Since late July Banshee has had AmazonMP3 store integration, earning a 10% affiliate fee. We're proud to send all of that revenue to the GNOME Foundation. Here is the cumulative revenue breakdown per store:

Amazon.com	$1185
Amazon.de	€315
Amazon.co.uk	£80
Amazon.co.jp	¥28
Amazon.fr	€70

That totals to about $1800 USD, all going directly to the GNOME Foundation! This accounts for about half of what GNOME has earned from Amazon in the last six months.

Our revenue has increased every month, too; in December we're on track for another record month! Find out more about Banshee...

tl;dr – To all you doomsday FUD mongers about Novell/SUSE/openSUSE STFU & let us show you what we can and will do!! For those living under a rock, yes Novell has agreed to be acquired. Welcome to the world of business, and especially in software this sort of thing is very common. Now for some reason a whole heap of people seem to think that this spells doom for Novell, SUSE and openSUSE.

I’ve been stewing over a response on the MeeGo developers mailing list for some time now. Basically the MeeGo Project and their steward, the Linux Foundation don’t seem to be wanting to play this whole open source, open community game. I wouldn’t have any issue with it if it was just Nokia and Intel fumbling with MeeGo, it would be just another lost opportunity that big corporations screwed up on. Problem is the Linux Foundation is involved and are supposedly the ones guiding the project.

Looks like it’s been a while since I mentioned anything about our dear friend Smeegol – sorry. As most will know MeeGo made a couple of releases: 1.0.5 mostly an update to their original release 1.1.0 the new release with new API, and renaming most packages So where is Smeegol? Well we’re pretty much there, although not 100%. I have 1.0.5 all built and packaged including an image. Problem is I seem to have hit a bug with network-manager-netbook – it doesn’t seem to be displaying networks which is a fairly fundamental issue :-(

I’m happy to announce LibreOffice 3.3 rc1 packages for openSUSE. They are available in the Build Service LibreOffice:Unstable project. They are based on the libreoffice-3.3.0.1 release. Please, look for more details about the openSUSE LibreOffice build on the wiki page.

The packages are based on release candidate sources but they have not passed full QA round yet and might include even serious bugs. Therefore they are not intended for data-critical usage. A good practice is to archive any important data before an use, …

As usual, we kindly ask any interested beta testers to try the package and report bugs against the product LibreOffice .

Known bugs

• unopkg crashes (bug #655912)
• shell wrappers are still ooffice, oowriter, …; we need to discuss the new wrapper names with other distros first
• some packages were not renamed, .e.g. OpenOffice_org-thesaurus, …; they are not built from the main LibO sources; we will do it later
• user configuration is stored into ~/.libreoffice/3-suse; we might try to share the directory ~/.libreoffice/3 after we fix the incompatible BerkleyDB; Well, we are not sure if it is enough and it is a good idea, so it will need some more testing
• GNOME quickstarter is started by default; you might disable it in Tools/Options/OpenOffice.org/Memory/Enable systray Quickstarter
• SLED10 build is not available; need more love

More known bugs

• Free Desktop bugzilla
• Novell bugzilla
• OOo issuezilla

Other information and plans:

The package are based on LibreOffice-3.3-rc1 sources. There are still some openSUSE-specific bugs that needed to be fixed. I hope that they do not break the base function, though.

We expect that rc2 will be needed within next two weeks. We will try to fix more openSUSE-specific bugs in the meantime…

Some months ago I joined the Game. "Join the Game" is the campaign from the KDE community to make it possible to everyone to support the KDE project. Although I contribute to KDE already (e.g. promotion) I had the impression that I still take more than I could give back. To show my love and to support the vision and the values behind KDE I decided to become a financial sponsor, too.

This is the little present I received in return.

Just recently I found again that openSUSE is not really positioned for some usecases. In my personal case that is especially the usage as a web/mail/dns/etc server on hosted environments. IMHO it just doesn’t make sense to roll out a distribution which is supported for only 18 months to a hosted system with limited access to it. I still have been doing that with previous openSUSE releases but it’s so annoying that I really regret it. Also the possibility to zypper dup doesn’t really fix that issue for different reasons. Anyway this post is not about whining about that fact or to explain why I don’t like to update these type of systems remotely every <= 18 months.

A possible solution?

Sometime last year there was a discussion about options for something like an “openSLE” or “openSUSE LTS” distribution. There is an external page where some outcome was documented here. The dicussions stopped mainly because of health issues of the main initiator. There was done some planning and voting on the different options but no real results ever happened (as far as I know). So I’m trying to resurrect that topic a bit once again:

The amount of work related to such a project is the critical part and therefore my proposal is to try to start off with a “lightweight” approach.

