I have an Acer laptop for about 5 years. It includes a generously 512MB of RAM, Intel Centrino 1.6Ghz (M730 processor to be more precise), ATI Mobility Radeon x600 64MB VRAM, 80GB HDD, yada yada yada. The battery is in an awesome shape if we consider the age and the usage I put on it during this time - previously 3 hours fully charged and now around 2 hours, so... I couldn't have asked for better. Nevertheless, the laptop has an 15.4" display and weighs 3Kg with battery plus the charger which I have to take always with me otherwise the battery would ran out quickly. All this factors led me to buy a new laptop with the main features to consider and give more priority on the weight, battery and size. I didn't want to buy again a new 15.4", up to 4 or 5 hours of battery, and weighed laptop. Basically the requirements were: 12" or 13" screen, up to 2Kg, battery that lasted at least 7 or 8 hours (wireless and reasonable screen brightness), 4GB of RAM or more, and obviously a "good" brand (Sony, Lenovo, Apple, Dell, and HP were on top of the list), not to mention a decent price I could afford. A few hours/days later I decided to pick an Apple Macbook Pro 13" 2.4GHz, not because of the Mac OS X as some might be imagining by now but because of the hardware itself.

The Apple Macbook Pro 13" I bought Tuesday includes an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz, 4GB of 1066MHz DDR3, battery up to 10 hours (wireless and 50% screen brightness), and weighs 2.04KG. It cost me 1.149€ but had an (indirect) discount of 5% plus 10€ on the FNAC client card (costs 5€ per year but worths it since it also gives you other discounts and benefits). Here is a short list of highlights regarding the hardware itself and the Mac OS X operating system which, by the way, I have to mention I have never used it until now:

Pros:

• Laptop is solid rock and its aluminum unibody makes it truly fresh (I don't fell any heat, except in the fan area where the air flows out obviously, while the Acer laptop is more like a heater than a laptop (I bet I could fry an egg on it));
• Touchpad pretty flexible e practical;
• Battery lasts up to 10 hours, meaning I don't have to carry the charger wherever I go;
• The charger has two cables: the charger with the cable to plug in the laptop and another one to extend the length of the cable to the wall socket. This means for, most of the cases, I can leave that extra cable aside or at home;
• Auto brightness (think a little and you will find how useful it can be);
• OS X is functional, intuitive, and has a clean UI overall.

Coins:

• I'm used to have the Ctrl key switched with the Fn key (something I want to get used);
  
• At least for the Portuguese keyboard, the square brackets as well as the curly brackets aren't shown in the keyboard and the key combination for the curly brackets isn't easy and convenient: alt+shift+8 for { and alt+shift+9 for } (keys 8 and 9 are where the parentheses are located at). Imagine how great will it to code, not!
• No "Cut" on files?!
• "exit" in the Terminal doesn't close the tab, but logs out and stays there opened;
• If running the OS in Portuguese, cmd+w doesn't close the tab as expected since the shortcut isn't associated and seems there is no way to do so. If running in English, the shortcut is there and do the job;
• Expected iChat to support the MSN protocol. Using Adium, which is way better;
• The file (un-)compressor included by default lacks lots of features such has the capability to uncompress split files. Using BetterZip, but still missing Ark from KDE!
• People advised me to use VLC instead of QuickTime for watching videos, specially those in HD since it seems the codecs used by QuickTime consumes more CPU than it should and that VLC consumes. I would have installed VLC anyway since I'm already used to it being the best video player out there in my opinion.

For those concerned about my devotion to the FOSS world and specially my openSUSE and KDE eccentricity, than there is nothing to you worry about! I'm still the very same guy you used to know. I just needed a laptop with the features I have stated above and that ended up to be an Apple Macbook. That's it, folks!

