Last week my mother in law started to share her Linux laptop with my wife. Suddenly my wife asked me how she could switch from one user session to another. She was looking for something similar to OS X fast user switch feature but she couldn’t find it. In fact there wasn’t a fast and easy way to switch between users’ sessions with KDE, until… now :)

Let me introduce my first plasmoid: the fast user switch plasmoid. It’s a simple icon in the panel that allows users to swich to another open session or to open a new login page. Here you can see the mandatory screenshots.

{% img /images/fast_user_switch/fastuserswitch02.png %} {% img /images/fast_user_switch/fastuserswitch01.png %}

You can find the source code here. Binary packages for openSUSE are already available on the build service.

One last thought about KDM

I think that KDM should allow to switch back to an already open session in a more transparent way. Right now if an user has already one session open, he goes back to the login screen and enters his credentials a **new ** session is started. I think that most users would expect to be switched back to their already running session. Starting a new session is just confusing for them.

Today openSUSE 11.3 is released, concluding 8 months of intense and enjoyable work. This release has been especially enjoyable for me, as it was the first openSUSE release where the community KDE team really took the driving seat and made decisions about what to include, updated packages and intensively tested. Instead of just being a slave to a feature list this release, I was more occupied in enabling, advising and reviewing others' contributions. I'd like to say "Excellent work!" to the whole openSUSE team here in Nuremberg, Prague, the rest of Novell and to every openSUSE contributor who has tested milestones, reported bugs, learned how to use osc and

After 9 months of enjoyable and intense work, our daughter Anna was released a couple of weeks ago. At the moment she's quite unimpressed by computers, desktops and operating systems, but I hope that Free Software will be of benefit to her life as it already is to millions around the world.

Last week was my last with Novell.

This week is my first with litl.



Novell was a great place to work and I recommend it to anyone. I will miss the Mono Accessibility team, but the beauty of being an open source project is that I can just pop into IRC or review some code on ReviewBoard when I'm feeling nostalgic.

At litl, I'll be working with Brad and his crack team to make the channel experience EVEN MORE AWESOME.

If you're wondering "what will the impact be on Tomboy/Snowy/etc?", the answer is that you can expect more polish on the Mac version of Tomboy now that I'll be dogfooding it every day. And it looks like I'll be switching Snowy to use lxml. Nothing else should change. I still intend to be as involved in GNOME as Stewie will let me. ;-)

SUSE GmbH has currently a job position open for an OBS Developer. Find details on the job position page at Novell.

OBS is used in the openSUSE project, but also internally at Novell and at plenty other places and companies.

The downside will be of course that you will have to work together with people like me

Dick Streefland has created a software based USB protocol implementation called usbtiny for the AVR attiny microcontroller family. I have stripped down the code so that I was able to add detection of a single programmable IR signal. When the signal is detected, an output pin triggers a power button press for 250ms. That way e.g. media center PCs can be switched on remotely. All this is documented on the project page.

During this project I decided to revive my passing knowledge about board layouting and etching. For layouting I have used kicad, IMHO the first open source layouting software that is actually usable. The result looks pretty good, the 8/10 mil raster shows excellent sharpness and only very little undercut. Especially considering that the material and chemicals have been laying around here unused for - what? - 20 years...

I thought it was about time that I enlightened people as to what the state of play is with my efforts of getting MeeGo 1.0 for Netbooks on openSUSE. The good news is I think I’m pretty much there :-) I believe all the essential packages are built now, although there is a *lot* of work to be done in getting the packages into Factory. The outstanding work is mostly spec file housekeeping but non the less it will be a relatively laborious task.

If you look at the list of binaries for a package (e.g. icecream), you may think that you can download the RPM right away – but if you follow the link in a browser you get to see details about the rpm.

Now if you only want to download it, you may already know the details and don’t care. So I added a little shortcut: if you request the binary url with a client not accepting html explicitly (e.g. curl, wget…), you get the file directly. Just copy & paste the link to your console and be done.

And due to the joy of rails, it’s just a couple of lines and now I get:


--2010-07-09 13:51:31-- https://build.opensuse.org/stage/package/binary?arch=i586&filename=icecream-0.9.5-11.1.i586.rpm&package=icecream&project=home%3Acoolo&repository=openSUSE_11.3
Resolving build.opensuse.org... 195.135.221.34
Connecting to build.opensuse.org|195.135.221.34|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 302 Found
Location: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/coolo/openSUSE_11.3/i586/icecream-0.9.5-11.1.i586.rpm [following]
--2010-07-09 13:51:32-- http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/coolo/openSUSE_11.3/i586/icecream-0.9.5-11.1.i586.rpm
Resolving download.opensuse.org... 195.135.221.130
Connecting to download.opensuse.org|195.135.221.130|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 302 Found
Location: http://widehat.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/coolo/openSUSE_11.3/i586/icecream-0.9.5-11.1.i586.rpm [following]
--2010-07-09 13:51:32-- http://widehat.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/coolo/openSUSE_11.3/i586/icecream-0.9.5-11.1.i586.rpm
Resolving widehat.opensuse.org... 62.146.92.202, 2a01:138:a004:0:21a:a0ff:fe26:efa9
Connecting to widehat.opensuse.org|62.146.92.202|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 184745 (180K) [application/x-rpm]
Saving to: `icecream-0.9.5-11.1.i586.rpm'


Really sad to read this:

.NET Culture Shock: Why .NET Adoption Lags Among Startups

Especially sad to find that Mono is not mentioned in the article.

Especially super sad to find that Mono is mentioned in the comments, but in a negative way.

Hey Mono community, help me reply all this nonsense.

Since the discussion (do check out the linked paper, BTW) and the opensuse-women announcement, I've been thinking about how to make the openSUSE community more friendly to women.

I think one good way is to make sure that new people feel welcome when they join a conversation, be it on the forums, on IRC or on the mailing lists. Now this would be easier if we all had infinite time to read and answer all questions, but as we don't, I decided to focus somehow.

The forums provide a handy shortcut for the focus, labeling a user who made few posts as a "Puzzled Penguin". So I've made a simple service, a feed of http://forums.opensuse.org showing only the posts by newcomer users: http://vidner.net/martin/software/rss-creator-blacklist

(Actually right now it does not show Puzzled Penguins only but instead excludes the 100 most-posting users until I learn how to optimize the PHP code.)

As part of an effort to expand Mago a bit by adding nautilus, Jeff Lane from Ubuntu created a launchpad team called mago-applications. It was created to let people interested in adding new applications to Mago collaborate on the same code bases without cluttering up the mago-contributors team.

The way we see it, mago-applications can focus on simply adding new application interfaces and test suites/cases to Mago, while mago-contributors can focus on the core Mago code making sure it works with the latest changes to LDTP and so forth.

So, if you're interested in adding applications to Mago, feel free to join:

https://launchpad.net/~mago-applications

Feel free to create your own branches there to add new apps to Mago, there are plenty that can be added to enhance desktop testing of Ubuntu!

Also, adding an application is a good way to get some experience adding to a project that uses Python, is OO based, complex, and useful!