If you are not a programmer, and still want to help LibreOffice, there are many ways; one of them is submitting good bug reports. And a good bug report means a report with as much information as possible - one that contains the exact version, file(s) that caused the issue, description of the steps that lead to the problem.

In case LibreOffice crashes for you (sorry for that! - we are trying hard to avoid such situations, but it still may happen), and you are on Windows, description of the problem used to be all you were able to do - but now you can do more: you can attach a backtrace, and help the developers tremendously.

What is a backtrace? It is a log describing where exactly the program failed. It used to be very hard to get one on Windows, as you had to build your own LibreOffice.

Now it is much easier - you can provide such backtraces either using the official builds starting with LibreOffice 4.2.0rc1, or using the daily builds, without the need to build anything - you can just connect to a so called symbols server, and that's it.

Official releases

Just install LibreOffice 4.2.0rc1 (or later when available), and follow the information on the How to get a backtrace wiki page, it will lead you through the process. Thank you +Christian Lohmaier so much for setting that up!

Daily builds

I have updated my tinderbox to produce daily builds that are ready for debugging too. If you see a crash, it is worth checking if it happens in the most recent daily builds too - so installing this will allow you to check it, and directly provide a backtrace too.

Please try it out - I am looking forward to seeing backtraces in the your bugreports. In case you have trouble with the How to get a backtrace description, or the process itself, please let me know - or improve the page yourself; it is wiki, after all :-)

Oh, and all this wouldn't be possible without Luboš Luňák, +Fridrich Strba and others who have helped to connect various pieces together - thank you!

Poor man's deduplication: scan directories to find duplicate files and remove all but one. This blog entry looks at two tools: fdupes and fslint
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There is a Perl module that I have been developing. It is now finding its way onto CPAN and the openSUSE Build Service; the process of reaching that goal, however, was a bit tedious -- hence this blog entry which will describe the workflow so I won't have to reinvent the wheel each time I want to do this again.
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Recently I decided to update my blog to something that will be less awkward than NanoBlogger I have been using until now. I mean, writing the entries in vim is great, running the nb script is easy, but the turnover to preview it, fix, run the script again etc. is just annoying.

Now I moved my old blog to holesovsky.blogspot.com, which will be much easier for me to handle. With some Perl scripting, I even converted all the old entries here, so that the old blog can really RIP.

Small note to the conversion

When you are using the blogger.com's Import XML feature, and it looks like the import is taking too long (minutes or so), the answer is simple: Your XML was not accepted by blogger.com. I have seen reports of people waiting several hours to import the blog.

Don't wait in such cases - it was just that an error occurred, and the UI has not reported that. Just try to find out what is in the XML that could have caused the import to get stuck - usual suspects are &'s instead of " or OTOH things like &Acaron;, or other less common escapes.

1. I think some people from the openSUSE community has perceived this first mail as a negative criticism to the project and their contributors. Cold analysis based on numbers do not provide a complete picture of the project... but provides a good one, in my opinion. I wrote the below mail/article thinking about a better future, not to revisit a past I am part of. 
2. A summary of the proposals was published in an openSUSE Team blog post. Please read it to get in context. As stated in that article, this first mail/article has as goal to share the motivations behind the later published proposals, trying to open a discussion about our current state that can lead us to agree on a picture we can use as starting point.
3. At the end of the article/mail, I proposed some questions. If you are interested in answering them (I would appreciate it), please:

• Subscribe to the openSUSE-project mailing list. Check how to do it first. 
• Make your comments as a reply of this thread.

Otherwise, in order to keep the debate centralized (for record purposes also), I will post/summarize your answers and comments also in that mailing list.

----------
 


INTRODUCTION/GOALS

• Share a picture as a starting point of discussion.
• Use the discussed picture as a reference to agree on actions we all can/want to execute. 

FIRST STEP: PIECES OF THE PUZZLE

One of the first things we did was digging into numbers that provided us information about the status of the project. Data cannot be the only source to create a complete picture, but it is helpful as first step.

• Alberto Planas talk at oSC13: openSUSE in Numbers[1]
• Alberto Planas' slides from the above talk[2]
• First openSUSE Team blog post: Numbers in openSUSE[3]
• Second openSUSE Team blog post: More on statistics[4]
• Jos post about numbers[5] 

1.- Downloads



2.- UUIDs (installations that update regularly)

• Looking at the number of machines that regularly update against openSUSE repositories (daily, weekly and monthly), we can easily conclude that the situation is very stable. The speed of growth (daily and weekly stats) or decline (monthly) is low.
• What the graph do not show is the acceleration. It has been negative (small in value) for quiet some time now.
• When looking at the architectures, we see that x86_64 is more popular than i586. This behavior is accelerating, as confirmed in the download numbers collected for 12.3
• When looking at the mediums where those installations come from, we clearly see three dominant ones: .iso (dvd version), ftp (net installs) and Live CD.
• There is a relevant detail that Alberto mentioned in his talk. More than half, almost 2/3, of openSUSE installations are not using the last version many weeks after Release date. There is also a significant amount of installations using unmaintained or Evergreen versions.

