I’ve noticed the following changes that might interest people using and developing openSUSE Factory:

Package changes

GNOME 3.1.3

The GNOME team plans to have GNOME 3.2 in for openSUSE 12.1 and thus have updated to the current development release 3.1.3. They have also started removing old GNOME 2 packages that are not needed anymore.

systemd

Frederic gave an update on systemd integration. The graphical bootloader allows now to switch during boot between systemd, SysVinit and also shell code.

Also, Lennart Poettering wrote in his “systemd for developers” series about socket activation where he uses cups as example.

hal

The hal daemon has been dropped from Factory after all users with clean spec files have been changed to work with the successors of hal like udisk and udev.

samba

Samba is getting updated to 3.6.0, one of its major features is full SMB2 support.

Linux Kernel Headers

Linux kernel 2.6.38 removed the Video for Linux v1 support and also the file linux/videodev.h. Since we now use the Linux Kernel 3.0, applications using the old interface need to be converted. A replacement is libv4l1-videodev.h from libv4l-dev >= 0.8.4.

Keeping old kernel(s) while installing new ones

Michal Marek descripes in his blog how it’s possible to configure which kernels to keep installed when a new one gets installed. With a simple change to the zypp configuration, you can define e.g. that you always like to keep the latest running kernel when you install a new one.

Upcoming Features

A new page called “upcoming features” has been created to point out new features for the next release. Please help updating the page with new information.

Policy and tool changes

Directories not owned by a package

We have now enabled a build time check that all directories are owned by a package and this hit 49 packages, most of them are fixed by now but packagers should fix the remaining onw.

Other interesting bits

openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 3

Coolo announced that milestone 3 is delayed due to some kernel bugs which the testing team encountered with their daily testing scripts.  On 2011-07-18 the 3.0 RC7 kernel was checked in and should fix this.

openSUSE Conference

The call for papers is continuing to run, please submit session proposals at the conference site. Also, registration is open now.

I created packages for the nice KDM and ksplash theme Steampunk. For this theme a matching color scheme, wallpaper and mouse theme exist and those are packed in the same rpm. Youtube shows the theme in action for Kubuntu, the version in the rpm is distribution neutral. The rpm can be obtained from the home:rbos repository, I hope you enjoy the theme.

Short weekly report is short, this week’s achievements:

- fixed the install/remove simulation bits (it can now tell what packages will be removed after applying changes)

- improved PackageInfo testing (works with both AptCache and PackageKit)

- found the problem with dynamic/static libs conflict: it is gio statically loaded from gtk and then Gio dynamically loaded from PackageKitGlib; loading Gio before everything seems to fix the conflict for now;

- got another round of refactor changes into trunk, thanks to mvo; this way my PK branch is one step closer to merging into software-center

ktnxbye

It is now possible to download GAL contents for offline usage through exchange web services in Evolution. Offline GAL is termed as Offline Address-book (OAB) in Exchange WebServices and it may contain one or more Offline Address-lists (OAL).

The check-box, ‘Cache offline address-book’ would be sensitive if the OAB url is discovered using the AutoDiscover service from the previous page (‘Receiving’). On clicking the fetch buton, the available offline address-lists would be displayed in the combo box.  The user can select the address-list which he is interested in.

If the GAL is not selected for offline usage.  A GAL folder would be created in Contacts component and would be used just for auto-completion when Evolution is online.

To change an offline address-list, one just needs to go back to ‘Receiving page’ in preference and select a different address-list. This would remove the old OAL folder and its contents and create a new OAL folder.  At the moment, evolution-ews supports caching only one OAL, though it is very easy to extend it to support many. I feel it would sufficient to have one at the moment, but if a need arises, the plugin can be extended to create new OAL folders on demand.

If an address-list is chosen for offline usage, one CAN auto-complete while the caching is in progress!! All operations are asynchronous and cancellable.

Internals

OAL’s would be listed in the link  <OABUrl> + ‘oab.xml’. They would be available as compressed files, compressed using LZXD format.  There are three versions of OAB ‘2, 3, 4’ and Evolution supports downloading, version 4 OAB Full Details file.

LZXD

To put it simply, lzxd extends the lzx decompression format adding support for differential updates. I have picked up the lzx decompression code from libmspack and modified it to make it decompress the lzxd file. The support for differential update is yet to added.

OAB

The format for the uncompressed OAB Version 4 file is available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc463914%28v=EXCHG.80%29.aspx . Evolution-ews has the decoder which decodes the oab file, converts to EContact and then we  populates the address-book sqlitedb in chunks of 1000 contacts.

And now the contents are available for offline use

CamelUrl props

“oab_offline” – says if oab is marked for offline.

“oal_selected” – contains the selected “oal id:oal name”

“oaburl” – contains the oab url

ESource props

“hosturl” – contains the host url, used for auto-completion.

“oaburl” – contains the oab url.

“oalid” – id of the OAL.

“gal” – a boolean that it indicates that its gal folder.

Yay openSUSE is having a shindig in September, yes it’s the openSUSE Conference 2011 (aka oSC11). And seeing as the theme is rwx³ I’ve submitted a couple of BoF propossals. Now they haven’t been approved yet, so I’m not 100% sure they’ll happen but either way I’ll be there and will be keen to talk to anyone that is interested. The first topic I’d like to talk about is as the post’s subject says “Designing the missing Web UI for Bongo”.

