Planet openSUSE

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

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

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

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

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

Zsync efficiently downloads only the changed metadata. Sweet!

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

The next milestone is scheduled for September 30.

OMG!SUSE! team: Inkscape updates abound!

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

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

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

New & improved

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

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

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

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

Install Inkscape for openSUSE 11.3

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

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

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

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

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

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

SUSE Studio: More secure SUSE Gallery

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

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

The security summary will tell you if the appliance contains:

unofficial software sources (repositories)

custom software packages

overlay files (especially executable ones)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any idea anyone? Thanks.

Matthew Ehle: openSUSE 11.3 Impressions

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

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

Network Installation

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

LiveUSB

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

KDE Desktop

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

Overall Impression

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

Nelson Marques: The Plan: Portuguese speaking community census!

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

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

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

User Privacy – This is by far one of the most important things where there can be no flaws! To accomplish this following an ethical conduct that complies with the philosophy of the openSUSE community, we adopted the ESOMAR Code of Conduct for this.

Questionnaire – We will create a sample questionnaire, more generic in English, which we will make available to the openSUSE Community and from which we will translate to Portuguese and make all the cultural adaptations required, also some minor changes to make more objective to our goals.

Software – The software we are going to use is LimeSurvey, which I believe that complies with the community philosophy. The data collected will be processed later by me through IBM’s SPSS (which is the only software I know for doing this, PSPP from GNU is not mature enough. I’m not a programmer, can’t help on that one! Hey maybe it’s a hint?!).

Documentation – I would like also to provide some documentation on topics I believe that might be relevant for the openSUSE Community or any other FOSS Project which needs to do some research. I’m currently looking into doing some ‘classroom’s’ through the IRC in English opened to anyone who wants to attend them. Later I will provide more information on the Planet and through the openSUSE Marketing Mailing List. I’m also considering placing some documentation about how to process the data, how to perform the ‘sampling’ process and so on… This will be most likely available on openSUSE wiki.

Report – The final result of this extensive project is to provide the openSUSE Community and the openSUSE Marketing Team with some data we believe that can become useful in the future. This will be accomplished through a report that will be available on the openSUSE wiki and advertised through the traditional means. It is our belief that knowing where we stand today might help us building a better future and also provide a way to evaluate in the future the efforts applied on the field by our Ambassadors which are working hard to preach ‘the word’.

Some concerns I have:

Databases – After the survey/questionnaire is completed… what to do with the databases? I’m not sure on how the community would like this to be. So please leave some feedback. I would like to comply with all the values of the openSUSE Community.

Notoriety – I would like to enroll the community on this process in order to reach the highest number possible of people to answer this survey, which will be only targeting Portuguese speakers which use/used openSUSE or any other Linux Distribution. Even non-portuguese speakers can help spreading the word!

Future – I would like that this project would be able to deploy to be re-used in the future by the openSUSE Community for any purpose you might need, no matter what project you are using it to. Documentation plays an important role here… I would like to ask also feedback from the community, specially from translation teams to find the best way to create such documentation to help any possible interests in having it translated to other languages. I also hope that through this, I can make the community sensible to the fact that ‘market research’ can be important for your projects and can give us the means to understand a wider community, and hopefully to better answer their needs as a Community and as a Linux distribution which has a high reputation in the FOSS realms.

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

nmarques/ketheriel

Nelson Marques: openSUSE:Tools for Fedora 13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SUSE Studio: Featured appliance - MiniSUSE

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 07:19:43 +0000
As promised, we have a new featured appliance this week and it belongs to Horváth Gergely J.. He will be receiving his Amazon gift card real soon!

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

Nelson Marques: Guerrilla Marketing: something fun…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guerrilla Marketing – IKEA ‘bus stop’, New York

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

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

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

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

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

To not support other distributions

To enlist package maintainers on each distro

To build the packages themselves for each distro

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

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

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

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

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

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

SUSE Studio: Boxy but good enough

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 11:44:09 +0000
We're happy to announce initial Internet Explorer support for SUSE Studio!

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

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

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

Testdrive does not fully work — the sidebar buttons are not enabled and the tabs do not not show up. It seems to be related to a Flash issue.

Sidebar sticking doesn't seem to occur, so you may need to scroll up to see warnings and errors.

Some graphics glitches are visible. This is related to PNG alpha transparency and opacity. It sometimes affects fonts as well. There are a few workarounds already, and we may have to add more.

