Planet openSUSE

openSUSE News: Announcing the First Keynote for oSC: Georg Greve on Freeing our Data

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 12:00:50 +0000

The openSUSE conference will feature Georg Greve as first keynote speaker, opening the event on Friday morning. He will talk about “Freedom in the world we live in and the value and importance of communities and Software Freedom”. That’s a mouthful and we’ve asked him to tell us a bit about himself and what he’ll talk about.

Personal life

We managed to catch him just before he was going to Hamburg for the holidays with the family, actively cleaning up the house and preparing for an early leave the next morning. Georg, born in ’73 on the tiny island of Helgoland outside the coast of northern Germany, spent the first 8 years of his life in this reclusive community before moving to the big city. There he studied biophysics and came across Free Software in 1993. Five years later he was the European speaker for the GNU Project, writing the well known ‘Brave GNU World’ column and in 2001 he initiated the Free Software Foundation Europe. Since 2009 he is the CEO of Kolab Systems AG and lives with his wife and “two utterly gorgeous” twin boys in the neighborhood of Zurich, Switzerland.

Free Software

We asked him about what he will share with us at the openSUSE Conference.

Georg: “I’m sure everybody is aware of current events around the leak of Prism. Watching it all unfold has been interesting from a variety of angles, both for our communities as well as the larger version of community: society at large. It is awesome that people look at what is going on, care and get upset. But at the same time, it is weird that they get upset now as much of this has been known for quite a while. If you cared for this topic at all you could have learned all of this from public sources in the past. Not with such detail and in such depth or with the drama, but the gist of it was actually not very much hidden. The fact that the USA treats its own interest above everything else and isn’t shy to use its power, knowledge and military for its self interest and most importantly the interest of its corporations isn’t exactly news. It has been like this for quite a while and they have been quite upfront about it.”

Jos: But at least people are angry about it, now…

Frenemies?

Georg: “People are shocked. But a few years too late. It is good that they are but we should ask the question: why is it worse to give your data to the government (which may use it in name of the corporations) rather than giving it to the corporations directly?

And people give their data willingly. Even the public sector is affected, just last week the Swedish government banned Google Apps usage in Sweden. They noted that it could not be guaranteed that the data would remain private. News, really? Perhaps there will be some rethinking of our over-eagerness to try new things (which is good) but will that message reach far enough? Will people realize that the problem is not the behaviour of the USA?”

Jos: Shouldn’t we, in the rest of the world, be angry at the USA?

Georg: “The United States are a sovereign nation and they can do what they want to do, nobody can stop them. The real question is about the control over our data. And this control (or lack there-of) results from the software handling it.”

Jos: So to control the data…

Georg: “… we need to control the software, yes. Of course, this is what we are about, as Free Software community: we create the tools to control our data ourselves, or make it possible that we can let someone we trust exercise that control. What we have to learn is that it’s not just about building the best tools in the world and throwing them out. From that follows too little. Good technologies have lost in the past. We need to evolve a professional ecosystem around these technologies to make sure that what we build reaches people, becomes available, accessible, is FUN to use for people. We need to target and reach that part of society which can’t do it themselves, who are not geeks. Geeks can always protect themselves – sure. But if we are satisfied with that we withhold the ability to protect themselves from the 98% who do not have the skills and knowledge to do so.”

Jos: Your message is then that we need to communicate more about our software?

Georg: “We need to go out more, become more professional. More grown-up in a way, at spreading that technology into the world at large. Some companies have successfully been doing that, but it is still not sufficient. We need to do this more pro-actively, and also build more of an understanding in some Free Software Communities about the important role that companies play in bringing the freedom to users. At the end it is about getting better as an ecosystem in providing that freedom to people in all ways that matter, including economically, so they can afford to take control over their own data.”

In the end, it’s about creating the world I would like to live in, and working with others to help us get there.

Learn more at oSC!

At this point the twins decided to derail our conversation, having discovered a new and innovative way of getting themselves soaked in some puddle. Making the world a better place while taking care of kids isn’t easy for sure. But Georg is working on it. He decided to join Kolab because “Groupware is the final pillar of Free Software that needs to become ubiquitous before Free and Open can become a choice for corporations on the corporate desktop”.

We’ll hear how that is going in about 4 weeks: on July 18, registration and opening party starts in Thessalonki! If you have not registered yet, you should do so as soon as possible. Of course, we plan on live streaming as many of the sessions as we can and make them available after the event as well. But nothing beats being there in the flesh so if you can, gear up and get ready to join oSC!

See you there and have a lot of fun!

Robert Schweikert: The Resourcefulness Of Our Great Community — An Example

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 18:37:46 +0000

At the risk of stepping on other people’s toes let me apologize before I start. I am certain we have many members in the community that have gone out of their way to overcome hurdles placed in their way by our “organization” or others. I was inspired by this story because it shows how dedicated our community members are and it really fits well with some of the issues we are still struggling with in the transition from Boosters to SUSE team and the transition between initiatives, Ambassadors to Coordinators and shipping of DVDs to boxes of promo material for designated events.

Peter Czanik was caught in the middle of all of this at a recent FSF conference where he and others had an openSUSE booth. With no DVDs being shipped, due to the transition in the promo material shipping procedure (this has been announced) and no money available through TSP for local production of marketing materials due to a snafu (a temporary solution is in the works) there was basically no help from the resources where help should be coming from, sorry about that Peter.

Despite these obstacles Peter and the team showed up and made due with what was available to have great success. In Peter’s words:

“”"”
- distributed the last few remaining openSUSE 12.2 DVDs. Many people complained, that it’s not the latest and greatest, but also many were happy, as they have an old machine and older Linux versions usually have lower resource requirements.
- reused the posters we printed last autumn to decorate the booth (at the end of the day they were in a sorry state, so can’t be reused any more…)
- used the few remaining openSUSE brochures, stickers we printed last year (printing was contributed last year by somebody working at a printing company and our company printer…)

- used my ARM machines and a few borrowed mini PCs to demo openSUSE and make the booth eye catching (people asked about the machines and went away with openSUSE DVDs and brochures )

So, in short: last autumn we had local contributions from community members, this year we used what was last few bits of it and some creativity.

The good thing is, that I was told from multiple directions, that openSUSE had the best booth among software projects at the conference (and they did not know, that it was from a ZERO budget…).

The bad thing is, that we don’t have any marketing materials left. No DVDs, posters or brochures.

“”"”"

There is no need to rose color the situation, leaving community members trying to represent openSUSE at a conference stranded like this should not happen and there is no excuse for creating this situation in the first place. Work is proceeding to address these issue. However, I want to focus on the positive, and that is undoubtedly how determined Peter and the team were to make the conference a success and how they overcame the obstacles presented to them.

Thank you Peter and team fro being such dedicated representatives of our community and project. Also thank you for pointing out the shortcomings in our current transition period. This will allow us to address these, hopefully in short order.

As I mentioned, am am certain many of you have similar stories to tell. Thanks for your efforts as well.

Andres Silva: openSUSE Conference - Chameleon Ad

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 23:53:00 +0000

The openSUSE Conference 2013 is ad portas and the media has already caught on to this Open Source event in Thessaloniki, Greece. There was a recent request for having an ad about the openSUSE Conference featured in a German Linux magazine. I quickly jumped to the action looking for ideas on what ways are more effective in delivering an ad about our project.

The first thought was to make something that talked about the conference and the things that will make the conference shine. However, a second thought also came through. The openSUSE Conference is just the result of a much bigger project, the openSUSE Project. If we are to feature an ad about our conference it should be centered on the project and not the conference necessarily.

