Part I Support and Common Tasks

SUSE offers a continuous stream of software security updates for your product. By default, the update applet is used to keep your system up-to-date. Refer to Section “Keeping the System Up-to-date”, Chapter 6, Installing or Removing Software, Deployment Guide for further information on the update ap…

For a quick overview of all relevant system information of a machine, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop offers the hostinfo package. It also helps system administrators to check for tainted Kernels (that are not supported) or any third-party packages installed on a machine.

In case of problems, a detailed system report may be created with either the supportconfig command line tool or the YaST Support module. Both will collect information about the system such as: current Kernel version, hardware, installed packages, partition setup and much more. The result is a TAR archive of files. After opening a Service Request (SR), you can upload the TAR archive to Global Technical Support. It will help to locate the issue you reported and to assist you in solving the problem.

Additionally, you can analyze the supportconfig output for known issues to help resolve problems faster. For this purpose, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop provides both an appliance and a command line tool for Supportconfig Analysis (SCA).

This section is intended for system administrators and experts who do not run an X server on their systems and depend on the text-based installation tool. It provides basic information about starting and operating YaST in text mode.

Being able to do file system snapshots providing the ability to do rollbacks on Linux is a feature that was often requested in the past. Snapper, in conjunction with the Btrfs file system or thin-provisioned LVM volumes now fills that gap.

Btrfs, a new copy-on-write file system for Linux, supports file system snapshots (a copy of the state of a subvolume at a certain point of time) of subvolumes (one or more separately mountable file systems within each physical partition). Snapshots are also supported on thin-provisioned LVM volumes formatted with XFS, Ext4 or Ext3. Snapper lets you create and manage these snapshots. It comes with a command line and a YaST interface. Starting with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 it is also possible to boot from Btrfs snapshots—see Section 4.3, “System Rollback by Booting from Snapshots” for more information.

Virtual Network Computing (VNC) enables you to control a remote computer via a graphical desktop (as opposed to a remote shell access). VNC is platform-independent and lets you access the remote machine from any operating system.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop supports two different kinds of VNC sessions: One-time sessions that “live” as long as the VNC connection from the client is kept up, and persistent sessions that “live” until they are explicitly terminated.

This chapter introduces GNOME configuration options which administrators can use to adjust system-wide settings, such as customizing menus, installing themes, configuring fonts, changing preferred applications, and locking down capabilities.

This chapter describes Zypper and RPM, two command line tools for managing software. For a definition of the terminology used in this context (for example, repository, patch, or update) refer to Section “Definition of Terms”, Chapter 6, Installing or Removing Software, Deployment Guide.

These days many people use computers with a graphical user interface (GUI) like GNOME. Although they offer lots of features, their use is limited when it comes to the execution of automated tasks. Shells are a good addition to GUIs and this chapter gives you an overview of some aspects of shells, in this case Bash.