As I collapsed on the sofa for the evening, I started browsing Fosstodon to see what I'd missed throughout the day. It's FOSS had just posted about a cross-platform text expansion utility written in Rust called espanso.

Installation:

espanso's installation instructions are for .deb based distro's or advise you to use the Snap package. I didn't want to so for those of you that want to get right to it, here's what you're going to need.

Packages:

• libxtst6
• xdotool
• xclip
• libnotify4

These cover the pre-reqs listed here in the espanso manual install docs of: libxtst6 / libxdo3 / xclip / libnotify-bin

sudo zypper install libxtst6 xdotool xclip libnotify4

Once you have those, you can actually follow the rest of the instructions from espanso. But here they are:

curl -L https://github.com/federico-terzi/espanso/releases/latest/download/espanso-linux.tar.gz | tar -xz -C /tmp/

This will download the the .tar.gz file from Github that is tagged with latest and then -x extract, -z gzip, -C to a specific location of /tmp/.

sudo mv /tmp/espanso /usr/local/bin/espanso

This will then move the file from your /tmp/ directory to your /usr/local/bin. Once you've done that, restart your terminal and away you go!

Pointless Waffle:

I've been looking for a truly cross-platform solution for text expansion for years (literally). I've had to make do with different solutions for my different workstations for far too long, all of them have had their quirks and in the end I gave up on them because they just wouldn't behave. I thought I'd take a closer look at espanso as I didn't really have anything to loose except a little time.

I'll be installing it on my macOS & Windows machines tomorrow and test syncing the configuration files across the various platforms with Syncthing.

I'm really looking forward to testing it out and seeing what it can do. Big thanks to Frederico Terzi & the contributors for creating such and awesome tool and to It's FOSS for highlighting it!

Im Büro gibts öfter den Fall, dass ein Dokument auf Papier eingescannt und versendet werden muss. Das geschieht entweder per Email (so hat man das früher gemacht…) oder besser per ownCloud Dateien teilen Feature. In jedem Fall muss dazu das Papier zuvor gescannt werden, was erstmal ein Bild ergibt. Das wird dann in ein PDF gewandelt, um es verschicken zu können.

Blöd, wenn dann das PDF riesengroß geworden ist, und das Bild trotzdem nur klein drauf ist und dazu noch einen Blaustich hat…

Wie schön wäre doch ein Tool, das dem gestressten Büronauten solcherart Übungen abnimmt und „einfach nur“ einige Seiten in ein PDF scannt?

Dafür gibt es auf dem Linux Desktop PDF Quirk. Dieses nette kleine Tool übernimmt das Scannen, zeigt die Scanergebnisse dann als als sortierbare Seiten an, und wandelt sie dann in ein ordentliches mehrseitiges PDF. Und das ganz ohne Kommandozeile, sondern schnell und mit maximal einfacher, aber hübscher Oberfläche…

Unter der Haube greift PDF Quirk auf Bewährtes zurück: Anstatt Scannen neu zu erfinden wird auf das Tool scanimage des SANE Projekts zurückgegriffen, das viele Scanner unter Linux unterstützt. Das Scankommando kann an die eigenen Bedürfnisse einfach angepasst werden.

Zur Wandlung in PDF kommt ein ImageMagick Utility zum Einsatz, mit dem aus den gescannten Bildern PDFs erzeugt werden. Die Aufrufe der Tools können natürlich innerhalb von PDF Quirk angepasst werden.

Ich hoffe, Linux mit diesem Werkzeug wieder ein bisschen attraktiver für den Einsatz im Büro von kleinen Unternehmen gemacht zu haben. Kraft ist ja sicher schon bekannt

Alle weiteren Infos Infos zu Installation und Konfiguration snd auf der PDF Quirk Website zu finden.

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

This week I have been fighting a bit with the size of the DVD. Due to some mistake in the pattern definition, it was for a good chunk ignored. Serves me right for fixing the error and then getting an ISO file that would not ever fit on a DVD, eh? Well, long story short: I needed to save some space, so looked at what the ‘fix’ newly brought on the DVD and aligned to what the DVD looked like before. As a result, week 28 only had two snapshots released (0707 and 0708), containing these changes:

• Mozilla Firefox 78.0.1
• file 5.39
• Linux kernel 5.7.7
• python3 packaging change (so far no difference for the user)

These changes are planned and work in progress:

• GNOME 3.36.4
• openSSL 3.0
• Python3 package will be renamed to python38. The goal will be to allow multiple python versions to more easily coexist.
• RPM changes: %{_libexecdir} is being changed to /usr/libexec. This exposes quite a lot of packages that abuse %{_libexecdir} and fail to build. Additionally, the payload compression is being changed to zstd

Flatpak comes pre-installed in openSUSE Leap 15.2. However, executing the flatpak command for the first time had a minor quirk in a freshly installed Leap 15.2 machine.

error: While opening repository /var/lib/flatpak/repo: opendir(objects): No such file or directory

I see other users commenting about this on Reddit. The error is "most probably" due to missing repositories. Therefore, we will add the Flathub repository as described in its documentation.

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

Voilà! Now, you may search apps and install them with the flatpak command. For example, if you would search for Visual Studio Code, you would do:

flatpak search code

Find its Application Id from the result obtained with the above command and install it as follows:

flatpak install flathub com.visualstudio.code

The installation command arguments format is:

flatpak install repo_name application_id

In order to remove an application that you previously installed through Flatpak, just replace install by remove followed by the Application Id and it's done.

Before introducing the recent changes in the YaST land, the team would like to congratulate the openSUSE community for the release of Leap 15.2. It looks like a pretty solid release, and we are proud of being part of this project.

