Planet openSUSE

Michael Meeks: 2012-05-18: Friday

Fri, 18 May 2012 19:26:28 +0000

Up early; mail chew, great to see the good work that David(s), Matus etc. have been doing on the gbuild conversion - switching away from a plunging 'dmake' compile to a pure gnumake version which has a ton of parallelism advantages.
Encouraged too to read the list of bugs fixed in 3.5.4rc1 release - rapidly ratcheting up the 3.5 quality, with several misc. improvements not captured by the generating script either.
Joined linkedin to try to hunt a few quiet ones down, and curious at the number of people it immediately identified as potential links; I wonder how - I didn't let it see my gmail addressbook.
Fine dinner with the babes in the evening. Back to work for a bit afterwards.

Roger Luedecke: Getting the most of your Gnome Shell with Extensions

Thu, 17 May 2012 23:04:14 +0000

Its no secret that I have become something of a fan of Gnome 3. That being said however there are certainly some legitimate concerns regarding functionality. One unfortunate thing, is that in order to really understand how best to use your desktop actually requires you to do some reading... its not always immediately obvious. I personally don't find this terribly troubling, but I can certainly see how this can frustrate newer users. The other criticism is that Gnome 3 is inflexible and not extensible with applets the way Gnome 2 was. Though this is a legitimate concern it is not an entirely legitimate criticism, simply because it isn't true. On the contrary, Gnome 3 offers an elegant and easy to use extension framework that is more versatile than what applets provide. It should be noted that Gnome 3 being new may not have the extension you had hoped for, but it most probably will given enough time.

So now I present to you my personal favorite Gnome Shell extensions to address a number of these concerns. I frankly like Gnome Shell, and am thus not terribly interested in trying to alter the appearance or behavior of the environment to ape Gnome 2 or any other desktops. That being said, there are a few things that probably should have been included. You must be using Gnome 3.2 or higher to be able to use the Gnome Shell extensions.

1.Alt-Tab switcher
Knowing to use the Alt-Tab application switcher is a quick way to speed up your workflow. However, the switcher in Gnome Shell is just a bit counter-intuitive since it is hybridized a bit. Check the Gnome Cheat Sheet to see if you like the original. If you don't like being unable to switch between windows in the older fashion (the new fashion by default simply lists open applications, then offers what is essentially a dropdown to get to the individual windows) then this extension is for you. A plus with this one, is that switches the behavior to a slick and attractive coverflow design.

2.Alternative Status Menu, or how the hell do I reboot!?!?!
With the Alternative Status Menu, the need for holding the Alt key is removed. Now you have access to powering off and rebooting in the normal way you would expect.

3.Network Connections.
So, often I have had to remove a connection in order to reconnect to a network that has changed in some way. Granted this is probably a flaw with my hardware or the router in question. Nonetheless, getting quickly to network connections isn't as obvious as it used to be. This extension fixes that by adding a shortcut in the networking menu.

4.Remove the Accesibility Icon.
Many people have no use for the accessibility options, and thus don't want the clutter in the panel. This extension removes it.

5.Notifications.
I like the new way of handling notifications, but if I step away from my computer I may miss them if I don't check that little auto-hiding tray in the lower right. This extension adds a little notifier icon to the panel to let you know you have new notifications and allows you to access them.

6.Calculator.
This isn't a lack from Gnome 2, but I like it. Simply start tapping in a math problem in the dashboard overview and see an instantly calculated result.

7.Media Player Indicator.
This extension adds an elegant little controller to your panel when there is an open media player that uses the correct interface(MPRIS2), which is most. This allows you to quickly control your media playback from such programs as Banshee or Rythymbox.

8.Advanced Settings
Add Advanced Settings to your status menu. This will allow you to instantly open the gnome-tweak-tool which is installed by default on openSUSE.

9.Places Status Indicator
This adds your home folder into a neat drop down. Its rather like a stackfolder, or the legacy gnome menu Places. Very convenient.

Michael Meeks:

IBM's Symphony code contribution

Thu, 17 May 2012 21:00:00 +0000

Today IBM seems about to deliver on their promise of opening up the Symphony codebase. That is a good thing. It represents an important way-point, in the middle of a long process.

A long journey

I recall well meeting Don Harbison at the OpenOffice conference in Koper in 2005, and a memorable party during which I no doubt bored him to death by re-iterating the importance of working with the community, in the open and contributing your code. Then around April 2006, IBM Workplace 2.6 arrived: a proprietary product based on a version of the OpenOffice.org 1.x code-base. That was enabled by the non-copy-left SISSL license variant the code was under at the time. Fast fowarding to September 2007, Lotus Symphony appeared in beta, complete with an interview "IBM joins OpenOffice to widen it's reach" with Doug Heintzman, promising:

"IBM will dedicate a core team of 35 programmers in China to the OpenOffice project, but more people will be added as needed around the world, he said."

Around this time, we got some contributions of parts of the Symphony feature-set thrown-over-the wall. Sadly these were mostly vs. an obsolete code base, and were mostly not maintained or forward ported (though LibreOffice's current Lotus Word Pro filter was rescued from that dump). At the time I confess I was eager for IBM not to contribute anything towards propping up the fundamentally unjustly managed and structured OpenOffice.org project, with which I'd become utterly disillusioned.

