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Wednesday
16 May, 2012


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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.


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Logo LinuxTagEuropes 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.


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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!

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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. 

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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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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


Tuesday
15 May, 2012


Jakub Steiner: Symbolic Icons

20:18 UTCmember

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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.


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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.)


Monday
14 May, 2012


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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

Sunday
13 May, 2012


Jos Poortvliet: SUSE 20 years old!

22:49 UTCmember

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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!

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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 with Elektra on LGM 2012 Vienna

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.


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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

Flattr this

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".


Saturday
12 May, 2012


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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:


Friday
11 May, 2012


Jos Poortvliet: fork on github?

13:44 UTCmember

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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 ;-)

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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?


Thursday
10 May, 2012


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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


face

Dear folks, I am very pleased to announce:
The Sesha Inventory application is ready for Horde 5 and it is in good shape. Sesha is a simple inventory keeping application which originally developed by Bo Daley and Andrew Coleman on Horde 3. The product was never officially released but it went into production at several sites. Sesha release cycle can now start together with the Horde 5 Alpha release cycle.

Sesha inventory can be configured to hold any number of stock categories with any number and type of attributes.
Like the original version, Sesha for Horde 5 can provide its stock categories as ticket queues for the horde ticketing application whups.
There are a lot of plans and ideas for upcoming versions but for this time the focus was on finishing a releasable product.There are no surprises for existing users of Horde 3 based sesha. Most work happened invisibly under the hood:

  • The Horde_Template library was exchanged by new Horde_View code
  • A migration script for database was added
  • Users can keep their original Horde 3 Sesha tables and data.
  • The sql backend driver was completely reworked into a driver based on the Horde_Rdo ORM library The new Driver Api provides enhanced search capabilities but the current frontend doesn’t make use of it. I do not plan to add any features to the classic view but start working on an Ajax view once the Horde 5 Redesign is completed. This may ship with Sesha 1.1 later on.
  • Object oriented code has replaced complicated hashes in many places

The Horde Rdo library is the new work horse inside Sesha. Rdo means Rampage Data Objects and is a lightweight ORM layer by Horde founder Chuck Hagenbuch. It maps database tables to PHP Objects. This is similar to the ActiveRecord pattern. Each database row can be turned into one Rdo item. For Sesha and another – non-public – software project, some enhancements went into the Rdo library for Horde 5:

  • Rdo now provides a caching factory or root object which speeds up creation of mapper objects
  • Methods for add, removing or checking many-to-many relations have been added
  • A number of edge case bugs have been fixed

I think the Horde 5 release cycle will start with alpha1 releases sometime in May. I know we’re a little late but it’s worth the wait.
That said, I welcome any early testing or updates of the language files. Provided everything works as expected, Sesha will be shipped with Horde 5 for OpenSUSE 12.2


Klaas Freitag: Cross platform again

19:01 UTCmember

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Writing cross platform code is easy nowadays. You use Qt, implement stuff, and it compiles and runs almost everywhere. I also enjoy that in my work on the ownCloud desktop client. But, as you know, there is the other part in the client called csync. Its the syncing engine underneath. And that does not build up on Qt, but is plain C. Adventure starts here.

This bug took me on an interesting (well…) journey into what cross platform really means.It is about a complex thing like filenames containing special characters, my favorite example is the directory “Übergröße”. Directories and files like this could not successfully be synced with the latest client.

Windows does not utf8 by default. As far as I understood it, it does a local encoding by default. If you use normal C functions to access the filesystem, something like readdir or so, you get the names in that encoding. But, because that caused problems in some point, there is another set of functions which often start with _w (for example _wreaddir) and that has an interface to deal with wide characters. This is the way to internationalization.

