Upgrading to openSUSE 12.2 with LXDE.

I upgraded my home computer to openSUSE 12.2. I use LXDE as my desktop environment. So far, I noticed two annoying bugs, but fortunately found workarounds for both of them.

1. It is not possible to logout from LXDE properly. Or, better to say, after the logout, the X server is not restarted. You have to switch to a text console and rerun lxdm manually as root. I was not able to find a simple fix, so I switched to lightdm which does not have the problem.

2. Firefox was showing a warning each time I started it: it was not able to connect to the DBus. After some googling and hacking, I discovered a rather simple solution. Just prepend the following line to your
~/.config/lxsession/LXDE/autostart:

    export `dbus-launch`

Farewell, my second hyper thread

I finally updated my desktop from openSUSE 11.2 to openSUSE 12.1. At first sight everything was more or less working, but when switching the machine off, I discovered it cannot be done without manually pushing the case button. All possible combinations of poweroff, shutdown and similar led just to the system halt, but the screen was showing the last messages and the fans were working on. Only the reset button could restart the machine.

The new init environment, systemd, was my first suspect. I started playing with it -- but only to discover only one of my CPUs is enabled (I have D865PERL motherboard with Pentium 4 with hyper-threading) . I identified the acpi=off option in the grub menu and removed the restriction... only to find that I can no longer even boot. The system froze during startup, each time at a slightly different time with a slightly different message (e.g. "BUG: unable to handle kernel initcall acpi_processor_init +0x0/0x100 [processor] returned with preemption imbalance", or "BUG: unable to handle paging request", or "scheduling with atomic", or just plain SIGSEGV or kernel panic).

I tried switching to different kernels (default, desktop, and vanilla), but the behaviour was the same. Even switching to systemv-init did not help.

I am currently running with hyper threading disabled at BIOS level. Therefore, I can boot with full acpi support and turn my machine off. However, I am running only one thread.

Update:
Googling for more information, I stumbled upon this thread:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1871247
Using their recommendation, namely adding processor.nocst=1 to boot options, solved the issue. Yay!

Another update:
I bought a new computer. It has an Intel Core i5-2400 chip and boots without problems :-)

Crackling Sound on HP Mini 5102 on Shutdown (openSUSE 12.1)

I upgraded my HP Mini from openSUSE 11.2 to 12.1. Everything went smoothly; I have discovered just one problem so far: when shutting the computer down, it emits a crackling sound for 1-2 seconds. I spent several hours googling for solutions and trying them.

The only working solution I have found so far is adding the following line to /etc/modprobe.d/50-sound.conf :

options snd-hda-intel single_cmd=1

The documentation says:

single_cmd  - Use single immediate commands to communicate
with codecs (for debugging only)

OK. I am debugging my sound card until I find a better solution.