We are happy to announce that the LibreOffice project has 10 Google Summer of Code projects for this 10th edition of the program. The selected projects and students are:

Project Title	&nbsp	Selected Student
Connection to SharePoint and Microsoft OneDrive	&nbsp	Mihai Varga
Calc / Impress tiled rendering support	&nbsp	Andrzej Hunt
Improved Color selection	&nbsp	Krisztián Pintér
Enhancing text frames in Draw	&nbsp	Matteo Campanelli
Implement Adobe Pagemaker import filter	&nbsp	Anurag Kanungo
Improvements to the Template manager	&nbsp	Efe Gürkan YALAMAN
Dialog Widget Conversion	&nbsp	freetank
Dialog Widget Conversion	&nbsp	sk94
Improve Usability of Personas	&nbsp	Rachit Gupta
Refactor god objects	&nbsp	Valentin

We wish all of them a lot of success and let the coding start!

Continuing in our efforts to create SUSE Cloud 3 Admin Appliance into a quick and easy way to deploy OpenStack, we have reached version 1.1.0. You can download the Standard or Embedded version.

Standard v1.1.0: https://susestudio.com/a/Mrr6vv/suse-cloud-3-admin
Embedded v1.1.0: https://susestudio.com/a/Mrr6vv/suse-cloud-3-admin-embedded

Standard has a process which will mirror all of the required repositories for the Admin Server, and contains the SLES 11 SP3 / SUSE Cloud ISO's

Embedded has everything that the standard image has and all of the required patch and update repositories in the image ready for you to consume. It might take a little longer to download but might be worth the wait if you need something with everything included and you want a quick testing environment to play with.

Changes from Github Project
1. restructure files into proper kiwi build directories to make it easier to build from a checkout
2. shell code needs consistent indentation
3. add a proper README.md
4. eliminate disk wastage from rebuilding huge .txz
5. eliminate copy'n'paste between setup-suse-crowbar*
6. Provide sensible default network config as outlined in the Deployment Guide
7. mount SLES 11 SP3/Cloud ISOs permanently instead of extracting files once the appliance is deployed

I like to call this "drive-by-bugfixing" and this is how it usually happens:

• I have a problem with e.g. xfce4-power-manager, which I'm unable to fix right now


• I check out some random other package (let's call it "yerba-power-manager") to check if it can replace xfpm for me


• I find it has a bug. Or two. Actually caused by broken openSUSE patches trying to implement new APIs


• Because it is "an interesting problem", I fix it them just for fun


• Later I find that I have no use for this package as (for unreated reasons), it does not fix any of my original problems

So far so good. Now I have a fixed package lying around in my home:seife buildservice repository. Trying to be a good cititzen, I submit it back to the original YERBA desktop project.
Can you imagine what happens next?
Correct! It gets rejected. Why? Because I did not mention all my patches in the changelog.

Come on guys. Policies etc. are all fine, but if you want people helping maintain your broken packages, then don't bullshit them with policy crap, period.
I had done the heavy lifting last sunday and fixed the bugs, now all that the desktop maintainer would have needed to do would have been to amend the changelog.

Well, I am not that interested in that particular desktop and its problems, so I just revoked the submitrequest and am done with it. I fixed XFPM instead :-)

And yes, I understand very well that such policies are a good thing to have, and necessary, and if I'm contributing to some subproject on a regular basis, then I of course make sure that I'm following these rules. On the other hand, it's really easy to discourage the occasional one-time contributor from helping out.

(Names changed to protect the guilty)

Some ruby gems are packaged for openSUSE, but often the packages are out of date or simply missing. Apparently, most people use the "Ruby Way" of installing gems. But. . . what is that and how to apply it in openSUSE?

Read more »

Do you love writing elegant and well-understandable code in Ruby? Do you want to do something new that really matters to thousands of people? Do you want to create open-source as your daily job and make openSUSE better? Join us and become a full-time Yast developer!

Yast team is looking for a new "Yastie". Job description can be found here at SUSE Careers page.

