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the avatar of Thomas Thym
the avatar of Thomas Thym

Back from the Desktop Summit 2011 in Berlin

Perhaps I am the last one writing about the wonderful Desktop Summit in Berlin some days ago. Nevertheless I want to summarize my personal highlights.

The Desktop Summit was awesome. I had the pleasure to meet people (old and new friends from all over the world), discuss complicated stuff face-to-face and of cause: have a lot of fun together.

In a combined cross desktop marketing BoF we discussed some ideas how we (GNOME and KDE) could join forces to get bigger media coverage (e.g. TV, radio or big newspapers). One intresting first step is by paying attention on our messages. It occured that the message was: "... is THE Linux Desktop Environment" or "A is better than B".

From a commercial marketing perspective this is very common. Just a little bit ignoring the reality and making a strong statement (with the hope the unknowing reader is going to believe it) is usual. On the other hand this takes us (down) to the same level of trust many of the big companies have today. Exacletly this is one of the big differences we want to make. We are NOT like these big companies, playing with "the truth" to manipulate people. So we agreed to use phrases like "... is ONE of the leading / bigest / ... Desktop Environments for Linux" etc. There is GNOME, there is the KDE Plasma Workspace etc. and if we look at the whole market we see, that the big competition is not the other community.

Further I had some good discussions with different people about the improvement of the business side of KDE. Recent (economic) developments showed us the danger of having only a few, but big companies in our environment. The big ones are very nice, however, we gain stability by having many small businesses as well in our ecosystem. You might like business or not. But who would deny some money for hacking on his/her favorite open source project?

I recognized with big pleasure how powerful, creative and successful small/medium companies could be when they cooperate. Plasma Active is here one excellent example. In my view we need more such cooperation. There were some ideas how we, the community could build a better context for those developments.

Besides the talks and BoFs there were many techical and social activities together.


 Hacking on computers ...

 ... and hacking on the piano ...

 ... or having lunch together.

 Jos did again his collaborative open source cooking.

There were really many great events. One of my personal favorite was the football match (thanks to openSUSE/SUSE for sponsoring).

Like last year I came back with a huge motivation and many plans how I could help to bring KDE further. As I know big plans and great ideas do not matter in our world, it is the result, the things you have actually done. My daylife hit me (not really soft) when I came back and I did a poor job for KDE so far. Other times will come in a few months.

a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar
a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar

Adding Several Repositories with a Single Installation URL

This is a simple but quite powerful feature of installation. By using a modified installation repository you can add several other repositories automatically (or let user decide which repositories to add). The only thing you need to do is to create an add_on_products.xml file describing all the additional repositories and add it either to root of the installation repository or root of the installation system.

Installation repository can be easily modified just by adding the file there, installation system (inst-sys) can be easily extended by Linuxrc DriverUpdate.

Let's see the add_on_products.xml file format: 
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<add_on_products xmlns="http://www.suse.com/1.0/yast2ns"
    xmlns:config="http://www.suse.com/1.0/configns">
    <product_items config:type="list">
        <product_item>
            <!-- Mandatory -->

            <url>http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/languages:/ruby/openSUSE_11.4/</url>
            <!-- Mandatory, use "/" if you don't know -->

            <path>/</path>
            <!-- Optional, default => empty list -->

            <install_products config:type="list">
                <product>Product-ID-From-Repository</product>
            </install_products>
            <!-- Optional, default => do not ask -->

            <ask_user config:type="boolean">true</ask_user>
            <!-- Optional, recommended if ask_user == true -->

            <name>Add-on Name to Display</name>
            <!-- Optional, default => selected -->

            <selected config:type="boolean">true</selected>
            <!-- Optional, default => none, set by packager -->

            <priority config:type="integer">20</priority>
        </product_item>
        <product_item>
            ...
        </product_item>
    </product_items>
</add_on_products>

Items Description:
  • url - Definitely mandatory ;) Defines the URL of additional repository to add.
  • path - Mandatory by design, defines additional relative path to a product at URL. Use "/" if you don't know.
  • install_products / product - Optionally defines which products should be selected for installation from that URL.
  • ask_user - Should be user asked whether to add this repository? Default is false and repository is just automatically added.
  • name - Name of the repository used in dialog while asking user whether to add that repository.
  • selected - Defines the default status of repository while asking user...
  • priority - Optional item defining the priority of repository to add (an integer value between 0 - the highest priority; and 200 - the lowest priority), since yast2-packager-2.21.12
Although this feature works only during [auto]installation, I believe YaST could be enhanced to provide the same functionality while managing repositories on a running system too if needed.

the avatar of Matthias Hopf
the avatar of Matthias Hopf

Bye bye, SUSE...