As time passed, the waiting and suspense continued to build, in November 2008 at OOoCon Beijing I had the pleasure of meeting Michael Karasick, whose (keynote) gave an apologetic score-card for this contribution, and promised "we will be contributing". More time passed. By July 2011, the donation of the code was announced in a press release "IBM Donates Lotus Symphony Source Code to the Apache OpenOffice Project", and still no code.

Then, this week Don Harbison announced that IBM have signed a software grant agreement to the Apache project for the code, which is planned to appear in svn as a single, flat, code dump. At last ! the code will be read and the valuations independently assessed. I have fond memories of working together with Doug, Michael & Don, and I'm certain their commitments were sincerely given and meant on each occasion. I suspect the primary cause of the delay is degrees of embarrassing frustration inflicted by part of a corporate machine fearful of, and unused to the transition costs of open, community based development.

Every day, open and engaged ...

Of course, it is great when code that has been proprietary and closed is finally opened, and licensed in a way that LibreOffice can include it. While there is some sad level of duplication vs. work done in LibreOffice, there are also some nice sounding features that should be useable for our next release as/when we have re-licensed.

On the other hand, one of the real pleasures of working in LibreOffice is the collegial, interaction and co-operation with my much-appreciated colleages from Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical, Lanedo, Google and the hundreds of developers and other supporters that have contributed to the project since we started ~eighteen months ago. The credit these guys deserve, for their outstanding effort defies praise. In my book what looks like the boring, every-day, long-haul work of open interaction to achieve shared goals is worth immeasurably more. It may take time to hammer out results that I don't always agree with, but it is good.

Playing well with the community seems to me to mean a lot more than a one-off code-dump. It also means being willing to compromise and work constructively with others of differing ideological viewpoints, encouraging and motivating people to work together.

It means that companies should not horde their changes, to try to be first to the market. There should be direct contribution of the totality of bug fixes and improvements, as they are made, to an appropriate branch. Unfortunately, licensing is a factor here too. The Apache license, by providing you with the choice of when to release your code: "now ? later ? never ?" creates an economic incentive to horde and create a saleable, proprietary feature-edge. That in turn creates a disincentive for others to share. In contrast, a weak copy-left license pushes people inevitably towards sharing, working together, and a service & support based business model.

Hoping for good corporate citizens

So, what does this mean, if anything ? if this move signals a genuine change of heart, towards working collaboratively with the developer community in a sustained and non-proprietary fashion - releasing code changes as they are made and working fully in the open, that is good news. Of course, the most convincing way to make such a commitment to work well as peers with the community, is to join with the existing majority of the developers around the code-base, who are eager to work with IBM as part of LibreOffice. Indeed, more than that - I (and I suspect others) are anxious to make room for our friends from IBM: Peace, Love, LibreOffice ! However, that will inevitably mean making a few real compromises, working in community always requires that. One would be formalizing that intention to contribute well in the most convincing way: using the form of a source-code-license like the MPLv2 or LGPLv3+ which codify such good behaviour. That helps to ensure timely, collaborative code contribution from all players, protecting everyone independent of scale. Is it hard to make such a binding commitment ?

Failing that the option of competing with that community, while trying to build a track record from scratch as an enthusiastic believer in open development, collaboration, compromise, working as an equal, etc. may prove problematic. One canary here may be how this substantial code dump is treated. Will it be split up into individual, digestible features & commits, which can be merged individually into the existing Apache OpenOffice codebase. Or will a single, big, un-documented code commit be attempted ?

A conclusion or two

It looks like IBM will release six+ years of work by their development team; that is a good thing, it will be interesting to see what their sharp team has been up to over that time. Opening previously proprietary software is almost always a good thing, and it may provide our users with some improvements in due course.

In this historical context actions speak much louder than words, but are much harder to extrapolate into the future. Will we see a positive, constructive engagement moving forwards ? the best sign of that would be positive interaction with, compromise and re-unification with the vast majority of developers. An ongoing sadness for me is the lack of even contemplation of that.

Still, in the meantime the LibreOffice community is having fun preparing for it's 3.6 freeze with steady hacking progress; a prototype new feature page is in the process of getting built, though I suspect completing that will need to wait for some last minute features to get pushed. It's a great place to have fun, make a difference and get involved with Free Software, why not try an Easy Hack today ? every little helps.

Michael Meeks: 2012-05-17: Thursday

Thu, 17 May 2012 21:00:00 +0000

More mail, pleasant call with Sean, an old friend, lunch. Team meeting, ESC meeting, Vojtech's staff meeting, call with Brian Green. Dinner, back to some typing.

Petr Baudis: Using CUPS to print text files in non-UTF8 charset encoding

Thu, 17 May 2012 17:17:43 +0000

At our university department, many people still haven’t migrated to UTF8 and are still happily using ISO-8859-2 – mainly due to the amount of legacy text (TeX, …) documents.
Nowadays, support for non-UTF8 is slowly waning though, and CUPS is a prime example. Most of (shabby anyway) support for non-UTF8 encodings have been removed few years ago. It is still possible to force CUPS to print text files in non-UTF8 encoding if you extract the appropriate files from ancient version (1.2 or some-such) of CUPS to /usr/share/cups/charset/ and print using e.g. lpr -o document-format='text/plain;charset=iso-8859-2'. However, there is simply no support for lpr automatically setting the charset based on your locale.

