A little over two months ago,  one of Moodles best partners announced the release of a suite of products called ELIS  http://www.eschoolnews.com/tech-solutions/all-press-releases/index.cfm?i=60118    The products and principles of this organization seem oddly familiar. They support open source for schools, so does the openSUSE for Education project. They support a lower more reasonable TCO for Education Technology, so does the openSUSE for Education project. They really do a great job of supporting these ideals, so does the team from the openSUSE for Education.  Thanks to both efforts open source Education Technology is becoming vastly superior choice.

Registration for the upcoming .NET/Mono Code Camp in Spain is open and filling up quickly, so if you are interested in attending, register now!

The agenda has also been published. It includes talks about Mono, MonoDevelop, mocking frameworks running on Mono, iPhone development (with MonoTouch), Moonlight, .NET to Linux portability, Mono.Addins and other stuff.

Important things first, just know that Ruben is no longer AWOL. He's even back to hacking mode, and working, together with Tigger, at adding image metadata support for images to taglib-sharp.

Now to the futile, I just released F-Spot 0.6.1.3 a few minutes ago. The main purpose of it was to fix the slideshow mode on gtk+ 2.18 (which we did) and as I was at releasing, I applied some pending patches from bugzilla, wrote some myself, and backported translations from master.

The change in the importing code is worth noticing. It no longer imports the files first to memory before writing them to disk. It's quite helpful now that most cameras can create video files bigger enough to fill your machine memory in less than a few minutes (at high bitrate, on HD resolution). It's only available if you have libgphoto2 >= 2.4 and doesn't work with the directory driver (used for memory cards e.g.). Marcus is working on a fix in gphoto2, so stay tuned.

If you ask about the screensaver, it still doesn't work with gtk+ 2.18 but works fine with gtk+ master, and will still work just fine with gtk+ 2.18.1 when it goes out.

That's it. Download it, build it, package it, enjoy it!

openSUSE shop already got the wind of it:


(obviously, this item is so popular that by now, it is available in America's shop only, being sold out from Europe's one for quite some time already).
Surprisingly, so did root.cz, the most popular Czech Linux and open-source e-zine:



(those folks went even further and offered those cute penguin motives also on ladies thongs, check out their shop :))

Unfortunately, this year's openSUSE conference organizing team either assumed that all the conference participants will be male, or (more likely) deliberately chose not to take female minority into account. Ladies tees were sadly not among the conference swag. So I said no, thanks, I already have a shelf full of Linux/opensource/tech conference T-shirts I can hardly wear, because they simply do not fit (those of you who happened to meet me at the conference know that I look drowned even in men's S size ;-) ). I see no point in handing them to friends/relatives either, after all, it was me, not them, who participated at the event, right?

It is a tiny little detail (compared to e.g. lack of wi-fi connection at the conference site), you may say, and you're actually right. But often it is a tiny little detail that can make you feel welcome and accepted in the community (and absence of which, on the contrary, can contribute to the feeling of being marginalized and invisible minority).

I don't believe this is all about money (and saving some cents on T-shirt print run). Some fraction of the T-shirt pool can well be a ladies model, those do not cost more. I also don't believe that majority of ladies tees would be left after the conference as participating ladies simply did not match organizing team estimate when it comes to the sizes. Come on, two years ago really cute ladies tees were handed out on SUSE Labs conference (even though only up to 5 of the participants were female) and they were gone in the first two days. Reason? Hackers simply took them home for their wives/girlfriends.

Imho, this is more about the least common denominator, minimalized effort and that sort of things. But - even if conference swag is just a cherry on the top of the cake, it can speak volumes. About how much you care about your community and how much you value users as individuals.

To conclude, instead of repeating obvious and anything that has been already said, read more on topic

• on Kathy Sierra's blog and
• on geekfeminism wiki

I couldn't say it better. And hey, conference team, for the next year, help openSUSE folks (all of them - including 4% female minority - 10 out of ~250 registered participants were women) look good in your T-shirts. After all, it is a form of community marketing, isn't it?

Evolution team is happy and proud to announce the evolution 2.28.0 release. To give an overview of what the release provides,

• Google calendar will be available through Caldav interface by default

• Configurable date formats

• Selecting local ICal files as calendar sources

• Better Calendar cache

• Attachment bar rewrite

• Support for unmatched vfolder and creating vfolder using vfolders is added back.

