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Dear folks, I am very pleased to announce:
The Sesha Inventory application is ready for Horde 5 and it is in good shape. Sesha is a simple inventory keeping application which originally developed by Bo Daley and Andrew Coleman on Horde 3. The product was never officially released but it went into production at several sites. Sesha release cycle can now start together with the Horde 5 Alpha release cycle.
Sesha inventory can be configured to hold any number of stock categories with any number and type of attributes.
Like the original version, Sesha for Horde 5 can provide its stock categories as ticket queues for the horde ticketing application whups.
There are a lot of plans and ideas for upcoming versions but for this time the focus was on finishing a releasable product.There are no surprises for existing users of Horde 3 based sesha. Most work happened invisibly under the hood:
The Horde Rdo library is the new work horse inside Sesha. Rdo means Rampage Data Objects and is a lightweight ORM layer by Horde founder Chuck Hagenbuch. It maps database tables to PHP Objects. This is similar to the ActiveRecord pattern. Each database row can be turned into one Rdo item. For Sesha and another – non-public – software project, some enhancements went into the Rdo library for Horde 5:
I think the Horde 5 release cycle will start with alpha1 releases sometime in May. I know we’re a little late but it’s worth the wait.
That said, I welcome any early testing or updates of the language files. Provided everything works as expected, Sesha will be shipped with Horde 5 for OpenSUSE 12.2
Writing cross platform code is easy nowadays. You use Qt, implement stuff, and it compiles and runs almost everywhere. I also enjoy that in my work on the ownCloud desktop client. But, as you know, there is the other part in the client called csync. Its the syncing engine underneath. And that does not build up on Qt, but is plain C. Adventure starts here.
This bug took me on an interesting (well…) journey into what cross platform really means.It is about a complex thing like filenames containing special characters, my favorite example is the directory “Übergröße”. Directories and files like this could not successfully be synced with the latest client.
Windows does not utf8 by default. As far as I understood it, it does a local encoding by default. If you use normal C functions to access the filesystem, something like readdir or so, you get the names in that encoding. But, because that caused problems in some point, there is another set of functions which often start with _w (for example _wreaddir) and that has an interface to deal with wide characters. This is the way to internationalization.
So what needs to be done is to use the wide character implementations everywhere where you deal with filenames (in my case). That, in turn, requires to use wchar_t instead of normal char. But that again requires a lot of #ifdef _WIN32, if its done the naive way at every place it needs to be done. I learned that typedef helps here and a meta type is defined called _TCHAR. And also for all the needed functions, meta functions are defined which are replaced by tricky defines depending on the platform. For example _treaddir becomes readdir on linux and _wreaddir on win32, while _TCHAR becomes wchar_t on Win and char on linux. The code is written using the meta types to not poison it too much with platform ifdefs.
But that is only the first step. Wide character is not utf8! And since utf8 should be used within the software all over, a conversion from wide character to utf8 and back is needed whenever the file system is accessed. Thankfully from csyncs nature, these places are quite nicely concentrated.
All that combines into a larger patch. And now the “Übergröße” folder can be synced correctly from Windows to Linux and back. Great.
What can we learn from that? Well, easy, and once again: If you have no Qt, you’re alone. Better don’t let that happen. If you have Qt, be happy and aware of what it does for you 
Allan has done a great job giving an overview of what we’ve been focusing on recently among the design team. This still leaves some room for me to give a peek on some of the details of what’s coming.
One of the decisions we made for GNOME 3 in terms of identity, was embracing Dave Crossland’s Cantarell and its open source pedigree and making the typeface our own. So far I have only been humbly shaping minor aspects of the typeface, but a long standing issue has been left long untouched, support for Cyrillic. Typeface design is certainly going outside my comfort zone. Luckily most of the glyphs can be dealt with by borrowing from their latin counterparts. The major part of the work involved (and will involve) some shape tweaks, metrics and hinting. Again, the bold weight poses bigger challenges at small sizes, which is our main focus.
Substituted cyrillic glyphs were all sorts of broken.
.
As you can see, there’s still some tweaking left to do on the shapes and hints before rolling out 0.0.9, but those not intimidated by jhbuild, please give it a go so you can help me identify issues that aren’t apprent to me. Another set Cantarell needs to support is Greek, as it’s stylistictically required to keep close to the Latin set.
Notification to speakers
The GUADEC 2012 programme committee took a bit more time than first anticipated to evaluate all talk submissions, but it's now all done: this morning, we finally sent the notification to speakers. Thanks to everyone who submitted a talk: it looks like we'll have a great GUADEC :-) Of course, we still need to create the schedule, but that should be trivial, right? (hmm...)
