Ben Kevan’s Blog

Installing VMWare Workstation 6.0.4 on openSUSE 11.0

So the time has come. OpenSUSE is now in release canidate cycle, and VMWare has released VMWare Workstation 6.0.4 which will work on openSUSE 11.0 natively (without the need of the vmware-any-any patch for 2.6.25 kernel).

I have created a new wiki just for openSUSE 11.0 and VMWare Workstation 6.0.4.

You can find it here in the wiki

I will be creating a new Wiki and Blog post for an installation of VMWare Workstation 6.5 on openSUSE 11.0 since there are currently some “Gotha’s” in the beta because of how GCC is detected.

Tags: 11.0, opensuse, VMWare

openSUSE 11.0 RC First Glance and Initial Review

Today openSUSE 11.0 RC was released, and without a second to spare I downloaded the ISO and started the installation on a Dell D820 with NVIDIA NVS 110M Card and Intel 3945 Wireless Driver (which has been known to have poor support lately).

You can download openSUSE 11.0 fom http://en.opensuse.org/developer. Be sure to seed your torrent when you’re done downloading to help increase the download speeds for everyone else.

The installation screens newly ported to QT4 looked great.

Now onto some issues during installation:

During installation I had configured my Wireless NIC but was unable to use it as an Update Device since the module wasn’t loaded after I configured it, this made it imposible to update during the installation, and caused me to update post installation. This is a minor inconvinience but why ask me to configure the NIC if you know I won’t be able to use it?

I installed initially with only KDE 3.5 (as I would suggest most others to do if this is a work or a required stable machine since I do not quite believe KDE 4.0.4 or KDE 4.1 (a.k.a 4.0.80) is ready for the prime time because of issues mostly with plasma. So after the installation I was presented with a beautiful initial KDE screen

Here are some versions of stuff installed:

libzypp-4.25.0-5
zypper-0.11.5-2
MozillaFirefox-2.9.95-22 (3.0 Beta 5)
mozilla-xulrunner190-1.8.99.5-25 (Possible issue with Lotus Notes 8.0.1, I’ll test at a later time)
kernel-pae-2.6.25.4-8
kde 3.5.9 (This was my option during installation to choose the more mature and stable KDE 3.5 Family), the 3.5.9 Installation does however include many KDE 4.x packages in the games / krdc etc portions, which are considered stable.
koffice-1.6.3-153 ( I prefer openoffice but I went with the default installation of KDE 3.5.9)
NetworkManager-0.7.0.r3685-3
NetworkManager-kde-0.7r812889-2
NetworkManager-gnome-0.7.0.r729-2
yast2-2.16.71-2
Gnome 2.22 (I am not a Gnome person, but I have to admit I was impressed by this version, but would find myself using KDE Applications like KMail, Amarok, KNotes, SuperKaramba and is why I will stay with KDE)
KDE 4.0.4 (if you choose this over KDE 3.5.9)

Picture of YaST Installer (looks the same in KDE 3.5.9 as it did in other versions)

Picture of YaST Software Manager in the Patterns View

Here is a picture of the 3.5.9 KControl, which has 2 generic icons that I guess someone forgot about:

Here is a few screenshots from the GNOME installation post initial installation

Initial screen of GNOME during first login:

Shot of GNOME’s YaST Control Center:

Shot of GNOME’s Control Center:

Heck, lets do a few things with KDE 4

KDE 4 YaST Screenshot

KDE4 Control Center

Some very obvious post installation issues I see users will have:
No NVIDIA Repository listed in Community Repositories which was in 10.3, they should have talked with NVIDIA and have been allowed to at least release the “Beta” version of the driver in that repository.

Zypper is not working correctly, you can run sudo zypper lu -t package and see that packages need to be upgraded, but running sudo zypper up -t package -r “Repo Alias” does not install those packages marked as upgradable by zypper lu, please see the following novell bugzilla report I have created and marked as Urgent / Blocker so hopefully it’ll be fixed by the Final version due out in 20 days.

The iwl3945 driver does not handle the wlan (Wireless LAN) indicator lights on my Dell Latitude D820, the ipw3945 in previous versions did, I will look into the driver to see why it doesn’t if / when I have time.

Setting up the Network Devices for me when I had no network connection threw errors when activating Network Services asking for Curl to be installed. I recieved 4 errors since I had 4 active repo’s. This shouldn’t happen on a new installation with or without Network Connectivity.

Down to some of the nit-picky issues:

The different Wireless KNetworkManager for Wired, Wireless and a third for generic KNetworkManager settings is messy in the system tray, they should be condensed like older versions.

Changing the panel size in KDE 4.x does not resize the icons in the system tray to the matched tiny size.

You can find all the pictures I have taken for openSUSE 11.0 RC in my online gallery

Sorry the quality of the post went downhill towards the end, it’s getting late and I am getting quite tired.

Thank you for all that read it, I will also be updating once the final version comes out with another initial review, and also some installation walkthroughs with VMWare Workstation (6.0.3 or newer (whatever is most recent then), as it will take the vmware any any update).

My VMWare VCP 3.0 Notes

Many people have contacted me asking for some notes on the ESX 3.0 VCP Test.

I know the test is no longer a VCP 3.0 test, but my notes should be fine with the exceptions of some of the Min / Maximums. Note that many of these are just references for me as a reminder of what each portion of VMWare does and how it works.

Here is the link to my wiki with all the notes:
VMWare VCP 3.0 Notes

Installing Patches on your ESX Server

VMWare releases patches for ESX quite often, and it can get tiring installing them all the time one by one. So I wrote a wiki for the methods I use, which cut down the time of installation (for me having 20+ production hosts) quite a-bit.

Here is the link:
http://www.benkevan.com/wiki/index.php/Installing_Patches_on_ESX_Server

Here’s a little excerpt from it:

Install Released Patches

To install patches released by VMWare download them and transfer them to your esx server
scp -r patchrootdir user@server:/tmp/patches

ssh into your ESX server with your local ESX server account.
ssh servername

One you are on the host change user to root
su -

If you copied over the zip files change directory to the patches location and unzip all the patches
cd /tmp/patches
for i in *.zip; do unzip $i; done; rm *.zip

Now install the patches
for j in ESX*; do cd $j; esxupdate –noreboot update; cd ..; done
Note: If there are dependancies and not all of them are install just run the command above twice.

Tags: esx, VMWare

Password protecting website without using .htaccess

Do you host your own website and since you have control of the /etc/apache2/conf.d directory you would rather not enable .htaccess usage?

Now you wonder how do I password protect a directory without having a .htaccess file in the directory. You actually use the same options etc you would use in a .htaccess.  So here is a sample configuration file which requires authentication for the directory /var/www/stats

Here is the location of the file below:
/etc/apache2/conf.d

<Directory /var/www/stats>
AuthType Basic
AuthName “Statistic Tracker”
AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/htpasswd.setup
Require valid-user
</Directory>

To create the required htpasswd file (with the name above) do:
sudo htpasswd -c /etc/apache2/htpasswd.setup username

Now you will have to reset apache:
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

I will be adding this to my Wiki later

Tags: apache, linux, opensuse, tech, ubuntu

Installing VMWare Workstation on openSUSE 10.3

Well, since I have been getting tons of hits on this page, I figured i’d blog it and let people know that it actually exists. Here is a nice little write up I made for installing VMWare Workstation on openSUSE 10.3.

http://www.benkevan.com/wiki/index.php/Installing_VMWare_Workstation_on_openSUSE_10.3

Hope it helps, and I’ll bring some more like this hopefully soon (when time permits, we all know how that is).

Tags: 10.3, opensuse, VMWare, workstation