My third semester as an associate teacher at UOC (Open University of Catalonia) has just finished. During this semesters, I've been helping students on doing their Bachelor thesis and Master thesis on the Free Software master and Computer Engineering.

In some of them we've used SUSEStudio in order to build LiveCDs as a demonstration of their work. It has been a very useful tool and I am sure we'll be using it on the next semesters.

This is the list of the projects that we've used susestudio:

Eucalyptus migration

This project deals with all life cycle phases in a migration project of a Data Center to IAAS (Infrastructure as a Service). The chosen solution was Eucalyptus, an open source software. In practice it involved the creation of a Live CD to display this technology, it was developed with SuseStudio and published in SuseGallery.

SLES securization

This project shows how to securize sles and how to create a livecd with suse studio with this securization.

Study and implementation of a cybercoffe with free software

This project shows how to build a cybercoffe by using free software. Different appliances are made with susestudio.


Next semester is about to start. Students will be choosing their projects during the first week of March. As I am responsible for proposing projects (that they may or may not choose), any ideas will be very welcome.

This past week, I've started to get back into photography a bit more (thanks, Nina!) and started taking my camera into the office with me every day to remind myself to take photos. As a result, I've taken a bunch of photographs of my co-workers in the office.

Would you like to meet the hackers?

The Founders

Most of you would probably recognize the infamous Miguel de Icaza, Xamarin's CTO:

Next up is our very own Steve Jobs, Nat Friedman, our CEO and the man who reminds us to pay attention to the details:

Another person many of you will recognize is our very own COO, Joseph Hill:

MonoDevelop Team

Well, okay, I've only got a photo of the famous Michael Hutchinson, but he's a very important player in the development of MonoDevelop.

QA Team

Next up, we have the QA team. They do their best to make sure that we, the developers, didn't break anything. When they aren't testing a specific application before a launch, they hammer away at our products and try to find weak spots in our code (but we still love them anyway!)

This is PJ, and as you can see, he's demonstrating how to QA popcorn corn cobs:

(Did it pass the test, PJ?)

Next up is Lindsey. She's been working on writing automated tests to make it less likely for releases to include regressions. Let's hope she's successful!

Release Team

Alex Corrado is the man behind the curtain. He's our head Release Team engineer and also the brilliant mastermind that started CXXI, the Mono C++ interop project that we hope to give him time to finish someday soon.

Web Team

The newest addition to our ranks (just this week, in fact!), but long-time contributor to the Mono project, is Bojan Rajković. You can see we've already put him to work (he is no doubt puzzling over some ASP.NET code on his screen).

Documentation Team

Nina is the only Cambridge resident on our Docs Team. Specifically, she hacks on our Documentation Portal. She's also the one who has encouraged me to get back into taking photographs, so she'll have to put up with me using her as a guinea pig the most. Here she is taunting me with her hot cup of Chaider:

In Kontact/KOrganizer it is possible to view automatically generated birthdays (generated from the addressbook) in your calendar. The generated title of the event is "Geburtstag von %name". In the month view there is not enough space to display the whole title. The result is that in every birthday I can only read "Geburtstag" and not the person who has her/his birthday.


 I can see that it is a birthday due to the candle-symbol (yes, that is not a battery symbol) and the colour of the item (calendar colour). (I think the english version is "%name's birthday" where "birthday" is cut away when the text is too long.)

So I filed a bugreport but it seems to be more difficult to get a real good solution for that. However the text is changed (thank you Frederik) in the next version.

I didn't want to wait that long and Burkhard was so kind to give me a howto so I could change it on my local machine. I want to share that with anyone who wants to change that, too (it seems to be a problem in other languages as well). This howto is for openSUSE but you should change that easily to your distro of choise.

0) install package gettext-tools

1) msgunfmt /usr/share/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES/akonadi_birthdays_resource.mo >/tmp/akonadi_birthdays_resource.po

2) edit /tmp/akonadi_birthdays_resource.po

Change "Geburtstag von %1" to "%1 (Geburtstag)"

[shortcuts: i = edit   esc = exit edit   :wq = save and exit] or use "kwrite" instead of "edit"

3) sudo msgfmt /tmp/akonadi_birthdays_resource.po -o /usr/share/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES /akonadi_birthdays_resource.mo

It takes a view minutes until the titles will be changed.

FOSDEM was awesome this year. We had an overbooked schedule for our DevRoom, we inaugurated the beautiful and fantastic K building, and i got to present the lima driver.

First off, i would like to thank the FOSDEM organizers and the ULB. The already unique event that is FOSDEM just keeps getting better and better. Pascal & friends: congratulations, like every year, you've outdone yourselves.

