In some scenarios, FreeRDP performs better than the rdesktop client, which is currently available as the Linux RDP client. Thus, we added support for FreeRDP in SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 SP2.

To avoid the breakage of existing scenarios we will not uninstall rdesktop with the SP3 upgrade.

Since SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 SP1, Openoffice.org has been replaced with LibreOffice. If you perform an upgrade, manual interaction is needed, otherwise you will stay with the old OpenOffice.org packages. Future updates will only be prepared and published for LibreOffice.

Some parts of the documentation packages still mention 'OpenOffice.org'.

OpenSCAP is a set of open source libraries providing a path for integration of SCAP (Security Content Automation Protocol). SCAP is a collection of standards managed by NIST with the goal of providing a standard language for the expression of Computer Network Defense related information. For more information about SCAP, see http://nvd.nist.gov (http://nvd.nist.gov) .

The common PAM configuration files (/etc/pam.d/common-*) are now created and managed with pam-config.

This feature addresses the issue that eth0 does not map to em1 (as labeled on server chassis), when a server has multiple network adapters.

This issue is solved for Dell hardware, which has the corresponding BIOS support, by renaming onboard network interfaces to em[1234], which maps to Embedded NIC[1234] as labeled on server chassis. (em stands for ethernet-on-motherboard.)

The renaming will be done by using the biosdevname utility.

biosdevname is automatically installed and used if YaST2 detects hardware suitable to be used with biosdevname. biosdevname can be disabled during installation by using "biosdevname=0" on the kernel commandline. The usage of biosdevname can be enforced on every hardware with "biosdevname=1". If the BIOS has no support, no network interface names are renamed.

Replacing an unmaintained version of MySQL.

SLE 11 SP3 introduces the upgrade of the MySQL database to version 5.5. This upgrade involves a change of the database format and the database needs to be converted before MySQL can run again. Therefore MySQL is not running directly after the upgrade.

To migrate the MySQL database, run the following commands as root:

touch /var/lib/mysql/.force_upgrade
rcmysql restart

To verify failures during the server start check the log files under /var/log/mysql/ .

We strongly recommend to back up the database before migrating it (mostly /var/lib/mysql ).

If you are migrating from a previous version, take a look at the MySQL upstream documentation regarding migration:

USB3 Link Power Management and Latency Tolerance Messaging have been implemented for improved power efficiency.

To upgrade a PostgreSQL server installation from version 8.3 to 9.1, the database files need to be converted to the new version.

Newer versions of PostgreSQL come with the pg_upgrade tool that simplifies and speeds up the migration of a PostgreSQL installation to a new version. Formerly dump and restore was needed that was much slower.

pg_upgrade needs to have the server binaries of both versions available. To allow this, we had to change the way PostgreSQL is packaged as well as the naming of the packages, so that two or more versions of PostgreSQL can be installed in parallel.

Starting with version 9.1, PostgreSQL package names contain numbers indicating the major version. In PostgreSQL terms the major version consists of the first two components of the version number, i.e. 8.3, 8.4, 9.0, or 9.1. So, the packages for Postgresql 9.1 are named postgresql91, postgresql91-server, etc. Inside the packages the files were moved from their standard locations to a versioned location such as /usr/lib/postgresql83/bin or /usr/lib/postgresql91/bin to avoid file conflicts if packages are installed in parallel. The update-alternatives mechanism creates and maintains symbolic links that cause one version (by default the highest installed version) to re-appear in the standard locations. By default, database data are stored under /var/lib/pgsql/data on SUSE Linux.

The following preconditions have to be fulfilled before data migration can be started:

Upstream documentation about pg_upgrade including step by step instructions for performing a database migration can be found under file:///usr/share/doc/packages/postgresql91/html/pgupgrade.html (if the postgresql91-docs package is installed), or online under http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/pgupgrade.html . NOTE: The online documentation starts with explaining how you can install PostgreSQL from the upstream sources (which is not necessary on SLE) and also uses other directory names ( /usr/local instead of the update-alternatives based path as described above).

For background information about the inner workings of pg_admin and a performance comparison with the old dump and restore method, see http://momjian.us/main/writings/pgsql/pg_upgrade.pdf .

When upgrading from SUSE Linux Enterprise Server or Desktop 11 SP2 to SP3, you may encounter a version downgrade of specific software packages, including the Linux Kernel.

SLE 11 SP3 has all its software packages and updates in the SP3 repositories. No packages from SP2 repositories are needed for installation or upgrade, not even from the SP2 update repositories.

Note

It is important to remember that the version number is not sufficient to determine which bugfixes are applied to a software package.

In case you add SP2 update repositories, be aware of one characteristic of the repository concept: Version numbers in the SP2 update repository can be higher than those in the SP3 repository. Thus, if you update with the SP2 repositories enabled, you may get the SP2 version of a package instead of the SP3 version. This is admittedly unfortunate.

