Planet openSUSE

Jörg Stephan: What comes (12.2, Evergreen)

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 05:09:47 +0000

So, my last post was released some time ago. So what happens since that?

I have seen some post the first milestone of 12.2 is on the way. Trying to find some changelog information was somekind of hard. But i took a look at the current factory versions and i guess they should fit too

http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Factory_versions

i did some search for the packages i normally use ( apache2, php5 and mariadb) and just found only minor changes at the factory list, so while i hope that thats not honored by a list which is not up to date, there should be no problem on my webserver.

I followed some discussion by the evergreen project. As you can see Evergreen ist the LTS version on openSUSE side, or better it should become the LTS. Currently there is a lot of ongoing discussion

http://en.opensuse.org/Evergreen

some of the discussion is usefull (in my opinion) the other stuff is quite boring. In my mind the biggest problem is how to mark a release as evergreen. You cant have every version supported, i guess thats a fact, so maybe every **.2 release should be marked as evergreen. In my opnion 12.1 would be a bad choice to be LTS, caused by to many problems. 11.4 could be LTS for sure, it was a good and stable release (which still runs on my notebook and “live” server systems)

So, we will see what comes

Nelson Marques: Moniz gets one step closer to the reality!

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 21:37:43 +0000

Almost year and half ago in a talk with Javier Llorentz from KDE/openSUSE, we became fond of a Linux distribution oriented to our part of the world, the Iberian Peninsula, fully localized in the several idioms spoken in Spain and of course the Portuguese spoken in mainland Portugal. Many time has gone by and meanwhile Javier published ‘openSUSE IBERIA’, a KDE flavored image of openSUSE localized for Spain and Portugal.

I’ve decided to jump on, but I’ve worked on top of the outstanding GNOME implementation that openSUSE offers to it’s users though I’ve made Cinnamon the default shell for my little child. I’ve also changed completely the default applications to be presented and I’m going to introduce a few cosmetic changes also, trying to take the best out of each niche into my creation.

The name… Moniz, after the Portuguese Knight Martim Moniz, a hero of the Siege of Lisbon in 1147, and a national forgotten hero. The release name… I’ve taken it from the Iberian History, Pelayo, after Don Pelayo, the last Visigoth King that started the “Reconquista“.

The branding colors are Blue and White, and the branding itself alongside with default Desktop Layout has been asked to the Portuguese Community in the Zwame Tech Forums, where the largest part of Linux users hangs around in Portugal.

Currently seeking for a place to call “home” to mirror the openSUSE base distro (so we can have speedy mirrors) and to host the images for Download. Project page is coming soon as well.

This tiny project was made possible greatly due to openSUSE supreme tools: Open Build Service and Kiwi. Soon… the “Reconquista” of the Desktop!

Jeffrey Stedfast: Meet the Hackers

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 12:35:57 +0000

This past week, I've started to get back into photography a bit more (thanks, Nina!) and started taking my camera into the office with me every day to remind myself to take photos. As a result, I've taken a bunch of photographs of my co-workers in the office.

Would you like to meet the hackers?

The Founders

Most of you would probably recognize the infamous Miguel de Icaza, Xamarin's CTO:

Next up is our very own Steve Jobs, Nat Friedman, our CEO and the man who reminds us to pay attention to the details:

Another person many of you will recognize is our very own COO, Joseph Hill:

MonoDevelop Team

Well, okay, I've only got a photo of the famous Michael Hutchinson, but he's a very important player in the development of MonoDevelop.

QA Team

Next up, we have the QA team. They do their best to make sure that we, the developers, didn't break anything. When they aren't testing a specific application before a launch, they hammer away at our products and try to find weak spots in our code (but we still love them anyway!)

This is PJ, and as you can see, he's demonstrating how to QA popcorn corn cobs:

(Did it pass the test, PJ?)

Next up is Lindsey. She's been working on writing automated tests to make it less likely for releases to include regressions. Let's hope she's successful!

Release Team

Alex Corrado is the man behind the curtain. He's our head Release Team engineer and also the brilliant mastermind that started CXXI, the Mono C++ interop project that we hope to give him time to finish someday soon.

Web Team

The newest addition to our ranks (just this week, in fact!), but long-time contributor to the Mono project, is Bojan Rajković. You can see we've already put him to work (he is no doubt puzzling over some ASP.NET code on his screen).

Documentation Team

Nina is the only Cambridge resident on our Docs Team. Specifically, she hacks on our Documentation Portal. She's also the one who has encouraged me to get back into taking photographs, so she'll have to put up with me using her as a guinea pig the most. Here she is taunting me with her hot cup of Chaider:

Michael Meeks: 2012-02-12: Sunday

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 21:00:00 +0000

Even worse, slept fitfully most of the day, N. similarly ill; unpleasant really. Rallied a little in the afternoon, watched some Frozen Planet prettiness.

Petr Baudis: Full-text search in mutt: alternative notmuch integration

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 19:25:23 +0000

If some feature is too slow, you end up conciously avoiding it and losing productivity. This is one of the reasons that we emphasize so much that Git is as fast as it is – you end up using it more because of that. One thing I always found very frustrating was full-text search in mutt; it takes _minutes_ on my mailbox and I end up trying many different header-based queries instead in order to find the mail. But today, I have finally set up notmuch, a very nice and fast mail indexer.

Unfortunately, there was no satisfying way of integrating notmuch with mutt! There is a notmuch-mutt script which creates a temporary maildir with results and moves me there. This was not going to work for me – you cannot make any changes in the “search results list” like deleting mails (I wonder if status would carry if I reply to mails; I suspect not) and in order to get back to your mails, you need to switch mailbox – which implies that your previous position is not restored and that it’s quite slow (few seconds – too much!).

What I envisioned instead was something like the ‘l’imit function that I use very much, just faster. ;-) It turns out that mutt can match message-ids in the limit query and that notmuch can output a list of message-ids of matched mails. Therefore, the most hackish approach is simply to use notmuch to generate a limit specification and perform that – and it turns out that this is good enough (in my scenario)!

