Our call to apply for the openSUSE Core Test Team end of July attract a great deal of attention. So we got applications from nearly 50 members out of the openSUSE community, much more than expected.

Caused by that large number of offers to move testing of openSUSE forward, we decided to increase the number of members for the new openSUSE Core Test Team from 15 to 25. A number that enables even more areas to be covered by the openSUSE Core Test Team.

Six weeks later – with the release of Milestone 7 of openSUSE 11.2 – the team is formed and already started his work to ensure that openSUSE will also be a rock-solid Linux distro in the future. First discussion about prioritizing tasks is already started and members of the team are planing their first real time meeting on IRC.

But everybody that is not (yet) part of the team is also able to take part in discussions of the openSUSE Core Test Team and contribute. The communication platform for the new team is the public opensuse-testing@opensuse.org mailing list (further information at http://en.opensuse.org/Testing). And of course you don’t have to be part of the Core Test Team to help the openSUSE project with testing of Milestone 7 and later releases (which are available at http://software.opensuse.org/developer).

I’m exited to see the team to carry the world before one.

Contributors Romain Tartière, Bertrand Lorentz, Robert Dyer, Andreu Correa Casablanca Features

• View Fullscreen option
• User docs translated into ca

Bugs Fixed

• Build fixes for *bsd
• Update recent files list after opening a document
• libdir expansion issue fixed in Hyena, depends on 0.2

Translations

• es (Andreu Correa Casablanca)
• pt (Filipe Gomes)
• sv (Daniel Nylander)

See the website for links to tarballs, git, packages, the mailing list, irc, bugzilla, and more. I'd like to thank Bertrand Lorentz for doing the actual release!

Last 3 weeks were spent with a week of vacation, a week of work, and another week of vacation.

First vacation week ... I went to the Linuxbierwanderung (Linux Beer Hike), this year happening in Helmbrechts, Upper Franconia, Bavaria, Germany. Nearly no Linux (except running on Laptops and in some smaller discussions), not much walking (for me personally no walks), but some sightseeing, and quite an amount of beer. Saw the German-German wall museum in Moedlareuth.

One week of busy work, including hurrying out another kernel fixing a new local root exploit.

And another week of vacation, this time going to Maurach at Achensee in Tirol, Austria with my best friend Bianca. Nice hotel with good food, wellness area and in easy distance from the lift. We spent two days walking in the mountain, one week of relaxing in the sea bath at the Achensee, and one day shopping in Innsbruck. Also took a ride with the local Steamrailroad. Nice and relaxing week, pictures here.

Recently lots of people asked me how to build QJson under Windows. Most of them reported build/link errors, so I decided to try personally.

The good news is that QJson can be successfully built under Window, I can show you proof ;)

{% img /images/qjson/qjson_windows_1.png %} {% img /images/qjson/qjson_windows_2.png %}

I have written the build instructions on QJson website: just take a look here.

One last note: if you have problems with QJson please subscribe to the developer mailing list and post a message.

We have started planning the sessions for the .NET/Mono Code Camp in Tarragona (Spain). The sessions are being organized in two tracks: a Mono track and an MSDN track. I plan to give at least a couple of talks: one about the upcoming release of MonoDevelop, and one about application extensibility based on Mono.Addins. If you are interested in giving a talk, it is now time let us know. You'll find here a form you can use to submit your proposal. We will select the proposals we find more interesting, and we plan to pay the travel expenses for all speakers. Update: sessions are going to be held in spanish. Update 2: we don't have a big budget, so we may not be able to pay full expenses to people coming from outside Spain. Update 3: the deadline for the call for papers is September 11th. I like how the Code Camp is shaping up so far. It will be a chance to meet with spanish Mono hackers and users, but it will also be a good chance to talk about Mono and Linux to an audience which typically is very Microsoft-centric.

I got to go tough installation routine again.
It is Radeon Xpress 200 graphic adapter that is making trouble.

The open source radeon driver is OK for almost anything, specially after removing strange sized "Virtual 3840x1200" when frame rates jumped to values comparable to proprietary fglrx, but the "Almost" is a keyword here.

Despite glxgears giving nice number of the frames per second, Google Earth was like molasses, and fan would start turning in high speed almost from start, YouTube videos refused to take full screen, with Flash actually going on strike.
So, to cover those cases I attempted to install fglrx again.

First attempt was to compile driver, but that didn't work well. The ati installer didn't do the job well.

Using /usr/share/ati/fglrx-uninstall.sh I removed remnants of "Hard Way" installation and used procedure described in http://en.opensuse.org/ATI_Radeon_Xpress


When all was done, Google Earth was running as it should, YouTube didn't complain to run in full screen mode.

Someone asked me if I could add the missing parts of GtkBuilder in Gtk#Beans so he could use it with IronPython on mono.

Hey, it looks there's no missing parts ! It all works fine since day one. Here's the the trick:

import clr
clr.AddReference('glib-sharp')
clr.AddReference('gtk-sharp')
clr.AddReference('gtk-sharp-beans')
import Gtk
import GLib
import GtkBeans
import System.IO

def PyBuilderAutoconnect(builder, target):
def _connect(builder, object, signal_name, handler_name, connect_object, flags):
    name = ''.join([frag.title() for frag in signal_name.split('_')])
    event = getattr(object, name)
    event += getattr(target, handler_name)

for object in builder.Objects:
    setattr(target, object.Name, object)
builder.ConnectSignalsFull (_connect)

class Application:
def __init__(self):
    builder = GtkBeans.Builder (System.IO.FileStream ('ui.ui', System.IO.FileMode.Open))
    #use this ctor if you don't like FileStream
    #builder = GtkBeans.Builder ()
    #builder.AddFromFile ('./ui.ui')

    PyBuilderAutoconnect (builder, self)
    self.window1.ShowAll ()

def onbuttonclicked(self, o, args):
    Gtk.Application.Quit()

Gtk.Application.Init ()
app = Application ()
Gtk.Application.Run ()

Now your IronPython skills are ready to rock Gnome3!

I have updated the Firewall Zone Switcher.
It now starts with a main window by default instead of
directly going to the system tray. There’s a settings dialog that
allows to enable the system tray icon and optionally also enables
starting the applet on log-in. Furthermore the daemon now uses
PolicyKit for access control and the applet supports i18n.

Packages for openSUSE 11.1 are available from the openSUSE build service. You also need to update SuSEfirewall2 from that repo. Source code repo is available at gitorious.

I woke up this morning with an awesometastic merge request from Anton Keks. During the night (or was it already started weeks ago ?) he wrote a LiveWebGallery extension for F-Spot. It means that you can, using a web browser, see the whole (or only parts of) photo collection of someone else in your local network.



The HTML/js UI is pretty slick even !

The code is not merged yet, but I packaged the extension and it's now installable from within F-Spot (> 0.6.0.0) from the "Extension Manager" dialog.

More details can be found on Anton's blog.

[Update 2009/09/15. The code is now merged]