I’ve had a lot of people ask me both within the openSUSE community and outside of it, whether I applied for the vacant openSUSE Community Manager role. In a nutshell, yes I did apply for it. Why the past tense? Well I got notified almost two weeks ago that I was unsuccessful :’-( The good thing that did come out of it, is that there seem to be some very good candidates in the running – let’s face it, they would have to be pretty damned good to beat me ;-)

I have just published my RAnsrID git repository on gitorious.org. Beginning now I will stay backward compatible with old versions of journal and disk meta structure blocks. Get the git repo from
    git clone git://gitorious.org/ransrid/ransrid.git

Unfortunately, there is little (read: no) documentation available yet; that will change after LinuxTag. Upto then the only doc is the heavily commented source code. Grab it, study it, enhance it, send a patch - that's the open source way.

For LinuxTag I have another goodie - I will be traveling with four USB disks and give a short live demo of what the system is already capable of. Live add and removal of disks isn't working yet, but reading, writing, validation, and rebuilding is.

Note that nbd used to freeze machines during writes if client and server were running on the same machine. Since kernel 2.6.26 there is a patch included that ought to fix this issue, but there were some (inconclusive?) discussions about this patch beforehand. Using xen for the client seems to work around this issue as well, though.

Hi,

as hackweek continue I want to present my contribution for this year event. My plan is to support our the youngest supported desktop environment LXDE. So I contact our LXDE guy Andrea Florio and he ask lxde developers. Then we communicate directly and I found as the most intersting idea to replace gnome gvfs which is needed to have usable gio interface in glib ( geek-deserialization: allow easy access remote systems, zip archives in file manager like it is part of filesystem). Motivation for replacement is quite big gvfs dependency and system resource requirements. It choose it because I can learn something new, can return to programming in C from Ruby on Rails which is used for webyast and last not least I think it is usable also for another lightweight environment xfce4.

Code can be located in pcman git repository. Idea of implementation is quite simple. Don’t use daemons and special code to handle different backends. Instead use fuse and its already written fs based on fuse. As first I start with ftps and its sshfs implementation. Code for single fs is simple and short. Today I finish first working proof of concept of gvfs extension and its gfile extension. It can query and copy file on gvfs as you can see in file gfusevfs.c where is testing program. Main problem which I still see is that fs is not umounted so it takes some sources, but umount it after file operation can lead to annoying behavior like passing password on each file operation.

I welcome any comments and ideas about this project.

Hi developers!

These are first hours of hackweek. A lot of people in Novell and in the community are starting to work on different projects. What can I give for free software in this week? Sure, my favorite project is NetworkManagement.

As you can see, NetworkManagement don’t work well. For example, it can’t see WiFi connection and don’t show wired connetcion. Yes, right now we have one bug with module “networkmanagement”.

This module must be loaded after start NetworkManagement, but this is not happening

If you check it, you will see:

anaumov@pizza:~/plasma/networkmanagement> qdbus --system org.freedesktop.NetworkManagerUserSettings
Service 'org.freedesktop.NetworkManagerUserSettings' does not exist.

Why it’s happening? Problem is in connection between plasmoid and deamon NM (via DBus).

anaumov@pizza:~/plasma/networkmanagement> qdbus org.kde.kded /kded loadModule networkmanagement
true
anaumov@pizza:~/plasma/networkmanagement> qdbus --system org.freedesktop.NetworkManagerUserSettings
/
/org
/org/freedesktop
/org/freedesktop/NetworkManagerSettings
/org/freedesktop/NetworkManagerSettings/0
/org/freedesktop/NetworkManagerSettings/1
/org/freedesktop/NetworkManagerSettings/2
/org/freedesktop/NetworkManagerSettings/3
/org/freedesktop/NetworkManagerSettings/4
/org/freedesktop/NetworkManagerSettings/5
/org/freedesktop/NetworkManagerSettings/6
/org/freedesktop/NetworkManagerSettings/7
/org/freedesktop/NetworkManagerSettings/8
anaumov@pizza:~/plasma/networkmanagement>

So, now we can see WiFi interface:

And WiFi interface can see WiFi connections:

Good, but this works not automaticly. It’s first what I want to hack on this week.

And what do you want to do on this week?

Today I got a email about registration for “Qt Developer Days 2010”. This conference will be in Munich (October 11-13) and in San Francisco (November 1-3). I think this is the biggest and best Qt-event. Last time there was more than 700 people. It’s very interesting for me as the KDE developer, but it’s not free like FOSDEM or openSUSE Conference

For example, 3 days in Munich cost 499€ (if you pay befor 15th september and 699€ if you pay after). Ok, I know that Qt/Nokia makes very good coffee, but anyway this event is very costly for students like me

I will wait for the openSUSE Conference and meet the Qt/KDE hackers there.

Greetings!

This time I come to announce the departure of openGarrobito FULL 0.4.5 and openGarobito LITE edition 04.3

That brings improvements:

1. Support for Broadcom wireless card brand (now supports more wireless cards because of the new module broadcom-sta)
2. The LITE version is made from scratch to weigh less and reached a 4 GB USB)
3. Update to KDE 4.4.3
4. All software has been updated to May 11, 2010
5. With driver for ATI graphics cards, osea brings fglrx, nvidia cards are still in process, I hope soon;)

There are few things that were corrected, but making major changes jejeje

http://ecentro.uca.edu.ni/~novell/

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.