The time has come when The Document Foundation will elect a new Board of Directors. As you might already know, there are many good candidates. And since I clearly think I am the best of them, I am writing this to ask you to vote for me. Some of you might know me a bit already, but it is never bad to present myself.

My name is Fridrich Štrba, national of Switzerland and Slovakia, happily married with Susan since more then 12 years and father of 3 wonderful children: Patrick (9), Miriam (6) and Nathanael (3).

My story with LibreOffice started around 2004, with its predecessor, OpenOffice.org. I was just trying to contribute to libwpd which is the horse-power of our WordPerfect import and the OpenOffice.org integration was an interesting thing to contribute to. And since then, my love story with our project went through different stages, but we are still together and sometimes even happy.

I have been mentoring Google Summer of Code students since 2006 and recently I was co-responsible for several import filters for reverse-engineered formats (i.e. Visio, CorelDraw, MS Publisher). I can frankly say that my development and marketing work around the filters are a huge part of the reason why LibreOffice is called the "Swiss army knife of file-formats". We managed quite recently to bootstrap a vibrant community of filter-writers and the the amount of supported file-formats will only grow.

Between 2007 and 2013, I was highly blessed to be working on LO as my day-job, employed by Novell, then SUSE. Since September 2013, I am again a volunteer as many of you. This new-acquired independence is an advantage. I have no monetary interests of any kind in LibreOffice and, if elected, I will take decisions only and only considering the good of the project as such.

The advantage of my election would be that I am part of various native language communities. I speak several languages and can understand the aspirations of the corresponding communities. Besides that, I was part of the Membership Committee from 2010 and the last year, I was its Chairman. In this quality, I was able to push forward my vision of diverse and open and inclusive community that goes beyond personal sympathies or aversions. And this is the vision I desire to pursue if you give me your trust.

And since it is written "You don't have because you don't ask", with this message I ask you to cast your vote for me.

Have you ever wondered why openSUSE is the platform for development? Because it offers all that is needed for professional development, also if development goes beyond the basics.

A nice proof that openSUSE has more than others was posted here by our friend Thomas, a convinced Debian user. He writes about setting up openSUSE in vagrant to be easily able to build (master build) the ownCloud Client for Win32 in it. Very easy and cool stuff. But that can be even easier without vagrant through this link ;-).

Btw, there is an appliance in SUSE Studio to ease experiments with vagrant with openSUSE as base. I haven’t tested yet, experiences?

This is a copy of my openSUSE Election Platform, that I'm putting here with the shameless intention of doing my best to ensure as many people read my thoughts as possible. The original can be found on our official wiki

Introduction and Biography

Hi! I'm Richard Brown, 31 years old, and since last month living in Nürnberg in Germany.

Originally from London, England, I used to joke that I had been steadily moving south and was on my way to becoming French, however it seems once I crossed the Channel I turned left, skipped right past France, and ended up in a land of good Beer and Bratwurst :)

• Email: RBrownCCB at openSUSE.org
• IRC: ilmehtar on irc.freenode.org
• I'm @sysrich on twitter
• My Blog is here

 

I currently work as a QA Engineer for SUSE, the wonderful Enterprise Linux company that also is the main sponsor of our openSUSE Project.

Previously I worked as a Systems Manager for City College Brighton and Hove, a large UK further education college where we use a lot of openSUSE, SUSE, and other FOSS technologies. I was also the UK Representative on the Advisory Board of the TTP Academic User Group, an usergroup for sysadmins working in Academia that deals with SUSE, Novell, and NetIQ products, with good links to the developers and management teams in these companies and their partners. The TTP is very supportive of both SUSE & the openSUSE Project, and was proud to have a track of sessions during our oSC 12 conference in Prague.

I've used SUSE/openSUSE since 2003, and have found myself getting more involved as time has gone on.