Just put these two bindings (or only the first one) in your .muttrc:

# 'L' performs a notmuch query, showing only the results
macro index L "<enter-command>unset wait_key<enter><shell-escape>read -p 'notmuch query: ' x; echo \$x >~/.cache/mutt_terms<enter><limit>~i \"\`notmuch search --output=messages \$(cat ~/.cache/mutt_terms) | head -n 600 | perl -le '@a=<>;chomp@a;s/\^id:// for@a;$,=\"|\";print@a'\`\"<enter>" "show only messages matching a notmuch pattern"
# 'a' shows all messages again (supersedes default <alias> binding)
macro index a "<limit>all\n" "show all messages (undo limit)"

Perhaps sometime in the future, we will get native libnotmuch support in mutt, but I think this is a pretty good substitute for now. :-)

TODO list

the way this snippet prompts using a temporary file is completely absurd; mutt needs to get a builtin prompt function for its macros
only the most recent 600 search hits are shown, since…
…the filtering is grossly inefficient; it is still very fast on my computer, but if mutt could just directly get a list of message ids and match them, things would be much nicer than me abusing the regex matching machinery
the 600 search hits limit is global over all folders, therefore if you have a lot of mails and a lot of folders, searching for a common word may hide even some recent results
notmuch cannot search for substrings, apparently, only whole words
notmuch does not deal with diacritics and other locale transliteration character classes

Cornelius Schumacher: Releasing Polka 0.9

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 12:56:55 +0000

I'm at Osnabrück 10, the tenth edition of the annual meeting of the KDE PIM community at the lovely city of Osnabrück. I took the opportunity to put some finishing touches to the next release of Polka. So here it is: Polka 0.9. I consider it the last beta release before releasing 1.0 as first stable release.

It's still an experiment to provide a new view on the user interface of dealing with people. But it works quite stable and well as it is, and you can give the UI concepts a try. Read more about the concepts in my blog entry "It's not an address book". Get Polka 0.9 by checking it out from git or downloading the release tarball: polka-0.9.tar.gz.

I'm happy about feedback, so if you have comments, questions, or ideas, or would like to discuss Polka, please don't hesitate to get in contact.

Finally as a teaser here also is a sneak peek into another world:

It's not done yet, but there is first build running on the N9. The UI needs some adjustments, but the general concept actually feels right on a phone as well.

Thomas Thym: German labelings of birthdays in KOrganizer

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 11:07:15 +0000

In Kontact/KOrganizer it is possible to view automatically generated birthdays (generated from the addressbook) in your calendar. The generated title of the event is "Geburtstag von %name". In the month view there is not enough space to display the whole title. The result is that in every birthday I can only read "Geburtstag" and not the person who has her/his birthday.

I can see that it is a birthday due to the candle-symbol (yes, that is not a battery symbol) and the colour of the item (calendar colour). (I think the english version is "%name's birthday" where "birthday" is cut away when the text is too long.)

So I filed a bugreport but it seems to be more difficult to get a real good solution for that. However the text is changed (thank you Frederik) in the next version.

I didn't want to wait that long and Burkhard was so kind to give me a howto so I could change it on my local machine. I want to share that with anyone who wants to change that, too (it seems to be a problem in other languages as well). This howto is for openSUSE but you should change that easily to your distro of choise.

0) install package gettext-tools

1) msgunfmt /usr/share/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES/akonadi_birthdays_resource.mo >/tmp/akonadi_birthdays_resource.po

2) edit /tmp/akonadi_birthdays_resource.po

Change "Geburtstag von %1" to "%1 (Geburtstag)"

[shortcuts: i = edit esc = exit edit :wq = save and exit] or use "kwrite" instead of "edit"

3) sudo msgfmt /tmp/akonadi_birthdays_resource.po -o /usr/share/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES /akonadi_birthdays_resource.mo

It takes a view minutes until the titles will be changed.

Michael Meeks: 2012-02-11: Saturday

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 21:00:00 +0000

Slightly brighter, visited by a couple of Jehovah's Witnesses, with a Dan-Browne quality conspiracy theory: that the New-Testament autographs were uniformly corrupted without anyone contesting that, or writing a word about it. Justifying your translation on the basis of other people's subjective decisions (when back-translating to Hebrew), made a thousand plus years later also seems curious [sic]. Using J.BeDuhn to try to buttress quality when he condemns this too is odd.
Slugged, sickly around; fever worse in the evening; slept fitfully.

Michael Meeks: 2012-02-10: Friday

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 21:00:00 +0000

Wiped out day, lay in bed sleeping fitfully on and off, urgh.

Luc Verhaegen: FOSDEM Aftermath.

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 12:56:44 +0000

FOSDEM was awesome this year. We had an overbooked schedule for our DevRoom, we inaugurated the beautiful and fantastic K building, and i got to present the lima driver.

First off, i would like to thank the FOSDEM organizers and the ULB. The already unique event that is FOSDEM just keeps getting better and better. Pascal & friends: congratulations, like every year, you've outdone yourselves.

Secondly, i would like to thank all the speakers in my devroom. It is clear by now why the first-come-first-serve algorithm has to be used, and it is also clear that it is working. But thank you all for making this a successful event (even Chris, who couldn't make it due to a train derailment). I hope you guys had a lot of fun too, both during your talk and with the rest of FOSDEM.

Lastly, to all those who attended my talk (and those who couldn't get in anymore as well): Thank you all for your very positive feedback. No matter what happens with lima in future, this talk will be the most memorable moment. (oh, and a big thanks to Will Stephenson, from SuSE and KDE, for getting a webcam up that quickly). To whoever shouted something along the lines of "we don't see that, it looks like a perfect cube to us" when the caching went off in the rotating cube hack: this is the open source spirit in its most tangible form. Thank you very much.

To end this post, let me plug the lima website again. We also have a mailinglist and the #lima channel on freenode. The limare code has been available since yesterday night. Heise and lwn posted the story already, and the videos from the FOSDEM talk should soon hit phoronix as well.

Pavel Machek: What does electric heating pad and electric chair have in common?

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:43:49 +0000

To keep myself warm, I purchased nice "beurer hk25" heating pad. According to their manual, it is "thoroughly tested" and "high-quality" product. It was supposed to have three temperature
settings... but in fact it has three power settings, with emergency overtemp fuse that renders the pad useless. Uncool :-(. [Pad is connected by two wires to the control unit]. It was not exactly cheap, either.

I expected some kind of switching/tyristor control, but apparently control unit just contains resistors, so it "may heat up" and "may not be covered". Oops. I thought that controlling 100W of heat is not a rocket science.

But that was not biggest surprise. Biggest surprise was that heating pad is actually able to induce enough electricity in the human body to be felt. Just touch another person, and her skin appears appears to vibrate very rapidly.

Now, the manual does have a lot of warnings; but "don't touch another person while using this" is not there. (Ok, the warnings mostly say "this can not be used at all"). One of warnings describes possible pacemaker interference, and lists electrical specs: 5000V/m electric
field strength, 80A/m magnetic field strength, 0.1mT magnetic flux density.

