The individual aspects changed from version 9 to version 10 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.
It is possible to install multiple kernels side by side. This feature
is meant to allow administrators to upgrade from one kernel to another by
installing the new kernel, verifying that the new kernel works as expected,
then uninstalling the old kernel. While YaST does not yet support this
feature, kernels can easily be installed and uninstalled from the shell using
rpm -i package
.rpm.
The default boot loader menus contain one kernel entry. Before
installing multiple kernels, it is useful to add an entry for the extra
kernels, so they can be selected easily. The kernel that was active
before installing the new kernel can be accessed as
vmlinuz.previous
and
initrd.previous
. By creating a boot loader entry similar
to the default entry and having this entry refer to
vmlinuz.previous
and initrd.previous
instead of vmlinuz
and initrd
, the
previously active kernel can be accessed. Alternatively, GRUB and LILO support
wild card boot loader entries. Refer to the GRUB info pages
(info grub) and to the
lilo.conf
(5) manual page for details.
The following kernel modules are no longer available:
km_fcdsl
—AVM Fritz!Card DSL
km_fritzcapi
—AVM FRITZ! ISDN Adapters
The following kernel module package was changed internally:
km_wlan
—Various drivers for wireless LAN cards.
The madwifi
driver for Atheros WLAN cards from
km_wlan
was removed.
For technical reasons, it was necessary to drop support for Ralink WLAN cards. The following modules were not part of the distribution and will not be added in the future:
ati-fglrx
—ATI FireGL Graphics Cards
nvidia-gfx
—NVIDIA gfx driver
km_smartlink-softmodem
—Smart Link Soft Modem
As of 2.6.10, serial devices on ia64 are named based on the order of ACPI and
PCI enumeration. The first device in the ACPI namespace (if any) becomes
/dev/ttyS0
, the second becomes
/dev/ttyS1
, etc., and PCI devices are named sequentially
starting after the ACPI devices.
On HP systems, you must reconfigure the EFI console then
you can drop the console parameter from the kernel boot command. As a work-around,
you can try console=ttyS1...
as a boot parameter instead
of console=ttyS0...
.
Find details in /usr/src/linux/Documentation/ia64/serial.txt, which is
part of the kernel-source
software package.
Do not set the LD_ASSUME_KERNEL environment variable any longer. In the past, it was possible to use it to enforce LinuxThreads support, which was dropped. If you set LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.x in SUSE Linux Enterprise 10, everything breaks because ld.so looks for glibc and related tools in a path that does not exist.
The tar usage syntax is stricter now. The
tar options must come before the file or directory
specifications. Appending options, like --atime-preserve
or
--numeric-owner
, after the file or directory specification
makes tar fail. Check your backup scripts. Commands such
as the following no longer work:
tar czf etc.tar.gz /etc --atime-preserve
See the tar info pages for more information.
The Apache Web server (version 2) has been replaced with version 2.2. For Apache version 2.2, Chapter 41, 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.
Kerberos
is the default for network authentication
instead of heimdal
. Converting an existing heimdal
configuration automatically is not possible. During a system update, backup
copies of configuration files are created as shown in Table 8.1, “Backup Files”.
Table 8.1. Backup Files
Old File | Backup File |
---|---|
|
|
|
|
The client configuration (/etc/krb5.conf
) is
very similar to the one of heimdal. If nothing special was
configured, it is enough to replace the parameter
kpasswd_server
with
admin_server
.
It is not possible to copy the server-related (kdc and kadmind) data.
After the system update, the old heimdal database is still available under
/var/heimdal
. MIT kerberos maintains the database under
/var/lib/kerberos/krb5kdc
. For more information, see
Chapter 46, Network Authentication—Kerberos and Chapter 47, Installing and Administering Kerberos.
Hotplug events are now completely handled by the udev daemon
(udevd). The event multiplexer system in
/etc/hotplug.d
and /etc/dev.d
is no longer used. 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.
To increase security, the enclosed firewall solution SuSEFirewall2 is activated at the end of the installation in the proposal dialog. This means that all ports are closed initially and can be opened in the proposal dialog if necessary. By default, you cannot log in from remote systems. It also interferes with network browsing and multicast applications, such as SLP, Samba ("Network Neighborhood"), and some games. You can fine-tune the firewall settings using YaST.
If network access is required during the installation or configuration of a service, the respective YaST module opens the needed TCP and UDP ports of all internal and external interfaces. If this is not desired, close the ports in the YaST module or specify other detailed firewall settings.
By default, IPv6 support is not enabled for KDE. You can enable it
using the /etc/sysconfig
editor of YaST. The reason for
disabling this feature is that IPv6 addresses are not properly supported by all
Internet service providers and, as a consequence, this would lead to error
messages while browsing the Web and delays while displaying Web pages.
Online Update now supports a special kind of RPM package
that only stores the binary difference from a given base package. This
technique significantly reduces the package size and download time at the
expense of higher CPU load for reassembling the final package. See
/usr/share/doc/packages/deltarpm/README
for
technical details.