If you submitted a talk and didn't get a positive or negative answer by mail, please first check your spam folder: mail is from guadec-papers, and contains Your talk at GUADEC 2012
in the subject. If you don't find anything, feel free to ping me.
Help organize the lightning talks!
Next step is the call for lightning talks and for BoFs! I guess this will happen in the next few days. I don't think we have anyone in charge of this yet, so if that's something you'd like to help with, just drop us a quick mail on guadec-list and we'll happily give you a I'm fantastic: I'm helping organize GUADEC
badge ;-)
After few weeks of heavy testing, Weblate 1.0 has been released today.
Compared to 0.9 there are just minor changes and bug fixes. The most important thing is that Weblate should be now really ready to use :-).
Full list of changes for 1.0:
You can find more information about Weblate on it's website, the code is hosted on Github. If you are curious how it looks, you can try it out on demo server. You can login there with demo account using demo password or register your own user. Ready to run appliances can be found in SUSE Studio Gallery.
Weblate is also being used https://l10n.cihar.com/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, Gammu, Weblate itself and others.
If you are free software project which would like to use Weblate, I'm happy to help you with set up or even host Weblate for you (this will be decided case by case as my hosting space is limited).
Filed under: English Phpmyadmin Suse Weblate | 0 comments | Flattr this!
Work related i do a lot of things with MySQL/MariaDB. If you ever wanted to real-time monitor your system i guess you want to use mytop as well
S | Name | Summary | Type --+-------+-----------------------+-------- | mytop | A top Clone for MySQL | package
you can easily install it with
zypper in mytop
Now you can start it with
mytop -p <passord> -s 1
The option
Now you should see something like
MySQL on localhost (5.5.23-MariaDB-mariadb1~squeeze-log) up 24+03:17:13 [11:27:05]
Queries: 271.0 qps: 0 Slow: 0.0 Se/In/Up/De(%): 121540/00/00/00
qps now: 2 Slow qps: 0.0 Threads: 2 ( 1/ 17) 00/00/00/00
Key Efficiency: 98.8% Bps in/out: 0.0/ 0.8 Now in/out: 41.4/11.3k
Id User Host/IP DB Time Cmd Query or State
-- ---- ------- -- ---- --- --------------
47030 root localhost 0 Query show full processlist
47033 froxlor localhost:47453 froxlor 57 Sleep
Since 17 Issues the open-slx Newsteam publishes a Weekly News in the german language called "open-slx Wochenrückblick". The "Wochenrückblick" was the successor of the meanwhile discontinued german openSUSE Weekly News Project. With the beginning of the year 2012 a new Newsteam has formed that publishes regularly round about the Linuxworld. Interesting Stuff from the Distributions and also new topics like Plasma Active, Mer, Tizen and Android was collected. Just now the Linuxworld in its mobile form is very interesting.
Now we're pleased to announce a new open-slx publication called "open-slx Weekly News". We're planning to publish this weekly on the same day as the german version, starting with the next Issue.
If you can read and write in the english ölanguage, and would like to contribute into the new publication, just net us know and write to: newsteam@open-slx.de.
For both languages we're continually searching for Communitymembers who want to write little abstracts from other articles, or who collects interesting news or just proofread a new issue.
We're looking forward to see you soon :-)
Our Provo data center will take down a few server starting today at 6pm local time (MDT) which is 10th of May, 0:00 UTC. The downtime is expected to last for three hours.
The following openSUSE services might be effected:
Some applications seems unlucky to find their way in the hearts their intended users. Reading today thread "What does this error message mean?", I can see Apper sinking another few notches. Is it Apper's fault? The answer is not, but being visible component that appears when disharmony in software management shows up, it can fall as a victim. Use Google to find out about "opensuse apper" and
I finished my monthly column for Linux User last night - way late, as usual. It was about a number of projects openSUSE has going on to improve software installation. Porting Ubuntu Software Center to PackageKit, website integration in OBS, the improved online software store and last but not least the release of the snapper website. And I noted that all of these are cross-distribution: we're not just trying to improve openSUSE, we're trying to improve all Free Software. And it's not just us - I feel there is more and more collaboration in the Linux space (not that there aren't exceptions of course).
As conclusion, I wrote that
I personally believe that any project which fails to have this ambition will fail to really make a difference in the long run. Free Software is not just about 'abiding by the rules of the GPL' - it is about working with others.
non-collaborative efforts fail to make a difference for Software Freedom in the long run
openSUSE contains many independent software projects that have an "upstream" - for example the GNOME desktop in openSUSE is developed mainly by the upstream GNOME community, and the openSUSE developers add integration to make a distribution polished and easy to use. Integration consists of packaging, testing, bugfixing and some extra customization and development. Also the openSUSE developers talk with the GNOME developers about their needs and problems.
