Planet openSUSE (en)

Friday
24 May, 2013

Felix-Nicolai Müller: Kleine Einführung in citeulike.org

@ 18:59 UTC

Ich habe 2011 eine Zertifizierung “E-Kompetenz” an der Universität Trier erworben. Lange habe ich nicht mehr daran gedacht, bis ich letzte Woche eine Email meiner Universität erhielt, dass sie es begrüßen würde, wenn ich mein damaliges Abschlussprojekt zur Verfügung stellen würden.

Genau das mache ich jetzt. Es handelt sich um eine kleine Einführung in citeulike.org.

Meine Empfehlung: ladet euch das Video direkt auf den PC. Dann ist es wunderbar hochaufgelöst – so dass man auch alles erkennen kann -.

Viel Spass damit

Rechts-Klick oder ctrl-Klick um dieses Video herunterzuladen.

Tor Lillqvist: Another marketing achievement in LibreOffice: $(OUTDIR)/inc is gone

@ 15:48 UTC

Thanks to the great work of our marketing experts like dtardon and mst__, no headers are any more copied ("delivered"), not even from 3rd-party packages, and thus $(OUTDIR)/inc is no more. Bye bye and good riddance! This makes the build tree again a bit cleaner, reduces build time somewhat, and can in cases avoid unneeded re-compilation of some source files.

Thursday
23 May, 2013

Michael Meeks: 2013-05-23: Thursday.

@ 21:05 UTCmember

Up; mail chew, hand-held some odd Windows build issues - the old plague of DOS line-endings coming back to bite. Patch review, got the libreoffice-4-1 branch checked out and building.
Lunch. Team meeting, ESC meeting, Vojtech's staff.

Jos Poortvliet: Getting involved in Free Software

@ 11:42 UTCmember

I frequently get the question, by mail or over social networks:

But how do I get involved in $PROJECT?

Now a common answer is 'just do it' while others often point to resources like the KDE Developers Beginners Guide and Contribute to openSUSE, or write a simple how-to for building a package. But I usually don't actually reply with links to any of those. Mostly, people have found these resources by themselves.

What they want to know now is how to, you know, actually do it! And as that question can actually be answered rather project-independent so I thought it would be useful to write it down here.

Step one - Build the Code and get Familiar

After reading the various guides and how-to's, you set up a development environment. Be sure you can run the unstable application(s) or hack on a package. Getting that up and running is a very good first step.

I would also subscribe to mailing lists, read the blogs and hang out in IRC. Just watch what is going on: it will teach you the culture of the community and that's crucial to get stuff done later.

Step Two - Hack Something

Perhaps you will already find bugs, then: trying to report them is good, trying to fix them is better. It will not be easy to fix them but that is when you can ask for help on IRC, forums or here!

If you don't find any bugs you want to fix, perhaps you can think about what to add, what to change. What do YOU think is important and what needs to be done? It doesn't matter if you pick something yourself or find a todo list or wiki page of the project and pick something there. The hardest part will be: JUST DO IT. Get hacking. You'll get stuck, that is OK: read documentation and when you can't figure it out, just ask for help. Above all: don't give up until you are done! I would suggest not to pick something too big. A one-liner patch will take you a day, easily, and might not seem important, but this first step matters a lot. Don't try to fix the entire user interface or work flow with your first change! For example, fixing code style to comply with the project rules is already a perfectly fine first step.

Step Three - Get it in

Now you got something, so get it back to the project. On Github or on the Open Build Service you do a merge request; in other projects you have different work flows varying from sending the patch by mail to using review board or other tools. It doesn't matter.

This won't be easy, but that is mostly due to you being so anxious about it: it can take quite a while for the developers to review the patch and they're sure to have some comments on it. Don't …

Wednesday
22 May, 2013

Nagappan Alagappan: [Ann]: Cobra 3.5 - Windows GUI test automation tool

@ 22:36 UTC

New features:
* ooldtp python client
* Support setting text on combo box
* Added simple command line options
* Support state.editable in hasstate
* Handle valuepattern in click API
* Support ToolBar type on click
* Write to log file if environment variable is set (set LDTP_LOG_FILE=c:\ldtp.log)
* Support control type Table, DataItem in Tree implementation
* Added scrollbar as supported type

New API:
* MouseMove
* setcellvalue
* guitimeout
* oneup
* onedown
* oneleft
* oneright
* scrollup
* scrolldown
* scrollright
* scrollleft