I'm part of the team which maintains GNOME in openSUSE, as well as lead maintainer for the 'Branding' packages in openSUSE, which leads me to work very closely with our great Artwork team. I also am heavily involved in Marketing, as well as the Advocates & Local Coordinators Programmes, where I was involved in implementing many of the changes transforming the former 'Ambassadors' programme into its new structure.

I'm an active Advocate for our project, who regularly attends conferences where I do my best to to both evangelise about our work, but also gather ideas and feedback on how we could improve. My session at oSC 12 "Using openSUSE for Real Work" really helped gather feedback which shaped my efforts to improve our project over the last year. At oSC13 I gave talks about the transformation of the Ambassador programme into the Local Coordinator and Advocates groups, as well as a talk about the work involved in Branding openSUSE. I also led the organisation of openSUSE's presence at the last two FOSDEM conferences.

I'm a keen tester who especially enjoys the crunch in the weeks leading up to releases, frantically testing and packaging patches to try and get bugs big and small squashed out so our releases are as polished as possible. I'm also very interested in Power Management, and have done a lot of work finding ways to optimise Power consumption on Intel laptop chipsets

I spend a lot time in our IRC channels, where I go by the handle ilmehtar (a very obscure Lord of the Rings/JRR Tolkien reference, I'll owe a prize to anyone who figures it out)

I have very broad interests which finds me often getting involved in both the technical and more 'community' aspects of our project.
I'm always keen to help out, try and resolve issues, come up with ideas, and then get my hands dirty trying to implement them.
I'm very happy learning new things and trying to help out in areas outside of my 'comfort zone', such as this year where I was given the opportunity to join the openSUSE Board - and after a year of hard work and interesting challenges, I'm back again hoping for your votes so I can continue the work I started this year.

Issues

Managing Change - In the last few weeks the openSUSE team from SUSE have initiated a number of discussions (1), (2), (3) proposing changes to our projects goals and practical changes to our 'Factory' development distribution. Over these next few weeks and (if I am elected) into the early months of next year I intend to work hard to ensure that the discussions progress well and we, together as a cohesive project, find an exciting way forward.

I do not expect this to be a painless process, and I expect there will be occasions where some people will want things to develop in one direction, while others pull for another. This is precisely the sort of issue the Board is there to deal with, and I'm prepared to put in the work to make sure everyone can contribute to shaping the future of our Project and its Distribution(s).

Improve Working Relationship with the openSUSE Team @ SUSE - The Board have a responsibility to 'Facilitate communication with all areas of the community' - ie. We need to make sure all the Teams that make up our project have strong communication and therefore are able to work effectively with each other.

This is important for every Team in our project, but especially so for the openSUSE Team at SUSE, because not only are they contributing to openSUSE to make it better for themselves as well as everyone else, but as paid employees of our primary sponsor (SUSE) they currently control some aspects of the project the 'wider community' have little or no involvement in. As has been mentioned on our mailing lists, over the last year, the working relationship between the openSUSE Team and the Board has become strained.

I have already begun working on this issue, and if I am elected, I intend to continue to work hard to improve the situation. I think the Board can do a better job of keeping the members of the openSUSE Team informed about the current needs, wants, desires and 'pain points' of our wider openSUSE community, and inversely, I think with improved communication between us, the Board will be in a better position to help the openSUSE Team at SUSE in their communications with the wider openSUSE community. We need to squash the feeling of 'us & them' which has started to creep into that narrative, we're all one Project and one Community, and it's down to the Board to keep it that way.

openSUSE Membership - I think the Project needs to start thinking about changing the way 'openSUSE Membership' works. With our growing maturity as an independent project, it's very important that we have a healthy way of making big decisions which impact the entire Project. I do not think our current system is wholly broken (it's certainly healthy enough for these elections), but I'm concerned about a number of areas, especially the growing number of 'former Members' who maintain full voting rights. If I am elected, I intend to begin the discussions to reform the openSUSE membership, focusing first on a suitable way of 'retiring' openSUSE members who are no longer involved in the project, and after that looking at other issues such as improving the selection/approval process and the 'perks' of becoming an openSUSE member.