Why? Because there are many conferences and events every year. It is hard for the general public to know and acknowledge the differences of conferences around the Linux world. However, there is only 1 openSUSE Project. The conference's main event is not the conference itself, it is openSUSE. Therefore, I thought that rather than having the conference-made logos and graphics, we should focus on the main event, openSUSE.

In the end, this is what will go on the magazine. I hope you like it!

Michael Meeks: 2013-06-17: Monday.

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 21:00:00 +0000

Up earlish, staggered downstairs before the babes left for school for a chorus of hugs & beautiful Father's day cards.
Really pleased to see the announcement of MIMO joining The Document Foundation Advisory Board. MIMO support the LibreOffice ecosystem by contracting developers to fix their bugs and improve LibreOffice for everyone.
Chat with Cloph, lunch. Chat with Marcos from Brazil, working on improving the equation editor. Fixed up some Arabic / UTF-8 in C++ that I pushed, apparently some compilers can't cope, dug at some bugs, reviewed a patch or two. Mail chew.

Jordi Massaguer: Developer events in Bcn this week

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 17:10:31 +0000

Hi!

This week in Barcelona:

Thursday 20, at 19:00 - Barcelona on Rails monthly meeting
XING's office at Consell de Cent 332
Topic still to be defined
http://barcelonaonrails.com/

The Barcelona Graphic + Web Design Meetup Group
Thursday, June 20 at 8:30 PM
http://www.meetup.com/graphicdesign-159/events/gfcdnyrjbbc/

Luca Beltrame: 4.11 beta 1 packages available for openSUSE 12.3

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 05:50:55 +0000

As a consequence of the recent changes in the repositories, the openSUSE KDE team is happy to announce the availability of packages containing the first beta of the KDE Platform, Workspaces and Applications 4.11.

Packages are available in the KDE:Distro:Factory repository. As it is beta software, it may have not-yet-discovered bugs, and its use is recommended only if you are willing to test packaging (reporting bugs to Novell’s bugzilla) or the software (reporting bugs directly to KDE). For specific queries on the 4.11 beta not related to specific openSUSE packaging, use the KDE Community Forums 4.11 Beta/RC area.

Have a good test!

Michael Meeks: 2013-06-16: Sunday.

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 21:00:00 +0000

Off to the hack-fest, lots of people there, poked at some horrible performance problem in a participant's monster document; interesting - lots of styles. Michael S. found and fixed an evil writer most annoying bug in 4.1, caught up with Astron, lots of fun. Caught up with Tim as I left, a good hack-fest.
Lengthy train (must remember to be in the right end of the Hamburg airport train - note to self: listen to Stephan harder); plane; coach; other coach; bed tired.

Bruno Friedmann: I will miss the 5th edition of openSUSE Conference

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 13:48:19 +0000

I’m not going to osc13

Sunny sky, rainy heart today.

Two days ago, I took the decision to not assist the certainly most fabulous openSUSE Conference next July in Thessaloniki.

A conjunction of several factors lead to that decision.
First what I regret was the chosen date. Damn July is the only expensive period to travel to Thessaloniki. The plane ticket never drop below the 800€ (hey! for sure I want to have Françoise with me), especially with the late announce of precise days. May, June, September would have been so cheaper…
I can understand the choice main sponsor SUSE do, and their need to spread osc and SUSECON at a 6 month delay in the year’s schedule, but sadly does not work for me this year.

Thessaloniki port

Secondly after February marketing hack-fest, I missed (I still don’t know how) the opportunity to get my travel reimbursed by the TSP and then loose half of the budget for osc. Before TSP get improved, and send a bounce email to ask you to send back your forms. So if you are sponsored for osc, fill and send back your expenses quickly after the event. Don’t believe you do it, check twice you really do it! Don’t suppose, be sure!

Another side, I already knew that a customer project will happen during that time-frame. As it concerns a lot of partner’s I’ve to take in account the availability of each of them. Unfortunately, after believing that it could be doable to free-up time for osc I decide to stop persecuting myself, and make a deal to live in peace and go ahead: no osc this year.

Maths have their say: statistically, more osc will be, more the chance to miss one will increase ( I know still not a real excuses)

I would like to share my deep apologizes to the whole Greek Community in charge of OSC13. You all know, how I was and still am a big found of your commitment and really appreciate each of you.
I will all miss you!

I really hope osc13 will stay in history as one of the ever greatest conference organized.

Don’t worry Thessaloniki, I know how great the place is, kind the people are, etc..
I’ll be back soon!

Αχ Θεσσαλονικη – Αντωνης Βαρδης

Michael Meeks: 2013-06-15: Saturday.

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 21:00:00 +0000

Off to the hackfest, great to meet up with a trickle of people old and new coming to hack on fun stuff. Realised that my list of invisible things in 4.1 - missed Eike's great continuing work on langtag / bcp47 etc. Also Bjoern / David O / Norbert's awesome gerrit / on-demand multi-platform build integration: select a sha1 hash to be built on all three systems and wait for the result. Poked at the docs for that with David.
Pushed Benjamin's patch, got Issa setup with push access and his new flat icon theme included; got Rolf setup with some comment translation. Caught up with the KACST guys, poked at lots of bits of code variously, fixed a number of UI / ergonomic issues. Up until 4am hacking with the hardest of the hard-core guys - struggling with some awful bugs.

Michael Meeks: 2013-06-14: Friday.

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 21:00:00 +0000

Up early; E's fifth Birthday, present unwrapping and playing with at breakfast - fun. Off into Cambridge with J. and Emily - bus to the airport, plane to Hamburg, caught up with Thorsten, admired his new eco-flat, on to the meal / meet-up in the evening (kindly sponsored by Lanedo) - up rather late talking over this and that.

Andrés G. Aragoneses: Modernizing blam's autotools (or shaving the yak to move out from GoogleReader...)

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 10:07:04 +0000

Before focusing my spare time completely on the GSoC* (as I have mentoring responsibilities this year \o/ ), I wanted to solve a problem that cannot wait after July...

Yes, I've been victim of Google's cuts too... And I was wondering, where should I move? Feedly? ThingyBob? Well, I shouldn't make the same mistake twice, right?

Actually, some time ago I was using a desktop app to avoid relying on software that I cannot control (yes, vendor lock-in, the most important thing that open source tries to solve, right?): Thunderbird. But somehow the convenience of a web app (that I can access from any computer) and the hassle of using my mail client for RSS reading made me move to the web.

I should be able to find a replacement that no company or individual can "take down", and which feels less clunky than Thunderbird for reading RSS. So, enter blam (in the future I'll figure out how to sync its state between computers, maybe using SparkleShare?, to achieve that same convenience that a web-app provides), that Gnome app that has strangely managed to not catch my eye until now...

Well, maybe because if I install it from debian sid and I try to import my very first RSS feed from my GoogleReader list it doesn't work? Well, apparently it is a bug that is already fixed upstream, thanks to Carlos which has modernized the way that the program deals with XML and serialization.

Then I went ahead and tried to compile master myself... and guess what, the autogen.sh execution fails. Here the yak shaving begins, when I feel like this when trying to fix the autotools stuff:

Fortunately, after some tinkering (and some copy&paste from banshee's build scripts), I managed to fix the problem, and also modernized a bit some things (like using the brand new ".ac" extension instead of ".in" for the configure script, or using properly the AC_INIT and AM_AUTOMAKE_INIT macros,...).

Anyway, the real thing to highlight here is that while I was fixing this stuff and pushing to the repository...

... I saw some really good stuff committed by Carlos: using the new .NET 4.5 C# async patterns to get rid of those ugly callbacks! Kudos to him.

