I am sure that most of you know and like acetoneiso2, a nice tool to menage isos and lots of other things. Latest release, 2.2.1 support only kde, gnome and xfce as DE and allow to open their file managers to browse files and mounted stuffs…

So, you know, FLOSS is our world.. i took the code, and improved it, just a trivial change, but really nice. I added LXDE/PcmanFM support, as you can see from the picture:

Now you can have acetoneiso2 run pcmanfm too.

The patched package is already into Packman repository and a submit-request (#41069) has been submitted to KDE:KDE4:Community repository, so hopefully, it would be available even there quite soon.

So people.. enjoy it

Andrea

I know, I know… it is a bit late ( more than a month ) since FLISOL took place in Guayaquil-Ecuador this year… but a lot a time consuming activities have stopped me from reporting some results. Even though more than a month have passed, I think I should let you know what happened.

Compared to previous years, the event of this year was relatively smaller. An approximate of 200 people assisted, from which for the ~80% it was their first time that assisted to FLISOL, 50% of visitors had not used or heard about FLOSS before, ~13% were below 18 years old and ~75% were between 18-35 years old.

There are 3 things that I would like to point from this year’s event:

1. Most of the event was organized by the new members from Kokoa ( ESPOL’s Free Software Community ), who I send my congratulations since it was a very good start. They were just newbies and took the challenge of organizing the biggest FLOSS event in town. As an old Kokoa kore member I know how difficult can be to organize FLISOL, and I can say those guys did a good job.
2. One of the rooms that caught most of the attention of the visitors was the gaming room. It mostly attracted the young visitors from different genres. I think that gnu/linux is a niche that has started to be exploited in the gaming area. Personally I have tried some games since the very first time I had openSUSE (SuSE Linux back then) installed and I have seen how good known titles and good quality indie games are coming to gnu/linux. I think that with openSUSE GameStore , some gamers and developers from the openSUSE community we can try to promote our lovely green as a good platform for gaming.
3. Last but not least, I would like to say thanks to Jarflex, ESPOL’s Digital Culture Club, Ecuagamers and all the people who contributed to make this event possible.

Summarizing, this year it was seen a collaboration between different groups and enterprises somehow related to FLOSS that , locally, was not seen before. This might be a further step of what was started in 2007 when we tried to take FLISOL from a FLOSS installation festival for FLOSS enthusiast to a FLOSS event that will catch the attention of people of different ages with different interests.

Until the next post people of the openSUSEsphere…

jaom7

PS.1: Some pictures by: @sarahjessi, Kmeng, @_abejamaya , Jarflex and Ecuagamers
PS.2: If you are interested or have some ideas related to openSUSE gaming [site] please write a comment or contact me.

This post explains how to execute a single unit test (or even a single test method) instead of running the complete unit test suite.

In order to run the unit tests of your rails application, basically you have these official possibilities:

• rake test: runs all unit, functional and integration tests.
• rake test:units: runs all the unit tests.
• rake test:functionals: runs all the functional tests.
• rake test:integration: runs all the integration tests. Each one of these commands requires some time and they are not the best solution while developing a new feature or fixing a bug. In this circumstance we just want to have a quick feedback from the unit test of the code we are editing.

Waiting for all the unit/functional tests to complete decreases our productivity, what we need is to execute just a single unit test. Fortunately there are different solutions for this problem, let’s go through them.

The easy approach: use your favorite IDE

Most of the IDE supporting ruby allow you to run a single unit test. If you are using Netbeans running a single unit test is really easy:

• make sure the editor if showing the file you want to test or the file containing its unit tests
• Hit Ctrl+Shift+F6 or click on the following menu entry: Debug->Debug Test File Two new windows will be opened: one will contain the output produced by your unit test, the other one will show the results of the unit test.

As you will notice the summary window contains also some useful information like the:

• hyper links to the exact location of the code that produced the error/failure.
• execution time required by each one of the test methods. As you will experience it will be like “compiling” your ruby code.

