KDE SC 4.9.5 packages for openSUSE
KR49 now holds KDE SC 4.9.5 packages. Thanks to the packagers involved! You can report issues on the opensuse-kde mailinglist or on IRC in the #opensuse-kde channel.
The latter is also where the next openSUSE KDE team meeting will take place, on Tuesday 8 January 18:30 UTC (19:30 CET).
openSUSE 12.2 Review: an Immaculate Conception
When I first updated my computer to 12.2 I wasn't all that impressed, but that was apparently due to having used the live upgrade via 'zypper dup.' Earlier today (December 20th) I got fed up with some of the anomalies and accumulated mess of my system, and decided to reinstall. Quite frankly, though the 'dup' process had (for once) gone without any real problems, this was clearly the right decision to get a proper impression of our latest release. In short, I'm quite impressed.
This may very well be the most polished experience I've had since I used Macintosh OSX. Refinements and polish show all throughout the system, from the moment you turn it on up to doing your work. For that matter there is even a couple of notable changes to the installation process itself. Besides the freakishly fast loading of the installer (or live environment) enabled by the transition to systemd, there is the nice fact that writing a DVD image to USB flash media (via ImageWriter or using the 'dd' method on the CLI) no longer requires you to run isohybrid on the ISO any longer. One annoyance though, is that a bug I had experienced in 12.1 persisted into this release also. That being where it fails to select kernel-firmware package for installation, which is vital to the functioning of my Broadcom WiFi card using the brcmsmac driver. If I recall though, that is a problem with udev.
Upon boot we are greeted by the much prettier interface of the new Grub 2 bootloader, giving us the option of booting openSUSE normally (or Windows if you dual boot) and 'advanced options' for openSUSE, which leads to another page with the usual failsafe booting option. However, I've yet to discover how to manually enter boot options and at this time assume that it can't be done. The YaST Bootloader module has been refined and support for Grub 2 is fully present.
Once we are past Grub 2 we are promptly greeted by Plymouth, the elegant successor to Splashy the splash screen. An elegant green background with the openSUSE logo superimposed in the center stand solidly while the animated activity of white whisps meander about the logo. These whisps gently float about drifting gradually towards the center of the screen before suddenly converging just below the logo into one orb of light, indicating the transition to your login screen or desktop in the case of autologin.
With autologin disabled, Plymouth gently segues us into the login screen. Very little has changed here, excepting the slightly improved graphical performance. Above the user selections within the window, the openSUSE logo has been placed. I've found this looks a bit garish on smaller displays, but is a nice touch for those with larger displays than my little netbook provides.
In similar fashion, the transition from login to desktop is gently handled and has a more elegant temperament than previously. Gnome shell has not changed in appearance at all, but has however become a bit more responsive. The graphical effects, such as the transition to the activities dashboard or the ripple effect of the upper left hand corner are noticeably smoother. As I've used the Gnome system and its application suite, everything feels quicker and more responsive though there aren't too many major changes to the applications that are immediately noticeable. One notable change to the shell however is the inclusion of more options to set up in the 'Online Accounts.' Now, we have Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Windows Live. Setting up your Google account works as before, and the only functionality so far of the other options is setting your IM accounts in the Empathy framework. Below I shall elaborate upon the more notable changes of the system with emphasis on the Gnome application suite and the shell.
- Shell
- Identity Menu?
- Does not set status as online upon login. However when you
open the menu it would indicate that you actually are online. This
looks to be half a bug, with the other a deliberate design choice.
Toggling your status as unavailable then back to available fixes
this.
- Windows Live completely broken. So there is still no MSN
access. Not a big deal to me though.
- Does not set status as online upon login. However when you
open the menu it would indicate that you actually are online. This
looks to be half a bug, with the other a deliberate design choice.
Toggling your status as unavailable then back to available fixes
this.
- Identity Menu?
- Evolution
- Correctly set up by Online Accounts, whereas before it was
unstable unless Gmail was set up manually and disabled in Online
Accounts.
- Imap noticeably faster and smoother. In fact the performance
change is dramatic.
- Emails load faster, and are not seriously slowed by
downloading or synchronizing.
- Correctly set up by Online Accounts, whereas before it was
unstable unless Gmail was set up manually and disabled in Online
Accounts.
- LibreOffice
- Startup is significantly faster, quick enough that I am not
annoyed by waiting anymore.
- Overall behavior is smoother, more responsive, and more
predictable than ever. In short time, LibreOffice since forking
from OpenOffice has shown massive improvements and could reach a
level where it can contend with MS Office on purely technical
merits.
- Startup is significantly faster, quick enough that I am not
annoyed by waiting anymore.
- Extensions
- Many extensions are deprecated by the newer shell. However,
most of them have more advanced successors. The Gnome extensions
gallery is getting quite nice.
- Many extensions are deprecated by the newer shell. However,
most of them have more advanced successors. The Gnome extensions
gallery is getting quite nice.
- Kernel
- Performance increase
- The newer kernel shows off its optimizations for filesystem
I/O. One of the bigger reasons for performance increases is the
much updated compiling stack we use now.
- The newer kernel shows off its optimizations for filesystem
I/O. One of the bigger reasons for performance increases is the
much updated compiling stack we use now.
- Improved hardware support
- On my netbook I have an uncommon model of touchpad, that up
until this version of openSUSE had never been identified
correctly. Thus, upto now I wasn't able to toggle things such as
“tap to click.” Also, my webcam now works with any app that
uses a webcam.
- On my netbook I have an uncommon model of touchpad, that up
until this version of openSUSE had never been identified
correctly. Thus, upto now I wasn't able to toggle things such as
“tap to click.” Also, my webcam now works with any app that
uses a webcam.
- Heating issue
- My netbook and another AMD laptop a client of mine had
would overheat fairly easily, shutting off. This issue has
noticeably improved as has power consumption. We now have longer
bath life.
- My netbook and another AMD laptop a client of mine had
would overheat fairly easily, shutting off. This issue has
noticeably improved as has power consumption. We now have longer
bath life.
- Nouveau
- Were it not for games, I would probably not have bothered
to install the NVidia proprietary drivers. The behavior of the
system running nouveau was nearly indistinguishable from the
proprietary. In fact, the desktop with its compositing was
smoother than before.
- Were it not for games, I would probably not have bothered
to install the NVidia proprietary drivers. The behavior of the
system running nouveau was nearly indistinguishable from the
proprietary. In fact, the desktop with its compositing was
smoother than before.
- Performance increase
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.