Planet openSUSE

openSUSE News: Strategy sucks

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 19:48:05 +0000

strategy statement from team

Hi all,

Over the last weeks there has been a lot of disussion, both internally and externally, about the strategies which have been proposed. However, we also missed a lot of voices from our community. We take responsibility for leaving many of you behind by focusing on a very corporate-management solution to the initial question which prompted this process. A question we think still is relevant: The identity of openSUSE both as a Community and as a Project.

Initially our goal was to answer: ”Who is openSUSE and what does it (want to) do?” prompted by the discussion about the default desktop at the openSUSE conference last year. In five years the openSUSE project has evolved from a fully company-driven project to a communty project where everybody can contribute. This has brought uncertainty and a lack of direction. The current lack of a clear ‘story behind it all’ is hampering our ability to establish a common identity and sense of security. From a marketing point of view, it becomes an uphill battle…

Throughout the process, we consulted some people and the discussion about a strategy started with the goal to solve this issue. However, many feel that ‘strategy’ and the approach to find one is not fitting our community. We lost most of you in the second paragraph of the strategy pages on the wiki – too much talk.

We would like to go back to the start and focus on describing who we are, as a community, instead of finding new ways to go. The input you all have given us by mail, forums, IRC and in person was valuable and we will use that. So that is what we will do:

Highlight the story behind openSUSE

Identify what users we target and illustrate what we offer to them,

Connect it with the issues that matter most to our community

And then we will document this story, image, direction, strategy – or however your call it .

From you all – we will continue to seek your input on it once we post it. By mail, forum, IRC or in person – again. Without your help it won’t be much, so please think about that!

Greetings,

Your strategy team

Jos Poortvliet: Banshee

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 16:14:35 +0000

Since a couple of days I'm using the Banshee music player. Last sunday I installed openSUSE with GNOME on my desktop system to play around with it. Banshee surely stuck - I installed it on my laptop with Plasma desktop as well. It's a very nice player with only one weird thing: it really really likes Opeth. Often I set it to play some electronic music at random, then it suddenly starts moves to metal - Opeth usually. Not that I greatly dislike that, I just have no idea why it does it ;-)

Suusie GNOME being nice

Otherwise, openSUSE is treating me reasonably well. The NVIDIA drivers on my desktop are less of a hassle than Intel was on my laptop - they do make the screen fuzzy sometimes, and Compiz really works horrible so I had to disable desktop effects in GNOME. KWin works almost fine somehow... Just a tad slow. GNOME Shell does desktop effects best: completely sharp screen, good performance. It does seem to restart itself sometimes but only the screen goes to showing only the wallpaper for a few seconds.

(I know newer NVIDIA/Xorg/Kernel should solve these issues, btw, I'll just install newer versions once I feel they're stable enough)

Tracker is great - incredibly fast and very little effect on system resources as far as I could tell. Sorry for Nepomuk but when it comes to actually finding files - no dice, it just crashes a lot. Both fill my .xsession-errors up like crazy, however. Vuntz has asked for the tracker errors already :D

In general, GNOME is fast and lean. Only Banshee sometimes manages to sometimes use 161% cpu on my desktop - rather impressive. Luckily I have a nice quadcore :D

Evo less so

Evolution was quite painful, I stopped using it. With the treeview (flat lists don't work with more than 10 mails/day) it is almost impossible to see the individual messages - the 'tree' itself is completely hidden, only showing small triangles leaving you guessing what thread a message belongs to. I added this to the GNOME Pet Peeves Project page, hope someone can fix it... Of course, maybe I just couldn't find the configuration option, lemme know if that's the case and I'll say sorry :D

good

bad

The keyboard shortcuts don't work for me either - I am used to using the left and right arrow keys to go through the list of messages and the up and down to scroll through the message itself. And keys like A, R and L to reply to all, sender or a list. Not figured out how to configure that and for efficient use of my time, this is crucial. Same with Liferea, btw.

I found out that Xchat didn't do what I needed from IRC (like putting names behind the nicks in the list and hiding part/join messages), neither did Empathy, but Pidgin is much more convenient. And to be honest, it looks better than any messaging app I've used before. I don't use chat (other than IRC) very often so I haven't installed in on my laptop yet, but I might.

Cheese rocks, period. I can however only say that from previous experience - not current, as neither my desktop webcam nor my laptop webcam work :(

Integration

Thanks to the Oxygen-molecule theme GTK applications fit in KDE very well. The only exception is the system tray - they don't understand that it is transparent so they show ugly squares behind the icons. But the work on sharing a notification spec makes sure they use the normal notifications in Plasma, nice touch! Within GNOME the KDE apps adjust their theme automatically with the exception for icons - not sure if that's intended or a bug.

Bansee in Plasma Desktop (I must admit I had to adjust colors a bit to make it fit really well - somehow the Oxygen Molecule theme has its colors slightly-off)

GNOME desktops

GNOME offers two desktops - the 'old' one and GNOME Shell. What I like about the default desktop is how easy it is to add applets to the panel - I always want a load applet there to see what is going on. Otherwise it works ok-ish but it ain't very special - unlike GNOME Shell.

