Part of our “umbrella” milestone, Pavol and Robert ported software.opensuse.org to the Bento theme. To get more feedback for it, I now deployed it as http://software.opensuse.org/stage.

Please note two things:

• it also includes a new feature from the Education project: a link to openSUSE derivates
• the language box is experimental and we kind of decided already to kill it again

On top of that of course: the Bento theme is not yet finished – it’s only a stage deployment to get feedback.

Have fun!

Last Wednesday we released Banshee 1.5.4, which included an opt-in feature to submit anonymous usage data. Over 500 people have already opted-in!

Interesting Stats
They are primarily getting Banshee through the Ubuntu PPA, with a moderate number building from source or using other distributions — including 20 OS X users.

383	Ubuntu
33	source-tarball
27	openSUSE/SLED
22	git-checkout
20	OS X
16	Gentoo

They are using Banshee in 36 locales, across 30 languages. Keep in mind the Preference to opt-in is (so far) only translated into 9 languages.

223	en-US
51	en-GB
41	de-DE
35	unknown
21	ru-RU
18	it-IT
14	fr-FR
12	en-CA
11	en-AU
11	es-ES
9	pl-PL
8	pt-BR
6	es-CL
5	es-MX
5	nl-NL
5	sv-SE

About half have the Banshee window maximized, enable ReplayGain support, show the bottom-left cover art, and show the context pane.

I'm still working on better ways to analyze the data and extract actionable information. I plan to have distribution graphs and such soon. In the meantime, I've posted some more stats here. As we get more submissions, add more data points, and get better analysis, we will be able to identify options nobody uses and optimize Banshee for real-world users.

New KDE Four Live CDs with KDE 4.4.1, and much more are up.

They were built with openSUSE Build Service's KDE:Medias project and SUSE Studio and consist of openSUSE 11.2 plus all updates, KDE 4.4.1, upstream branding, Nepomuk enabled and Strigi disabled (because it's a Live CD).

They can be used as Live USB sticks too, see these instructions if you don't know how to dd a file to a device.

You can also install to disk and use it as a normal distribution using the installer on the desktop. Once installed, the first update will pull in all the packages that are normally on an openSUSE KDE install that do not fit on a single CD.

The wonderful Vincent has already sent the initial call for participation, so who’s up for it then?

OK I’ll take it that there are several hands raised in the audience (I reckon I’m being overly cautious, I’m sure there are loads of hands up but as I don’t have my glasses on I can only see the first two rows).  So what do we need from our lovely community to help make GSoC 2010 a success?

* We need some admins for openSUSE in GSoC 2010. This mainly involves making sure that we do everything we need to participate in GSoC; making sure students feel comfortable in the project, and push our contributors a bit to publish ideas and mentor students.  Basically the GoTo contact points.

* We need people to maintain the GSoC 2010 wiki page.  I have already started the GSoC 2010 page on the wiki, yes it is pretty much a  copy/paste of last years but it gets the ball rolling

* We need people to start thinking about ideas that students could work on.  If you have a good idea, why not put it in openFATE and put it on the wiki too (with a link to the openFate entry)?  That way we can utilise the voting feature of openFate and gauge how much the community would appreciate the student’s hard work.

So there’s nothing stopping you from joining in, so get to it! Oh and if you’re looking for a way to contribute to openSUSE but aren’t a coder this is a great way to get your feet wet with the community

On this week the leading KDE developers met together again. This time it was held in Nürnberg, in the openSUSE premises and was kindly made possible by Novell and KDE e.V.
26 hackers, who make KDE better.

For me it was first time, where I met hackers not for drinking a cup of beer, but for working, for hacking, for learning… and I think in this time I got much more fun.

We started at 9-10 am and finished it at 1-2 am. Yes, these two days we hacked like crazy. I’m not so good in KDE, I mean – I’m just trainee in SUSE/Novell, but in these two days I took a lot of information about KDE (arhitecture), Solid, Plasma, methods of project’s buildings (cmake), etc.

I have uploaded photos. You can find these here.

I have worked before on KNetworkManager. It was just a couple of patches (Qt/KDE3 based), and KNM has another aspects of integration with hardware as we have now in KDE4. In KDE4 we have SOLID, and this makes more easy to asking for such things like, for example, wired connection or to find hidden SSID wi-fi…

Yes, my current project is Network Management plasma applet.

With Sebastian Kügler and Will Stephenson, we worked together on functionality to easily connect to wired, wireless and mobile broadband networks and also to VPNs. As I said, I don’t did so much, but I started working on support for connection. Maybe next month I will be able to show that I did.

I would like to thank everyone with whom I spent those 2 days. Especially Will, who always supports and helps me to become a KDE developer.

I had been nominated to candidate for X.org's Board of Directors this year (actually two years, because members are elected for a two years term each) - and was actually voted for and elected.

During this year's elections a number of questions came up about several issues, partly regarding the financial situation of the foundation, partly about how the board members communicate with each other and the regular members. It basically all boiled down to the number one perceived issue with the X.org board:

    It's transparency. Or rather the lack thereof.

