Swapping CapsLock to Esc key in openSUSE 15.+

Being a vim user I have adopted my keyboard to swap the caps key from the esc key. In openSUSE the file /etc/vconsole.conf needs to be edited in order to make the changes permanent.

1.  First thing we need to do is create a new directory somewhere in /usr

  mkdir -p /usr/local/share/kbd/keymaps/ 

Keeping the Bash shell history

There are a lot howto's and instructions about keeping the shell's history but my favorite is my own fork of dhist.sh which is sdb. Now you're probably asking as to why would anyone wants to keep the history of all the commands you have written during the interactive shell? Well for starters you can check which commands did you executed during the last week on which directory or the exit status of that command. or you want to check for the commands that has a word  foo  somewhere in there or you remember a very cool command that has a lot of combinations of pipes, subshell, redirections and so on, that you have had executed but forgot the exact syntax.

How to Install packages from my hard drive.

Most if not all packages (files ending in *.rpm) are on the online repositories. In some cases you have the rpm from your pc or you have downloaded it from some site/server etc.  Question is how would one install it?

How to revert packages from the previous repo

 The most common usecase doing a vendor change of packages

You did a dup to a specific repository but you want to revert back the packages to the previous repository.

Curl and download error of packages

Most of the time i am behind a NAT router either at work or at home and those error are pretty common on my openSUSE system.

The old school trick i always do is ping those hosts.

 ping download.opensuse.org 

 ping downloadcontent.opensuse.org 

now edit the file /etc/hosts  and add

 RESULT-OF-IP-FROM-PING  download.opensuse.org 

 RESULT-OF-IP-FROM-PING  downloadcontent.opensuse.org 

eg. something like this.

 195.135.221.134  download.opensuse.org 
 195.135.221.157  downloadcontent.opensuse.org  

That trick always saves me from choosing a local mirror manually. It works for me and I'm not saying it will work for everyone, just try it and see.

Boot-Installed-System

Some tips howto boot your not so bootable system using the DVD.

Disable autorefresh

Disabling auto refresh of your repositories has some benefits. If you are on a limited internet connection or you just do not want to refresh every time you invoke zypper or yast sw_single then this post might be of interest for you.