We decided that the best way to go is to simply auto-detect the encoding using the awesome enca package and convert text files from this encoding to UTF8. This should be actually fairly fool-proof in practice, unless you are dealing with an extremely mixed set of languages. Making own CUPS filter is easy – just change texttops entries in /etc/cups/mime.conv to textautoencps and create a new /usr/lib/cups/filter/textautoencps file:

#!/bin/bash
 
if [ $# == 0 ]; then
  echo >&2 "ERROR: $0 job-id user title copies options [file]"
  exit 1
fi
 
{ if [ $# -ge 6 ]; then
    cat $6
  else
    cat
  fi; } |
    enconv -x utf-8 -L czech |
    /usr/lib/cups/filter/texttops "${@:0:6}"

Jos Poortvliet: Re:Publica

Thu, 17 May 2012 17:00:00 +0000

About two weeks ago I went to Re:Publica, a hipster event (can I say that?) in Berlin. It was an interesting event - related to the stuff I usually visit, yet different. I'll go over the differences, then present what I see as the challenge for Free Software events: get those creative, digital and always-online people closer to us!

Audience

The main audience of the event could probably be best described as people interested in the 'digital lifestyle'. People who use smartphones, are always on-line. They find their places-to-go on foursquare, talk to their friends on facebook, share their opinions on twitter, Whatsapp with their love - but they don't hang out on IRC or visit forums very often and they probably have a Macbook Air and a high-end android phone. Yes, not that different from us.

Subjects

The event featured talks on things like the web, new cloud services like on-line music and creativity like music and video tools, open video etcetera. But that was only about 10-20%. Another 20-30% was about the future - social media, social innovation and more. To my surprise, the remaining 50% of the talks was about Freedom - and I use the capital for a reason. The Occupy movement, Digital Restrictions Management, Net Neutrality, Open Data, Digital influence on revolutions, eco-journalism, (internet) governance. Very close to what we, the Free Software community, hold dear (and find interesting!) Yes, not so different from us.

Marketing and artwork

You can imagine - an event organized by ~~hipsters~~ creative people looks good. It does! Team t-shirts were sponsored by spreadshirt and had the title 'actionist'. There was a big wall with the program, using pictures of the speakers, QR codes and more weird stuff. A twitter stream on a screen is old, people. Here, if you tweet a hash-tag you get your face as part of a logo shape or you get a gift if you check in with foursquare. That's more like it. Oh, and they had a 'carry your own chair' program - not unlike we did at the last openSUSE conference at the end of each day, except that it was 'cool', not 'please help us out with moving chairs'!

There were other things, too. Interesting or just plain weird stickers - with just a QR code or a shortened link, or only a slogan. There was stuff like a live steaming camera so you could interact with people on-line (easy to do: a laptop with a webcam connected to a google hangout?!?) and plenty of other good ideas. Surely different from what we usually do!

Challenge for us?

I lately have been feeling that Free Software is loosing the battle for the hearts. Privacy and security are not important, internet is just a tool. We've been trying to educate people about Freedom but they don't care.

I was wrong. Collaboration and Freedom DO matter and people know it. We just don't reach the most of those who care about these things. This is where our challenge lies!

After talking with others and thinking about this, I conclude that there are two things we have to do better:

Positivism

Wake up!

Relevance

Can do

Can't do

Concrete

At least at the conference's I'm involved in I'll be trying to broaden the audience a bit and attract people outside of our usual circle. By changes to the program (workshops on Krita, Gimp, Blender, Kdenlive and Inkscape? ownCloud? web stuff? Talks about Wikimedia, the EFF, net neutrality, copyright?) and by advertising/spreading the word in less usual places (maybe an Apple fan magazine or a design paper). Let's see if we can get more people to see what we do, get involved, care!

Awesome images by Renehamburg on flickr

openSUSE Education: openSUSE related topics

Thu, 17 May 2012 16:24:57 +0000

6 JUNE 2012 - please mark this day in your calendar, as this is the World IPv6 day. This day is meant to call attention to the fact that IPv4 addresses have run out and the web has to move on to IPv6. openSUSE-Education will be part of this initiative, joining the ranks of Google, Yahoo and Facebook in making sure its infrastructure is IPv6 capable on June 6th.

The openSUSE-Education team is working hard to bring IPv6 services up. They started a few weeks ago and plan to be ready on June 6th, the World IPv6 day. On that day, all external services will be reachable via both IPv4 and IPv6. This includes this webpage, rsync and also the Email system.

Jan Holesovsky: Improved Rulers

Thu, 17 May 2012 08:58:00 +0000

Recently I was able to spend a bit of time on the UI hacking again; and this time it was the "Rulers" in Writer. Thanks to Mirek M. (BTW, have you seen his Call for GSoC projects designs, and Call for Templates blog entries?) who provided me with a helpful mockup, I was able able to implement the new look quickly and effectively, mostly by removing code :-)

I hope I will be able to do more such changes before the 3.6 feature freeze; I'll keep you informed. And if anybody of you is interested in UI-related hacking, just mail me or ping me on the IRC (kendy on irc.freenode.net), and I'll provide you with code pointers to other interesting areas :-)

Jos Poortvliet: openSUSE at LinuxTag Berlin 2012, SUSE Hiring!

Thu, 17 May 2012 07:20:27 +0000

Heya!

