Zum Jahresabschluss 2019 wurde noch die neue Kraft Version 0.90 herausgegeben.

Das wichtigste neue Feature ist die Überarbeitung der Folgedokumente. Als Folgedokumente werden Dokumente bezeichnet, die bei der Abwicklung von Aufträgen aufeinander folgen, zum Beispiel eine Rechnung, die auf ein Angebot folgt.

In Kraft gibt es Unterstützung dafür: Anstatt die Rechnung, die auf das Angebot folgen soll, ganz neu anzulegen, kann das Angebot selektiert werden und im Menü der Punkt Nachfolgedokument erzeugen ausgewählt werden. In dem darauf folgenden Dialog kann in der neuen Version ausgewählt werden, ob und aus welchem Quelldokument die Posten in die Rechnung kopiert werden sollen.

Wenn zb. eine Abschlagsrechnung als erstes Folgedokument des Angebotes angelegt wurde, möchte man nicht deren Posten, sondern die des Angebotes kopieren.

Ebenfalls neu ist die Unterstützung von Abschlagsrechnungen. Wenn eine als Folgedokument gestellt wurde, wird der Schlussrechnung automatisch ein Posten eingefügt, der die Summe der Abschlagsrechnung abzieht. Er kann dort angepasst werden.

Weitere Änderungen sind eine weiter vereinfachte Benutzeroberfläche, um die Arbeit mit Kraft noch einfacher zu machen. Die Übersetzung der Dokument-Vorlagen wurde vereinfacht und die Vorlagen wurden in Details verbessert. Daneben gibt es viele andere kleine sichtbare und unsichtbare Verbesserungen.

Nicht unerwähnt sollen Beiträge aus der Kraft-Community bleiben: Es wurde eine komplette Übersetzung der Software ins Niederländische beigetragen und ein neuer Dokument-Typ Angebot ohne Preise hinzugefügt, der von der Community vorgeschlagen wurde. Dafür besten Dank, davon lebt Kraft!

Viel Erfolg mit Kraft in 2020!

In my short time of using a tiling window manager, I very quickly became aware of the benefits of quick tiling features on the desktop. Being able to very quickly split your screen and be able to see information side-by-side, like writing a post and having my collection of pictures beside it is incredibly useful … Continue reading Quick Tiling in KDE Plasma on openSUSE →

There are several ways to update openSUSE Leap. However, there is one way that has served me the best over the last 10 years using openSUSE. And this is via the YaST Software Management graphical (GUI) interface.

Other ways to update openSUSE Leap are:

• Via the command line / Zypper
• YaST online update
• KDE Plasma Software Updates

The command line / Zypper method works just as well as the method described in this article. However, not everybody is comfortable with using the command line (CLI) interface.

YaST online update is good for patching openSUSE official software, however this doesn’t cover software patches from third party repositories such as Packman or Google Chrome.

KDE Plasma Software Updates does find all software that needs updating, however it isn’t smart enough to resolve all issues So sometimes a software update will fail because of missing dependencies or package conflicts.

Using YaST Software Management for updating an openSUSE Leap system is therefore the most reliable way of doing it. The first step in this method is to open YaST and then open Software Management.

The next step is to open the tab Repositories. If you have used this tab before, it should already be available. Otherwise, click on the View button and then select Repositories.

In this tab, click on one of the software packages with the right mouse button (context click) and select ‘All in This List’ and then click on ‘ Update if newer version available’.

Now go to the tab Installation Summary and click on the Accept button.

In many cases there are also Automatic Changes, these are dependent software packages that will be automatically updated to the right version or will be automatically installed. Click Continue to advance.

Now the update will start and all updates will be downloaded and installed.

In some situations a new Linux kernel is installed as well. The system will need to reboot for this new kernel to work. All other software packages will function normally and will not require any system reboot. So you can continue working if you want to. But reboot your system after finishing your activities. Click OK to advance.

In the end YaST Software Management will present an overview of the installed software packages. Click on Finish to end the update process. Or click on Continue if you like to install additional software packages.

Conclusion

The YaST Software Management tool is the most reliable way to update your openSUSE Leap system via a graphical (GUI) interface. In a future article I will address updating openSUSE (Leap and Tumbleweed) systems via the command line.

Published on: 1 January 2020

CAD is one of the things I really enjoy doing. I am most adept at using PTC Creo for my employer. I am able to easily “think” and design ideas as easily in that software as I am able to draw it on a piece of paper. I’m making it a point to get that … Continue reading Fusion 360 on openSUSE Linux | Review →

To squeeze one more blathering in before the end of the year, here are a few things I am noodling around currently. The 10th Noodling arriving, not because anyone asked for it… Christmastime Activities Post Christmas Day shopping yielded me a really nice find, specifically something pretty fantastic from Lowe’s that allows me to fix … Continue reading Noodlings 10 | Christmastime, xLights, Exploring Media Servers and Computer History →

This blog is to inform that Kraft, the Qt and KDE based desktop software to manage documents like invoices and quotes in your small company was released in version 0.90 recently.