And if you're willing to help more with our autotools housekeeping, please do, I still feel this autogen.sh is way too long and needs some ironing.

* And if you're wondering what's up with GSoC (aka Google Summer of Code):

I had Nicholas Little lined up to work on Rygel+Banshee integration, but sadly he couldn't apply due to work commitments (hopefully he will still work with me on it in his spare time).
I had Rashid Khan lined up to work on Cydin+Banshee integration, but sadly there were not enough GSoC spots for him :( (fortuntately he told me he still wanted to work on it with me in his spare time).
I had Tomasz Maczyński lined up to work on Banshee integration with more REST APIs, and fortunately he was selected! So expect some nice FanArt.TV and SongKick plugins soon!

Luca Beltrame: Upcoming changes to openSUSE KDE repositories

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 06:11:07 +0000

Since KDE has released the first beta of Platform, Workspaces, and Applications 4.11, there will be some changes in the packages offered in the openSUSE repositories.

In short:

KDE:Distro:Factory will now start tracking 4.11 betas and RCs: packages are being worked on. Use this version to test packages and to report bugs upstream.
KDE:Release:410 has been decoupled from KDE:Distro:Factory. If you were using 4.10 packages from KDF, you’re highly encouraged to move to this repository.
KDE:Unstable:SC will keep on carrying snapshots from KDE git repositories.

If you test the 4.11 packages, report bugs in the packaging (or openSUSE-specific functionality) to Novell’s bugzilla, and bugs in the software to bugs.kde.org. Also, please use the dedicated area on the KDE Community Forums to discuss issues.

Let the testing commence!

Andrew Wafaa: Changed Blogging System Again

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 23:00:00 +0000

It's been almost 18 months since I last made any change to this site, and I've been meaning to do it for a while. In all honesty, it's been a while since I last blogged so I thought it was as good a time as any. Thanks to the likes of Twitter and Google+, and my corporate blog I'm finding myself blogging less an less.

As my blog is getting less content, is it really worth running an sql server etc? I don't think it is. There's the system overhead (I'll explain why I'm thinking about system overhead in another post), the maintanence of a critical component, the backups etc. WordPress is OK, but it really is overkill for simple blogging. After seeing peers, friends, and general interweb related buzz, I finally decided to move and use a static site generator. Problem is which one - there are loads?! I read and an LWN article which somewhat helped, so now I needed to choose. I finally bit the bullet and went for Nanoc after recommendations from trusted people.

So far I'm loving it. I had already started to get into Markdown, so creating content using the language was easy enough (I'm by no means an expert though). I get most of the functions that I want straight out of the box, it renders perfectly regardless of browser - desktop or mobile, it is immensly portable, backups are a breeze, and overall maintanence is simple. I regularily ask myself why I took so long to make the move.

As part of the move I've also rejigged URLs etc, so if you crazily had my blog bookmarked for whatever reason you will need to update. I've not quite finished fiddling yet, I've not implemented comments yet, but you could always use G+ or whatever in the meantime. I also want to tweak the theme and some other bits. I'd like to thank Marcus Ruckert for helping me with some of the code tweaks, Peter Aronoff for the current theme and some ideas.

Michael Meeks: 2013-06-13: Thursday.

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 21:00:00 +0000

Up, pushed a blog about where we're at, technically with our 4.1 betas, and with some credits for our hidden heros. Pleased to see Minh push his first VLC integration work to our GSOC feature branch. Dug into some callgrind traces.
Team meeting, ESC meeting, Vojtech's staff.
Really pleased to see the LibreOffice 2012 conference videos show up, you can enjoy them, slides have been up for a long time. Perhaps it's a great time to watch a video and then book for LibreOffice conference 2013 - September in Milan/Italy - to best the see progress.
Booked coach to the Hamburg Hackfest tomorrow - it should be great. Dinner. Poked at a horrible leak with StarView meta files compounded by piles of architectural lunacy.

Michael Meeks:

LibreOffice's under-the-hood progress in 4.1.0 (beta)

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 21:00:00 +0000

Rather soon we will be releasing LibreOffice 4.1—currently we're in a Beta phase of that, and we appreciate people getting stuck in and helping with testing. You can download builds from here pre-releases or if you like some up-to-the-hour builds from dev-builds.

( This post is also available in French )

We're still building our list of features and credits. We have a number of new visible features of course with credits against them. Cor has made a pair of beautiful blog entries highlighting UI improvement and the Photo Album features in 4.1. That made me think of the many developers who have been working extremely hard on things that are under the covers and not so easily seen, but are still really important. I'd like to explain just some highlights of that here, (crediting the developers' employer where there is one at the first mention). Often these are tasks that are easy to get involved with, and may seem trivial in isolation but cumulatively add up to a code-base that is far easier to understand and to contribute to.

Build system: configure / make

One of the tasks that most irritates and has distracted new developers from doing interesting feature work on the code-base over many years has been our build system. At the start of LibreOffice, there was an incomplete transition to using GNU make, which required us to use both the horrible old dmake tool as well as gnumake, with configure using a Perl script to generate a shell script configuring a set of environment variables that had to be sourced into your shell in order to compile (making it impossible to re-configure from that shell), with a Perl build script that batched compilation with two layers of parallelism, forcing you to over- or undercommit on any modern builder; it looked something like this:

# old and awful
autoconf
./configure --enable-this-and-that
source LinuxIntelEnv.Set.sh
./bootstrap
cd instsetoo_native
build --all

Thanks to the stirling efforts Björn Michaelsen (Canonical), David Tardon (Red Hat), Peter Foley, Norbert Thiebaud, Michael Stahl (Red Hat), Matúš Kukan, Tor Lillqvist (SUSE), Stephan Bergmann (Red Hat), Luboš Luňák (SUSE), Caolán McNamara (Red Hat), Mathias Bauer (Oracle), Jan Holesovsky (SUSE), Andras Timar (SUSE), David Ostrovsky, Hans-Joachim Lankenau (Oracle) and more—(more details) the 126 thousand targets, and 1700 makefiles are now fully converted to GNU make so we have the significantly simpler:

# LibreOffice configure & make as of now:

./autogen.sh --enable-this-and-that
make

No shell pollution, no 'bootstrap' script, no Perl build wrapper, no obsolete 'dmake' required, just plain GNU make files—and incredible build parallelism—after generating headers, we could utilize a thousand CPUs. This is a clean-cut task with a clear boundary; like the process of removing dead code in previous releases, it is now complete—freeing up developers for more interesting things.

Build system: make dev-install

LibreOffice, in contrast to much other software, is fully relocateable—you can plonk it down where you like, and run it from there. As such we use a make dev-install to create an install set in install/ that you can run in the build tree. This process has traditionally been performed by a Perl script using a convoluted set of pre-processed rules, to achieve what is (mostly) a copying operation. David Tardon has made some great progress moving this to use much simpler file-lists that we auto-generate. So—nowadays we have an instdir/ top-level (on which these file-lists operate) that starts to mirror the install—the hope being to do away with the make install phase for running inside the build tree. So far we have more than 250 file lists, handling nearly 20k files.

This initiative makes it significantly easier to add or remove files from install, and removes lots of zipping and un-zipping of sets of files that used to happen during the build: thus making packaging a build faster: the SDK packaging went from 90s to 30s or so, while also dropping lots of scp2/ rules. The hope is that, when this is complete we will have an office suite that is runnable out of the box after a make, without an extra install phase.