It's good practice to push everything upstream and then the upstream community might just accept the change, ask for changes, or even reject it.
Similarly, for SUSE Linux Enterprise openSUSE is an upstream development - and the openSUSE community with its release team can decide what to do with changes or requests coming from downstream (SUSE Linux Enterprise).
Also, SUSE as a company, has developers working in upstream projects like GNOME or the Linux kernel as well as in the upstream openSUSE and for sure on SUSE Linux Enterprise.
There are different ways to integrate: Some of that work will be done downstream first and then pushed upstream - and others will be done upstream with the intent to have it downstream later.
openSUSE 12.1 saw for example the integration of snapper - a snapshoting tool for BtrFS where development was driven by SUSE Linux Enterprise needs with the goal to have it in SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 Service Pack 2. It was stable, integrated without problems into openSUSE Factory and thus was added in time for openSUSE 12.1.
Note that SUSE Linux Enterprise as a distribution selects packages from openSUSE, adds some of its own, especially own branding packages, might have some different policies (e.g. how to partition or regarding security) and a different installation work flow. Before a release is done, the distribution need to run on all supported architectures - currently x86, x86-64, System z, Power, Itanium -, gets tested extensively which makes bugfixes necessary and gets certified by ISVs and IHVs and passes certifications like LSB or for IPv6 compliance. This testing leads to fixes that then go back to the upstreams - to the openSUSE distribution and the upstream open source projects.
A recent example: The testing for SLE 11 SP2 on Linux 3.0 resulted in a number of fixes. These went in the upstream kernel and thus became via upstream part of the Linux kernel that openSUSE uses. Many of these patches were also added directly to the openSUSE kernel.
So, SUSE Linux Enterprise is working in many ways similar with upstream as the openSUSE GNOME team with the upstream GNOME project: both take packages from upstream, add own branding, have refined polices from upstream, send patches etc.
What hasn't been done loudly in the past is raising voice - the SUSE Linux Enterprise developers and product managers raising their voice on what they need for their product and therefore would like to have from openSUSE and discuss how this can be done best. I expect to see more of this engagement of the openSUSE community by the SUSE …
Introduce my self
My name is Athanasios-Ilias Rousinopoulos. I am an openSUSE Ambassador and an active member of openSUSE Community. This year i participate in Google Summer of Code with openSUSE .[0]. My project is called “Ambassador/Event plugin for openSUSE Connect”.
Introduce my project
As an openSUSE Ambassador [1] i participate in conferences , make presentations and promote openSUSE to the people. openSUSE Connect is the social network of openSUSE Project (based on Elgg ). In my opinion openSUSE Connect it is more than a useful tool. Ambassadors , members of openSUSE community do use it in order to communicate , form groups , follow other people, create events ,create polls etc. Although it is a useful tool , it does suffer from some deficiencies. As an ambassador i found using the wiki in order to manage the community events not a good idea at all. As mentioned before openSUSE Connect is based on Elgg. Elgg is an open source social networking engine that provides a robust framework on which to build all kinds of social environments. [2]. Elgg provides well-organized documentation [3] for developers. Furthermore Bug tracker is also available [4] . Besides Elgg has its own API Reference [5] which developers can use it. Finally he goal of my project is to create a plugin (developed in Elgg) which allows the users planning of events in openSUSE Connect , instead of using the wiki pages so as to create an event. Using this plugin by the community can be more beneficial
Progress
Event #1 (23/04-07/05) [Community Bonding period begins]
What did i do
Until now i did made my “Contact first steps” [6] which means i talked with my mentor , informed him about my plan. Furthermore i started using Trello as a project management tool. Focusing more on the project i read openSUSE connect’s main features and Installed it as well [7] , [8] , [9]. openSUSE Connect allows create and develop new widgets , plugins and new themes by using the Elgg platform. During installing openSUSE Connect i did face some problems , so i edited the documentation [10] in order to make the installation process easier and more successful. After the installation process i read Elgg’s Wiki Main page [11] , how Elgg’s Engine works , and made my firsts steps with Elgg Plugin Development. [12] ,[13], [14]. Elgg’s offers some introduction tutorials so as to begin developing your plugin. In addition Elgg offers about 1500 plugins which you can download them and install them as well. Finally i installed PHP plugin for Eclipse and started using it.
What i am going to do
This week i will focus more on Elgg’s Plugin Development and try to implement the first tutorials [15] . Furthermore i am going to focus on Elgg Plugin Development and read upon the current used event plugin.
