Core Development Group

• Kernel
• Power Management
• Security
• Virtualization

Linaro Connect

Factory as a rolling release: openSUSE development version

Personal challenges

LinuxCon Europe

Akademy 2014

TEDxLaLaguna

Now JuliaLang packages are available from Science repository.

• Stable version: OBS page, 1-Click Install
• Git version: OBS page, 1-Click Install

About Julia:

Julia is a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing, with syntax that is familiar to users of other technical computing environments. It provides a sophisticated compiler, distributed parallel execution, numerical accuracy, and an extensive mathematical function library. The library, largely written in Julia itself, also integrates mature, best-of-breed C and Fortran libraries for linear algebra, random number generation, signal processing, and string processing. In addition, the Julia developer community is contributing a number of external packages through Julia’s built-in package manager at a rapid pace.

You can get more information about JuliaLang on official web-site.

It has been a long time and it has been more than 2 years now I have left college. It has been an enriching and humbling experience and has contributed a lot to my personal growth. Let me share a few of them.

• Help is always there, we need to ask for it – On numerous occasions, I have taken help and advice from a lot of people around and away from me. They have become valuable friends over a course of time. In case you need some advice, talk to your parents, friends and even strangers (change the context though :P), you may find meaningful insight.
• Do not hold grudges – We all have good and bad times with people we know. However, as everything in the world is transient, our bad times should not make us hold grudge against them forever. Move On!!!
• Be an optimist – There are times when one might think there are things that cannot be done. Be an optimist, be patient and keep at it, some day you will get the hang of it.
• Be your own (wo)man – Everyone finds someone better than themselves at one point or the other and then we start competing with others. What we usually do not realize is that this competition leads to a cheap imitation of our counterpart. We start losing our own identity and then we are no more ourselves.

openSUSE will host its first Asia Summit at Beihang University in Beijing, China in October. This is the first time the lovely green chameleon will host an event in Asia. This summit has been in the pipeline for a while and will finally see the light of day, thanks to the amazing openSUSE community in China.

To make this event a success, we need a lot of help. If you want to help around with the event, there are many ways to do that.

• If you are into artwork, we require posters, logos and a lot of artwork that goes into the event. There is also a Artwork and Logo contest.
• Submit a Talk/Workshop. This is the mainstay of the conference, and there will be many talks throughout the conference. CfP is open for End User Track, Business Track, Community and Project Track, Technology and Development Track.
• For Django developers, openSUSE is using a voting tool called ‘Snoek’, which was developed during one of the SUSE Hackweeks. Support is needed for adding features like openID support and some more feature enhancements

A big thanks to those who are working round the clock to make the event a great success and to set the bar for future summits. I will keep writing more about the Summit in the weeks to come.

For more information about the summit, the following link can be used
http://summit.opensuse.org/

Yesterday, we released ownCloud 7. You might have read that somewhere on the internet - it was widely announced and broadly picked up. If you do not have ownCloud yet, you really should try it now, and if you are one of the people happily using ownCloud for a while, update soon!

In my opinion, ownCloud 7 is a real step ahead. So much work went into it from the brave server guys, and the result is simply impressive: It is fast, beautiful and fully focused on what it is supposed to be and do: File sync and share, even though you still have of course all the other useful stuff like calendaring and such.

Apart from the wellknown features ownCloud 7 also brings some things that you do not see on the first look. Some of these things relate to syncing and as a guy working mainly on the sync client I am especially happy about that: Already with the current released clients you will see a performance win in syncing, because ownCloud 7 handles parallel HTTP requests way better. Moreover, ownCloud 7 sends some interesting information about it’s files, and the next generation of sync clients will for example know which files are shared and their permissions. We are currently working on some exciting stuff on the client side, stay tuned.

That all should be reason enough to celebrate together, because ownCloud is done by all of us in the community.

On Tuesday, august 5th, we will do a Release Party in Nuremberg, Germany. As last time, the Coworkingspace Nürnberg is hosting us. We will start at 18:00.

Everybody who is interested in ownCloud for whatever reason is very welcome to show up. We will probably have a short informal demonstration or two, but of course plenty room for questions, discussions, meet and greet with all kind of FOSS people, some core ownCloud people, nice beer and big fun.

You really should come! And don’t forget to tell your friends, thanks!

For more than 10 years, PHP core developers repeatedly raised the topic of providing a formal language specification for PHP. Now a team of facebook employees has written such a specification. The spec document is currently only available as a preview chapter a preview chapter . PHP veteran Sara Golemon announced on the “PHP internals” list that the full document will be ready for O’Reilly’s OSCON 2014. Sara Golemon published the standard book on “Extending and Embedding PHP” some years ago and now works for Facebook’s own PHP implementation HHVM. The PHP spec defines PHP version 5.6 in about 200 pages and contains all the odd and obscure quirks of the language core. Facebook’s own HHVM aims to be as close to the spec as possible. Currently, PHP developers discuss how amending the spec can become a mandatory part of the language development process. Though some are sceptic that all developers will embrace the change in the process, everybody on the list was happy to have the new document.