Except that values listed are not actual values produced by the pad, but limits from health regulations. So this does not do help me determining if this device is designed to introduce interesting sensations, or if my device is somehow faulty.

(Not sure how I should be measuring this, anyway. So far I know that multimeter indicates cca 2V AC between me and ground when it is on, so I know I'm not imaginging this, but....)

Now, I don't think this is unavoidable. Including AC/DC converter would be one possible solution... right?

Michael Meeks: 2012-02-09: Thursday

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 21:00:00 +0000

Awoke in the night with pins & needles in half of the scalp, whatsat ? Back to the e-mail in the morning. How does it back-up so ?
Chat with Guy, lunch. Wrote Linux Format column. Team meeting, ESC, did a bit of legacy git repo surgery to avoid confusion.
Started to feel pretty awful in the evening; headache.

Saurabh Sood: Of openSUSE 12.1 and Misc Stuff

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 19:36:57 +0000

This post has been long overdue. I have been meaning to post since a long time, but it has got delayed due to some or the other reason. The last few months have been great. I completed most of the code for my OBS widgets, and quite a lot of the errors in pulling the data from the API have been taken care off, but still some minor irritating bugs exist. Also, the task of packaging the widgets remains.

After nearly a month of it’s release, I installed the KDE version of openSUSE 12.1. The installation bugged me a lot, and I had some problems setting it up. After the installation finished, I knew why openSUSE is the best KDE distribution. The branding is just awesome, and everything works seamlessly. I spent nearly two hours playing just with Activities, and the Netbook interface. All seemed well, till I started getting Kernel messages, and after that, all hell broke loose. I kept getting messages from syslogd, and the system used to hang up after that. I attempted a reinstall, and things seemed to work better, but the messages didnt subside. I need to get my system serviced for Hardware Problems now.

I applied for a talk on ‘Developing OSC Plugins’ at FOSDEM under the Distributions Devroom. My talk got approved, but I had to pull out of the talk due to some constraints. It was quite gutting not to be able to attend a major conference. I followed the talk via Twitter, and the Live Streams, and specially liked Adrian’s talk on the OBS. I would surely try and make it to the conference the next time.

Google Summer of Code 2012 has been announced, and I have begun my preparations in full fervor. I have chalked out a plan, and have begun checking out the list of projects, and interacting with communities. I hope to finally participate this year, and get a great project with loads to learn, and have a cracking summer

Fridrich Strba: FOSDEM 2012 - How to make the best of it and become LibreOffice developer

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 15:11:19 +0000

FOSDEM 2012 is just round the corner and, as you might know, LibreOffice will have a DevRoom this year too. And, as it was already publicized, your servant and Eilidh McAdam of libvisio fame will attend too. The goal of this event will be to help you to become a LibreOffice developer, by helping you to get your first contact with the code from inside.

How to prepare for the event?

In order to give as many community members the possibility to speak, the presentations will not take more then 15 minutes each. But we will be there for one-to-one contacts and hacking goodness. If you are interested in contributing to our new Visio import filter, or the upcomming Corel Draw and MS Publisher filters, here is what you can do:

Find a bug that is bothering you in the current Visio import filter, or some simple feature that the importer currently does not support
Check out the following libraries:
- master branch of libwpd (git clone git://libwpd.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/libwpd/libwpd)
- STABLE-0-2-0 branch of libwpg (git clone -b STABLE-0-2-0 git://libwpg.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/libwpg/libwpg)
- master branch of libwps (git clone git://libwps.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/libwps/libwps)
- master branch of libvisio (git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/contrib/libvisio), and
- master branch of libcdr (git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/libcdr)
Build them as system libraries and install them in the same order.
Then build LibreOffice according to these instructions. The important thing is to use those system libraries that you just built. To do so, be sure you added to the configure flags
- --with-system-libwpd
- --with-system-libwpg
- --with-system-libwps
- --with-system-libvisio
- --with-system-libcdr

With this kind of build, you will be ready to make the most from your Brussels weekend. Nevetheless, you can drop around at our IRC channel #libreoffice-dev channel at irc.freenode.net for more information and ideas.

Starting to do it instead of planning to do it ...

... is the best way to enter the FOSS development. That is why your servant and Eilidh will be around to hold your hand with debugging and finding way to implement your favourite features. We will answer your questions about the library design. We will point you to the place in the code where your bug might linger. And for more complicated stuff, we will debug it with you.

Don't expect us to give you a fish, but we will certainly teach you how to catch it by yourself. And in the same token, you will become a contributor inside a community of smart people that is fun to hang and hack with.

See you in Brussels the 4^th and 5^th of February 2012.

Michal Čihař: ColorHug with non English locales

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 11:00:00 +0000

Since infamous erasing of factory calibration in my ColorHug device and restoring calibration matrix, I noticed it did screen calibration wrong. However I did not find time to properly investigate the issue. Yesterdays mail from Richard was actually trigger for me so I've opened up this topic.

In the end it turned out to be caused by Little CMS wrongly parsing CCMX in case you are using locales which use something else than . as decimal point.

After lot of googling, I've realized there is probably no good way of parsing floats independent on current locales, so I used one of hacks I found and I think it's less intrusive - get current decimal point by printing float string using printf and then convert the string to it. I know it looks ugly, but including own implementation of strtod is also not nice and playing with locales is definitely something not thread safe to do within widely used library.

Anyway I've asked upstream to merge my patches, so let's see what they think of it.

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Stefan Seyfried: What to do about a trademark trolls?

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 08:27:50 +0000

Imagine there is a GPL’d open source project, going strong for more than 10 years, with more than 50 contributors. Now a company comes along and registers the name of the project as a trademark with the clear intention of suing people using this name to sell equipment with the software preloaded.

They are not contributing to the project.

Is there anything the project can do about that?
The opposition deadline (german: “Widerspruchsfrist”) is not over yet.

Oh - and of course they are blatant GPL violators, linking the project’s GPL’d software against closed source libraries which in turn use closed source kernel drivers, ship a U-Boot version of which nobody has ever seen the sources and so on, but that’s a different story.

Michael Meeks: 2012-02-08: Wednesday

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 21:00:00 +0000

Up early, dispatched babes; mail. Pleased to see Josh Heidenreich's growing work on adding README's to each top-level module in the source tree and then building a pretty source directory from that - a pleasant, hacker-friendly place for code overview documentation.
Pleased to see that Gerv as well as Hacking for Christ, has duplicated himself; hence the absence from FOSDEM.
More E-mail thrash, quick chat with Gabriel, then JRB, then TDF board call.
Out to cell group in the evening.