Secondly, i would like to thank all the speakers in my devroom. It is clear by now why the first-come-first-serve algorithm has to be used, and it is also clear that it is working. But thank you all for making this a successful event (even Chris, who couldn't make it due to a train derailment). I hope you guys had a lot of fun too, both during your talk and with the rest of FOSDEM.

Lastly, to all those who attended my talk (and those who couldn't get in anymore as well): Thank you all for your very positive feedback. No matter what happens with lima in future, this talk will be the most memorable moment. (oh, and a big thanks to Will Stephenson, from SuSE and KDE, for getting a webcam up that quickly). To whoever shouted something along the lines of "we don't see that, it looks like a perfect cube to us" when the caching went off in the rotating cube hack: this is the open source spirit in its most tangible form. Thank you very much.

To end this post, let me plug the lima website again. We also have a mailinglist and the #lima channel on freenode. The limare code has been available since yesterday night. Heise and lwn posted the story already, and the videos from the FOSDEM talk should soon hit phoronix as well.

Yesterday I woke up to the news that Canonical are no longer going to fund Riddell to work on Kubuntu. I've trying to figure out what that means for KDE and for community Linux generally.

Disclaimer: I work in the same role as Jonathan at SUSE, a competing Linux company that sponsors the openSUSE project. This is my personal opinion, not that of the openSUSE Board or SUSE Linux GmbH.

I'm sad for Jonathan personally. He has put a lot of his lifeblood into Kubuntu over the years, at no little cost to himself, and to be pulled off one's favourite project hurts. The same thing could happen to me if the powers that be decide, so I can easily empathise with him.

In the bigger picture, I have to say that this doesn't surprise me at all. For Canonical, Kubuntu fulfilled its purpose a few years ago already. Kubuntu, and the other official Ubuntu derivatives, have always been a spoiler move to tie up community contributors who believed in the early community-centric image of Ubuntu, but who didn't agree with the main Ubuntu's direction. Otherwise, there was the risk that Ubuntu design decisions would polarize the Linux community and send people towards Ubuntu's competitors. With the derivatives, they are safely occupied under the big tent of the Ubuntu brand.

If we look back at the Ubuntu game plan as history neatly lays it out for us, we have

1. Establish the Ubuntu brand amongst early adopters (check, by about 2005)
2. Expand it to the wider Linux user base (check, by about 2007)
3. Make Ubuntu the default Linux for non-technical users (2009)
4. Tie up a paying market. Initial targets have been enterprise desktop Linux (maybe next year ;)) or consumers in the massmarket netbook segment (but that was squashed by tablets and Microsoft rounding up the manufacturer back to the XP prison), and now they are aiming at embedding into consumer electronics (TVs) and will probably snare a tablet OEM as a cloud OS (hell, if KDE can do it...) or a bookseller or someone who wants a platform to digitally sell something else off of.
5. Profit
6. Buy more spaceflight (Probably. For some, 5) is enough)

Somewhere after 1), the massive demand for KDE on Ubuntu in KDE's main territories (Germany, via the ubuntu.de forums, which IIRC threatened an unofficial fork) caused Canonical to realise that it was better to control a large dissenting minority with some token gestures than to have them really doing their own thing. So Jonathan, at that point a KDE packager at Debian, was hired, and Mark Shuttleworth did his salesman job at a couple of KDE events making some insubstantial promises (If I had a dollar for every KDE eV board member at the time who told me "But Mark has promised to install and use Kubuntu on his workstation" multiplied by every Ubuntu developer overheard chuckling that "But they don't know that Mark never uses his workstation, he's always on a notebook"...), a few community people got flights to events, and Kubuntu was born, and legitimised by the then-leaders of the KDE community.

Once 2) was consolidated, Kubuntu was redundant to Canonical, but on the average professional Linux hacker's salary, Jonathan was an affordable luxury. Now, I suspect that with the trend at Canonical to develop more and more in-house to chase 4) rather than just distribute what the FLOSS community provides, putting paid man-hours on a mature product is no longer a good way to spend engineering budget.

By cheaply tying up competitors' resources, Kubuntu has hindered KDE's overall growth via other distributions and balkanized the KDE community. It can be argued that Kubuntu has brought users and contributors to KDE as part of the rapid initial growth of Ubuntu, and Kubuntu has been a success in focussing their developers on improving KDE, but this came at the price of cementing KDE in the role of a second class environment in the eyes of everyone who came to Linux via Ubuntu. I suspect that the GNOME community, which previously surfed the wave of Ubuntu's growth, will feel the pinch of necessity as Canonical moves towards its endgame, and having already been displaced as the default desktop for an inhouse development, will move further towards just being an anonymous organ donor to Unity and subsequent productisable UIs.

