It’s less than a week, that GSoC 2011 coding period have begun. This is my first report for the project.Every Friday I will make a report in this blog to share with you the progress I am making on the project.So what did I do during these first days?

First of all I created an online repo on GitHub and I forked the Augeas project. That will permit me to use version control of my project “GIT” during the implementation and retain an online repo where I can commit my changes to, while experimenting with the source code. This gave me the opportunity to practice more with git, create branches merge commit changes etc. I have to admit that until now, I didn’t used a version control system much, but i really don’t know why?!?! Really git is awesome and can save the developer valuable and useful time.

Next, I continued with trying out OBS for the first time, the openSUSE Build Service, that just renamed to Open Build Service. Even thought i faced some troubles in the start finding my way around (packaging was a new thing for me, and after using obs I have to say that it is not as hard as I initially believed), with the help of my mentor I think I can understand now better the service and use it. But why use OBS to package so early in the project? Well we thought that by using obs we will be able to create packages (please care they are experimental ) with the changes i make, so other people can try them out if they are interested and maybe help with future debugging.

Finally among my initial experiments with Augeas source code, I have created a branch “helloworld” on my git repo, whether i added a simple hw – Hello world command in the augtool that is contained within Augeas. That command prints as you may have guessed :), a hello world message on screen. Then i compiled the project by using the sources of the specific branch, and at the end i used obs to create some packages that can be found on my obs repo :D.

As I had not any important experience with building software and packages, I occupied myself this week mainly with administration actions. Which however, will help the community and of course everyone interested in my gsoc project, to follow the changes, make suggestions, and contribute with new ideas, but will also help in the latter phase of integrating

Conclusion

The progress of the week 1 in bullets:

• created git repo online through GitHub
• practice with git
• compiling packages from git sources
• Learn the basics about using OBS
• experimenting with augeas code, and creating a small command as a test
• creating openSUSE packages through OBS

The GSoC have just begun, and I have already learned many new and very exciting things. This summer will be very interesting for sure!!! Now i will focus on the actual coding and specifically in the merging procedure that will used in Augeas. Till the next report,

Best Regards,
Christos Bountalis

[1] http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/mpounta/openSUSE_11.4/
Notice: This is the first time I compile and package a project with obs, therefore the packages inside the repo are highly experimental and only for testing purposes.

There was a long pause during the strategy process. Now the strategy team is working on it again. News are coming the next days. Stay tuned.

Hi all,



good news for Virtual Machine addicts : VirtualBox team has fixed issues which were preventing VirtualBox to work properly with GNOME Shell. You need VirtualBox release 4.0.8 (minimum) and GNOME 3 live image release 1.3.0 (it contains updated VirtualBox guest additions, required for openGL).

To download the image :  http://www.gnome.org/getting-gnome/

Enjoy.

Greek openSUSE community, Translation of openSUSE Weekly news in Greek(issue 175)

Hello out there,

I am very pleased to announce the new issue (175) of openSUSE Weekly
News in Greek. In this one you will read about:

* openSUSE 11.2 has reached end of SUSE support – 11.2 Evergreen goes on!
* Sebastian Kügler: What’s new in Plasma Active?
* Thanasis Rous: Medical Report
* Nelson Marques: Unknown Horizons, a nice strategy game, now on openSUSE
* jun auza: 7 Nifty Tricks to Get the Most out of LibreOffice Writer

And of course many many interesting news about openSUSE, plus usefull
advice for making our lives easier.

Enough… read more at: own.opensuse.gr or at
http://el.opensuse.org/Weekly_news.

Looking forward to hearing your comments, advice and anything you would
like to read about at the next issue.

Enjoy it!
Efstathios Agrapidis (efagra)

So word from the new Big Cheese, Herr Braukmann, is openSUSE is vital to SUSE – newsflash, this isn’t new or surprising ;-) In the same breath SUSE is vital for openSUSE, again nothing new here. One problem though, there are many elements that still see them as void of each other and don’t trust or believe in the community. Hopefully with the re-organisation this will start to change. One thing that SUSE has marketed for a long time is that it has the highest number of ISV software certified to run on their platform.

Well, have you?  Not the satisfying expulsion of excess gas, but the simplest way you can materially contribute to openSUSE.

I was just hanging in the #active channel, watching my KDE chums make their new touchscreen interface (video), when somebody complained that shared-desktop-ontologies does not yet contain the latest release needed by KDE git master.  And instead of updating the package myself, I suggested they just BURP:

• Branch,
• Update,
• Request,
• the Package

And by doing so we all get the latest versions in the devel project and soon in Tumbleweed and openSUSE Factory.  So ambassadors, boosters and motivated contributors know how to do that right?  Now you can use this glib little acronym to persuade friends and colleagues to do the same.

Happy BURPing!

After a problem with the organizers' equipment, kobliha's openSUSE laptop was used to watch the live stream from Skynet I/O Chrome keynote.

"Rule 1: Stay calm." Ralph Angenendt talks about problem solving.

Party!

As Christian Boltz and myself held a quite successful talk on Wine on the 2010 openSUSE conference, we decided to again hold a talk at Germanys largest Linux fair, Linux Tag 2011 in Berlin.

We again ran the pun talk “Wine” (not) the Emulator vs “Wine” the beverage, with Christian talking about life and work at a vineyard and his wine grower community at Deutsches Weintor.

Included in this talk was a Wine tasting of 4 different kinds of Wine, as grown in the area were Christian lives.

His stories on Vineyard activities and the processing from grape to wine interluded with myself talking about Wine the Emulator, its historical and statistical parts, game support and futures.

Around 70 people  enjoyed our light hearted wrap up talk of this Linux Tag conference.

Images: by hueck2342 at flickr.com, licensed as Creative Commons  – Share Alike, Attribute, Non Commercial http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/

Hi all,



a quick post for people who want the GNOME 3 promo DVD iso image (it is based on 1.1.0 image, combining both x86 and x86-64 images and some demo video and music).

You can download it at : http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/misc/promo-dvd/

Beware this image will not be updated, it is just there for archiving purpose.

Just a quick post to enlighten those that use an Intel 945GME powered machine of a certain pixel limitation that you may not know about. I’m a full time user of the spiffy new GNOME3 with the fancy gnome-shell mojo. As such it’s on my primary machine, which at the moment is an eeePC 1000HE. Yup, that’s a netbook with a small 10″ screen and relatively low resolution of 1024×600 pixels.