• GroupWise conversation threading

• GroupWise meeting retract/resend

• Tons of bug fixes

As many would know already, we branched evolution early in order to get rid of bonobo. Am happy to see this from mbarnes!

We have already started working on the tasks identified for the 2.30. Here is the summary of those tasks,

• Bonobo less Evolution

• EDS DBus port

• Exchange MAPI Improvements

• Mailer async operations (with IMAPX)

• GNOME 3.0 Cleanup

• Migrate go-evolution wiki contents to lgo and gnome.org/projects/evolution

• Quick steps for writing evolution plugins

• Disk summary regressions on vfolder

If you would like to get involved in any of the above work or have some new ideas, we would be happy to guide. We need more people getting involved in Evolution development!

Some screen shots of the new features added,

Configurable date formats

Allow Local  Ical files to be added as calendar sources

This is a special release for myself and mbarnes as we have taken the responsibility of maintainer-ship from this release.

Thanks to all the users, testers, developers, translators, bug masters, distributors and everyone involved in the project.

I'm just back in from the first day the openSUSE conference. The day started badly when I woke up in a cold sweat dreaming that OpenOffice ate my presentation (again), but it was still there when I resumed my laptop and so I biked the 5km into the Berufsförderungswerk Nuernberg, the technical college where the conference is a guest. A good number of people were in for Lenz Grimmer's keynote on virtual development teamwork, which was a relief, then I sat in for a bit of the openSUSE Weekly News talk by Sascha Manns. Running a news magazine is an important and demanding part of a project's internal and external communications and I'm grateful that Sascha and team put in the effort, and hope they get more contributors. Then I earwigged at the back of the GNOME team meeting, while Andy Wafaa demoed me the SUSE Goblin image. It's impressively polished and will give the Plasma netbook interface a tough act to follow.

Over lunch I mingled with openSUSE users and developers old and new, and a good number of KDE people including Frank, Alexandra, Danimo and Frederik who had made the journey to Nuernberg. We had a cross-desktop meeting afterwards to figure out how to improve the general openSUSE desktop experience. Following the recent decision to set a desktop choice in openSUSE, I feared there might be some tension, but it was all very amicable and constructive. I had to leave early to give my talk, 'The Future of openSUSE KDE', moved forward from the weekend. OpenOffice behaved, nothing crashed, and I gave my manifesto for producing the best desktop distribution with exemplary cooperation with upstream projects. And interspersed it with previews from openSUSE 11.2, so nobody fell asleep. KNetworkManager4 drew the most questions, and even managed to detect Danimo's phone on hotplug, something I'd never tested.

Finally we had a BoF session led by Cornelius to plan a KDE Showcase image for use at shows and by reviewers, which has a lot of potential, if also to be a lot of work.

Tonight we're unwinding at Joe's Bar, a refactoring of the Novell/SUSE office as a den of iniquity, hosted by our Community Manager, Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier. Don't speak too loudly to me in the morning...

Some news, in no particular order:

F-Spot 0.6.1.2 was released a couple of minutes ago. It fixes db upgrade for the people who went in holidays in the far future. Now F-Spot can update a db with photos taken (or reported to be) after 2038. It also fixes a crash while running on gtk+ 2.14.

The LiveWebGallery extension is now merged into the main tree, and installable, from the Manage Extension dialog, on any F-spot > 0.6. The extension crashing on gtk+2.14 is part of the past too.

Ruben is MIA. Last time we heard from him, he was "in a park near a pond near a museum".

A new extension, allowing finer control over the BlackAndWhite conversion process is coming soon. It leverages the expensive CPU you paid big bucks for via Mono.Simd. Mandatory screenshot:
That's it for today.

Some weeks have passed since the announcement of kaveau. I’m really proud and happy about this project because I received a lot of positive feedback messages and it has been chosen as one of the best Hackweek’s projects.

In the meantime I kept working on kaveau, so let me show you what has changed:

• rdiff-backup has been replaced by rsync.
• the setup wizard has been improved according to the feedback messages I received.
• old backups are now automatically removed.
• the code has been refactored a lot.

The switch to rsync

Previously kaveau used rdiff-backup as backup back-end. rdiff-backup is a great program but unfortunately it relies on the outdated librsync library. The latest release of librsync is dated 2004. It has a couple of serious bugs still open and, while rsync has reached version three, this library is still stuck at version one.

