Do you feel hot?

The time has come to arrange your summer getaways!

The 2nd openSUSE Collaboration Summer Camp has almost arrived this year in the familiar place (hotel Grand Platon in Katerini beach) at 20-22 July 2012!

Like last summer we will all meet together and we will combine our baths and beers by the pool with presentations and workshops (don’t forget to bring your laptop with you!)

The event is not only about openSUSE users!

The goal of the event is the collaboration between people who enjoy to contribute to FOSS and the acquaintance with the different ways they can do it.

We look forward to seeing all of you no matter the distro you use, to discuss, exchange opinions and of course we wait for your own presentations and/or workshops on the topics that interest you!
Like last summer there will be a variety of topics that are going to be presented, that will be interesting to everyone, even to the new and not so experienced users.
Everyone can actively contribute, attend the presentations and host their own workshops!

You have to know:
1.[CfP] Submission of presentations and workshops is open! We are looking forward for your ideas. Please fill the form , by clicking on the link below :

http://www.os-el.gr/content/submit-talk-collaboration-summer-camp-2012

2. Participation & room reservation : (It would be a good idea to do it as early as you can , so we can check the availability of the rooms with the hotel. Please send us an e-mail with your details at reservations@os-el.gr )

(In order to reserve a room you have to pay the 50 % of the total cost – You will receive more info about the bank deposit via e-mail.)

The cost for the rooms is (including breakfast & dinner):

* Single room – 35 euros/per night

* Double room – 45 euros/per night

* Triple room – 60 euros/per night

3. For more information & registration form:
— Send us an e-mail at : summercamp@os-el.gr
— Get into our IRC Channel #openSUSE-el in Freenode

4.Maps
Coordinates (Hotel):  40.249513,22.585809
Map (Directions from Thessaloniki) -> http://goo.gl/maps/HIGu
Map (Directions from Athens) -> http://goo.gl/maps/kxrN
Map (Directions from Railway station of Katerini to the Hotel)-> http://goo.gl/maps/TGkq

Because we love what we do, we are having fun contributing to FOSS and we hate doing it alone in our rooms during Summer time.

WE ARE LOOKING FORWARD TO SEEING YOU ALL!

Uff, it is done!!!

We started to work on the text support inside libcdr already before the Libre Graphics Meeting in Vienna. We worked hard during the talks and the long evenings after having eaten some portions of Wienerschnitzl.

Now we are proud to announce that we managed to release yesterday libcdr-0.0.8 with "basic initial primitive [u]ncomplete" (further BIPU) text support. At the moment, we are supporting only a couple of parameters as a font face and font size and we are able to detect the encoding and produce a corresponding utf-8 string. Far from being perfect, it is nonetheless a milestone, because in the FOSS world, there was no support for CorelDraw text before.

We know that you prefer to look at nice pictures instead of reading bad text. So, this gives your heart's desires.

A simple document with text in CorelDraw 7:

The same document opened in a build of LibreOffice from yesterday:

At the moment, libcdr is able to convert text in CorelDraw documents from versions 7 to 16. Nonetheless, we know already roughly how to read it in files of lower versions and we will add the support for next release. In the same way, we will extend our support of other text properties, like font colour, transparency, effects, paragraph alignments, character positions, etc.

How can I test it? All this goodness will be part of LibreOffice 3.6.0 release. You will be able to test the text support in the 3.6.0 beta2 pre-release. For the brave, any of the daily builds that are built from a code checkout after June 11th also include libcdr-0.0.8 and thus the text support in CorelDraw files.

As usual, this is a free and open source software project and, as such, it delights in developers that want to help. So, if you feel the itch, patches can be sent to libreoffice-dev mailing list. And, do not forget to find a way to join the #libreoffice-dev channel at irc.freenode.net in order to meet other developers. We can promis you that you will feel at home in the LibreOffice community.

Do not update to the packages in the KDE:Release:48 repo. The repo is currently broken.

See http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-kde/2012-06/msg00034.html and http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-core-devel&m=133931384906792&w=2.

