Every time that I make a new openSUSE installation, I always add some additional stuff to get an even better user experience, that’s why I enumerate here the things that i suggest to you do after a successfully openSUSE installation.

Read well, read again, so you will not be lost. All the commands that I show here between double quotes (“) for the time of the execution will go without the quotes and with the text in bold just like that.

Wireless cards suppport

Although in the Linux kernel there are a lot of wireless cards supported by default, there are others “rare” that need a little more of work, so the first thing that you must do is execute this in a command line interface: “/sbin/lspci“, to get the list of your devices and then look for a line like this:

04:01.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR2413 802.11bg NIC (rev 01)

In my local desktop i have an Atheros Wireless Card that the kernel detected and put working by default. The same can happen with Intel an another ones around. If your luck is to have an Broadcom, like BCM43xx (the xx could be any number), you will need to plug your machine into a LAN, and then execute “su -c ‘install_bcm43xx_firmware’ “, this will ask you for your root password (normally its the same that your user password), and then this will going to install some files (the firmware) to get the working the B43 module. After the installation, just reboot your machine, now it should work. If not, you have some of those really weird Broadcom, so you must install the proprietary controller with: “sudo zypper in broadcom-wl“.

Audio and Video Codecs

Of course that you can play those divx, xvid and wmv video files, and your mp3 files with full support, all you must do its go to: “YaST -> Software Repositories”, then will show you the repos management window, you push “Add”, and then select “Community Repositories”, “Next”, select the “Packman Repositories”, “Next”, if he ask you something you say yes (import gpg signature and stuff), then you get back to the main window and then you hit “Accept”.

Then you execute in the command line: “zypper in libxine1 libxine1-codecs win32codecs“, and done. If he ask something about “providers change” you say yes.

Next to come: Adding games.

I thought I should let anyone that cares know what the latest status of my work is. What work? Getting MeeGo on openSUSE, of course! I’m calling it Smeegol – SUSE MeeGo Linux, and this just happens to be the Teal Goblin – Teal is the code name for 11.3 ;-) Well I’m not quite there yet (unfortunately) :-( I have one major issue which is the Network Panel not displaying properly, and as such is difficult to use.

After announcing few days ago the first beta of the openSUSE-LXDE live CD based on openSUSE 11.3, the openSUSE-LXDE team is proud to announce the openSUSE-LXDE 11.3 RC1 Live-CD.

The isos finally fit into a CD, the sizes are 666MB for the 32bit version and 680MB for the 64bit version.

While the betas versions was into the 0.0.x series (0.0.1, 0.0.2, ecc), this RC and the next ones (if needed) will be into the 0.x.y series (0.1.0, 0.1.1, 0.2.0, ecc)

Our goal is to provide as soon as possible a stable release that will be 1.0.0.

Please help us, test this iso, report any missing/un-needed package you find, any bug or issue.

If none will be reported, most probably this configuration will be rebuilt as 1.0.0 and released to the public as STABLE.

Rember users root and linux has NO password.

The iso, as usal is hybrid and persistent, so if copied into a USB pendrive, at the first boot it will expand and create a read-write folder were you can save your datas.

Download as usual, is available under X11:lxde project here:

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/X11:/lxde/images/iso/

Andrea

Just a quick note, I released a new version of the fastuserswitch plasmoid. This new release implements all the improvements suggested by the users plus some minor fixes.

Code can be downloaded from here. openSUSE packages are already available on the build service.

These are some screenshots illustrating fastuserswitch’s new features.

{% img /images/fast_user_switch/fastuserswitch011.png %} {% img /images/fast_user_switch/fastuserswitch021.png %} {% img /images/fast_user_switch/fastuserswitch03.png %}

Hi people,

I know lots of you was waiting for that, and i am really sorry if it took some time, but i can finally announce the first beta release for our 11.3 live cd.

