Release Notes for SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 SP4

Version 10.4.9 (2013-01-10)

1.0 Purpose
  1. This SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 serves several purposes:
2.0 New Features or Version Updates
  1. Since Service Pack 3 (SP3)
  2. From General Availability (GA) to Service Pack 3 (SP3)
3.0 New Drivers
  1. Intel Wireless drivers have been updated:
4.0 Known Issues
  1. Installation Using Persistent Device Names
  2. Network Mode for System Installation over SSH
  3. CJK Language Support with Text-Mode Installation
5.0 Documentation
  1. PDFs of the System Documentation in Sub-Packages
  2. Deployment Guide: 3.3.1 Accessing an SMT Server
  3. KDE User Guide: 15.6.4 Disabling Features / GNOME User Guide: 12.6.4 Disabling Features
6.0 Hardware Related Issues
  1. Limited Graphics Support on IBM SurePOS 700 4800-7X3 during Installation
  2. Graphical Distortions on the FIC GE2 Plattform (Transtec SENYO600)
  3. Tablet PC Features on 64-bit Architectures
7.0 Update Related Issues
  1. Updating from SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 Service Pack 2 (SP2) to Service Pack 3
  2. Problems with Novell Client for Linux When Upgrading
  3. Updating from SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 Service Pack 1 (SP1) to Service Pack 2 (SP2)
  4. PatchCD Update Relies on Configured Installation Sources
  5. MDNS and .local Domain Names
8.0 Software Related Issues
  1. Removing the Epiphany Web Browser
  2. Removing the RealPlayer on SP4
  3. YaST Software Management Gtk and Qt Front-Ends
  4. Notes on yast2-add-on-creator, yast2-cd-creator, and yast2-product-creator
  5. Read-Write Support for the NTFS File System
  6. Java Plug-In and Firefox
9.0 Legal Notices
  1. Novell, Inc. makes no representations or warranties with respect to the contents or use of this documentation, and specifically disclaims any express or implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose. Further, Novell, Inc. reserves the right to revise this publication and to make changes to its content, at any time, without obligation to notify any person or entity of such revisions or changes.

1.0 Purpose

This SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 serves several purposes:

Through joint testing and maximum care, we try hard not to break any ISV certification with a Service Pack, but we recommend checking with your ISV about your application's certification status.

2.0 New Features or Version Updates

Since Service Pack 3 (SP3)

From General Availability (GA) to Service Pack 3 (SP3)

3.0 New Drivers

Intel Wireless drivers have been updated:

4.0 Known Issues

For the latest version of the SUSE® Linux* Enterprise Desktop 10 Release Notes, see http://www.novell.com/linux/releasenotes/i586/SUSE-SLED/10-SP4/.

Installation Using Persistent Device Names

If you plan to add additional storage devices to your system after the OS installation, we strongly recommend to use persistent device names for all storage devices during installation. The installer by default uses the kernel device names.

How to proceed:

During installation, enter the partitioner. For each partition, select "Edit" and go to the "FStab Options" dialog. Any mount option except "Device name" provide you persistent devicenames.

To switch an already installed system to using persistent device names, proceed as described above for all existing partitions. In addition, rerun the boot loader module in YaST to switch the bootloader to using the persistent device name also. Just start the module and select "Finish" to write the new proposed configuration to disk. This needs to be done before adding new storage devices.

For further information, see http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Persistent_storage_device_names.

Network Mode for System Installation over SSH

During remote system installation over SSH use "Traditional Method without the NetworkManager Applet" as the network mode. After the installation you can set the network mode to "User-Controlled Interfaces with the NetworkManager Applet", if wanted.

If you set the network mode to NetworkManager during the installation over SSH, the connection will get lost after rebooting for the second stage of the installation due to reconfiguration of the network, which is leasing new settings from DHCP.

CJK Language Support with Text-Mode Installation

CJK languages (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) do not work properly with text-mode installation if framebuffer is not used. Other languages that require special fonts are probably also affected. The following solutions are available to work around this issue:

5.0 Documentation

For SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 documentation, see http://www.suse.com/documentation/sled10/.