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

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

SUSE Studio: SUSE Linux Enterpise 11 SP1

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

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

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

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

SUSE Studio: Build openSUSE 11.3 appliances now

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 11:35:53 +0000
It took us a bit longer than expected, but now we are happy to announce, that SUSE Studio now also supports building appliances based on openSUSE 11.3. So you can take advantage of the latest and greatest features, which come with this release of openSUSE. We will continue to support building existing appliances on older openSUSE versions, but new openSUSE based appliances will all be 11.3.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SUSE Studio: New featured appliance of the week!

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 11:34:31 +0000
Congratulations to Patrick Shoaf for landing a spot in our "Featured appliance" section in SUSE Gallery! His winning VMware Open View appliance is a bootable Linux Thin Client that autoloads and runs VMware View 4.5 Open Client. It is available as a live disk image (for USB/Flash and hard drives) as well as live CD/DVD.

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

Michael Meeks: 2010-08-31: Tuesday.

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

Up at 6am, hiked to Preson Park, train to Gatwick, waited for delayed flight. Extremely impressed with the battery life on this new Duo (with SSD). Caught up with the news variously.

Read Simon's excellent position oncontributor agreements, with relation to the (potentially problematic) Project Harmony.

Highly amused by an article in The Economist on 'the cost of weapons'. Learned an important new German term: Eierlegende Wollmilchsau or "egg-producing wool-milk-sow" (apparently this is the A400M specification) - could there really be engineering and business problems with a-priori over-specification ? Another priceless quote:
In Iraq and Afghanistan numbers matter more than firepower. The same applies to warships fighting pirates off the coast of Somalia; a ship cannot be in two places at the same time. As Stalin reputedly said, "Quantity has a quality all of its own".

Read a nice article on gcc with some helpful reminiscence on the egcs/gcc fork and its resolution.

Michael Meeks: 2010-08-30: Monday.

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

Up early, breakfast, out shopping for misc. omitted party items, did some work, lunch. Out shopping again for vegetarian sausages - which live in a carefully camouflagued section of Tescos (in a freezer).

Back for Miriam's party, barbeque mayhem, playing the guitar for various musical games (log-pot tragically failed in the portable CD player), trying to force feed the assorted children & parents, and so on. Good to see Sue, Adam & James too.

Bid farewell to them all; Cheryl kindly dropped me to the station, set off - using the new Android device, which (now I'm not in the middle of no-where) seems to have some great Edge/3G connectivity, even on the train.

Reviewed, merged, and pushed the next set of awesome bootchart2 work from Riccardo. Wondered how I can get an ESRCH (No such process) response from a pread at a valid address, on a memory map of a (live) process' /proc/<pid>/mem particularly when the process is still alive afterwards (with the same pid); most odd.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Federico Mena-Quintero: Mon 2010/Aug/30

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

Rooting the file chooser

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

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

The API makes it easy.

GSList *roots; roots = g_slist_append (NULL, "file:///home/federico"); gtk_file_chooser_set_root_uris (chooser, roots);

And in the following example, the filechooser has been constrained to my $HOME and to /tmp:

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

This is bug 609886 - multiroot support for GtkFileChooser.

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

Bruno Friedmann: Come on ! Join the Bacula developer conference

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

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

Direct information : bacula.org conf page

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

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

Are you interested to:

Meet the Bacula developers in person

Learn how we maintain the source code

Hear some presentations about Bacula from the developers

Want to learn about and help define the Bacula roadmap.

Want to give feedback or ideas directly to the developers.

Learn more about Bacula Systems

Any of a load of other reasons

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

Maps : here

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

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

Sunday 26 Sept. Bacula Systems Open House. Visit the Bacula Systems offices and meet the Bacula developers and the Bacula Systems founders. Totally informal and optional. Day 1: Monday 27 September 2010 Presentations by Bacula developers and anyone else who would like to give a formal presentation (30 to 45 minutes) Tentative program: - Swisscom sharing our experiences with Bacula (SAP backup, ...) - DassIT new Bacula conf file GUI editor - Bacula in Brazil - Linux Bare Metal Recovery - Bacula development process - Bacula Roadmap - Bweb - How Bacula Systems supports the project -- Rob Morrison Day 2: Tuesday 28 September 2010 Birds of a feather meetings: Informal direct conversations with the developers, planning, organizing, ... - Using git - How patches are integrated - Regression testing - CDash regression dashboard - Release cycle - Roadmap discussion and your input Brain storming new backup strategies such as deduplication - How Bacula plugins work - Rpms and how to improve them ... Naturally, we will furnish plenty of beer and pizza and other goodies.