At the end of the installation (proposal dialog), the ports needed for the print system must be open in the firewall configuration. Port 631/TCP and port 631/UDP are needed for CUPS and should not be closed for normal operation. Port 515/TCP (for the old LPD protocol) and the ports used by Samba must also be open for printing via LPD or SMB.
The change from XFree86 to X.Org is facilitated by compatibility links that enable access to important files and commands with the old names.
In the course of the change to X.Org, the packages were renamed
from XFree86*
to xorg-x11*
.
The configuration tool SaX2 writes the X.Org configuration settings into
/etc/X11/xorg.conf
. During an installation from scratch,
no compatibility link from XF86Config
to
xorg.conf
is created.
The packages xview
,
xview-devel
,
xview-devel-examples
,
olvwm
, and xtoolpl
were
dropped. In the past, only the XView (OpenLook) base system was provided.
The XView libraries are no longer provided after the system update. Even
more important, OLVWM (OpenLook Virtual Window Manager) is no longer
available.
A number of terminal emulators were removed because they are either no longer maintained or do not work in the default environment, especially by not supporting UTF-8. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server offers standard terminals, such as xterm, the KDE and GNOME terminals, and mlterm (Multilingual Terminal Emulator for X), which might be a replacement for aterm and eterm.
OOo is now installed in /usr/lib/ooo-2.0
instead of
/opt/OpenOffice.org
. The default directory for
user settings is now ~/.ooo-2.0
instead of
~/OpenOffice.org1.1
.
There are some new wrappers for starting the OOo components. The new names are shown in Table 8.4, “Wrapper”.
Table 8.4. Wrapper
Old | New |
---|---|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| – |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The wrapper now supports the option --icons-set
for
switching between KDE and GNOME icons. The following options are no
longer supported:
--default-configuration
,
--gui
,
--java-path
,
--skip-check
,
--lang
(the language is now determined by means of locales),
--messages-in-window
, and
--quiet
.
KDE and GNOME extensions are available in the
OpenOffice_org-kde
and
OpenOffice_org-gnome
packages.
The sound mixer kmix is preset as the default. For high-end hardware, there are other mixers, like QAMix. KAMix, envy24control (only ICE1712), or hdspmixer (only RME Hammerfall).
In the past, a patch was applied to the cdrecord
binary from the cdrecord
package to support burning
DVDs. Instead, a new binary cdrecord-dvd
is installed
that has this patch.
The growisofs
program from the
dvd+rw-tools
package can now burn all DVD media
(DVD+R, DVD-R, DVD+RW, DVD-RW, DVD+RL). Try using that one instead of
the patched cdrecord-dvd
.
The manual=1
at the boot prompt. Normally this is not necessary
because you can set installation options at the kernel prompt directly, such as
textmode=1
or a URL as the installation source.
Due to technical problems with JFS, it is no longer supported. The kernel file system driver is still there, but YaST does not offer partitioning with JFS.
As an intrusion detection system, use AIDE (package name
aide
), which is released under the GPL. Tripwire
is no longer available on SUSE Linux.
New Configuration Files (containing comments for more information)
common-auth
Default PAM configuration for auth section
common-account
Default PAM configuration for account section
common-password
Default PAM configuration for password changing
common-session
Default PAM configuration for session management
You should include these default configuration files from within your application-specific configuration file, because it is easier to modify and maintain one file instead of the approximately forty files that used to exist on the system. If you install an application later, it inherits the already applied changes and the administrator is not required to remember to adjust the configuration.
The changes are simple. If you have the following configuration file (which should be the default for most applications):
#%PAM-1.0 auth required pam_unix2.so account required pam_unix2.so password required pam_pwcheck.so password required pam_unix2.so use_first_pass use_authtok #password required pam_make.so /var/yp session required pam_unix2.so
you can change it to:
#%PAM-1.0 auth include common-auth account include common-account password include common-password session include common-session
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.
The configuration files in
/etc/sysconfig/powersave
have changed:
Table 8.5. Split Configuration Files in /etc/sysconfig/powersave
Old | Now Split Into |
---|---|
|
|
| |
| |
| |
| |
|
/etc/powersave.conf
has become obsolete. Existing
variables have been moved to the files listed in Table 8.5, “Split Configuration Files in /etc/sysconfig/powersave”. If you changed the
“event” variables in
/etc/powersave.conf
, these must now be adapted in
/etc/sysconfig/powersave/events
.
The names of sleep states have changed from:
suspend (ACPI S4, APM suspend)
standby (ACPI S3, APM standby)
To:
suspend to disk (ACPI S4, APM suspend)
suspend to ram (ACPI S3, APM suspend)
standby (ACPI S1, APM standby)
Names of the powersave configuration variables are changed for consistency, but the sysconfig files are still the same. Find more information in Section 29.5.1, “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
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).
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 need 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
.