Here's a few tips and tricks that some people might want to use to fine tune their openSUSE 12.3 machines

'Traditional' Multi-monitor behaviour for GNOME 3 workspaces

GNOME 3 has a bit of a weird way of handling multiple monitors with its multiple workspaces feature. When switching workspaces, it's only the workspace on the 'primary' monitor which changes, the applications running on the second monitor (or 3rd or 4th..) remains where they are, as if they're on the own single, static, workspace.

Some people like this behaviour - I use it so I can have one screen with key tools I need all the time (Network monitors, etc) where my other screen is the one where I'm constantly shifting and changing depending on what I'm doing

But if you'd like to change to a 'traditional' arrangement where changing workspaces changes the applications on all of your screens, all you need to do is run the following command as yourself (I'd recommend pressing ALT+F2 and just copy/pasting this in there)

gsettings set org.gnome.shell.overrides workspaces-only-on-primary false

and if you decide you want to change it back to the standard behaviour

gsettings reset org.gnome.shell.overrides workspaces-only-on-primary

Making your fonts even prettier in GNOME 3

First things first - I strongly recommend that if you have them installed, remove the Microsoft TTF fonts with the following command as root

zypper rm fetchmsttfonts

As I explain on my Google+ post, 'back in the day' Microsoft's fonts were pretty much considered the only acceptable fonts and the Free/Open alternatives installed on openSUSE by default were considered ugly.

That might have been true back then, but in this day and age the Free/Open fonts installed are much smoother and I find myself looking at the MS fonts and recoiling in horror much as I used to at Linux fonts.

To really get your fonts looking perfect, I'd recommend playing around with the 'Hinting' and 'Antialiasing' options in the Fonts section of 'gnome-tweak-tool' (launch by pressing the Winkey/Super and searching for Tweak)

I find that having 'Hinting' set to 'Slight' and 'Antialiasing' set to 'Rgba' looks best on my machines.

Installing the Groupwise Client on openSUSE 12.3

Quite a few of us openSUSE users work for companies that run Novell's Groupwise. Their Linux client hasn't seen any development in recent years, but with the absence of an open source alternative, many of us needed to find a way to get 'old faithful' working.

Thanks to Michael Brookhuis from SUSE, we have a solution. Run the following command as root to make sure you have all the necessary packages installed

zypper in openmotif-libs-32bit libstdc++33-32bit libpangox-1_0-0-32bit

And then run the following to make a symlink so Groupwise can find the openmotif libs you just installed

 ln -s /usr/lib/libXm.so.4 /usr/lib/libXm.so.3

Or you could just be like me and use the Groupwise Web Interface, which has finally grown on me :)

Hope this helps some people out there