I was at an Agile Roundtable not too long ago and someone was talking up Strengths Finder 2.0, so I decided to pick up the book off of Amazon:

The book has a short introduction, which is a quick read, details about the strengths, and a code to take the test on their website. The test is timed and probably takes about 35 minutes. After the series of questions are answered it calculates your strengths and gives you your top five strengths. Once you have your five strengths the site and the book gives you an explanation of the strength as well as “Ideas for Action” for that strength.

According to the test these are my top five strengths.

1. Adaptability
2. Input
3. Learner
4. Communication
5. Achiever

What are yours?

It has long been a challenge to use MS Silverlight based websites on linux systems. Especially in The Netherlands this is a big hurdle as many (>80%) of the secondary school websites that pupils must use to communicate with their school (for homework, marks, etc) are equipped with Silverlight. Yes, really…

Fortunately at the end of August 2013 I discovered pipelight, a very smart idea to use MS Silverlight based website natively on Linux. The problem was however to find a working pipelight package for openSUSE. As there was none, I decided to build one myself using the incredible openSUSE Build Service. It was quite a quest to obtain a working package, but due to very good cooperation with the pipelight developers, I’m now able to present a working pipelight package to the openSUSE community. Oh, and while working on the package I reported a bug via the bug report system, that was solved and published via an rpm package within 1 hour after reporting it (that was during out of office hours). Indeed within 1 hour after reporting the problem it was; accepted, investigated, analysed, fixed, tested, handed over to me, packaged, tested and published! The amazing world of Open Source Software!

Pipelight works okay for the following sites (among many others): arte, LOVEFiLM, Netflix, Magister based NL schoolwebsites, WATCHEVER, etc. View the complete list on the pipelight website.

The installation instructions are on the pipelight website. Be aware though, that pipelight requires the wine package that is provided via the home:rbos:pipelight repository. With any other wine package, pipelight will (very likely) not work. If you rely on your currently installed wine package and installed MS applications and are unsure that the wine package provided via the home:rbos:pipelight repository will leave your currently in use MS applications untouched: don’t install pipelight (or only after making very good backups). You can always start by installing pipelight in a virtual machine.

Have fun with pipelight.

Summer is ending soon (at least for those living in the northern hemisphere) and while usually cleaning is done during spring, the KDE team decided to do what I’d call… autumn cleaning of repositories.

You may know that the KDE presence in openSUSE, aside being the default desktop, is quite a long one. In the past years different repositories were created by the members of the openSUSE KDE team (at the time mostly made up by KDE people hired by Novell) in order to review and test packages, like newer Qt versions, KDE software, and so on. Fast forward to the present: nowadays the members of the KDE team are almost completely from the openSUSE community, and quite a number of changes went by the repositories as well. For example, newer releases of KDE software are submitted as maintenance updates for the latest available version of the distribution, and there are the KDE:Release:xy repositories for those who want the latest and greatest KDE software.

That also meant that a lot of repositories were unused, and were left bitrotting (and consuming the OBS’s precious build power). But no more! Recently, thanks to the input from Raymond (tittiatcoke on IRC), a rather large cleaning of repositories is taking place.

The following repositories are going to be deleted:

• KDE:Qt45

• KDE:Qt46

• KDE:Qt47

• KDE:Qt:Stable

• KDE:Netbook

• KDE:Qt50

In the (unlikely) case you are using them, you should remove them ASAP.

This repository instead will be **moved **(thanks kdepepo for reminding me):

• KDE:Frameworks → KDE:Unstable:Frameworks

As with repository cleaning, there was also a reorganization of the maintainership, because a number of former maintainers had moved on. In practice this will mean that notifications and reports will get to the right people instead of just clogging the mailboxes of unrelated people. ;) Of course, the present KDE team stands on the shoulders of giants, and is extremely thankful for the work done by those people in the past.

That’s all, now we’re back to our regularly scheduled programs.

Sometimes you don’t have access to vim’s wonderful xxd tool, and you need to use it to generate some .c code based on a binary file. This happened to me recently when packaging up the EFI signing tools for Gentoo. Adding a build requirement of vim for a single autogenerated file was not an option for some users, so I created a perl version of the xxd -i command line tool.