Bryen Yunashko: Lots of excitement for openSUSE in Florida

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:14:36 +0000

As promised, I’m blogging periodically to update you all on the progress of our soon-to-be-named openSUSE conference in Florida.

Name it!

With our naming poll closing this Saturday (11-February), the naming poll is getting pretty exciting. A last minute entry is gaining popularity and it looks like possibly it will be a toss-up between two proposed names before the poll ends. If you haven’t voted yet, why not? Vote here.

I wanna join!

On IRC, mails, and directly on our planning wiki page, people are volunteering to be a part of the planning. On the wiki page, you’ll see we’ve solidifed the types of committees we need and added some good notes to relevant committees. People have volunteered whether or not they think they can actually make it to the conference. A good show that just because you may not actually be there, that doesn’t lessen your value within the community.

I’m especially excited to see some good diversity on the program committee. Itxshell, from Honduras, is joining Alan Clark, Drew Adams and myself and will give us good mileage toward our goal of making this a great bi-lingual conference. We want to make this a welcoming experience for both English and Spanish speakers, both languages have high presence in the area.

Sponsorship Committee

Many of the committees that have immediate tasks to perform are moving along at a good pace after our kickoff meeting last week. However, one immediate need is the sponsorship committee. This is a vital function that needs to be organized in the very near future. As we have said already, we cannot expect guaranteed funds to cover all our conference expenses and we want to reach out to potential sponsor donors to help fund the conference as well as any possible travel sponsorships. If you can join the sponsorship committee, everyone would be ever so grateful.

What else is going on?

As said, our naming poll ends this Saturday. At that point, we’ll be able to move quickly with setting up our conference web page, promotional posters and flyers to distribute to events, and other things that depend on having a formal name attached to the event. Andi Silva is already hard at work coming up with designs for our posters and flyers.

Alan Clark has done a nice job of compiling a list of LUGS in the Florida area that can help our organizing efforts. I think we should expand that to include neighboring states since they’re so close by.

Alexia, the conference manager for SUSECon, will be making a trip sometime in the near future to do ground scouting of the area near the hotel. We’ll get some good information back about what resources exist in the neighborhood and a better idea for the lay of the land. This is going to be useful for when we add location information to our website for attendees.

It is my hope that we make a formal public announcement launching the conference by early March. We’ll tap into the expertise of folks like Mike McCallister and Jos Poortvliet to formalize the press releases, and in conjunction with a site launch and promotional materials printing, we should have a pretty good bang going on in March.

That’s not to say there’s already some excitement going on out there in the world about our conference. LPI has already jumped in and offered to provide testing services for the LPIC exam.

I’m having the feeling we’re stepping into something good!

Will Stephenson: Thoughts about Kubuntu's Status, Canonical, and your distribution's sponsors

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 11:07:26 +0000

Yesterday I woke up to the news that Canonical are no longer going to fund Riddell to work on Kubuntu. I've trying to figure out what that means for KDE and for community Linux generally.

Disclaimer: I work in the same role as Jonathan at SUSE, a competing Linux company that sponsors the openSUSE project. This is my personal opinion, not that of the openSUSE Board or SUSE Linux GmbH.

I'm sad for Jonathan personally. He has put a lot of his lifeblood into Kubuntu over the years, at no little cost to himself, and to be pulled off one's favourite project hurts. The same thing could happen to me if the powers that be decide, so I can easily empathise with him.

In the bigger picture, I have to say that this doesn't surprise me at all. For Canonical, Kubuntu fulfilled its purpose a few years ago already. Kubuntu, and the other official Ubuntu derivatives, have always been a spoiler move to tie up community contributors who believed in the early community-centric image of Ubuntu, but who didn't agree with the main Ubuntu's direction. Otherwise, there was the risk that Ubuntu design decisions would polarize the Linux community and send people towards Ubuntu's competitors. With the derivatives, they are safely occupied under the big tent of the Ubuntu brand.

If we look back at the Ubuntu game plan as history neatly lays it out for us, we have

1) Establish the Ubuntu brand amongst early adopters (check, by about 2005)
2) Expand it to the wider Linux user base (check, by about 2007)
3) Make Ubuntu the default Linux for non-technical users (2009)
4) Tie up a paying market. Initial targets have been enterprise desktop Linux (maybe next year ;)) or consumers in the massmarket netbook segment (but that was squashed by tablets and Microsoft rounding up the manufacturer back to the XP prison), and now they are aiming at embedding into consumer electronics (TVs) and will probably snare a tablet OEM as a cloud OS (hell, if KDE can do it...) or a bookseller or someone who wants a platform to digitally sell something else off of.
5) Profit
6) Buy more spaceflight (Probably. For some, 5) is enough)

Somewhere after 1), the massive demand for KDE on Ubuntu in KDE's main territories (Germany, via the ubuntu.de forums, which IIRC threatened an unofficial fork) caused Canonical to realise that it was better to control a large dissenting minority with some token gestures than to have them really doing their own thing. So Jonathan, at that point a KDE packager at Debian, was hired, and Mark Shuttleworth did his salesman job at a couple of KDE events making some insubstantial promises (If I had a dollar for every KDE eV board member at the time who told me "But Mark has promised to install and use Kubuntu on his workstation" multiplied by every Ubuntu developer overheard chuckling that "But they don't know that Mark *never* uses his workstation, he's always on a notebook"...), a few community people got flights to events, and Kubuntu was born, and legitimised by the then-leaders of the KDE community.

Once 2) was consolidated, Kubuntu was redundant to Canonical, but on the average professional Linux hacker's salary, Jonathan was an affordable luxury. Now, I suspect that with the trend at Canonical to develop more and more in-house to chase 4) rather than just distribute what the FLOSS community provides, putting paid man-hours on a mature product is no longer a good way to spend engineering budget.

By cheaply tying up competitors' resources, Kubuntu has hindered KDE's overall growth via other distributions and balkanized the KDE community. It can be argued that Kubuntu has brought users and contributors to KDE as part of the rapid initial growth of Ubuntu, and Kubuntu has been a success in focussing their developers on improving KDE, but this came at the price of cementing KDE in the role of a second class environment in the eyes of everyone who came to Linux via Ubuntu. I suspect that the GNOME community, which previously surfed the wave of Ubuntu's growth, will feel the pinch of necessity as Canonical moves towards its endgame, and having already been displaced as the default desktop for an inhouse development, will move further towards just being an anonymous organ donor to Unity and subsequent productisable UIs.

