of the powersave configuration variables are changed for consistency, but the sysconfig files are still the same. Find more information in Section 32.4.1, Configuring the powersave Package.
cardmgr no longer manages PC cards. Instead, as with Cardbus cards and other subsystems, a kernel module manages them. All necessary actions are executed by hotplug. The pcmcia start script has been removed and cardctl is replaced by pccardctl. For more information, see /usr/share/doc/packages/pcmciautils/README.SUSE.
Many applications now rely on D-BUS for interprocess communication (IPC). Calling dbus-launch starts dbus-daemon. The systemwide /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc uses dbus-launch to start the window manager.
If you have a local ~/.xinitrc file, you must change it accordingly. Otherwise applications like f-spot, banshee, tomboy, or Network Manager banshee might fail. Save your old ~/.xinitrc. Then copy the new template file into your home directory with:
cp /etc/skel/.xinitrc.template ~/.xinitrc
Finally, add your customizations from the saved .xinitrc.
For reasons of compatibility with LSB (Linux Standard Base), most configuration files and the init script were renamed from xntp to ntp. The new filenames are:
/etc/slp.reg.d/ntp.reg /etc/init.d/ntp /etc/logrotate.d/ntp /usr/sbin/rcntp /etc/sysconfig/ntp
Hotplug events are now completely handled by the udev daemon (udevd). We do not use the event multiplexer system in /etc/hotplug.d and /etc/dev.d anymore. Instead udevd calls all hotplug helper tools directly, according to its rules. Udev rules and helper tools are provided by udev and various other packages.
Find the TEI XSL stylesheets (tei-xsl-stylesheets) with a new directory layout at /usr/share/xml/tei/stylesheet/rahtz/current. From there, for example, use base/p4/html/tei.xsl to produce HTML output. For more information, see http://www.tei-c.org/Stylesheets/teic/
For proper functionality, GNOME applications depend on file system change notification support. For local-only file systems, install the gamin package (preferred) or run the FAM daemon. For remote file systems, run FAM on both the server and client and open the firewall for RPC calls by FAM.
GNOME (gnome-vfs2 and libgda) contains a wrapper that picks gamin or fam to provide file system change notification:
If the FAM daemon is not running, gamin is preferred. (Rationale: Inotify is supported only by gamin and it is more efficient for local file systems).
If the FAM daemon is running, FAM is preferred (Rationale: If FAM is running, you probably want remote notification, which is supported only by FAM).
Refer to the article Known Problems and Special Features in
SUSE Linux 10
in the SUSE Support Database at http://www.novell.com/suselinuxportal under the keyword special
features.
For Apache version 2.2, Section 30.0, The Apache HTTP Server was completely reworked. In addition, find generic upgrade information at http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/upgrading.html and the description of new features at http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/new_features_2_2.html.
By default, xinetd no longer starts the vsftpd FTP server. It is now a stand-alone daemon and you must configure it with the YaST runtime editor.
With Firefox 1.5, the method for applications to open a Firefox instance or window has changed. The new method was already partly available in former versions where the behavior was implemented in the wrapper script.
If your application does not use mozilla-xremote-client or firefox -remote, you do not have to change anything. Otherwise the new command to open a URL is firefox url and it does not matter whether Firefox is already running or not. If it is already running, it follows the preference configured in .
From the command line, you can influence the behavior by using firefox -new-window url or firefox -new-tab url.
On some computers, Firefox with Pango support enabled is very slow. The performance seems to depend on the X server. Set MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=0 if you want to switch on font rendering for your environment anyway:
export MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=0 firefox
As with every major release update, it is strongly recommended to perform a backup of the MySQL table files and create an SQL dump beforehand. After the update, /etc/init.d/mysql automatically executes mysql_fix_privilege_tables. Refer to http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/upgrade.html for more information and detailed instructions.
The local and IO APIC for the 32-bit x86 architecture has changed. A local and IO APIC (I/O Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller) is an SMP-capable replacement for PC-style interrupt controllers. SMP systems and all recent uniprocessor systems have such a controller.
Until now, local and IO APIC was disabled on uniprocessor systems by default and had to be manually activated by using the "apic" kernel parameter. Now it runs by default and can be manually deactivated. For 64-bit systems, APIC is always enabled by default.
Any system with a BIOS version newer than 2001 gets local and IO APIC activated by default unless local and IO APIC is disabled in the BIOS or by the user.
Any BIOS from Intel newer than 1998 gets local and IO APIC activated by default.
Any system with more than one CPU gets local and IO APIC activated by default.
If you experience problems with devices not working properly, you can manually apply the following configuration options:
To disable local APIC, use nolapic (this implies disabling IO APICs).
To disable IO APIC, use noapic.
To get the same default as earlier releases, use nolapic.
The ulimit settings can be configured in /etc/sysconfig/ulimit. By default, only two limits are changed from the kernel defaults:
SOFTVIRTUALLIMIT=80 limits a single process so that it does not allocate more than 80% of the available virtual memory (RAM and swap).
SOFTRESIDENTLIMIT=85 limits a single process so that it does not occupy more than 85% of the physical memory (RAM).
These soft limits can be overridden with the ulimit command by the user. Hard limits could only be overridden by root.
The values have been chosen conservatively to avoid breaking large processes that have worked before. If there are no legitimate processes with huge memory consumption, set the limits lower to provide more effective protection against run-away processes. The limits are per process and thus not an effective protection against malicious users. The limits are meant to protect against accidental excessive memory usage.
To configure different limits depending on the user, use the pam_limits functionality and configure /etc/security/limits.conf. The ulimit package is not required for that, but both mechanisms can be used in parallel. The limits configured in limits.conf override the global defaults from the ulimit package.
A new mounting mechanism replaces the submount system used earlier. This new mechanism does not unmount media automatically, but on hardware request. Some devices, most notably older CD drives but also some new drives with broken firmware, do not send this signal. To eject the media on such devices, select Eject in the context menu (opened by right-clicking) of the device in "My Computer" or select Eject in the context menu of the device icon on the desktop.
Refer to the Bugs
article in the openSUSE wiki at http://en.opensuse.org/Bugs.
The kernel-default package contains the standard kernel for both uniprocessor and multiprocessor systems. The kernel comes with SMP support and runs with minimal overhead on uniprocessor systems. There is no kernel-smp package anymore.
Include the language add-on medium in your list of installation sources, if you want better support for one of our tier 2 languages. Tier 2 languages are all but the tier 1 languages (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, simplified and traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Czech). Support for tier 1 languages is available on the standard media set.
Refer to the Bugs
article in the openSUSE wiki at http://en.opensuse.org/Bugs.