There’s two ways to do it: The Easy Way, and the Easier Way.

The Easy Way:
rpm -e zen-updater
rpm -e rug
rpm -e zmd
rpm -e libzypp-zmd-backend
rpm -e sqlite-zmd

And the Easier Way:
rpm -e zen-updater rug zmd libzypp-zmd-backend sqlite-zmd

Now you may have a few questions, such as how are you easially going to update your system? Can I use something else to manage my packages? How old are you? Well, the answers to these questions are simple: Yes, Yes, and 31. The simplest way to update your system is to use the built in OpenSuseUpdater utility. You can launch OpenSuseUpdater by doing the following from a terminal:

opensuseupdater

Don’t be discouraged if it doesn’t run the first time you start it. I had to launch it, launch it again, exit my X session, and launch it one last time to get it to run properly on two of my systems. After that, it’s run perfectly for me. You should also be able to force it to launch on login by doing the following:
Computer->Sessions->Startup Programs->Add->opensuseupdater

As far as managing packages goes, I prefer to use the Smart system. The OpenSuse wiki has a page dedicated to setting that up, but that’s not going to stop me from typing up what I had to do to get it working. But that’s for another time.

rpm -e kerry
rpm -e kio_beagle
rpm -e kdebase3-beagle
rpm -e beagle-evolution
rpm -e beagle-gui
rpm -e beagle-index
rpm -e beagle
rpm -e beagle-firefox

Alternately, you can do it all on a single line:

rpm -e kerry kio_beagle kdebase3-beagle beagle-evolution beagle-gui beagle-index beagle beagle-firefox

Bye-bye, Beagle.

AMD Athlon64X2 6000+
Gigabyte GA-3PXSL-RH MB
PNY Geforce 8800 GTS 320MB
2GB DDR2-667 RAM
Seagate 250GB SATA2 HDD
WD 160GB SATA2 HDD
ASUS 18X DVD+-RW w/Lightscribe SATA
Plextor 48x CDRW IDE
Creative Audigy2

I booted off the DVD, and right away ran into problems. As soon as the bootloader loaded the kernel, my screen goes black. I figure it is probably something to do with my video card, so I reboot the system and press F3 at the DVD boot screen and change my screen to “VESA”. Kernel loads, I see text scrolling on the screen, and then the system locks. I reboot and do the same thing, expecting different results for some reason, but it still doesn’t work. So off to Google I go, searching for the last thing that is listed on my screen before the lockup, “net: registered protocol family 2 opensuse” . The first result has the answer; add maxcpus=0 as a kernel parameter during setup. That does the trick, and the system boots into the Suse installer. I chose all the normal additional things I do during setup (Kernel-sources, C/C++ Dev tools, findutils-locate and nano), and installation proceeds as I would expect it too. I let it update all of the installed software, so it’s less to do later. I get all the way through to where it is detecting hardware, and my screen goes black again. Crap. Reboot, Suse notices that the installation didn’t finish, picks up where it left off, and the gently proceeds to do the same thing.

At this point, I figure there is some kind of conflict with my video, so I reboot, go into the BIOS and enable the motherboards on-board video, poweroff the system and take the 8800 out. The onboard video is an NVIDIA 6150, so it’s nothing to write home to mom about, but it will get the job done. I boot back up, and the Suse installer magically finishes for me. I can now get the system to boot up into OpenSuse.

Since my onboard video is supported by the same NVIDIA drivers that the 8800 needs, I head on over to their site and download the latest drivers, and get ready to install. Well, I couldn’t get them to work. I don’t know if it was just me being dumb, or because this was the first version of the drivers to support the 8800 family, or if Gloria Gaynor did, in fact, survive. I went and got the latest beta drivers. I installed them, rebooted, and everything came up fine. I’m kind of glossing over that I did have to fiddle (who says fiddle?) with my xorg.conf file to get my monitor setup, but that doesn’t really have much bearing on getting the 8800 working. And unlike Ubuntu, I could do that from within the graphical utilities (SaX from within YAST2) if I had wanted to (I didn’t want to).

