Due to weird-ass PolicyKit rules, you may not be able to mount external drives – such as USB Hard drives, Pen drives, or other mass storage drives. while the drive gets recognised, on trying to mount you’ll end up with this error:

org.freedesktop.hal.storage.mount-removable no <– (action, result)

This is because of a PolicyKit rule, which prevents external media from being mounted. To get around this, you’ll have to edit the policy. So first open the terminal. Switch to root by typing

su root

Next, open the PolicyKit config file corresponding to Storage. This file is located at

/usr/share/PolicyKit/policy/org.freedesktop.hal.storage.policy

Open this file for editing, by typing
kate /usr/share/PolicyKit/policy/org.freedesktop.hal.storage.policy
Next, search for this section

<action id="org.freedesktop.hal.storage.mount-removable">
<description>Mount file systems from external drives.</description>
<message>System policy prevents mounting external media</message>
<defaults>
<allow_inactive>no</allow_inactive>
<allow_active>yes</allow_active>
</defaults>
</action>

And replace it with

<action id="org.freedesktop.hal.storage.mount-removable">
<description>Mount file systems from external drives.</description>
<message>System policy prevents mounting external media</message>
<defaults>
<allow_inactive>yes</allow_inactive>
<allow_active>yes</allow_active>
</defaults>
</action>

Save the file, and then restart the HAL subsystem by typing

rchal restart

From now on, your external drives should be mounted with full access.

One of the heavily improved aspects of openSUSE 11 is the package manager and the way packages and repositories are handled. Although YaST [Yet Another Setup Tool, openSUSE's system admin/configuration tool] is no longer the slow poke that it used to be, its still no match in terms of speed to Debian’s apt-get/Synaptic.
One of the more irritating part of YaST is that it auto-refreshes the repositories every time you launch the package management tool.ie, YaST downloads the info regarding all the packages that are available in the repo. Now if you’ve subscribed to multiple repos(most likely the case) or if you’re stuck on a slow connection, this can take the wind out of your sails, especially if you want to jsut install something from the DVD. So here’s a small step to disable auto-refresh of repos.
First head over to YaST, click on Software and then Software Repositories.

Next,Select the repo, and ensure that Automatically refresh is disabled. That’s it!

The repos will no longer refresh automatically.

Amarok is probably amongst the best audio player and jukebox software, bar none. This feature rich software is  also very flexible and extensible. By making use of third party scripts (and writing your own, if you know, say Python or Ruby) you can enrich your experience your Amarok experience. Here’s a list of some must have Amarok scripts

• weekalarm

weekalarm is one heck of a alarm script – you can set multiple alarms for the day, different times for different days, support for snooze and nap, make use of fading, and even use a separate playlist for your alarm tunes. Can’t imagine waking up without this one!

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