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the avatar of Klaas Freitag
the avatar of Klaas Freitag

ownCloud 4 and ownCloud Client 1.0.2 released

It’s release day today: This morning, ownCloud 4 was released! With a very cool set of features it’s even more useful and again more fun to use.

Along with that I am happy to let you know that we also released the ownCloud Desktop Client in version 1.0.2.

It is a maintenance release with a couple of important bugfixes, such as the cross platform filename encoding problem I was already talking about. Apart from that big blocker a couple of smaller, but annoying problems were fixed. Also the GUI was polished, text changes here and there and a new icon set that looks more cool and more like ownCloud.

Version 1.0.2 is also the version that is released on all big desktop platforms the first time. Now we also offer a dmg for MacOSX as well as a Windows Installer and packages for the major Linux distributions. Have fun!

If you want to talk about ownCloud, file synchronization or such, we have a booth on Linuxtag in Berlin and I will be there. I am looking forward to meeting you.

the avatar of Robert Riemann
the avatar of Robert Riemann

The Usual KDE Beginners Desktop

img

Every now and then I’m visting my best friend’s mom (generation > 50a) to update her old Pentium 4 system with the last opensuse software. Each time, I have to restore her Desktop to provide the basic features like managing opened windows, add the clock again, etc. Each time, I pay carefully attention to lock the screen afterwards. Sometimes I get doubts, that they are just fooling me, but my friend declined this, of course.

This time they disarranged the screen in a very extreme way1. Take it for amusement or for considering a clearer warning of unlocking the screen. I vote for:

You might end with a coruppted system!
Please copy this into the form field below:
I asked my son’s friend and got his permission.

:wink:

  1. Did you recognize these empty plasma panels on each edge of the screen which prevents all application to get maximized properly? ↩︎

a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar
a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar
a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar

A New Font Repository

what do you need when you write some text? Content, of course. Apart from your content you need an additional part to make it a shiny contribution: fonts! If you don’t know already: we have now a new repository dedicated just to fonts.

With the invaluable work and effort from Petr Gajdos, Takashi Iwai, and all the creative designers, we now have more than 100 open source fonts in the M17N:fonts repository. Most fonts are licensed under the OFL or other open/free licenses. Thanks a lot to all! This repository contains fonts like the previously mentioned Exo typeface, the famous Linux Libertine, or fonts from the Google Webfonts page to name a few. With all these fonts available at your hand, you have many choices to make your text readable and attractive as you like, be it on the Web or in print.

Previous to openSUSE 12.1, all the fonts had a terrible naming convention: some contained a “fonts” prefix, other don’t. Now all fonts follow a naming convention to make it easy to find. So don’t be surprised when your font package has been renamed. If you need further information, check out my original idea from FATE#313035. Packagers will probably find the article about Packaging Fonts in the openSUSE Wiki helpful.

The new M17N:fonts repository collects all fonts now and in the future. New fonts will appear and developed there. To use it, add the repository to your list:

zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/M17N:/fonts/openSUSE_12.1/M17N:fonts.repo

Currently, the supported distributions are openSUSE 11.4, 12.1, Evergreen 11.1, 11.2, Factory, Tumbleweed, as well as SLE11 SP1 and SP2.

Have fun and be creative with the new fonts! 🙂

the avatar of Andrew Wafaa
the avatar of Andrew Wafaa

Time To Say Sionara

After five years at Fujitsu it is time for me to move on. I’ve had a blast, both good and bad, whilst there and was lucky enough to have experienced and hopefully learnt a lot. Whist there I’ve worked in all sorts of verticals; including but not limited to Government, Financial, Education, Science and HPC. Although I was brought in to deal with Linux and Open Source it was never limited to that and was lucky enough to have been exposed to a multitude of technologies that I wouldn’t have known about had it not been due to work.

a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar
a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar
an orange sun containing an empty html tag, the logo of Google Summer of Code

Coding period starts!

I have finally started working on my GSoC project now, that is the Karma plugin for OpenSUSE Connect. Since Connect is developed under the Elgg framework, hence, my project requires me to work with Elgg.
Elgg which is extremely powerful(which i realize now :) ), is totally new to me.
Still stuck up, trying to figure out why the plugin displays default Elgg icons on calling getIcon(), even when I try registering plugin hooks for entity:icon:url or using the setIcon() method to change the default url for locating entity icons!
Time to hurry up now, I guess.

a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar
a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar

Improved Rulers

Recently I was able to spend a bit of time on the UI hacking again; and this time it was the "Rulers" in Writer. Thanks to Mirek M. (BTW, have you seen his Call for GSoC projects designs, and Call for Templates blog entries?) who provided me with a helpful mockup, I was able able to implement the new look quickly and effectively, mostly by removing code :-)

I hope I will be able to do more such changes before the 3.6 feature freeze; I'll keep you informed. And if anybody of you is interested in UI-related hacking, just mail me or ping me on the IRC (kendy on irc.freenode.net), and I'll provide you with code pointers to other interesting areas :-)

a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar
a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar

YaST is Moving to GitHub

The SUSE Systems Management team has finished converting YaST from Subversion to GIT and will be migrating all repositories to GitHub this week.

We'd like to benefit from some GitHub features, such as code review, comments, easier merging and cherry-picking, integrated wiki etc., but most of all, we'd like to be closer to the community so it's easier for you to change anything in YaST.