From the console

If you are not using Netbeans you can always rely on some command line tools.

No additional tools

These “tricks” don’t require additional gems, hence they will work out of the box.

The first solution is to call this rake task:

rake test TEST=path_to_test_file

So the final command should look like

rake test TEST=test/unit/invitation_test.rb

Unfortunately on my machine this command repeats the same test three times, I hope you won’t have the same weird behavior also on your systems…

Alternatively you can use the following command:

ruby -I"lib:test" path_to_test_file"

It’s even possible to call a specific test method of your testcase:

ruby -I"lib:test" path_to_test_file -n name_of_the_method"

So calling:

ruby -I"lib:test" test/unit/invitation_test.rb - test_should_create_invitation

will execute only _InvitationTest::test_should_createinvitation.

It’s also possible to execute only the test methods matching a regular expression. Look at this example:

ruby -I"lib:test" test/unit/invitation_test.rb -n /.*between.*/

This command will execute only the test methods matching the /.between./ regexp.

Using the single_test gem

If you want to avoid the awful syntax showed in the previous paragraph there’s a gem that can help you, it’s called single_test.

The github page contains a nice documentation, but let’s go through the most common use cases.

You can install the gem as a rails plugin:

script/plugin install git://github.com/grosser/single_test.git

single_test will add new rake tasks to your rails project, but won’t override the original ones.

Suppose we want to execute the unit test of user.rb, just type the following command:

rake test:user

If you want to execute the functional test of User just call:

rake test:user_c

Appending _”c” to the class name will automatically execute its functional test (if it exists).

It’s still possible to execute a specif test method:

rake test:user_c:_test_name_

So calling:

rake test:user_c:test_update_user

Will execute the _test_updateuser method written inside of _test/functional/user_controllertest.rb.

It’s still possible to use regexp:

rake test:invitation:.*between.*

This syntax is equivalent to ruby -I"lib:test" test/unit/invitation_test.rb -n /.*between.*/.

Possible issues

When a single unit test is run all the usual database initialization tasks are not performed. If your code is relying on newly created migrations you will surely have lots of errors. This is happening because the new migrations have not been applied to the test database.

In order to fix these errors just execute:

rake db:test:prepare

before running your unit test.

As you already know, the Festival Latinoamericano de Instalacion de Software Libre event will be held this Saturday here in Chile.

In La Serena we are starting around 9 am at Universidad de La Serena campus Isabel Bongard, with plenty of fun talks and room for installations, I am more than ready to install our awesome green! =). By the way, I will be creating an ISO with SUSE Studio so everyone can grab it on USB devices.

Some talk topics we are presenting: KVM, Free Knowledge, Linux beyond the Desktop, and Contributing to openSUSE without having to be a developer.

I would like to thank Andreas and everyone at Novell who has been supporting the Ambassadors Program, shipping DVDs, Geekos, T-shirts that the audience really appreciates and do make a difference.

In my spare time I've been working on a RAID-lookalike system for storing large amounts of data with multiple redundancies - and with significantly lower power consumption and disk spinning time than standard RAID if you only access single large files in a typical session.

The whole thing is implemented as a network block device (nbd), and will be presented (in an early, but at least already partially working state) on LinuxTag 2010 in Berlin.

Note that this is not a direct competitor to a standard RAID solution - in fact, I propose using a RAID 1 for the journal it needs (e.g. use the system disk - you're already using a RAID there, right?). For a comparison table check the project page.

Source will be available soon, I've not decided which git hoster to use yet. I don't think it's reasonable to put this on freedesktop, because is relation to freedesktop to close to nothing. I might change my mind, though .

Hi!

A few years ago the LUG opensuse-nicaragua has the project named “Escuelita opeSUSE” this project was to provide basic courses for the people opensuse.

And the last week, we finally  made it!!!

