openSuse 11.1 vs Ubuntu 9.04

Recently, there were a couple of new Linux distribution releases that have been causing quite a bit of buzz around my workplace. Many of us have become fans of Ubuntu, but have used Suse for quite a while, so we like to stay informed of where each of the distributions is currently at. I installed Ubuntu 9.04 on my laptop, and had the opportunity to install openSuse 11.1 on an identical laptop for a co-worker. This gives me a moment to briefly compare a few of the things I found in the very short time that I had with the Suse box.
The first thing that I didn't like with Suse is that the wireless card, which in this case was a broadcom card, didn't auto-install. I had to search the internet, and finally found some pages that referred to running the following scripts:

/usr/sbin/install_bcm43xx_firmware
/etc/init.d/network restart

After these scripts, the wireless worked as expected. I found it kind of sad that I needed to connect to the internet and do some searching when the scripts were already with the installation. I wish it would detect that I had that type of card, and offer to run them for me. I liked Ubuntu much better, as it seemed to handle this in a fashion that would be easier for a new user to get running.

Also, openSuse seemed to be trying too hard in the looks department. It had a lot of transparency and floating menus. Kind of weird. Just didn't have a really appealing look to me.

More LibJPEG Fun

As I was compiling the jpeg library, I kept getting errors about ./libtool not being found. It was an easy fix, all I had to do was to change ./libtool to libtool in the Makefile, but I didn't want to do that every time, especially because I was trying to automate and script the build. I found an article that showed passing variables to make, and that seemed to solve my problem.

make LIBTOOL=libtool

That way, I could put it into my build script and everything would be happy, still using
the latest tarball untouched off the internet.

Apache2, PHP, and LibJPEG

I'm configuring new server software for our internal webserver at work. I went through the build several times, and it kept complaining about not finding libjpeg.so. I finally figured out that you need to pass the configure --enable-shared or --enable-static in order to make the libraries build. Just thought I'd pass along this information, and hopefully save somebody some headache.

Read Only File and Directory Permissions

Today I needed to lock down some data so that it could only be accessed by a particular user and his group. We wanted to make sure that this archive was not modified, so I needed to lock down the permissions. For a long time, I don't think I fully understood that directory permissions are much different than file permissions. To get around this, I did my chmod in 2 steps. First, I did a
find -type d -exec chmod 550 {} \;
This needs to be 550 because the execute bit on a directory is actually an "access" bit. If you don't set it, you can't access the directory.
Then I did:
find -type f -exec chmod 440 {} \;
This gets the regular files and sets them to read only with no world access. Fairly basic, but I thought somebody might find it useful if they're struggling.