These are the reasons of the switch from rdiff-backup to rsync. This choice breaks the compatibility with the previous backups but it introduces a lot of advantages. One of the most important improvements brought by the adoption of rsync is an easier restore procedure: now all the backups can be accessed using a standard file manager, while previously rdiff-backup was needed to access the old backups.

Backup directory structure

On the backup device everything is saved under the kaveau/hostname/username path.

The directory will have a similar structure:

drwxr-xr-x 3 flavio users 4096 2009-09-12 18:50 2009-09-12T18:50:19
drwxr-xr-x 3 flavio users 4096 2009-09-14 23:07 2009-09-14T23:07:46
drwxr-xr-x 3 flavio users 4096 2009-09-14 23:30 2009-09-14T23:30:36
lrwxrwxrwx 1 flavio users   19 2009-09-14 23:30 current -> 2009-09-14T23:30:36

As you can see there’s one directory per backup, plus a symlink called current pointing to the latest backup.

Old backup deletion

Nowadays big external storage devices are pretty cheap, but it’s always good to save some disk space. Now kaveau keeps:

• hourly backups for the past 24 hours.
• daily backups for the past month.
• weekly backups until the external disk is full. Thanks to hard links’ magic, old backups can be deleted without causing damages to the other ones.

Plans for the future

Before starting to work on the restore user interface I will spend some time figuring out how to add support for network devices.

A lot of users requested this feature, hence I want to make them happy :) .

I’m planning to use avahi to discover network shares (nfs, samba) or network machines running ssh and use them as backup devices. Honestly, I want to achieve something similar to Apple’s time capsule.

As usual, feedback messages are really appreciated.

Now that 11.2 gets closer and closer to the rc status being able to play mp3 becomes important in order to make the testing experience even nicer.

Here is my workaround to get that mp3 working in amarok. I do not know about the dvd’s as the only one that I own is to boring to use it for testing purposes

wget http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.1/repo/oss/suse/x86_64/libcdio7-0.80-5.30.x86_64.rpm
zypper in file:<Path-to>libcdio7-0.80-5.30.x86_64.rpm
wget http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.1/repo/oss/suse/x86_64/libiso9660-5-0.80-5.30.x86_64.rpm
zypper in file:<Path-to>libiso9660-5-0.80-5.30.x86_64.rpm
wget http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.1/repo/oss/suse/x86_64/libMagickCore1-6.4.3.6-5.3.x86_64.rpm
zypper in file:<Path-to>libMagickCore1-6.4.3.6-5.3.x86_64.rpm
wget http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.1/repo/oss/suse/x86_64/libMagickWand1-6.4.3.6-5.3.x86_64.rpm
zypper in file:<Path-to>libMagickWand1-6.4.3.6-5.3.x86_64.rpm
zypper in libxine1-codecs

So as you can see I just use the missing libs from 11.1.Of course I assumed that you added the 11.1 packman to your repos already.

Ladies and Gents,
we’re glad to announce that SOAD Linux 3.2.1 is out and available for download.

This is a bugfix release mostly. Please read the changelog:
Changelog

Active mirrors are updated weekly, starting from Monday:
GWDG.DE
Yandex.ru

We do need your feedback about “Ecomorph” – some kind of auto configuration script is already managed (no manual adjustments are required before launch), but looks like some important parameters/values are still missed unfortunately. Already collected several “White Screen Compiz Bug” reports from owners of NVIDIA GPU’s and just wish to collect some more to get the reason how to improve it. Right now (for LiveCD/LiveUSB) “Ecomorph” should work with the modern NVIDIA (drivers already in) and with other video cards, where “Compiz” is supported by a current “Mesa”/(current Xorg drivers). The case here is to tweak some values to be sure that things could work “out from the box”.
Example: if we’re building/installing NVIDIA drivers manually from official *.run.sh – everything is just fine. If we’re using the “packaged” rpm’s with the same drivers – “White Screen” could happen with “Ecomorph”.

As a sweet eye-candy the work for “Restoration of a GANT iconset” has been started – hope you like it. Current status – a bit more then Alpha, works, but feedback is highly appreciated.

Soon we’re planning to update our Enlightenment repositories up to the current E-svn. QA is in progress. Unfortunately bleeding-edje svn code is not always stable enough :).

Regards,
sda