PDFs of the System Documentation in Sub-Packages

Most sled-* packages with the system documentation are split. Find the PDFs in the *-pdf sub-packages or directly at http://www.suse.com/documentation/sled10/.

Deployment Guide: 3.3.1 Accessing an SMT Server

The names of the boot prompt parameters given in the manual are obsolete and will get discontinued in SUSE Linux Enterprise 11. Instead of smturl use regurl and instead of smtcert use regcert.

KDE User Guide: 15.6.4 Disabling Features / GNOME User Guide: 12.6.4 Disabling Features

By default, Firefox does not honor settings made with the GConf system. In order to make the GConf lockdown keys effective, edit /usr/lib/firefox/local-configuration.js and set config.use_system_prefs to true. This file allows the administrator to set and lock preferences that will apply to every Firefox user.

6.0 Hardware Related Issues

Limited Graphics Support on IBM SurePOS 700 4800-7X3 during Installation

There is only limited graphics support on IBM SurePOS 700 4800-7X3 systems with 4820-2GN monitors. During a graphical installation you can encounter an error message from the monitor (OSD = On Screen Display) such as:

OUT OF RANGE H: -48.4 KHz V: -60.1 Hz.

To work around this issue try a different resolution, VESA or text-mode for installation. Another option is to choose the native driver by specifying acceleratedx=1 on the boot prompt. It might also help to update the BIOS.

After system installation the problem does not occur any longer and the graphics system is fully supported.

Graphical Distortions on the FIC GE2 Plattform (Transtec SENYO600)

On the FIC GE2 platform when using 24 BPP color depth and resolutions >= 1280x1024 on the DVI interface stripes are displayed on the X server. This distorts all windows.

Changing to 16 BPP color depth seems to solve the problem.

Tablet PC Features on 64-bit Architectures

Currently, Tablet PC support is only available for 32-bit architectures. To use Tablet PC features on 64-bit architectures, you need to install a 32-bit system.

7.0 Update Related Issues

Updating from SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 Service Pack 2 (SP2) to Service Pack 3

The update to Firefox 3 requires some additional packages to be installed. Some libraries used by Firefox3 will be installed under /usr/lib[64]/firefox/ as a second stack. Those libraries are only used by Firefox3.

Technical Instruction Document 7008357 (http://www.novell.com/support/documentLink.do?externalID=7008357) contains additional documentation for upgrading an installed system to SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10.

Problems with Novell Client for Linux When Upgrading

If Novell Client 2.0 SP1 is installed on SLED 10 SP1 or SP2 and you upgrade to SLED 10 SP3, some undesired files and directories will not get removed. These files and directories prevent users from logging into the system using the Greeter screen as the Gnome Session Manager crashes.

Login as root and run the following commands either before or after the upgrade:

cd /home rm -f `find . -name "ncl*.desktop" -print` rmdir `find . -name "ncl*.desktop" -print` cd /root rm -f `find . -name "ncl*.desktop" -print` rmdir `find . -name "ncl*.desktop" -print` rm -f /etc/profile.d/novell-ncl-tray.sh

After executing these commands there is an additional issue with NCL 2.0 SP1 running on SLED 10 SP3. ncl_tray does not autostart, however it can be started manually. The recommendation is to upgrade to NCL 2.0 SP3.

Updating from SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 Service Pack 1 (SP1) to Service Pack 2 (SP2)

For updating from SP1 to SP2 using YaST online update, zen-updater, or rug, we recommend to apply the slesp1-libzypp-4907 patch first.

This patch fixes the restart of ZMD during updating the maintenance stack itself. If the patch is not applied first (and ZMD restarted afterwards), you encounter issues during the update to SP2, such issues as thrown exceptions, etc.

For more information about the update procedure, see the manual.

PatchCD Update Relies on Configured Installation Sources

Before starting the PatchCD update, add additional installation sources for all add-on products and KMP packages (such as nVidia or ATi graphics drivers) to match the Service Pack level to be installed. Use the YaST 'Installation Source' module for this. Otherwise, the PatchCD update might show dependency conflicts due to installing updated packages, e.g. the kernel packages.

