Maybe not everybody knows it or it may be a bit too late, but nevertheless… the Calibre repository on home:thomas-schraitle:calibre has been moved to Documentation:Tools. It was necessary due to some internal reorganisation. The new location is now the official devel project.

Have fun!

In the last days I read two post on planetkde and planetsuse, written by (to me) new contributors with the best intention to help their projects. However the response of the community was not as positive as they would have expected. What happened?

3 types of potential new contributors

Some lines from my last years Akademy paper.

"Krogh, Spaeth and Lakhani analyzed the characters of potential new contributors in mailing lists.[12] Based on that work three types could be found.

• Proactive problem-solver: They use the program, find a bug, and work out the solution. In the first mail to the list they send the patch. These people are very successful in communities and often become continuous contributors.
• Waiting volunteer: This group offers their abilities to the community and waits until they get a job allocated. In general this character is not very active. Most communities can not integrate them successfully.
• Visionary: They use the program and have ideas on how the program should be improved. Although visions and aims are important in communities, the character-type visionary is not successful. In the past his/her visions were not identical with the ideas of the code developers. The resulting costs of conflicts exceed the benefits of the discussion."

Even the headline of one of the post gives you a hint which type might be behind the post in question. Visionaries often use words like "it should", "you have to" etc. instead of "I have done" or "I am going to do".

Results matter - words do not

In open source communities the developers decide what they do. They want to get work done. In most cases they have a vision for their project and not enough time to do as much as they would like to. That's one of the reasons why achievement is the currency. Talking and writing visions is not. If you want a change - do it.

This does not mean, that your contribution is not appreciated. The contrary is the truth.

Contributions that make a difference

KDE as well as openSUSE have special pages to guide new contributors. They propose your first steps into the project. (You will find other useful information about how to start contributing at openhatch a plattform to bring new contributors and projects together.)

Contributions that make a difference are contributions which are important and valuable from the perspective of the community; things the developers want to get done. Help them and you will succeed. Junior Jobs (JJ) are a good starting point as well.

Start now doing things!

There is really a lot to do. Your contribution is very welcome. Visions are important in communities, but they are not the best point to start with.
Instead, grab a task the community needs to be done. Inform yourself first, invest some time and love. Then contact the mailing list and post your questions or ask for a mentor. Present a solution and be amazed by the positive feedback you might receive.

Good luck!

P.S.: If you have an idea how the program could be improved use the provided tools (the brainstorm section in the KDE forum is the place for your are locking for; more experienced users could open a feature request at bugs.kde.org; openSUSE has openFATE.) or contact the developers on the mailing list.

While getting one of my packages rejected for inclusion into the python lang repo for openSuSE, the comments made by the reviewer pointed me to find the package: py2pack.

This package made the packaging of Python packages on OpenSuSE brain dead easy by doing all of the heavy lifting, creating a sample spec file that really needs very little editing. Install py2pack, and follow this guide, http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Packaging_Python#The_fast_and_automated_way and put that together with the great openSuSE build service and you will have a great time packaging which is usually a thankless job no one wants to do.

Update:

Wow the ruby packaging method is about the same too: http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Packaging_Ruby

We just released OBS 2.2.72, another alpha release for OBS 2.3. The most significant change to former alpha snapshots is the switch to apache. We do so for a number of reasons:

1. Getting a maintained base again for our default httpd
2. Using mod_rails (passenger) is more flexible then the static setup before
3. Optimizations are possible via additional modules (more about that later)

We think that some bugs like the invalid occassional empty replies by the api server are solved via this switch as well.

The OBS 2.2.72 appliance is already comming with apache setup. Please note that we use also SSL by default, a default SSL CA is created on bootup and becomes part of your data partition.

In case you use the packages outside of the appliance, you need to do some configuration steps. But don’t worry, a apache vhost file comes with the packages already and only a few steps need to be done, the README files should reflect this already.

lighttpd setups should still work, but please note that lighttpd is running with an own user id (“lighttpd”) and the default is now the generic “wwwrun” user for some directories.

Did that get your attention? Good, it was supposed to. Now get back to making KDE 4 rock in whatever way you are able and resist the temptation to put 'KDE 5' in your blog title to get some clicks. KDE 4 is not going anywhere in the foreseeable future because GNOME just increased their major release number.

If you care about the neat feature about synchronizing metadata to your device using Banshee, and you have an Android device, you may be interested to hear that I created a patch for it, and it was recently reviewed requesting some changes here.

