Some applications seems unlucky to find their way in the hearts their intended users.

Reading today  thread  "What does this error message mean?", I can see Apper sinking another few notches.

Is it Apper's fault?

The answer is not, but being visible component that appears when disharmony in software management shows up, it can fall as a victim. Use Google to find out about "opensuse apper" and you can read about a lot of problems, and advice to remove it was given so many times that new user has no problem to find it. 

Do we need simpler software management?
For sure, yes. YaST module Software Management is old guy that is exactly what old Linux users need, versatile tools for software management, not simple install or remove software  utility that we can see in some popular distros. But, times are changing, old, technically inclined computer users that were almost only Linux users are now in minority, and new generation wants to use computers, not to deal with them.

Speaking of Packman mirrors... we're in a pretty sorry state regarding that so if you're aware of sites that do mirror Packman but never told us (I'm aware of the one at yandex.ru, have to get it on that mirror list), or if you can get in touch with some mirror sites near you or even on your continent to ask them to mirror Packman, please do.

They can then simply contact us on our mailing-list (that's packman followed by an "at" sign followed by "links2linux" and a dot and "de" -- grrr to spammers) and we'll get back to them with the details for rsync.

The Packman mirror at packman.inode.at is down. We don't know yet what happened nor whether it will be back up soon (or not).

In the mean time, please use another mirror in the mean time.

Here's a quick copy'n'paste one-liner you can put in a shell (konsole, gnome-terminal, xterm, urxvt, ...) as root to switch:

perl -p -i.old -e \
's,^(baseurl=).*(/suse/.+)$,${1}http://ftp.halifax.rwth-aachen.de/packman${2}, if /^baseurl=.*packman\.inode\.at.*/' \
/etc/zypp/repos.d/*packman*.repo

Here we are in an era in which ad-based services (like LastFM) and closed-products (like Apple ones) are on the rise.

But contradicting what you may think, open source is still friendly to them.

If you have an Apple device supported by libgpod* and you're an avid user of LastFM's scrobbling feature, you can today configure Banshee to send all the songs that were played on your device to your LastFM account the next time you connect your device while you have Banshee running.

Pretty handy, especially if you own a device that doesn't have internet connection these days (something definitely not on the rise). You should thank our new Banshee developer Phil Trimble for doing an awesome job on implementing this feature (and on resisting to not sending me to hell when I made the patch reviews...).

The next version of Banshee, in the 2.5.x series, should include this feature. Until then, hold on to your seats! (or compile it yourself from master ;) )

* Beware: not the last generation ones! you would have to donate to libgpod project if you want those recognised.

PS: If you're a developer and want to extend this feature to other kind of devices, you should just implement the interface IBatchScrobblerSource in the corresponding Source class of your device. If you want to make it scrobble to a different service than LastFM, just create a Banshee addin (simple sample here) that subscribes to the ServiceManager.SourceManager.SourceAdded event to then later subscribe to the IBatchScrobbleSource.ReadyToScrobble event from it, to later make the corresponding HttpWebRequests to the scrobbling service.

... when make spends maybe 15 CPU minutes thinking really hard, with no output, and then says Nothing to be done for `slowcheck'. The mind boggles at how slow it might have been otherwise.

Bugtracker! I meant to say "bugtracker", I swear!

So, the oh so popular and useful Packman project finally has a proper bugtracker, how awesome is that? Yes, truckloads of awesome. More seriously, it was about time and I finally just decided to do it.

From now on, please use our bugtracker to submit bugs, package requests, etc..., rather than using the mailing-list, although the latter is still fine for discussions and such, obviously.

Using a bugtracker will make it a lot easier for everyone to keep up with what needs to be done, for the packagers to pick things to do when they're bored (hah! right... I had to look up that word in the dictionary), and to make it clear once more that we definitely need more packagers to join and help out.

One needs to create a user account to be able to file a bug/request, but that's quick and doesn't involve any pain. We cannot use openSUSE accounts (as on .opensuse.org), sadly.

In case you didn't notice from the links above, the URL of the Packman bugtracker is https://bugs.links2linux.org.

This week we prepared another ownCloud sync client (oCC) release for you. oCC is released together with csync 0.50.5, the underlying library on which shoulders oCC stands. Find packages for your distribution.

Only a couple of weeks after the first release we could come up with a quite long changelog, larger than for a maintainance release.

First and foremost, oCC now supports SSL connections and does not store passwords any more, well, in clear text in a config file. Still there is no strong encryption for the password in (as that’s a non trivial if not impossible thing) but its not clear text any more, so accidents should not longer happen. For those who really care and put security over convenience there now is the option to not store the password at all but provide it at startup. The whole password storage will get more attention soon, I did some work on that already, also using kwallet, more on that in another post.

The whole start process of oCC, which is more complex as it might seem as libcsync expects a nice environment with a verified connection to the ownCloud, was cleaned and matured. I had to learn about QNAM but now we seem to be friends.

Efforts also went into the following areas:

• Error handling: People got confused about error messages from oCC which were not accurate here and than. I added more fine granular error reporting to libcsync so that oCC now can give even more helpful error messages.
• MacOSX: On the sprint weekend in Stuttgart, we made good progress on that platform, will also soon get a release. Domme got the most out of cmake to get dmg image building going, thanks, you rock!
• Qt 4.6: As usual one has to learn that current distributions ship not so current Qt versions. Thanks to Thomas, he put quite some effort in porting back to Qt 4.6 - so that Debians friends can also use oCC now.
• Packages: Check out the community repo on OBS: We now can provide packages for way more platforms including Ubuntu and Debian. Still your help would be appreciated in maintaining.

Speaking about the recent sprint in Stuttgart: It was great to be there, ownCloud has an open, friendly and welcoming community in which you really feel the spirit of working on something new and interesting with cool potential. I really enjoy being here,. Thanks guys for all your work and feedback :-)

SUSE Studio and Systems Management teams are looking for designers and web-developers!

You've always loved SUSE and wanted to join the team? You can do it now. There are several positions open at the SUSE careers page.

• User Interface Designer
• Front-End Web Developer
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• and more...

Learn more about SUSE Studio positions also here.