It has been far too long since the GNOME Team actually put their heads together and talked about what is going on in the garden. As such regular meetings are re-starting, but with a slight difference – it will be monthly on the 3rd Tuesday of each month at 1400UTC, for localised times please see here.

That means the next meeting will be held this Tuesday, 18th May 2010, in the garden (otherwise known as #opensuse-gnome on Freenode). The Agenda is pretty simple and can be added to on the wiki. For those curious it will kind of follow the lines of:

1. openSUSE GNOME Status
1.1 Packaging
1.2 Bugs
1.3 Q & A
2. Upstream GNOME Status
2.1 What’s New
2.2 Bugs
2.3 Q & A
3. General Q & A

So please come buy the garden, pull up a chair and crack a cold one open. Join in the fun and add anything you need to the agenda.

Just a shot, Lugaru HD has been released as opensource, we can build and give it to all of you…

well.. done

i just packaged it, so just wait for servers to sync

http://packman.links2linux.org/package/lugaru/

Have fun players

We all know we are doing well, we see that from your feedbacks, bugreports, obs submitreqs, and IRC. So guys.. Thank you a lot for supporting and helping us.

But do you think there is something better to see your work on a magazine? a national magazine? I guess it’s really exciting isn’t it?

Well we did it! The Italian Linux Magazine wrote two entire pages for us, and our live cd (together with XFCE one) was into the attached DVD or CD!

That was cool!!!

Andrea

Have you ever thought how users should configure their systems, deployed by AutoYaST or kiwi? One of possible answers is called YaST Firstboot.

The YaST firstboot utility is a special kind of configuration workflow that can be run after the basic system is installed. It is started on the first boot of the system and guides a user through a series of steps that allow for easier configuration of their desktops. YaST firstboot does not run by default and has to be configured to run by the user or the system administrator. It is useful for image deployments where the system in the image is already configured (read: AutoYaST, SUSE_Studio, KIWI), and end-user should do only the last few steps, like setting the root password.

Enabling Firstboot

To enable running firstboot configuration sequence on the machine, it is necessary to:

• Have yast2-firstboot package installed. Depending on your installation method, this means adding the package to the list of packages to be installed (e.g. for AutoYaST) or that are part of installation image.

• Create the empty file /var/lib/YaST2/reconfig_system. If this file is present on system boot, firstboot configuration sequence is started. YaST Firstboot removes the file when the configuration is done.

Customizing YaST Firstboot

There are two files that control the behavior of Firstboot: the firstboot control file (firstboot.xml) and the sysconfig file /etc/sysconfig/firstboot. The control file defines the steps that should be part of your configuration sequence, in the sysconfig file it is possible to define custom messages and paths to various files.

Customized Messages

Most important texts configurable in sysconfig file is the text shown in the License Agreement screens. For license texts, there are sysconfig variables FIRSTBOOT_LICENSE_DIR and FIRSTBOOT_NOVELL_LICENSE_DIR.

The license text is read from the file ‘license.txt’ or from ‘license_<locale>.txt’. The license texts of the Novell base product are by default installed to the directory /etc/YaST2/licenses/base/ — you can set different value to FIRSTBOOT_NOVELL_LICENSE_DIR if they are elsewhere. Use FIRSTBOOT_LICENSE_DIR to indicate a path to directory containing vendor licence texts; it is preferred to put these license texts into another subdirectory of /etc/YaST2/licenses/.

To show two license texts in one dialog (typically the one from vendor and one from Novell), use ‘firstboot_license_novell’ step in your firstboot.xml file. This client will use the license texts specified by both FIRSTBOOT_LICENSE_DIR and FIRSTBOOT_NOVELL_LICENSE_DIR.

Customized Workflow

The default firstboot workflow can be controled using one single file which uses the same syntax as the control.xml file used to control the complete installation. The firstboot control file consists of workflow and proposal configurations and can be used to add or remove configuration screens depending on the end configuration of the system. The file firstboot.xml is installed with the yast2-firstboot package and can be found at the following location: /etc/YaST2/firstboot.xml.

This file can be modified to match the post installation requirements of the product in question. In addition to the default and pre-installed components, custom screens can be added to enable maximal flexiblity during post installation. Look into the example firstboot.xml file coming with your yast2-firstboot package for more available steps.

Custom Scripts

Not everything can be achieved with already prepared steps, and it is usually not necessary to write your own ycp dialogs.

You can add schell scripts to be executed at the end of the firstboot configuration. Scripts should be placed in /usr/share/firstboot/scripts or in a custom location that can be set using the variable SCRIPT_DIR of /etc/sysconfig/firstboot configuration file. The scripts are executed in alphabetical order of their names.

AutoYaST Support

It is possible to configure the firstboot process as a part of autoinstallation, so the system can be installed with most of the default values set via AutoYaST profile, leaving the rest to the end user during the firstboot sequence.

As a part of autoinstallation configuration, you need to provide all the changes mentioned above:

• Customize /etc/sysconfig/firstboot: it can be done e.g. via Sysconfig Editor in System section of AutoYaST configuration module.

• Provide customized firstboot.xml file and point to its location in FIRSTBOOT_CONTROL_FILE value of /etc/sysconfig/firstboot.

