Virtualbox on openSUSE 11.2

* make sure virtualbox-ose and virtualbox-ose-kmp-desktop are installed, they come with the OSS repository

* the first time Virtualbox OSE is started from the Startmenue -> System a pop-up window informs you:

"You are not a member of the "vboxusers" group. Please add yourself to this group before starting VirtualBox. You could do it using: Yast / Security and Users / User and Group management. Don't forget re-login your user account!"

* add yourself to the vboxusers group -> YaST -> Security and Users -> User and Group management -> choose the user you want to add the group to and enter "Edit", in the next following dialog, under "Details", vboxusers is one of the "Additional Groups" and can be selected.
or on the command line enter: groupmod --add-user vboxusers

Now you have to logout and login again so that the changes take effect.

* start Virtualbox OSE and in my case it converted previous configuration files over. The virtualmachines from my previous opensuse 11.1 installation were still available

I was able to start a SLES11 Virtualbox previously installed under Virtualbox openSUSE 11.1 right away.

Postfix sending mail & /etc/resolv.con on openSUSE 11.2

Sometimes my openSUSE 11.2 client is connected to a SLES10 router and DHCP Server, connected to another Linksys router.

I just realized that my connection dropped every 15 minutes or so, and I saw that my mail was still in the mailqueue and wasn't send out.

Sending an email with postfix I get the following error:
(Host or domain name not found. Name service error for name=relay.host.com type=MX: Host not found, try again)

So something is wrong with the DNS setting.

# host relay.host.com returns only the
relay.host.com has address _IP_address

I checked the /etc/resolv.conf and find the IP of the router in it, although my DHCP server should deliver the nameserver. Apparently the IP of the router doesn't work well.

In /etc/resolv.conf I read:

# Before you change this file manually, consider to define the
# static DNS configuration using the following variables in the
# /etc/sysconfig/network/config file:
# NETCONFIG_DNS_STATIC_SEARCHLIST
# NETCONFIG_DNS_STATIC_SERVERS
# NETCONFIG_DNS_FORWARDER
# or disable DNS configuration updates via netconfig by setting:
# NETCONFIG_DNS_POLICY=''
#


My settings:
YaST2 - Network Settings - "Global options":
Traditional Method with ifup

Hostname/DNS
Modify DNS configuration -> Use Default Policy

with the following DNS variables in /etc/sysconfig/network/config

NETCONFIG_DNS_FORWARDER="resolver"
NETCONFIG_DNS_STATIC_SEARCHLIST=""
NETCONFIG_DNS_STATIC_SERVERS=""
NETCONFIG_DNS_POLICY="auto"

In /etc/resolv.conf the nameserver entry is pointing to the access point/Linksys router: nameserver 192.168.1.1



In YaST2 I changed Hostname/DNS settings to:
Modify DNS configuration -> Only Manually

The following changes were made automatically to /etc/sysconfig/network/config:

NETCONFIG_DNS_FORWARDER="resolver"
NETCONFIG_DNS_STATIC_SEARCHLIST=""
NETCONFIG_DNS_STATIC_SERVERS=""
NETCONFIG_DNS_POLICY=""

The last one: NETCONFIG_DNS_POLICY="" is exactly the change needed and also documented in /etc/resolv.conf as well.

After I made the change:

# host relay.host.com returns
relay.host.com has address _IP_address
relay.host.com mail is handled by 5 relay.host.com

And my mail gets delivered too.

# postqueue -f

Flushes the email stuck in the mailqueue as well.

Mozilla Firefox 3.5 (address bar and bookmarks)

I had problems saving bookmarks, the only place I could save them was in "Unsorted Bookmarks" or one out of three folder randomly in the list of bookmarks. very odd. Basically I was never able to scroll through the list of my bookmark folder and pick one to save the bookmark under.

The second problem: the address bar has square edges and is a layer over another address bar with round edges.

These two problems don't seem to be related but yet they are.

When I installed the new openSUSE 11.2 with the new Firefox version 3.5, the installation preserved my whole Firefox configuration (since I use /home on a separate partition), including a Theme, that is not available for this version of Firefox.

Once I changed the Theme, the problems were gone.

Dropbox on openSUSE 11.2

Although on the Dropbox download side I read: "Dropbox is supported on x86 and x86_64 versions of Ubuntu 9.04, Ubuntu 8.10, Ubuntu 8.04, Ubuntu 7.10, and Fedora Core 9. There have also been reports of users getting Dropbox to work on different versions of Gentoo, Arch Linux, OpenSUSE, and Debian."

I searched the openSUSE Build Service if a package is available. Yes, there is, I installed the nautilus-dropbox-0.6.1-1.1.i586.rpm for openSUSE 11.2. After the installation an Icon was available in the panel and I could use my login credentials to start using it.
Very easy!
Make sure, before you install nautilus-dropbox, you'll need to install those packages to resolve dependency issues upfront:

* GTK 2.12 or higher
* GLib 2.14 or higher
* Nautilus 2.16 or higher
* Libnotify 0.4.4 or higher

For user who don't want to use Nautilus, there is a CLI interface available as well. The above dropbox download link points to the instructions how to set up the script.

There is a Dropbox iPhone appliation available as well. Now I can easily sync my iPhone with my computer.