How to set the time with NTP as an option

I will show you how to manually update the time and manually use NTP to update the time.

1. Set the current time manually. Before you can use NTP, you need to have the time on your system correct to within a few minutes. If its more than an hour or so, NTP won't have confidence in the time it gets from the server and as a result, it won't update the time. As root:

date "MMDDHHmmYYYY"

where MM is the two digit month, DD is the two digit day, HH is the two digit hour on a 24-hour clock, mm is the two digit minute, and YYYY is the four digit year. For example, 6:30pm on July 30, 2009 would be:

date "073018302009"

2. As root, use YaST to setup the NTP daemon:

yast ntp-client

This YaST module is available under the "Network Services" section of the YaST2 GUI.

You'll need to set the NTP start to automatic before YaST will let add a time server. Add a public server (the tool has a pretty good list of servers you can use). Then, if you don't have a permanent Internet connection (including a laptop or a computer using the Network Manager applet), set NTP to only start manually.


3. From this point on, anytime you want to reset the time on your computer, use, as root:

ntpd -q

This will cause NTP to set the time and then quit.

Sound not working in Flash? Here's a possible fix.

Here's the symptom: your sound works fine, except in Flash. You've tried multiple browsers and Flash sound doesn't work in any of them.

The problem is that you're using PulseAudio as a sound engine and sometimes Flash doesn't work well with it.

To fix this, remove the libpulse0 package. As root:

yast --remove libpulse0

When I did this, it ended up removing MPlayer due to dependecies. I reinstalled MPlayer from the repositories which brought back one PulseAudio package, but sound still worked in Flash.

How to fix inconsistent font sizes

I had a problem after installing OpenSUSE 11.1 with KDE 3.5 where the fonts were normal in some programs and way too small in others. In Firefox, the fonts of webpages were normal, but the fonts of the controls (like the web address, File, Edit, View, etc) were too small. The font used for YaST was barely readable.

The fix is pretty easy. Fire up the KDE control center, either by choosing "Configure Desktop" from the Gecko menu or running kcontrol from the terminal. Choose "Appearance & Themes" from the left hand menu and then choose "Fonts". Set "Force fonts DPI" to either 96 DPI or 120 DPI. On my Eee PC, I chose 120 DPI and now all of my fonts are nice and large and readable.