GNOME Shell is quite unfinished as it is undergoing heavy development. It seems to ignore about 4 out of 5 clicks of my mouse making it a bit cumbersome to use. Yet I already prefer it over the normal desktop - if only just because I love seeing something new and exciting. It provides a very intuitive way of working with one or more desktops and windows. Most of that intuitivity is in small details - like the ripple effect you see when you bump your mousecursor to the top-right corner of the screen. They still have to improve the menu's but app search already works awesome. While it doesn't work here I know you can just drag an app to one of your virtual destkops to start it there - awesome! So despite the current issues I would definately say GNOME Shell the right direction for GNOME development.

This turned out a bit too long

I initially wanted to write about Banshee alone, cuz I like it - but now this is about pretty much all of my GNOME experience in a few days :D

I might blog more about it, but first I'm working on some OBS and SUSE Studio things - they're both pretty awesome. Oh and did you know you can win 10K with a good SUSE Studio appliance?

openSUSE News: openSUSE Connect Beta

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 12:30:41 +0000

As a result of the openSUSE Boosters’ ‘HackMeck‘ two weeks ago at FrOSCoN we are proud to present you with a new beta of openSUSE Connect.

Connect is supposed to become the central user database for the openSUSE project. Sounds bland, don”t it? But you know the Boosters, everything we do comes with a grain of spice and Connect is no different. The spice here are a lot of nifty social network features like user profiles, friending, groups, an event calendar and possibly more. Thats possible because on top of the user database we use a Free Software social network framework called Elgg. Elgg will help us to go a step further in one of the most important areas of the openSUSE project: Connecting our community. We do a very good job connecting code at the moment but there is no central place for openSUSE users to mingle, form relationships and meet collaborators.

Try it!

Did we whet your appetite? Want to try it? No problem, just head over to our beta instance http://connect.opensuse.org and login as user geeko with the password opensuse to try it out. Make some friends, create a group or run a poll. This instance is regularly deployed with the newest code from our git repository so you will always get the latest and greatest. But please don’t forget that this is a beta If you encounter any problems, guess what, make a bugreport in our bugzilla!

Help out!

Or how about you get your hands dirty? So far our experience with Elgg is wonderful. It’s a tidy, extensible and well designed piece of software. The community is very helpful and there is a lot (if not to say a butt-load) of functionality available. And if something is not there already we have found that we can easily add it. You could too you know? Elgg runs on a combination of Apache, MySQL and the PHP scripting language and as this is the most popular web server environment in the world we hope we can attract more people to help to fit Elgg to openSUSE’s needs. And on top of that it’s really easy to hack on it! The changes we did so far at the HackMeck and the last couple of weeks are self-contained in plugins that extend the basic functionality. The powerful data model and view system of Elgg make it possible to change it to openSUSE’s needs without ever touching the core functions. So if you are interested in helping, get to know Elgg and then get in contact with the openSUSE Boosters.

We hope you will enjoy this new openSUSE tool. And remember: Have a lot of fun…

OMG!SUSE! team: Bringing the tribes together to help each other

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 12:00:00 +0000

Last July, following GUADEC there was some amount of controversy going on in the greater Linux community after Canonical, the company driving a large amount of Ubuntu development, was criticized for number of contributions it has made to the GNOME project. The resulting number of backlash amongst open source backlash-mongers led Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth to write a great post on tribalism.

The underlying point that I think Mark makes is very important: underneath our red hats, Meerkat and Lizard costumes, we all strive to build a stellar open-source operating system. Deep down, we're all penguins!

Mark's comments motivated one notable open-source contributor, Miguel de Icaza, the co-founder of both the GNOME and Mono projects, to help cut down on the tribalism. Shortly after the lobbing of insults calmed down, Miguel sent out a call to create a non-tribal version of StackOverflow for Unix and Linux users:

As we know, tribalism makes you stupid. So let us commit to the Linux and Unix Q&A site powered by StackOverflow that will help answer questions for Unix and Linux users of all distributions and blends.

It shouldn't be surprising but a huge number of folks registered their interest in the "StackExchange" site which is now open for (beta) business!

If you're unfamiliar with the whole StackOverflow/StackExchange concept, the gist of it is that the site is a community-specific question and answer site with community-driven feedback for questions and answers. In the ideal world, this means the most interesting/pressing questions are heavily upvoted, and then the best answers to those questions have a number of votes as well.

To visit the site you just need to bounce on over to unix.stackexchange.com

Image courtesy of mypenguintravels.com

Nelson Marques: Equinox GTK2 Engine – Updated, 1.30

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 19:53:16 +0000

I have updated the following packages to version 1.30:

gtk-equinox-engine (Fedora 13)
gtk2-engine-equinox (openSUSE 11.3)

Updated to 1.30.1 and added i686 arch. Finally sorted mock problem out after some struggle!

Jeffrey Stedfast: Microsoft Double Rainbow!

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 19:10:04 +0000

Microsoft has just created a new commercial for its Windows Live Photo Gallery software that plays on the "Double Rainbow!" stoner guy. I have to give them props for trying to be hip and cool, but I'm too busy laughing my butt off right now. You've got to see this:

What I want to know is what kind of camera is that guy using? Never seen anything like it. A friend suggested it was this antique digital camera, but I'm not convinced. If you have any idea what that camera is, let me know in the comments - it is gonna bug me for days until I know what that was!