Unfortunately my Android phone broke completely (don't ask me the details...) so I cannot work on the patch anymore. Anyone wants to continue the work?

If yes, go ahead and ask me anything you want, I'm usually in irc://irc.gnome.org/banshee with the "knocte" nickname, or you could also ask the question on the channel if I'm not there, there are usually awesome contributors there that will try to help. If you haven't ever coded for banshee, check the Contributing page first.

BTW, kudos to all the people involved in the Banshee v.2.0 release!

Feedback from MadLab Gnome3 Launch, a talk was given by a Gnome Developer on the latest and greatest features of gnome3, however it was also mentioned that it only works on Intel 3D graphics cards at the moment, due to the closed source nature of the NVidia drivers as well as the ATI events these cards are not supported.

The launch was attended by a total of 25 people including the speaker and the room was full.

On a more general note the attendees were general linux and FreeBSD Users one user was from ArchLinux, 2 users were from Ubuntu (although one - the presenter was disgruntled that as of ubuntu 11.04 Unity is default, gnome 2.x as backup for users not happy with unity and from ubuntu 11.10 gnome fallback will be dropped completely.  Other users represented Debian, Linux Format Magazine and Manchester Linux User Group.

I gave out old 11.3 Promo DVD's and I had and introduced the concept of the Retail Boxes.  Comment was made that Fedora and openSUSE only exist to serve Redhat and SLED - open source distributions which exist to serve as beta software for their enterprise cousins.

I argued that openSUSE was more than just a launch platform for enterprise systems, and whilst I cannot argue for Fedora I would doubt they would accept that claim also. I stated that through the retail boxes my aim was to get openSUSE available in high street computer shops as well as online.


Discussion was made that Microsoft pressurize retailers to include Windows on their computers, that a real opportunity was last after the release of Windows Vista to target disgruntled windows users through NetBooks.



Comments were also made that HP have announced they will be shipping WebOS PC's where all documents are stored online and all applications are launched online so no operating system will be required. Is the age of the OS (Windows or Linux) dead regardless so there is little or no point in launching any kind of legal claim against Microsoft for shipping oem windows.

Many users were dissatisfied with both Gnome 3 and Unity I suggested that instead of promoting Ubuntu for those new to Linux they should now seriously consider promoting openSUSE instead.  Those interested took Live DVD's and promised to take a look.

It was argued also that Novell and RedHat provide more developers into Gnome than Canonical have ever done.  Ubuntu may have brought a lot of positives into Gnome in terms of desktop users but this is likely to change as Ubuntu switches to Unity.

Further from a developers point of view Canonical's submission agreement is quite vague in its wording, and if followed to the letter could result in Canonical using code in corporate versions, without the permission of the developer and all rights being transferred to Canonical's ownership by default. 

My first patch to FluentNHibernate was just merged upstream!

What it basically does is a bit of what I call WTF reduction: you will no longer get a confusing message like "For property 'Foo' expected 'Bar' of type 'Bar' but got 'Bar' of type 'Bar'" when unit testing your entities' properties.

AFAIK the next release will include this, and will be the first one to link to the new version of NHibernate, 3.0, which I've found that works very well.

This was a special moment for me since i'm involved on GNOME project, it marks a new era for GNOME. Over this years i contributed on Brasero, Zenity, other modules, distro packages, being a tester and now contributing for the marketing team where i admin the GNOME Facebook page.
Looking forward to contribute to 3.x release cycles and i hope i'll be here for GNOME 4.0. Special thanks to everyone that made GNOME 3.0 possible.

See you soon :)

Hi everybody,

just in time for GNOME 3.0 release, I'm please to announce GNOME 3 Live Image version 1.0.0 release.

As you might expect, this release is built with GNOME 3.0.0. Other features, compared to latest image release :

• radeon KMS should be fixed (it was preventing GNOME Shell to start since version 0.3.1)
• speech-dispatcher is used for speech synthesis (ie Orca)
• tracker is installed on the image
• more fonts are installed by default

Live installer is also available from the running image, just search for "live" in GNOME-Shell overview panel (or you can still start the live install by adding liveinstall to boot command line).

As always, you can download the image from http://gnome3.org/tryit.html

For openSUSE 11.4 users, we will soon make a stable repository available with GNOME 3.0, watch this space for more info ;)


As a side note, I'd like to thanks my employer (Novell) and my managers who allowed me to work on GNOME 3 for weeks fulltime.

Enjoy.