Just a quick note, I released a new version of the fastuserswitch plasmoid. This new release implements all the improvements suggested by the users plus some minor fixes.

Code can be downloaded from here. openSUSE packages are already available on the build service.

These are some screenshots illustrating fastuserswitch’s new features.

{% img /images/fast_user_switch/fastuserswitch011.png %} {% img /images/fast_user_switch/fastuserswitch021.png %} {% img /images/fast_user_switch/fastuserswitch03.png %}

Hi people,

I know lots of you was waiting for that, and i am really sorry if it took some time, but i can finally announce the first beta release for our 11.3 live cd.

It is still a beta and such as it have some flaws, like for example it doesn’t fit into a CD yet. The good news is that this is an hybrid and permanent iso, so you can use dd to copy the iso into your usb pendrive.

Please help us testing and reporting bugs and issues you find.

To download the isos, as usual browse here!

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/X11:/lxde/images/iso/

i believe i should be able to release new isos soon, i need to at least provide you isos able to fit into a cd!

Andrea

I have made a bug-fix release of ruby-dbus, a Ruby language binding for the D-Bus IPC system.

• Many on_signal could cause DBus.Error.LimitsExceeded (bnc#617350).
  Don't add a match rule that already exists, enable removing match rules. Now only one handler for a rule is called (but it is possible for one signal to match more rules). This reverts the half-fix done to fix Issue#3.
• Re-added InterfaceElement#add_param for compatibility.
• Handle more ways which tell us that a bus connection has died.

RPMs can be found via Webpin.

Business
I'm giving a talk on Friday, July 30 at 10:15am. I intend it for people who want to start hacking on FOSS and GNOME projects but haven't found a way in yet, and those of all experience levels who want to learn more about hacking on Banshee in particular. Of course I'll talk a lot about the state of the project, and some of our cool new features too.

Pleasure
If you want to meet up in Amsterdam sometime Wednesday through Saturday, or in The Hague after that, send me an e-mail. I arrive in AMS early Wednesday with no plans.

Finally, a lazyweb request: if you have advice on prepaid data SIM cards in the Netherlands, I'd love to hear it.

Update
After taking the train to Amsterdam Central, I went to this Vodafone store and got a €7.50 sim card, €5 of call/txt credit (incoming is free, outgoing is 30 cents/min and 19 cents/txt) and a 50% off €10 30 days of data — so all told, €17.50. The guy spent 10 min or so fiddling with my G1 (dev phone) to get it activated, and then I goggled the APN info you need to enter manually: live.vodafone.com with username and password 'Vodafone'. Seems to be working great!

Happily, I was invited the last Weekend to give a conference about Security and Hacking at the International Congress of Informatics and E-Business (Congreso Internacional de Informática y E-Business) at the paradisaical Island of Margarita, Venezuela at the Caribbean Sea .

Of course, I don’t loose any time to Spread the openSUSE word, so I talk a lot about Linux, Why to use Linux in security matters, Why Windows is a Joke, and how openSUSE its a great choice for newbies and advanced users. There was 3 conferences for 600 people, in groups of 200. I gave DVD’s, CD’s and Stuff to everybody who ask, or want one… After my chat, everybody ask a lot about our beloved Geeko…

I hang some pictures in Flickr about the event. Next stop, make my Launch Party, that I couldn’t the last Weekend because this event. Cheers!

We have a little regression in the buildservice API test suite. And looking at the commit log I didn’t find the obvious problem, so I tried bisect, because I know it worked very recently:


git bisect start master 1dfd9717348d8425492b556d3a183b4d265007d
git bisect run sh -c "cd src/api; ruby test/functional/build_controller_test.rb --name=test_project_index"


And it gave me:
25347c2d712e6e4b598e05442dd95b5e82f14aed is the first bad commit
commit 25347c2d712e6e4b598e05442dd95b5e82f14aed
Author: Jan-Simon Möller
Date: Sun Jul 18 01:14:01 2010 +0200

[api] Add fixtures for request controller ACL tests.

