Producing a Solid SLED10 Installation

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One of the greatest strengths of switching to a GNU/Linux based Operating System for your client machines is the fact that you can setup all of your client machines in the exact same way with the exact same software without having to worry about software licenses and the increased cost that entails.

NOTE: You can of course run proprietary software on your SLED 10 machines, but most software that is available for GNU/Linux is Free Software (software that you can freely study, modify and distribute).

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Standardizing on a Desktop Enviornment

The first thing you must do is standardize on a Desktop Enviornment, currently SLED10 offers two different environments: KDE or GNOME (as well as other Window Managers). Both offer all the programs and utilities you would need on a network client, and whichever you choose mostly depends upon personal preference and user experience. However, the rest of this guide will have sections that focus on the GNOME desktop (which is the default desktop enviornment on a new installation). If anyone wants to contribute sections for KDE your contribution would be highly appreciated.

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Adding Additional Software

When I deploy SLED10, I simply use the default choices presented during installation, then add to or subtract from any apps that I think the clients would need. Upon completion of the install I run the following command to ensure that I have all the libraries/applications I need from the install media. 

yast -i imlib2 libdc1394 libgsm libsidplay1 libid3tag arts id3lib \
OpenOffice_org-galleries openclipart freefont gstreamer010-plugins-good-extra \
libvisual-plugins

Then I remove any extra software that is part of the default installation that the client probably won't need. 

rpm -e ICAClient linphone linphone-applet gnomemeeting ptdownloader

Now I install all the applications that are not part of the installation media that I believe most clients would want these include (you can find these at my custom SLED10 rpms page:

  • Extended Multimedia Support (various RPMS)
  • Scribus (page layout)
  • Audacious (basic media player)
  • Audacity (for sound editing)
  • Glabels (basic label creation)
  • Wine (running Windows Applications)
  • Bluefish (web developers)

To install these simply put all of the RPMs in a single directory, then run the following to install: 

rpm -Uvh *

Learning how to build RPMs is something that you should seriously consider learning if you are going to maintain any type of network that runs an RPM based Linux Distribution. Not only does it provide an easy and quick way to deploy custom applications, the RPM database provides a wealth of information on what is installed on the workstation.

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Installing Additional Fonts

In addition to all the fonts that Novell provides on the installation media, most users will probably want to install additional fonts, whether they are free fonts or are fonts purchased from a foundary.

Some administrators seem to want to install everything as an RPM file, this in theory is a good idea, but is sometimes unnecessary. I tend to manually install any fonts the client wants, this is because every client has different fonts. In order to install additional fonts simply copy them to the appropriate directory then run a simple commmand. The following is a script that I have that installs fonts that I have collected: 

install -m 644 mscorefonts/* /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/truetype/

SuSEconfig --module fonts

Just remember if you have different types of fonts, be sure to copy them to the appropriate directory on your system.

If you find that only certain users need access to certain fonts, or you do not have the appropriate licensing to install all of the fonts on every workstation, you could have each user place all the fonts they need/have access to in the ".fonts" directory within their home directory.

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