Sometimes the Linux install (especially with SuSE) forgets to set up DPMS for the monitor. So this is what you have to check then in your /etc/XF86Config file:

Section "Monitor"   Option "DPMS"

In KDE this is quite easy - but can be tricky for certain constellations. So this is how I got it working for German and Russian:

• For German: set it to "basic incl. latin"
• For Russian, use "winkeys"
• In the XKBDOpt options, set it to use the right Alt as Compose

Having problems with e.g. the hotkeys in Midnight Commander (with xterm) with full 8bit input? Or just want to change some settings for your xterm or other apps, w/o affecting the global environment? Here's the solution: In your home directory, create a file called .Xresources. In this file, just add a few lines (in this example, the first line solves the problem with Midnight Commander):

XTerm*eightBitInput: false xterm*rightScrollBar: true xterm*saveLines: 20000 xterm*background: black xterm*foreground: white xterm*font: 10x20 xterm*cursorColor: yellow

Then, still as user (not root!), and being in the same directory as the file resides (otherwise just specify the full path), execute the command

xrdb -merge .Xresources

and you're done!

Especially when not working in a Gnome environment, it is not easy to find out how to tell Gnome applications how to handle specific files (e.g. Evolution and attachments). Usually, there's a graphical interface integrated with the Gnome Control Center; but on some installation this is missing. So here's how to work around that problem:

As user root...

1. cd to the /usr/share/applications directory
2. check if there's a *.desktop file for the target application. if not, create one (e.g. by copying and editing one of the others)
3. edit the mimeinfo.cache file by adding the name of your desktop file (from the previous task) to the end of all mime types you want to associate it with, and/or creating lines for mime types not yet in this list
4. optionally, if you want the "new application" being the default handler for (one of) these mime types, edit the defaults.list accordingly.
5. you may also want to edit /usr/share/mime/globs for file extensions.

SuSE provides a nice tool to find out all about your PC. As root, type the following command:

Then look out for the results in a file named siga.txt.

To get a list of your installed hardware, you alternatively can do the following:

root@machine # cd /var/lib/hardware/unique-keys/ root@machine # hwscan --list

With SuSE 9.0, the guys changed the locale character set to UTF-8. So if you used special national characters in file names or content, you may need to convert those. The tools needed for this are:

• convmv for the file names
• recode for the file contents

For both commands, man <command> gives you closer information (of course you need to replace <command> by either convmv or recode). A quick start for the file names:

While in earlier versions of SuSE you may have been used to just entered xhost +localhost as user (or put it into your ~/.bashrc to be enabled by default), made a su - and then start some X11 App as root, this no longer works with recent versions of SuSE (for security reasons). Things you can do:

• go to the /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager file and change the setting for DISPLAYMANAGER_XSERVER_TCP_PORT_6000_OPEN
• set up X11 Forwarding in your ~/.ssh/config file and use slogin root@localhost instead of su -
• or use ssh -X root@localhost to start a SSH session with enabled X11 Forwarding

Not all at once - just chose one option of this list ;)

This is very annoying - especially when transfering large files or a larger collection of files with one command. But there's an easy way around: just install rsync and use this instead of scp - but still encrypted with ssh! So scp <source> <target> becomes

The options used stand for:

• -P: display Progress indicator
• -a: use archive mode (see the manpage for details)
• -e ssh: use ssh for the transfer (this must be the last parameter)
• -C: exclude all files CVS would exclude

By default, CUPS is set up to accept connections from the local machine only. To be able to use it, e.g., from another client in our office, we need to do some changes to its configuration. As root, open the /etc/cups/cups.conf and look for the <Location /> block. It looks much like a directory directive from the apache config. Here we need to add the line

Allow From 192.168.101.*

provided our home network uses these IP addresses. After a restart of the CUPS server (/etc/init.d/cups restart), the CUPS server should be available to all our clients.

For Windows clients, there may be two additional changes necessary: we need to make the "raw" mode available. This is done in the files mime.convs and mime.types. Each of these files has a line containing the application/octet-stream directive, which is by default disabled. So if those lines start with a hash mark (#), remove that hash mark, and restart the CUPS server - now Windows clients should be able to print fine. If you need help on this, have a look at the information about CUPS and Windows.