Software Architect Stas Malyshev:

Thank you Sara and Facebook team for doing something we’ve been talking
about for more than a decade and before that nobody actually attempting
to do. I think it is a great development and I hope to see the first
version soon.

http://dl.hhvm.com/resources/PHPSpec-SneakPeak.pdf

Yesterday, my Moto G got an Official update to Android 4.4.4. Yeah!
Unfortunately, it did not work: After downloading the update, the phone went into a boot loop, because CWM 6.0.4.6 (which I had installed in order to root the device) cannot flash the update. The phone then boots up, just to shut reboot almost immediately into recovery to try again.
To get out of this boot loop, I manually entered recovery and wiped the "cache" partition.
I retried with the latest CWM 6.0.4.7, this also did not work.
So I had to get the original stock recovery image for the Moto G and flash that. I did not easily find it with a web search, so in the end I downloaded the matching stock SBF image for my installed firmware (in my case "Blur_Version.176.44.1.falcon_umts.Retail.en.DE") from the Moto G firmware page on droid-developers.org, looked into the zip file and found that there is a "recovery.img" in the archive.

Now everything was easy: boot the phone into fastboot mode (power on + volume down), then

fastboot erase recovery

fastboot flash recovery recovery.img

reboot, once the phone is booted select "install system update" from the notification, stock recovery boots and installs the update, done.
I did not even lose root access, so I kept the stock recovery for now.
Later on I checked the md5sum of the recovery.img I flashed and of the recovery partition on the phone and they are identical, so the 4.4.4 update did not flash a new recovery for me. I'll keep the old one around in case I need it again.

Two years ago, I got appointed as chairman of the openSUSE Board. I was very excited about this opportunity, especially as it allowed me to keep contributing to openSUSE, after having moved to work on the cloud a few months before. I remember how I wanted to find new ways to participate in the project, and this was just a fantastic match for this. I had been on the GNOME Foundation board for a long time, so I knew it would not be easy and always fun, but I also knew I would pretty much enjoy it. And I did.

Fast-forward to today: I'm still deeply caring about the project and I'm still excited about what we do in the openSUSE board. However, some happy event to come in a couple of months means that I'll have much less time to dedicate to openSUSE (and other projects). Therefore I decided a couple of months ago that I would step down before the end of the summer, after we'd have prepared the plan for the transition. Not an easy decision, but the right one, I feel.

And here we are now, with the official news out: I'm no longer the chairman :-) (See also this thread) Of course I'll still stay around and contribute to openSUSE, no worry about that! But as mentioned above, I'll have less time for that as offline life will be more "busy".

openSUSE Board Chairman at oSC14

Since I mentioned that we were working on a transition... First, knowing the current board, I have no doubt everything will be kept pushed in the right direction. But on top of that, my good friend Richard Brown has been appointed as the new chairman. Richard knows the project pretty well and he has been on the board for some time now, so is aware of everything that's going on. I've been able to watch his passion for the project, and that's why I'm 100% confident that he will rock!

I recently received some bittersweet news, my good friend Vincent Untz is stepping down as Chairman of the openSUSE Board as a result of a happy personal event that I'm sure is going to keep him busy in the months and years ahead.

In addition the formal thanks as part of the official announcements, I'd like to add my own personal thanks to Vincent. I owe much to Vincent's help and support throughout the years, both technically as a maintainer of GNOME in openSUSE, and as an Board Member to the Project. I know this isn't goodbye, and look forward to still seeing Vincent around the Geeko world in the future.

As a result of Vincent's decision, the openSUSE Board requires a new Chairman. I'm excited and humbled to be able to announce that I have been appointed by SUSE to serve as the new Chairman of the openSUSE Board, effective from today.

When I started contributing to openSUSE in 2005, I never thought I could find myself in a position like this. I'm looking forward to doing the best I can to help keep openSUSE moving forward and become more recognised as the exceptional, wonderful, and successful open source project that it already is.

For anyone who doesn't know the governance structure of openSUSE, the Board is a group of six members, five who are elected by the community and a Chairperson who is appointed by SUSE. It's the Board's job to 'lead' the openSUSE Project, by providing guidance, governance and support to the rest of the project. As I was one of those elected Board members, the Board are currently discussing our options regarding my now vacant Board member seat, and we hope to be able to announce something soon.

I'm also very pleased to be able to be able to share that this October 18th-19th openSUSE will be having an openSUSE Summit Asia in Bejing!
Sunny and her team have put together a great website with all the information, please Check It Out!

There's also lots of very interesting developments happening around openSUSE Factory, which is progressing towards becoming a fully rolling release. You can download the latest snapshots HERE. And to provide feedback or learn more, you can join the conversation in our openSUSE Factory mailing list or in IRC at #opensuse-factory in irc.freenode.org

Have a lot of fun!