Bugs fixed:
* Fix to support taskbar with consistent index
* istextstateenabled API
* Fallback to object state enabled if value pattern is not available
* Fix to support InvokePattern on Open button
* Use width, height if provided while capturing screenshot
* Work around for copying text to clip board
* QT 5.0.2 specific changes
* Check errno attribute to support cygwin environment
* Fix keyboard APIs with new supported key controls (+, -, :, ;, ~, `, arrow up, down, right, left)
* Don't grab focus if type is tab item

Java client:
* Fixed selectRow arguments
* Fixed compilation issues
Python client:
* Fix optional argument issue in doesrowexist
C# client:
* Added new APIs (scrollup, scrolldown, scrollleft, scrollright, oneup, onedown, oneleft, oneright)
Ruby/Perl client: No changes

Credit:

Nagappan Alagappan, John Yingjun Li, Helen Wu, Eyas Kopty, VMware colleagues

Please spread the word and also share your feedback with us (email me).

About LDTP:

Cross Platform GUI Automation tool Linux version is LDTP, Windows version is Cobra and Mac version is PyATOM.

* Linux version is known to work on GNOME / KDE (QT >= 4.8) / Java Swing / LibreOffice / Mozilla application on all major Linux distribution.
* Windows version is known to work on application written in .NET / C++ / Java / QT on Windows XP SP3 / Windows 7 / Windows 8 development version.
* Mac version is currently under development and verified only on OS X Lion. Where ever PyATOM runs, LDTP should work on it.

Download source / binary (Windows XP / Vista / 7 / 8)
System requirement: .NET 3.5, refer README.txt after installation

Documentation references: For detailed information on LDTP framework and latest updates visit http://ldtp.freedesktop.org

LDTP API doc / Java doc
Report bugs

Michael Meeks: 2013-05-22: Wednesday.

@ 21:00 UTCmember

Horrible damage in Oklahoma, encouraged to hear the first response of this guy on seeing his house not there anymore. Call with Vojtech, mail chew.
Booked travel to the Hamburg Hackfest - which should be great: June 15/16th. Chat with Florian. Lunch. Partner call, filed expenses.

Tuesday
21 May, 2013

Michael Meeks: 2013-05-21: Tuesday.

@ 21:00 UTCmember

Up early, maiol chew, poked at some calc performance regression tests Kohei has written, call with him, stats crunching; ESC bug stats & agenda collation; dinner.

Kostas Koudaras: Organizing oSC13 - 57 days before

@ 11:21 UTCmember

When I started this series of 'Organizing oSC13' posts I wanted to make three main things.

Blog about what it takes to make oSC13
Include things that could be useful in the future to people who will take over the next conferences
Inform people how things are going out of a strictly personal sight

Now I warned you before, this blog contains explicit content. If you are easily shocked or feel offended when someone talks a bit dirty then please stop reading. A lot of documentation can be found elsewhere.

Having said that I continue :D

Now so far I haven't wrote anything about the actual progress of the conference. Today I will write about it.

So far we have 36 people working on tasks on https://trello.com/osc13 which is where we put tasks and work on them.

Now let's talk in numbers:

So far we have 111 total tasks separated in 3 sections. The Sections are Program - Promo - Venue.

We have a total of 22 tasks in Program. From those 22 tasks we have 17 on 'To Do', 1 on 'Doing' and 4 on 'Done'.

We have a total of 64 tasks in Promo. From those 64 tasks we have 11 on 'To Do', 15 on 'Doing' and 38 on 'Done'.

We have a total of 25 tasks in Venue. From those 25 tasks we have 15 on 'To Do', 4 on 'Doing' and 6 on 'Done'.

We also have tasks that were finished even before reaching https://trello.com/osc13 , like articles or gathering some equipment that we already have in our possession.

In order to finish all that tasks many work hours where spent, many people were on to them and many fights between us where given so that we succeed the best possible result. This is something I really want to point out. We fight over a lot of things, mostly because we want to do things perfect, have in mind that this is a good thing and in the end of the day we are more bonded than before. We are closer because we understand more the person we are working with. This leads to less fights and better results as we continue. If you have a solvent character those fights make you better in many ways.

One thing I really like this year is that everyone of the people I've worked with so far is ready to take one for the team. Another is that we all want the same thing, to make this Conference the best possible.

If you have some time and you want to be a part of this team then join us at https://trello.com/osc13 and help. If you have the will to do things, even if you feel you can't do anything, there are people there who will be happy to help you finishing tasks. Help needed, help wanted and help can be provided.

Jos Poortvliet: LinuxTag Awesomeness!