OMG!SUSE! team: Google Video Chat for openSUSE

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 18:08:01 +0000

Thanks to a tip from our friend @decriptor, it looks like the Google Video Chat browser plugin is now available for openSUSE!.

If you visit the download page you can download an RPM for a 32-bit or a 64-bit openSUSE installation. The plugin should allow you to use video or voice chat to talk to all your GMail contacts straight from your web browser. Since I don't use GMail, I can't verify how well the plugin works, but I have successfully held a video chat with a friend using it via my n900.

Pretty spiffy!

openSUSE News: openSUSE Announce First 11.4 Development Milestone With Improved Package Management Performance, New XOrg, KDE and GNOME

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 13:08:52 +0000

Metalink multichannel download, so package candy melts your screen, not your internet connection.

openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 1 is available today, Thursday, September 2 for developers, testers and community members to test and participate in the development of openSUSE 11.4. M1 starts off openSUSE 11.4 development at a cracking pace with performance improvements in the package management network layer and version updates to major components.

This milestone contains libzypp version 8.1, which has a new backend for http and ftp package downloads. MultiCurl replaces the old MediaAria backend, and brings support for zsync transfers and better Metalink download support. These will improve both repository refresh and package install and update performance. Metalink allows the multi-channel download of packages by downloading the individual blocks of a package in parallel from multiple servers. ZSync reduces the amount of data to download by only fetching the changed parts of a file instead of the whole file. This speeds up repository refreshes, since due to the way the repository data is structured, it is easy to locate the parts of the metadata that changed since the last update. The new Curl-based zypp backend also gives libzypp and therefore zypper and YaST better support for network proxies, by using the same proxy configuration as the rest of YaST instead of its own, and adds support for HTTP BASIC password-protected repositories. And as an added bonus, MultiCurl should eliminate slow and hanging package installations that occurred due to bugs in the old MediaAria backend.

Zsync efficiently downloads only the changed metadata. Sweet!

Other major components that have received updates from upstream projects for Milestone 1 include XOrg 1.9, KDE 4.5 and GNOME 2.32.0 Beta 1. Automated testing and brave openSUSE Factory testers have been validating early builds to make sure that Milestone 1 is suitable for others to test, so please download Milestone 1 and report bugs – the earlier a bug is reported in the development cycle, the more likely it is that it will be fixed on release day, March 10, 2011.

The next milestone is scheduled for September 30.

OMG!SUSE! team: Inkscape updates abound!

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 12:00:00 +0000

This is a cross-post from our sister site: OMG! Ubuntu!

Scalable Vector Graphic fans of the world rejoice – Open Source’s premier vector drawing application Inkscape has been bumped up to 0.48, adding lots of fixes and features for artists to get excited about in the process.

New & improved

The text tool in particular has received lots of attention and now has support for:

"Line Spacing:" Distance between baselines of adjacent lines
"Letter Spacing:" Spacing between letters
"Word Spacing:" Spacing between words
"Horizontal kerning"
"Vertical shift"
"Character rotation"

The new multi-mode spray tool allows users to quickly [create] effects that previously would take much longer to achieve.

Other changes include a handful of new extensions, improved exporting & select UI changes. More information can be found in the release notes.

Install Inkscape for openSUSE 11.3

OMG!SUSE! team: Sprichst du open source? Check out the openSUSE Conference

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 10:00:00 +0000

This coming October in the beautiful German city of Nuremberg, the second international openSUSE conference will be held.

Before get out your jump to conclusions mat and assume this is just for openSUSE folks, it should be mentioned that the conference isn't just for lizard-lovers but also for all members of the open source community that can attend.

The "call for papers" has finished meaning the conference organizers are hard at work preparing the program for the event, which plans to bring folks together from various areas of the open source universe such as the Mozilla and Debian projects. The conference should be interesting for hackers and users alike with Bird-Of-a-Feather sessions, open discussions and of course, plenty of hacking on open source!

Unfortunately the conference details aren't all hammered out, but if you're on that side of the pond on October 20th through the 23rd, you should definitely mark it on your calendar. In the meantime, I suggest following @openSUSEConf to keep up with the conference preparation.

SUSE Studio: More secure SUSE Gallery

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 07:39:14 +0000

This week we introduced an important feature to SUSE Gallery — the appliance security summary. It is displayed for every published appliance and is designed to help you better understand what the appliance contains. This is useful for security reasons as you can easily see if the appliance contains any sources where undesirable code might slip in. It also provides a quick overview of the appliance’s contents.

The security summary will tell you if the appliance contains:

unofficial software sources (repositories)
custom software packages
overlay files (especially executable ones)
custom scripts that run after boot

Of course, the presence of any of these does not mean that the appliance is unsafe — many regular and completely safe appliances will have some yellow warning icons displayed in the summary. But it gives you some hints and more control. If you ever encounter any unsafe appliance, simply report it. We will take it down immediately and flag the appliance creator’s account accordingly.

Fred Blaise: Tomcat: Too many open files… but why?

