Copyright © 2010 Novell, Inc.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included as the file fdl.txt.
The release notes are under constant development. Download the newest version as part of the Internet test or refer to http://www.suse.com/relnotes/i386/openSUSE/11.3/RELEASE-NOTES.en.html.
These release notes cover the following areas:
Installation: Read this if you want to install the system from scratch.
General: Information that everybody should read.
System Upgrade: Issues related to the process if you run a system upgrade from the previous release to this openSUSE version.
Technical: This section contains a number of technical changes and enhancements for the experienced user.
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Installation Quick Start guides you step-by-step through the installation process.
In Start-Up, find information about installation and basic system configuration.
Reference covers deployment, administration, and system configuration in detail and explains how to set up various network services.
KDE and GNOME Quick Start give a short introduction to the desktops and some key applications running on it.
The KDE and GNOME User Guide guide you through using and configuring the desktops and help you perform key tasks.
The Application Guide introduces you to the key desktop applications such as browsers. e-mail clients, office applications and collaboration tools as well as graphics and multimedia applications.
The Security Guide introduces basic concepts of system security, covering both local and network security aspects.
LXDE provides a lightweight desktop environment for old and obsolete computers with limited hardware resources.
Since quite some time, smbfs is no longer part of the kernel. The cifs component has replaced it. To avoid confusion with the name of the service, we finally renamed it accordingly.
During the upgrade of a system with an installed samba-client package, the state of the service will be saved, /etc/samba/smbfstab migrated to /etc/samba/cifstab, and the state of the service restored, if required.
With openSUSE 11.3 we are switching to KMS (Kernel Mode Setting) for Intel, ATI and NVIDIA graphics, which now is our default. If you encounter problems with the KMS driver support (intel, radeon, nouveau), disable KMS by adding nomodeset to the kernel boot command line. To set this permanently, add it to the kernel command line in /boot/grub/menu.lst. This option makes sure the appropriate kernel module (intel, radeon, nouveau) is loaded with modeset=0 in initrd, i.e. KMS is disabled.
In the rare cases when loading the DRM module from initrd is a general problem and unrelated to KMS, it is even possible to disable loading of the DRM module in initrd completely. For this set the NO_KMS_IN_INITRD sysconfig variable to yes via YAST, which then recreates initrd afterwards. Reboot your machine.
On Intel without KMS the Xserver falls back to the fbdev driver (the intel driver only supports KMS). On ATI for current GPUs it falls back to radeonhd. On NVIDIA without KMS the nv driver is used (the nouveau driver only supports KMS).
The mount.cifs program that is being used to mount Samba/CIFS shares will not be allowed to be run as a setuid root program. mount.cifs has been the subject of several security bugs that have arisen due to some of the users using it as a setuid root program. For e.g., tools like smb4k on the distribution require mount.cifs setuid root. So there is a chance that users of such tools set the setuid bit. This program has not been properly audited for security and the Samba team strongly recommends that it not be installed as a setuid root program at this time.
To make that very clear, this release forcibly disables the ability for mount.cifs to run as a setuid root program. People are welcome to trivially patch this out, by setting CIFS_DISABLE_SETUID_CHECK to 1, but they do so at their own peril.
A security audit and redesign of this program is in progress by the Samba Team.