I guess it’s time for another Evergreen status update.

I cannot tell much about 11.2 (but as far as I can see Stefan does an awesome job in maintaining it) but will share my thoughts about the 11.1 flavour of Evergreen.

When I started that project it was clearly an experiment as I haven’t had an idea how much work it would be and if people would use it or even help with it. Looking back at what we’ve created it finally is more than I expected. Compared to what I announced in the beginning it was almost possible to maintain every part of the distribution and not only server packages. There are things which turned out be quite hard (e.g. kernel) but overall most issues were covered for 11.1. I think what I was able to prove is that it’s possible to somehow maintain a distribution  with very few manpower.

Now as 11.1 is nearing its 3rd birthday on December, 18th and given the fact that it’s getting harder having stuff updated while still being more or less compatible and stable I found that I cannot keep the pace with my limited spare time and without neglecting my other volunteer projects (remember Mozilla’s rapid release cycle?). For that reason I’m announcing that I’ll step back from being the Evergreen/11.1 project leader by end of this year. As of now noone else has stepped up so I need to announce that 11.1 will most likely be unmaintained as of end of this year. This does not affect 11.2 and I’ll also try to keep my packages updated for maintained Evergreen projects in the future. I’ll also stay involved and help out with organizational and administrative stuff where needed.

It’s still possible to step up taking over the 11.1 maintenance but in the end I think 3 years is already a good timeframe for a community distribution.

I hope that I find a bit of time in december to post a (statistical) summary about Evergreen/11.1 to let you know about some details.

Thanks for your support during the last year!

I wasted several hours on two (mis)features of the native Android development toolchain:

• The tool that creates .apk packages, the one that "ant debug" invokes, silently skips shared objects in the libs/armeabi-v7a folder that don't end with ".so". In my case, one of the very first libraries involved when starting to do unit tests of LibreOffice code on Android had a name like this, libuno_sal.so.3. I had to look in the Android source code to see the reason why it wasn't present in the .apk.
• When creating a .apk, it works fine to put a shared object with a name that doesn't start with "lib" into the libs/armeabi-v7a folder. But then when you install such an .apk on the emulator (or device), the installer silently skips such shared objects, and doesn't copy them to the app's lib folder. Again, I had to look in the source code to find the reason for this.

Sigh...

now with openSUSE 12.1 out maybe some of you would like to try something new… that will be probably in the future versions of KDE.

A lot of interesting packages can be found in KDE:Unstable:Playground

for me one of the most expected feature would be the new telepathy IM component for kde.

I have created a simple one click install for 12.1 if you are curious to try. Please test and contribute.

During the SUSE Hackweek Vladislav Lewin (member of the YaST team) has had the nice idea writing a WebYaST plugin which provides a console terminal witch which the user has the opportunity to login on a console on the target machine. He sould be able to start any console based application there ( of course even YaST :-))

So the benefit is to login on a target linux machine from a computer which

• has not to be a unix machine and
• is without any VPN configuration stuff.

Just a simple Web browser is needed to get a login via the Web on another linux machine:

Mainly the architecture is based on shellinabox which we have packaged together with the WebYaST Terminal Plugin. These RPMs are now available for download.

BTW: You will be surprised that the source code of the WebYaST Terminal Plugin has about 100 lines only !!!

How to get:

• All needed packages can be downloaded from OBS
• The source code can be found in Github

For those that might care, your servant will be attending this week the ODF Plugfest #7 in Gouda (Netherlands).

I will have on Friday a short presentation of the best free and open source library for parsing Microsoft Visio Documents. The other exciting thing is that after more then 6 years of common collaboration I will get to meet personally one of my libwpd co-maintainers, Johannes Marcus Maurer also know as "uwog".

What an exciting time before us!!!

Hello everyone!

I am very pleased to announce the new issue (200) of openSUSE Weekly News in Greek.
In this issue you will read about:

* Help us spread the word on openSUSE 12.1!
* openSUSE Medical Project searches for new Leadership and other participation
* Linux Journal/Bruce Byfield: Four Hidden Tools in Scribus
* linuxcareer.com/Writing manual pages on Linux
* Jun Auza: How to Convince Your Friends to Use Linux Without Being a Jerk

As well as many interesting news about openSUSE and useful advice, which can make our lives easier.

Enough said though... Read more at: http://own.opensuse.gr, http://el.opensuse.org/Weekly_news or www.os-el.gr

We are always looking forward to receiving your comments as well as suggestions regarding things you would like to read about in our next issue.

The openSUSE Weekly News is being translated in the Greek language from issue #150. You can read older translated issues here: http://el.opensuse.org/Κατηγορία:Weekly_news_issues

For those that aren’t subscribed to the openSUSE Project Mailinglist: As was announced last month, the Board is looking for some new blood. As such I intend to run for one of the available seats. Yes people, your lovable FunkyPenguin is hoping to be able to represent you and all your crazy ideas (I’ve got some of those myself ;-) ). I know of a few other candidates that are running, and they’re fine upstanding folk of the openSUSE community.

For my backups I am using a iomega storcenter device.

All management is done by web interface and I needed a way to shut it down from a script.

Here is the script.


  1 COOKIE_FILE=/tmp/iomega-stor-center-cookie.txt
  2 IP=192.168.1.3
  3 curl -c $COOKIE_FILE -k --data "login=admin&passwordx=" https://$IP/index.html
  4 #curl -b $COOKIE_FILE -k --data "restart=identifyDevice" https://$IP/stg-device.html?t=6
  5 curl -b $COOKIE_FILE -k --data "restart=Poweroff" https://$IP/stg-device.html?t=6
  6 rm /tmp/iomega-stor-center-cookie.txt

Just sent out the ack/nack emails for the developer rooms at FOSDEM 2012, the latter part always being pretty tough, but we have to make choices.

On the good side: here is the list of the devrooms for FOSDEM 2012.

Mind you, that list does not include the Distribution Miniconf, which will take place in two rooms during both days and will gather sessions, talks, ideas from many (mostly Linux) distribution projects.