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 05:56:25 +0000

Each morning, my tomcat server is out, returning 500 errors because of this:


SEVERE: Socket accept failed
org.apache.tomcat.jni.Error: Too many open files
        at org.apache.tomcat.jni.Socket.accept(Native Method)
        at org.apache.tomcat.util.net.AprEndpoint$Acceptor.run(AprEndpoint.java:1156)
        at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:619)

So, I initially had a ulimit -n of 1024. No problem, changed my shell and limits.conf to have 4096 and restarted the process. The next day, same error. So increased it to 32768. Same results.

So I ran a couple cron job to see what was happening during the night:


# Monitor openfiles
* * * * *       /usr/sbin/lsof -n -u root|egrep 'java|alfresco|tomc' | wc -l >> /tmp/lsof_mon.out
* * * * *       cat /proc/sys/fs/file-nr >> /tmp/file-nr.out

Apparently, the results are OK, despite the continuing errors. The “lsof” cron job never get any higer than 1320, and the monitor on file-nr didn’t get above “2550 0 767274″.

Yes, I made sure the process was launched with the new parameter. Even after restarting the system, ulimit -n returns the correct amount of file descriptors. Even running “lsof” by itself doesn’t return more than 3000 lines.

For info, server is running CentOS 2.6.18-194.3.1.el5 #1 SMP x86_64. libtcnative is at version 1.20. Process running as root.

Any idea anyone? Thanks.

Matthew Ehle: openSUSE 11.3 Impressions

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 20:29:48 +0000

While openSUSE is my preferred distribution for server installations, my desktop use of it has been somewhat more sporadic. However, while reformatting my laptop from Mint to a Windows 7-Linux dual boot, I decided to give 11.3 a try. Here is a short post about my experience and impressions:

Network Installation

I have tried this in the past and have generally gotten poor results. However, I really like the concept of network installations, so I thought I would see if any improvements were made with 11.3. Alas, my experience was similar to how it was with previous releases. The first attempt failed entirely, so I tried it again. The second network installation finished, but I could only boot in failsafe mode after it was done. It seems that some packages get corrupted or don’t install at all. With this kind of success rate, it still just isn’t robust enough for real world use. Onto a different installation method…

LiveUSB

Long story short, this was a fantastic experience. I downloaded the LiveCD image, installed the imagewriter utility, and it all worked as advertised. I was really impressed with how simple of a process this actually turned out to be. As an added bonus, the installation went about 1 1/2 times faster than it would have with a LiveCD.

KDE Desktop

While I am personally more of a Gnome user, I am really starting to enjoy what the latest in KDE has to offer. In addition, the openSUSE developers have done a great job of polishing the distribution’s presentation. The GRUB menu, splash screen, login window, and desktop look unified and generally very good. I made a couple of desktop tweaks to fit my preferences, and the customizing experience was much better than with previous KDE versions. The only problem is that the power manager does not recognize changes in my AC adapter status. This is a known and filed bug, so I hope this gets fixed sometime in the near future.

Overall Impression

Even in the short couple of years that I have been using openSUSE, I have seen it come a long way. Network installation still has issues, it took a little while to find information on installing the Broadcom wireless driver, and the power manager could use a little work. Other than those details, I would have to say that this release is really solid and provides a really clean user interface. Keep up the good work, openSUSE!

Nelson Marques: The Plan: Portuguese speaking community census!

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 19:18:55 +0000

After a long talk with Carlos Ribeiro, Ambassador from Brazil and a devoted member of the openSUSE Community we realized that it is important to get some more data about our Portuguese speaking user base. We will accomplish this by running a questionnaire open to all the Portuguese speaking community that uses or knowns openSUSE Linux.

Making things simple and objective here’s some stuff we’re looking into:

User Privacy – This is by far one of the most important things where there can be no flaws! To accomplish this following an ethical conduct that complies with the philosophy of the openSUSE community, we adopted the ESOMAR Code of Conduct for this.
Questionnaire – We will create a sample questionnaire, more generic in English, which we will make available to the openSUSE Community and from which we will translate to Portuguese and make all the cultural adaptations required, also some minor changes to make more objective to our goals.
Software – The software we are going to use is LimeSurvey, which I believe that complies with the community philosophy. The data collected will be processed later by me through IBM’s SPSS (which is the only software I know for doing this, PSPP from GNU is not mature enough. I’m not a programmer, can’t help on that one! Hey maybe it’s a hint?!).
Documentation – I would like also to provide some documentation on topics I believe that might be relevant for the openSUSE Community or any other FOSS Project which needs to do some research. I’m currently looking into doing some ‘classroom’s’ through the IRC in English opened to anyone who wants to attend them. Later I will provide more information on the Planet and through the openSUSE Marketing Mailing List. I’m also considering placing some documentation about how to process the data, how to perform the ‘sampling’ process and so on… This will be most likely available on openSUSE wiki.
Report – The final result of this extensive project is to provide the openSUSE Community and the openSUSE Marketing Team with some data we believe that can become useful in the future. This will be accomplished through a report that will be available on the openSUSE wiki and advertised through the traditional means. It is our belief that knowing where we stand today might help us building a better future and also provide a way to evaluate in the future the efforts applied on the field by our Ambassadors which are working hard to preach ‘the word’.