Best regards,
Kern Sibbald

Danny Kukawka: How to calibrate your TabletPC

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

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

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

After installation follow these steps on shell:
# check if xinput_calibrator found any device
user@tablet:~> xinput_calibrator --list
Device "Wacom ISDv4 90 Pen" id=10

# start calib.: for multiple devices use --device option
user@tablet:~> xinput_calibrator
You get this screen, follow the instructions:
You get some output with some instructions as soon as you finished the procedure. The preferred way to setup the tablet/touchscreen with the calibration data is coping a snippet from the output into '/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-calibration.conf' (as root). Here an example for such a snippet:
Section "InputClass"
        Identifier      "calibration"
        MatchProduct    "Wacom ISDv4 90 Pen"
        Option "MinX" "0"
        Option "MaxX" "28606"
        Option "MinY" "0"
        Option "MaxY" "17876"
EndSection
You may need to restart your X-server after setting up the file. If it doesn't work checkout the instructions in the output for other ways to setup the changes.
Tech Tags: TabletPC

openSUSE News: Software Freedom Day is Coming!

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 15:00:24 +0000

On September 18, it is international Software Freedom Day. Software Freedom Day aims to celebrate Free Software and the people behind it. It wants to spread the word about Free Software and help people find each other.

We, the openSUSE community, of course need to be part of this! So this is a call to you all: mark september 18 in your agenda. Check the Software Freedom Day website and find the meeting in your neighboorhood.

If there is none, how about setting one up? Go to the Start Guide and get to work. You can organize your own event!

Of course, openSUSE will help you. If you plan to go to an event or organize one, get in contact with us at marketing@opensuse.org ! If you mail us your information we can send you a package with openSUSE Promo DVD’s, a poster and some stickers so you can be an ambassador for openSUSE at your local event.

Help us spread the word!

Greetings,

The openSUSE marketing team

OMG!SUSE! team: QOTD: What's your killer app

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 12:00:00 +0000

As I look around my office, a wasteland of machines I've collected over the years, I feel quite proud of how many of their lives have been extended thanks to open source operating systems. An iBook G4 running NetBSD serving up media, a partially disassembled Eee PC 701 with an Ubuntu Netbook Remix on it, a Soekris net4801 and a Thinkpad T43 running FreeBSD, a couple standard desktops and laptops running openSUSE and then...the Macs.

Years ago I was a Mac developer, I loved (and still do to some extent) the Mac platform for all its integrated goodness from a user's perspective but also from a developer's perspective. After the release of the iPhone, the writing on the wall was clear to me, this platform was doomed to be locked down, and I started migrating everything to open source operating systems.

Why do I still have machines running Mac OS X? Two words: net flix, okay, one word, Netflix.

I remember chiding friends who used Windows to "play games" for choosing to be locked into such a platform, and now I find myself in a similar boat. For them, their PC games were the biggest reason to stick to Windows, for me Netflix is the killer app.

Built on Silverlight, Netflix's streaming video solution is so close to being available for openSUSE users via the Moonlight project but Microsoft refuses to share Silverlight DRM framework with the Moonlight Team. Netflix alone has kept two Apple computers from succumbing to the ways of the Geeko, which leads me to the QOTD.

The question of the day is: What is the killer-app that prevents you from coming to Linux?

Michael Meeks: 2010-08-29: Sunday.

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 21:00:00 +0000

Lie in, off to All Saints (NCC not meeting it seems). Max preached briefly, good to walk homw with Bronie & Robin (recently avoiding death in a falling ladder episode).

Had Effie and Dee over for lunch, lovely to spend some time with them. Set too cleaning the house a little for the onslaught of babies tomorrow. Girls watched the lame children's movie: Stuart Little.

Got accidentally swallowed by Hannah's bed-time story: the Lord of the Rings; stayed up deep into the night getting Saruman finished off properly.

Nelson Marques: notify-osd (openSUSE 11.3) with extended configuration!

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 19:44:23 +0000

I’m in the process of doing some more unconventional packages for GNOME due to a personal project which I will call ‘MERC’, a all around toolkit that will work from a USB stick, featuring mainly networking diagnose/audit utilities alongside with some more cool stuff… and a second, ‘MERC Retro’ which will work on the same principals, but offering a set of emulators for retro platforms such as ZX Spectrum and Commodore64 / Commodore Amiga 500/1200.

I’ve decided to use SUSE Studio to accomplish this, because it’s attractive and easy to use and specially because it seems to interact very good with OBS platform. Another of the cool interesting characteristics of openSUSE 11.3 it’s the package dependency structure which very flexible. I’ve looked first into Fedora 13, but the main problem was that for instance ‘notification-daemon’ dependencies would take me into torturous ways, like forcing me to repackage nearly all GNOME, or eventually go the evil wicked way of enforcing ‘–nodeps’ here and there alongside with a couple of ‘–force’ carnage.