@ 05:30 UTCmember

Heya,

Tomorrow LinuxTag starts again. There'll be an openSUSE booth, although we won't be overstaffed this year. If you're up for helping, that would be greatly appreciated. You don't have to be a super technical person to be at a booth and help out: if you follow some blogs around openSUSE you already know more than most visitors and you can help out just fine! It's how I got started...

See you at LinuxTag! You can find us Geekos at Hall 7.1a, Booth 130.

Monday
20 May, 2013

Michael Meeks: 2013-05-20: Monday.

@ 21:00 UTCmember

Up early, mail chew; plugged at some make check failures, and tested build pieces on Windows and Linux. Built slideware, Lunch. Back to mail, debugging and patch review for the freeze. Worked late.

Jos Poortvliet: Consensus decision making

@ 12:53 UTCmember

Jono blogged about respect in community discussions. I have zero to say on the storm-in-a-teacup (his words) that started it other than, perhaps, suggest that when there are waves, there is wind. But whatever direction that wind blows, I'd like to focus on something else. Jono made the following statement:

Ubuntu is not a consensus-based community. Consensus communities rarely work, and I am not aware of any Open Source project that bases their work on wider consensus in the community.

I'm not entirely sure what he means with consensus and community here. He himself defines community as "a collection of people (or animals) who interact with one another in the same environment". Consensus decision making, according to Wikipedia, is:

"a group decision making process that seeks the consent of all participants. Consensus may be defined professionally as an acceptable resolution, one that can be supported, even if not the "favourite" of each individual"

Talking consensus

Let me take this as an opportunity to address a common misconception about consensus: that consensus means full agreement. The Wikipedia entry already points out that the outcome has to be 'acceptable', one that 'can be supported'. This matters: Jono probably meant to say that there is no sizeable community where everybody fully agrees on every decision and I can't imagine he is wrong on that. But that is not what consensus means.

(dis)agreement

The reality is that in a large and diverse group of people, it is impossible to really reach full agreement on any sufficiently complicated matter. Making decisions on agreement of all participants thus doesn't work. Consensus, instead, allows a decision to be made even in the face of disagreement. Essentially, it is a form of democracy without voting.

Ever heard the phrase: "Let's agree to disagree"? That is it: at some point in a decision making process, consensus requires some of the participants to be mature enough to step out of the way and let a decision actually get made. And others need to respect them for that.

Voluntairy

What makes consensus different from voting?

Usually, those in a small minority are the ones who have to (wo)man up and accept that the decision and project is more important than them. The main difference between voting however, where minorities (anything below 50%, usually) don't get their way, is that it is not mandatory. In some cases, the minority can get their way and it can be the majority which steps back and lets them. And even if that doesn't happen, the difference between being forcefully over-ruled and gracefully accepting that you can't always win is big.

A second key point is that ruling by consensus requires discussion, much more than voting does. You can't make decisions by consensus without informing people of the choices - you have to know what you (dis)agree with. Certainly, a community where a few take decisions without talking about it does not decide based on …

Cornelius Schumacher: Don't sell free software cheap

@ 11:11 UTCmember

How can I get paid for free software development? That's a question many developers ask. And it's a good question, because software development is expensive, no matter what the license is. Money is one way to pay for this, but fortunately there are many other ways to get paid for free software. The one thing you should never do, though, is to sell free software cheap.

It's tempting. Put some ads on your blog, a donation button on the project page, get a low paid student job, etc. It's fine, if you can work on free software, right? Some money is better than nothing, isn't it?

No, it isn't. Because it interferes with other ways of being compensated for free software development, such as reputation, control, freedom, learning, or just satisfying your curiosity. Money adds dynamics which can go against these. It changes to whom you are accountable, it alters expectations, and it can actually harm your motivation, because money is a bad motivator. So you need to be very careful when putting money into the equation.

That doesn't mean that there are no good ways to get paid money for free software development. In fact an increasing number of companies have realized that they are better off developing a good part of their software as free software, and they don't compromise on quality or payment. So there are well-paid jobs for free software developers. Guess who gets these jobs. Not those who do it for cheap, but those who have built up a good reputation as a free software developer.

Contributing to free software actually is a great way to build up a career. You are in control. You don't need a university or company program, you can start any time. You can build a reputation doing something you want, something that matters. You can learn and grow following your passion. This is a great foundation for a professional career, and studies show that committers to free software actually get higher salaries than those who don't do this.

Your work on free software is an investment in your happiness, your career, and a better world. Don't sell it cheap.

openSUSE News: Be a volunteer at oSC13, it matters

@ 08:18 UTC

Master oSC13 Kostas just published his “only 58 days to go” blog in his series of daily how are we doing posts and it should be clear that with less than two months to go, we’re getting close! openSUSE conference 2013 is already just around the corner… And starting today, you can sign up to volunteer and help out at the venue!