Now if you look at the commit, it is not obvious why it’s a problem. But now that git has proven, it has to be buggy I looked at the other fixture data and then it’s obvious and the fix is simple:


--- a/src/api/test/fixtures/package_user_role_relationships.yml
+++ b/src/api/test/fixtures/package_user_role_relationships.yml
@@ -11,8 +11,8 @@ testpack_maintainer:
bs_user_id: 267
role_id: 3
-testpack_maintainer:
- db_package_id: 10095
+testpack1_maintainer:
+ db_package_id: 11006
bs_user_id: 42
role_id: 3


Thanks git

I have an Acer laptop for about 5 years. It includes a generously 512MB of RAM, Intel Centrino 1.6Ghz (M730 processor to be more precise), ATI Mobility Radeon x600 64MB VRAM, 80GB HDD, yada yada yada. The battery is in an awesome shape if we consider the age and the usage I put on it during this time - previously 3 hours fully charged and now around 2 hours, so... I couldn't have asked for better. Nevertheless, the laptop has an 15.4" display and weighs 3Kg with battery plus the charger which I have to take always with me otherwise the battery would ran out quickly. All this factors led me to buy a new laptop with the main features to consider and give more priority on the weight, battery and size. I didn't want to buy again a new 15.4", up to 4 or 5 hours of battery, and weighed laptop. Basically the requirements were: 12" or 13" screen, up to 2Kg, battery that lasted at least 7 or 8 hours (wireless and reasonable screen brightness), 4GB of RAM or more, and obviously a "good" brand (Sony, Lenovo, Apple, Dell, and HP were on top of the list), not to mention a decent price I could afford. A few hours/days later I decided to pick an Apple Macbook Pro 13" 2.4GHz, not because of the Mac OS X as some might be imagining by now but because of the hardware itself.

The Apple Macbook Pro 13" I bought Tuesday includes an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz, 4GB of 1066MHz DDR3, battery up to 10 hours (wireless and 50% screen brightness), and weighs 2.04KG. It cost me 1.149€ but had an (indirect) discount of 5% plus 10€ on the FNAC client card (costs 5€ per year but worths it since it also gives you other discounts and benefits). Here is a short list of highlights regarding the hardware itself and the Mac OS X operating system which, by the way, I have to mention I have never used it until now:

Pros:

• Laptop is solid rock and its aluminum unibody makes it truly fresh (I don't fell any heat, except in the fan area where the air flows out obviously, while the Acer laptop is more like a heater than a laptop (I bet I could fry an egg on it));
• Touchpad pretty flexible e practical;
• Battery lasts up to 10 hours, meaning I don't have to carry the charger wherever I go;
• The charger has two cables: the charger with the cable to plug in the laptop and another one to extend the length of the cable to the wall socket. This means for, most of the cases, I can leave that extra cable aside or at home;
• Auto brightness (think a little and you will find how useful it can be);
• OS X is functional, intuitive, and has a clean UI overall.

Coins:

• I'm used to have the Ctrl key switched with the Fn key (something I want to get used);
  
• At least for the Portuguese keyboard, the square brackets as well as the curly brackets aren't shown in the keyboard and the key combination for the curly brackets isn't easy and convenient: alt+shift+8 for { and alt+shift+9 for } (keys 8 and 9 are where the parentheses are located at). Imagine how great will it to code, not!
• No "Cut" on files?!
• "exit" in the Terminal doesn't close the tab, but logs out and stays there opened;
• If running the OS in Portuguese, cmd+w doesn't close the tab as expected since the shortcut isn't associated and seems there is no way to do so. If running in English, the shortcut is there and do the job;
• Expected iChat to support the MSN protocol. Using Adium, which is way better;
• The file (un-)compressor included by default lacks lots of features such has the capability to uncompress split files. Using BetterZip, but still missing Ark from KDE!
• People advised me to use VLC instead of QuickTime for watching videos, specially those in HD since it seems the codecs used by QuickTime consumes more CPU than it should and that VLC consumes. I would have installed VLC anyway since I'm already used to it being the best video player out there in my opinion.