It's generally accepted, that even some of the actions required by the By-Laws (like meeting minutes) have been somewhat neglected. As a result of the discussions, Eric Anholt has now published the irclogs on members.x.org, thanks for that! Also the irc channel for the regular board meetings (#xf-bod on irc.oftc.net) has probably not been advertised enough since its opening to the public. It is also safe to assume that this hasn't been done by intention, but just by lack of time - the daily schedule of most open source people is extremely cluttered (geez, when did I last blog?!?).

I want to promise that I will try my very best to push for transparency as much as possible, maybe starting by taking/polishing minutes after the next (my first) irc meeting.

I'm quite exited about the days to come .
And that is a good thing, because I'm pretty sure it will be - say - a little bit less thrilling after a while... as with all good things .

Banshee 1.5.4 is out, with cool new features and lots of fixes! This is our fifth release in preparation for our big 1.6 release at the end of March.

Banshee Community Extensions

We have made a 1.5.4 release of Banshee Community Extensions as well. This includes the Alarm Clock, Lyrics, and Mirage extensions, and several others.

Mirage Similarity Engine

The Mirage extension has been modified heavily, dropping the old “Automatic Playlist Generator” in favor in integration into the playback controller – adding shuffle-by-similar, and into the Play Queue Auto DJ – adding fill-by-similar. Mirage calculates the acoustical similarity between two songs.

Play Queue Auto DJ, fill by similar Anonymous, Opt-in Usage Data

Under Preferences, you can choose to "Improve Banshee by sending anonymous usage data" back to the Banshee developers. This collects information on what version you're running, what OS, library size, slow SQL queries, and a whitelisted subset of your preferences. This information will help us choose better defaults and see what parts of Banshee are used most and can be improved.

The 30+ people running a development version of Banshee and already submitting data are using 11 different language locales, have a median screen resolution of 1440x1024, and a median music library size of 5k songs. I'm working on some analysis/viz software to crunch the data - stay tuned! Other Notable Improvements

• Wikipedia context pane extension enabled by default
• Add support for Nokia N900 phones
• Coverart for unicode artist/albums now supported
• Dropped glade-sharp dep; GNOME 3.0 ready
• Add columns showing track sample rate and bits per sample
• Option to sort an artist's albums by year, not title
• Fixes to GIO backend
• Many crash/startup fixes for OS X build
• Fix several memory leaks

More Information

As always, check the release notes for more detailed information, screenshots, and download links. Thanks to everybody who made this release happen!

Miguel recently blogged about a trick for loading an executable assembly as a project inside MonoDevelop. I have now added native support for this feature, which means that it is now possible to directly open a .exe or .dll as a project, or add it to an existing solution. Also, MonoDevelop will get the list of source code files from the debug info of the assembly (when available). For example, this is what you get when you open gmcs.exe:

OpenGarrobito, is the fruit of the philosophy of free software, because source code is shared, you can create fancy layouts at ease, and are applicable to our needs as I am passionate about the multimedia computer, and worked in a distribution based on my beloved openSUSE and resulted openGarrobito.

For the realization of this release, I am taking a very useful tool that works in the cloud, called susestudio, which compile multiple multimedia programs that are used in Linux, because in the ordinary distributions that are distributed on the Internet and groups that distribute Linux users, do not incorporate multimedia codecs and many multimedia programs, due to licensing issues, I gave myself the task of compiling them into a single distribution and make it public.

But that is exactly what we can do with openGarrobito:

1. Play our mp3 with amarok
2. See our movies with VLC
3. Shingles and DVDs with DeVeDe k9cpy
4. Convert Video devede
5. Edit images with gimp
6. Edit sound with audacity
7. Edit Video KDEN-live
8. Perform our jobs college or office with OpenOffice
9. Browse the Internet safely with Konqueror or Firefox and Google Chrome.
10. Organize our photos with Digikam or if you prefer using Picasa

And now, in this release you can play your favorite games like Nexuiz or openarena.

Countless numbers of applications we can give to this distribution, which is constantly evolving, is currently running under the latest version of openSUSE’s 11.2, and default desktop is KDE SC 4.4.

You openGarrobito has the latest security updates, and all the software on this date until 11 February. I hope you will enjoy it this distribution

Link for download: http://sourceforge.net/projects/opengarrobito/

Link of my blog: http://decks.260mb.com/

Since the last two months i've been looking and enjoying watching javascript code using gjs and seed.
I fell in love by this language and how easy is to code around it. The worst part of this journey and what it become difficult to write a full application with it was that the gjs and seed are very different and it's very easy to spot bugs on them. But thanks to their maintainers (they've been very helpful) we hopefully get things more stable and bug free.
The lack of documentation is other problem that these implementations have. Hopefully i found someone with the same problem around the web that is trying to get this problem fixed and making javascript one of the finest language bindings for GTK+.

Now my contribution for documentation is this statusicon example that should be work on seed.
I found a bug on gjs that should be fixed on the next GTK+ release and i should get the working version on gjs done too.

So here's statusicon.js available on my people.gnome.org page.

With this i try to get some ideas and try to write one of the first full GNOME applications using javascript!

PS: Thanks to Alan Knowles for helping me with some seed specific stuff since i wrote this initially for gjs.