Join the Team

Many people are already helping with the organization in trello.com/osc13 – if you have not seen where we are yet, just follow the link and check it out! We want to organize our event as openly as possible, and Trello is a great way of doing that.

But there is more than preparation. We also need an ‘army on the ground’: the people who make it happen on the conference days! If you want to get more involved and help out during the conference days, you can apply to be a volunteer for oSC13 by filling out the form at http://bit.ly/10s5HDJ. We need you!

Training

One important thing to have in mind is that ALL Volunteers must attend the Volunteers Training, which means that you have to be at the venue on the 18th of July at noon. This year the training of the volunteers will be something you have never seen before. Beyond the regular volunteer training you will be able to get some basic knowledge on First Aid and how to react on-site in case of emergency or disaster (such as a fire or an earthquake). All the training will be conducted by professionals. Our purpose is for volunteers to acquire knowledge that can be used basically everywhere.

The Awesome Greeko’s at oSC12 in Prague

About oSC13

As a quick refresher of your memory, this year the openSUSE Conference takes place in the beautiful city of Thessaloniki, Greece. The to-be-awesome event is organized by our Greekos, an elite team of Greek contributors to openSUSE.

The event is shaping up to be a one-of-a-kind, bringing together the beautiful beaches with the incredible history of Greece in one inspiring place. And you can be a part of it!

Kostas Koudaras: Organizing oSC13 - 58 days before

@ 06:19 UTCmember

Meetings-planning-searching-meetings and here we go again meetings-planning-searching-meetings. Of course not always with that turn and some times with even more meetings. Having A LOT of meetings is the necessary 'evil' when organizing a conference. In meetings you get to interact with other people, get feedback and generate new ideas out of the interaction. You get to know what is going well and what it does not, where you need more things to be done and where you need less things to be done. What works and what it doesn't. Nevertheless meetings although they are necessary for the organization hide what I think is the biggest enemy of an organization. This enemy is Paralysis by analysis.

An experienced person should be able to recognize this after a while but the thing here is that if you fall into this loop, you will have time lost and time as I said before is really precious when you organize an event. Given the fact that within reasonably boundaries anything that you plan can take place, time is your only obstacle. It is the mail reason why many good ideas are left out of the organization of many conferences over the years.

This leads to the conclusion that recognition of Paralysis by analysis after the fact is not enough. When starting to organize something always have that in the back of your head. Avoiding it is not that difficult but at some points require to have a good programming of the meetings. What I've noticed over the year is that most of the times people who cause this are the people who lead and most of those times this happens for 2 reasons.

Case 1: Someone has an idea and you know that this idea is either not viable at the timeline you have or it has failed in the past(there are other reasons too but those are the most common). Now you try to convince this person that you should not do that for X reasons. The person is convinced that the idea is perfect and disagrees with you and you all fall in the loop of trying to prove your point. So after a while you spend more time talking that the actual time that would take for this to be done or for this to be failed. You should have a vision of either let the person do this (if you can afford it) or to have this person directed to documentation or other people so that the person will go look for it and see your point. This problem can be partially predicted while reading the agenda of the meeting and knowing the people you work with. Reading the agenda of the meeting before is always important.

Case 2: I often call that The conference bag problem. You and your team have an idea that will make the conference great. There should be a certain limit of how much time you will spent on talking about anything …

Sunday
19 May, 2013

Michael Meeks: 2013-05-19: Sunday.

@ 21:00 UTCmember

Up lateish; NCC - visiting speaker: empty cross + tomb & occupied throne. Back for lunch, Peter over - caught up with him through the afternoon. Played with babes in the garden and slugged in the evening happily.

Saturday
18 May, 2013

Michael Meeks: 2013-05-18: Saturday.

@ 21:00 UTCmember

Up earlyish; mail chew, poked at builds, and helped babes with games; M. struggling with the concept of minesweeper. Breakfast, out to Noughton Park for a wander around - various tree climbing feats, and a fine wander. Back for a disgracefully late, large, fried breakfast/lunch thing.
E. out to Sue's to play with Sophie; checked and re-started a Windows build.
Pleased to read theregister's take on 3D printed guns - only for the incredibly wealthy, deranged individual that likes to kill at ultra-close range. Annoyed by self promotion and the stupid knee-jerk responses it produces. There is a photo of a far more dangerous, and often cheaper device here, with which you can make a reasonably functional gun that 'actually works(TM)'.
One of the supreme amusements of life is that as soon as you do anything you think is cool & new you find out it's already been done before: see this neat new 3D printer thing ? turns out you didn't meet the self-replicating "anyone who has a lathe can build a lathe" mob of yesteryear (did you miss the industrial revolution perhaps ?). But wait ! surely these un-controllable, self-replicating 3D tools are a radical threat to the civilised world ? - time to ban the lathe, milling machine, drill-press ... toothbrush etc. ? Perhaps not.
Dinner. Argh - git submodules just beat me up again when I least needed it - translations module acting stupidly, and refusing to update - combined with trying to remove that submodule (can you even remove submodules? - and failing).

