Tuesday, March 8, 2011

openSUSE 11.4 RC2 bêtes noires

Call me a self-flagellant.

I was so pleased with the smooth upgrade to KDE 4.5.5 that I decided to just go ahead and follow the instructions to upgrade to OpenSuSE 11.4 (oS11.4). Spent several hours RTFM on zypper, set up the 11.4 repos and removed the older ones, and pushed zypper dup. About an hour later it was all done.

[Footnote: OpenSuSE is now calling itself openSUSE so I guess we can all stop following the ancient German-based capitalization scheme...]

It went well enough. oS11.4 is at Release Candidate 2 Beta with only a few days to the full release. But there are some questions, if not bugs:

+ The splash screen is a grey streaked thing with a jagged gecko in the lower right corner that looks as if the video is corrupted until you notice that the gecko in the middle of the screen is perfect. So maybe this is a Beta reservation of some sort? It goes on and brings up the plasma desktop without fault or error. And indeed, the new video is crystal clear. Very cool.

+ There is a new tool KPackageKit that seems to be trying to takeover from YaST. It wakes up and downloads a scrunch of stuff, even though I had just done zypper dup the night before.

+ Squezebox Server (SBS) 7.5.3 won't connect. Part of it was a firewall thing (dropped port 3483 packets) solved by moving from guarddog to.the openSUSE firewall and turning on masquerading, but it still doesn't load. It shows as enabled but doesn't load, and when explicitly loaded does not respond. Now this may be an oS11.4 thing, or it may be an SBS 7.5.3 thing. I've posted to the forum, watch this space.

+ My mouse problems have been solved by replacing the keyboard (and its included stick mouse).

Other than that no noticeable problems except:

+ Bluedevil. Aaargh.

It was working on oS11.3 with KDE 4.5.5 but now doesn't. More to follow, but at present:
    - It sees the phone, the phone sees it, they pair.
    - The phone can send files to Bluedevil, but not vice versa
    - Neither can browse the other.

So this is what we've done:

1. Delete PC from N8, N8 from PC, reboot both.

2. Discover N8 on PC (Manage devices):
    a. It finds the N8, sends a PIN. Acknowledge all prompts on the N8 (PIN, services, access, etc.)
    b. Set up services on PC (Send files), follow prompts
    c. Transition into attempt to send file. Follow prompts, select file, destination, OK. Nothing happens. No audio on phone, no prompt on PC, no files on phone.

3. Discover PC on N8 (delete pairing on N8, search and pair):
    + You have to be really quick as the prompt doesn't last long on the PC, and after a few attempts does not appear at all. So reboot and try this step again:
        - Minimize all PC windows, with mouse at about 3 o'clock on the screen
        - Start the process on the N8
        -click the PIN approval
    + Success. Send from N8 to PC: (have mouse in same position)
        - Accept connection: success.
    + Send file from PC to N8: no joy, same as 2c. above.
    + Delete pairings on both devices, re-pair on PC, but do NOT transition to send.
    + Attempt send: once again you have to be quick. The notifications widget has the attempts but doesn't alert! But same as2c. above, no joy.

So:
    + Pairing does work in both directions, but you havae to be quick if pairing from phone to PC.
    + Better to pair on the PC - the prompts are too short-lived and obscure on the PC.
    + File transfer works from phone to PC regardless of pairing direction. But watch the notifications area for prompts and be quick.
    + Browsing a remote device does not work in either direction.

The installed version is 1.0.2-3.8.1. What happens if we uninstall and reinstall an older version?
We find version 1.0-2.9 at
    http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Release:/45/openSUSE_11.3/i586/
and give it a whirl.This was the version that worked for us before. But no joy. They all show
    0.6 KiB/s
    0.0 KiB/s
in the notifications section.

I've posted to
http://forums.opensuse.org/forums/english/get-technical-help-here/install-boot-login/455185-bluedevil-under-opensuse-11-4-rc2.html#post2300263
Se we await comments of others smarter than I.

FWIW, pretty much everything else works flawlessly on OS 11.4. Firefox 4 beta has a few problems, but that is not an OS 11.4 issue...

So all in all, a good couple of days.

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