Why am I writing this? I don't want to be so crass as to just say 'come to my project instead'. I'd like to take this opportunity to suggest that you should have no illusions about what your community Linux distribution means to the businesses that sponsor it.

For openSUSE, it's some engineering contribution to and testing of SUSE enterprise products' codebase, and supporting the enterprise brand via a halo effect from the community brand. In setting up the openSUSE project, SUSE has been militant in giving the community complete control of the project and the distribution that comes out of it. Call it an insurance policy or a lifeboat, but by opening and freeing all the tools that create openSUSE (as well as the source code), we assure that the results of 20 years of work are indefinitely available. SUSE is secure enough in its business and believes strongly enough in free software to do this with the rootstock of its enterprise products, because the modular, federated Open Build Service allows SUSE to derive enterprise products from openSUSE without having to steer it.

SUSE Studio: Deploy to EC2 from SUSE Gallery

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 08:42:49 +0000

It's almost been a year since we launched our EC2 management page which allows for uploading your appliances to the Amazon cloud. We are constantly improving and extending it, but up to now it has been lacking integration with SUSE Gallery.

If you wanted to run an appliance from Gallery in EC2 you had to clone and build an EC2 image of it first. In order to improve this workflow we came up with this:

Notice the new "Upload to EC2" button in the cloud section? It will directly take you to the EC2 management page where you can start uploading this appliance right away. Now we have a nice shortcut which renders the old way of cloning and building it first redundant.

Mike McCallister: First openSUSE Community Conference in North America Coming This Fall

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 02:41:54 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

Thrilled to bits to report that for the first time in the Americas, openSUSE users, developers and folks who might want to be in those categories will be gathering in Orlando, Florida this September. This community conference doesn’t have a name yet (more on that later), but is sure to be informative and exciting. As with all openSUSE activities, participants will certainly have a lot of fun!

The story is that the annual corporate SUSE conference is happening September 18-21. This is where system administrators, developers and other people who make their living using SUSE Linux Enterprise gather. Just speculation on my part, but I’ll guess that Attachmate/SUSE got a better deal from the hotel if they reserved the entire week. The beneficiaries of this arrangement include the scruffy brigands of openSUSE.

Planning for the event began last Wednesday on Internet Relay Chat, with a dozen or so active participants, including your humble scribe (see the full transcript) (see a summary). We want to make this a conference that is comfortable for both basic users and the developers who make openSUSE the great distribution it is.

Aside: For KDE users who may be feeling abandoned by Canonical/Kubuntu today, maybe it’s time to look at another powerful, yet simple desktop Linux distribution.

The first item on our agenda, though, is naming this first ever conference. Quite a few names were suggested at the kickoff chat, and a poll is being conducted at openSUSE Connect. Choose your favorite before Saturday!

If this conference excites you, you can help make it happen. Visit the conference wiki and sign up for one or more of the task teams.

Watch this space for more news as things move forward.

openSUSE News: openSUSE at FOSDEM

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 02:19:20 +0000

Busy time at the booth

openSUSE brought lots of fun to FOSDEM in Brussels, Belgium. We’re all exhausted now from selling beer, t-shirts, hats and giving demonstrations of openSUSE with GNOME Shell, KDE, Plasma Active, openSUSE-on-ARM (running XFCE) and countless other things. Yet we did want to tell you about FOSDEM before we go catch up on sleep!

Beer and Goodies

Like last year, the crew from the SUSE office in Nuremberg loaded up a bus with people, beer and anything/one else needed for FOSDEM. The bus was left during Friday night at the ULB where FOSDEM would happen. Despite the risk of somebody breaking in and stealing our awesome goodies, it was deemed more important to join the other FOSDEM go-ers in their attack on the tasty-beverage supply of Brussels! Besides, a night outside in the > -10C degrees from last weekend ensured the beer would be cold and ready to drink.

Cool hats to keep your head warm

The next morning, those smart enough not to drink too much (or (wo)manly enough to ignore the hangover and show up anyway) prepared the booth for the onslaught of visitors eager to learn the latest about openSUSE and buy the coolest beer at FOSDEM. Besides this great beverage we also had the usual assortment of stickers, openSUSE DVDs, t-shirts (in any size as long as your size is Large) and of course our demo systems showing off openSUSE. This year we had our big touch screens again, one with GNOME Shell, the other with the latest from KDE, as well as an assortment of smaller devices. Several of them ran ARM with either consoles or XFCE and there was a “WeTab” with Plasma Active on it as well.

Interestingly, our beer got “forked” by the Firefox crowd who bought a bunch of them (we threw in some t-shirts) and put a firefox sticker over the Old Toad badge. Yes, “Free as in Beer” and all that. Suffice to say the beer was not only popular (as some evil tongues claimed) because the K building had no other drinks available – everyone who tried it agreed it was actually a high quality lager. If you want to know more about the beer, see here. Sorry, we don’t ship it, but if you look us up at LinuxTag in May (Berlin) we will have some!

Two ARM devices with openSUSE

FOSDEM

If you have never been to FOSDEM there is little we can do to describe this event. Nevertheless I will attempt to paint you a picture as everyone deserves to know how awesome it is! For starters, as you might know, our beloved Pascal “Yaloki” Bleser is part of the FOSDEM organisation. There is no doubt that the event can do anything but rock! Of course, while Pascal might be as strong as many men, he’s just a part in the mighty wheels that keep FOSDEM running. That is to say: it is big. VERY big. The two days the event lasts (Saturday and Sunday) are packed with over 400 sessions, summing up to over 200 hours of content (yes, in two days), varying from BOF sessions to keynotes and presentations and the attendees litteraly number in the many thousands.

This year, almost all booths were moved to the new K building, which also hosted a number of so-called “devrooms” (project or topic specific rooms). As the old location was getting crowded (crowded as in standing nose to nose breaks) the change was great, both from a hygenic and comfort point of view. Especially since the weather made going outside far less appealing as it had been in previous years – one has to feel sorry for the nicotine addicted at FOSDEM.

