SaX2 offers to change the resolution even for the fbdev driver. Because this is controlled via a VGA kernel option, rebooting is needed after resolution changes. In other words: Modifications will take effect the next time the graphics system is restarted; in some cases a reboot of the machine is needed.

Since SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 SP1, Openoffice.org has been replaced with LibreOffice. If you perform an upgrade, manual interaction is needed, otherwise you will stay with the old OpenOffice.org packages. Future updates will only be prepared and published for LibreOffice.

Some parts of the documentation packages still mention 'OpenOffice.org'.

The update repository integrity used by SUSE is ensured by a GPG signature and the checksums of the YUM repomd XML metadata.

SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 so far used sha1 as intermediate checksum, which should no longer be used.

With SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 and SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 SP4 we start to use sha256 for the XML integrity handling and so get rid of the old sha1 hashing methods.

If you have tools parsing the XML metadata yourself, please verify they can handle also the newer sha256 hashes.

The common PAM configuration files (/etc/pam.d/common-*) are now created and managed with pam-config.

numactl and libnuma have been updated to the latest version.

This update comes with many bug fixes and some new features that are especially important for large NUMA systems, e.g.:

In addition to the /etc/SuSE-release file the file /etc/os-release is now available.

/etc/os-release is a cross-distribution standard to identify a Linux system. For more information about the syntax, see the os-release man page ( man os-release ).

When upgrading from SUSE Linux Enterprise Server or Desktop 11 SP3 to version 11 SP4, you may encounter a version downgrade of specific software packages, including the Linux Kernel.

SLE 11 SP4 has all its software packages and updates in the SLE 11 SP4 repositories. No packages from SLE 11 SP3 repositories are needed for installation or upgrade, not even from the SLE 11 SP3 update repositories.

Note

It is important to remember that the version number is not sufficient to determine which bugfixes are applied to a software package.

In case you add SLE 11 SP3 update repositories, be aware of one characteristic of the repository concept: Version numbers in the SP3 update repository can be higher than those in the SP4 repository. Thus, if you update with the SP3 repositories enabled, you may get the SP3 version of a package instead of the SP4 version. This is admittedly unfortunate.

It is recommended to avoid using the version from a lower product or SP, because using the SLE 11 SP3 package instead of the SP4 package can result in unexpected side effects. Thus we advise to switch off all the SLE 11 SP3 repositories, if you do not really need them. Keep old repositories only, if your system depends on a specific older package version. If you need a package from a lower product or SP though, and thus have SLE 11 SP3 repositories enabled, make sure that the packages you intended to upgrade have actually been upgraded.

Summarizing: If you have an SLE 11 SP3 installation with all patches and updates applied, and then migrate off-line to SLE 11 SP4, you will see a downgrade of some packages. This is expected behavior.

To migrate the system to the Service Pack 4 level with zypper, proceed as follows:

Online migration from SP3 to SP4 is not supported, if debuginfo packages are installed.

Beginning with SLE 11 SP1, we switched to use KMS (Kernel Mode Setting) for Intel graphics support. This means that mode setting is now done in kernel space instead of user space (X driver).

If—in rare cases—the new driver concept does not work for you, create an X.Org configuration manually:

You can update your previous KDE installation (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 or earlier) during system upgrade as described in the manual or as a package update using YaST or zypper. Because of a huge amount of package renaming, it is not possible to update your previous KDE installation using plain rpm commands.

For more information about KDE 4.3, see Section 5.1, “Desktop”.

We ship the GroupWise 8 client with this release. If you want to keep the GroupWise 7 client, enter Software Manager and disable the GroupWise update.

The Groupwise 7 client is available in the extras-repository which can be enabled after registration.

With SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 the kernel RPMs are split into different parts:

The man command now asks which manual page the user wants to see if manual pages with the same name exist in different sections. The user is expected to type the section number to make this manual page visible.

If you want to get back the previous behavior, set MAN_POSIXLY_CORRECT=1 in a shell initialization file such as ~/.bashrc.

This release of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop ships with AppArmor. The AppArmor intrusion prevention framework builds a firewall around your applications by limiting the access to files, directories, and POSIX capabilities to the minimum required for normal operation. AppArmor protection can be enabled via the AppArmor control panel, located in YaST under Security and Users. For detailed information about using AppArmor, see the documentation in /usr/share/doc/packages/apparmor-docs.