Some concerns I have:

Databases – After the survey/questionnaire is completed… what to do with the databases? I’m not sure on how the community would like this to be. So please leave some feedback. I would like to comply with all the values of the openSUSE Community.
Notoriety – I would like to enroll the community on this process in order to reach the highest number possible of people to answer this survey, which will be only targeting Portuguese speakers which use/used openSUSE or any other Linux Distribution. Even non-portuguese speakers can help spreading the word!
Future – I would like that this project would be able to deploy to be re-used in the future by the openSUSE Community for any purpose you might need, no matter what project you are using it to. Documentation plays an important role here… I would like to ask also feedback from the community, specially from translation teams to find the best way to create such documentation to help any possible interests in having it translated to other languages. I also hope that through this, I can make the community sensible to the fact that ‘market research’ can be important for your projects and can give us the means to understand a wider community, and hopefully to better answer their needs as a Community and as a Linux distribution which has a high reputation in the FOSS realms.

As we move with this project, we will provide more information through the openSUSE Planet and through the openSUSE Marketing Mailling list.

nmarques/ketheriel

Nelson Marques: openSUSE:Tools for Fedora 13

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 17:51:32 +0000

I’ve been looking around openSUSE:Tools for Fedora 13 and found the naming could be more Fedora friendly. I’ve made some small patches to the .spec files in order to achieve that and made them available. In addition I’ve also recompiled the stuff using the new spec files and uploaded them for x86_64 only to my fedorapeople.org user space (and made out of it a YUM repository for Fedora 13 users).

So far for a Fedora user there is a problem with this packages… xdg-utils has to be brute force installed requiring dangerous wizardry from the user side… it conflicts heavily with the version from Fedora 13 which has a huge amount of dependencies that shouldn’t be messed with. I’m wondering if anyone in the community could help me in overcoming this problem.

About i686 packages… I will compile them later on, once I have sorted out the xdg-utils package conflicts.

James Ogley: O, won’t you please authenticate me

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 10:30:41 +0000

Yesterday, Twitter disabled the basic username/password authentication for client applications. This is a move toward greater security but it did mean that anyone using Gwibber will suddenly have found that their Twitter stream stopped updating.

A mere matter of hours later and an updated version of Gwibber has been pushed out that supports the new “OAuth” method.

People using openSUSE have two options to get hold of a fixed version. The first is to follow the relevant links on the openSUSE wiki entry for Gwibber and grab the version from GNOME:Apps. I just sent an update request for this package so again, in a matter of hours at most, you should get an update.

If you can’t wait that long, you can get the latest version from home:Riggwelter:GNOME. This package comes with a health warning though. Although at this moment it is the same as the version in GNOME:Apps, it tends to track the very latest code ahead of a released version. That can occasionally cause problems and instability.

I’m going to try to get a patch done for the packages that were in 11.3 for those who don’t want to add any repositories but that could take some time – and may not happen at all.

Just to be clear, I recommend using the packages in GNOME:Apps.

SUSE Studio: Featured appliance - MiniSUSE

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 07:19:43 +0000

As promised, we have a new featured appliance this week and it belongs to Horváth Gergely J.. He will be receiving his Amazon gift card real soon!

His winning MiniSUSE appliance is based on openSUSE 11.3 (the current latest version) and is intended as a Live CD/DVD or USB thumbdrive. It is a small but useful Linux system that you can use as a rescue disk, to format drives, etc. A "Swiss army knife for your Linux needs" as Horváth puts it.

If you need a small and quick openSUSE system to try out, be sure to check this one out!

Nelson Marques: Guerrilla Marketing: something fun…

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:56:05 +0000

Nelson lives in a dream world… or some far away planet… Pluto? — who knows?! I have compiled a small list of actions made in Europe and Brasil of Guerrilla Marketing activities. I believe this is a nice way of demonstrating cool stuff that can be done to promote stuff… I wonder many times if such actions couldn’t be used to promote free open source software? Maybe it becomes inspiration to someone else!

Disclaimer: I know it’s youtube and h.264, but that’s where I found them

[1] – Optimus, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxpt5OgPUbM | Origin: Portugal

[2] – Edding, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xw90jkaZ7Y | Origin: Germany

[3] – Tropa, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWnWxeTwEPU | Origin: Brazil

[4] – PUMA, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4Y04cNYw30 | Origin: Sweden

[5] – (Give visibility to “books”) – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATcqzhe19q0 | Origin: Spain

I hope everyone likes them and maybe you got ideas on what to do to promote your project or distro!

Guerrilla Marketing – IKEA ‘bus stop’, New York

OMG!SUSE! team: What openSUSE can build for you?

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 12:00:00 +0000

Ever heard of OBS, also known as the openSUSE Build Service? You may not recognize the acronym, but if you're using openSUSE you're certainly using software built by OBS. The build service provides an invaluable tool for developers to overcome some of the challenges caused by the slight fragmentation between the various Linux distributions.

The OBS provides developers of all your favorite apps with an easy to use tool for creating and distributing packages for openSUSE, Ubuntu and Fedora on a number of architectures. The idea of it all being that a developer can upload their code to the OBS and it will produce packages such as .rpm or .deb packages which are ready for openSUSE/Fedora and Ubuntu/Debian respectively.