Why am I writing this? I don't want to be so crass as to just say 'come to my project instead'. I'd like to take this opportunity to suggest that you should have no illusions about what your community Linux distribution means to the businesses that sponsor it.

For openSUSE, it's some engineering contribution to and testing of SUSE enterprise products' codebase, and supporting the enterprise brand via a halo effect from the community brand. In setting up the openSUSE project, SUSE has been militant in giving the community complete control of the project and the distribution that comes out of it. Call it an insurance policy or a lifeboat, but by opening and freeing all the tools that create openSUSE (as well as the source code), we assure that the results of 20 years of work are indefinitely available. SUSE is secure enough in its business and believes strongly enough in free software to do this with the rootstock of its enterprise products, because the modular, federated Open Build Service allows SUSE to derive enterprise products from openSUSE without having to steer it.

It is time to step back and look again at few applications that I use.

KMail2, the most recent incarnation of a mail client software KMail, is slow on pretty current hardware that consists of Quad Core 2.66 and 8 GB RAM. I have to wait longer to see an email then with single core 1250 MHz Athlon on 1.5 GB RAM. 

I can see my Inbox filling up while mail filters struggle to deal with incoming emails  and deliver them to respective folders. That never happened in old KMail, in other words serious step back.

Transition is not completed as all mails are not imported.  I guess that my mix of mailbox and maildirs was too much for simple mind of KMail migration tools. I landed with mix because on old computer mailbox storage was far faster then maildir, so all large folders were converted to mailbox.

For instance migrating Thunderbird based mail system is just a bit longer then plain move of its directory from one installation to the other. 


Apper, the latest rewrite of PackageKit frontend for KDE, managed to annoy me more then any previous. With its default settings and bugs, it was more distraction then help.

In normal circumstances YaST Software Management, or zypper, when they spot that package management is locked, they will:

• give you warning that is locked
• ask you if you want them to ask another process to quit
• if you want, they will send  appropriate signal to process
• another process quits and releases lock

This works fine between zypper and YaST, but not with Apper. You see every time the same PID that ignores messages. In the moment it was asked to quit it was refreshing repositories metadata and that process  can be stopped at any moment with only drawback that you have to repeat it later. 

When you attempt to stop it manually with:
it will be restarted by KDE service manager and start scanning for updates extending package management lock. In this case PID is changing, as previous Apper instance actually exits, but new is started almost instantly, preventing you to use YaST Online Updates (YOU) needed to actually run updates that Apper was unable to do. To end daily wrangling I removed Apper from installation. 

In a recent email is mentioned that it can be disabled using configuration utility Configure Desktop, which in email is called systemsettings. Also, I took time to explain this in a wiki page  http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Apper_troubleshooting .

To be clear, I'm not opposing to refresh package management with design that is easier for new users. My problem is that new software must have very easy to find Quit button, not some option buried in depth of System Settings, that even experienced users have trouble to find. 

PS. Apper is back on my computer, although it is not used right now, not even as notification daemon. 
I see some improvements in the interface, like list of repositories, which is very cute, but also usability glitch with configuration hidden behind wrench, with no text, while other settings have text :) 

I found out late that openSUSE Edu is on a SourceForge main page as a project of the month.

Congratulations to small, but skilled and diligent team that is keeping high quality of openSUSE Education since its beginning.

You might still remember some of my blogs about our new and shiny MS Visio import filter in the upcoming LibreOffice 3.5.0.

But what about 3.6.0? Is it going to be an exciting version too? Well, the answer depends on what kind of things excite you generally, but for sure, there will be a lot of goodness as usual to make the best free office suite even better.

In my free time, I have been working for some time already on the next graphics import filter for LibreOffice. This time it will be a CorelDraw import filter. The horse-power is a library, libcdr. In the same way as libvisio, libcdr reuses the API of libwpg and thus is easily pluggable into LibreOffice reusing all the ODG generator classes of the current writerperfect module. The importer is currently part of the git master tree.

You might be already shouting: "Where are the screenshots?" I know that a picture speaks louder then hundred words, and so here you are served:

Simple and more complex shapes in CorelDraw 7

The same shapes imported into LibreOffice Draw.

As you can see, it is an initial implementation, which cannot but get better. If you want to participate in this adventure, you can drop around at our IRC channel #libreoffice-dev channel at irc.freenode.net where a community of smart and friendly developers can direct you.

Stay tuned for more nice pictures as this project advances.

It’s been a little over a month since the last update and as always there has been progress :-) First let’s get some of the numbers out of the way, currently we have 4202 packages built successfully, with 120 failed which is leading to 582 unresolvable. Remember this is for a full openSUSE Factory (12.2) build. Not bad, but we still have a way to go if we want to have an ARM port ready for 12.