The new K building booth area

FOSDEM has a number of buildings spread over the ULB university campus, each of them filled with a number of booths as well as many rooms where talks are held. There are some HUGE rooms but most of them have capacities of 80-150 people. These rooms are organized by a FOSS project or by topic: there were the cross-desktop and the cross-distro rooms but also spaces for LibreOffice, Mozilla, embedded operating systems, JBoss, Mono, Java, Legal issues, virtualization, cloud and more. In other words: you will feel the need for a decent cloning machine once you get an idea of how much interesting stuff goes on in those two days. But (un?)fortunately, that’s not all. The “hallway track”, as in, the area around the booths, is absolutely STUFFED with interesting people. Core developers from projects ranging from Python to Arch Linux and LibreOffice to the kernel can be found wandering around. As a matter of fact, many FOSDEM veterans are known to not visit more than one or two talks – and those often presented by themselves. There are just too many people to talk to. And getting in contact with people at FOSDEM is both easy and hard. Hard, as you will find it difficult to find a person you are looking for in the huge crowd. And easy because most people are incredibly easy to aproach and very much open for a chat.

Motivational poster...

Results

So what did we take away from FOSDEM? First of all – about 6-700 euro from the sales of the t-shirts and beer. This money has been donated to the FOSDEM organisation in the hopes they will use it for something good (like giving themselves a well deserved evening of relaxation, food and drinks).

Second of all, openSUSE is clearly popular and getting more so. Our efforts are recognized and appreciated by our users and that’s a great thing! Many people where very happy to donate a bit for a t-shirt, a hat, some stickers, DVDs and more and we surely convinced quite a few to give openSUSE 12.1 a test drive. There was of course the usual slew of users thanking us for our efforts – as well as those coming with the issues they faced. Interestingly enough, stability was not often a big problem but there are still things “out there” which are not packaged. Hard to believe with the almost 170.000 packages on OBS! But yes, we don’t have the perfect Linux distribution yet, so keep up the good work!
There was quite a number of “geeko talks”, as usual. Of course a number of enthusiastic LibreOffice developers consider themselves Green but there were of course talks by openSUSE contributors in the cross-distribution, X-org, and cross-desktop rooms as well as in many other places. Highlights include talks on openQA, OBS, openSUSE-on-ARM, Snapper, a round table discussion around ambassadors with other distribution projects, and much more.

We had many hugs and catch-up moments as we don’t see each other all that often – it was truly great to meet so many friends again. With visitors from around Europe (and quite a few from other continents too) it was great seeing old and making new friends.

There were interesting discussions with fellow FOSS projects, e.g. with the Ubuntu LoCo team from Belgium that had a stand right next to us.

Last but not least, Richard and Tom deserve big hugs for their organizing work. And obviously, so does everyone else who was there. It was awesome because we were all there!

View more FOSDEM pictures here and here and all around the web…

Jos Poortvliet: FOSDEM: Green Beer, Open Advice and more Cool Stuff™

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:56:18 +0000

Last weekend was FOSDEM and it was a blast! Camila's first and I get that she didn't look forward to it that much - we had some trouble on the way there. As I'm now just on the way to the airport to pick her up (she had a meet-up with some KolabSys people) I dunno if she changed her mind but I bet she did. If only because she got some Brazilian beans from Izabel Valverde ;-)

For me it was the usual - there was little visiting of talks for me. Seriously, 200 hours of talks in 2 days? Attempting to visit the interesting ones just leads to frustration so I've given up on that. There are just too many people to talk to, too much beer to drink and sell and little catch-ups to have. FOSDEM needs to become a week-long event. Seriously.

A cool highlight of FOSDEM was of course the release of Lydia's awesome Open Advice project. It's a book for people who want to participate and make a difference in Free Software, explaining our culture and drawing upon some bright minds for real-world experiences. It is quite a read - I only got as far as the introduction by ex-FSFE Dude Georg Greve and some first paragraphs of a few chapters. But it's worth it if what I've read is any indication. Of course, in true Free fashion, it's open and even ready to edit and improve if you want!

There was a lot of fun around the openSUSE crowd as usual. The crew did a great job selling t-shirts, hats, beer and other stuff all for the benefit of FOSDEM (we donated the proceeds of the sales as usual). The awesome 'Old Toad' beer was as popular as ever - it is indeed a great beer and a good way to keep the fun alive. The Greek(o)s really drove this part as they must've drunk at least half our supply ;-)

Oh and after being pressed Frank promised that he'll ensure ownCloud has a good booth next year. So, ownCloudies (can't think of a better name atm) - you guys & girls really have to take that dive in 2013!!! Don't let Frank pull it alone. Not that His Baldiness can't do that, it's just that he'd look lonely. We can't have that.

And at night the usual great dinners - Thai food one night, Japanese Tepan Yaki or something (fiery, dang) another. Finishing it off properly with a few beers.

By the way, I've set up the LinuxTag wiki page for the openSUSE gang, sign up!

hugs,
Jos

Michael Meeks: 2012-02-07: Tuesday

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 21:00:00 +0000

Up unfeasibly late, is that the sleep debt ? breakfast, checked mail. It was a sad day when my friend GregKH, veteran of many absorbing SUSE initiatives, decided to leave SUSE for a dream job at the Linux Foundation. Sad (perhaps) to see less of him, though naturally he will continue doing cool stuff at the Linux Foundation. Imagine my surprise and pleasure to see the start of this new, rich seam of awesomeness in his first patch set to LibreOffice which arrived last night. Of course, we value all our contributors, especially new ones - without them we'd be nothing; here's a snapshot of Ohloh's nice statistics (though the 'first commit after two months' stuff is clearly barking): The lines removed/added also shows a rather pleasing direction of change, given that we're adding features. Truly, the easy hacks are easy. Want to be where the cool kids are ? why not try one ? Failing that, simply mentioning that you "use" LibreOffice might help to redress a historical imbalance, and lack of an 'un-use' button.
Idle catch-up; took babes to music lessons, early dinner, J. out, chat with Kohei, and worked through mail for much of the evening.

Danny Kukawka: PandaBoard: persistant MAC address via initrd

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 13:41:18 +0000

I worked out a solution to replace the random MAC address set by the smsc95xx kernel module with the MAC address generated by u-boot on the PandaBoard(ES). It should also work on the BeagleBoard.

As first you need this kernel patch to fix isses with exporting the assign type (PERM, RANDOM, STOLEN) to /sys/class/net/*/addr_assign_type correctly if the smsc95xx driver generate a random MAC address. Build your kernel, if you use openSUSE:Factory:ARM you can get RPMs here, until it's integrated into the official openSUSE kernel.