Let's say for example, the devs for an app like Skrooge decide not to use the OBS. To support the various Linux distributions they have a couple options:

To not support other distributions
To enlist package maintainers on each distro
To build the packages themselves for each distro

This approach seems to be more and more common with applications developed targeting Ubuntu, such as Pino, which has taken route #2. If the developers choose to take advantage of the OBS however, they can provide support to multiple distributions all from one location. Users would be directed to the same webpage and find fresh packages without the developer having to know how each distribution maintains their packages. Linux users can search through packages built by the OBS with at software.opensuse.org and install All Linux users would be able to search OBS (http://software.opensuse.org/) in order to see if they have the newest version of Skrooge.

OBS does not magically turn source files into packages. OBS cannot simply be fed a .tar.gz -- developers must still prepare their software in the .rpm and/or .deb format, but afterwards, they can sit back and watch as OBS handles the rest. It will create a repository to host the file, and at no cost to the developer.

OBS also offers its services to applications that are built elsewhere. VLC -- the popular video editor available for Linux, Mac, and Windows users -- is built by machines operated by the VideoLAN group, but is distributed to many distributions using OBS. Developers do not have to use all that OBS has to offer in order to benefit from it.

If you want to see what packages are being hosted and which are the most popular, Novell provides a dashboard from which you can observe these statistics.

What does Novell get out of this? Well, the hope is that developers who use the OBS to distribute their products will be inclined to also produce .rpms for openSUSE, thus providing openSUSE users with a greater pool of software at their fingertips. And if openSUSE has more software to select from, so, too, does Novell's SUSE Enterprise Linux. Novell will foot the bill to host all of this software for developers in hopes of creating a better landscape for their users.

By now, you may be thinking, "This is all well and good, but what does OBS do for me?" Plain and simply, it means that if you are an openSUSE user, you can go to software.opensuse.org as your one-stop shop for checking whether a package is available in any of Novell's hosted repositories. It also provides you with one-click install access to all of these packages. openSUSE users have just had their lives made easier, and hopefully more distributions will benefit with time.

SUSE Studio: Boxy but good enough

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 11:44:09 +0000

We're happy to announce initial Internet Explorer support for SUSE Studio!

It's taken countless hours, lots of creative debugging, and many mysterious bug hunts — but we've finally done it.

(This was one of the more "helpful" error messages!)

There are a few know issues at this time, however:

Testdrive does not fully work — the sidebar buttons are not enabled and the tabs do not not show up. It seems to be related to a Flash issue.
Sidebar sticking doesn't seem to occur, so you may need to scroll up to see warnings and errors.
Some graphics glitches are visible. This is related to PNG alpha transparency and opacity. It sometimes affects fonts as well. There are a few workarounds already, and we may have to add more.

Also, it's worth noting that we do not plan to make SUSE Studio look the same in Internet Explorer. For now, this means that you will not see rounded corners, subtle shadows, and a few animations. Also, Internet Explorer 8 is noticeably slower than the competition (but it's still acceptably quick). Internet Explorer 9 (in beta now) should address these issues.

If you use SUSE Studio on Windows, please take the site for a spin in Internet Explorer 8 and let us know how it goes! If you do run into any bugs, please inform us either in a comment here or by clicking the feedback link to let us know what happened. Thanks!

SUSE Studio: SUSE Linux Enterpise 11 SP1

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 11:36:01 +0000

SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 (SLE11) Service Pack 1 (SP1) was recently released and we are happy to announce that it is now also available on SUSE Studio.

Existing SLE11 appliances can be easily upgraded to SP1 with just one click.

Check out the release notes to see what's new in Service Pack 1.

SUSE Studio: Build openSUSE 11.3 appliances now

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 11:35:53 +0000

It took us a bit longer than expected, but now we are happy to announce, that SUSE Studio now also supports building appliances based on openSUSE 11.3. So you can take advantage of the latest and greatest features, which come with this release of openSUSE. We will continue to support building existing appliances on older openSUSE versions, but new openSUSE based appliances will all be 11.3.

We will also add migration of 11.2 based appliances to 11.3, so that you can easily move existing appliances to the latest openSUSE version. If all goes well, we'll release this next week. Until then you can just continue with your 11.2 based appliances and migrate them later, or if you prefer to have 11.3 immediately start with a new one.

Have a lot of fun with openSUSE 11.3 in SUSE Studio.

SUSE Studio: Win $10,000 building appliances with SUSE Studio

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 11:35:12 +0000

In case you haven't heard about The Disters Contest yet, check it out now. We are looking for the best appliances in two categories, community and commercial. The winners will get $10,000 each. So don't wait, go to SUSE Studio, build your appliance, publish it on SUSE Gallery, and submit it to the contest. While there is still some time before the contest closes, don't wait with publishing it. You still have time to refine it, and you will get valuable feedback. The proven "release early, release often" philosophy applies here as well.

If you are looking for inspiration, you can browse SUSE Gallery for some examples. There are live CDs as demos of applications like Marble in a box, special purpose distributions like openSUSE Medical, templates providing a software stack as base for other appliances like the LAMP server, or special-purpose applications, which run well as appliance, like the Subscription Management Tool.

While there are various ways to include software in Studio, the best is to use the openSUSE Build Service to package it, and then import it in SUSE Studio. In many cases there already will be a package, and if not, it's certainly a worthwhile effort to create one. See for example the Build Service Tutorial for some more information how to do this. For details about how to do specific things in SUSE Studio, which might not be obvious in the UI, there is for example a series of SUSE Studio Howtos in the openSUSE Wiki, and of course you can discuss how to do things with other users and developers in the forum or on IRC.