openSUSE News: Server outages the coming days

@ 10:15 UTC

Believe it or not: a car crashed into the Nuremberg SUSE office building. Our geekos are fine but the power will have to be shut down so repairs can take place. You can expect some availability issues for our servers the coming days. Hopefully things will be back up next week!

Friday
17 May, 2013

Michael Meeks: 2013-05-17: Friday.

@ 21:00 UTCmember

Up early, mail chew, hacking to the 4.1 feature-freeze. Interested to read Open source is not a war zone. Up late working.

Greg Kroah-Hartman: Updated history of the 2.6.16-stable kernel

@ 16:34 UTCmember

A few years ago, I gave a history of the 2.6.32 stable kernel, and mentioned the previous stable kernels as well. I'd like to apologize for not acknowledging the work of Adrian Bunk in maintaining the 2.6.16 stable kernel for 2 years after I gave up on it, allowing it to be used by many people for a very long time.

I've updated the previous post with this information in it at the bottom, for the archives. Again, many apologies, I never meant to ignore the work of this developer.

openSUSE News: openSUSE Kicks Off Development with Milestone 1

@ 09:00 UTC

openSUSE is pleased to announce that the newest Milestone for the upcoming version of openSUSE 13.1. is available for testing. As early version, it is expected that this Milestone is not fully functional or very stable and we welcome bug reports and fixes for the issues. This is the first in a series of upcoming updates to the distribution that will end with the final release of 13.1 projected by November of 2013. As usual with an alpha release, the most prominent changes in openSUSE 13.1 Milestone 1 come from the upgrades that packages are going through.

Major updates

Some major updates below:

GNOME 3.6 > 3.8.1
apache2 2.2.22 > 2.4.3
digikam 3.0.0 > 3.1.0
giflib 4.1.6 > 5.0.3
icecream 0.9.7 > 1.0.0
kernel 3.7.10 > 3.9.0
libreoffice 3.6.3.2.4 > 4.0.2.2.1
ocaml 3.12.1 > 4.00.1
qemu 1.3.0 > 1.4.0
qt-creator 2.6.2 > 2.7.0
ruby 1.9.3 > 2.0
systemd 195 > 202
wpa_supplicant 1.1 > 2.0
xorg-x11-server 1.13.2 > 1.14.1

Most Annoying Bugs

The list of most annoying bugs is still short. We’re looking towards you to help us make that list bigger! We need to find out what’s wrong so we can fix it. You can report bugs with this link. The process of reporting bugs involves a couple of steps that you can take in order to contribute with the distribution. Reporting bugs and problems with the packages is essential for openSUSE to retain its stability. Please review our sections on how to contribute to factory, and submitting bug reports.

You’re more than welcome to organize some bug-finding-and-squashing sessions! Take a look at previous efforts in our last beta-pizza-party!

Planned Changes

Some time ago, the team posted a suggested list of changes for openSUSE 13.1. The idea behind this is to accept the changes provided by the community and at the same time meet specific team goals. Please keep in mind that this list is subject to change but it helps when understanding where the next release of openSUSE would like to go.

For the base system, planned changes include updating GCC to version 4.8 and working on the latest integrations for the Linux Kernel. On booting there was a discussion looking to completely move to SYSTEMD and dropping SYSVINIT. Replacing MKINITRD with Dracut.

On the KDE environment the planned list includes making PHONON support GSTREAMER 1.0 and replacing Kopete, largely unmaintained now, to KDE Telepathy. Gnome is also looking to change a few things in 13.1 starting by adding Gnome 3.10, cleaning out some outdated libraries and changing its default theme to a greener one.

On security the list is simple so far, AppArmor will be promoted further as a preferred security suite and updating SELinux.

Get involved!

This …

Thursday
16 May, 2013

Michael Meeks: 2013-05-16: Thursday.

@ 21:00 UTCmember

Mail chew, poked at misc. bugs; Team meeting, ESC meeting, company meeting; worked late - J. feeling unwell, starting to sicken slightly too.