See you soon at GitHub!

a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar
a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar

Getting the most of your Gnome Shell with Extensions

Its no secret that I have become something of a fan of Gnome 3. That being said however there are certainly some legitimate concerns regarding functionality. One unfortunate thing, is that in order to really understand how best to use your desktop actually requires you to do some reading... its not always immediately obvious. I personally don't find this terribly troubling, but I can certainly see how this can frustrate newer users. The other criticism is that Gnome 3 is inflexible and not extensible with applets the way Gnome 2 was. Though this is a legitimate concern it is not an entirely legitimate criticism, simply because it isn't true. On the contrary, Gnome 3 offers an elegant and easy to use extension framework that is more versatile than what applets provide. It should be noted that Gnome 3 being new may not have the extension you had hoped for, but it most probably will given enough time.

So now I present to you my personal favorite Gnome Shell extensions to address a number of these concerns. I frankly like Gnome Shell, and am thus not terribly interested in trying to alter the appearance or behavior of the environment to ape Gnome 2 or any other desktops. That being said, there are a few things that probably should have been included. You must be using Gnome 3.2 or higher to be able to use the Gnome Shell extensions.

1.Alt-Tab switcher
Knowing to use the Alt-Tab application switcher is a quick way to speed up your workflow. However, the switcher in Gnome Shell is just a bit counter-intuitive since it is hybridized a bit. Check the Gnome Cheat Sheet to see if you like the original. If you don't like being unable to switch between windows in the older fashion (the new fashion by default simply lists open applications, then offers what is essentially a dropdown to get to the individual windows) then this extension is for you. A plus with this one, is that switches the behavior to a slick and attractive coverflow design.

2.Alternative Status Menu, or how the hell do I reboot!?!?!
With the Alternative Status Menu, the need for holding the Alt key is removed. Now you have access to powering off and rebooting in the normal way you would expect.

3.Network Connections.
So, often I have had to remove a connection in order to reconnect to a network that has changed in some way. Granted this is probably a flaw with my hardware or the router in question. Nonetheless, getting quickly to network connections isn't as obvious as it used to be. This extension fixes that by adding a shortcut in the networking menu.

4.Remove the Accesibility Icon.
Many people have no use for the accessibility options, and thus don't want the clutter in the panel. This extension removes it.

5.Notifications.
I like the new way of handling notifications, but if I step away from my computer I may miss them if I don't check that little auto-hiding tray in the lower right. This extension adds a little notifier icon to the panel to let you know you have new notifications and allows you to access them.

6.Calculator.
This isn't a lack from Gnome 2, but I like it. Simply start tapping in a math problem in the dashboard overview and see an instantly calculated result.

7.Media Player Indicator.
This extension adds an elegant little controller to your panel when there is an open media player that uses the correct interface(MPRIS2), which is most. This allows you to quickly control your media playback from such programs as Banshee or Rythymbox.

8.Advanced Settings
Add Advanced Settings to your status menu. This will allow you to instantly open the gnome-tweak-tool which is installed by default on openSUSE.

9.Places Status Indicator
This adds your home folder into a neat drop down. Its rather like a stackfolder, or the legacy gnome menu Places. Very convenient.

a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar
a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar

Horde 5 Preview: Sesha Inventory App 1.0 and updated Rdo library

Dear folks, I am very pleased to announce:
The Sesha Inventory application is ready for Horde 5 and it is in good shape. Sesha is a simple inventory keeping application which originally developed by Bo Daley and Andrew Coleman on Horde 3. The product was never officially released but it went into production at several sites. Sesha release cycle can now start together with the Horde 5 Alpha release cycle.

Sesha inventory can be configured to hold any number of stock categories with any number and type of attributes.
Like the original version, Sesha for Horde 5 can provide its stock categories as ticket queues for the horde ticketing application whups.
There are a lot of plans and ideas for upcoming versions but for this time the focus was on finishing a releasable product.There are no surprises for existing users of Horde 3 based sesha. Most work happened invisibly under the hood:

  • The Horde_Template library was exchanged by new Horde_View code
  • A migration script for database was added
  • Users can keep their original Horde 3 Sesha tables and data.
  • The sql backend driver was completely reworked into a driver based on the Horde_Rdo ORM library The new Driver Api provides enhanced search capabilities but the current frontend doesn’t make use of it. I do not plan to add any features to the classic view but start working on an Ajax view once the Horde 5 Redesign is completed. This may ship with Sesha 1.1 later on.
  • Object oriented code has replaced complicated hashes in many places

The Horde Rdo library is the new work horse inside Sesha. Rdo means Rampage Data Objects and is a lightweight ORM layer by Horde founder Chuck Hagenbuch. It maps database tables to PHP Objects. This is similar to the ActiveRecord pattern. Each database row can be turned into one Rdo item. For Sesha and another – non-public – software project, some enhancements went into the Rdo library for Horde 5:

  • Rdo now provides a caching factory or root object which speeds up creation of mapper objects
  • Methods for add, removing or checking many-to-many relations have been added
  • A number of edge case bugs have been fixed

I think the Horde 5 release cycle will start with alpha1 releases sometime in May. I know we’re a little late but it’s worth the wait.
That said, I welcome any early testing or updates of the language files. Provided everything works as expected, Sesha will be shipped with Horde 5 for OpenSUSE 12.2