Now you need a mkinitrd with this patch or a you install these RPMs for openSUSE. This adds a initrd boot script to set the MAC address from kernel cmdline parameters. These are the available parameters and some example values:

setmac.set_mac_addr=01:23:45:67:89:ab

setmac.set_iface=eth0

setmac.set_module=smsc95xx

The setmac.set_mac_addr= is mandatory to change the MAC and you have to choose one of the other two parameters. Either you specify the network interface or the kernel driver/module. In case you use setmac.set_module the first network device provided by this module which has a random MAC gets the new address assigned. Please note: this script change the MAC of a interface only if addr_assign_type=1 , otherwise nothing will change.

If you have installed the new kernel and mkinitrd you may need to follow these steps:

# mount the boot partition which contains the uImage (and may also the MLO file)
mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /mnt
# make sure this partition contains the new uImage
# build a new initrd
mkinitrd -B
# create a uInitrd
mkimage -A arm -O linux -T ramdisk -C none -a 0 -e 0 -n initramfs -d /boot/initrd /mnt/uInitrd

Now you need to tell u-boot to boot from the uInitrd and to set the needed cmdline parameters. I prefer to use a uEnv.txt file instead of a boot.scr since you simply can change it without call mkimage. You can download my currently used uEnv.txt here. The content depends on your setup you may need to adapt yours:

bootargs=root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rw rootwait rootfstype=ext3 console=ttyO2,115200n8 vram=16M omapfb.vram=0:16M

bootcmd=mmc rescan ; setenv bootargs ${bootargs} setmac.set_mac_addr="${usbethaddr}" setmac.set_iface=eth0; fatload mmc 0:1 0x80000000 uImage; fatload mmc 0:1 0x81600000 uInitrd; bootm 0x80000000 0x81600000

uenvcmd=boot

Now umount /mnt and reboot your system. If you already worked around the random MAC address problem: don't forget to remove/disable these hacks.

SUSE Studio: Hyper-V appliances are GO!

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 11:32:45 +0000

Here at SUSE Studio, we strive to support the widest range of formats, both physical and virtual, so you can be assured that your Studio-built appliance will work wherever you need it. To that end, we've added support for building the Virtual Hard Drive format, for use with Microsoft® Hyper-V® Server.

The VHD format will be initially available as an experimental feature - you can sign up via your (recently updated) account page. With those features enabled, you will be able to build VHD images for both SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 SP1 and openSUSE 12.1. For SUSE Linux Enterprise, when you enable the VHD format on the Build tab, you will be prompted to add a couple of extra packages (this isn't necessary for openSUSE 12.1; everything you need is already in the kernel).

As a little bonus, we're packing VHD files into .zip archives, instead of our usual .tar.gz, so Windows can open them without any additional software.

Kai-Uwe Behrmann: ICC wants streamlined workflows

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 10:53:33 +0000

The ICC meeting from 30th January to 1th February was again a great chance to meet with colour management people in person. The meeting was hosted in Munich at Adobe with a great view over the snowy city. I joined the sessions under the OpenICC umbrella to represent the open source community.

Of course many talks went over various specification topics and coordination with other standard bodies and groups of interest in colour exchange. But as ICC is evolving, there are new topics coming up as well.

Notably, ICC is slowly moving from a solely static colour content description of what colours are. There is great interest to cover as well the process of applying colour conversions. This covers necessarily definition of terms and workflows and gets to the questions of why, how and who handles colour. This will help users to do high level decisions as opposed to the current need to understand low level technical ICC terms and figuring out how that applies to actual used implementations.

I presented my work inside OpenICC to add monitor identification and calibration state information inside ICC profiles to streamline profile distribution and installation. The concept found support and the presentation about the meta tag keys came along nicely.

ICC members dive currently into spectral imaging, which is prototyped in SampleICC. I appreciate this direction, as it very likely simplifies the use of spectral readings for colour calculations in applications.

The only discussed hint to reduce the size of n-channel profiles, was work on how to put formulas inside the colour processing pipe. It would be great if that comes to a useful result. Formulas inside ICC profiles where first introduced during the v4 specification but only apply to single channels. For per channel operations are currently some few formulas supported. However the new approach allows to express with more elementary operations and allows free access to all channels.

Obviously many members have a strong background in printing, which is greatly reflected in the spec. But some companies have a strong relation to various imaging industries, like camera manufacturers, who as well create printing or displaying devices. There is potential, that ICC will support their interests, provided they actively contribute. For instance ICC profile embedding inside images is well covered inside the ICC spec. That was a good base for e.g. the W3C to introduce colour management for photography on the net. There is no equivalent to movie or video content. In parts embedding of ICC profiles there does not even exist.

Altogether, the ICC meeting was a great chance to coordinate and intensify the work of ICC and OpenICC.

Michal Hrušecký: How did I enjoyed FOSDEM 2012?

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 10:22:39 +0000

As every year, FOSDEM was great! I spend some time at our stand talking to the people, telling them how great openSUSE is. I visited several interesting talks and met a lot of people, quite some of them I no longer remember (sorry), but I took some business cards and notes from some interesting talks. Some talks I haven’t got enough space to sit and type, some were too interesting to take a notes
If I try to summarize most interesting stuff, there is a lot of going on toward standardized ARM platform, things are slowly settling down and drivers are slowly getting where we need them. And many people are interested in ARMs. Hurray! Oh, and btw. I had a talk there about openSUSE on ARM
I also learned a little bit about TCP MultiPath. Sounded quite interesting. Providing classic socket API and using classic TCP streams to make sure everything works on already existing applications/infrastructure and creating new awesome features at the same time. Great lightning talk.
And there was also talk and some discussion how to get average people more interested and involved. Sounded like a good plan and let’s see what will happen in few months.
Overall, I had a great time on FOSDEM and missed most of it in previous paragraph. But as after every FOSDEM, I’m full of ideas and I feel really great to be part of the open source world!

openSUSE News: GNOME Accessibility Hackfest (interview)

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 09:47:53 +0000

A few weeks ago in A Coruña, Spain a Hackfest around GNOME Accessibility took place hosted by Igalia . openSUSE found the opportunity to make some questions to the people involved and then learn a bit more about this interesting Project. Our interviewers were Alejandro Piñeiro Iglesias, Joanmarie Diggs and Juanjo Marín.

1 – What is ATK and AT-SPI in simple words?

AT-SPI is the acronym for Assistive Technology Service Provider Interface. Its main purpose is to provide a means for an assistive technology to interact with an application. For instance, the Orca screen reader wants to present newly-inserted text, such as a new instant message, to the user. Therefore Orca asks AT-SPI to inform it whenever text gets inserted. When Orca is told what text has just been inserted, it can present that new text to the user in speech and in braille. Similarly, Orca presents each newly-focused object to the user as the user navigates via the keyboard. Orca can do this because AT-SPI tells it each time a new object gains focus.

