These release notes cover the following areas:
The RPM packages NVIDIA_GLX and NVIDIA_kernel for the nVidia driver with 3-D support are no longer available as of SUSE LINUX 8.2. To install the nVidia driver, use the nVidia-driver patch in YOU (YaST Online Update). The drivers for 2D support are still included in SUSE LINUX.
See http://www.suse.de/~mfabian/suse-cjk/locales.html
Removable media are now integrated via subfs. It is not anymore necessary to mount the media manually. A cd /media/* triggers the automatic mounting. Note that media cannot be ejected while a program is accessing them.
If you install within vmware, you should disable acceleration in vmware: Edit-> Virtual Machine Settings -> Options -> Advanced -> Disable acceleration
The network device setup has been changed. Previously the configuration of a non-existing interface triggered initialisation of the hardware. Now, new hardware is searched for and initialized first, which then triggers the setup of the new network interface.
Additionally new names are introduced for the configuration files. Since the name of a network interface is created dynamically and the usage of hotplug devices increases more and more, a name like ethX is not usable anymore for configuration purposes. Therefore we now use unique descriptions like the MAC-address or the PCI slot for naming of interface configurations.
Note: You can use interface names of course once they are present. ifup eth0 / ifdown eth0 still works.
The configuration for devices is found in /etc/sysconfig/hardware. The interfaces these devices provide is as usual (just with different names) in /etc/sysconfig/network.
An extended README is available under /usr/share/doc/packages/sysconfig/README.
After an update from an older distribution the sound cards will have to be reconfigured. This can be done using the sound module of YaST2. In order to achieve this, please call YaST as user root using the command yast2 sound.
Files on filesystems created by 9.0 and older distributions are using (when not set otherwise) non-UTF-8 encoding for its file-names. If these file names contain non ASCII characters, they will be garbled on SUSE LINUX 9.1 and later version. A fix is to use the convmv script which changes the encoding of the files to UTF-8.
The FHS now requires XML resources (DTDs, stylesheets, etc.) to be installed in /usr/share/xml. Therefore, some directories are no longer available in /usr/share/sgml. If you encounter problems, modify your scripts or makefiles or use the official catalogs (especially /etc/xml/catalog or /etc/sgml/catalog).
When mounting VFAT partitions the parameter formerly called code= must be changed to codepage=. If mounting a VFAT partition causes problems, check if the file /etc/fstab contains the old name for the parameter.
The apache web server (version 1.3) has been replaced by apache2 (version 2.0.49). A system update on a machine with a HTTP server installation will remove the apache package, install apache2 and you will need to adapt your setup manually. Configuration files that were under /etc/httpd are now in /etc/apache2. Apache2 requires either of the packages apache2-prefork (recommended for stability) or apache2-worker.
Information on how to set up an installation source that can be used by YaST can be found under: http://portal.suse.com/sdb/en/2004/02/yast_instsrc.html
New feature: linuxrc understands a new installation source, slp. If you select install=slp at the bootloader prompt, linuxrc will send a SLP (Service Location Protocol) request for service install.suse to the network and prompt you to select an entry from the list of returned URLs. See RFC 2608 and http://www.openslp.com for more information on SLP.
The gssapi support has been replaced with the gssapi-with-mic to fix possible MITM attacks. These two versions are not compatible. This means that you cannot authenticate from older distributions by kerberos tickets as different methods for authentication are used.
People using FreeRADIUS now have to link against unixODBC as libiodbc has been dropped.
Incompatible change: the resolver library treats the .local top level domain as link-local domain and sends multicast DNS requests to the multicast address 224.0.0.251 port 5353 instead of normal DNS requests. If you already use the .local domain in your nameserver configuration you will have to switch to another domain name. See http://www.multicastdns.org for more information on multicast DNS.
There is now experimental support for Intel Centrino WLAN adapters. The driver is not complete, WEP support and operation modes other than managed are missing.
Various services can be announced over SLP. One has to install the openslp-server and start the slpd service. SLP is currently supported by cupsd, rsyncd, ypserv, openldap2, ksysguardd, saned, kdm VNC login, krfb, distccd, smpppd, rpasswd, postfix, sshd and kpf.
The new network browser shown on the desktop can be used to display and use services based on SLP and MDNS. Apart from the service:/ URLs also the following types are supported: "slp:/" to browse SLP services. "mdns:/" to browse multicast-DNS services.
When using remote access (notably SSH, telnet and RSH) between 9.1 (in its default configuration with UTF-8 enabled) and older systems (9.0 and lower, where UTF-8 is not enabled by default or not supported), terminal applications might display garbled characters.
This is because OpenSSH does not forward locale settings so that system-defaults are used which might not match the remote terminal settings. This affects text mode YaST and applications run remotely as non-root user. The applications run as root are only affected when the users changes the default locales for root (only LC_CTYPE is set by default).
If problems occur with ncurses based applications running on the text console then simply issuing unicode_stop (reverting keyboard and console from unicode mode) should usually provide a fix.
SUSE LINUX 9.1 / SLES 9 features a new pthread implementation called NPTL, which is faster and better than the old implementation called linuxthreads.
If your old program is incompatible with this new threading implementation, we also provide the old one. To switch to the old version, set the environment variable LD_ASSUME_KERNEL to 2.4.21 by using (e.g.) export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.21 in bash.
SuSEplugger now supports drive notifications and therefore does not poll the devices. Drives that fail to support notification might not react. A workaround is to enable polling to get back the old behavior.
For information about the changes with printing see http://portal.suse.com/sdb/en/2004/03/jsmeix_print-einrichten-91.html
With the new kernel 2.6 standby/suspend is now supported with ACPI. Note that this feature is still experimental and not supported by all hardware. To use it you need the package powersave. Further information about the package can be found under /usr/share/doc/packages/powersave. A graphical front end can be found in the package kpowersave.
Some wireless LAN cards (PrismGT, Centrino, Atmel, ACX100) need firmware to operate. Due to licensing issues we can not ship these firmware binaries. Please read /usr/share/doc/packages/wireless-tools/README.firmware for information on how to obtain and install the firmware.