It's almost that time: in one week LinuxTag opens its doors! Courtesy of your friends at Fedora and openSUSE, there will be 'Beefy Miracle' hotdogs and 'Old Toad' beer. And together with the numerous other projects we bring you talks about Linux and new Free/Open Source technologies, interesting people to talk to and lots of fun and party!

Cool stuff in the booth area, BEER AND HOTDOGS!

This year, openSUSE & Fedora gang up to both support you, the visitors, and LinuxTag, our gracious hosts. We'll hand out 'Old Toad' beer and 'Beefy Miracle' hotdogs for a small donation (€1 per item) to the LinuxTag e.V.! So there you have it:

Come, buy and eat hotdogs and drink beer in support of LinuxTag!

(the openSUSE beer is actually free as the catering didn't like us asking for donations to LinuxTag. However, we strongly suggest to give a donation anyway)

Sessions at openSUSE booth

At the openSUSE booth we'll also have short hands-on tech sessions every day. The schedule:

Wednesday-Saturday
13:00 your ownCloud by yours truly
Thursday
15:00 Colour Management by Kai-Uwe Behrman
Friday and Saturday
15:00 AppArmor Crashkurs by Christian Boltz

Work work! Looking for a job?

I've also heard that two HR people from SUSE will be at or around the booth during most of Friday and Saturday. We're 20 years old, still going strong and have plenty of opportunities so if you're interested in an exciting job at the greenest company in the FOSS world, ask for Johanna Grau or Nadine Pieper!

I'm greatly looking forward to seeing all the friends from various Free Software projects again, like GNOME, KDE, LibreOffice, Fedora, TuxRadio, FreeBSD and many others. And you of course, dear reader!

(yes, the posters are all mine. Didn't know I had it in me. Honestly, they're all rip-offs of real art of course, the first two based on the official LinuxTag poster and the 'we believe' is something which fuzzily came to me this morning after a way-to-short night. The art is inspired by suse.com/careers - I really like that. It is, of course, all in github (I really DO believe) and merge requests or suggestions are very welcome. But before tomorrow, it has to be printed for LinuxTag!)

Michael Meeks: 2012-05-16: Wednesday

Wed, 16 May 2012 21:00:00 +0000

Mail chew, call with Vojtech; more trawling of statistics, E-mail, and wiki editing; minor patch review. Interview. More admin.

Kai-Uwe Behrmann: Linux Color Management Hackfest idea

Wed, 16 May 2012 18:29:27 +0000

Sirko brought up the idea to organise a hackfest together with developers of applications for Linux desktops and experts interested in colour management. The idea behind that event was to bring interested developers together, support them in implementing color management in their software and move forward that topic across desktops and distributions.

During the recent LGM we found a chance to involve Richard Hughes and planed together about what we like to do during the hackfest. We spotted three main areas of interest: desktop applications including window managers, web browsers and printing. These topics are already worked on, but in a scattered way.

As example, Gwenview is a really great application for managing pictures. But it has no color management implemented yet. Color management in KWin is worked on during the GSoC this year, but in the opposite color management in the compositing manager mutter on the GNOME side is far away as can be read here. Not many web browsers support color management and if they who do, it is often incomplete. The SVG v2 standard will for example introduce additional color management features compared to SVG v1. So it is now the right time to get these implemented in order to be well prepared. For the KDE printing stack there is also a GSoC project this year, but also the Linux Foundation has a working group for this topic.

So, by meeting in person in one place, we want to get something done and build a good understanding of the role of each participating group for a working end to end colour management.

The hackfest will very likely happen in Brno in the Czech Republic at the Red Hat offices. A good time appears later this year 16th till 19th November. Now we like to collect more ideas, speak to people and sort financial issues.

Sascha Manns: open-slx Weekly News 18 published

Wed, 16 May 2012 15:16:06 +0000

We are pleased to announce the new open-slx Weekly News 18 in the Formats PDF and EPUB.

You can find in this week (abstract):

open-slx Screencast: Updating Plasma Active
Vivaldi Tablet with 8GB
Tizen runs Android Apps too
Installing Java 7
and more...

The open-slx Weekly News 18 are downloadable there [881,31 kB] (PDF) and there [11,94 kB] (EPUB).

Because Textwriters are needing Coffe just donate anything.

Original Post: http://community.open-slx.com/news-42-open-slx-weekly-news-18-published.html

Technorati Tags:Technology, News, Mobile App, Tablet, Tablets

Download: PDF-Format [881,31 kB] EPUB-Format [11,94 kB]

Dieser Wochenrückblick wurde unter der Creative Commons by Share Alike veröffentlicht.

Kai-Uwe Behrmann: Colour Management Talk @ LinuxTag 2012

Wed, 16 May 2012 14:03:28 +0000

Europes biggest event arround Linux and Open Source – LinuxTag, is’nt far away anymore and Oyranos will participate on it. LinuxTag take its place in Berlin from 23.-26. May on the exhibition area arround the Funkturm. On saturday the 26th of May I will present together with Sirko an talk about colour management – “Bring Color To The Game“. The talk will not introduce Oyranos as CMS, it will more explain what color management is and about the actual status on free desktops. We want as well to talk about what a user needs to get colour management running. During LinuxTag I will be reachable on the openSUSE booth for questions and introduction into profiling and bring some colorimeters.

