Part I Advanced administration #

The ncurses-based pseudo-graphical YaST interface is designed primarily to help system administrators to manage systems without an X server. The interface offers several advantages compared to the conventional GUI. You can navigate the ncurses interface using the keyboard, and there are keyboard sho…

This chapter describes Zypper and RPM, two command line tools for managing software. For a definition of the terminology used in this context (for example, repository, patch, or update) refer to Book “Start-Up”, Chapter 9 “Installing or removing software”, Section 9.1 “Definition of terms”.

Snapper allows creating and managing file system snapshots. File system snapshots allow keeping a copy of the state of a file system at a certain point of time. The standard setup of Snapper is designed to allow rolling back system changes. However, you can also use it to create on-disk backups of user data. As the basis for this functionality, Snapper uses the Btrfs file system or thinly-provisioned LVM volumes with an XFS or Ext4 file system.

Virtual Network Computing (VNC) enables you to access a remote computer via a graphical desktop, and run remote graphical applications. VNC is platform-independent and accesses the remote machine from any operating system. This chapter describes how to connect to a VNC server with the desktop clients vncviewer and Remmina, and how to operate a VNC server.

openSUSE Leap supports two different kinds of VNC sessions: One-time sessions that “live” as long as the VNC connection from the client is kept up, and persistent sessions that “live” until they are explicitly terminated.

A VNC server can offer both kinds of sessions simultaneously on different ports, but an open session cannot be converted from one type to the other.

Sophisticated system configurations require specific disk setups. You can perform all common partitioning tasks during the installation.

openSUSE Leap supports the parallel installation of multiple kernel versions. When installing a second kernel, a boot entry and an initrd are automatically created, so no further manual configuration is needed. When rebooting the machine, the newly added kernel is available as an additional boot parameter.

Using this functionality, you can safely test kernel updates while being able to always fall back to the proven former kernel. To do this, do not use the update tools (such as the YaST Online Update or the updater applet), but instead follow the process described in this chapter.

openSUSE Leap includes the X.org server, Wayland and the GNOME desktop. This chapter describes the configuration of the graphical user interface for all users.