For those concerned about my devotion to the FOSS world and specially my openSUSE and KDE eccentricity, than there is nothing to you worry about! I'm still the very same guy you used to know. I just needed a laptop with the features I have stated above and that ended up to be an Apple Macbook. That's it, folks!

Believe it or not, I'd prefer the 13° and the rain in Dublin. My neighbors are going completely nuts with the heat (OK, me too, but that's different). There's this guy who now screams night and day. Maybe he's an actor and rehearses for the next movie. Hands up, hands up, do not leave, stay here, stay here, hands up! The rest of his screaming I couldn't get. Guess he was rehearsing for a thriller tonight. First I really thought something's going on but this guy has a history with screaming, so it should be nothing to worry about. This morning obviously he was rehearsing for a western. Hooo, hoooo, catch it, catch it. Hooo, hoo. Geez, I'm going mad there. I really was looking out the window expecting to see some horses running wild. Good that I found a new flat and will move away soon before I start screaming myself. That's almost as weird as my colleagues who are freaking out over some mobile phone. I feel alienated sometimes. :-)

OpenSUSE 11.3 is a very bleeding edge release with all the latest OSS available and comes with GNOME 2.30.1 and the following changes:

- GNOME 3.0 preview is available with GNOME Shell and the new accessibility stack (disabled by default)
- Tracker is the default file indexer, replacing beagle.
- Empathy is the default IM client for GNOME. Empathy supports now sending files via drag and drop and the IRC module now includes support    for common IRC commands such as /join.
- Access to iPhone and iPod touch files from nautilus. Rhythmbox can also play music from those devices.
- Transmission is shipped with DHT enabled
- Tomboy’s start-up time has been drastically improved. Syncing notes can now be done automatically by enabling it in the preferences.
- Nautilus’ user interface now includes a new split view mode and the default is set to browser mode.
- Simple right-click menu item to open a an archive file (zip, .tar.gz, etc.) in nautilus.
- Improved selection of screen-savers and games installed by default.
- Complete move away from hal to udisks/upower.
- Removal of the GNOME 1.x stack.
- Massive improvements to Banshee - the default media player
 new grid view for albums,
 automatic play queuing modes to ensure non-stop playback,
 gap less playback eliminating the annoying little gap between tracks,
 new extensions such as showing Wikipedia information for current artist, related YouTube videos and much more,
 support for audio equalizer.
-Evolution has improved imap (imap ) implementation with live view updates, non-blocking operations and IDLE support. 'evolution --express'  provides better user experience for netbook users.
- Huge improvements to YaST-GTK Software Management:
 general improvements to the interface,
 simple check-box interface to install/remove software,
 improved search box,
 "Available", "Upgrades", "Installed" tabs have been removed and replaced by optional status filters,
"History of changes" (from Menubar -> Extras) shows a history of all installed/removed packages and repositories,
"Summary of changes" box that shows all changes to packages in the current package management session, and allows you to "undo" changes,
 option to close package-manager or return to it after all installation/removal is done is shown in the summary box that pops-up when user hits the  "apply" button,
 options "Clean-up when deleting packages" and "Allow vendor change" are now available (Menubar -> Options), and 
 buttons to "Upgrade patches" and "Upgrade all" are shown when the "Upgradeable" filter is selected.

for GNOME Developers to use jhbuild i recommend:
- Adding the Contrib repository
- sudo zypper in jhbuild jhbuild-recommended-deps (installs everything you need to setup a jhbuild environment)

et voilá, OpenSUSE 11.3 is much more developer friendly. Of course you have the option to use OBS to build your packages or grab the GNOME unstable releases..