So what needs to be done is to use the wide character implementations everywhere where you deal with filenames (in my case). That, in turn, requires to use wchar_t instead of normal char. But that again requires a lot of #ifdef _WIN32, if its done the naive way at every place it needs to be done. I learned that typedef helps here and a meta type is defined called _TCHAR. And also for all the needed functions, meta functions are defined which are replaced by tricky defines depending on the platform. For example _treaddir becomes readdir on linux and _wreaddir on win32, while _TCHAR becomes wchar_t on Win and char on linux. The code is written using the meta types to not poison it too much with platform ifdefs.

But that is only the first step. Wide character is not utf8! And since utf8 should be used within the software all over, a conversion from wide character to utf8 and back is needed whenever the file system is accessed. Thankfully from csyncs nature, these places are quite nicely concentrated.

All that combines into a larger patch. And now the “Übergröße” folder can be synced correctly from Windows to Linux and back. Great.

What can we learn from that? Well, easy, and once again: If you have no Qt, you’re alone. Better don’t let that happen. If you have Qt, be happy and aware of what it does for you :-)



Jakub Steiner: Cyrillic

12:21 UTCmember

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Allan has done a great job giving an overview of what we’ve been focusing on recently among the design team. This still leaves some room for me to give a peek on some of the details of what’s coming.

One of the decisions we made for GNOME 3 in terms of identity, was embracing Dave Crossland’s Cantarell and its open source pedigree and making the typeface our own. So far I have only been humbly shaping minor aspects of the typeface, but a long standing issue has been left long untouched, support for Cyrillic. Typeface design is certainly going outside my comfort zone. Luckily most of the glyphs can be dealt with by borrowing from their latin counterparts. The major part of the work involved (and will involve) some shape tweaks, metrics and hinting. Again, the bold weight poses bigger challenges at small sizes, which is our main focus.

Substituted cyrillic glyphs were all sorts of broken.

.

As you can see, there’s still some tweaking left to do on the shapes and hints before rolling out 0.0.9, but those not intimidated by jhbuild, please give it a go so you can help me identify issues that aren’t apprent to me. Another set Cantarell needs to support is Greek, as it’s stylistictically required to keep close to the Latin set.


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Notification to speakers

The GUADEC 2012 programme committee took a bit more time than first anticipated to evaluate all talk submissions, but it's now all done: this morning, we finally sent the notification to speakers. Thanks to everyone who submitted a talk: it looks like we'll have a great GUADEC :-) Of course, we still need to create the schedule, but that should be trivial, right? (hmm...)

If you submitted a talk and didn't get a positive or negative answer by mail, please first check your spam folder: mail is from guadec-papers, and contains Your talk at GUADEC 2012 in the subject. If you don't find anything, feel free to ping me.

Help organize the lightning talks!

Next step is the call for lightning talks and for BoFs! I guess this will happen in the next few days. I don't think we have anyone in charge of this yet, so if that's something you'd like to help with, just drop us a quick mail on guadec-list and we'll happily give you a I'm fantastic: I'm helping organize GUADEC badge ;-)


Michal Čihař: Weblate 1.0

10:00 UTC

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After few weeks of heavy testing, Weblate 1.0 has been released today.

Compared to 0.9 there are just minor changes and bug fixes. The most important thing is that Weblate should be now really ready to use :-).

Full list of changes for 1.0:

  • Improved validation while adding/saving subproject.
  • Experimental support for Android resource files (needs patched ttkit).
  • Updates from hooks are run in background.
  • Improved installation instructions.
  • Improved navigation in dictionary.

You can find more information about Weblate on it's website, the code is hosted on Github. If you are curious how it looks, you can try it out on demo server. You can login there with demo account using demo password or register your own user. Ready to run appliances can be found in SUSE Studio Gallery.

Weblate is also being used https://l10n.cihar.com/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, Gammu, Weblate itself and others.

If you are free software project which would like to use Weblate, I'm happy to help you with set up or even host Weblate for you (this will be decided case by case as my hosting space is limited).

Filed under: English Phpmyadmin Suse Weblate | 0 comments | Flattr this!


