Migrating to Linux pt.2: Annoyances

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It’s been a while since the first part of this series, but my plans have drastically changed. In two months I have changed my OS three times: I tried Ubuntu, Kubuntu and settled down to OpenSuse for the time being. Last night, I was trying to restrain myself from installing Fedora and then it became crystal clear that I am in no position to write such a series of posts. Following me, not only you will not migrate to Linux, you face the danger of not migrating to anything! So I decided there will be no part three, I will sum it up and move to writing something of more essence.

As soon as the installation of OpenSuse finished, I noticed a couple of things I didn’t like. I understand that Ubuntu and Suse are different, probably there’s a whole different philosophy behind each, but we are talking about my home PC, where only I have access. I am willing to sacrifice some security for comfort and if you chose to follow the solutions presented here, so should you.

First thing I noticed, was that /sbin was not in  the user path. So, in order to run ifconfig for example, I had to type:

sudo /sbin/ifconfig eth0

One could argue that this is supposed to be this way, because a user does not need to execute commands in sbin. While this might be true, I am not a user on my machine and I am perfectly capable of running whatever command I wish! I did not want to run everything as root (ie, using sudo su), so I found this simple solution:

In your home folder there’s a file named .profile which should be edited to include the following line: export PATH=$PATH:/sbin:

Now, every time you log in, the export path command will be executed and you will have the sbin commands at your disposal. Note, that this affects only your user, so it is relatively safe.

Next item on my list was some very weird behavior when mounting an internal HDD. I was required to give the administrator’s password every time I wanted to access an internal drive (in ext4 format). My external drives (formatted in NTFS) had no problem whatsoever and I was really really annoyed. A little bit of digging in the OpenSuse forums yielded a solution:

Open and edit the following file: /var/lib/polkit-1/localauthority/10-vendor.d/org.freedesktop.udisks.filesystem-mount-system-internal.pkla

Locate this line:  ResultActive=auth_admin_keep and change it to this: ResultActive=yes

That’s it.

I still have some way to go, before my installation is what I want it to be, there are things to tweak, things to fix and things to get used to. I am not entirely sure I will stick with OpenSuse for long, but KDE 4 is quite fun.