Orca, of course, is not the only assistive technology out there. Speech recognition tools can make it possible for users to speak the name of something they wish to click on, like the ‘Close’ button in a dialog box, and then do the clicking for them through AT-SPI. A screen magnifier can make sure the user’s location is always visible on the screen by paying attention to changes in the location of the caret, in the selected item, and in the focused item — each of which gets reported to assistive technologies by AT-SPI.

AT-SPI in turn needs a way to get this information from the applications being used. This is typically accomplished through the application’s toolkit. For instance, Gtk+, Clutter, Gecko, and other toolkits implement an accessibility abstraction layer called ATK. If a toolkit implements ATK, then AT-SPI will automatically receive the information from that toolkit thanks to the atk-bridge. It turns out that, in the case of Qt, there is no ATK implementation. Instead Qt implements its own direct bridge to AT-SPI. But that is a special case. What is important is that in all cases, accessible free desktop toolkits expose information to assistive technologies, and assistive technologies get that information via AT-SPI.

2 – How easy is for someone with disabilities to run a computer? How far is Linux from other similar proprietary software?

In short: it is not especially easy. And in some cases the problems start early on in the user experience because not all distros have accessible installers yet. Having said that, we are seeing more and more awareness of accessibility on the part of developers as well as distros. Thus we are getting closer and closer to the point of Linux accessibility which “just works.”

With respect to how far away Linux is from other similar proprietary software, we’ve admittedly got a ways to go. But it is also worth mentioning that in the case of Linux GUIs, accessibility is comparatively new, having been created just 10 years ago.

3 – Do you believe the financial costs make it more difficult?

Yes, in our opinion financial costs do make things more difficult for the end user. Accessibility related software and hardware tend to be quite specialized, and are only required by a very small percentage of the overall user market. As a result these tools are often expensive. For example, the leading, proprietary Windows screen readers cost in the ballpark of $1000 US for a single user license. In the case of the hardware, a braille display with just 24 cells can cost three thousands dollars (or more). Figuring out how to make the hardware more affordable is a difficult problem to solve, but we can at least reduce the overall costs faced by users through Free Software.

4 – How did you get involved with GNOME Accessibility?

Piñeiro: In my case it started when a former contractor asked Igalia to provide support for automatic testing. Accessibility technologies are also used to implement automatic testing (like the Mago project). As one of the outcomes of that work, I implemented a basic ATK implementation for Clutter. Then we decided that it would be useful to use that work for accessibility purposes. I contacted the Clutter maintainers to see if they would be interested. They were, so we started to include that functionality in Clutter itself. As part of that work, I began interacting with the GNOME Accessibility developer community and also attended the Boston Summit where I met Joanmarie Diggs who is one of the Orca developers.

Joanmarie: In 2006 Massachusetts announced their decision to make ODF the official file format of the Commonwealth. At that time, I was an Assistive Technology Specialist working at the Carroll Center for the Blind and, due to some issues surrounding the Commonwealth’s decision, a number of companies began paying us a visit to talk about free desktop accessibility. One of those companies was Sun Microsystems, which in those days was where much of the GNOME Accessibility development effort was housed. Orca was amongst the items presented to us, and for the first time I saw something I had wanted for the bulk of the previous decade, namely a screen reader that didn’t cost $1200 and which users and instructors could truly make their own by providing input and contributing code. At the time, my non-work systems were running Kubuntu, so it was just a matter of crossing over to GNOME and getting up to speed on Orca and how things worked in the GNOME community.

5 – Where do you get your feedback to improve the development of accessibility generally? Is there just a community involved?

We get a considerable and ongoing amount of input from the community. For instance, GNOME’s Orca mailing list has lots of discussion and can always be relied upon for timely feedback. The participants of that list range from basic users to individuals with enough knowledge to compile and install Orca from master in order to see if a new feature meets their needs or a proposed fix solves a problem. Some users even provide patches for proposed fixes or features to the developers.

We also get feedback from other sources. For example, when local governments want to migrate their desktops to Free Software solutions, they conduct evaluations of the accessibility tools, and provide us with feedback and/or a list of requirements.

6 – How can someone who wants to help join forces? Do they need to have any special hardware equipment?

Anyone interested in contributing should take a look at https://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/ or http://projects.gnome.org/accessibility/. There they will find information about accessibility in GNOME, the different areas (development and non-development) in which they help, and how to get in touch with us. Having access to assistive hardware devices is not required, unless of course someone wants to provide a feature or fix based on a specific type of hardware or a particular device.

7 – What has been achieved in this Hackfest and what are the next steps?

Being able to bring the free desktop accessibility developers — a group of individuals who are normally scattered around the globe — together in the same room for five full days of discussions was extremely valuable: We were able to talk about how GNOME does things versus how Qt does them; about the differences between Gecko and WebKitGtk; about what Orca needs from the toolkits, how AT-SPI provides it, and what challenges are faced by those toolkits when providing that information via ATK. It is essential that we achieve the most reliable, performant, and standardized accessibility implementation possible, and this event brought us closer to achieving that goal.

The most immediate next step is to implement solutions based on the conclusions reached during the hackfest. Beyond that, we need to keep working together to find answers and reach consensus on the questions and issues which remain unresolved.

Anyone interested in contribute can take a look at http://projects.gnome.org/accessibility/

Thanks to GNOME accessibility team!

Nelson Marques: Cinnamon for openSUSE 11.4 + GNOME 3.2

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 01:06:59 +0000

I’ve just added a build target for openSUSE 11.4 with GNOME 3.2. The correct install process should be:

Install openSUSE 11.4 GNOME 3 LiveCD and fully update it;
Install the GNOME 3.2 (in case you installed an earlier version of GNOME, ex: 3.0) and update it;
Install Cinnamon repo or one click installer

Feedback / Testing is welcome for openSUSE 11.4 with GNOME 3.2. I do strongly recommend that the more skeptical update also to 12.1. Not much has happened in Cinnamon land except for improving the packaging and fixing minor issues for a cleaner rpmlint update. A fix was also implemented to allow builds with newer versions of clutter (accepted upstream).

With a bit more of time now that Cinnamon is ok (yeah, a few things can be done for muffin as well), it’s time to finish the base of MATÉ which is over 90% already done. Meanwhile a bit of toying around with some customizations and Kiwi.