Code cleanup / linting

A huge amount has been done here to make the code-base easier to understand. Doing this makes it easier and quicker for us to read the code, check it is correct, understand the flow—and so to add features or fixes.

sane includes: In the bad old days each module used to have an inc/<module> directory inside itself where its external include files were concealed. During the build of each module, these were copied to a separate artifacts directory (the 'solver') and the next module was compiled against those copies. This lead to a number of problems with debuggers identifying copies of headers, newbies editing the wrong (solver) headers, performance issues on windows, and more. So—thanks to Bjoern Michaelsen, Matúš Kukan, Michael Stahl for moving all the headers to a single top-level include/ directory and de-crufting the makefiles to make that nice.
tools cleanup: The tools/ module has a lot of duplicate functionality that is not needed, in this cycle we removed a complete duplicate file-system abstraction by writing it out of the code, thanks to Tomas Turek, Krisztian Pinter, Thomas Arnhold, Marcos Paulo de Souza & Andras Timar. It is always good for security to remove yet another duplicate, cross-platform, safe temporary file creation code-path.
String cleanups: We continued to make good progress on the removal of the obsolete UniString class, with a couple more method removals from Jean-Noël Rouvignac & Caolán McNamara. In addition Lubos Lunak did a mass removal of redundant rtl:: namespace prefixes all across the code for OUString and OString - making the code more readable, with a number of other significant performance, and cleanliness improvements. Large numbers of call sites were upgraded from UniString to OUString, had their redundant RTL_USTRING_CONSTASCII macro bloat removed, and used faster ways of concatenating strings—thanks to: Olivier Hallot, Christina Rossmanith, Stephan Bergmann, Chris Sherlock, Peter Foley, Marcos Paulo de Souza, José Guilherme Vanz, Jean-Noël Rouvignac, Markus Mohrhard, Ricardo Montania, Donizete Waterkemper, Sean Young, Thomas Arnhold, Rodolfo Ribeiro Gomes, Lionel Elie Mamane, Matteo Casalin, Janit Anjaria, Noel Grandin, Tomaž Vajngerl, Krisztian Pinter, Fridrich Strba (SUSE), Gergő Mocsi, Prashant, Ádám Csaba Király, Kohei Yoshida—and more I missed in the log (mail me).
component service registration: Noel Grandin continued his indomitable work to cleanup all call-sites that create components with new-style service constructors, with lots of other associated improvements—around two hundred and fifty new commits in 4.1.

Code quality work

Perhaps the least visible kind of improvement is crasher bugs that are not there anymore. Clearly the goal is never crashing, but how do we get there ? Markus Mohrhard worked on a lovely set of automated tests to load over twenty four thousand files—of the most evil and twisted kind: ie. the contents of all bugzillas we could scrape. Thanks to some great work from Markus, Fridrich Strba (SUSE), Michael Stahl, Eike Rathke (Red Hat) for fixing the results, we hope users will enjoy fewer sightings of our ugly crash dialog.

Another source of significant improvement, was the use of static checking tools to increase code quality, and hence reliability. This release a team started systematically going through the coverity data. This yielded nearly three hundred commits—thanks to: Markus Mohrhard, Julien Nabet, Norbert Thiebaud, Caolán McNamara, Marc-André Laverdière (TCS), and others. In addition Julian Nabet got over sixty fixes from the cppcheck tool included. Lastly lint-wise, we continue to use Clang and Lubos' nice plugins to find and remove questionable code as it appears.

Another great tool we that has improved here is bibisect—allowing us to have a git repository with binaries from every few dozen previous commits included inside it. This allows end-user testers to find very precisely where a given bug was introduced into the product using bisection of lots of binary builds crammed into a single git repository. Thanks to Bjoern Michaelsen & Canonical's QA labs for more build hardware here.

We also built and executed more unit tests with LibreOffice 4.1 to avoid regressions as we change the code. These are rather hard to measure, since people like to pile up new tests inside existing unit test modules. By grepping for the CPPUNIT_TEST registration macro we can see that that we added around a hundred such tests to 4.1—the majority of these were added to calc, with significant gains in writer, chart2, connectivity and impress. Thanks to Miklos Vajna (SUSE), Kohei Yoshida (SUSE), Noel Power (SUSE), Markus Mohrhard, Luboš Luňák, Stephan Bergmann, Michael Stahl, Noel Grandin, Eike Rathke, Julien Nabet, Caolán McNamara, Jan Holesovsky, Thomas Arnhold, Tor Lillqvist, David Ostrovsky, Pierre-Eric Pelloux-Prayer (Lanedo), Christina Rossmanith and others for working on the tests.

Calc core refactoring

One of the reasons why Calc gained so many, badly needed, systematic unit tests for previously un-covered code, was the very significant re-factoring work going on in the core. For many years, calc was architected under the delusion that a spreadsheet is composed of cells - which created some serious scalability and performance problems. The end goal of this work is to kill ScBaseCell completely—and move to storage of spans of contiguous data of uniform type down a column. Some of the initial work for this is in place in 4.1, but the full benefit will have to wait at least until 4.2 or even later versions when we can make further adjustment to take full advantage of the new cell storage structure. The aim with 4.1 is to have no visible performance regression, perhaps some minor speedups and memory footprint reductions in some areas, but more importantly, better code maintainability thanks to the separation of cell broadcaster mechanism from the cell storage itself. Thanks to Kohei Yoshida for his great work here.

German Comment Translation

Always encouraging to build the metrics, in the last release cycle we lost approaching five thousand lines of German comment: translated into English. That helps new developers get started on the code, understand it and get developing faster. The rough graph of this (which unfortunately includes a number of false positives for lines of German) looks like this:

With many thanks to Urs Fässler, Christian M. Heller, Philipp Weissenbacher, Luc Castermans, David Verrier, Chris Sherlock, Joren De Cuyper, Thomas Arnhold, Philipp Riemer, and others. Help appreciated from German speakers with translating the last sixteen-thousand lines—it's a matter of checking the code out and running bin/find-german-comments on a module, translating a few lines and mailing a git diff to libreoffice At lists.freedesktop.org (no subscription required).

Completed Wizard conversion to python

Java remains an excellent, if not preferred environment for writing cross-platform extensions. All the existing Java support and APIs remain as before. Having said that—on some platforms Java is not available, and as such using our bundled, internal python runtime makes good sense for built in features.

This release we completed porting the Java wizards, which can be used in the File->Wizards menu, to Python. This should give a better experience for Windows users who are not lucky enough to have a JRE installed. Many thanks to Xisco Fauli, and Javier Fernandez (Igalia)

Linking & startup

One of the key features required to get the LibreOffice prototypes running on Android and iOS was to be able to link nearly all our code into a single shared library (Android) or executable (iOS). This work is re-used with an --enable-mergelibs configure option—which aggregates much of the common code of LibreOffice into a huge, single shared library: much as is done with Mozilla. This is increasingly the default choice for Linux distribution builds, and should yield improved seek and hence cold-start performance. Work remains to be done on code re-ordering, and PGO to further improve startup performance. Many thanks to Matúš Kukan (for the Raspberry Pi Foundation) and Tor Lillqvist for working on this.

Another startup performance feature kindly funded by the Raspberry Pi foundation is to reduce the amount of configuration data pointlessly parsed during startup. One nice win in this area was removing fourteen thousand lines of data for printing sheets of labels from our configuration, and defering that parsing, until someone wants to print a label, thanks to Matus Kukan for that too.

New type format

The programming interfaces that are used in LibreOffice require type information to inform their work, particularly for scripting. In the past this was stored in some ancient, inefficient, legacy binary database. Thanks to Stephan Bergmann (Red Hat) we now have a new, more efficient and compressed binary format, with our main offapi.rdb shrinking ten-fold from 6.5Mb to 0.65Mb, more details in his Well Typed Uno talk at FOSDEM. So far this format is used only for private, internal type information, and we plan to remain fully backwards compatible for extensions that provide old-style type information. Documentation of the format is availble in the source tree: nowadays we have increasingly detailed structural / overview documentation in each module's README file.