I’m doing some testing and I can’t certify that my packaging of notify-osd is following the guidelines of openSUSE, either way it’s working solid as a rock on my testing machines, even with some cool scripts which pump lots of un-usefull stuff into notifications like file copying, permission changing etc…

I’ve also decided to include on this package the ‘leolik patch‘ which allows further configuration for Notify OSD, for example, the introduction of a .notify-osd file in user’s home which allows to tweak it and theme it properly. It’s nice, no longer it looks like Ubuntu anymore!

My packages are available on my OBS Repository in case any GNOME users want to check it… they were built from the latest source code in Launchpad repository and patched with leolik’s patch.

Any feedback is most welcomed, specially regarding packaging guidelines. This is basically the start of a new learning curve for me and all help is most welcomed, specially considering that I’m a ‘Marketing drone’ and not an engineer or someone with formation on Software Engineering.

Regarding the ~/.notify-osd file this can be edited using you preferred text editor (emacs, vim, gedit, etc) and the contents are pretty much self explanatory:

slot-allocation = dynamic
bubble-expire-timeout = 10sec
bubble-vertical-gap = 10px
bubble-horizontal-gap = 10px
bubble-corner-radius = 50,5%
bubble-icon-size = 36px
bubble-gauge-size = 5px
bubble-width = 320px
bubble-background-color = e0d6ba
bubble-background-opacity = 100%
text-margin-size = 15px
text-title-size = 100%
text-title-weight = bold
text-title-color = 008000
text-title-opacity = 100%
text-body-size = 100%
text-body-weight = normal
text-body-color = 152114
text-body-opacity = 100%
text-shadow-opacity = 25%

Feel free to add my OBS repository and check it out! Any feedback is most welcome! Eventually if you decide to add my repository to zypper which will feature more software in the future (starting working on Unity dependencies), that can be accomplished by doing the following:

* Create a file named ketheriel.repo on /etc/zypp/repos.d with the following contents:

[Ketheriel's Den]
name=Ketheriel’s Den – openSUSE_11.3
enabled=1
autorefresh=1
baseurl=http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home/ketheriel/openSUSE_11.3/
type=rpm-md
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home/ketheriel/openSUSE_11.3/repodata/repomd.xml.key
keeppackages=0

* Fire up your preferred method to install packages (YaST, zypper) and check out for ‘notify-osd‘.

I have currently the following packages on my repository:
* notify-osd
* gtk2-engine-murrine (development snapshot from git)
* gtk2-engine-equinox (1.20)

And will soon add the following:
* faenza-icon-theme
* unity (with dependencies, some are already available through packman repository like the Vala packages)
* nautilus-elementary (with dependencies)

Sirko Kemter: openSUSE T-Shirt motive

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 11:37:02 +0000

A week ago asked michl on opensuse-artwork list for a design for the next genereation of tshirts. Interesting since then the most doing t-shirt motive for the openSUSE Conference. Javier had a nice idea putting the shape of Nuremberg in the background. And thats what I have in mind right now as shirt for openSUSE Conference.

For the next generation of tshirts I working on a graffiti-styled serie but they are not really ready for showing yet. When you have some ideas for the shirts? Join the discussion on artwork-list.

Martin Vidner: n2n package improved

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 08:23:19 +0000
Root.cz recently ran an article (in Czech) about the n2n virtual private network sofware, an open alternative to Hamachi. I intend to use it to cross the NAT in my mom's DSL modem so that I can connect to her computer with ssh and VNC.
Thanks to happyman_eric and Grief, openSUSE Build Service already contained a package. I have made an improved version, adding an init script and a sysconfig file. Get the sources in my home project, or the binaries.

Michael Meeks: 2010-08-28: Saturday.

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 21:00:00 +0000

Up early, packed everything into the car, roof-box, etc. Off to see Sandra's to swim in the pool again - M. finally shed her fear of the water and started swimming lengths at crazy speed in her swimming ring, good.

Picked some apples, had lunch, bid 'bye to the parents & thanks for their help, and set off to drive home. Three and a bit hours later (a very clear drive) arrived.

Unpacked variously, fed the babes, read them stories. Started on the inbox, oh dear ... perhaps a mistake; but it's a bank holiday on Monday too it seems.

Interested to read that Wheat has been tentatively sequenced:
The wheat genome is the largest genome decoded to date. It is five times larger than the human genome and is known to be a very complex structure, comprised of three independent genomes.(BBC)
Interesting - if you were astounded by having an ~identical genome to a chimpanzee, perhaps it is time to get a bigger-is-better inferiority complex going with your breakfast cereal; alternatively - time to start collecting base-pairs (or chromosomes ?).