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This was a day (or at last a couple of hours) for finally updating my Linux notebook again.
I had screwed the packaging system or yast like 2 months ago, and I haven’t been able since to do any updates through yast.
This afternoon I did not really have the nerve for anything else then this – well, I could have gone to the gym, but I wanted to be a little productive at least.

I booted from a CD-ROM, installed (“upgraded”) over the network, and after like 2.5 hours it looked as if I could log into the new system straight away. But I couldn’t. After the log in there wasn’t really any progress, it kept showing me the wallpaper. I started a yast remotely over “ssh -X”, created a new user, logged into that user, but creating virtual desktops wasn’t really successful. My diagnosis was, that the openSUSE guys finally had screwed, what they long intended to screw: gnome on openSUSE. I gave KDE a chance. I installed KDM and the KDE Desktop packages, restarted xdm, logged into my account, created my 4*5 virtual desktops, and started starting up my work environment as usual. KDE feels a little strange, but then: I actually live within emacs and a couple of xterm-s. Why did I actually switch from KDE to gnome like 12 years ago during my London period? Because KDE only allowed me 4*2 virtual desktops or so. That restriction got lifted apparently, so no big deal, I now go with KDE – not as a disciple, just as a user.
This is what I call my KDE GNOME zigzag.

And now back to work, resp. answering a couple of e-mails.

The reason, why I was quite nervous during this afternoon, “dissolved”. I received rather good news. Maybe I just interprete them a little too positive. Maybe I am going to recover economically a little (or even more then that) in a short while. Now I have good reason for some optimism at least. I am a lot calmer now. Maybe I should not have written private e-mails during the last couple of days. They weren’t really the most sensitive ones for quite some time. But they were honest. And I had good reasons to write them the way I did. Yes, this paragraph does not belong under this title.

Update 2010-10-21 #1
The upgrade screwed my mailing system as well.
The messages sounded, as if the SMTP server “out there” did not want to relay my messages any longer. The support staff there told me, my software would not attempt the required authentication (any longer). Remember: all this had worked before the upgrade!
The mailing system set up makes me believe, they push you into setting up an LDAP server, and that they want the local SMTP server to talk to that LDAP server. Alright, easy dialogs, set up seems to complete successfully.
But then: still to not success WRT the mailing system.
A couple of years ago I had switched from using sendmail to postfix, as the set up had no longer worked easily with sendmail, but with postfix it did then. So now I give sendmail another try. And? Success!!!
sendmail rants something like this:

Authentication-Warning: MY_BOX.fritz.box: MY_USER set sender to USER@SURNAME.name using -f

That was really easy to solve. I had seen that message a couple of times before in my life. I always got it solved. Searched the web for this message, leaving out the private bits, keeping “using -f” together by quoting it in the enquiry. Found the resp. documentation on the sendmail.org website. Added MY_USER to /etc/mail/trusted-users, just as that manual page said. Great! My mailing system works again.
This is what I call my sendmail postfix zigzag.