Yesterday was my last working day at SuSE Linux Products. After exactly 7 years of working for this awesome Linux distribution there was an opportunity I couldn't refuse. I made innumerable friends in this company (and it's the people that define a company!), and there were many great moments that will stick in my memory forever  .

Now I'm moving (back) to academia, and will start teaching and researching at the Georg-Simon-Ohm University of Applied Science, as "Professor for Applied Computer Science" (which is the official job title).

Currently, it's the free period of the summer semester, and the University is almost deserted. I'm currently only starting to get used to the new environment, prepare courses, meet with other professors, etc.

I'm pretty excited about the new opportunities in this position, and will keep you posted how everything turns out!

Now back to Fantasy Film Fest again ;-)

the avatar of Carlos Gonçalves
the avatar of Carlos Gonçalves

Apple MacBook Pro 13" battery history


One year has passed since I bought my Apple MacBook Pro 13" (mid 2010) laptop, and at that time I blogged about it. One feature I demanded was good battery capacity - the MBP 13" seemed like a great choice and I did go for it.

By middle of August I discovered coconutBattery, an application that shows the current battery capacity, its designed capacity, and current and maximum charge, as well as age of the laptop, battery load-cycles, temperature and power usage. One additional feature that popped-out right away was the ability to save the maximum battery capacity and as so since August 12, 2010 to today I've recording these statistics with a fully charged battery to later analyze how my laptop's battery health changed over time. That time has just ran out so let's take a quick look over it!

First, data extraction. A config.xsl file was created with the following content:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<!-- Edited by XMLSpy® -->
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">




<xsl:template match="/">
  <html>
  <body>
  <h2>My Apple MacBook Pro 13" (mid 2010) battery history</h2>
    <table border="1">
      <tr bgcolor="#9acd32">
        <th>Date</th>
        <th>Current Capacity</th>
      </tr>
      <xsl:for-each select="database/object[@type='SAVEDDATA']">
      <tr>
        <td><xsl:value-of select="attribute[@name='date']" /></td>
        <td><xsl:value-of select="attribute[@name='capacity']" /></td>
      </tr>
      </xsl:for-each>
    </table>
  </body>
  </html>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
Then, I fired up my terminal and ran:
$ xsltproc --nonet config.xsl ~/Library/Application\ Support/coconutBattery/\
coconutBattery.xml | sed 's|\(.*\)% (\(.*\) mAh)|\2|' > battery.html

This generated a battery.html file with 146 records dumped to a HTML table:

(table dump sniped)

And here is a chart of it:



And finally a screenshot of my coconutBattery:

Battery load-cycles is at 58 after one year and one month and a half. Note that the age of my Mac that reads above is 15 months but the accurate age is 13 months (the former is time since manufactured).

Do you also log your battery health over time? Have these kind of data? Please share it with us!
the avatar of Pascal Bleser
the avatar of Pascal Bleser

http://counter.opensuse.org/link/

Since quite a while, we're having those nifty countdown images for openSUSE, which we've used for releases as well as for the countdown to the openSUSE Conference.

One issue with it is that it does not ship a link to point to when clicked upon, obviously, as it is just a plain image (and no javascript nor flash). Well, if you have put that picture on your blog/site/pants, please consider surrounding it with a link that points to http://counter.opensuse.org/link/, and we will adapt that link (which is a plain HTTP redirect) accordingly over time (e.g. now it points to the openSUSE conference page, then it will point to the 12.1 release page, etc...).

To do that, if your HTML-foo isn't that high, just use this:

<a href="http://counter.opensuse.org/link/"><img src="//counter.opensuse.org/small/"/></a>
the avatar of Pascal Bleser
a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar
a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar

openSUSE conference 2011

As promised a little look into the future: I will be attending the openSUSE conference in Nürnberg, Germany in 10 days. This years conference topic/focus is RWX3, which places a heavy emphasis on hands-on workshops and BoF's.  It should be a great conference with many side activities and a Wild West themed social event. I also hear that there will be some cooking workshops which I definitely want to be a part of, since I have a great interest in cooking and have cooked professionally for several years, as well as, with and for many hackers and community members over the years and they love it :-) Now,  this is the type of diversity and creativity all communities need to embrace!

In addition to my attendance, I  will also be presenting a workshop entitled 'Introduction to Cross-cultural Communication, Conflict and Collaboration' on Sunday the 9th of September from 14:30 to 15:50 in Salon Brendl. This workshop will definitely be hands-on and will include a conflict simulation which all attendees will take part in to help better understand their fellow contributors, as well as, themselves. I also look forward to learning more about Greg KH's initiative and future plans with Tumbleweed at his talk on Monday. More information on my presentation and all others including the full timetable can be found here.  It looks to be a pretty full timetable filled with hands-on sessions, so this event is sure to yield significant outcomes.

I look forward to meeting with those colleagues and contributors with whom I have met before, as well as, those new faces I have never met before, to have discussions and launch initiatives that support collaboration, organization and healthy community development. Most of all, I just look forward to (GTD) Getting Things Done!