It is recommended to avoid using the version from a lower SP, because using the SP2 package instead of the SP3 package can result in unexpected side effects. Thus we advise to switch off all the SP2 repositories, if you do not really need them. Keep old repositories only, if your system depends on a specific older package version. If you need a package from a lower SP though, and thus have SP2 repositories enabled, make sure that the packages you intended to upgrade have actually been upgraded.

Summarizing: If you have an SP2 installation with all patches and updates applied, and then migrate off-line to SP3 GA, you will see a downgrade of some packages. This is expected behavior.

To migrate the system to the Service Pack 3 level with zypper, proceed as follows:

Because of a dependency conflict make sure to enable the SLED11-Extras repository. This can be done with the following command before calling yast2 wagon:

zypper mr -e SLED11-Extras; zypper ref

On SLES this extra step is not needed. For more information, see Novell TID 7012368, Section “Update to SP3 via patches” http://www.novell.com/support/documentLink.do?externalID=7012368.

Online migration from SP2 to SP3 is not supported, if debuginfo packages are installed.

Beginning with SLE 11 SP1, we switched to use KMS (Kernel Mode Setting) for Intel graphics support. This means that mode setting is now done in kernel space instead of user space (X driver).

If—in rare cases—the new driver concept does not work for you, create an X.Org configuration manually:

You can update your previous KDE installation (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 or earlier) during system upgrade as described in the manual or as a package update using YaST or zypper. Because of a huge amount of package renaming, it is not possible to update your previous KDE installation using plain rpm commands.

For more information about KDE 4.3, see Section 5.1, “Desktop”.

We ship the GroupWise 8 client with this release. If you want to keep the GroupWise 7 client, enter Software Manager and disable the GroupWise update.

The Groupwise 7 client is available in the extras-repository which can be enabled after registration.

With SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 the kernel RPMs are split into different parts:

The man command now asks which manual page the user wants to see if manual pages with the same name exist in different sections. The user is expected to type the section number to make this manual page visible.

If you want to get back the previous behavior, set MAN_POSIXLY_CORRECT=1 in a shell initialization file such as ~/.bashrc.

This release of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop ships with AppArmor. The AppArmor intrusion prevention framework builds a firewall around your applications by limiting the access to files, directories, and POSIX capabilities to the minimum required for normal operation. AppArmor protection can be enabled via the AppArmor control panel, located in YaST under Security and Users. For detailed information about using AppArmor, see the documentation in /usr/share/doc/packages/apparmor-docs.

The AppArmor profiles included with SUSE Linux have been developed with our best efforts to reproduce how most users use their software. The profiles provided work unmodified for many users, but some users find our profiles too restrictive for their environments.

If you discover that some of your applications do not function as you expected, you may need to use the AppArmor Update Profile Wizard in YaST (or use the aa-logprof(8) command line utility) to update your AppArmor profiles. Place all your profiles into learning mode with the following: aa-complain /etc/apparmor.d/*

When a program generates a high number of complaints, the system's performance is degraded. To mitigate this, we recommend periodically running the Update Profile Wizard (or aa-logprof(8)) to update your profiles, even if you choose to leave them in learning mode. This reduces the number of learning events logged to disk, which improves the performance of the system.

SuSEfirewall2 is enabled by default. That means that by default you cannot log in from remote systems. It also interferes with network browsing and multicast applications, such as SLP and Samba ("Network Neighborhood"). You can fine-tune the firewall settings using YaST.

To benefit from enhancements and improvements which have been developed in the upstream community, postfix is upgraded from version 2.5.13 to the current version 2.9.4.

Incompatibility Issues:

New Features:

unixODBC 2.3.1 provides the most recent upstream fixes; this helps for seamless population of DB2 data using automated tools and improves interoperability with MS SQL server.

Updating Ethernet Firmware

The Emulex Ethernet driver supports updating the firmware image in the UCNA flash through the request_firmware interface in Linux. You can perform this update when the UCNA is online and passing network/storage traffic.

To update the ethernet firmware image:

Copy the latest firmware image under the /lib/firmware directory:

cp be3flash.ufi /lib/firmware

Start the update process:

ethtool -f eth<X> be3flash.ufi 0

Firmware Update Needed for SR-IOV Functionality

Emulex 10Gb E Virtual Fabric adapter firmware version 4.6.166.7 or later is required for SR-IOV functionality.

Limitation in Bridging on Emulex 10Gb E Virtual Fabric Adapter with SR-IOV Enabled

PING is not working when attempting to bridge the ports of the Emulex 10Gb E Virtual Fabric adapter to the virtual machines when SR-IOV is enabled in the BIOS. This issue occurs due to limitations of the virtual Ethernet bridge in the adapter. Please reference the Emulex Release Notes for further information before enabling SR-IOV

This Service Pack adds official support for the following Intel Centrino Wireless Adapters:

This Service Pack adds support for the 4th Generation Intel® Core™ Processor integrated graphics core.