Having said that, let’s focus on what the team has achieved during the past sprint.

Summary of the (Auto)YaST Changes

• Fix an embarrassing installer crash (boo#1172898). We suspect that it might be a Ruby problem, but we implemented a solution in the installer.
• Add a mechanism to ask AutoYaST to export a reduced profile. At this point in time, only the yast2-users module supports such a mechanism.
• Publish our conclusions about the usage of wizards in the Expert Partitioner.
• Study the impact of adding support for new types of LVM logical volumes in our storage layer. We will use the outcome of such research to plan future work in this area. If you are curious, you can start by having a look at LVM features and YaST document.
• Use the REMOVE libstorage-ng view when deleting devices. You can check libstorage-ng#740 if you are interested in the mentioned view.
• Remove the obsolete repository initialization, which made installation using an unsigned/self-signed repository impossible.
• Do not solve dependencies while checking the connection to libzypp.
• Add support to collect memory usage data during installation. If you are interested, check the follow-up document, which contains some nice ideas for the near future.
• Backport to SLE 12 SP4 some fixes related to Ruby gems loading in order to solve a problem some appliances were having after a Ruby security update.
• Do not remove /etc/hosts entries during autoinstallation.

The YaST Blog Poll Is Still Running

A few weeks ago, we announced that we were changing our sprint reports’ format to reduce the amount of work that it takes us to write them. Thus, instead of using a consistent and self-contained nice story, we decided to go for a digest-like approach.

After having published two reports using the new approach, we decided to open a poll to know your opinion of such a change. We have already received quite some feedback, but the poll is still open and we would love to hear from you.

The release of openSUSE Leap 15.2 continues to expand its use and is now available for Windows Subsystem for Linux in the Microsoft Store.

Leap can be executed on top of WSL to deliver the power of openSUSE to the Windows world.

WSL is a compatibility layer for running Linux binary executables natively on Windows systems. WSL is available for 64-bit versions of Windows 10 and Windows Server 2019.

System Administrators who like using tools such as rsync, tar, grep, sed, awk, and more might be limited to corporate environments where the use of Windows is mandatory. With openSUSE Leap 15.2 for WSL, sysadmins are empowered with the freedom, ability and tools to manage systems and networks.

WSL allows users to run Bash shell scripts and GNU/Linux command-line tools like vim and emacs; languages like NodeJS, Javascript, Python, Ruby, Rust, Go and more; and services like MySQL, Apache, MongoDB and PostgreSQL. Additional software is available using openSUSE’s package manager zypper.

Leap 15.2 on WSL isn’t just for sysadmins; developers that want to leverage Linux and users who would like to learn it without setting up a dual-boot system or virtual machine have an opportunity to try openSUSE and a few other distributions on WSL.

Before installing any Linux distributions on Windows, users must enable the “Windows Subsystem for Linux” optional feature. Documentation about using WSL is available on the openSUSE wiki and on Microsoft’s quickstart guide.

I have been working at what has been my dream job at Whirlpool Corporation for six years. Every day I was either working on something new or making something better. The way I saw it, every day I was given a great gift of being payed to play with toys. Sure, they were appliances or … Continue reading New Adventures | Unexpected Change in Employment Status →

Estu Fardani is a helpful & jovial fellow whom I met at the openSUSE Asia Summit last year in Bali, Indonesia. Recently, for the openSUSE Virtual Summit, Estu did a short presentation on Podman. His presentation video is available on YouTube and slides deck available on Google Slides.

While I am not a fan of alias docker=podman I believe Estu added that part in his slide below to make the Podman transition a bit smoother for users already familiar with Docker commands.

Note that the latest release of openSUSE Leap, i.e version 15.2, comes with support for Podman through the libcontainers-common package.

Previously, if one needed to experiment with Podman and/or deploy in production then openSUSE Tumbleweed, Kubic or MicroOS were the supported choices. Now, one may deploy Podman containers on their existing Leap infrastructure (after upgrading to the latest version 15.2).

All sessions videos from the openSUSE Virtual Summit 2020 are available on the openSUSE YouTube channel.

Almost finished this on time… 16th Noodling of things There are certain numbers, due to my nerdiness, that have importance to me. 16 is one of them. Some people get excited about reaching 10 or 20 or 100, I get excited about base 2 numbers. 8, 16, 32, 64 will be huge! I’ll have to … Continue reading Noodlings 16 | Amiga 1200, openSUSE Leap 15.2 and Documentation →

२ जुलाई २०२० को openSUSE Leap 15.2 संस्करण उपलब्ध हुआ।

openSUSE Leap एक निशुल्क और लिनक्स-आधारित ऑपरेटिंग सिस्टम है जो आप अपने पीसी, लैपटॉप या सर्वर पर इस्तेमाल कर सकते है। Leap 15.2 और SUSE Linux Enterprise एक समान कोडबेस उपयोग करते है जिस से openSUSE Leap 15.2 की स्थिरता और ज्यादा मज़बूत होती है।

यह विशेष संस्करण कृत्रिम बुद्धिमत्ता, यानी आर्टिफिशियल इंटेलिजेंस, को अधिक आसानी से सुलभ बनाता है। निम्नलिखित पैकेज ऑफिशल रिपॉजिटरीज से प्राप्त किए जा सकते हैं।

• टेनसरफ्लो
• पाइटोर्च
• ग्राफाना
• प्रोमेथेउस

इस संस्करण में अधिक कंटेनर टूलस् शामिल है, जैसे कि कुबनेटिस् (जो पहली बार के लिए Leap संस्करण में उपलब्ध हुआ है) हेल्म और सिल्यम।