This works because everyone has perl in their build systems, whether they like it or not. Instead of burying it in the efitools package, here’s a copy of it for others to use if they want/need it.

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#!/usr/bin/env perl
#
# xxdi.pl - perl implementation of 'xxd -i' mode
#
# Copyright 2013 Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
# Copyright 2013 Linux Foundation
#
# Released under the GPLv2.
#
# Implements the "basic" functionality of 'xxd -i' in perl to keep build
# systems from having to build/install/rely on vim-core, which not all
# distros want to do.  But everyone has perl, so use it instead.

use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Slurp qw(slurp);

my $indata = slurp(@ARGV ? $ARGV[0] : \*STDIN);
my $len_data = length($indata);
my $num_digits_per_line = 12;
my $var_name;
my $outdata;

# Use the variable name of the file we read from, converting '/' and '.
# to '_', or, if this is stdin, just use "stdin" as the name.
if (@ARGV) {
        $var_name = $ARGV[0];
        $var_name =~ s/\//_/g;
        $var_name =~ s/\./_/g;
} else {
        $var_name = "stdin";
}

$outdata .= "unsigned char $var_name\[] = {";

# trailing ',' is acceptable, so instead of duplicating the logic for
# just the last character, live with the extra ','.
for (my $key= 0; $key < $len_data; $key++) {
        if ($key % $num_digits_per_line == 0) {
                $outdata .= "\n\t";
        }
        $outdata .= sprintf("0x%.2x, ", ord(substr($indata, $key, 1)));
}

$outdata .= "\n};\nunsigned int $var_name\_len = $len_data;\n";

binmode STDOUT;
print {*STDOUT} $outdata;

Yes, I know I write perl code like a C programmer, that’s not an insult to me.

Sometimes you don’t have access to vim’s wonderful xxd tool, and you need to use it to generate some .c code based on a binary file. This happened to me recently when packaging up the EFI signing tools for Gentoo. Adding a build requirement of vim for a single autogenerated file was not an option for some users, so I created a perl version of the xxd -i command line tool.

This works because everyone has perl in their build systems, whether they like it or not. Instead of burying it in the efitools package, here’s a copy of it for others to use if they want/need it.

You might have heard, ownCloud Client 1.4.0 was released last week. It is available from our sync clients page for all major desktop platforms, investigate the Changelog.

Danimos Visual Guide has outlined the new stuff in the release already, so no need to repeat it here. You should install and try it, that seems to be the opinion of many people who tried it.

Also people who shared their critical view on the client very publically in the past are much more pleased now with 1.4.0. One example is a recent blog post on BITBlokes. It is a blog about all kind of topics around FOSS. I regularly read it and often share its opinions. He concludes very positively about the 1.4.0 client.

It is good to see the positive feedback overall. That shows a couple of things from my engineering point of view: The concentrated work we continously do on all parts of ownCloud pays off. That is obvious of course, but still nice to see. And our (also obvious) actions to improve code quality such as the consequent use of continous integration, code reviews and such helps to improve quality.

“People are always excited if releases come with GUI changes!” I heard people saying. Well, maybe, but that’s not the whole truth. It also proves for me again is how important UI design and UX is. Me as a knee-deep-developer have an interesting relationship to all UX topics: I always have an opinion. Often a strong opinion. But the results coming out of that have not always been the, well, the most optimal. Very fortunate on the client we work together with our UX guy Jan and the positive feedback also shows how good that is for the software.

But enough of release pride. There is more work to do: The bug tracker is still not empty, the list of feature ideas is long. We will continue to focus on correctness, stability and robustness of syncing, performance and useful features and work on a version 1.5 for you.

These are a couple of concrete points we’re focussing on for 1.5:

1. we already merged the client code on the new upstream sync version in git.
2. performace improvements through further reduction of the number of requests and more efficiency in database operations on the client.
3. we are working on a new propagator component that allows us to do the changes mentioned in 2 more easily.
4. File manager integration, which means havingn icons in Explorer, Dolphin and friends.

A more detailed list can be found at github.

Thank you for all your help and support. It’s big fun!

First let me explain why openSUSE Factory and not in fact Gentoo.

