openSuSE Quick Fixes
Regardless of which Linux distribution you choose to run, there will always be a number of 'quick fixes' required to either improve functionality or to tailor the installation to your personal preference. What follows is my list of quick fixes for openSuSE. I have also included a notation of which versions of openSuSE each fix is applicable to. To prevent this page from becoming excessively long, I only include fixes relevant to versions of SuSE/openSuSE that I still have installed. Currently, that includes SuSE 10.0 through 11.1. Note: I have no remaining installs of 10.1 or 10.2.
Beagle - "The Dreaded Dog"
For those not familiar with beagle, beagle is an indexing system that is supposed to run in the background and provide search capabilities to help you find information on your hard disk. However, what beagle actually is and an annoying program that brings your system to its knees when it is indexing and then eats your hard drive by storing multi-Gigabyte index files on your system. Beagle, fondly named "the dreaded dog" is the first piece of software I shoot in the head on every install. Here's how:
Stopping Beagle and Preventing it from Running:
For those that just want to stop beagle without actually removing it from their systems, you can create a file in your home directory that will prevent beagle from running:
touch ~/.dontrunbeagle
Killing the dreaded-dog dead -- Permanently
There are a number of ways to get rid of beagle permanently. You must uninstall beagle, its library, kerry and it packages and then remove the cache files that have already been created. Here are a few of my favorites. They allow you to shoot the dog in the head with a single command line. One-shot One-kill.
Run as root:
rpm -e $(rpm -qa | grep beagle | sed -e '/^lib/d') \
$(rpm -qa | grep kerry) && \
rm -r /var/cache/beagle && \
rm -r /home/{put your username here}/.beagle
or
rpm -e beagle libbeagle1 kio_beagle \
kerry kerry-lang kdebase3-beagle && \
rm -r /var/cache/beagle && \
rm -r /home/{put your username here}/.beagle
Of course you could always just use Yast...
You will notice that all of the sluggins performance of your machine experienced when you first start a kde session has completely vanished ;-)
Fixing sudo in KDE
Kdesu now again defaults to using su instead of sudo because of various problems with using sudo in KDE. This is a huge PITA, because even though you have properly configured sudo with visudo and you are a member of the wheel group, every time you start an application in KDE requiring root privileges, you are still prompted for a password. You can change the default and fix this problem using kwriteconfig:
kwriteconfig --file kdesurc --group super-user-command --key super-user-command sudo