I'm really looking forward to see your appliances on SUSE Gallery. Just to give some more ideas, it would for example to be great to have a Drupal , Gitorious, or status.net appliance, which can be used out of the box. Or you could create a template for use by other people, e.g. a Rails server, complete with deployment and monitoring tools. Or you create an optimized environment for development of KDE, GNOME, Mono, or some other applications, including development packages, documentation, and programming tools, maybe even a pre-configured IDE. There are certainly tons of other ideas. Feel free to add them in the comments and tell us and others what you would like to see on SUSE Gallery.

SUSE Studio: New featured appliance of the week!

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 11:34:31 +0000

Congratulations to Patrick Shoaf for landing a spot in our "Featured appliance" section in SUSE Gallery! His winning VMware Open View appliance is a bootable Linux Thin Client that autoloads and runs VMware View 4.5 Open Client. It is available as a live disk image (for USB/Flash and hard drives) as well as live CD/DVD.

Patrick gets an Amazon gift card from us as a small token of appreciation for his efforts. We will be selecting a new featured appliance in SUSE Gallery each week, so stay tuned as yours might be next!

Michael Meeks: 2010-08-31: Tuesday.

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 10:05:44 +0000

Up at 6am, hiked to Preson Park, train to Gatwick, waited for delayed flight. Extremely impressed with the battery life on this new Duo (with SSD). Caught up with the news variously.
Read Simon's excellent position oncontributor agreements, with relation to the (potentially problematic) Project Harmony.
Highly amused by an article in The Economist on 'the cost of weapons'. Learned an important new German term: Eierlegende Wollmilchsau or "egg-producing wool-milk-sow" (apparently this is the A400M specification) - could there really be engineering and business problems with a-priori over-specification ? Another priceless quote:
In Iraq and Afghanistan numbers matter more than firepower. The same applies to warships fighting pirates off the coast of Somalia; a ship cannot be in two places at the same time. As Stalin reputedly said, "Quantity has a quality all of its own".
Read a nice article on gcc with some helpful reminiscence on the egcs/gcc fork and its resolution.

Michael Meeks: 2010-08-30: Monday.

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 21:00:00 +0000

Up early, breakfast, out shopping for misc. omitted party items, did some work, lunch. Out shopping again for vegetarian sausages - which live in a carefully camouflagued section of Tescos (in a freezer).
Back for Miriam's party, barbeque mayhem, playing the guitar for various musical games (log-pot tragically failed in the portable CD player), trying to force feed the assorted children & parents, and so on. Good to see Sue, Adam & James too.
Bid farewell to them all; Cheryl kindly dropped me to the station, set off - using the new Android device, which (now I'm not in the middle of no-where) seems to have some great Edge/3G connectivity, even on the train.
Reviewed, merged, and pushed the next set of awesome bootchart2 work from Riccardo. Wondered how I can get an ESRCH (No such process) response from a pread at a valid address, on a memory map of a (live) process' /proc/<pid>/mem particularly when the process is still alive afterwards (with the same pid); most odd.

Atri Bhattacharya: What’s cooking in openSUSE’s GNOME for 11.4

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 19:54:31 +0000

The openSUSE GNOME team has launched itself full throttle into preparations for openSUSE 11.4, which will be released with GNOME 2.32 as one of the desktops. Along the way, we decided on our focus points for the upcoming release:-

New packages: More applications for a richer desktop experience
While there are a large number of excellent GNOME/Gtk-based apps in openSUSE already, this looked like a great time to start getting more apps catering to a variety of requirements into the GNOME:Apps and GNOME:Factory build service projects. Since deciding on this, several new packages have already been worked on and are now available in the corresponding repositories. The status of new applications is tracked here. Many of these applications will, subject to review, reach Factory and a few might even become part of the default openSUSE GNOME desktop.
You are welcome to request the packaging of applications you have found particularly useful or impressive, and if you are in earnest, why not join us at #opensuse-gnome and start packaging them for yourself? Requests for new applications may be made through comments here, on the mailing-list or at irc, but the best way to do this would be to open a feature request and tag it as “gnome-wishlist-packages”.

The GNOME Pet Peeves Project: Dealing with minor irritants on the desktop
I bet there have been times when you have come across a little but pesky irritant or a usability issue that left you feeling “this could have been done so much better…” We decided to track down such issues and try to have them fixed before the next release. Thus the GNOME Pet Peeves Project, where we note and research such issues, their workarounds and solutions. As you can see, we have located a few of these already, and started working on them.
We invite you to report your pet peeve with GNOME through comments here or otherwise. Of course, the good Samaritan is more than welcome to help with the process of solving such problems as well by providing fixes, pointing to existing upstream patches or even nudging upstream developers at bugzilla or irc, to ensure a more polished GNOME desktop on openSUSE.

There is much to celebrate about, in GNOME-land come March 2011… and we hope to join the party, as well, with an (unofficial) GNOME3 take on openSUSE 11.4 to be released on the GNOME3 release day!