• Enable Firstboot: do it via GUI in Misc/Firstboot section of AutoYaST configuration module or manually by adding the section

<firstboot>
   <firstboot_enabled config:type="boolean">true</firstboot_enabled>
</firstboot>

to your AutoYaST profile.

This is the shortened version of the article published at http://en.opensuse.org/YaST_Firstboot

During the last week blogs, twitter, facebook and other means of communication for the users experienced a lot of traffic related to the Humble Indie Bundle. This bundle was nothing more than a package composed of 6 DRM-Free games developed by 6 Independent game developers that could be obtained at a price set by the user. This bundle included the games World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru HD, Penumbra Overture and Samorost 2. The bundle was available for one week and the earnings went to the developers, The Child’s Play Charity and Electronic Frontier Foundation depending on the will of the buyer. At the end of the week the bundle reached 1’000.000 US$ of income, reason for which Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru HD and Penumbra Overture are releasing their code under FLOSS licenses. As you can see here was already released under GPL2, and the other games source code is being prepared to be released within this week.

In addition to this, it was officially announced that Steam will be available for Linux at the end of this summer, which means lots of games and lots of fun is coming to gnu/linux and the breach in gaming between gnu/linux and other OSs is getting smaller.

Here some trailers of the games that will be released as FLOSS  from the Humble Indie Bundle

Aquaria |  Gish |  Lugaru HD |   Penumbra Overture

Linux gamers it is time to have even more fun

jaom7

Yes I’m still at it, trying to get YOU the openSUSE community talking about what is important to you. This time round I’d like to hear your opinions and thoughts about something. I’m going to keep my views on the matter quiet until we get some dialogue going, so if you want to hear my thoughts (and let’s face it who doesn’t? ;-) ) best you start airing your opinions.

Attempt to create structure in the wiki, or to classify all articles, is next logical step after years of, to be modest, disharmony in the current wiki, but how far we should go and what content can be structured with reasonable amount of work, and what should be left to self organization.

Article Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags talks among other things about application domain of ontology.

Now applied to our wiki, we have:

1. mix of both stable well defined categories and new topics that are in flux,
2. relatively restricted domain - Linux and openSUSE, but we go into a lot of details there,
3. mix of topics that cross boundaries of disciplines, 
4. participants are more or less not experienced,
5. there is a limited number of people interested in the work on the wiki, specially to spend time learning how it works 

To me it seems that we are a bit more on "let it organize itself", which will mean make basic structure and rules for maintenance crew, so that copy-editors can straighten out stray articles on important topics without author complains, and don't be to much upset when the rest lives its own life.

or yet another way to shoot yourself in the foot.

Supporting people with problems too long creates support burnout. Those that suffer from it can't find that by themselves, and even resist to accept facts when confronted. It manifests in to much attention to details that should provide better support, but actually stand in a way for the primary goal of any support effort, a happy user.

Today I had one more touch with that.
One of people that supports open-slx version of openSUSE wanted to add Support Database (SDB) to the new wiki Main page and he did it. I objected, but did nothing to remove the entry. First it is visible only in a draft page (our wiki is using FlaggedRevs, a MediaWiki extension), so normal visitors will not see it, and second I want to  discuss this on the wiki mail list.

Why giving so prominent place to Support Database is bad?

SDB has many articles from those that solve problems with openSUSE, to few that explain how to use Linux for daily tasks. What will be opinion of a new user that just installed Linux thing and has no required background knowledge to explain large disproportion between articles about problems vs. advices how to do regular daily tasks using new applications and functionality. I know that I would not feel comfortable with software that has many problems and few useful functions, and I have no reason to think that that majority will have different opinion.

Ditto, SDB should be easy to find, but giving people with problems few other options before they start digging trough it, like it was done in Support article. I must admit that now reading article again, I can see my support burnout in the tone of the article and the fact that SDB link was first in the section "Non interactive", before Spyhawk (Remy) added documentation  link as a first and saved the day.

In my opinion, we (openSUSE) have to keep advices about daily tasks and problem solutions for irregularities separated as much as it is possible in the visitor eyes, which fits fine with current description in Help:Namespaces :

• Main - Presentation of the current version of the openSUSE distribution. Everything for consumers of our distribution.
• SDB - Help, Howtos, support. If you have a problem with the distribution you will find help here.

What can be better presentation of your new operating system then articles that will explain how you can do all that you did before and of course much more. 

So further to my post on a11y in openSUSE, I was asked how one would enable Accessibility. Now to be honest I only *kind of* know how to do it in GNOME, so I set off on a little exploration of the other desktop environments. It may seem strange that I’m trying to champion a subject that I don’t really know, but that’s part of the reason why I’m doing so.

There is an 13 letter word that begins with “a” and ends with “y”, can you guess what it is? Yup, *a11y* is what I’m on about, also known asAccessibility. I think the subject of a11y is possibly a very misunderstood one, I for one incorrectly associated it with disabled use of a computer. I have been corrected (on more than one occasion) to the fact that Accessibility actually refers to the ability for anybody to be able to use a computer (or any other device) regardless of any impairment they might have.