On to the 3d desktop. I’m a big fan of it. When I first started playing with Compiz last year, I thought it was stupid and pointless. After using it on one of my other PCs and on my SLED10 laptop, I can’t seem to live without it. Everything else seems stale and old now. All I had to do was Go to Computer -> Control Center -> Desktop Effects. It tells me it doesn’t know my device, 3d Acceleration is disabled, and that it doesn’t like me very much. All you have to do here is shift-click the “disabled” right next to 3D Acceleration and it will show as enabled, and then click the Enable Desktop Effects button that lights up at the bottom. Log out, log back in, and you’re in business.

All in all, it was an adventure getting this card working. I’m kind of getting used to having an easier time of getting video working properly, so I think I’m a bit spoiled. In this case, the problem was just that the drivers are so young and the card is so new that I couldn’t use the provided SUSE installation source that NVIDIA provides (that’s always at least a version or two behind the latest driver version). All in all, I’m happy with how it worked out.

Then I tried to change my display resolution. My choices were 1024×768, 800×600, and the ever-present 640×480. Um, what? Ok, I figure that it didn’t load the proper display driver. I check the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file, and I see the open source “radeon” driver is loaded, which is fine for my purposes. Then I see what I figure is the problem: all my color depths have modes of the above-listed resolutions, and nothing higher. So I manually create the modeline for 1600×1200 and add it to all the color-depths. I restart X, expecting things to be right with the world. But it isn’t. It’s all still 1024×768, with no higher choices.

I head back to the xorg.conf file. This time, I notice that my monitor was detected as a standard VESA monitor with crappy horizontal sync and vertical refresh rates. I have a Dell 20.1 LCD, hardly what I would consider a strange display, considering that other distributions find it perfectly. I check the xorg.conf file on one of my other systems and input the correct values for my monitor in this one, restart X, and all is good in the world.

Why, since Ubuntu aims to be a simple-to-use distro, did I have to do this? I had to do this by hand because Ubuntu 7.04 “Feisty Fawn” Beta didn’t come with a utility to allow me to choose my monitor. If I had been an inexperienced user, I would have been screwed. Yes, I know it’s a beta, but we’re two weeks from the official release, and I doubt that this will be changed.

Other than the display issue, Ubuntu 7.04 seems to be very solid and usable. But I don’t think I’ll be switching from Suse permanently any time soon.

Update: Since I wrote this, the final version of “Feisty Fawn” was released. With the same monitor problem.

SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", SYSFS{address}=="00:16:41:e2:dd:6b", IMPORT="/lib/udev/rename_netiface %k eth0"
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", SYSFS{address}=="00:00:86:50:aa:ca", IMPORT="/lib/udev/rename_netiface %k eth1"
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", SYSFS{address}=="00:0f:b5:89:29:43", IMPORT="/lib/udev/rename_netiface %k eth2"
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", SYSFS{address}=="00:19:d2:34:dc:00", IMPORT="/lib/udev/rename_netiface %k eth3"
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", SYSFS{address}=="00:04:e2:fe:a3:98", IMPORT="/lib/udev/rename_netiface %k eth4"
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", SYSFS{address}=="00:13:f7:2d:9a:07", IMPORT="/lib/udev/rename_netiface %k eth5"

The eth1, 3 and 4 NICs are not present, so we need to take them out of the file. You’ll have to go by MAC address of the NIC here. I went through and removed the non-existent NIC lines, and changed the assignments of the present NICs. Now my file looks like this:

SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", SYSFS{address}=="00:16:41:e2:dd:6b", IMPORT="/lib/udev/rename_netiface %k eth0"
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", SYSFS{address}=="00:0f:b5:89:29:43", IMPORT="/lib/udev/rename_netiface %k eth1"
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", SYSFS{address}=="00:13:f7:2d:9a:07", IMPORT="/lib/udev/rename_netiface %k eth2"

After you make any changes to this, you’ll need to reboot the system, as the kernel reads this in at boot time. Additionally, if you run VMWare of any sort, you’ll need to run vmware-config.pl and reconfigure your virtual network settings to match up with any changes you made.

