Thousands of signatures still needed by January 16th to push the US government to embrace FOSS in our schools.
A petition posted to the Whitehouse's website still has many signatures to go before the administration will be required to address it. Which is frankly surprising considering the size and connection of our community, and the importance of the petition.
We in the Free Software communities know how important Free Software is. It is not merely an abstract freedom, but the various side effects as well. Before I became acquainted with FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) computers were still obscured to me, and esoteric mystery. Granted, I had a more advanced understanding than most, hence why I came to Linux. But it was not until I dove in that I came to really understand computers. Everything from the Object Oriented paradigm to user interface principals finally made sense. The amazing resource of learning that FOSS provides cannot be underestimated, but only underappreciated.
Our schools in particular stand to benefit from FOSS. The enormous savings to taxpayers, both from the software being free of cost, and not being subject to the faults of Windows and its insecurity is staggering. Further, there is an enormous library of educational software as well as software made for the administration of learning spaces and libraries... all readily available and free of any cost. Finally, as computers continue to become pivotal to our society and the future, it behooves us to make sure that children are learning these technologies. Particularly, the availability of high grade development tools would greatly aide in making affordable programming classes for our children.
In the words of the petition:
"Each year our educational system wastes billions of dollars for the purchase and support of proprietary operating systems and application software in our schools. The software is rigid and inflexible, opaque in its design and mysterious to our children.
We advocate and propose the gradual replacement of privately owned software with restrictive licensing in favor of open source alternatives with GPL type licenses. In as much as possible we should have our students using software that complies with the definition of free software as defined by the Free Software Foundation.
The GNU/Linux operating system, underlying source code, tools and documentation are readily available to students already. Their use should be encouraged as the tools and code are available cost free."
I feel very strongly that we should not stand idly by, but should at the least sign and advocate this petition.
zoumpisInstalling Gummi in openSUSE 12.2
Since yesterday i started using LaTeX. So i was searching which LateX editor fix better in my needs. After searching and testing i use Gummi. Let’s see what is going on :
What is Gummi?
Gummi is a LaTeX editor for the Linux platform, written in C/GTK+. It was designed with simplicity in mind, but hopes to appeal to both novice and more advanced LaTeX writers. Gummi was released as free opensource software under the MIT license. [1]
Installing Gummi
In order to install Gummi in openSUSE you have to install the following packages :
– gummi (by typing sudo zypper in gummi , in the terminal)
Problem
After installing the gummi package , i couldn’t execute gummi and saw the follwoing error message
“Failed to execute child process “enchant-lsmod” (No such file or directory)”
Solution
The solution to this problem is to install the following packages :
– enchant (and 5 sub-packages) [2]
– enchant-devel
– libenchant1 [3]
After installing them , Gummi will work fine!
[1] http://dev.midnightcoding.org/projects/gummi
MemberTesting KScreen packages available for openSUSE
Yesterday Alex Fiestas showed on his blog a video of a recent development version of the KScreen library, created to handle easily multiple monitor setups in KDE, almost in an “automagic” way. As this is a project where configurations and setups are highly heterogeneous, a lot of testing is required to ensure things work reliably.
Of course, you cannot ask a developer to have all sorts of screen combinations, but remember one of the strengths of FOSS: “many eyes make bugs shallow”. And that’s why the KDE team prepared testing packages for KScreen for openSUSE users.
Before you jump to the repository, bear in mind that these packages are for testing and bug reporting purposes. They can potentially cause unwanted effects, connect your displays to some random alien homeland, make your house blow up, and so on.
If you are still daring, you can find them in the KDE:Unstable:Playground repository. Install both the libkscreen and kscreen packages, and you’ll see a new entry in System Settings when you go to the monitor configuration control panel.
Make sure you report all bugs (along with detailed information on monitor setups etc) to bugs.kde.org.
Let the testing commence!
Easily install Dropbox, Skype, and Google Music Manager in openSUSE 12.2
Skype
cd ./Downloads
zypper in skype-4.1.0.20-suse.i586.rpmBoom, that is it.
Dropbox
Google Music Manager
cd ./Downloads
sudo zypper in google-musicmanager*Zypper will complain about supposedly missing a dependency. It is not actually missing and will work anyway. Choose option 2, ignoring the problem and installing anyway:
Problem: nothing provides qtwebkit needed by google-musicmanager-beta-1.0.54.4672-0.x86_64
Solution 1: do not install google-musicmanager-beta-1.0.54.4672-0.x86_64
Solution 2: break google-musicmanager-beta-1.0.54.4672-0.x86_64 by ignoring some of its dependencies
Choose from above solutions by number or cancel [1/2/c] (c):
Fully integrate Firefox with elegant new Gnome 3 theme
DevStack on openSUSE, or how to quickly setup OpenStack on openSUSE
One of the first things I did when I joined the Cloud team at SUSE was to start porting DevStack to openSUSE. DevStack is a set of shell scripts to build complete OpenStack development environments. It is useful to create a small OpenStack environment that will be used for hacking, testing, etc. and is therefore primarily used for upstream development. Getting this to work on openSUSE seemed like a logical first step before doing more OpenStack work. I got things working pretty quickly, but for various reasons, this all stayed in a personal branch of mine (except for a few preliminary patches).
A few weeks ago, I got time for DevStack again. So I rebased my branch, cleaned up everything, and started submitting the patches. After reviews from Sean Dague and Dean Troyer (and some patch rewriting to address the issues that were raised), the openSUSE support landed in master. A few other people tested it, and nobody has been hitting any major issue, so yesterday, I finally submitted the patch to make openSUSE 12.2 a supported distribution. Now you can play with DevStack on openSUSE!