UPDATE: Issues seem to be sorted out by now.

Dear All.

In the light of the recent hack of the Linkedin server and advisement from fellow colleagues within IT security, my account has been closed. This is not the first time a big organization has implemented poor security policies, many times due to it relating to costs. Well, their costs might be lower, but the cost of having your personal information being spread across the net without your consent, is much higher of a cost to YOU than it will ever be to them. 
It is better to be safe, than sorry!!

Yesterday openSUSE 12.2 beta 1 was officially released. Remember, take a look at the list of most annoying bugs before downloading it ;-). If you find a bug, please report it. The final version is scheduled for mid-July.

As you can see, green is quite present on openSUSE 12.2 beta 1

Event #3 (25/05-06/06)

What did i do

This period of time was the continuity of the last one (ok i suffered from fever for 3 days). So the hacking is on and new features are already added. As i promised on my last post , i had to add some new useful features in the Event Calendar Plugin (while creating a new event). So i added some new fields which are useful for the ambassadors and also requested from users. These fields are :

Material ,Arrival,Departure ,Booth ,Travel,Talks [1] .

Adding these fields means that ambassadors can add more information while creating a new event. But what is going on when an ambassador or a new user wish to add extra info on these fields? In openSUSE Connect you can make comments as a general instance in a page , but by default you cannot make comments into fields. Μore detailed i made annotations for the ElggObject ($event) and then printed their value (annotation value is a comment for a example). [2] . In order to make the comments visible during “View Event” i created new fields (Material Comment,Arrival Comment, Departure Comment , Booth Comment , Travel Cmment , Talks Comment) where the annotation from the user are available [3].

Problems and Solutions

During this period i faced problems with annotation. Elgg only allows annotating ElggObject but not metadata (our fields are metadata of the object $event) . I made a lot of tries and tried many thoughts so as to reach my goal. Creating a new Object would be a disaster and with no sense. So annotating the $event and add the annotations as a new StdClass was the solution in the problem [4].

What i am going to do

This period of time i will add a map locator for the each event. Furthermore i will  find out if other fields are requested from users and try to add them to event calendar plugin.

As Sophie Gauthier announced in the language of Voltaire, LibreOffice was branched for the beta phase in view of the 3.6 release. This is a major step in order to bring the features we were working on during the last half a year to the end users. But, it is also oportunity to bring to the main codebase all the nifty nice features that were developed in feature branches and targeted for the next big release, presumably the 3.7.

It is this way that the first version of our new Microsoft Publisher import filter landed to the master. This filter is developed by Brennan Vincent from the University of Arizona in the frame of the Google Summer of Code. Although being a work in progress and supporting for the while only the Publisher 2003 file-format, the progress is spectacular. Brennan has been busy like a bee even long before the start of the program. After only two weeks from the official kick-off, we have a first (non-)release, libmspub-0.0.0.

And as the careful readers of this blog already know, an image speaks louder then thousand words, here are the pics:

A random document from the Internet opened in Microsoft Publisher 2003:

The same document opened in LibreOffice master build from yesterday:

With Valek Filippov, we have a lot of fun mentoring this project. If anybody of the distinguished readership wants to join this effort, the code of libmspub lives in LibreOffice freedesktop.org repository. The patches can be sent to libreoffice-dev mailing list. And, do not forget to find a way to join the #libreoffice-dev channel at irc.freenode.net in order to meet other developers.

You will never regret the decision to get involved in LibreOffice.

Ζεσταθήκατε;

Ήρθε η ώρα να κανονίσετε τις καλοκαιρινές σας εξορμήσεις!
Το 2ο openSUSE Collaboration Summer Camp πλησιάζει και φέτος στο γνωστό μέρος (ξενοδοχείο Grand Platon στην παραλία Κατερίνης) στις 20-22 Ιουλίου 2012!

Όπως και πέρσι θα μαζευτούμε στην πισίνα και θα συνδυάσουμε μπάνια και μπύρες με παρουσιάσεις και workshops (μην ξεχάσετε να φέρετε τα laptop σας!)