Improve usability by allowing a single execution of smbcacls to propagate an ACL recursively (as appropriate) to each node in a directory tree according to its inheritance flags.

Add support for a new smbcacls option '--propagate-inheritance', to be used with the existing --set, --modify, --add, or --delete arguments. For a single invocation of the smbcalcs command called with '--propagate-inheritance', the --set, --modify, --add, or --delete operations are applied firstly to the directory specified, then any inheritiable ACE(s) are automatically propagated recursively down the directory structure.

For more information, see the updated man page for smbcacls (in particular the INHERITANCE section).

Add-on media like the Software Development Kit or third party driver media can be added to SUSE Linux Enterprise during installation or later in the running system. Sometimes it's advisable that an add-on media is available from the very beginning, for example to make drivers for new hardware available.

It is now possible to provide one or more URLs that point to the location of add-on media at the installer's command line by providing an "addon=url" parameter. Multiple add-ons need to be provided as a comma-separated list ("addon=url1,url2,...").

Snapper, which was introduced in previous service pack, has been implemented following enhancements:

For more information, see the Administration Guide.

The libzypp history in /var/log/zypp/history now contains a transaction ID added to each record. Any scripts, which parse the history file and which rely on the order of data fields, need to be checked that they still parse the history file properly.

Xen hypervisor is shipped as an EFI application, and signed. It will negotiate with the shim loader to validate the Dom0 kernel signature before booting it. Enabling the alternative kernel image format takes as a prerequisite the bumping of the backward compatibility level from 3.2 to 4.X, so we are not able to boot a SLE 11 SP3 PV guest on SLE 10 SP4, even if secure boot is not enabled.

XFS Realtime Volumes is an experimental feature, available for testing and experimenting. If you encounter any issues, SUSE is interested in feedback. Please, submit a support request through the usual access methods.

The SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 kernel contains a fully supported ext4 file system module, which provides read-only access to the file system. A separate package is not required.

Read-write access to an ext4 file system can be enabled by using the rw=1 module parameter. The parameter can be passed while loading the ext4 module manually, by adding it for automatic use by creating /etc/modprobe.d/ext4 with the contents options ext4 rw=1 , or after loading the module by writing 1 to /sys/module/ext4/parameters/rw . Note that read-write ext4 file systems are still officially unsupported by SUSE Technical Services.

ext4 is not supported for the installation of the SUSE Linux Enterprise operating system.

Since SLE 11 SP2 we support offline migration from ext4 to the supported btrfs file system.

The ext4-writeable package is still available for compatibility with systems with kernels from both the SLE 11 SP2 and SLE 11 SP3 releases installed.

Kernel configuration and NFS userland utilities have been updated to fully support NFSv3 over the IPv6 protocol. The same functionality for NFSv4 has already been enabled since SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 SP2.

AutoFS now mounts NFS volumes over IPv6.

Due to limitations of the legacy x86 and x86_64 BIOS implementations booting from devices larger than 2 TiB is technically not possible using legacy partition tables (DOS MBR).

With SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 SP2 we support installation and boot using UEFI on the x86_64 architecture and certified hardware.

For better sound functionality we strongly recommend that pulseaudio 0.9.14 or higher is installed. This version is available via maintenance channels for SUSE Linux Enterprise systems registered with SUSE.

The modify_resolvconf script is removed in favor of the more versatile netconfig script. This new script handles specific network settings from multiple sources more flexibly and transparently. For more information, see the updated manuals and the netconfig man-page.

Instead of the madwifi driver the ath5k/ath9k in-kernel replacement is now available. ath5k/ath9k does not support access point mode yet, but normal networks (infrastructure and ad-hoc) are well supported by the new driver.

Lenovo ThinkPad laptops have special code in the MBR (master boot record) because of the "Blue ThinkVantage button" functionality. If proper detection and preparation fails, it might be necessary to restore the boot sector.

If you have a ThinkPad, ensure that the bootloader is not installed into the MBR (verify it in the installation proposal!) and the MBR is not rewritten by generic code (in installation proposel select Bootloader -> Boot Loader Installation -> Boot Loader Options -> Write Generic Boot Code to MBR -- should be unchecked).

If your MBR gets rewritten, the ThinkVantage button will not work anymore. The back-up of the MBR is stored in /var/lib/YaST2/backup_boot_sectors/.

To avoid the mail-flood caused by cron status messages, the default value of SEND_MAIL_ON_NO_ERROR in /etc/sysconfig/cron is now set to "no" for new installations. Even with this setting to "no", cron data output will still be send to the MAILTO address, as documented in the cron manpage.

In the update case it is recommended to set these values according to your needs.

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 no longer occurs and the graphics system is fully supported.

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 this problem.