Believe it or not, I'd prefer the 13° and the rain in Dublin. My neighbors are going completely nuts with the heat (OK, me too, but that's different). There's this guy who now screams night and day. Maybe he's an actor and rehearses for the next movie. Hands up, hands up, do not leave, stay here, stay here, hands up! The rest of his screaming I couldn't get. Guess he was rehearsing for a thriller tonight. First I really thought something's going on but this guy has a history with screaming, so it should be nothing to worry about. This morning obviously he was rehearsing for a western. Hooo, hoooo, catch it, catch it. Hooo, hoo. Geez, I'm going mad there. I really was looking out the window expecting to see some horses running wild. Good that I found a new flat and will move away soon before I start screaming myself. That's almost as weird as my colleagues who are freaking out over some mobile phone. I feel alienated sometimes. :-)

OpenSUSE 11.3 is a very bleeding edge release with all the latest OSS available and comes with GNOME 2.30.1 and the following changes:

- GNOME 3.0 preview is available with GNOME Shell and the new accessibility stack (disabled by default)
- Tracker is the default file indexer, replacing beagle.
- Empathy is the default IM client for GNOME. Empathy supports now sending files via drag and drop and the IRC module now includes support    for common IRC commands such as /join.
- Access to iPhone and iPod touch files from nautilus. Rhythmbox can also play music from those devices.
- Transmission is shipped with DHT enabled
- Tomboy’s start-up time has been drastically improved. Syncing notes can now be done automatically by enabling it in the preferences.
- Nautilus’ user interface now includes a new split view mode and the default is set to browser mode.
- Simple right-click menu item to open a an archive file (zip, .tar.gz, etc.) in nautilus.
- Improved selection of screen-savers and games installed by default.
- Complete move away from hal to udisks/upower.
- Removal of the GNOME 1.x stack.
- Massive improvements to Banshee - the default media player
 new grid view for albums,
 automatic play queuing modes to ensure non-stop playback,
 gap less playback eliminating the annoying little gap between tracks,
 new extensions such as showing Wikipedia information for current artist, related YouTube videos and much more,
 support for audio equalizer.
-Evolution has improved imap (imap ) implementation with live view updates, non-blocking operations and IDLE support. 'evolution --express'  provides better user experience for netbook users.
- Huge improvements to YaST-GTK Software Management:
 general improvements to the interface,
 simple check-box interface to install/remove software,
 improved search box,
 "Available", "Upgrades", "Installed" tabs have been removed and replaced by optional status filters,
"History of changes" (from Menubar -> Extras) shows a history of all installed/removed packages and repositories,
"Summary of changes" box that shows all changes to packages in the current package management session, and allows you to "undo" changes,
 option to close package-manager or return to it after all installation/removal is done is shown in the summary box that pops-up when user hits the  "apply" button,
 options "Clean-up when deleting packages" and "Allow vendor change" are now available (Menubar -> Options), and 
 buttons to "Upgrade patches" and "Upgrade all" are shown when the "Upgradeable" filter is selected.

for GNOME Developers to use jhbuild i recommend:
- Adding the Contrib repository
- sudo zypper in jhbuild jhbuild-recommended-deps (installs everything you need to setup a jhbuild environment)

et voilá, OpenSUSE 11.3 is much more developer friendly. Of course you have the option to use OBS to build your packages or grab the GNOME unstable releases..

Last week my mother in law started to share her Linux laptop with my wife. Suddenly my wife asked me how she could switch from one user session to another. She was looking for something similar to OS X fast user switch feature but she couldn’t find it. In fact there wasn’t a fast and easy way to switch between users’ sessions with KDE, until… now :)

Let me introduce my first plasmoid: the fast user switch plasmoid. It’s a simple icon in the panel that allows users to swich to another open session or to open a new login page. Here you can see the mandatory screenshots.

{% img /images/fast_user_switch/fastuserswitch02.png %} {% img /images/fast_user_switch/fastuserswitch01.png %}

You can find the source code here. Binary packages for openSUSE are already available on the build service.

One last thought about KDM

I think that KDM should allow to switch back to an already open session in a more transparent way. Right now if an user has already one session open, he goes back to the login screen and enters his credentials a **new ** session is started. I think that most users would expect to be switched back to their already running session. Starting a new session is just confusing for them.