Role of the board

Last year, I said that I wanted the board to become more approachable and more prepared to 'step in' and help resolve issues.
While I think we have been broadly successful in achieving this, there is always room for improvement, and I'm hoping will a fully staffed Board we'll be able to build on the improvements we've seen in these last 12 months.

I don't think leadership in a project like ours should be dictatorial. I feel the board should act as 'enablers', 'cheerleaders', 'champions', and troubleshooters. The board's job should be to help you (the community) by proactively identifying where the project is going wrong and help pull people together to steer it in the right direction.

The board should be the primary point of contact for contributors and users to raise issues that cant be addressed elsewhere, which is why our board needs to be active, visible, and accessible. I do not think enough of our community know the Board is there to address their issues, so I think we need to make a big push to advertise our purpose and availability.

The board should also be a source of new ideas and proposals for the community to consider, and should also encourage other contributors to field their own ideas and help keep the great green Geeko rolling forward

Why you should vote for me?

• I've worked hard for you all as a Board member this year, and would like the opportunity to continue to do so.
• SuSE/openSUSE is my first distribution and I've been a loyal user and contributor since 2003. I care a great deal about seeing our project continue and improve.
• I've provided both technical and non-technical contributions to the project, and so have a strong working knowledge both the technical and community aspects of our project.
• While I have my own opinions and will often argue passionately for them, I always listen to and consider the opinion of others, especially when they disagree with me. If I am elected I will continue to champion the desires of the community, not just my own agenda.
• My experience outside of openSUSE, especially as a board member of the TTP, give me skills and knowledge I think will help me here
• I enjoy learning and getting involved in new things, and see working on the board as an opportunity to get help out in parts of the project that I'd probably otherwise not see.

 

Aims/Goals

If elected I will strive to

• Continue the work I've started over the last year as a Board Member
• Investigate ways to better advertise the work the Board is doing for the project
• Be involved in the recently started discussions about the Future of our project to find a viable plan for our Project going forward, especially one that addresses the needs of both our users desiring stability and a moderate pace of change, and for those whom using the latest and greatest stable versions is more important.
• Listen to the our users and contributors as much as possible, to figure out what you want the Board to be doing

 

Endorsements

Michal '-miska-' Hrusecky
I know Richard for few years and he always cared a lot about openSUSE. He is active on our channels and whenever he sees some troubles, he steps up and do his best to help the project. Not only technically but also on ''boring'' organization tasks. I can imagine, that being part of the board is a hard work although not that appreciated and visible to the outside. But nevertheless it is important for the project and I believe that Richard will continue to represent us very well. What is also great about Richard as board candidate is that he is not a classical politician - he doesn't do long speeches without content and he prefers to cut to the chase.

The questions of whether to run fsck on the root filesystem at boot, and how often, are important ones for administrators. Here's some minimal information to get started:
Read more »

I don’t know if you are aware of that, but Docker 0.7.0 has been released a couple of days ago.

You can read the full announcement here, but let me talk about the biggest change introduced by this release: storage drivers!

Docker has always used AUFS, a “unionfs-like” file system, to power its containers. Unfortunately AUFS is neither part of the official kernel nor of the openSUSE/SLE one.

In the past I had to build a custom patched kernel to run Docker on openSUSE. That proved to be a real pain both for me and for the end users.

Now with storage drivers Docker can still use AUFS, but can also opt for something different. In our case Docker is going to use thin provisioning, a consolidated technology which is part of the mainstream kernel since quite some time.

Moreover Docker’s community is working on experimental drivers for BTRFS, ZFS, Gluster and Ceph.

What changes now for openSUSE?

Running Docker is incredibly simple now: just use the 1 click install and download it from the ‘home:flavio_castelli:docker’ project.

As I said earlier: no custom kernel is required. You are going to keep the one shipped by the official openSUSE repositories.