Lukas Ocilka: YaST is Moving to GitHub

Wed, 16 May 2012 13:56:27 +0000

The SUSE Systems Management team has finished converting YaST from Subversion to GIT and will be migrating all repositories to GitHub this week.

We'd like to benefit from some GitHub features, such as code review, comments, easier merging and cherry-picking, integrated wiki etc., but most of all, we'd like to be closer to the community so it's easier for you to change anything in YaST.

See you soon at GitHub!

Kostas Koudaras: 2ο openSUSE Collaboration Summer Camp

Wed, 16 May 2012 11:15:43 +0000

Ο καιρός έχει ζεστάνει για τα καλά και ήρθε λοιπόν η ώρα να κανονίσουμε ξανά τις καλοκαιρινές μας εξορμήσεις για φέτος. Έτσι λοιπόν ήρθε η ώρα να βρεθούμε και πάλι όλοι μαζί για το φετινό openSUSE Collaboration Summer Camp !!!

Τι θα κάνουμε είπες;

Θα μαζευτούμε όλοι μαζί δίπλα στη θάλασσα για να παρακολουθήσουμε διάφορα workshops (μην ξεχάσετε να φέρετε τα laptop σας!) και θα δουλέψουμε πάνω στα αγαπημένα μας projects!

Πότε;

Το Παρασκευοσαββατοκύριακο 20-21-22 Ιουλίου 2012!

Πού;

Στο ξενοδοχείο Grand Platon Hotel ( www.grandplaton-hotel.gr ) στην Ολυμπιακή Ακτή στην παραλία Κατερίνης. Λεπτομέρειες για το πώς να έρθετε μπορείτε να βρείτε εδώ.

Ποιός;

Η ελληνική κοινότητα openSUSE που διοργανώνει το 2ο openSUSE Collaboration Summer Camp θα φροντίσει για την ομαλή ροή του προγράμματος, το χώρο και τις λεπτομέρειες της διοργάνωσης. Απευθύνεται σε όλους όσους ασχολούνται με το ΕΛ/ΛΑΚ οι οποίοι μπορούν τόσο να συμμετέχουν όσο και να πραγματοποιήσουν το δικό τους workshop!

Γιατί να έρθω λοιπόν;

Στόχος μας είναι να φέρουμε πιο κοντά τις κοινότητες, ενθαρρύνοντας τη συνεργασία και δουλεύοντας όλοι μαζί πάνω στα projects που μας ενδιαφέρουν, ενώ ταυτόχρονα να ενδυναμώσουμε την επικοινωνία ανάμεσα στα μέλη της ελληνικής κοινότητας ΕΛ/ΛΑΚ. Φυσικά δε θα λείψουν οι αμέτρητες βουτιές στη θάλασσα και οι άφθονες μπύρες, διότι αγαπάμε αυτό που κάνουμε και περνάμε ωραία συνεισφέροντας στο ΕΛ/ΛΑΚ ακόμα και το καλοκαίρι!

Όσοι θέλετε να συμμετέχετε, επικοινωνήστε μαζί μας και δηλώστε συμμετοχή ώστε να μπορέσουμε να οργανώσουμε καλύτερα τη διαθεσιμότητα των δωματίων!

Για περισσότερες πληροφορίες & δήλωση συμμετοχής:

- Επικοινωνήστε μαζί μας στο summercamp@os-el.gr

- Μπείτε στο κανάλι μας #openSUSE-el στον IRC server Freenode.

SUSE Studio: Repositories Spring Cleaning!

Wed, 16 May 2012 10:14:54 +0000

Over the next few days, we will gradually remove these duplicated 3rd party repositories from Studio. Official and private user repositories will not be affected. Affected appliances will be automatically updated.

What impact might this have on you?

Most users will not notice anything different, but some may encounter a couple of side-effects:

Your 3rd party repositories in Studio may now have a different name.The name of the repository being used by your appliance may change, but you don't have to worry about that because:
- Your account was not compromised - the change is done by our cleanup script.
- The contents of the affected repositories (if any) should be identical.
- The official and private user repositories are not affected.
Your appliance may have software resolution errors. This is rare, but can happen if the explicitly requested software version is not available in the new repository (eg. the old version is no longer in the repository nor in the Studio cache). If this happens, Studio will propose the following solutions:
- Add the latest version of the package: This will explicitly require the latest version of the package from the repositories in your appliance.
- Do not require a specific version of the package: This removes the explicit version constrain, pulling in latest version instead.
- Remove the package: No longer install the package in the appliance.

If you must have the old package, you can either package it inside of a dedicated repository with the openSUSE Build Service or upload the RPM to Studio.

Please contact us via the forum or mailing list if you have any questions or problems.

Why are we doing this?

It’s spring time once again and so we’re busy with housekeeping to maintain a reasonably fast and responsive site, even as the number of users grows. This week’s spring cleaning target is the software repositories in Studio. There are three types of software repositories that can be added to your SUSE Studio appliances:

Official repositories: Repositories added by the Studio administrators, like openSUSE 12.1 OSS and SLES 11 SP2 x86_64.
3rd party repositories: Public repositories hosted outside of susestudio.com that have been added by Studio users, such as those from the openSUSE Build Service and PackMan.
Private user repositories: Repositories that are automatically created and hosted by Studio whenever you upload a RPM to your appliance in the software tab. These are private to your appliance and are only accessible by Studio.