Problems & Solutions
After the installation process i wasn’t able to access Elgg due to an Error message. Also while configuring “System settings” i had to add a folder which is not …
Speaking of Packman mirrors... we're in a pretty sorry state regarding that so if you're aware of sites that do mirror Packman but never told us (I'm aware of the one at yandex.ru, have to get it on that mirror list), or if you can get in touch with some mirror sites near you or even on your continent to ask them to mirror Packman, please do.
They can then simply contact us on our mailing-list (that's packman followed by an "at" sign followed by "links2linux" and a dot and "de" -- grrr to spammers) and we'll get back to them with the details for rsync.
The Packman mirror at packman.inode.at is down. We don't know yet what happened nor whether it will be back up soon (or not).
In the mean time, please use another mirror in the mean time.
Here's a quick copy'n'paste one-liner you can put in a shell (konsole, gnome-terminal, xterm, urxvt, ...) as root to switch:
perl -p -i.old -e \
's,^(baseurl=).*(/suse/.+)$,${1}http://ftp.halifax.rwth-aachen.de/packman${2}, if /^baseurl=.*packman\.inode\.at.*/' \
/etc/zypp/repos.d/*packman*.repo
16.37 km/h average over 10 kilometers. Yes, my fjord horse just likes to run. And no, I can't compute, which meant missing the deadline by 15 seconds, and not doing too well in 20km race.
It has been more than a year. Around March 2011 we shipped SUSE Manager 1.2 and enhanced the management story for our customers. Since then we have been very busy! Time to look back and see what we have done. This first post will describe the features we have been working on. In a future post I will address more details about our development process and relationship with Spacewalk.
SUSE shines not only in the number of certified enterprise applications but also in the appliances area with tools like SUSE Studio. We allow our customers to build custom SUSE-based distributions with a few clicks.
When we set to build SUSE Manager as a product we decided to eat our own dog-food. After looking at the installation procedures of Spacewalk we found a natural way to make setting up SUSE Manager simple by using our existing technologies.
Not all the cool stuff happens in SUSE Manager itself. The Studio team added a feature that allows you to create appliances in SUSE Studio that are SUSE Manager-ready. This means once the image boots, it will automatically register itself to your SUSE Manager server and be ready to be managed.
James did a very nice demo at BrainShare creating an image in SUSE Studio, deploying it to a private OpenStack cloud directly from the Studio user interface, and having the machine automatically register itself to SUSE Manager after booting. Watch it here.
Regulatory and corporate auditing requirements require our customers to record what actions (and by whom) were done to the managed systems. We introduced an audit logging feature that allows you to record actions to a remote log, database, xml files, etc.
Audit Log Keeper, the buffer that receives the actions from the application is not specific to SUSE Manager and any application can be integrated using XML-RPC. Keeper is open-source and available on github.
SUSE Manager can deploy images to a physical host so that they run as virtual machines. If you are a SUSE customer, you will use Studio to create images. Creating in Studio, download the image, upload to SUSE Manager, deploy…? No way.
We added a feature to deploy the images from Studio directly in the SUSE Manager user interface. The code is already being reviewed upstream.
For our customers running SLE-10 we back-ported the Code11 ZYpp stack (including a very fast zypper using the SAT solver). The Code11 stack includes a plugin architecture that we use to hook with the spacewalk agent in order to get the server-side repositories and keeps the managed server software inventory up-to-date.
Joe has …
Open Build Service is a generic system to build and distribute packages from sources in an automatic, consistent and reproducible way. OBS 2.3 brings the functionality to maintain a released software product in an efficient and transparent way. This includes
This functionality is already used for doing the maintenance updates for the openSUSE distributions. The features can be used all together or in parts for own products.
In addition OBS 2.3 provides
It is recommended to read the Release Notes before updating an instance. OBS packages can be found in the openSUSE Tools project or as an appliance which can be used on hardware or in VM.
About Open Build Service
The Open Build Service (OBS) is an open and complete distribution development platform. It provides the infrastructure to easily create, release and maintain software for openSUSE and other Linux distributions on different hardware architectures. It is developed under the umbrella of the openSUSE project, but is licensed under GPL and used by other open source projects like MeeGo or Tizen. It is also used by universities, ISVs and companies like Intel, Dell, and SGI.
The Open Build Service(OBS) version 2.3.0 brings new features esp. in the Maintenance and Release Management area and is the latest stable maintained version. It is recommended to update to this version to get improved security protections. It is also the first version which comes with official support offerings from B1-Systems backed by SUSE.
