The init script for jenkins on openSUSE (rcjenkins) doesn't set the HOME environment variable. This breaks e.g. the cvs plugin, which tries to load the CVS password from /root/.cvspass. There are probably a lot of other places where the lack of HOME also breaks things.

Proposed fix:
Change line 160 of rcjenkins from

startproc -n $JENKINS_NICE -s -l /var/log/jenkins.rc -u "$JENKINS_USER" -p "$JENKINS_PID_FILE" $JAVA_CMD $PARAMS

to

HOME=$JENKINS_HOME startproc -n $JENKINS_NICE -s -l /var/log/jenkins.rc -u "$JENKINS_USER" -p "$JENKINS_PID_FILE" $JAVA_CMD $PARAMS