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Work related i do a lot of things with MySQL/MariaDB. If you ever wanted to real-time monitor your system i guess you want to use mytop as well

S | Name  | Summary               | Type
--+-------+-----------------------+--------
  | mytop | A top Clone for MySQL | package

you can easily install it with

zypper in mytop

Now you can start it with

mytop -p <passord> -s 1

The option

  • -p tell it to use the password during connection
  • -s <seconds> tells the update intervall

Now you should see something like

MySQL on localhost (5.5.23-MariaDB-mariadb1~squeeze-log)   up 24+03:17:13 [11:27:05]
 Queries: 271.0   qps:    0 Slow:     0.0         Se/In/Up/De(%):    121540/00/00/00
              qps now:    2 Slow qps: 0.0  Threads:    2 (   1/  17) 00/00/00/00
 Key Efficiency: 98.8%  Bps in/out:   0.0/  0.8   Now in/out:  41.4/11.3k

        Id      User         Host/IP         DB      Time    Cmd Query or State
        --      ----         -------         --      ----    --- --------------
     47030      root       localhost                    0  Query show full processlist
     47033   froxlor localhost:47453    froxlor        57  Sleep

Wednesday
09 May, 2012


Michael Meeks: 2012-05-09: Wednesday

21:00 UTCmember

face
  • Up lateish; mail, patch review, merge, cherry-picking etc. Dug into grammar checker related slowness from Daniel's nice notes. Poked away at scripting, and mailing people, worked late.

face
 
News

Since 17 Issues the open-slx Newsteam publishes a Weekly News in the german language called "open-slx Wochenrückblick". The "Wochenrückblick" was the successor of the meanwhile discontinued german openSUSE Weekly News Project. With the beginning of the year 2012 a new Newsteam has formed that publishes regularly round about the Linuxworld. Interesting Stuff from the Distributions and also new topics like Plasma Active, Mer, Tizen and Android was collected. Just now the Linuxworld in its mobile form is very interesting.

Now we're pleased to announce a new open-slx publication called "open-slx Weekly News". We're planning to publish this weekly on the same day as the german version, starting with the next Issue.

If you can read and write in the english ölanguage, and would like to contribute into the new publication, just net us know and write to: newsteam@open-slx.de.

For both languages we're continually searching for Communitymembers who want to write little abstracts from other articles, or who collects interesting news or just proofread a new issue.

We're looking forward to see you soon :-)

Flattr this


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Our Provo data center will take down a few server starting today at 6pm local time (MDT) which is 10th of May, 0:00 UTC. The downtime is expected to last for three hours.

The following openSUSE services might be effected:

  • all openSUSE wiki instances, e.g. en.opensuse.org
  • the wordpress instances like news.opensuse.org and lizards.opensuse.org
  • the forums at forums.opensuse.org

 


Rajko Matovic: Apper

04:14 UTC

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Some applications seems unlucky to find their way in the hearts their intended users. Reading today  thread  "What does this error message mean?", I can see Apper sinking another few notches. Is it Apper's fault? The answer is not, but being visible component that appears when disharmony in software management shows up, it can fall as a victim. Use Google to find out about "opensuse apper" and


Tuesday
08 May, 2012


Michael Meeks: 2012-05-08: Tuesday

21:00 UTCmember

face
  • Up, poked mail, worked through license E-mailage, updating the wiki etc. Got idly curious & poked my pile of perl at my Apache OpenOffice (incubating) git repo. Omitting Rob Weir's checkin of everything, hdu's removal of tango and Andrew Rist's changing of header licenses, it's interesting to see out of the ~66k files in the repo, less than 4k have any other changes: 6% of files changed even slightly, filtering just for .[ch]* the same number - 6% - ho hum.
  • It is amusing to me that the "developers from over 21 corporate affiliations" advertised by Apache OpenOffice (incubating), are never enumerated; presumably many are co-incidental employers of free-time volunteers rather than official supporters of the project; and odd given the 23 committers in the last year that Ohloh suggests.
  • Matus got his collaborative editing session going, so we're all set for some Google Summer of Code goodness. Worked away until Lydia & Janice over for dinner.
  • Worked through bugs with patches in the evening, pushing them to people for review, and merging a good few.