See you there!
a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar
a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar

HCC Linux Day Bunnik NL: Looking back

I attended  HCC linux day on Saturday the 21st of May in Bunnick, The Netherlands. I have always wanted to see how the local communities present themselves at events in the NL, since I mainly attend the international events. HCC is one of the largest, if not the largest, communities in the NL comprised of members that use a variety of different distros and projects that support development within the FOSS ecosystem. This event's focus was on Security and was hosted at the Postillion Hotel.

I first arrived at the event at 10:00 and was quite impressed with the venue for such a small event. It was easy to get to (by car at least) and the hotel was quite new, which provided a quaint, by specialized feel. The presentation rooms were new and fitted with new equipment which gave the event an added feeling of style and prestige. I decided to attend some presentations held by Jos Poortvliet, the community manager for openSUSE whom introduced the new initiatives (OBS, SUSEStudio, Tumbleweed, Evergreen) and the different desktops that are supported in openSUSE latest release 11.4 within the course of two separate presentations. I also got a chance to visit the openSUSE booth, which seemed to have quite a buzz going around it and Jos was nice enough to introduce me to his local team which consisted of some new members who looked very enthusiastic about the event and being involved in the openSUSE community. I also had a chance to speak to some of the local contributors, some from Ubuntu and others who were developers, gamers and just interested users. Many of the people attending this event had been users of FOSS for quite a while, either as a hobby or in their work. I had a feeling that actually most could be classified as users and not your hardcore developer types. I see absolutely no problem with this as these users help spread the message and play a part in keeping the ecosystem alive.

Overall, I really liked the event since I was able to speak to people who are not quite your "normal" FOSSies and saw aspects of our communities from a different point of view, which is always refreshing. In addition, this was quite a low key event, so it also carried a very relaxed feeling to it :-) There is still a need for these types of events, as there are for the events on other levels, since these events provide access points for people of all types to get involved in FOSS. Especially the locals, whom cannot or do not want to travel far to get their questions answered and to hang out with those that share the same interest ;-)

Thanks again HCC, I enjoyed the event and look forward to attending another event of yours. Also a great thanks to Jos and the local Lizards for the constructive discussions, openness, and engagement demonstrated by the openSUSE team. 
a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar
a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar

LinuxTage 2011: looking back

Sorry about this post being quite belated, but I have been wanting to make this post for quite a while. This last May (11-14th) I attended LinuxTage in Berlin where it is hosted every year. It was my first time at the event and many of my hacker colleagues gave me mixes feelings about the event before I attended. There complaints with the event were that over the years that it has become more corporate oriented and that community presence has been less regarded over corporate interest when arranging and planning for community presence (booths, etc.).

I always try to keep and open mind when attending an event i which I have never been to before, so I arrived at the event on the 11th with a business colleague of mine to introduce him to the world of FOSS to see his thoughts on it, but more to try and give him a picture of what I have been investing a lot of my time into over the past 3 years. He, like many others, rarely see the point of FOSS and the meaning behind just having another operating system on your computer. As many others I have spoken to over the years, he had a hard time understanding why he should give FOSS a try when he had no problems with using Windows. My strategy was to just introduce him to the ecosystem and let him make his own assumptions on what he saw and then provide answers and support to the questions he had.

As we entered the exhibition hall, the first time, he was reluctant from the beginning and THEN he saw names of projects he was familiar with which he did not know stemmed from our ecosystem. Projects he used on windows, such as VLC, XMBC, to name a few. He then shifted his opinion to being a little less reluctant and began to open his mind a little more to this FOSS thing. We split up for a while, as I told him to get involved, ask questions, and just look around! In the meantime, I visited my old colleagues at the Fedora Project and CentOS to see how they are doing. Furthermore, I had a good talk with the Debian project about their plans, future development, and got all of of my questions answered in a nice informed way about the CUT/Rolling release initiative. In final, as always, I also had a chance to chat with some community managers and discuss some issues facing our communities and ecosystem and how we can improve cross-community collaboration.

Overall it was quite a decent event, I met some new people, got up to speed with the old and planted a seed in someones mind of what opportunities and tools FOSS can give the average individual and business person, but I will have to agree with my hacker colleagues, it was a little to corporate and presented itself as more of a hybrid event rather than a community one. Berlin, in itself is awesome, one of my favorite cities in the world, since there are just not too many places like it ;-) C-Base is also one of a kind hacker meeting place/lab which definitely demonstrates the unique qualities of this city and the local FOSS community in Berlin. Oh, and not to forget, my business colleague left with a greater understanding of our ecosystem and a smile on his face, so I think that speaks for itself ;-) Will be seeing you again shortly, Berlin, that I can guarantee!!
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