For faster appliance builds and improved reliability (eg. builds will still work if the external repository is temporarily down), all RPMs from these repositories are cached by Studio. Whenever a new repository is added, all the RPMs within it are added to the download queue and bumped up if it is required by an appliance build (the build process waits for the download to be completed).

With more than 18,000 repositories, these cached RPMs use quite some terabytes on our storage servers. There are often duplicated RPMs from different repositories, so we use file deduplication to reduce the overall storage footprint.

Duplicate repositories were initially avoided by checking the repository URL, but this is of course insufficient as it does not handle repository mirrors. Thus it now checks the repository ID, so we can detect these mirrors and remove them. This does not reduce the storage footprint much since the RPMs are already deduplicated at the file level, but it does save on the repository metadata resulting in faster and cleaner repository searches.

What is coming next?

We are close to completing the first phase of revamping our backend repository and package handling service, allowing us to overcome the limitations of the current system. Stay tuned, we will blog about this in the near future.

Michael Meeks: 2012-05-15: Tuesday

Tue, 15 May 2012 21:00:00 +0000

Up early, more mail chew, generated some bug metrics for the ESC. More patch review / merge, worked at slideware. Continued licensing work.
Advisory Board call in the evening. Dinner with Lydia & J. out for a beer with Chris - good to catch up with him as he prepares to go into the Anglican ministry.

Jakub Steiner: Symbolic Icons

Tue, 15 May 2012 20:18:41 +0000

GNOME 3 introduced a new style of icons we call symbolic. Last year, Meg Ford joined the effort we kicked off with Lapo and did a great job extending the theme coverage, without us having any style guidelines in place yet. This year, we’ll have another Woman Outreach program participant joining the effort, so I’ve edited a little video introduction on how we design these icons along with a little overview of all the icon styles currently in place.

Watch on youtube

Pavel Machek: Multi-monitor setup using notebook

Tue, 15 May 2012 13:36:32 +0000

I'm right handed. I'd like to use notebook with big monitor, docking station, external mouse and keyboard.

Question is, what is the reasonable setup? For now, I have notebook to the left of the big monitor, with X set up to use both monitors, and notebook "to the right" of the big monitor. Yes, it is usable, but moving mouse right to get to the display that is to the left of the screen is strange.

If I put notebook to the right of big monitor, I'll have no place for the mouse.

So... is there clever solution?

(I'd still like to undock and be able to use the apps I've opened.)

Michael Meeks: 2012-05-14: Monday

Mon, 14 May 2012 21:00:00 +0000

Up early; mail chew, created another commit account, patch review variously for the 3.5.4rc1 freeze today. Pushed a substantial grammar checker speedup - removing an un-necessary annoying hang on first-typing (basically caused by poor design of the linguistic/ APIs).
Wrote/sent status report, spent some time on slideware. J.'s Pregnancy Crisis Centre AGM in the evening, hacked away at this & that.

Jos Poortvliet: SUSE 20 years old!

Sun, 13 May 2012 22:49:00 +0000

I've been with SUSE now for almost 2 years now and it's been quite a ride. SUSE itself, however, has been having fun long before I joined. Heck, even before Free Software was on my radar (that's somewhere around 2000), SUSE was already going strong! November it'll be 20 years. Cool to see that in that time, Linux went from 'nothing' to "two-thirds of the global Fortune 100 uses SUSE Linux Enterprise"!!!

At SUSECon there'll be a celebration, the geeko's will re-do that at the openSUSE Summit afterwards. But SUSE has already been gearing up for the celebrations, putting up this infographic for example, see also on the right. Quite cool ;-)

There's another one showing 'where SUSE leads', the 11 good reasons why SUSE is the savvy Linux choice. It is used on the careers page with the header "where SUSE leads, YOU lead". Nice touch :D

Join us?

Talking about careers, I know the SUSE Studio team is looking for an UI designer. If you've played with SUSE Studio you know you've got some big shoes to fill. But it is an amazingly cool project with an amazingly cool team and an amazingly cool project lead - that would be Cornelius Schumacher, or Mister President for you!

The Boosters are also looking for new blood and so are many other teams in SUSE. Just have a look on this page for the job openings, about 40 at the moment.

At LinuxTag in Berlin, about three weeks from now, there'll be two SUSE HR people, who can answer any questions you might have. So, if you wanna work on awesome stuff for the Greenest company in the F/LOSS world, come and talk to us ;-)

See you at LinuxTag!

Kai-Uwe Behrmann: LGM 2012 Impressions

Sun, 13 May 2012 22:00:23 +0000

The Technikum Wien provided a nice place and great support for the LibreGraphicsMeeting. Many thanks to them. LGM happened together with the Linuxwochen Wien and developers and users could talk about graphics and arts themes. Additionally to the one presentation track over all days, we had BoF’s and workshops. Some of us took the chance to present to a non LGM audience and meet people there too.

The LGM talks covered lots of OpenCL projects. That means modern GPU computing power is available to open source graphics components in a much broader way. As the use of OpenCL is supported by the Mesa software implementation, there is some kind of guarantee, that OpenCL programs will run on elder hardware. That means OpenCL can be used without the need for developers to provide a fallback mechanism, which simplifies adoption.

