zypper ar -f http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/YaST:/Head/openSUSE_12.3/
YaST:Head
zypper dup --from YaST:Head

The latest release of the KDE Platform, Workspaces, and Applications (4.11) is around the corner: in fact, the last RC was recently made available. We’re almost there, but it doesn’t mean that testing and reporting should stop: on the contrary, it is needed even more to ensure that no bad bugs crawl up in the final release.

As part of this effort, openSUSE packages for RC2 have been released through the OBS, and are available in the KDE:Distro:Factory repository. Like always, please report upstream bugs to KDE directly, and use Novell’s Bugzilla for packaging or openSUSE specific issues.

While 4.11 will be part of openSUSE 13.1, users of older versions will be able to install packages through the KDE:Release:411 repository which will be created after the official release. And now, back to testing!

Last week-end I was in Greece, in Thessaloniki, enjoying the openSUSE Conference 2013. If I had to summarize the event in one word, that would be: wow! It was the first time we had this event in another city than Nuremberg and Prague (two places where SUSE has offices), and it was the first time the organization was fully lead by the community. I was quite confident that things couldn't go wrong since, after all, what matters is that we're all in the same place. But I was amazed that the whole event went so smoothly! This was really a great job from a whole team of volunteers:

Just to give an example of the hard work that was accomplished: most (all?) talks were successfully streamed, and the recordings are already online! Stella and Kostas definitely deserve credits for the overall success, as they kept leading the organization in the right direction since last year, and the event wouldn't have been possible without their dedication. Our sponsors also helped make all this happen, so many thanks to SUSE, ARM, DevHdR and Oracle!

Having people from all over the world was once again an opportunity to meet up with old and new friends, who were coming from Brazil (Izabel, Carlos), the US, all over Europe obviously, but also India (Manu, Saurabh) and China as well as Taiwan (Sunny, Max, David, etc.)... The conference is the global event of the openSUSE community, without any doubt. With 250 attendees, there were a lot of hallway chats and informal meetings; I'm sure the GNOME couch tradition that we initiated with Dominique and Richard will stay over the years ;-)

Unsurprisingly, the openSUSE Board took opportunity of having so many community members to discuss several topics with as many people as possible. The board also organized for the first time a session about team reports. Even though several teams didn't participate to that session (generally because no team members was there), we had more than ten teams joining the party on stage, and this was probably one of the best way to see how broad our community really is and to learn the latest developments in various areas of the project. We also had our usual town hall meeting which went rather nicely, with useful feedback to the board.

The bad thing for me is that I had to stay only for a few days due to work, but there's already a next opportunity to meet with the community: this will be the openSUSE Summit in Orlando next November. And if you cannot make it, then I can only recommending making sure that you will join us next year, for the openSUSE Conference in Dubrovnik!

What can I say more, The Greeks sure now how to make an event more enjoyable. This conference was definitely something I was not expecting, apart from high technical standards of the conference and also the excellent Geeky People, who knew I guess anything and everything from the world to the parties that the Greeks hosted and the way they managed to skew the timeline to add a bit of surprise to whatever we do plus the sleepless nights and the amazing Greek house along with a random encounter with a bunch of hippies, this trip was nothing but a NIRVANA trip

Thanks a lot again guys for putting the hard work and rounding up an excellent conference.

# cat /etc/crontab
SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/lib/news/bin
MAILTO=root
#
# check scripts in cron.hourly, cron.daily, cron.weekly, and cron.monthly
#
-*/15 * * * *   root  test -x /usr/lib/cron/run-crons && /usr/lib/cron/run-crons >/dev/null 2>&1

here is something new and eye candy in the ownCloud Client, so let me show a bit of what we have worked on recently.

Many users of the ownCloud Client were asking for sync progress information, in fact there was none at all until today which is a bit boring. The reason why we hadn’t it was simply that csync, which is the file synchronizer engine we use, did not have an API to hand over progress information of an actual up- or download to higher levels of the application.

We implemented two callbacks in csync: One that informs about start, end and progress of an up- or download of an individual file. Another one processes the overall progress of the currently running sync run, indicating for example that eight files have to be processed, current is file number four, and x of the overall sum y bytes have been processed already.

That information is passed into a singleton class called ProgressDispatcher in the client code, where other classes can connect to a signal providing that information. That comes handy as we need the information at different places in the client GUI. [caption id=“attachment_299” align=“alignright” width=“399”] Sync Progress Display[/caption] The screenshot shows the first and probably most detailed implementation of the progress display in the sync accounts details which are part of a new settings- and status dialog.

The visual appearance was worked out by our interaction designer Jan. We always have to argue a bit because obviously I am the greatest interaction designer around ;-) but well, finally we do like Jan says and the result is great IMO. It’s great that we have him for ownCloud as that guarantees that our project is not drifting too much onto the geeky techy side which (I heard) is scaring off some users…

Hope you like it! You can get a preview in the current nightly builds (win, mac, Linux) of the client! Please report bugs as you find them, thanks.

Well, oSC13 has come and gone and what a great event to look back on. Starting with the pre-registration party on Thursday night all the way to the end on Monday the program was jam packed with interesting talks and workshops. All sessions were well attended and some were hopelessly over flowing.

The millions of thank you’s directed toward Kostas and Stella, the driving forces for the organization, are probably not enough. In addition to having a great event we also had the opportunity to learn a lot about what it takes to pull off oSC. Until oSC13 a lot of knowledge about the oSC organization was locked up within SUSE as the primary driving force of the conference organization in previous years. The “locking up” of information was just something that happened due to the nature of the organization of previous conferences. Information inside companies just gets lost, that’s the nature of the beast and this is certainly not intentional. Additionally, at least for me, having the community organized event this year made me think more about what it takes to pull off the organization. I guess with SUSE standing behind the event not just as a sponsor, but also as the lead organizer, it somewhat made the individuals that worked on the organization anonymous. We certainly had great conferences previously and many of us like to think back and reminisce about previous events when we meet. Another point is probably that one thinks that many more resources are brought to bare when a company is behind the organization of an event, although that is not necessarily the case.

Having the community drive the organization for oSC13 is just a completely different feeling, and I think I am not alone with this sentiment. The people that were involved in the organization of previous conferences were always happy to help and share information, and some were intimately involved in pulling things together, thank you.

The knowledge accumulated will certainly spread through the community and a number of meetings and many discussions at oSC13 started this process already. During the live project meeting, a.k.a. Town Hall meeting, it was my pleasure to announce that oSC14 will take place in Dubrovnik in April 2014. Svebor, the lead for the oSC14 organization endured a number of brain dumps and got bombarded with ideas and suggestions.

This conference paves the way for oSC to grow as a community organized event and I know that Stella and Kostas had to swallow more lumps, as the prime movers, than others in the future will have to. Thank you.

With somewhere around 250 attendees we all can be very proud of the first community organized oSC. For impressions check out some pictures of oSC13 and the video recordings of the sessions. Now is also a good time to seriously start thinking about your travel plans for April 2014. See you in Dubrovnik