The course was in UNICIT(Iberoamerican University of Technologies and Cience), were 2 intensive days of linux linux and linux jejeje, the pensum of course was:

1.      Installation of openSUSE

2.       Basic Configurations

3.       KDE

4.       YaST

5.       Shell

6.       Software and repositories

And Thanks to the marketing group for the materials!! Second fase of Escuelita openSUSE is comming soon!!!

As part of what we do, we help business people migrate over from their usually rotten Windows XP, Vista and what ever else incarnation of Redmond OS over to Linux. We found that some people really took to Linux while some got stuck in purgatory complaining constantly in the transition period. I found that certain types of personality as well as expectations makes the whole process smooth and dare I say even enjoyable?

• I found that the more open the new user is to a new OS, being more open to forget about Windows they are the more enjoyable the process is. "This used to work so much better on my laptop in Windows ..." kinda attitude will almost guarantee a world of pain.
• Having a positive attitude helps ... as in you are home ... your printer does not work instantly ... instead of just chalking it up to the new OS being bad just give it a whirl and think of the fun of trying out something new will make it enjoyable. 
• Trusting your new OS as well as your new found friend (me) when it comes to buying peripherals will help during the transition. 

Those with the attitude above really took to Linux like fish to water and it sorta became their bragging rights in among their friends. Remember too that these are pure business people without any prior Linux experience. So it's gratifying to me to over hear them in conversation with their friends "Aiya ... you are still using that slow piece of crap .. see my new Open Source OS! No virus can touch it and it's blazing fast!" It's nice to know we did one for Linux advocacy in our own way as well as fill our pockets up a bit :).

Enterprise in the Community It has been mentioned that the Geeko is somewhat of a schizophrenic at times, and do you know what I kind of have to agree. The difference is I disagree on how the schizophrenia affects our dear friend. Most people think that the multiple personalities are desktop related – you know, KDE vs GNOME vs XFCE vs $DE. I on the other hand feel it is to with audience – Enterprise vs Consumer.

or basic inventory of what we have.

Temporary openSUSE Wiki is created few moths ago to allow test of new tools and content reorganization  without disrupting daily operation of openSUSE Wiki. It is running on MediaWiki version 1.15.1. The basic software is already much better then the old version 1.5, but the goal is not only to have one time cleanup, but also to organize wiki that will provide benefits for all involved parties: visitors, writers and maintainers. To achieve this we added few extensions to the basic MediaWiki listed here .

Semantic MediaWiki  is complex extension that has its own extensions.It can become one of our flagships, but at the time of this post I don't know much about it.

We already have working implementations of the following extensions:

CategoryTree is navigational tool, intended to provide compact list of other pages that user might want to visit. It is based on MediaWiki categories , which means that creation and maintenance of categories and its structure, is one of the primary tasks for all involved.

FlaggedRevs will allow better content quality control. It is set to show casual visitors only article revisions that passed quality control process. Editing is not prevented, so anyone can change page content, but that is hidden from visitors until some of reviewers check the article.

MultiBoilerplate is meant for simplified creation of articles, providing ready to go templates for different types of articles that wiki user can choose from drop down list.  The openSUSE version is patched to allow different sets of templates for different namespaces.

InputBox provides 3 functions:

• Different modes search boxes, 
• Creation of pages using predefined templates, which overlaps in functionality with MultiBoilerplate to some extent, but allows article writer tight control over used template.
• Adding comments to existing pages which can be used, for instance, to simplify collection of user comments, user contributed tips, simplify contribution to hardware compatibility list.

DynamicPageList is navigational tool that lists selected content of one or more categories. It overlaps with CategoryTree when it shows content of a single category.

ParserFunctions  allow some kind of macro language to be used in templates.


SimpleFeed  is used to import feeds from other pages to the wiki. It was used in old wiki for the right column news.It can be used to import news to any of the portal pages.

VideoFlash is simple extension that allows author to embed YouTube and other Flash videos in the wiki pages.

SyntaxHighlight will make easier reading of the code snippets on the wiki page.

Tools for users and administrators:

SpecialInterwiki   is a tool for wiki administrators.

Hermes Notify is our notification agent.