Miscellaneous

Other areas showed some great improvements:

Time: The resolution of the time-related datatypes in UNO (LibreOffice's API) has been increased to nanoseconds, from centi- and milliseconds. This is mainly useful in Base, where LibreOffice will not anymore truncate times and timestamps to centiseconds, nor durations to milliseconds, in user data. Lionel Elie Mamane
Base: In a form, DatabaseListBox now exposes the selected value(s) (as opposed to the selected display strings) to the scripting interface. Lionel Elie Mamane
UI migration to Glade XML: The UI migration to Glade layout based XML files continued apace with contributions from many individuals, we managed to go from 64 .ui dialog descriptions in 4.0 to 230 in the 4.1 branch (so far): quite a jump towards completeness at five hundred dialogs—thanks to Caolán McNamara, Krisztian Pinter, Jack Leigh, Alia Almusaireae (KACST), Katarina 'Bubli' Behrens, Abdulaziz A Alayed (KACST), Jan Holesovsky, Faisal M. Al-Otaibi (KACST), Abdulmajeed Ahmed (KACST), Andras Timar, Manal Alhassoun (KACST), Bubli, Albert Thuswaldner, Olivier Hallot, Miklos Vajna, Abdulelah Alarifi (KACST), Gokul Swaminathan (KACST), Rene Engelhard, and others. It is also worth mentioning the great work done by translators to check & update strings here. The most significant benefit of the UI migration is finally making it extremely painless to tweak and improve the user interface.
Debugging output: There are new SAL_INFO and SAL_DEBUG macros which make it easy to add filtered, or temporary debugging output. Our git hooks warn if you leave any SAL_DEBUG statements around on commit too.
Gallery building: LibreOffice has been lumbered with a rather hideous format in which to store galleries. We generally ship the gallery images as standalone files, but have a set of binary resources containing thumbnails of these, and unqiue integers to refer to their translated names which ship in the libreoffice binary. In 4.1 we build most of these on each platform during compile, making them easy to extend, (and avoiding having impenetrable binaries in git), and we translate the theme name with a new .desktop syntax file alongside. This also should make it easy for users to build their own galleries as extensions and ship them with translated names.
Intermediate SDF removal: While we removed SDF from our developer facing translation flow for 4.0—we still generated some SDF files as temporary build intermediates. Thanks to Tamás Zolnai for moving us to a pure .po solution.

Getting involved

I hope you get the idea that more developers continue to find a home at LibreOffice and work together to complete some rather significant work both under the hood, and also on the trim. I've enjoyed hacking on several of these improvements. Our hope is that as the on-ramp to the project gets less precipitous, people will join us, and find out how fun, and how much easier it is to improve the code these days. You'll also be in good company—first in terms of the number of code contributors to collaborate with:

And also in terms of diversity of code commits, we love to see the unaffiliated volunteers contribution by volume, though clearly the volume and balance changes with the season, release cycle, and time available for mentoring:

Of course, we maintain a list of small, bite-sized tasks which you can use to get involved at our Easy Hacks page, with simple build / setup instructions. We now have a cleaner, and safer environment to work on improving the code.

One of the easiest things to do is to help out with bug reporting, and bug triage (confiming and quality checking other people's bug reports), you can be an effective triager with little experience, and good bug reports really help developers out, just grab and install a pre-release and you're ready to contribute alongside the rest of the development team. Even better you could get involved with the fun QA Bug Triage Contest and win a prize.

Conclusion

LibreOffice 4.1 will be another milestone, and we hope a yet-higher watermark for code-quality, design improvement, and incrementally more solid foundations for improving the best office suite in the world. Of course, with so much changing, we really appreciate early testing of our betas and release candidates, which (we hope) should be useful for doing work with - though save regularly and generationally. If you havn't time to test our betas or release candidates, our time-based release plan predicts our final release date at the very end of July. Thank you for supporting LibreOffice.

Calumma Brevicorne: Keeping Factory in shape

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 12:00:41 +0000

Michal Hrušecký has been helping out on maintaining Factory in shape and shares his experiences.

Factory is development version of openSUSE and it is where the next openSUSE is taking form. Hundreds of packagers send packages into Factory to be integrated as a part of the new release and many more use Factory for testing or for their daily work. Thus it is really important to keep Factory rolling and usable. Everybody knows that Coolo is the Factory master and he does everything to make next openSUSE be the best ever. But keeping factory in shape is really complicated and stressing task. There are dozens of request everyday and each one of them can potentially break something. So Factory can always use a pair of extra hands and for some time I have been one of them. I’d like to give you some insight in what we do, working on keeping Factory building and working.

Keep it building

With a constant influx of newer and cooler versions of libraries and tools it is easy to break existing applications with shiny new software. So we always have some build failures in Factory. Part of our job is to resolve them because if it doesn’t build, you can’t test nor ship it. As developer, you may have seen submit request in various projects in OBS fixing builds for Factory. Everyday I take a look at a number of build failures, investigate why they are not building in Factory and try to do something about it.

For example new version of the GNU C Compiler (GCC) is quite often more strict on includes, requiring developers to be more verbose about the exact internal and external libraries there applications require to be build. What used to build now doesn’t, because you are missing include files. The older GCC let you slip by, but now you have to fix it, build failure by build failure. Another example is GTK which keeps deprecating old API functions and you have to keep up and replace them with correct counterparts from the new API. Sometimes even the kernel changes API and third party modules stops building. All these errors will get eventually resolved upstream (if upstream is alive), but as we follow upstream quite closely before feature freeze, it may happen that we are first facing these issues because sometime we are the first ones who tried to compile this software using new GTK or the new GCC. Of course, we attempt to get these fixes back upstream and share them with other distributions where appropriate!

Image depicting the Factory Workflow

Test it

Another important part of working on a better Factory is testing. If everything builds, we’re happy. You might have heard the saying:

if it builds, ship it!

(un)fortunately, this isn’t Coolo’s idea of how the world works. In Factory, things not only have to build, but also work. Oh, AND conform to some stringent requirements. Here comes into play what most of our team was working on in the past months and what was described last week – openQA. openQA tests the latest builds of openSUSE Factory, tries to install them and run tests on some applications as well. But still, not all failures from automatic testing are real failures. Sometimes application just changed too much to be covered by test. So from time to time we go through failing openQA tests, try to reproduce them, figure out what went wrong and either fix it or report it via bugzilla to the corresponding maintainer.

Concluding

Each of these tasks is relatively small (check why this test failed, fix this package to build with new gcc) but what makes it hard is the number of packages we’ve got and the constant inflow of changes. Also, because the issue can be all over the place, each and every one requires you to dive into an entirely new package, with new and interesting quirks, build systems, languages and more. It is a great way of getting to know a wide variety of packages and applications, finding a gem every now and then. But also implies a lot of work.

Things will get slower and more stable after feature freeze when we will spend more time in the testing part, while today we mostly work on the build part. Still, Factory has to keep building, without that it becomes impossible to keep developing openSUSE. What we do, fixing these build errors, it might not be super visible, but it matters a lot.