3.- Factory and Tumbleweed installations/"users"

4.- Contributors to factory and devel projects


5.- Social media and comparison with Fedora


SOLVING THE PUZZLE


ADDING CONTEXT TO THE PICTURE

YaST switched to the GPL license back in 2004, but there were still a lot of obstacles to easy contributions to the project. There was a bunch of changes in the past to improve contribution to the project, like switching from the openSUSE subversion server to GitHub, generating documentation to doc.opensuse.org or having public IRC. But we are not satisfied and do even more steps to make it easy to contribute to YaST.

The most visible action in the last year was the conversion from YCP to Ruby. We found that having a special language just for YaST made some sense in the past, but now becomes useless and makes obstacles for newcomers which must at first learn a language before they can change anything. Ruby is a well known language with a nice ecosystem around including benchmarking, profiling, debugging or testing frameworks. The latest mentioned testing framework is quite important, because good test coverage allows reducing of fear from changes. For tests we chose the well known framework RSpec, so people coming from the Ruby world know it and others find it intuitive.

Related to tests are also continuous integration that tests code after each code change and automatically sends new packages to the devel project and to Factory if needed. We make our CI node publicly visible on the openSUSE CI server, so everyone can see if build succeeded and what is the reason if it failed.

We also decided to help newcomers with a quick introductory documentation. One page recently updated to reflect the current state is about code organization which helps newcomers to orient in current YaST modules. The content is a bit terse and a minority of pages links to some old tutorials and documentation, but we take care to quickly react to questions and suggestions.

Another change is deletion of the internal YaST IRC channel and now all communication happens on the #yast Freenode channel. This change really increases the chance that you catch YaST developers on IRC. Others ways are the YaST mailing list, Bugzilla, GitHub or openSUSE feature tracker.

So let’s start hacking YaST and if you find any obstacle, contact us, so we can remove it.

Hello,

During the past two weeks we have seen ann influx of data, projects and ideas going around through the community. We have engaged in discussing some greater changes for our distribution and community in the search for higher acceptance and performance of our distribution of choice.

The comments on our mailing lists about the possible changes on the horizon make me think that there is a lot being asked of us. While many that participate in openSUSE might think that it is ok to the let the times roll with us as mere spectators, this request for change has become a wake up call for many of us. We may need to gather our strength, voice our opinion, change the status quo of our contributions. If anything, this proposals have stirred many of our minds and revived the passion that makes openSUSE a personal favorite.

Not only the request about changes and realignment have made this happen, but also events and people that participate of the openSUSE community are currently working on making a very successful event for our conference in Dubrovnik, Croatia next April.

The openSUSE Conference is a long-standing event for our members and enthusiasts to meet and gather around common goals and to promote our distribution. It is also an opportunity to showcase much of what we do on our own for the project.
I have involved my self in this organization, providing a few ideas for design and promotion. I hope that the results of this team's efforts are looked upon with gratitude, for while this is not coding, we still do a lot of our work spending countless hours to make this event a success.

Another important event happening at the moment are the openSUSE Board Elections. This time we have a few aspirants for the position running with what they can offer for the rest of the community. It surely shows a higher level of commitment to want to help the project as a whole to move forward for the future.
I humbly ask that if you have not yet cast your vote for this election, that you do so. Your favorite candidates are still waiting for your support and if you feel that this is elections process does not care for what you have to express, think again.

I say this because of the times that we are facing. Think of this because now the industry is exploring more ways that Linux can be present in a massive way for many more people than ever before. This is what has prompted our discussion about the future of openSUSE. SteamOS, for example has just launched with a promising future based on Linux. Many other distributions are now exploring going mobile or be embedded in smaller everyday devices that we will end up using.

Because of the changes in the industry is that I ask that you vote. Help the board at openSUSE hear your particular voice through votes. Let us know what you would like to see happen with openSUSE. Our candidates will thank you deeply.

Thank you!
Andy (anditosan)

For more information click here!

That is a great idea. A kids toy and a barcelona souvenir all in one! Those conform the Barcelona skyline and I just bought one for myself as a souvenir since I am moving from Barcelona at the end of the year.

I think this is a very nice and innovative idea designed in Barcelona by mitoi .

The ownCloud community released ownCloud 6 a couple of days ago. That was another big release and we want to celebrate!

Please, everybody who is interested in ownCloud, like to learn more, give feedback or just want to meet other people from the community, you are invited to show up at Coworking Space in Nuremberg, Josephsplatz 8, on december 18th, 6pm.

We will have a relaxed evening with a little discussion, maybe short demos, cakes and stuff, and fun. No heavy talks and serious faces!

We are looking forward to meeting you.