The colour management talks provided lively discussions around many topics like printing, displaying and open hardware. We discussed as well the impact of introducing colour management in frameworks like GEGL. As mizmo showed interest, I explained the most basic terms of ICC rendering intents in a small BoF using ICC Examin. Animtim compiled and installed Oyranos from sources and wrote already a small tutorial on how to build Oyranos on kubuntu-12.04.

Markus Raab presenting Elektra on LGM 2012 Vienna

The presentation of Markus Raab about the Elektra configuration gave to me some impressive insights into the concepts and flexibility of that small framework. The really cool thing about this library is it can abstract a lot of details and provide additional features, which can be added on run time like DBus support. He announced a new release of Elektra as version 0.8.0 during the event.

The metalab was for most people from countries without a similar open hardware/open source collaboration zone a impressive visit. We all enjoyed to could stay there for some hours and felt, this place is much in the spirit of most LGM contributors.

Nathan Willis @ LGM 2012 Vienna

During Nathan Willis workshop about the Create wiki, we discussed to start a email list for create users. That list is supposed to provide help and talk about experiences with graphics applications and help from users for users.

Sirko (alias gnokii) and Tobias (alias houz) played diplomat and managed to channel information in a way that Richard Hughes and I could finally meet in a productive atmosphere and continued talking about technical issues. At the end we found a mod to work again together on standards inside the OpenICC collaboration project. I am pretty happy with that change. So, thanks to all parties who helped with that.

Café Hawelka Vienna

Tatica, Pete, Sirko and I walked around on the last day in Vienna and relaxed in the café above.

Michael Meeks: 2012-05-13: Sunday

Sun, 13 May 2012 21:00:00 +0000

Up late, off to Church, N. off to a party. Ruth spoke on holiness. Chatted to people afterwards; Emily & Beth over for lunch, played in the garden with the babes.
Got everyone kitted up, and tried to train E. to steer a pedal-less bike in the road, against fierce resistance. Finally got somewhere at least, no injuries.
Watched the Princess Bride with the babes; put them to bed, did a little hacking on repsnapper, and up late talking to J.

Sascha Manns: calibre 0.8.51 packaged for openSUSE

Sun, 13 May 2012 18:45:22 +0000

I'm pleased to announce the new available EBook-Manager calibre package 0.8.51 for openSUSE.

Whats happend since the last Minorupdate?

New Features

When switching libraries preserve the position and selected books if you switch back to a previously opened library.
Conversion pipeline: Filter out the useless font-face rules inserted by Microsoft Word for every font on the system
Driver for Motorola XT875 and Pandigital SuperNova
Add a colour swatch the the dialog for creating column coloring rules, to ease selection of colors
EPUB Output: Consolidate internal CSS generated by calibre into external stylesheets for ease of editing the EPUB
List EPUB and MOBI at the top of the dropdown list fo formats to convert to, as they are the most common choices

Bug Fixes

E-book viewer: Improve performance when switching between normal and fullscreen views.
Edit metadata dialog: When running download metadata do not insert duplicate tags into the list of tags
KF8 Input: Do not error out if the file has a few invalidly encoded bytes.
Fix download of news in AZW3 format not working
Pocketbook driver: Update for new PB 611 firmware.
ebook-convert: Error out if the user prvides extra command line args instead of silently ignoring them
EPUB Output: Do not self close any container tags to prevent artifacts when EPUBs are viewed using buggy browser based viewers.
Fix regression in 0.8.50 that broke the conversion of HTML files that contained non-ascii font-face declarations, typically produced by Microsoft Word

Where to get Calibre?

You just can add the Documentation:Tools Repository and install it via YaST or zypper. You also can use one of the following 1-Click Installer:

This one for the openSUSE 12.1 Documentation:Tools (12.1 Standard)

This one for the openSUSE 12.1 Documentation:Tools (12.1 KDE 4.8)

It can take some time, because of the packages are build but at not available in the Repo. Should come next time.

You wish to donate anything to the Packager?

Sounds good. Just read Donate a Coffee.

You want to try out calibre with faenza Toolbaricons?

Have a look there (German Article). If you don't know german, just add the Documentation:Tools Repository and install "calibre-faenza-icons".

Michael Meeks: 2012-05-12: Saturday

Sat, 12 May 2012 21:00:00 +0000

Up early; packed the babes in the car and set off to Aldeburgh, dropped J. off near Ipswich. On via a diversion to Anne's. Cup of tea.
Out to the boating lake, Bruce had kindly made up four boat-hooks for rescuing model boats (far more fun than the boats themselves it seems); much fun had by all. Went to throw stones at the sea - as you do.
Back for fine lunch, and off to pick J. up, then to hospital in Colchester - went to see him. Home - packed babes off to bed.
Worked until midnight looking at an obscure OLE2 file format / fat chaining issue causing performance issues, the trivial fixes defeated by our regression tests; finally got it.

Calvin Gaisford: Road and Mountain Bike Rides back to back

Sat, 12 May 2012 00:24:04 +0000

Boyd and I gave everyone the afternoon off at Appigo and went on a bike ride. We couldn't decide between road or mountain bikes so we tried both. First we did a 19 mile road bike ride up South Fork Canyon and then we switched to mountain bikes and climbed up to the altar below Timpanogos. It was fun but at the end we decided next time we'll focus on one only! Here are the results:

Michael Meeks: 2012-05-11: Friday

Fri, 11 May 2012 21:00:00 +0000

Up, more gut-wrenchingly tedious mail, commit license auditing, wiki statement list updating, etc.
Lovely steak dinner with babes, put them to bed. Worked late.