Statistics

On a related note, we’d like to (re) introduce weekly Factory statistics! It has been a while since we had those, once upon a time courtesy of AJ and Guido. Now, Alberto provides them. Here you go, the top-fifteen contributors to openSUSE Factory last week (from Sunday June 2nd to to Sunday June 9th):

Dominique Leuenberger
Tobias Klausmann
Stefan Dirsch
Peter Varkoly
Stephan Kulow
Marcus Meissner
Michal Hrusecky
Cristian Rodríguez
Dirk Mueller
Sascha Peilicke
Kyrill Detinov
Dr. Werner Fink
Bjørn Lie
Tomáš Chvátal
Niels Abspoel

Michael Meeks: 2013-06-12: Wednesday.

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 21:00:00 +0000

Up early; patch merging, mail catchup, partner call, worked late.
Disappointed with 'Arch Memory' on Amazon, whose memory did not work work with my W500, even after BIOS upgrades, North Bridge reset etc. and who refused to refund return postage. Tried Crucial instead - lets see if they can do better, or if it's jusy my hardware / BIOS.

Saurabh Sood: Installing Realtek 8273AE driver on openSUSE 12.3

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 16:22:13 +0000

This was a problem I didnt think I would face while getting a new laptop. I got the Toshiba C580 laptop, which has quite decent specifications. It is a nifty machine, and openSUSE works more or less flawlessly. The only issue I faced was with the Wireless card. It is a Realtek device, which is usually well supported, but this particular model, the 8273AE is yet to be fully supported by the kernel. I had to dig around a lot to get this to work, but received a lot of help from the openSUSE forums, and managed to get it to work. Thanks to lwfinger for writing the patch to get it to work properly.

1.) Use YaST to install the Kernel Development, C/C++ development and Base Development patterns

2.) Download the compat-wireless package from
http://linuxwireless.org/download/compat-wireless-2.6/compat-wireless-2012-10-03.tar.bz2

3.) Download the patch from
http://www.lwfinger.com/realtek_drivers/rtl8723ae_master_patch

4.) Run the following commands
tar jxvf compat-wireless-2012-10-03.tar.bz2 cd compat-wireless-2012-10-03/ patch -p1 < ../rtl8723ae_master_patch make sudo make install

5.) Check if the driver is working with
sudo modprobe -v rtl8723ae

This should get the driver working properly

Source: http://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/wireless/477285-rtl8723ae-realtek-wirless-driver-hell-3.html

Michael Meeks: 2013-06-11: Tuesday.

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 21:00:00 +0000

Up early, mail chew, continued to wrestle with cairo canvas & compositing. It seems the bane of my life is VCL's horribly unhelpful design around separate alpha, and some combination of pre-multiplied alpha, bogus 24bit alpha masks and worse. Eventually unwound it all, and a number of un-related issues - now it renders correctly at least.
Poked GSOC student, built ESC bug stats and prototype agenda, more mail chew.

openSUSE News: openSUSE 12.1 EOL, 13.1 Milestone 2 released!

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 16:55:25 +0000

For those of you waiting for (or working on) openSUSE 13.1, we have good news: milestone 2 is now out for you to download. As to be exptected, the inclusion of newer software versions is the highlight of this release. Broken in M1 and fixed now are automake, boost, and webyast. But first, let’s talk openSUSE 12.1: it is no longer maintained.

openSUSE 12.1 no longer maintained

openSUSE 12.1 has reached end of life. This release came into the world on the 16th of November 2011, giving it a life span of about 19 months. With openSUSE releasing new versions every 8 months, this means there are already a 12.2 and an 12.3 – with 13.1 to be released by the end of this year! For 12.1 users, the time has come to move on to a newer version and benefit from more, better and faster software!

As the announcement from the security- and maintenance team explains:

openSUSE 12.1 was the first openSUSE distribution maintained using OpenBuildService methods (known as “OBS Maintenance”), allowing full community participation, from the beginning.

Currently, there are no plans to add 12.1 to the evergreen-project. If something changes, I’ll inform you as soon as possible.

Here are some statistics of our released updates (compared to 11.4):

Total updates: 789 (+65)

Security: 389 (-28)

Recommended: 398 (+92)

Optional: 2 (+1)

Fixed CVE-entries: 1508 (+193)

Fixed Bugs (overall): 1874 (+319)

The increase of the resolved issues is related to the easier participation in working on openSUSE with the OpenBuildService.
Thanks on this point to our awesome packagers, community and OpenBuildService-Team!

Your maintenance- and security-team

Changes, changes: openSUSE 13.1 M2 is out!

With M2 out, openSUSE 13.1 is still in an early period of development and lots of changes are coming. The most notable list of changes made in Milestone 2 includes:

livecds using overlayfs now with persistent hybrid support
automake 1.12.1->1.13.2
boost 1.49.0->1.53.0
util-linux 2.21.2->2.23.1
evolution 3.8.1->3.9.1
gtk3 3.8.1->3.9.0
icu 50.1.2->51.2
iproute2 3.7.0->3.9.0
kernel 3.9.0->3.10.rc4
libreoffice 4.0.2.2.1->4.0.3.3.2
MozillaFirefox 20.0->21.0
pulseaudio 3.0->4.0
qemu 1.4.0->1.5.0

For Milestone 3 the major goals are to bring Perl 5.18 and GCC 4.8 on board. You can get Milestone one from software.opensuse.org.

Most Annoying Bugs

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

Statistics

As you might have seen in the openSUSE team blog about Factory development yesterday, the openSUSE team has collected some statistics on development of openSUSE. Where the blog contains the top-15 contributors of last week, here’s the top-20 of contributors to openSUSE 13.1 between Milestone 1 and Milestone2:

Stephan Kulow
Sascha Peilicke
Dominique Leuenberger
Jan Engelhardt
Marcus Meissner
Dr. Werner Fink
Dirk Mueller
Stefan Dirsch & Michal Hrusecky
Andreas Stieger
Cristian Rodríguez
Tobias Klausmann
Andreas Schwab
Petr Gajdos & Ismail Donmez
Peter Varkoly, Dinar Valeev & Asterios Drami
Vincent Untz
Bjørn Lie
Tomáš Chvátal, Togan Muftuoglu, Dmitriy Perlow & Ciaran Farrell
Wolfgang Rosenauer & Joop Boonen
Michal Vyskocil & Matthias Mailänder
Tomas Cech, Johannes Weberhofer, Hrvoje Senjan & Andreas Färber

Get hacking!

As always, testers and contributors are welcome throughout the development process. We published some plans for 13.1 in the M1 announcement and if you want to make sure your application makes it into openSUSE 13.1, see this article on getting your package in Factory. You should also check out the participation portal, join the Factory Mailing List and have a lot of fun!

Remember, we will soon have the openSUSE Conference in Greece and this is a great place to get started on openSUSE development & meet the folk already hacking.

According to the road map, The next milestone is expected for the 11th of July, followed by new ones each month. Beta 1 is planned for the 19th of September, RC one will be on October 10 and RC2 on October 31st.

Pool ball graphic courtesy of Victorhck – openSUSE Artwork Team member

Kostas Koudaras: Organizing oSC13 - 38 days before(a conference without history is a tree without roots)

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 08:46:18 +0000

Today I feel like talking about history. The history of all the openSUSE confernces in the past. If I made my research right the first openSUSE Conference was in 20-23 of October in 2010.

Here are some graphics that was used at that time. I really find them interesting since I like history and I believe that a lot of lessons can be tought by history. I don't really know much about oSC10 since I was really new to the openSUSE project at that time and I hessitated on going there at that time. Looking back now I think I made a mistake not going there. Of course I found this out when joined the second conference in 2011 which also took place in Nuremberg from 11 to 14 of September in 2011. This was a lifetime experience. If you ever joined an openSUSE conference I am sure you all remember your first time there. It was amazing since I was a volunteer and I went to Nuremberg one day before the conference and there I had Allan Clark making pins, Juergen Weigert making the lights and a bunch of other top coders carring arround stuff in order to set up the venue. No Rock stars there, just people who are devoted in openSUSE and in making the conference work, for all.