Just keep in mind that Docker does some initialization tasks on its very first execution (it configures thin provisioning). So just wait a little before hitting its API with the Docker cli tool (you will just get an error because docker.socket is not found).

The road ahead

Support SLE

Right now Docker works fine on openSUSE 12.3 and 13.1 but not on SLE 11 SP3. During the next days I’m going to look into this issue. I want to have a stable and working package for SLE.

Make it more official

Once the package is proved to be stable enough I’ll submit it for inclusion inside of the Virtualization project on OBS.

So please, checkout Docker package and provide me your feedback!

Today I discovered recoll, a tool for indexing files (i.e. both file names and contents, and including emails) and running searches over the index. It has both graphical and command-line interfaces, and unlike some other open-source tools that claim to do this job, it really seems to work. While traditional tools like grep and find work fine, grep for example was not designed to run searches with multiple search keys, and neither of them use an index, so every search walks the filesystem anew. Another traditional tool, locate, uses an index for speed, but it only knows how to search filenames (and paths), not file contents.

Anyway, recoll appears to be the open-source file indexing and searching tool that I was looking for. Here's how to install it in openSUSE:
Read more »

And so, finally openSUSE 13.1 is out of the door (I couldn’t celebrate like I wanted, as I’ve been very busy). This release has lots of improvements, and of course, the latest stable software from KDE. It is time (perhaps?) to look back and see what the team has done during this development cycle.

With regards to the KDE software packaging, the past 8 months have seen quite an increase in the involvement of poeple from the community. Aside the “usual suspects” like Raymond “tittiatcoke” Wooninck and Hrvoje “shumski” Senjan, we’ve seen offers from help from the Cloverleaf community (now folded into openSUSE) and in general an increase of non-SUSE contributions. Relationship with upstream has also improved, as a number of changes present in the packages were submitted directly to KDE (which is always a good thing).

There were also [some much-needed organizational changes in projects]({{ site.url }}/2013/09/kde-in-opensuse-repository-and-maintainership-changes/), to keep things manageable. And thanks to the effort of shumski, openSUSE offers, like other distributions, [regularly updated KF5 packages to help with development and testing]({{ site.url }}/2013/08/qt5-on-opensuse-including-experimental-kf5-packages/). Aside for the very-bleeding-edge-it-will-kill-you software, the team eats a lot of its own dogfood, testing things as much as possible (and suffering from fallouts, sometimes ;) before pushing them to stable packages.

The goals for the future? Make the KLyDE splitting, originally devised and implemented by Will Stephenson of KDE and SUSE fame, a reality for the next version of openSUSE (13.2): there are quite a number of months ahead so it’s the perfect time for changing things and testing. Aside splitting, we’ll be watching closely the KF5 work, so that once releasable versions come out (in about a year) we’ll be ready to offer them in the distribution (as an option over the stable 4.x series, of course).

It may not seem like a large list, but it is a lot of work. ;) So if you feel like helping, don’t be shy and drop us a note either on IRC (#opensuse-kde) or on the opensuse-kde maling list.

Under some condition, mysql is not able to restart after an upgrade from SLES11 SP2 to SLES11 SP3. The output messages are a bit misleading