Today openSUSE 11.3 is released, concluding 8 months of intense and enjoyable work. This release has been especially enjoyable for me, as it was the first openSUSE release where the community KDE team really took the driving seat and made decisions about what to include, updated packages and intensively tested. Instead of just being a slave to a feature list this release, I was more occupied in enabling, advising and reviewing others' contributions. I'd like to say "Excellent work!" to the whole openSUSE team here in Nuremberg, Prague, the rest of Novell and to every openSUSE contributor who has tested milestones, reported bugs, learned how to use osc and

After 9 months of enjoyable and intense work, our daughter Anna was released a couple of weeks ago. At the moment she's quite unimpressed by computers, desktops and operating systems, but I hope that Free Software will be of benefit to her life as it already is to millions around the world.

Last week was my last with Novell.

This week is my first with litl.



Novell was a great place to work and I recommend it to anyone. I will miss the Mono Accessibility team, but the beauty of being an open source project is that I can just pop into IRC or review some code on ReviewBoard when I'm feeling nostalgic.

At litl, I'll be working with Brad and his crack team to make the channel experience EVEN MORE AWESOME.

If you're wondering "what will the impact be on Tomboy/Snowy/etc?", the answer is that you can expect more polish on the Mac version of Tomboy now that I'll be dogfooding it every day. And it looks like I'll be switching Snowy to use lxml. Nothing else should change. I still intend to be as involved in GNOME as Stewie will let me. ;-)

SUSE GmbH has currently a job position open for an OBS Developer. Find details on the job position page at Novell.

OBS is used in the openSUSE project, but also internally at Novell and at plenty other places and companies.

The downside will be of course that you will have to work together with people like me

Dick Streefland has created a software based USB protocol implementation called usbtiny for the AVR attiny microcontroller family. I have stripped down the code so that I was able to add detection of a single programmable IR signal. When the signal is detected, an output pin triggers a power button press for 250ms. That way e.g. media center PCs can be switched on remotely. All this is documented on the project page.

During this project I decided to revive my passing knowledge about board layouting and etching. For layouting I have used kicad, IMHO the first open source layouting software that is actually usable. The result looks pretty good, the 8/10 mil raster shows excellent sharpness and only very little undercut. Especially considering that the material and chemicals have been laying around here unused for - what? - 20 years...

I thought it was about time that I enlightened people as to what the state of play is with my efforts of getting MeeGo 1.0 for Netbooks on openSUSE. The good news is I think I’m pretty much there :-) I believe all the essential packages are built now, although there is a *lot* of work to be done in getting the packages into Factory. The outstanding work is mostly spec file housekeeping but non the less it will be a relatively laborious task.

If you look at the list of binaries for a package (e.g. icecream), you may think that you can download the RPM right away – but if you follow the link in a browser you get to see details about the rpm.

Now if you only want to download it, you may already know the details and don’t care. So I added a little shortcut: if you request the binary url with a client not accepting html explicitly (e.g. curl, wget…), you get the file directly. Just copy & paste the link to your console and be done.

And due to the joy of rails, it’s just a couple of lines and now I get:


--2010-07-09 13:51:31-- https://build.opensuse.org/stage/package/binary?arch=i586&filename=icecream-0.9.5-11.1.i586.rpm&package=icecream&project=home%3Acoolo&repository=openSUSE_11.3
Resolving build.opensuse.org... 195.135.221.34
Connecting to build.opensuse.org|195.135.221.34|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 302 Found
Location: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/coolo/openSUSE_11.3/i586/icecream-0.9.5-11.1.i586.rpm [following]
--2010-07-09 13:51:32-- http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/coolo/openSUSE_11.3/i586/icecream-0.9.5-11.1.i586.rpm
Resolving download.opensuse.org... 195.135.221.130
Connecting to download.opensuse.org|195.135.221.130|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 302 Found
Location: http://widehat.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/coolo/openSUSE_11.3/i586/icecream-0.9.5-11.1.i586.rpm [following]
--2010-07-09 13:51:32-- http://widehat.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/coolo/openSUSE_11.3/i586/icecream-0.9.5-11.1.i586.rpm
Resolving widehat.opensuse.org... 62.146.92.202, 2a01:138:a004:0:21a:a0ff:fe26:efa9
Connecting to widehat.opensuse.org|62.146.92.202|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 184745 (180K) [application/x-rpm]
Saving to: `icecream-0.9.5-11.1.i586.rpm'