Η εκδήλωση δεν αφορά σε καμία περίπωση μόνο χρήστες του openSUSE!
Σκοπός είναι η συνεργασία μεταξύ ανθρώπων που απολαμβάνουν να προσφέρουν στο Ε.Λ/Λ.Α.Κ και η γνωριμία με τους διάφορους τρόπους που μπορούν να το κάνουν.
Σας περιμένουμε όλους ανεξαιρέτως από τη διανομή σας για να συζητήσουμε, να ανταλλάξουμε απόψεις και φυσικά περιμένουμε και τις δικές σας ομιλίες ή/και workshops πάνω στα θέματα που σας ενδιαφέρουν!

Όπως και πέρσι θα υπάρχει ποικιλία θεμάτων που θα παρουσιαστούν τα οποία θα ανταποκρίνονται σε όλους, ακόμα και στους πιο νέους και όχι και τόσο έμπειρους χρήστες.
Όλοι μπορούν να συμμετέχουν ενεργά, να παρακολουθήσουν τις παρουσιάσεις και να πραγματοποιήσουν workshops!

Τι πρέπει να γνωρίζετε:

1.[CfP] Η υποβολή ομιλιών/workshops έχει ανοίξει και περιμένουμε και τις δικές σας προτάσεις!
Το μόνο που χρειάζεται να κάνετε είναι να συμπληρώστε τη φόρμα: http://www.os-el.gr/content/submit-talk-collaboration-summer-camp-2012

2. Για δήλωση συμμετοχής & κρατήσεις δωματίων (καλό είναι να το κάνετε εγκαίρως για να μας βοηθήσετε να κρατήσουμε τα διαθέσιμα δωμάτια που θα χρειαστούν στο ξενοδοχείο) στείλτε τα στοιχεία σας στο reservations@os-el.gr
(Για κράτηση δωματίου απαιτείται η καταβολή του 50% του κόστους - περισσότερες πληροφορίες για την κατάθεση θα σας δοθούν μέσω email)

Το κόστος για τα δωμάτια είναι (συμπεριλαμβάνεται πρωινό & βραδινό):

* Μονόκλινο - 35 ευρώ/βραδιά
* Δίκλινο - 45 ευρώ/βραδιά
* Τρίκλινο - 60 ευρώ/βραδιά

3. Έχετε άλλες ερωτήσεις ή απορίες;
* Περισσότερες πληροφορίες μπορείτε να βρείτε στη σελίδα www.os-el.gr/summercamp
* Για οποιαδήποτε ερώτηση, επικοινωνήστε μαζί μας μέσω email: summercamp@os-el.gr
Διότι αγαπάμε αυτό που κάνουμε & περνάμε ωραία συνεισφέροντας στο ΕΛ/ΛΑΚ ακόμα και το καλοκαίρι!

ΣΑΣ ΠΕΡΙΜΕΝΟΥΜΕ ΟΛΟΥΣ ΕΚΕΙ!

Recently I found myself in front of a strange problem that prevented me from creating new virtual machines with libvirt on KVM. Everytime I tried to create a virtual machine, I got a message similar to this:

Error: internal error Process exited while reading console log output: chardev: opening backend "pty" failed: Permission denied

Interestingly, directly after a reboot of the host, the same guest configuration would simply work. I did some searches in the internet and found, that there only view other people had this same problem, but I could not find a solution.

After tracing libvirtd and pestering some of my colleagues, I found that it actually could not access /dev/pts correctly. It turned out, that some change root environment also mounted /dev/pts although not with the right mount parameters. This had the effect, that the original /dev/pts also was remounted with the wrong mounting parameters.

So, to solve this issue, you need to

1. find who is mounting /dev/pts in a wrong way and correct it
2. remount /dev/pts correctly

The remount can be done with the following command:

mount -n -t devpts -o remount,mode=0620,gid=5 devpts /dev/pts

After this, libvirtd will be able again to access the device and work as desired.