131122 14:41:28 InnoDB: The InnoDB memory heap is disabled
131122 14:41:28 InnoDB: Mutexes and rw_locks use GCC atomic builtins
131122 14:41:28 InnoDB: Compressed tables use zlib 1.2.7
131122 14:41:28 InnoDB: Using Linux native AIO
131122 14:41:28 InnoDB: Initializing buffer pool, size = 128.0M
131122 14:41:28 InnoDB: Completed initialization of buffer pool
131122 14:41:28 InnoDB: highest supported file format is Barracuda.
131122 14:41:28 InnoDB: Waiting for the background threads to start
131122 14:41:29 InnoDB: 5.5.33 started; log sequence number 4796605421
/usr/sbin/mysqld: Out of memory (Needed 64 bytes)
131122 14:41:29 [ERROR] Plugin 'INNODB_CMP' registration as a INFORMATION SCHEMA failed.
131122 14:41:29 InnoDB: Unable to allocate memory of size 8120.
131122 14:41:29 InnoDB: Assertion failure in thread 140387876259584 in file mem0mem.c line 361
InnoDB: We intentionally generate a memory trap.
InnoDB: Submit a detailed bug report to http://bugs.mysql.com.
InnoDB: If you get repeated assertion failures or crashes, even
InnoDB: immediately after the mysqld startup, there may be
InnoDB: corruption in the InnoDB tablespace. Please refer to
InnoDB: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/forcing-innodb-recovery.html
InnoDB: about forcing recovery.
13:41:29 UTC - mysqld got signal 6 ;
This could be because you hit a bug. It is also possible that this binary
or one of the libraries it was linked against is corrupt, improperly built,
or misconfigured. This error can also be caused by malfunctioning hardware.
We will try our best to scrape up some info that will hopefully help
diagnose the problem, but since we have already crashed,
something is definitely wrong and this may fail.

key_buffer_size=16777216

In the end it turned out to be a permission problem with /var/run/mysql
To fix this:

chown -R mysql /var/run/mysql
rcmysql restart


This did it for me. I had this problem on several but not all instances of mysql on SLES11SP2 upgrading to SLES11SP3. My wild guess is that it is based upon if this was a fresh SP2 install or upgraded from an earlier service pack.

Entrenador de culturismo explica por que come cereal para el desayuno después de un entrenamiento joeie avanafil hogar – el mejor suplemento de culturismo sin esteroides, el mejor suplemento de entrenamiento sin esteroides – warframe wiki.

As many who follow the LibreOffice mailing lists know, soon we will have the elections for the Bord of Directors again. Without doubt, there will be a lot of good candidates and the choice will be difficult. Different competencies, personalities, sensibilities. As many parameters as there could ever be. Nonetheless, there is one parameter that was eliminated from before the first election: the corporate pressure.

From the very beginning of The Document Foundation, the Steering Committee and the initial Membership Committee knew that while corporations can contribute a lot to open source, they can also in some moments try to use the community bodies for their own interest. That is the reason that all elected bodies of The Document Foundation have the 30 per cent rule, where no more then 30 per cent of any body can have the same affiliation. In the same spirit, the election system was designed the way that it is technically impossible for anybody to know how a given member voted. From the experience with the "old good times" of OpenOffice.org, it was obvious that corporate influence can do a lot of harm and skew the elections in a considerable way. And even if the rule of 30 per cent is in place, it might be hard for a election officer or for a MC member to stand strong before a corporate pressure. And this was the reason why we chose a design that makes it impossible even for the election officer to know whom you voted for. This information is known only to you.

If your running VMware Workstation 9 and above and you use both existing and new VMs you can possibly get a return of "Unable to change virtual machine power state: Cannot find a valid peer process to connect to" error.

This does not happen with everyone, but the problem seems to come from the Nvidia drivers. At least as far as I can tell thus far. I have not been able to debug further because this problem is not happening to me. If you have this problem and your running the Nvidia 331.20 drivers then you will want to do the following.

1) Download the Nvidia 325.15 driver from here http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux-display-amd64-325.15-driver.html

Create a custom patched Nvidia driver.

2) Download the patch below for the latest kernel in openSUSE 13.1 which is 3.11+
http://cvs.rpmfusion.org/viewvc/*checkout*/rpms/nvidia-kmod/devel/kernel_v3.11.patch?revision=1.1&root=nonfree

save as kernel_v3.11.patch

3) Execute the following to create the custom patched Nvidia installer.

# sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-325.15.run --apply-patch kernel_v3.11.patch

4) You will get a file output NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-325.15-custom.run
5) You can now install this custom Nvidia driver which should fix your VMware Workstation problem.

Enjoy!