Nagappan Alagappan: Announce: LDTP 3.5 - Linux GUI test automation tool

@ 08:04 UTC

Highlights:
New API:
* inserttext, objtimeout, guitimeout, getcellsize, getcellvalue,
getobjectnameatcoords, getcombovalue, getaccesskey in Python client
* doubleClick, doubleClickRow, onWindowCreate, getCellSize, getComboValue,
appUnderTest, getAccessKey in Java client
* getcellsize, getcellvalue in Ruby client
* GetCellSize, GetComboValue, AppUnderTest, GetAccessKey, MouseRightClick,
DoubleClick, DoubleClickRow, RightClick in C# client

New control type:
* POPUP MENU for Ubuntu environment

Bugs fixed:
Ruby client:
* Fixed optional arguments to imagecapture
* Check window_name parameter, if empty then use @window_name passed in
constructor

Python client:
* Fixed optional argument APIs to work on both Windows and Linux
* imagecapture x, y offset, height and width parameters are disregarded if
window parameter is provided - Bug#685548
* Return unicode string all the time on gettextvalue
* Fix partial match argument in selectrow, compatible with Windows
* Patch by ebass to support Python 2.6
* Added Errno 101 as we see in ebass Ubuntu 10.04 environment

Core LDTP2
* Include label type on gettextvalue
* Don't include separators in the list

Perl client:
* Added perl client

Credit:
* Sawyer X for the Perl interface
* ebass (IRC nick name)
* Marek Rosa
* Thanks to all others who have reported bugs through forum / email /
in-person / IRC

About LDTP:
Cross Platform GUI Automation tool Linux version is LDTP, Windows version
is Cobra and Mac version is PyATOM.

* Linux version is known to work on GNOME / KDE (QT >= 4.8) / Java Swing /
LibreOffice / Mozilla application on all major Linux distribution.
* Windows version is known to work on application written in .NET / C++ /
Java / QT on Windows XP SP3 / Windows 7 / Windows 8 development version.
* Mac GUI testing is known to work on OS X Snow Leopard/Lion/Mountain Lion.
Where ever PyATOM runs, LDTP should work on it.

Download source / binary (RPM/DEB)

Documentation references: API / JavaDoc

For detailed information on LDTP framework and latest updates visit
http://ldtp.freedesktop.org

Report bugs

To subscribe to LDTP mailing lists

IRC Channel - #ldtp on irc.freenode.net

How can you help: Spread the news and send back your feedback to us

Wednesday
15 May, 2013

Michael Meeks: 2013-05-15: Wednesday.

@ 21:00 UTCmember

Up early; mail chew, merged gallery pieces. Partner call / hand-holding, fixed up SDK packaging, fixed a few gallery snafus.

Kostas Koudaras: Organizing oSC13 - 64 days before

@ 17:39 UTCmember

Rule #64// Cornering confidence increases with time and experience.
This pattern continues until it falls sharply and suddenly.
Taken From http://www.velominati.com/the-rules/

If you ride a bicycle of a motorcycle you should be very familiar with this rule either in theory as written above or in action if you ever slipped in a turn. There are always the bending places and then there is the breaking point of everything. Handling proper situations and 'bending' them when necessarily should also come with the ability of the handler of knowing when something breaks. Knowing and avoiding the breaking point like hell is pretty important. After that last bending point it is you who should come and fill the gap between those bending points. Being lazy for any reason to feel this gap can lead to a total collapse of your whole structure. This is pretty important when organizing something like a conference.

What the organization of a conference is actually looks a lot like a structure made of things that must be there and it is like the foundations of the building, things that is equally important to be there like windows and doors and things that is good to be there but the whole structure can be operational and without all those like the decoration of the building. The shitty thing here is that most of the people who only know a conference as visitors (and attract visitors is one of your the main goals) get all this backwards.

Having the perfect conditions and everything you need to organize a FOSS conference is beyond imagination so in order to do proper work and in the same time keep everyone of your visitors satisfied you have to 'bend' some things. Most of the time it is your patience and you time but many times is your volunteers and your budget. Did I ever mentioned so far that you have to be very creative? Well when organize a conference many times you will have lemons and you will be asked to make orange juice No worries. If you and your team are highly creative, making orange juice out of lemons is just foreplay. It is not impossible and once you do it once or twice then you come to a point when you find it very easy. The time you will find something (in other conditions extreme and undo-able) easy be very careful. This is the point when there is a big change to 'fall sharply and suddenly'. There is nothing wrong with failing up to a point. After that point is when you will start having structure problems. If you pay attention you will only have some bruises, if not...