MDNS and .local Domain Names

The .local top level domain is treated as link-local domain by the resolver. DNS requests are send as multicast DNS requests instead of normal DNS requests. If you already use the .local domain in your nameserver configuration, you must switch this option off in /etc/host.conf. Also read the host.conf manual page.

If you want to switch off MDNS during installation, use nomdns=1 as a boot parameter.

For more information on multicast DNS, see http://www.multicastdns.org.

8.0 Software Related Issues

Removing the Epiphany Web Browser

Due to severe security issues we have dropped and removed Epiphany from SP4. We recommend to use another Web browsers, such as Firefox, instead.

Removing the RealPlayer on SP4

Due to severe security issues we have dropped and removed RealPlayer from SP4.

YaST Software Management Gtk and Qt Front-Ends

YaST comes with two front-ends depending on the desktop installed on your system. By default, the YaST gtk front-end runs on the GNOME desktop, and the YaST qt front-end on the other desktops. This is defined with the WANT_UI variable in the /sbin/yast2 script. Feature-wise, the gtk front-end is very similar to the qt front-end described in the manuals. One exception is the gtk software management module, which differs considerably from the qt port.

Notes on yast2-add-on-creator, yast2-cd-creator, and yast2-product-creator

yast2-add-on-creator creates a custom product (ISO image) from plain RPM files. It is intended for ISVs who want to create extensions for SUSE Linux Enterprise products.

yast2-cd-creator creates a (bootable) ISO image from existing product(s). It can be used for customizing an existing product. For example, it can create a smaller ISO image with a subset of all packages (e.g., basic packages for a minimal system), or, the other way around, an ISO image with more products such as SLES + SDK.

yast2-product-creator is a successor of the cd-creator. It includes a GUI for the kiwi imaging system. This way it is also possible to create a Live-CD, XEN image, etc. from the same configuration used in the CD creator. The product creator will get shipped together with the SDK.

Note, the cd-creator does not support YUM installation sources, but the forthcomming product-creator (part of SDK) will do. If you want to create a medium with updates included, use the product-creator.

Read-Write Support for the NTFS File System

You can enable read-write support for the Microsoft NTFS file system. Mount a NTFS partition using ntfs-3g as the file system type. For example, enter on the command-line:

mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /mnt

If you want to mount a NTFS partition permantently with read-write support, add a line to the /etc/fstab to mount it automatically at boot-time (create the mount point first!):

/dev/sda1 /data-ntfs ntfs-3g defaults 0 0

A more complete example would be:

/dev/sda1 /data-ntfs ntfs-3g \ users,gid=users,fmask=113,dmask=002,locale=en_US.UTF-8 0 0

This would give authenticated users write access to the partition, read access for everyone else. It also gives an example of the proper use of locale if necessary. Using default for an option opens the partition wide, even for abuse.

Java Plug-In and Firefox

The Sun Java plug-in crashes Firefox on the first run. To work around this issue, restart Firefox after this first crash. Then Firefox will run properly.

9.0 Legal Notices

Novell, Inc. makes no representations or warranties with respect to the contents or use of this documentation, and specifically disclaims any express or implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose. Further, Novell, Inc. reserves the right to revise this publication and to make changes to its content, at any time, without obligation to notify any person or entity of such revisions or changes.

Further, Novell, Inc. makes no representations or warranties with respect to any software, and specifically disclaims any express or implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose. Further, Novell, Inc. reserves the right to make changes to any and all parts of Novell software, at any time, without any obligation to notify any person or entity of such changes.

Any products or technical information provided under this Agreement may be subject to U.S. export controls and the trade laws of other countries. You agree to comply with all export control regulations and to obtain any required licenses or classification to export, re-export, or import deliverables. You agree not to export or re-export to entities on the current U.S. export exclusion lists or to any embargoed or terrorist countries as specified in the U.S. export laws. You agree to not use deliverables for prohibited nuclear, missile, or chemical biological weaponry end uses. Please refer to http://www.novell.com/info/exports/ for more information on exporting Novell software. Novell assumes no responsibility for your failure to obtain any necessary export approvals.

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