Followup Documents

A great new feature is the completely reworked handling of so called follow-up documents. Kraft has this feature to help dealing with docs that follow on a certain kind of predecessor doc in the business flow, such as an invoice follows on an offer once the work has been finished.

To achieve that and to have all the items of the offer again referenced in the invoice, the Kraft user justs clicks on the menu item “Create Followup Document” on the selected offer, and the new doc is created with all the items of the offer prepared. It is ready to be adjusted to the final invoice details.

Now with version 0.90 this has even improved. Often, the flow is a bit different because a partial invoice is sent while the job is still in progress, for example to cover cost for material. A partial invoice usually has only one item, which is the progress payment the customer should pay.

Kraft users can handle that now very easy: The new UI does not only allow to choose from which predecessor document the final invoice should copy the items (which usually is the offer in the beginning) but it also realises that a partial invoice was sent before, so this amount of payment has to be substracted from the final invoice. Kraft adds an item to the final doc automatically here.

This helps to create high quality documents for your customers even faster, which is exactly the mission of Kraft.

Other Improvements

In addition to that, as usual a lot of other visible and invisible changes have gone into this release. For example, the UI has been simplified again by a clean up of the menu for example. The About Kraft dialog was removed and integrated into the Kraft information page.

Under the hood, we finally added unit tests, which is just a start so far, and ntroduced a new, XML based system to manage the available document types which makes igrations way easier. Last but not least the python based pdf conversion script was ported to python 3 to be ready for the end of python 2.

Community

Last but not least, Kraft got new contributions from the community: A new document type was initiated by a community member, which is a offer like document without showing the price information. Also, the complete app was translated to Dutch by a volunteer, and the translation is now shipped with Kraft by default. Also, other smaller bugfixes went in.

Thank you all for your help to improve Kraft.

As a kind of Christmas gift to myself, I spent the 5th day of Christmas disassembling and installing a new battery into this “shelved” phone of mine. It is something I have wanted to do since the battery started fading and I finally got to it. I bought a battery replacement kit on eBay for … Continue reading Restoring my Nexus 6P To Working Order →

This year's openSUSE Election Committee is composed of Ariez Vachha, Edwin Zakaria and myself. Ariez joined the committee for the first time, while Edwin and I have worked together on the previous Board election. Weeks ago, after consulting the election rules and brainstorming a bit, we came up with an election schedule that spans over several weeks, starting in December 2019 until January 2020.

Candidates

As the call for nominations and applications ended on 25 December, we had a list of four candidates for the two seats on the openSUSE Board. The candidates are:

• Alessandro de Oliveira Faria
• Simon Lees
• Sarah Julia Kriesch
• Vinzenz Vietzke

The election campaign now begins. Members are encouraged to ping the candidates and ask them questions about their views and ideas that they'd like to bring on the the openSUSE Board.

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

The year 2019 is coming to an end and this is the final week of the year. As you are surely aware, in many regions people tend to stay away from computers during this period of the year and it is thus not surprising, that Tumbleweed has been rolling a bit slower. But actually: has it? During the last week, 2 snapshots (1221 and 1225) have been published to the users. But there were also snapshots tested and discarded (e.g. 1223 and 1224). Just because we have a snapshot does not mean we distribute it (in this case the issues were around libmozjs60 switching to be an i686 base library, but polkit being an i586 application linking this library). But anyway: let’s talk about the success of this week and what updates those two published snapshots brought the users in the end:

• KDE Frameworks 5.65.0
• QEmu 4.2.0
• PHP 7.4.1
• zsh 5.8 (pre2)

The staging areas are still all filled up with the following updates:

• Python 3.8
• Rust 1.39.0 (Thunderbird failing to build)
• Mozilla Firefox 71.0 (currently staged together with rust, which I’d hope to get ready soon)
• systemd 244 (Need a fix for python-prompt_toolkit1)
• Qt 5.14 (looks like being ready soonish)
• Kubernetes 5.17 (one failing openQA test identified)
• RPM 4.15
• Linux kernel 5.4.x (kexec identified issues around the used signing infrastructure)
• SQLite 3.30.1 (breaks python-Django)

Christmastime is a time of hope and joy, despite the cold and darkness that comes with it. It is like it stands in defiance against the darkness, warms people and brings out the best, or at least, has the potential to do so. Link to YouTube video of light show.Link to Second YouTube video of … Continue reading Another Christmastime Blathering | Linux Powered Lighting →