OBS 2.3 brings the functionality to maintain a released software product in an efficient and transparent way. This includes
This functionality is already used for doing the maintenance updates for the openSUSE distributions. The features can be used all together or in parts for own products.
In addition OBS 2.3 provides
It is recommended to read the Release Notes before updating an instance. OBS packages can be found in the openSUSE Tools project or as an appliance which can be used on hardware or in VM.
About Open Build Service
The Open Build Service (OBS) is an open and complete distribution development platform. It provides the infrastructure to easily create, release and maintain software for openSUSE and other Linux distributions on different hardware architectures. It is developed under the umbrella of the openSUSE project, but is licensed under GPL and used by other open source projects like
MeeGo or Tizen. It is also used by universities, ISVs and companies like Intel, Dell, SGI.
I have been accepted into this year’s Google Summer of Code program under the openSUSE project. It is a great opportunity to contribute to one of the best communities I have come across. My project is ‘Beautiful 1-Click Install’, and its intention is to make the 1-Click install feature of openSUSE really ’1-Click’. Over the course of the program, I would implement the user interface in Qt, which will interact with the user in reading YMP files, and then perform the actual installation using libzypp. I would try and separate the user interface and the backend as much as possible, so that applications in GTK+ can also be implemented. My mentor Cornelius Schumacher, and Co-mentor Matt Barringer have been extremely helpful in guiding me through the details regarding the project.
So far, I have made a simple interface for the main screen (without styling), and have been trying out sample codes to read and parse YMP files, and add repositories. I will be using this space to post updates regarding the status of the project at regular intervals. I hope to do this project justice, and learn a lot in the process
After Marco had added initial support for WAC apps to Plasma, at open-slx, we spent a few cycles on taking this to a next level. WAC apps are apps written in HTML5 which are shipped as packaged websites with everything needed included in the package. On top of the normal webbrowser APIs, WAC apps can access a set of API calls that allow access to various aspects of the underlying system, device and network information, contacts, hardware such as camera, accelerometer, location sensors, etc.).
Most of the hard work is already done by the excellent webkit. The parts needed in Plasma and KDE are support for loading the package format, and allowing access to certain system APIs. Marco has written an AppletScript Plugin, which basically wraps the WAC format into a Plasmoid so it can be loaded into any Plasma Shell (Plasma Desktop, Netbook, Active, MediaCenter, etc).
Implementing the WAC-specified APIs turns out to be quite a bit of work. I have started on the DeviceStatus API, and on my laptop, HTML5/WAC apps are now able to access system information such as software versions and battery status. The complete WAC API is quite big, so right now we only support a small subset. The basics are done, and with growing support in this API, we’re able to run more and more apps on Plasma devices.
In the screencast, you see how WAC apps are running inside Plasma Desktop. One interesting thing I’m explaining is the permission model, so I’d like to go a bit more into details about this. WAC apps have the concept of so-called features. The app can check which features are available on a given platform, and then provide or remove features. Plasma’s equivalent to this concept are extensions, which maps a bit, but not too differently. I’ve added a translation mechanism between those two, so what the app is now asking for is access to specific Plasma extensions, very much like our JavaScript Plasmoids.
Everything is running inside a sandbox (in our case a webkit container inside Plasma), so it is quite easy to restrict everything beyond the browser’s DOM API. When working on the permission model, I reflectd about how the user actually handles these permissions. Many people seem to complain that even if the app announces which APIs it wants to access, the user still does not really have a choice beyond all-or-nothing, so most people end up blindly OK’ing whatever the app wants. The code for WAC in Plasma is set up in a way that we can allow access only to certain bits of the API, disallow access or — and that’s the catch — fake access. Fake access means that we tell the app that we support certain APIs, but we will only deliver empty or bogus data, so the app still works, but our address book is not in jeopardy of being sent to some blackhat in a far away country.
… happens every day.
Some days ago i switched to the latest factory snapshot of openSUSE 12.2. Right after the first boot after installation my screen turns black and i cant access any console. Strange, i played around with the x11failsafe which worked, and thought the problem is maybe part of the mode selections suse does to get a beautiful screen. so i did
bootoption: nomodest
and it worked. I made an bug report and changed the default boot-loader settings to always do this nomodeset. But more strange…
On monday my boss allowed me to use SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) for a 60day trial first and the option to buy a license if it does the job. And i had just the same problem (on a total different hardware regarding ATINvidia, chipset, processor) nomodeset fixed it again. But it shouldn’t be made that way.
Update:
As i was told some minuits ago it is also possible to do switch NO_KMS_IN_INITRD to “yes” and a new initrd is generated, which should solve the problem also. I will test it later at home.