Factory points:

• + Much faster install/update
• + Better out of the box experience – no need to fiddle with everything to get it running
• + I can throw stuff to OBS and get it back fast as a binary when I am on battery
• – It has more issues than Gentoo stable in some areas
• – Unable to remove things like pulseaudio easily

Gentoo points:

• + More stable on stable – this will change a lot in near future if everything goes right for openSUSE
• + Faster system (matter of few percents)
• + Possibility to remove stuff you really don’t want
• – Compilation of everything – I update/install on battery often
• – Smaller chance to fix anything while I am traveling as I have to compile it on the box

So how should I install it? (Break your machine in 3 easy steps)

We will need ISO that is easy to grab from our build service.
Sometimes when we do fancy TM stuff on Yast side the ISO might not work, YAY, but fear less you can still grab latest released version and start from there.

Installation

You really don’t expect me to give you guide on how to install it right? Just get it to state where it reboots for the first login.

Actual migration

Check the repositories and verify that they are pointing on the Factory target, depends on media we went from but it is not hard to change.
Just remove the repositories installer provided us during the installation and put the following ones in (or edit them if you want) the yast:

mosquito:~ # zypper lr -u
# | Alias              | Name                     | Enabled | Refresh | URI                                                    
--+--------------------+--------------------------+---------+---------+--------------------------------------------------------
1 | repo-debug         | openSUSE-Factory-Debug   | No      | Yes     | http://download.opensuse.org/factory/repo/debug/       
2 | repo-non-oss       | openSUSE-Factory-Non-Oss | Yes     | Yes     | http://download.opensuse.org/factory/repo/non-oss/     
3 | repo-oss           | openSUSE-Factory-Oss     | Yes     | Yes     | http://download.opensuse.org/factory/repo/oss/         
4 | repo-source        | openSUSE-Factory-Source  | No      | Yes     | http://download.opensuse.org/factory/repo/src-oss/

Q: How should I add them in the zypper from cli?
A: zypper ar -f -n openSUSE-Factory-Oss http://download.opensuse.org/factory/repo/oss/

After this change we just migrate to the Factory by updating the whole distribution (even if nothing changed as the ISOs sometimes won’t build for a bit).
I recommend running this from CLI and not having anything running at the time, even if it won’t hurt much it is just safer :-)

zypper dup

As a note keep in mind that you should always run zypper dup on factory as we actually sometimes even downgrade and so on, so forget the zypper up there.

I did it. Now what?

Well mate, now you have rolling based binary distribution that is quite usable and working even despite all the openSUSE contributors trying to break it every day ;-)

If you find any problems during the usage just drop by on respective development IRC channel (#opensuse-kde/…) for the package that might be causing the trouble for you and ask the members if they already have fix and if yes if it is on its way to Factory. Then sit back for a while and in ~1 day enjoy your updated/fixed package.

If there is no fix, or nobody else willing to fix your issue (as that might happen as we all see our priorities differently), just try to file a bug or do even better. Hack on it and fix it yourself and get some cool stuff like irc cloak and email alias for being contributor (that does not come with the first fix obviously :P).

What are your current issues with the Factory?

Actually it is running quite well and if I find some issue I can annoy somebody/fix it pretty fast but let me list some things I am currently indiferent or are not annoying enough to fix:

• Czech translation of SUSE internals is sometimes funny
• Disk decrypt password dialog shows the disk name the way it overflow the screen, not a biggie
• Artwork for obvious reasons is moving target so sometimes it says 12.3 sometimes it changes every day and so on, that is not bug that is expected
• Akonadi is PITA, not a problem of Factory at all but it is biggest issue I have on all my machines
• Kernel updated too often – that was my bad as I approved the 3.11 too early and then I had to put in the fixes so you guys do not suffer :-)

As endnote I have to mention I udpated bit our wiki to explain who we are and what we do. It is more of work in progress but it should give at least some explanation how we achieve the Factory and what are the issues we face. We are always looking for contributors that want to work on fixing the current factory state or improving our tools. If you are bored help us out so 13.1 is awesome release for everyone…

Mandatory screenshot

Excuse the Nexus 4 camera, too lazy to reach out for normal one :-)

What's the problem?

Reinvention galore

What is Intel afraid of?

Software Fascism

The responsibility of a graphics driver

The andriodization of linux

The low road