A long awaited feature of the openSUSE update stack is finally here!
Since some time, it has been possible to tell libzypp to not delete old
kernels on update:

multiversion = provides:multiversion(kernel)

in /etc/zypp/zypp.conf. That way, you don’t have to worry that a
brand new -rc kernel from Factory makes your system unbootable. This however
solves one problem and brings another one – you have to manually delete the
old kernel so that your /boot partition does not fill up. openSUSE 12.1 will
provide a solution to this, you will be able to tell what kernels you want to
keep after an update, other kernels will be deleted. The configuration is the
same file, /etc/zypp/zypp.conf:

## Comma separated list of kernel packages to keep installed in parallel, if the
## above multiversion variable is set. Packages can be specified as
## 2.6.32.12-0.7 - Exact version to keep
## latest        - Keep kernel with the highest version number
## latest-N      - Keep kernel with the Nth highest version number
## running       - Keep the running kernel
## oldest        - Keep kernel with the lowest version number (the GA kernel)
## oldest+N      - Keep kernel with the Nth lowest version number
##
## Default: Do not delete any kernels if multiversion = provides:multiversion(kernel) is set
multiversion.kernels = latest,running

If you configure this and the above multiversion variable, then after each
kernel update, during a subsequent reboot, a script will compare the list of
installed kernels with the multiversion.kernels setting and delete those that
are no longer needed. Examples:

• Keep the latest kernel and the running one if it differs. This is similar to
  no enabling the multiversion feature at all, except that the old kernel is
  removed after reboot and not immediatelly after installation. BTW, you
  probably always want to include “running”:

  multiversion.kernels = latest,running

• Keep last two kernels and the running one:

  multiversion.kernels = latest,latest-1,running

• Keep the latest kernel, the running and a my test kernel with a fancy
  patch:

  multiversion.kernels = latest,running,3.0.rc7-test

If you want to try it, it’s all in Factory already. Check if these packages are
recent enough and uncomment the two variables in zypp.conf:

$ rpm -q --changelog kernel-desktop mkinitrd libzypp | grep -B2 312018
* Fri Jun 17 2011 mmarek@suse.cz
- rpm/post.sh: Touch /boot/do_purge_kernels on package install
    (fate#312018).
--
- Add purge-kernels script to automatically delete old kernel packages
  on boot, based on configuration in /etc/zypp/zypp.conf, variable
  multiversion_kernels (fate#312018).
--
* Tue Jun 21 2011 dmacvicar@suse.de
- Add configuration template for automatic kernel
  purge (feature#312018) to zypp.conf
$ grep ^multiversion /etc/zypp/zypp.conf
multiversion = provides:multiversion(kernel)
multiversion.kernels = latest,running

Happy updating!

I am just debugging (well, not really, I am not expecting anything to actually do much interesting) for the first time cross-compiled LibreOffice code on the iOS Simulator. (So yeah, technically instruction-set-wise this is not cross-compiled, as the Simulator runs i386 code, too, but under a simulated iOS environment.) Not really that exciting, but still, couldn't help blogging. No, there is still nothing to "beta test", there is still no actual LibreOffice UI showing up or even any code to draw a single pixel on iOS.

Hello again,

This is the 7th week report for my GSoC project. During the implementation of the matching procedures, i talked in my last blog post, there were some new developments concerning the project. That made the actual matching procedure halt for a while, because there are no effective way at the moment to test the matching progress in the actual implementation. Where is the problem? The problem that occurred is the handling of the special comments that are used in many of the sysconfig files. These comments may appear next to simple description comments but contain useful information that are then interpreted by the program, such information could be for example the type of a variable etc. So what now? This week I am trying to find an effective way to deal with this problem, the initial idea i have is to modify the sysconfig lens, used by Augeas, in order to represent the sysconfig files in a tree form (with more levels that the current) that will be suitable for the matching/sorting algorithms i have already implemented.

What else?

I got a response for my first patch i submitted in Augeas too, and i have learn many useful things from the tips. So among other things this week i had the chance to rework that patch in order to achieve a better result.

What i need to do this week?

– finish the modification of the sysconfig.aug lens.
– implement a way to effectively deal with the comments (special and simple ones).

Conclusion

During the last weeks I am on the toughest part of my gsoc project. I hope that when i finish this part of the project, there will be a burst of progress for the last parts of the initial schedule.

Till next week,

Christos

Hi everyone, for this week report I would like to show you a screencast with the packagekit-backend branch of software-center:

As you can see in the video above, I’m using PackageKit in Software Center for the install/remove operations and also for fetching package information, such as summary, description and version.

The install backend lacks updates and addon management; also the dependency simulation is missing. For package information, work is still needed into getting license, installed_size and other custom fields, but all these seam doable.

Before you jump into running it by yourself, please note that to get PackageKit introspection working, you need the invoke-rewrite branch of pygobject, which will hopefully be merged into main and released next week.

This milestone being set, my work continues by completing the backend and then moving forward to other things such as optimizing or distro integration, packaging and testing

I'll be enjoying the nice seaside of Dalmatia (Croatia) for the next 3 weeks and, hence, won't be updating packages or be otherwise reachable to fix stuff.

That being said, I really haven't been very active (to say the least) the last few weeks. Lost the moment(um), somehow. Dunno. Maybe the motivation problem will have fixed itself after my holidays. I sure hope so.

For really urgent matters, a few people in the openSUSE and FOSDEM projects have my phone number, just poke the right people ;), e.g. Andreas Jaeger.

I most probably won't be checking my email, but I should be tweeting, so that's an option to poke me as well.