Monday
07 May, 2012


Michael Meeks: 2012-05-07: Monday

21:00 UTCmember

face
  • Up earlyish; packed everyone into the car and off to the Dinosaur park near Norwich. Played outside on the wonderful climbing facilities, enjoyed the various trails. Had a picnic lunch.
  • Enjoyed the farm / zoo, sheepdog demonstration, goat feeding, hand-washing, stamping of sheets etc.
  • Back to the soft-play area - really an impressive new addition to the park: a set of three drop-slides and play areas - in a world where the nanny state bans ever more fun things, big drop-slides for three-year-olds is one thing I didn't enjoy as a child - fun.
  • Fish and chips on the way home, bed.

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I finished my monthly column for Linux User last night - way late, as usual. It was about a number of projects openSUSE has going on to improve software installation. Porting Ubuntu Software Center to PackageKit, website integration in OBS, the improved online software store and last but not least the release of the snapper website. And I noted that all of these are cross-distribution: we're not just trying to improve openSUSE, we're trying to improve all Free Software. And it's not just us - I feel there is more and more collaboration in the Linux space (not that there aren't exceptions of course).

As conclusion, I wrote that

I personally believe that any project which fails to have this ambition will fail to really make a difference in the long run. Free Software is not just about 'abiding by the rules of the GPL' - it is about working with others.

What happens if you don't collaborate?

Let's talk about that. Who remembers Xandros? Linspire? They once were quite popular Linux distributions. So, they contributed a lot back to Free Software, right? Not really... They didn't work up-stream, instead, they built unique features like the Xandros Filemanager and Linspire's software management tools. Sounds familiar? right...

So, I believe that if you try to isolate yourself from the rest of the Free Software world, you're not only doing yourself a disservice, but all of Free Software. You can claim you contribute - lots and lots. Bringing in new users, making things simpler for end users (that's what Linspire and Xandros said, yes). But if you don't do it in a collaborative fashion, you have to carry more and more load yourself. Red Hat and Novell learned that the hard way - and now both companies have a strong policy: nothing goes in unless it is upstream. Yes, that benefits Free Software, of course. It's how we work. Even Google gets that and puts in significant resources to get their changes in the Linux kernel.

If you don't do that - you're work is irrelevant for the future of Free Software. Distribution-specific package managers are a great example: any distro hopper who has been around for a while can't count the different tools he/she has been using on two hands anymore. I know I can't. Most of these were cool, really. And most are dead code these days. Let me repeat:
non-collaborative efforts fail to make a difference for Software Freedom in the long run

But... but... but...

You'll say: but the code is free! Yes, it is. Which is about as valuable as... Let's see - how many distribution-specific package managers have been ported to others? Exactly. Very few. And most of those have very quiet lives. You say - but Linspire did lots of marketing. We brought new users in contact with Linux. That's cool, don't get me wrong. But at the same time they were


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openSUSE contains many independent software projects that have an "upstream" - for example the GNOME desktop in openSUSE is developed mainly by the upstream GNOME community, and the openSUSE developers add integration to make a distribution polished and easy to use. Integration consists of packaging, testing, bugfixing and some extra customization and development. Also the openSUSE developers talk with the GNOME developers about their needs and problems.

It's good practice to push everything upstream and then the upstream community might just accept the change, ask for changes, or even reject it.

Similarly, for SUSE Linux Enterprise openSUSE is an upstream development - and the openSUSE community with its release team can decide what to do with changes or requests coming from downstream (SUSE Linux Enterprise).

Also, SUSE as a company, has developers working in upstream projects like GNOME or the Linux kernel as well as in the upstream openSUSE and for sure on SUSE Linux Enterprise.

There are different ways to integrate: Some of that work will be done downstream first and then pushed upstream - and others will be done upstream with the intent to have it downstream later.

openSUSE 12.1 saw for example the integration of snapper - a snapshoting tool for BtrFS where development was driven by SUSE Linux Enterprise needs with the goal to have it in SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 Service Pack 2. It was stable, integrated without problems into openSUSE Factory and thus was added in time for openSUSE 12.1.