This would be something like an openSUSE LTS version. That means that the community would take over (security) maintenance after Novell as main contributor drops it out of official maintenance after around 18 months. This will likely only work for a subset of packages which were delivered with the original distribution but the focus might be on server services anyway. Using the openSUSE release which also is the base for SLE could help us a bit as the work is done anyway (some of the Novell employees who are also openSUSE community members would hopefully help us here?). There are quite some details to work out still but it could be doable.

While I think we wouldn’t need a lot of people we at least need some and the more the better.  We will bring that topic up again on opensuse-project@o.o as well. The main intention of this post is to get feedback if there is enough interest and contributors to do further planning. I’m very interested in hearing from you via comments, mailing lists or personal mail.

We had quite successful openSUSE Bug Day organized by A. Naumov on Saturday, November 27, and once rolling we continued through Sunday.

The goal was to clear old bugs that refused to die for quite some time.

You can see what is done in the wiki article.

November 28th, evening by US Central Time:

• openSUSE 10.2:  Start 40 bugs now we have 14 bugs left.
• openSUSE 10.3:  Start 162 bugs now is 87 bugs left.
• openSUSE 11.0:  Start 526 bugs now is 346 bugs left. 

We started with 728 bugs and now we have 447, which is 281 bug lesser.

I hope that A. Naumov will repeat call for the next Bug Day right next weekend.

It is 11pm and I am on my way home from LinuxDay in Dornbirn, Austria. It was a long but amazing day. Myriam, Mark and myself were at the KDE and Amarok booth. Surprisingly Christoph (a local KDE on Gentoo user/hacker) supported us rather the whole day.
We were demonstrating our software to potentially new users talked about upcoming awesome
features with more experienced users; we were selling some KDE merchandise articles and were giving a way a lot of openSUSE 11.3 CDs. Furthermore it was an excellent possibility to intensify the cooperation with other projects.


KDE EDU Applications
We showed and explanied KDE software to many visitors. The best feedback we got after presenting KDE EDU applications to a student was: "Hey, this way education really makes fun!"
We did at least one thing right. YES!!!


Linux4education
I meet Helmut and Matthias (from Austrian desktop4education and server4education project) at openSUSE conference in Nuremberg before. We got in contact there and discussed the brilliant stuff they are doing. Install a school server (based on openSUSE) with just two clicks (enter the IP address and the root password). The school server provides a LAMP server including authentication for all teachers and students (openLDAP), Fileserver (Samba), Webserver (incl. Joomla), Teaching tools (Moodle), etc. For the desktop I think you need about 4 questions to answer. The server could be accessed by Windows clients, too. The project is supported for (at least) the next 3 years by the department for education of Austria to distribute and teach their software at schools in Austria. This is really rocking cool!

At openSUSE conference we talked with Nuno about the KDE-Edu project in Portugal (special widgets and such stuff) and other possibilities the KDE Plasma Desktop provides. At the moment I saw them in Dornbirn today, they greeted my with the words "You don't have to convince us anymore. Our next release (coming out in December) will ship KDE."


LibreOffice and X2Go
It was also a great pleasure to talk to the LibreOffice crew to exchange some news and think about an intensified collaboration. X2Go is a open-source project providing remote access to other PCs and terminal services. Next to web-access a qt client provides access from the desktop. They are very interested in a cooperation, esp. together with OwnClowed to provided remote access to applications and data. X2Go is used by d4e mentioned above. This seems a great chance for the KDE and X2Go project to join forces and provide much better services than every project alone. Collaboration across borders rocks!


Work, live and learn with KDE software
At high noon I had the pleasure to giva a presentation about KDE software, esp. for in educational environment. Audience level: Beginners (so I was told at least). So my talk was aiming for beginners. To make sure I asked at the beginning. About 95% were using Linux and knew KDE software. I decided to change my talk. I only showed a view slides and did a mixture of live demo of cool features and questions & answers. I think it went quit well.

The day ended with the traditional "Kässpätzle" in a beautiful restaurant in the town. The event was professionally organized and I will be going next year, too.


Thanks to the organizers, the other projects, and especially Myriam, Mark and Christoph for the fun we had. I hope to see you soon again.

In addition to supporting file system capabilities (fate#307254) I’ve also updated the permissions handling in 11.4 slightly.

There have been complaints that every SuSEconfig run also calls SuSEconfig.permissions which leads to changed file permissions at unexpected times. Therefore I’ve modified SuSEconfig.permissions to only actually set permissions when called explicitly (ie SuSEconfig –module permissions). When called by a generic SuSEconfig run SuSEconfig.permissions now only shows files with wrong permissions but doesn’t actually fix them anymore.

Since packages that have files with special permission handling do call SuSEconfig.permissions explicitly via %run_permissions in %post the change above alone isn’t sufficient to avoid surprises. Therefore I’ve introduced the new macro %set_permissions. This macro expects file names as arguments. Only permissions of those files are adjusted then. To notify packagers of that new method an rpmlint check now issues an informal message if %run_permissions is used.