The AppArmor profiles included with SUSE Linux have been developed with our best efforts to reproduce how most users use their software. The profiles provided work unmodified for many users, but some users find our profiles too restrictive for their environments.

If you discover that some of your applications do not function as you expected, you may need to use the AppArmor Update Profile Wizard in YaST (or use the aa-logprof(8) command line utility) to update your AppArmor profiles. Place all your profiles into learning mode with the following: aa-complain /etc/apparmor.d/*

When a program generates a high number of complaints, the system's performance is degraded. To mitigate this, we recommend periodically running the Update Profile Wizard (or aa-logprof(8)) to update your profiles, even if you choose to leave them in learning mode. This reduces the number of learning events logged to disk, which improves the performance of the system.

SuSEfirewall2 is enabled by default. That means that by default you cannot log in from remote systems. It also interferes with network browsing and multicast applications, such as SLP and Samba ("Network Neighborhood"). You can fine-tune the firewall settings using YaST.

With the update to SLE 11 SP4, SaX2 no longer lets you select a video resolution when KMS is active. With KMS and the native or the modesetting driver RandR > 1.1 is available, which lets you change the resolution on the fly. The Gnome desktop provides a tool to do this and save the settings persistently across sessions.

For any UMS (and RandR 1.1) drivers you will still get the full list of video modes. If you select an unsupported mode, it will be ignored and a monitor preferred default mode will be used instead.

Xen updated to Version 4.4.

The SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 kernel contains a fully supported ext4 file system module, which provides read-only access to the file system. A separate package is not required.

Read-write access to an ext4 file system can be enabled by using the rw=1 module parameter. The parameter can be passed while loading the ext4 module manually, by adding it for automatic use by creating /etc/modprobe.d/ext4 with the contents options ext4 rw=1 , or after loading the module by writing 1 to /sys/module/ext4/parameters/rw . Note that read-write ext4 file systems are still officially unsupported by SUSE Technical Services.

ext4 is not supported for the installation of the SUSE Linux Enterprise operating system.

Since SLE 11 SP2 we support offline migration from ext4 to the supported btrfs file system.

The ext4-writeable package is still available for compatibility with systems with kernels from both the SLE 11 SP2 and SLE 11 SP3 releases installed.

Due to limitations of the legacy x86 and x86_64 BIOS implementations booting from devices larger than 2 TiB is technically not possible using legacy partition tables (DOS MBR).

Starting with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 SP2 we support installation and boot using UEFI on the x86_64 architecture and certified hardware.

Lenovo ThinkPad laptops have special code in the MBR (master boot record) because of the "Blue ThinkVantage button" functionality. If proper detection and preparation fails, it might be necessary to restore the boot sector.

If you have a ThinkPad, ensure that the bootloader is not installed into the MBR (verify it in the installation proposal!) and the MBR is not rewritten by generic code (in installation proposel select Bootloader -> Boot Loader Installation -> Boot Loader Options -> Write Generic Boot Code to MBR -- should be unchecked).

If your MBR gets rewritten, the ThinkVantage button will not work anymore. The back-up of the MBR is stored in /var/lib/YaST2/backup_boot_sectors/.

To avoid the mail-flood caused by cron status messages, the default value of SEND_MAIL_ON_NO_ERROR in /etc/sysconfig/cron is now set to "no" for new installations. Even with this setting to "no", cron data output will still be send to the MAILTO address, as documented in the cron manpage.

In the update case it is recommended to set these values according to your needs.

There is only limited graphics support on IBM SurePOS 700 4800-7X3 systems with 4820-2GN monitors. During a graphical installation you can encounter an error message from the monitor (OSD = On Screen Display) such as:

OUT OF RANGE
H: -48.4 KHz V: -60.1 Hz.

To work around this issue try a different resolution, VESA or text-mode for installation. Another option is to choose the native driver by specifying acceleratedx=1 on the boot prompt. It might also help to update the BIOS.

After system installation the problem no longer occurs and the graphics system is fully supported.

On the FIC GE2 platform (when using 24 BPP color depth and resolutions >= 1280x1024 on the DVI interface) stripes are displayed on the X server. This distorts all windows.

Changing to 16 BPP color depth seems to solve this problem.