It is still a beta and such as it have some flaws, like for example it doesn’t fit into a CD yet. The good news is that this is an hybrid and permanent iso, so you can use dd to copy the iso into your usb pendrive.

Please help us testing and reporting bugs and issues you find.

To download the isos, as usual browse here!

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/X11:/lxde/images/iso/

i believe i should be able to release new isos soon, i need to at least provide you isos able to fit into a cd!

Andrea

I have made a bug-fix release of ruby-dbus, a Ruby language binding for the D-Bus IPC system.

• Many on_signal could cause DBus.Error.LimitsExceeded (bnc#617350).
  Don't add a match rule that already exists, enable removing match rules. Now only one handler for a rule is called (but it is possible for one signal to match more rules). This reverts the half-fix done to fix Issue#3.
• Re-added InterfaceElement#add_param for compatibility.
• Handle more ways which tell us that a bus connection has died.

RPMs can be found via Webpin.

Business
I'm giving a talk on Friday, July 30 at 10:15am. I intend it for people who want to start hacking on FOSS and GNOME projects but haven't found a way in yet, and those of all experience levels who want to learn more about hacking on Banshee in particular. Of course I'll talk a lot about the state of the project, and some of our cool new features too.

Pleasure
If you want to meet up in Amsterdam sometime Wednesday through Saturday, or in The Hague after that, send me an e-mail. I arrive in AMS early Wednesday with no plans.

Finally, a lazyweb request: if you have advice on prepaid data SIM cards in the Netherlands, I'd love to hear it.

Update
After taking the train to Amsterdam Central, I went to this Vodafone store and got a €7.50 sim card, €5 of call/txt credit (incoming is free, outgoing is 30 cents/min and 19 cents/txt) and a 50% off €10 30 days of data — so all told, €17.50. The guy spent 10 min or so fiddling with my G1 (dev phone) to get it activated, and then I goggled the APN info you need to enter manually: live.vodafone.com with username and password 'Vodafone'. Seems to be working great!

Happily, I was invited the last Weekend to give a conference about Security and Hacking at the International Congress of Informatics and E-Business (Congreso Internacional de Informática y E-Business) at the paradisaical Island of Margarita, Venezuela at the Caribbean Sea .

Of course, I don’t loose any time to Spread the openSUSE word, so I talk a lot about Linux, Why to use Linux in security matters, Why Windows is a Joke, and how openSUSE its a great choice for newbies and advanced users. There was 3 conferences for 600 people, in groups of 200. I gave DVD’s, CD’s and Stuff to everybody who ask, or want one… After my chat, everybody ask a lot about our beloved Geeko…

I hang some pictures in Flickr about the event. Next stop, make my Launch Party, that I couldn’t the last Weekend because this event. Cheers!

We have a little regression in the buildservice API test suite. And looking at the commit log I didn’t find the obvious problem, so I tried bisect, because I know it worked very recently:


git bisect start master 1dfd9717348d8425492b556d3a183b4d265007d
git bisect run sh -c "cd src/api; ruby test/functional/build_controller_test.rb --name=test_project_index"


And it gave me:
25347c2d712e6e4b598e05442dd95b5e82f14aed is the first bad commit
commit 25347c2d712e6e4b598e05442dd95b5e82f14aed
Author: Jan-Simon Möller
Date: Sun Jul 18 01:14:01 2010 +0200

[api] Add fixtures for request controller ACL tests.

Now if you look at the commit, it is not obvious why it’s a problem. But now that git has proven, it has to be buggy I looked at the other fixture data and then it’s obvious and the fix is simple:


--- a/src/api/test/fixtures/package_user_role_relationships.yml
+++ b/src/api/test/fixtures/package_user_role_relationships.yml
@@ -11,8 +11,8 @@ testpack_maintainer:
bs_user_id: 267
role_id: 3
-testpack_maintainer:
- db_package_id: 10095
+testpack1_maintainer:
+ db_package_id: 11006
bs_user_id: 42
role_id: 3


Thanks git