Note that SUSE Linux Enterprise as a distribution selects packages from openSUSE, adds some of its own, especially own branding packages, might have some different policies (e.g. how to partition or regarding security) and a different installation work flow. Before a release is done, the distribution need to run on all supported architectures - currently x86, x86-64, System z, Power, Itanium -, gets tested extensively which makes bugfixes necessary and gets certified by ISVs and IHVs and passes certifications like LSB or for IPv6 compliance. This testing leads to fixes that then go back to the upstreams - to the openSUSE distribution and the upstream open source projects.

A recent example: The testing for SLE 11 SP2 on Linux 3.0 resulted in a number of fixes. These went in the upstream kernel and thus became via upstream part of the Linux kernel that openSUSE uses. Many of these patches were also added directly to the openSUSE kernel.

So, SUSE Linux Enterprise is working in many ways similar with upstream as the openSUSE GNOME team with the upstream GNOME project: both take packages from upstream, add own branding, have refined polices from upstream, send patches etc.

What hasn't been done loudly in the past is raising voice - the SUSE Linux Enterprise developers  and product managers raising their voice on what they need for their product and therefore would like to have from openSUSE and discuss how this can be done best. I expect to see more of this engagement of the openSUSE community by the SUSE


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Introduce my self

My name is Athanasios-Ilias Rousinopoulos. I am an openSUSE Ambassador and an active member of openSUSE Community. This year i participate in Google Summer of Code with openSUSE .[0]. My project is called “Ambassador/Event plugin for openSUSE Connect”.

Introduce my project

As an openSUSE  Ambassador  [1] i participate in conferences , make presentations and promote openSUSE to the people. openSUSE Connect is the social network of openSUSE Project (based on Elgg ). In my opinion openSUSE Connect  it is more than a useful tool. Ambassadors , members of openSUSE community do use it in order to communicate , form groups , follow other people, create events ,create polls  etc. Although it is a useful tool , it does suffer from some deficiencies. As an ambassador i found using the wiki in order to manage the community events not a good idea at all. As mentioned before openSUSE Connect is based on Elgg. Elgg is an  open source social networking engine that provides a robust framework on which to build all kinds of social environments. [2]. Elgg provides well-organized documentation [3] for developers. Furthermore Bug tracker is also available [4] . Besides Elgg has its own API Reference [5] which developers can use it. Finally he goal of my project is to create a plugin (developed in Elgg) which allows the users planning of events in openSUSE Connect , instead of using the wiki pages so as to create an event. Using this plugin by the community can be more beneficial

Progress

Event #1 (23/04-07/05) [Community Bonding period begins]

What did i do

Until  now i did made my “Contact first steps” [6] which means i talked with my mentor , informed him about my plan. Furthermore i started using Trello as a project management tool. Focusing more on the project i read openSUSE connect’s main features and Installed it as well [7] , [8] , [9]. openSUSE Connect allows create and develop new widgets , plugins and new themes by using the Elgg platform. During installing openSUSE Connect i did face some problems , so i edited the documentation [10] in order to make the installation process easier and more successful. After the installation process i read Elgg’s Wiki Main page [11] , how Elgg’s Engine works , and made my firsts steps with  Elgg Plugin Development. [12] ,[13], [14]. Elgg’s offers some introduction tutorials so as to begin developing your plugin. In addition Elgg offers about 1500 plugins which you can download them and  install them as well. Finally i installed PHP plugin for Eclipse and started using it.

What i am going to do

This week i will focus more on Elgg’s Plugin Development and try to implement the first tutorials [15] . Furthermore i am going to focus on Elgg Plugin Development and read upon the current used event plugin.

Problems &  Solutions

After the installation process i wasn’t able to access Elgg due to an Error message. Also while configuring “System settings” i had to add a folder which is not

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