In an effort to make OpenStack available to the non-tech user and appear much less of a heavy lifting project for them, I have created the SUSE Cloud 3 Admin Appliance. I have worked with so many partners, vendors, and customers deploying OpenStack with SUSE Cloud that the idea came to me that SUSE had some great tools that would enable me to create something that they could use to easily deploy, test, and discover OpenStack on their own without a whole lot of effort required. SUSE has integrated Crowbar/Chef as part of the installation framework for our enterprise OpenStack distribution – SUSE Cloud – to improve the speed of deploying and managing OpenStack clouds. This has allowed us to be flexible in our deployment when working with partners and software vendors and provide greater ease of use.

The creation of the SUSE Cloud 3 Admin Appliance is intended to provide a quick and easy deployment. The partners and vendors we are working with find it useful to quickly test their applications in SUSE Cloud and validate their use. Beyond those cases it has become a great tool for deploying your production private cloud based on OpenStack.

I have developed two different appliances and you can find them here:

Standard v1.0.1: SUSE Cloud 3 Admin Standard
Embedded v1.0.1: SUSE Cloud 3 Admin Embedded

Standard has a process which will mirror all of the requiredrepositories to the Admin Server.

Embedded has all of the required repositories in the image ready for you to consume. It might take a little longer to download, but might be worth the wait if you need something portable that can quickly load a private cloud.

This is version 1.0.x

Its important that you answer several questions before proceeding. You can find those questions in the SUSE Cloud 3 Deployment Guide

This Questionnaire will help you as a companion to the Deployment Guide. SUSE Cloud Questionnaire

This guide on using the appliance can help walk you through step by step. SUSE Cloud Admin Appliance Guide

- This version contains the GM version of SUSE Cloud 3
- Disabled IPv6 - Added motd (Message of the day) to reflect next steps
- Updated logos and wallpaper to align with product
- Updated init and firstboot process and alignment with YaST firstboot

Enjoy!

I was requested during the beginning of this year to give a crash course on C++ for the developers with C background in our company. A while back, sankar gave an introduction to go language using http://tour.golang.org/ . Fascinated by the interface of gotour, I wanted to give the C to C++ tour using a similar interface but needed it in a quick time.

I discussed it with sankar and he came up with https://github.com/psankar/kuvalai/. He masters in pulling people to learning something new So I quickly learnt a bit of Go and contributed to kuvalai. It was taking a while to get it done, so we discussed and decided to hack up the go-tour. Made it to work with c++!!

Readme.txt – explains howto apply the go tour patches and get it running.

All the programs and the article is now available at https://github.com/chenthillrulz/cpp-tour I wanted to put this up on webserver so that it can benefit others, esp. beginners to c++ and students. But since I don’t have any webspace at the moment, thats going to take time

It was really challenging to construct simple, connected, practical examples for demonstrating the features. I wanted this tour to go simply like a movie. I did not know that I would enjoy so much doing this stuff Got some happy, encouraging feedback from my peers after the training sessions. Perhaps I should thank my manager, Pradeep for persuading me to do this stuff. And my team, some of whom are still pushing me for the final session!!

Have conducted four sessions and the last one would cover advanced concepts such as traits, functors, template specialization, c++-11 features etc. The last session is taking time as I dont have practical experience on using traits, but still want to get some practical examples   Working on it!!

The descriptions in the doc. many require some polishing. It has about 42 sections at this point. And as always patches are welcome!!!

writing a blog after quite some time, refreshing

Corel released CorelDraw x7 on 27 March 2014. We had some time to look at the changes in file-format and we adapted libcdr to be able to open it. The changes landed this week in LibreOffice code, in master and libreoffice-4-2 branch. That means that support will be available in the next 4.2.x release.

It is good to note that while introspecting the files we discovered a flaw in CorelDraw x7 that makes files using the Pantone palette number 30 pretty unusable for CorelDraw users. We worked it around and the files are opening just fine in LibreOffice. Take this as a first contribution by the new Document Liberation Project.

Download this patch

Then follow these steps from a terminal as root user

# cd /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/
# cp vmnet.tar vmnet.tar.original
# tar xvf vmnet.tar vmnet-only/filter.c
# patch vmnet-only/filter.c < /location_of_filter.c.diff/kernel-3.14-vmware-filter.c.diff
# tar -uvf vmnet.tar vmnet-only/filter.c
# rm -rf vmnet-only/
# vmware-modconfig --console --install-all 

 Enjoy!