Chuck Payne: A bug with vm-install and raw images?

@ 16:00 UTCmember

I think I have found a bug in openSUSE 12.3. I have been running raw disk that I create with SUSE Studio with no issues, but in 12.3 I keep getting no boot sector found. Create a app in SUSE Studio, make your disk “USB stick / hard disk image”, once it download it. To [...]

Sascha Peilicke: Open source project licensing

@ 07:31 UTCmember

Whenever you decide to publish some code somewhere in the internet, you have to think about the license. For many of us not being lawyers, this is a rather random choice. Given what we’ve been told is best, we usually just use any GPL flavor or Apache, MIT or BSD and don’t spend much time on the matter. Trouble usually starts when you add 3rd-party dependencies to your code which have different licenses. At first, you wouldn’t care, you only need the functionality. But when it comes to distribution, problems may arise. There’s countless articles on how to mix and match various licenses, which one is compatible to the other, etc. One website I found particularly useful is www.tldrlegal.com. It presents licenses in a brief TL;DR form and allows to compare licenses. Most importantly, it also allows to combine licenses, i.e. what happens if your code becomes LGPL-3.0+ and Apache-2.0 licensed. A very helpful thing:

Filed under: OpenSource, SUSE Tagged: Apache, BSD, code, GPL, LGPL, Licensing, MIT, TL;DR

Federico Mena-Quintero: Tue 2013/May/14

@ 04:02 UTCmember

Emacs, C-SPC, dead keys, and ibus

Some time before or during the GTK+ hackfest, Emacs on my laptop started acting strange. C-SPC wasn't working (a major catastrophe), and when using a Latin American keymap, it was spewing nonsense like <dead-acute> is undefined.

Today I finally figured it out, but just by comparing things between my machine-where-emacs-works and my laptop. It turns out that ibus had gotten installed on my laptop, and it was screwing things up.

TL;DR Emacs stopped handling C-SPC and dead keys; I uninstalled the ibus package and everything works again.

I have no idea of how Emacs users manage to live when they actually need to use ibus for input methods.

Tuesday
14 May, 2013

Michael Meeks: 2013-05-14: Tuesday.

@ 21:00 UTCmember

Up early, packed babes off to school; into Cambridge to finish the patching-up experience; what fun - apparently recovering well: good. Hacked away at mail, and gallery cleanup while being tampered with. Built ESC bug stats. Cell-group with Dave in the evening.

Michal Hrušecký: Spring Europen 2013

@ 17:00 UTCmember

This Monday I was the first time guest and speaker at (contrary to it’s name) local Czech conference Europen. It was interesting experience. And I would like to share a bit of what I experienced. What made it different from conferences I usually speak at was the audience. Not many Linux guys and quite some Windows guys. I was told that this conference is for various IT professionals and people from academia interested in Open Source.

I was asked to speak there about something techy, low-levelly, genericy, and not SUSE only stuff. I offered OBS and Studio introduction as these are crown jewels of openSUSE environment, but I was told that they would prefer something more generic and little bit more hardcore. So in the end I decided to speak about packaging as that is something I do that since a long time ago. And to make it nor a workshop nor SUSE specific talk, I put in two more packaging systems that I worked with apart from rpm – Portage (from Gentoo) and BitBake (from Open Embedded).

Whenever I visit open source event in Czech Republic, I always know quite some people there already. I know the most prominent people from Linux magazines, other distributions and some other people who are big open source enthusiasts. On this conference, I knew something like six attendees in total (and all of them were there to give a talk and not sure what to expect from audience). Almost everybody was running MS Windows with few MacOS exceptions. Really quite different world.

As I said, in the end I spoke about why do we do software packages in Linux and how do we do it. I spoke about rpm and spec files, about Portage and BitBake showing how nice it is to have inheritance. And in the end I put in part about how great OBS is anyway.

From the almost a day I was at the conference, most questions and feedback got LibUCW library, but Martin Mareš gave amazing presentation and he had a really interesting topic. LibUCW is cool. If I’ll find a free time, I’ll write something about it separately. Otherwise audience was quite calm and quiet. For my presentation, I got question about cross-compilation of rpms, so in the end after the talk I could recommend OBS once more

It was definitely interesting experience as these people were mostly out of our usual scope. If you are interested in browsing the slides, you can, sources are on my github, but they contain quite some pages of example recipes that I was commenting on the spot.

Kostas Koudaras: Organizing oSC13 - 65 days before

@ 13:33 UTCmember

Feedback is very important while organizing a conference or when organizing or creating anything. Right feedback when it comes it can give you everything. I mean really everything. It can show you what you are doing right or wrong. It can guide you in avoiding dificult situations. It can give you new ideas. It can save you a lot of time. So it is really important to seek and take feedback.

