openSUSE 11.3 Peculiarities?

I upgraded my Dell Latitude E6400 Notebook to openSUSE 11.3 and while in total the system runs just fine (even UMTS finally seems to work out-of-the-box), I’ve encountered two issues:

  1. Under the GNOME environment, I can’t modify the number of virtual desktops. Right-clicking the virtual desktop chooser applet shows only the option to change the display behavior, not the number of desktops itself.
    UPDATE: This behavior appears when using 3D desktop effects, ie. when using Compiz as window manager. You can change the number of workspaces (it seems you don’t call it “virtual desktops” any more…) in the “Desktop effects” applet (also known as “Simple CompizConfig Settings Manager”) on the “Desktop” page.
  2. The notebook at least one time seemed to be stuck at a speed of 800 MHz. Calling cpufreq-set with –max to change the maximum frequency allowed simply doesn’t have any effect at all, regardless of the chosen scheduler type.
    UPDATE: It turns out that this behavior is caused by the BIOS when no power adapter is attached. Apparently the BIOS limits the frequency to 800 MHz when running on battery, which I actually find quite surprising.
Published
Categorized as Hardware

Leave a comment