Jos Poortvliet: fork on github?

Fri, 11 May 2012 13:44:14 +0000

Got lots of comments on my blog "on the value of collaboration". Some positive, some less so - but that's all fine. Today I wanted to point to one thing I had in there as a link: snapper.

Fork me on Github

Remember my blog about the Qt based firefox-like webbrowser Qupzilla and Fork me on Github? The new snapper website has a nice "fork us on github" button which does indeed link directly to the github repo of snapper!

Snapper

So snapper is a frontend for creating and handling the snapshots the new btrfs Linux filesystem can make. This was initially written by SUSE engineers for SLE and also made available for openSUSE - that's SLE's upstream after all. And the team thought it makes sense to make it available for other Linux distributions as well, as there's lots more interesting work to do in FOSS than re-writing tools from one distro to the other.

Thus right now Snapper is available for the following Linux'es: Ubuntu, Fedora, Red Hat, Debian, Mandriva and of course openSUSE.

The GUI is written as a YaST plugin to make it available for commandline users as well as both on GNOME and KDE. We have ported LibYui to other distro's but I don't know if that's already enough to have the plugin create a gui on say Gentoo or Ubuntu. Help and collaboration in that area is very much welcome - LibYui is on sourceforge.

Get it

So if you want snapper, get it at this link! You don't have to thank us but if you have ideas for improvements and some hacking time, please think about forking github repo and of course, once things are up and running, creating a merge request!

Thank you for collaborating ;-)

Pavel Machek: mbank.cz: insecure by default

Fri, 11 May 2012 11:12:01 +0000

So you want to get a debet card. It comes by email, with instructions, that you need to activate it over the web. So you do activate it. Then you realize that all limits are way too high... like $50000 per day for payments over the web. Oops. So you go to change it quickly. At this point, authorization SMS fails to come, so you can't. Nice.

What about having reasonable limits by default, dear mbank?

Jos Poortvliet: LFNW and other event awesomeness

Thu, 10 May 2012 21:51:31 +0000

Just had a look at the events openSUSE ambassadors have been visiting lately. From March 1 to April 30 we're talking about over 20 conferences and meetings! That's quite impressive. I myself have only visited a few in that time - most notably LinuxFest NorthWest (in Bellingham, Washington, USA), Chemnitzer Linux Tage (my blog) and I went to Re:Publica in Berlin. And later this month there'll be LinuxTag in Berlin. I'm organizing the openSUSE booth there so if it's a mess, you know who to blame ;-)

LinuxFest NorthWest

Let's talk about LFNW now. It was Carl Symons (your most dedicated dot editor) who bugged me for roughly a year about the event, including mentally preparing me by giving a LFNW t-shirt at the last Desktop Summit. And there was going to be an openSUSE booth, with Bryen, Brandon, James and even Michael attending. At that point, there was no going back - I had to come.

ownCloud talks

I submitted a talk about ownCloud - Carl told me I had to talk to the other ownCloud presenter who turned out to be Michael Gapczynski, ownCloud hacker and fresh employee of the new ownCloud Inc. We ended up giving two successive talks, me introducing ownCloud and walking through installation, setup and basic usage followed by Michael going into the development of ownCLoud Apps. The room was loaded, quite cool. Oh and I debuted pictures of Popcorn, our dog.

If you want to see the presentation, come to LinuxTag - I'll give a talk together with ownCloud founder Frank Karlitschek and we'll most likely follow the same schedule of me introducing oC & going over installation, then Frank going into a bit more detail.

13 yo Moe Jackson in action at LinuxFestNorthwest.
She had never touched a tablet before but Krita had her tied to the screen
for 3 hours creating awesome things!

Booth

The openSUSE booth at LFNW was well visited. We had one of those big "what's cool about openSUSE" posters, people took pictures of it or wrote down the links. A clear hint that we need flyers with that info! We also promoted the openSUSE Summit quite a bit but for some reason folks considered it a bit far away ;-)

Other stuff

The organization organized a party with food & drinks in a museum of electronic stuff - truly interesting. Some of the visitors spend hours zapping themselves with static electricity, others admired the weirdest devices from the onset of the electrical age. Hundreds of vacuum tubes, old radio's (even a bunch of mechanic music devices), lamps, early telegraph systems and more than you can see in a mere few hours. Awesome. Oh, and good beer - if you like Ale that is (I don't).

There was good food outside, daily, a large booth area with interesting projects and lots of talks. And probably most important, a really relaxed atmosphere with many technical people. It was all about the cool stuff, not about politics or corporate things. All in all, I can say - LFNW is an awesome event and if you can manage, you HAVE to go!

I made a video of the Museum we went too, see this Youtube video:

(or click)

(thanks to KDENlive inspiring me to make this, that app is just too cool. And oh, when I say "SUSE who paid" - that's of course for ME and my time, not for LFNW (SUSE was a sponsor, but not the only one by far).

Re:Publica, LinuxTag

I'll blog about Re:Publica tomorrow and LinuxTag about a week before it starts.

Hugs!vacuum