If you’re reading this, you probably already know what LDAP is. If not, well, this article isn’t for you. But I’ll give you a quick little overview. LDAP stands for “Lightweight Directory Access Protocol”. In short, it’s a direcrory that can store info on users, groups, machines, etc. Microsoft’s Active Directory and Novell’s eDirectory are examples of commercial LDAP-compliant directories. But for our purposes, we’re sticking with open source (except for Java).

Here’s what I’m using:

• Fedora Core 5 x86
  
• Fedora Directory Server 1.0.2-1
• Sun JRE 5.0 Release 9

Please note that on Fedora Core 5 I am not using SELinux. I don’t know what changes would need to be made to allow you to install/run/whatever FCDS. Also, as of October 8th, 2006 my FC5 system was completely up to date with all patches available via YUM. Also, if you have the openldap-servers and openldap-servers-sql packages installed, REMOVE THEM. I have run into a problem where duing the ./setup step below, the services keep failing to properly install/start. After removing these packages, I was able to complete the setup. After the fedora-ds setup is complete, you will be able to re-install these packages.

Let’s get started.

First, we’ll install java. Download the Sun Java Runtime Environment Release 9 self-extracting RPM. Then, from a bash prompt:

chmod a+x jre-1_5_9_09-linux-i586-rpm.bin
./jre-1_5_9_09-linux-i586-rpm.bin (follow prompts accepting defaults)
cd /etc/alternatives
ln -sf /opt/jre1.5.0_09/bin/java java

Now that Java is out of the way, it’s time to install the directory. Do this, and it’s installed:

rpm -ivh fedora-ds-1.0.2-1.linux-i586.opt.rpm

Now we need to setup the directory.

cd /opt/fedora-ds/setup/
./setup

Agree to the license terms. Type yes to continue. You may get a warning about memory size and file descriptors. Ignore these and continue.

You’ll be prompted as to the install mode. Choose “typical”, which is the default. After that, follow the prompts. Listed below is what I used for each entry. Make changes to hostname/dns names to meet your environment. Don’t forget the passwords you assign here, as you’ll need them.
Hostname to use: ironhide.cybertron.local
Server use ID to use: nobody
Server group ID to use: nobody
Do you want to register this software with an existing blah blah blah: No
Do you want to use another directory to store your data: No
Directory server network port: 389
Directory server identifier: ironhide
Administrator ID: admin
Suffix: dc=cybertron, dc=local
Directory Manager DN: cn=Directory Manager
Administrative domain: cybertron.local
Administration port: 64610
Run Administration Server as: root
Apache Directory: /usr/sbin


The administration port will be a random port between 1024 and 65540. You can also specify a specific port if you don’t want to use the random port for whatever reason.

Now it’s going to finish up and start the admin and slapd services for you. And it tells you to do the following:
cd /opt/fedora-ds
./startconsole -u admin -a http://ironhide.cybertron.local:64610/
Do that. The admin console should pop up and prompt you for the admin password. Enter the password here and it should launch and log in.

Now that you’re in the console, you can browse your way around, create users, etc. Try out the web interface at http://youripaddress:whateverportyouuse/. It’s an easy way to make querys, create users, etc. However, it’s overall design does leave something to be desired, but that’s what tools like phpLDAPadmin are for.

To verifiy that ldap searches are working, do the following from a bash shell. It should return a bunch of stuff:

cd /opt/fedora-ds/shared/bin
./ldapsearch -s base -b "" "objectclass=*"

As for getting the services started up on boot, or just being able to access it via the “services” command, you’ll need to write your own rc script. I am no good at rc scripts. In fact, I don’t know much of anything about them. But here’s what I do know: there are smarter people than me writing docs on how to do things. So I found a nice little article on Linux.com, written by Brian K. Jones, about writing a rc script to control the DS service. I was able to follow it and modify his script to meet my needs. Some people in the comments of the article complain about it, but for my purposes it worked great (other than the $OPTIONS variable, which is why I manually added a call to my start-slapd script). You can find said article at Linux.com and searching or by clicking on this thing that some of us call a “link“.

Update:
I probably won’t ever write another thing about Fedora Directory Server. I’ve moved on to OpenLDAP under OpenSuse, and tied my Samba into that. On my Windows PCs, I’m using pGina to log in via my LDAP accounts. Some day, I might write config guides for how I made that work. But I’m more likely to not do anything.