The most important and immediate source of feedback is yourself and the experience you have. The other is your team's experience. That is why when making a team try find people with experience, not neceserally conference or specific to whatever you do experience but life experience. Almost everything you do has to do with people so having people who know how people work is pretty important.

Another important source is feedback from past events. I read tons of blogs from people that attented past openSUSE Conferences. Finding what people liked and what they didn't is one of the best roadmaps you can get. I have to say here that before deciding to take over a conference is of high importance to make a research to see if you can actually do it.

Other than that feel free to bother people who organized great conferences you attended or you heard of. Never hesitate to ask anything, it is afterall the only way to get answers and feedback :D

Above all things try to stop what you are doing regularly and spend some time by asking people what do they think about what you are doing. I know perfectly well that time is really valuable but this is not at all wasted time. Have in mind that many times you will get feedback that you don't really like, meaning bad feedback that say that you are mistaken, accept it and value it. It can be a life saver if it comes from good source.

The feedback is something that is practically imposible to be finished in one(readable) post so I will continue with this at some other post. Afterall how the hll I will manage to fill 64 more posts?

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Friday24 May, 2013

Felix-Nicolai Müller: Kleine Einführung in citeulike.org

@ 18:59 UTC

Tor Lillqvist: Another marketing achievement in LibreOffice: $(OUTDIR)/inc is gone

@ 15:48 UTC

Thursday23 May, 2013

Michael Meeks: 2013-05-23: Thursday.

@ 21:05 UTCmember

Jos Poortvliet: Getting involved in Free Software

@ 11:42 UTCmember

Step one - Build the Code and get Familiar

Step Two - Hack Something

Step Three - Get it in

Wednesday22 May, 2013

Nagappan Alagappan: [Ann]: Cobra 3.5 - Windows GUI test automation tool

@ 22:36 UTC

Michael Meeks: 2013-05-22: Wednesday.

@ 21:00 UTCmember

Tuesday21 May, 2013

Michael Meeks: 2013-05-21: Tuesday.

@ 21:00 UTCmember

Kostas Koudaras: Organizing oSC13 - 57 days before

@ 11:21 UTCmember

Jos Poortvliet: LinuxTag Awesomeness!

@ 05:30 UTCmember

Monday20 May, 2013

Michael Meeks: 2013-05-20: Monday.

@ 21:00 UTCmember

Jos Poortvliet: Consensus decision making

@ 12:53 UTCmember

Talking consensus

(dis)agreement

Voluntairy

Cornelius Schumacher: Don't sell free software cheap

@ 11:11 UTCmember

openSUSE News: Be a volunteer at oSC13, it matters

@ 08:18 UTC

Join the Team

Training

About oSC13

Kostas Koudaras: Organizing oSC13 - 58 days before

@ 06:19 UTCmember

Sunday19 May, 2013

Michael Meeks: 2013-05-19: Sunday.

@ 21:00 UTCmember

Saturday18 May, 2013

Michael Meeks: 2013-05-18: Saturday.

@ 21:00 UTCmember

openSUSE News: Server outages the coming days

@ 10:15 UTC

Friday17 May, 2013

Michael Meeks: 2013-05-17: Friday.

@ 21:00 UTCmember

Greg Kroah-Hartman: Updated history of the 2.6.16-stable kernel

@ 16:34 UTCmember

openSUSE News: openSUSE Kicks Off Development with Milestone 1

@ 09:00 UTC

Major updates

Most Annoying Bugs

Planned Changes

Get involved!

Thursday16 May, 2013

Michael Meeks: 2013-05-16: Thursday.

@ 21:00 UTCmember

Nagappan Alagappan: Announce: LDTP 3.5 - Linux GUI test automation tool

@ 08:04 UTC

Wednesday15 May, 2013

Michael Meeks: 2013-05-15: Wednesday.

@ 21:00 UTCmember

Kostas Koudaras: Organizing oSC13 - 64 days before

@ 17:39 UTCmember

Chuck Payne: A bug with vm-install and raw images?

@ 16:00 UTCmember

Sascha Peilicke: Open source project licensing

Friday
24 May, 2013

Thursday
23 May, 2013

Wednesday
22 May, 2013

Tuesday
21 May, 2013

Monday
20 May, 2013

Sunday
19 May, 2013

Saturday
18 May, 2013

Friday
17 May, 2013

Thursday
16 May, 2013

Wednesday
15 May, 2013

Tuesday
14 May, 2013