Then it was oSC 2012. This was different for me. The Greeks were so close at taking oSC2012 but when Prague also claimed it we took a step back since we understood and we knew that we were not 100% ready for it. We needed more people for the Greek community to get practically involved with it so that next year we would have even more experience and feedback. You see sometimes stepping back is better.

We joinned oSC12 more active than oSC11 and we tried to do the most we could and we learned a lot there. The idea though was the same, people hanging around and talk to each other. There was no need to know someone from before or to be friends from before. Afterall the meaning of the conference is also to have people meet and talk F2F. I have to say here that I made actuall friends in all oSC's, people that I am happy to hear their news beyond openSUSE matters. People from all over the planet and this is something you can't do sitting in front of a keyboard.

Then we finally got the oSC13 to Greece. Not many things stayed as originally planned but this is only a good thing. We are prepairing a conference that for the first time is organized exclusively by the community and it is planned to be friendly to everybody and to produce a lot of work for the project. If you have any hessitations on comming to the conference because you don't know people or you fear that you will be a stranger among strangers forget it. Just track someone you really like from irc or from wherever and go say a hello, there is a big posbility a long time friendship to start with that hello. Any problem you might have will be solved. Ask anyone that ever joined an oSC. Come to share thoughts and learn from people. Come as you are and don't hessitate to deploy your personallity. There is enough place for everyone here.
Hope to see you all there.

Cornelius Schumacher: Experimenting with user interfaces for todo lists

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 07:56:06 +0000

When I presented Polka, my experiment to reframe the user interface for address books, some people suggested that it would be interesting to try something similar for todo lists. So I did try. The result is a small app called Bliss, because it makes you happy and gives you peace of mind.

I started with taking the concept from Polka to have freely arrangeable items on a canvas organized in groups. That works, but it had a flaw, because the basic element of todos is not the individual item, but a list.

Todos are much more dynamic than information about people. You create, remove, and rearrange them all the time. Context matters. One powerful effect of writing todos down is that you relieve your brain from having to constantly make sure you don't forget about them. This only works, if it's easy and quick enough to structure and arrange the todos according to your mental model. Lists are the natural structure here to keep priorities and order.

So basically a group became a list, where you can reorder items by dragging them around, either within the list or to other groups.

But in addition to this it's also quite useful to have multiple lists in one view. You can for example model a flow between things to do today, this week, and this month, where items in one list are replenished from the next one. Or you can have something like a personal Kanban with lists for things to do, being done, and done. Or you can use a scheme like in the Getting Things Done method. The combination of groups and lists is pretty powerful here.

Bliss keeps the complete history of what you did, so you can always look or go back without cluttering your views with done items. It animates all the transitions when moving items or navigating groups, so you don't lose context when items are rearranged or you change the view. Especially when dealing with such dynamic objects like todo items, animations really make sense, not as eye-candy, but as a way to support you in keeping track of what's happening. That said, they also make the app more fun to use.

The menus are done in the same way as in Polka, as semicircular context menus, which works nicely not only with the mouse, but also on a touch screen.

The code is in the KDE git as well as on GitHub. If you want to give it a try and play around with the UI you can get it from there. I'm happy about feedback.

The technology behind this experiment doesn't matter much. It's mostly reusing Polka code, a QGraphicsView based Qt GUI with an Kode-generated XML backend, which stores data in a git repository. To move forward it would be nice to redo the UI in QML and connect it to Akonadi. But the more interesting part it experimenting with the user interface right now.

Looking ahead it would also be interesting to rethink the UI of mails and calendars by moving beyond the limitations of the traditional widget based approach. This could make it possible to come up with user interfaces which are much more tailored to the natural mental model of people, and make full use of the opportunities you have by not being constrained to paper. There are tons of unexplored areas here.

I'm looking forward to more experimentation.

Michael Meeks: 2013-06-10: Monday.

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 21:00:00 +0000

Up early; mail chew, tried to test remote-X over ssh behaviour, and ended up falling foul of this ssh / IPv6 issue, worked around that. Chewed through some code reversion / tweaking.
Pregnancy Crisis Centre annual meal in the evening - rather nice to catch up with all that came and enjoy some food together.

Jos Poortvliet: oSC2013 next!

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 17:44:00 +0000

After Akademy 2013 in Bilbao, we will fly (via Berlin...) to Thessaloniki, Greece, where the openSUSE Conference will take place. Like I argued for Akademy, oSC is a relevant and useful event for the openSUSE folk.

History - oSC 10, 11 and 12

This year oSC takes place in Greece, a fact far more relevant than it might seem. The first three openSUSE Conferences I attended took place in Nürnberg. First in a conference center, the third was the legendary oSC2011 in the Zentrifuge, an old factory building creating an absolutely amazing atmosphere. Both events were largely organized by SUSE employees from the Nürnberg office but oSC11 already had a fair involvement of volunteers and a strong focus on BoF sessions and 'getting stuff done'. We had a lively marketing and ambassador team by then. I vividly remember the day before the event, when I rode a van full of crazy geekos by a few stores, buying everything from carpets and plants to lights to dress up the location. Every day we figured out who would staff the bar, organize stuff in the rooms - and moving the chairs was a matter of asking outside if a few folk would be willing to help out. At this event, there was already talk about doing the openSUSE conference in Greece.

First Prague

But going from doing the event in Nue and by SUSE people (with help) to doing it in Greece by volunteers (with help) seemed a big step and the team also had limitations as to the date and time: the event would have to be in May or June. As it was already September when oSC'11 took place, that was very close.

There came a different proposal from Michal and others in Prague, and with an office there, we decided it made much more sense to do it there and told Kostas that he'd have his oSC in Thessaloniki, but one year later. I joined Michal in scouting for a location in Prague and discovered a local community was about to organize another Linux event a mere two weeks after the openSUSE Conference! I proposed to merge the two, and the format of oSC'12 was born. Like oSC'10 two years earlier, this event tried to focus on collaboration and bringing communities together. I unfortunately had to scale back my involvement in the conference significantly after LinuxTag Berlin in May 2012 due to health issues and barely could make it to the event itself. Meanwhile, the Greeks had already started preparing the organization of oSC'13 and were present with a large team at oSC'12 to help run the show.

Greece in 2013

Feedback from the event did show that the openSUSE community wanted more 'Geeko time', so the Greek team has made sure that there will be a good openSUSE focus at the event. Of course, without compromising our open nature: there will be plenty colors besides green. Naturally, SUSE input will be lower than usual - the Nürnberg can't easily take a afternoon off to visit, even a bus trip is not enough. But we have made sure that many central developers will be there and there is a host of great sessions coming - a post about that on news.opensuse.org is coming soon!

Due to the internal changes at SUSE, I haven't been as much involved in the event as I would have liked but just seeing the conference team work has been amazing. It isn't just a Greek affair, mind you - for example, the logo and much artwork comes from the other side of the world, by the hands of US citizen Anditosan and Brazilian Carlos Ribeiro! And as with the Prague conference, Izabel Valverde again played a major role in handling travel support and sponsors. And we have Robert Schweikert and Henne Vogelsang, working on the program and website, Matt Barringer building OSEM (!!!) and some others.

Awesome

I might be overusing that word - but I really, really think oSC'13 will be awesome. As far as it is up to the Greekos organizing it, there's no doubt! And like with Akademy, if you haven't booked yet - you should...

