Another chunk of fixes from the essex-hack-suse  branch

Most of this changes are not only relavant to SUSE systems and should improve things for other OSes as well. (Tested on Ubuntu 12.04)

After this most of our changes to the crowbar barclamp have landed in pebbles. There are just a few more patches remaining that I will file in a separate pull request later. (Because they may need some more discussion)