I wrote some documentation for DevStack on openSUSE if you want to get more details on how to use it. But I guess it wouldn't hurt to show how easy it is to setup your own OpenStack environment this way...
I'm shamelessly stealing instructions from the single VM DevStack guide to show you the very short version. Just run the following in an openSUSE virtual machine (do not run this on your main system unless you're 100% sure it's what you want: DevStack is a little bit too invasive right now; see Daniel's analysis on this topic):
zypper in git-core git clone https://github.com/openstack-dev/devstack.git cd devstack echo ADMIN_PASSWORD=password > localrc echo MYSQL_PASSWORD=password >> localrc echo RABBIT_PASSWORD=password >> localrc echo SERVICE_PASSWORD=password >> localrc echo SERVICE_TOKEN=tokentoken >> localrc echo FLAT_INTERFACE=br100 >> localrc ./stack.sh
(You'll actually need to call FORCE=yes ./stack.sh until the patch mentioned above gets in.)
And there you go, you have OpenStack running! That was quite easy, right? :-) You can connect to the web dashboard (horizon) or use the command line tools (hint: source openrc will setup the proper environment variables for you). Here's a few commands you can use to get started:
source openrc glance image-list # find out which image is available nova boot --image cirros-0.3.0-x86_64-uec --flavor m1.tiny cirros-test # start an instance of one specific image nova list # see what instances are in the cloud
So go ahead, read the documentation, play with all this, and enjoy DevStack on openSUSE!
ownCloud Client 1.2.0 beta1
2012 is slowly coming to an end and we all are looking forward to a few silent days around Christmas. But we did not want to leave to holidays without adding another thing to your vacation experience: I am happy to announce the first beta of the upcoming ownCloud Client release 1.2.0, ready now for you to test and enjoy under the tree.
This is the first build with the new things we did in Berlin a couple of weeks ago, you will
- discover that there is much better error reporting if something goes wrong.
- probably feel like it syncs faster, yes faster.
- see that there are less HTTP requests to the server for a single sync run.
- don’t see any issues with MacOSX and funny characters in filenames any more.
- recognize a new icon set, which is not finalized yet (actually not all sizes are there, thats why the status dialog looks a bit funny) but we thought its nice to already add it to the beta. It should fit nicely into your operating system environment.
- realize that this client comes with a cross platform file system watcher on clientside, so no polling any more.
- have your password stored in a secure keychain on all platforms since we added qtkeychain to the client.
Maybe there is more, but we thought that’s already a nice beta release.
Please find packages for MacOSX, Windows and Linuxes. Note, not all packages are finished yet. If the one for your distro is missing, please come back later, or even better - speak up at packaging@owncloud.org and help fixing :)
Of course you also should note that this is an early beta and you would not want to use it without a good backup of your data and only on your test account without important data.
We would appreciate if you let us know your experience on the mailinglist. If you find problems, please report it to the client’s bugtracker mentioning client- and server versions and at best with useful logs.
With that we are happily vanishing to spend some time away from the computer, looking back on a very exciting and very busy year, working on an interesting topic with a lot of nice people.
Thanks and best Season’s Greetings!
KDE SC 4.10 RC1 packages available for openSUSE
The release of KDE SC 4.10 is approaching and RC1 packages are now available for openSUSE 12.2 and Factory users from the KDE:Distro:Factory repo aka KDF. You can test them and report packaging and openSUSE-specific bugs on IRC (#opensuse-kde) or the mailinglist (opensuse-kde). Everything else should be filed upstream at bugs.kde.org.
Big thanks to everybody involved!
KDE:Release:410 aka KR410 will be set-up shortly and published as soon as KDE officially releases the final packages for KDE SC 4.10.
Those using KR49 will have noticed that KDE SC 4.9.4 got already published and 4.9.5 will follow at the end of this month.
The KDE team is also proud to congratulate Raymond Wooninck on his election to the openSUSE board! Given his constant commitment to packaging KDE SC and other apps for openSUSE over the last years, I am sure the openSUSE community will profit from his work as member of the board. Congratulations also to Robert Schweikert, the second candidate who got elected to the openSUSE board.
Kraft 0.50 Released
Short before Christmas here is another present for you: After more than one year without release I am happy to announce the availability of Kraft 0.50, the latest version of the KDE software for easy quote and invoice management.
The most important change is that now multiple tax rates are supported within one document. That means that within e.g. one invoice items without tax, with reduced and full tax rate are supported. The sum calculation takes that in consideration properly. That enables Kraft for even more usecases.
Apart from that, a lot of bug fixes and improvements happened, read more details on the Kraft Homepage.
Sources and binary packages for various Linux distributions are available from the Download Page or will appear there soon.
This release is nice progress for Kraft and I hope you have fun and success with the new release. Thanks all who contributed to Kraft! I am looking forward to getting your feedback!
new osc buildlog –strip-time option
Hi,
as of late each line in the buildlog is prefixed with a “timestamp”. If you do not need
this information just run “osc bl –strip-time …” (this will remove the leading timestamp).
Additionally there’s a new config option to permanently enable the stripping:
osc config general buildlog_strip_time 1
(by default “buildlog_strip_time” is set to False).
The “–strip-time” option is also supported by the “localbuildlog” and “remotebuildlog”
commands.
Marcus