Have a lot of fun and see you in Greece ;-)

PS: note that the above is mostly my memory of How Stuff Happened™. There were plenty more people involved, pushing, making it happen. Thanks to all of them, as we're gonna have a great conference in Greece ;-)

openSUSE News: Schedule of openSUSE Conference

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 14:50:04 +0000

the openSUSE Conference kicks off in less than 6 weeks! The conference Paper Committee has been receiving and judging a lot of presentation proposals and while there is still time to send in papers, a number of sessions has been confirmed already. In this article we will present you some of these sessions!

Community and Project

The Community and Project track gathers talks around openSUSE and community activities, quoting the CfP page: “including but not limited to project governance, marketing, artwork, ambassador reports, collaboration with other FOSS communities and other topics”.

Find the geeko

Currently accepted talks will introduce local openSUSE communities, intro the new ambassador and merchandising programs and discuss Free and open in general.

One particularly interesting subject will be openSUSE statistics. It is given by Athanasios Ilias “zoumpis” Rousinopoulos, student and Greek openSUSE ambassador from Spain (long story…) and Alberto “aplanas” Planas from the openSUSE team. They will each talk about numbers in a different area. Zoumpis is a MSc student doing research on doing quantitative analysis on communication in Free Software projects. He has studied the openSUSE repositories, mailing lists and bugzilla and extracted information from them. He will analyze the activity of the openSUSE community with interesting graphs and statistics!

Alberto has been working on measuring statistics before, during and after the openSUSE release. How many downloads does openSUSE have, how many installations? And where do these numbers go? This gives interesting insights in where we, as a community, are going and what options we have before us.

Geeko Tech

An interesting array of speakers will give attendees insight into the inner workings of openSUSE during the great workshops and talks on the Geeko Tech track. Although it often seems that openSUSE works by an act of magic, reality is that there are very dedicated developers behind it. Here is a snippet of sessions dealing with the more technical aspects of openSUSE.

Starting with the Open Build Service, Henne Vogelsang will deliver a two-part masters workshop on how to get your packages processed by OBS. Ranging from the conception of new packages to updates for older releases, Henne will show the way.

Making sure that openSUSE stays stable is important for a good User-distribution relationship! What started as a way to improve quality for the final release of openSUSE by Bernhard Wiedemann became a important project to improve development of openSUSE. Through his mighty Perl scripts openQA is able to provide information to users about the state of openSUSE’s stability during development. A workshop and a talk dealing with the subject will teach attendees to use openQA to find and report issues and build further test cases, helping make sure that we all have the best openSUSE available.

Other talks include Lars Vogdt presentation of openSUSE’s infrastructure, showing what’s behind building and serving a Linux Distribution; a review of what openSUSE can do to make a tastier Raspberry Pi, making sure that openSUSE’s installations are secure and how you can carry server virtualization through OpenStack in the size of a flash drive.

Surely there is a great variety for those tech enthusiasts who would like to find out more about openSUSE development. Do not miss out on these fantastic presentations!

OpenWorld

For this area we invite other FOSS projects to share their work and collaborate with the openSUSE community. Submissions are not limited to technical content, you may choose to talk about your favorite pet project such as building a boat, a robot, or anything else you care about.

Two prominent and disrupting Window Manager presentations make their way into the conference. The MATE desktop with the latest changes and features will join the illumined Enlightenment Desktop in two great presentations about their awesomeness. Since the inception of drastic changes to the most popular window managers Gnome and KDE, many have sought to find alternatives that sit better with individual needs. MATE attempts to bring back a traditional Gnome 2 experience even after Gnome moved their packages to version 3. Enlightenment being an old classic in the bunch but always with fresh and daring ideas makes its appearance on stage with great ideas on how to show speed and a polished system to manage your files.

Cafe allowed a sneak-peek into a talk room

The Open World track helps you learn as well. Every morning Jos Poortvliet will teach you improved presentation skills and coupled with the presentation by Salih on how to evangelize Linux this becomes the perfect combo for those looking to help make more openSUSE adepts.

For those looking to dig deep into code, there will be sessions on Geeko Run, a game based on Javascript, talks on MYSQL 5.6, Puppet, Ruby, logical volumes, kernel hacking (centered around USB 3), and much, much more. Those attempting to make the grade will be pleased to know that LPI certifications will be available at the conference. You will not have to travel to a certification location, this time LPI comes to you and there will be exam rooms where you can pass your exam!

Now go and book!

The conference is soon but if you have not booked yet – there is still time. Go, prepare!

Pavel Machek: Dear William Hague

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 09:00:10 +0000

If you are not a criminal, please publish your PIN, bank account password, email/facebook passwords and complete medical history. You don't have anything to hide, do you?

Michael Meeks: 2013-06-09: Sunday.

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 21:00:00 +0000

Out to Church on the Green, sadly not a terribly sunny day: cold even. Back for lunch, watched HSM 2, out for a cycling expedition en-masse. E. managed her full length cycle, and won the babes an ice-cream: finally.

Michael Meeks: 2013-06-08: Saturday.

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 21:00:00 +0000

Up lateish, slugged variously; H. and Charlotte out to netball, and took the babes onto the race-course for more cycling practise; E. nearly got did the whole length of the race-course drive under the trees, but just missed it; great progress though. Home, tea, bed.

Michael Meeks: \2013-06-07: Friday.

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 21:00:00 +0000

Up early, call; dug away at EMF+ issues with Fridrich & Thorsten. Mail chew, more poking at corner-cases and rendering quality. Charlotte over in the evening for a sleep-over with H.

Michal Hrušecký: MySQL updates, openSUSE 13.1 and default configuration

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 11:00:02 +0000

Recently I had some time to do some clenaups/changes/updates in server:database repo regarding MySQL (and MariaDB). Nothing too big. Well actually, there are few little things that I want to talk about and that is the reason for this blog post, but still, nothing really important…

MySQL 5.5, 5.6 and 5.7

MySQL 5.6 is stable for some time already, so it’s time to put it in the action. So I sent the request to include it in Factory and therefore in openSUSE 13.1. There is off course a list of interesting stuff you might want to take a look at before you update. If you don’t want to update, you can install mysql-community-server_55 from server:database repo and stay a little bit longer with version 5.5. On the other hand, staying with old versions is boring, so you can also switch to mysql-community-server_57 which provides new MySQL 5.7. So if you are into databases and especially into MySQL and forks (we have MariaDB 5.5 and 10.0 as well), we have plenty of toys for you to play with.

NOTE: Having MySQL 5.6 in openSUSE 13.1 doesn’t mean switching default back to Oracles MySQL, M in LAMP still means MariaDB for whatever it is worth. It just mean, that you have MySQL 5.6 as an alternative available if you prefer it.

Default configuration

One of the interesting changes that happened in MySQL 5.6 is new default configuration. MySQL usually shipped with some examples of configuration that you can use. It was there since forever and never changed, although typical computers went from 256M of RAM to 8G. It contained some buffers sizes and various other optimizations. I heard various complains that it would be better shipping without it than with the one that is there. What folks at Oracle did was drop most of it and replace it with pretty much empty one, with various settings commented and described. They probably heard the same complains I consider it a really good step. Defaults are bult-in after all, so why to put them in config file? So I took theirs, added few things. For example Barracuda file format. It was set to be default upstream for few versions but they decided to go back to Antelope. But it’s also one of the thing people complain to me the most about – that they have to set file_per_table and Barracuda manually. And I added examples for multi configuration that we for some reason have included and exposed. This same config file will be pushed to MariaDB as well.

If you are interested in current state, you can see the config file on github and if you have some suggestions that everybody can benefit from, let me know either via comments or via pull request on github