That and more… indeed there is so much to look forward to, with the launch of 11.4, from the GNOME desktop user’s perspective. With your feedback and other contribution, you can help shape that perspective while also having a lot of fun.

Federico Mena-Quintero: Mon 2010/Aug/30

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 19:36:00 +0000

Rooting the file chooser

Christian Hammond has been working on a very cool branch of GtkFileChooser to let you define roots for the file dialog. Normally, this is what my file chooser looks like — it lets me browse anything on my file system:

In the following screenshot, the file chooser has been rooted to show only my $HOME. Note that no volumes or shortcuts that are outsideof my $HOME show up in the shortcuts pane.

The API makes it easy.
```
GSList *roots;

roots = g_slist_append (NULL, "file:///home/federico");
gtk_file_chooser_set_root_uris (chooser, roots);
```
And in the following example, the filechooser has been constrained to my $HOME and to /tmp:

This is basically the infrastructure we need to support proper lockdown in the file chooser. At some point it may be interesting for sysadmins to say, "don't let users wander in the filesystem, but constrain them to their home directory, the corporate shares and their USB stick".

This is bug 609886 - multiroot support for GtkFileChooser.

The patches are not quite ready yet (in particular, passing a GSList of strings is not very nice for language bindings, I think), but it should be easy to fix for production. Any volunteers?

Bruno Friedmann: Come on ! Join the Bacula developer conference

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 18:37:28 +0000

I love to see all of you, devs, packagers or just curious on the Bacula developer conference held in Yverdon-Les-Bains Switzerland on September 26, 27 & 28.

Direct information : bacula.org conf page

You don’t know what bacula is ? Well I would summarize it as an one of the essential component in enterprise IT. It not only backup your data, it give you them back when needed ! Don’t smile, many backup solution failed (even proprietary solutions) in this last crucial point.

Here’s the program extracted from our mailing-list.

Are you interested to:

Meet the Bacula developers in person
Learn how we maintain the source code
Hear some presentations about Bacula from the developers
Want to learn about and help define the Bacula roadmap.
Want to give feedback or ideas directly to the developers.
Learn more about Bacula Systems
Any of a load of other reasons

If so, we wondering if there is enough interest to have a Bacula developer’s
conference in Yverdon, Switzerland (about 1.5 hour by train from Geneva
Airport) on the 27th and 28th of September.

Maps : here

If you arrive on Sunday the 26th there would even be a chance to meet most of the Bacula Systems founders in person.

This conference would be mainly interesting for developers and advanced Bacula
users, but it is open and free for everyone. If you are or have been a
contributor to the Bacula project, the project may be able to sponsor part of
your trip.

Sunday 26 Sept.
  Bacula Systems Open House.  Visit the Bacula Systems offices and meet the
  Bacula developers and the Bacula Systems founders.  Totally informal and
  optional.

Day 1: Monday 27 September 2010
  Presentations by Bacula developers and anyone else who would like to give a
  formal presentation (30 to 45 minutes)

  Tentative program:
  - Swisscom sharing our experiences with Bacula (SAP backup, ...)
  - DassIT new Bacula conf file GUI editor
  - Bacula in Brazil
  - Linux Bare Metal Recovery
  - Bacula development process
  - Bacula Roadmap
  - Bweb
  - How Bacula Systems supports the project -- Rob Morrison

Day 2: Tuesday 28 September 2010
  Birds of a feather meetings:
  Informal direct conversations with the developers, planning,
    organizing, ...
  - Using git
  - How patches are integrated
  - Regression testing
    - CDash regression dashboard
  - Release cycle
  - Roadmap discussion and your input
    Brain storming new backup strategies such as deduplication
  - How Bacula plugins work
  - Rpms and how to improve them
    ...

Naturally, we will furnish plenty of beer and pizza and other goodies.

Best regards,
Kern Sibbald

Danny Kukawka: How to calibrate your TabletPC

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 16:30:41 +0000

Since a while e.g. the X11 driver for Wacom tablets should work out of the box, no calibration needed. I didn't test other tablet/touchscreen drivers in the last time, but I assume also some other should work out of the box. But sometimes you still need to calibrate your device.

But how do you calibrate e.g. your wacom tablet on a openSUSE 11.3 or Factory, since there is no wacomcpl anymore in the package, which was used in the past? And how about a evdev based device? Simply use xinput_calibrator. You can get the package for openSUSE from my openSUSE buildservice repo.

After installation follow these steps on shell:

# check if xinput_calibrator found any device
user@tablet:~> xinput_calibrator --list
Device "Wacom ISDv4 90 Pen" id=10

# start calib.: for multiple devices use --device option
user@tablet:~> xinput_calibrator

You get this screen, follow the instructions:

You get some output with some instructions as soon as you finished the procedure. The preferred way to setup the tablet/touchscreen with the calibration data is coping a snippet from the output into '/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-calibration.conf' (as root). Here an example for such a snippet:

Section "InputClass"
        Identifier      "calibration"
        MatchProduct    "Wacom ISDv4 90 Pen"
        Option "MinX" "0"
        Option "MaxX" "28606"
        Option "MinY" "0"
        Option "MaxY" "17876"
EndSection

You may need to restart your X-server after setting up the file. If it doesn't work checkout the instructions in the output for other ways to setup the changes.

Tech Tags: TabletPC