Tweaks

openSUSE 42.3 to 15.0 Upgrade notes

In a previous article I shown how to upgrade a distro using zypper, but after the first reboot some issue might always happen, that’s why I collected all the changes and the tweaks I applied switching from openSUSE 42.3 to 15.0.

Network

The first trouble I found was in the net connection, indeed I was unable to connect to the router, although username and password were exact.

In that case the solution is as simple as typing:

$ sudo netconfig update -f

Connecting again with NetworkManager worked fine.

Multimedia

Being not all Youtube videos playing well, I found that all the multimedia packages from Packman were replaced by the same coming from the main OSS openSUSE repository which, for license reasons, has codecs restriction issues.

All I had to do is reinstall multimedia packages from Packman:

$ sudo zypper dup --from REPO_NUMBER

Replacing REPO_NUMBER with the repo number represented by Packman in your repository list:

$ zypper lr

Manual package replacement

A group of packages was not correctly replaced or removed although unneeded, this is my list of changes:

  • Replaced all kdm packages with sddm_branding_openSUSE,
  • added libyui-qt-pkg8 in place of libyui-qt-pkg7 needed by Yast Software Installer,
  • added plasma5-session-wayland to test the new window manager,
  • replaced the old SuSEfirewall2 with firewall-config,
  • removed the obsolete dragonplayer package,
  • removed the obsolete telepathy package and its dependencies (libmission-control-plugins),
  • removed the obsolete ruby 2.1 package and its dependencies.

Other unneeded packages can be discovered with

$ zypper packages --unneeded

And orphan packages:

$ zypper packages --orphaned

Be aware that some of these packages might be still useful and can be reinstalled with another vendor, or they have just been installed outside any repo (like the jdk from Oracle does) and marked as orphan.

To change the vendor of a package:

$ sudo zypper up --repo REPO_NUMBER PACKAGE_NAME

Before to uninstall a package, orphaned or unneeded, is better to search for something similar already installed, that would make the whole cleanup process safer.

For instance, ruby-2.1 can be considered obsolete because replaced by ruby-2.5, searching for ruby will confirm that a replacement has been made:

$ zypper search --installed ruby

So we can remove the old package as well:

$ sudo zypper rm --clean-deps ruby-2.1

K3b tweaks

As k3b started suggested to add the current user to cdrom group, and so I did:

$ sudo usermod -a -G cdrom USERNAME

Nvidia drivers

Having Nvidia proprietary drivers installed i had to blacklist nouveau driver again:

# echo "blacklist nouveau" >> /etc/modprobe.d/50-blacklist.conf
# mkinitrd

If you did not add yet the user(s) to the video and bumblebee groups:

# gpasswd -a USER video
# gpasswd -a USER bumblebee

KDE application configs

Several KDE applications changed their default configurations path from ~/.kde/share/config/ to ~/.config/ and from ~/.kde4/share/apps/ to ~/.local/share/, every time some application toolbar or configuration looks like missing can try to move their files to the new folder.

Unfortunately, I didn’t keep track of all the path changes but is not difficult to understand how to replace them correctly, a little bit of patience and a keen eye will help!

Okular and PDF annotations

Okular now stores pdf annotation within files instead of docdata files, to update them you have just to open one by one all the files where annotation was made and confirm the Okular request to store that data within the file itself.

To print the list of ebooks to open again I made a simple Bash script which makes use of the xmlstarlet package:

$ sudo zypper in xmlstarlet

Copy and paste the script below within a new file, let’s call it annotated_pdf.sh:

#!/bin/bash

for i in ~/.local/share/okular/docdata/*.xml; do
  count=`cat "$i" | xml sel -t -c 'count(//pageList/page)'`

  if [ -n "$count" ] && [ $count -gt 5 ]; then
    cat "$i" | `xml sel -t -v '/documentInfo/@url' -n
  fi
done

and make it executable:

$ chmod u+x annotated_pdf.sh

Running it a list of all PDF with annotations will be print, then you can open them one by one with Okular and save the data correctly.

$ ./annotated_pdf.sh

Final thoughts

This is the list of all the changes I applied to fix the small issues after the upgrade was done, more or less than everyone else have to face because mostly depends on the software installed and how it is used.

More info about openSUSE Leap 15.0 is available at the resource list and at the release notes page.

Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

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