Space, the Final Frontier! This is the tale of one Amateur Astronomer that have found in openSUSE a terrific tool for public outreach, self-learning and teaching platform.

Ok, that was a bit exagerated.

But the truth is that I am enjoying the new SUSE Studio suite. And that’s because it is facilitating my job as an educator. I work with the Nicaraguan Amateur Astronomers Society (ANASA) in teaching basic astronomy to the public. Obviously, my workhorse is an openSUSE laptop, loaded with Stellarium, Celestia, KStars and Xephem (and many other tools for my personal job as an astronomer).

For a long time, I’ve been advocating the use of openSUSE as the reliable, user-friendly and safe Linux distribution that it is, but I face a big barrier: the big majority of people attending our astronomy lessons does not have the needed technical skill and knowledge to install a new operative system, specially one like Linux.

So, I’ve decided to build a Live CD using SUSE Studio, focused entirely in provide the same basic tools for learning the sky and their basic steps in Amateur Astronomy.

The name of the Project: AstroGarrobo

Garrobo is the Nicaraguan name for a male Iguana. The Nicaraguan Linux community have nicknamed our openSUSE mascot as Garrobo instead of the familiar Chameleon, because a Chameleon is a rare species here in my Nation.

So far, there is a Beta version available for download at SourceForge. I have received many valuable reports from Beta Testers from different parts o the world.

My goal here is to obtain a stable LiveCD, for free distribution, that may help others to obtain the tools needed to inspire, feed and motivate their love for Space.

I’ve written a more detailed explanation of this project in my Blog (in Spanish). I would appreciate any comments, insights and recommendations about AstroGarrobo.

Clear skies!

Wow...What a really interesting and fulfilling event in so many ways. Being my first, my mind is still running in circles about the amount of meetings and presentations I attended through the course of the weekend. I had the chance to meet many of the founding members and proven leaders of the open source community and hear their experiences and better yet their ideas for the future. A truly amazing power networking event!!

I look forward to putting those plans into action which many of us agreed to collaborate on and to also continue to innovate new ideas and concepts that will allow our community to grow and expand into new areas.

In addition, it was great to finally meet those members of the Fedora community where up until now I only knew a name. It was excellent to meet in person and put faces to those names.

Most of all, I would like to thank the ambassadors for the fun time we had and look forward to doing it all again next year :-)

Directly after the Fedora Activity Day,another exciting and necessary social event, from what I hear ;-) is the FOSDEM Beer event located here. This event will start on Friday the 5th at 18:00 and will be home to many of those from different projects and organizations whom are attending FOSDEM. I look forward to this activity to get a chance to see the F/OSS industry and it's members.

See you all there! And hope we survive to see Saturday morning:-)

FOSDEM will offically start on Saturday February 6, but the Fedora Ambassador team will be meeting here starting at 13:00 to discuss various topics on Friday February 5 at our Fedora Activity Day at FOSDEM. I will be attending and look forward to meeting those I know, but especially those I have not met yet since this is a new year with new initiatives. One of our project leaders whom spent some time developing the Fedora Project in the EMEA will be there as well as many others involved in board positions, as well as, various teams within the project. I look forward to seeing you all there and discussing future opportunities to support the Fedora community as well as the greater "Open" movement.

Suffice it to say, I’m actually enjoying my Storytlr install – maybe enjoy isn’t the right word but you get my drift, don’t you? Well I was determined to loose my coding virginity, and Storytlr’s plugin system seemed to be the safest way to do so. I chose to base my plugin on an existing plugin, and my two options were creating a Blip.tv plugin (based on the Vimeo plugin) or a Gitorious plugin based on the Github plugin).

If you are vim user and also use gpg to encrypt stuff, you might appreciate that you can teach vim to transparently open gpg encrypted files with vim gnupg plugin. Just install vim-plugin-gnupg from Contrib repository:

# zypper install vim-plugin-gnupg

Also, you should add following two lines to your .bashrc to make the plugin work properly:
GPG_TTY=`tty`
export GPG_TTY


Then, if you tell vim to open gpg encrypted file, it will ask for passphrase, transparently decrypts it and after you make changes, it will encrypt the file again.

I thought it would be wise to document how I installed Storytlr as I feel the official documentation doesn’t list everything. The basic requirements to get storytlr working are – Apache, MySQL, PHP5 (with php5-tidy, and php5-mcrypt). So once you have the basic system requirements met, the next step is to download the latest stable release from here and extract the tarball in your target directory. So in your virtual host file make sure you have enabled AllowOverride

NFS to the power of 4

After ext4 and btrfs in openSUSE 11.2, nfs4 is the next filesystem to be fully supported by libstorage (libstorage is the engine that makes YaST partitioner moving). In the upcoming first milestone of openSUSE 11.3, you can already try mounting nfs4 shares from partitioner during installation and later too (*cough* it has been possible to opt for mounting the share as nfs4 already in 11.1, but GUI option was just dummy, you ended up with regular nfs3 anyway *cough* ;-) ). Big thanks to Arvin and Thomas for implementing it (if you want to help with libstorage hacking, read here how, if you are not into hacking, you can contribute your ideas).

And slightly off-topic (as this post tends to be storage-related): you can also give nfs4-based software repositories a try - openSUSE 11.3 libzypp (hence also zypper and YaST repo manager) is now nfs4-enabled, too.

Sheep^WDisk cloning

Imagine a box with four brand-new clean disks you want to combine into RAID5. Unless you're proficient in CLI tools usage and script writing, here's what you'd probably do: go to YaST partitioner, click first disk, click Add (1st partition), enter the data, click Finish, click Add again (for 2nd partition), enter the data, click Finish ... the same procedure for all partitions on the first disk. Now multiply that by four - isn't so much clicking around an annoying waste of time and energy?

Well, it doesn't have to be so anymore. As disks in RAIDs  tend to have identical (or at least, very similar) partition layout, you can make use of new disk cloning feature (openSUSE 11.3 is the first one to have it - the original code was written by me for SLE11 SP1, and ported to 11.3 by captain Arvin):


Here you just partition one disk and pick the cloning option from the menu. A dialog with list that pops up shows all available disks that are suitable candidates for being the clone of the first one [1] Select one or more of those, confirm with OK and after committing the changes, voila! - there are now few clone brothers with the same partition layout, ready to be bundled into RAID (or LVM). It's easy :)


I wonder if any of other distro's partitioning tools can clone, too, and what approach they're using for setting up complex storage scenarios in an user-friendly way ...

[1] Of course, only the same size or bigger disks qualify, and for simplicity sake, they must share the cylinder size as well

OK so I’ve finally got round to getting this domain back up after nuking the server, problem is it isn’t back on the server but on my secondary and much less bandwidth friendly machine. So if you want to download anything please be aware it will take much longer than it did in the past ;-) As you can see (if you visit directly rather than through an rss reader) I am now running Storytlr.

We've just released Banshee 1.5.3, containing a lot of exciting new features and bug fixes.

New Features:

• Sync device from playlist option
• Type-ahead find in track, artist, and album lists
• Optional cover art in lower-left corner
• Cover art editable via drag-and-drop and right-click
• Audiobooks library extension
• Library-folder watcher extension
• eMusic importer/downloader extension
• GIO file backend, supports non-local files

Read the 1.5.3 Release Notes for the full scoop and some screenshots of the new features.

This release is what will become Banshee 1.6 and be picked up by distros; your help testing it and filing bugs is important and appreciated!

Try It

You can get packages for your distro, grab the source tarball, or follow the bleeding edge by trying it from git master.

Aaron worked hard to bring back the OS X build this release, too.

Digg It!