Mono got a room at FOSDEM2010 in Brussels, so we won't have to do that in the hallway this year !

Want to speak about something fun you did with mono ? Propose a talk. Using mono on your servers saved your company from bankrupt in 200[89] ? Talk about it too. You are a passionate mono hacker and want to spread the word about what we'll got in the upcoming version ? You know the link.

And for everyone else, eager to learn about it, to discuss it, join on Sunday Feb 7. You're all welcome.

Note: be quick, the deadline for the cfp is around Dec 20.

I have notebook which contain private data and I don’t want anyone to read it even if my notebook will be stolen. Encrypted whole home partition is too much as my home directory contains also svn or git repositories which could anybody read. So I create encrypted directory in home directory which contain all private data and rest is normal accessible. So how to do it?
At first install user space crypted filesystem encfs. Then create two directories. First one for encrypted data and second one for accessible data. It is up to you how it is named e.g. encrypted and .encrypted or .Xcache and data (if your government feel that you must give him your data, so encrypted data is not so visible). Then create filesystem for it:

mkdir .encrypted encrypted
encfs /home/jreidinger/.encrypted /home/jreidinger/encrypted

Easy, not? Then encrypted directory contain your data. you can unmount it by fusermount -u encrypted.
After reboot you must attach it again. Maybe it is possible to do it easier, but I need that data only if I work from home, so I mount it manually. It is same as if you create encfs /home/jreidinger/.encrypted /home/jreidinger/encrypted

If you've been paying attention at the back there, you'll know that openSUSE started using a new community-driven online update administration process for 11.2. As well as Novell employees, community people are taking care of the workflow of examining and approving online updates to buggy packages. Now I have a favour to ask of you - the online updates that are ready to go out need testing to make sure they don't inflict gross mischief on users' systems.

KNetworkManager has an online update sitting in this queue awaiting testing. As anyone who has read http://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=553908 knows, I forgot to initialise 2 bools added to KNetworkManager just before 11.2 shipped, causing the settings that control whether DNS and routing settings from DHCP to be applied to be set randomly, so the update team wants someone more reliable's opinion on whether my fix for that is any good.

If you want to test it out and take part, add the 11.2 update test repo (or manually browse this URL and install all the NetworkManager-kde4 packages yourself) - http://download.opensuse.org/update/11.2-test . NB that due to a process bug the release number is the same so you will have to --force the install. If it works for you, please comment on bnc#553908 to that effect.

I have just committed into trunk a couple of changes that make easier to serialize a QObject instance to JSON.

This solution relies on the awesome Qt’s property system.

Suppose the declaration of Person class looks like this:

{% codeblock [class definition] [lang:cpp ] %} class Person : public QObject { Q_OBJECT
Q_PROPERTY(QString name READ name WRITE setName) Q_PROPERTY(int phoneNumber READ phoneNumber WRITE setPhoneNumber) Q_PROPERTY(Gender gender READ gender WRITE setGender) Q_PROPERTY(QDate dob READ dob WRITE setDob) Q_ENUMS(Gender)
public: Person(QObject* parent = 0); ~Person();
QString name() const; void setName(const QString& name);
int phoneNumber() const; void setPhoneNumber(const int phoneNumber);
enum Gender {Male, Female}; void setGender(Gender gender); Gender gender() const;
QDate dob() const; void setDob(const QDate& dob);
private: QString m_name; int m_phoneNumber; Gender m_gender; QDate m_dob; }; {% endcodeblock %}

The following code will serialize an instance of Person to JSON:

{% codeblock [Serialize to JSON] [lang:cpp ] %} Person person; person.setName(“Flavio”); person.setPhoneNumber(123456); person.setGender(Person::Male); person.setDob(QDate(1982, 7, 12));
Serializer serializer; qDebug() << serializer.serialize( &person;); {% endcodeblock %}

The generated output will be: {% codeblock [JSON data] [lang:json ] %} { “dob” : “1982-07-12”, “gender” : 0, “name” : “Flavio”, “phoneNumber” : 123456 } {% endcodeblock %}

I hope you will find this new feature useful. I’m also considering to create a similar method inside the Parser class.

As usual suggestions are welcome.

A bumpy flight into Dublin. Quite some rain and clouds and occasional sun rays. A long night out in a pub that challenged me by hiding. Needed to clear my head the day after. Went on a long walk in Dublin bay. Luckily this part of Ireland wasn't affected by the flood. Rushed to meet up for a coffee in heavy rainfalls. The ticket machine refused to serve me. Had to face the Dublin traffic and the rain. Went to a friend's home and finally also met their little one. Have never seen a kid smiling that much. Extremely charming. An early start the next day. A very friendly taxi driver. Got deep-freezed at the gate and almost blown off my feet when entering the plane. Were held on the ground for an hour due to the gusts. Then the familiar culture shock at Nuremberg train station. Anyway, back home. Almost forgot: Hope to go back for the gorilla advertisement. Here are some pics of the short trip:

The current SUSE version of pm-utils is pretty old. Rpm -q said somethink like 0.99.4.20071229. And it also contains a hacked support for s2ram, which is nowadays in upstream version. There has been also a bnc#378883 – Need an updated pm-utils I started a work on this week.

A new pm-utils package for openSUSE is available in home:mvyskocil:branches:Base:System. The HIBERNATE_METHOD is no longer supported, because upstream version contains something better – modules. There are three methods how to run software suspend on Linux

1. kernel – plain echo something > /proc/something
2. suspend – tool contains a lot of quirks needed on some HW
3. tuxonice – kernel and userspace support for hibernate, not in upstream kernel, nor in openSUSE

Because there are too many ways in current Linux world, pm-utils simply support all by specific modules stored in /usr/lib/pm-utils/modules.d, which implements appropriate functions for suspend/hibernate and hybrid. The SUSE default is uswsusp module calls s2ram/s2disk/s2both from software suspend project, because it should be considered as a safe default.

If you want to use different module, you can add a config file somewhere to
/etc/pm/conf.d/
and set the value of SLEEP_MODULE.

# The default sleep/wake system to use. Valid values are:
# kernel The built-in kernel suspend/resume support.
# Use this if nothing else is supported on your system.
# uswsusp If your system has support for the userspace
# suspend programs (s2ram/s2disk/s2both), then use this.
# tuxonice If your system has support for tuxonice, use this.
#
# The system defaults to "kernel" if this is commented out.
SLEEP_MODULE="uswsusp"


You can type more methods, which will be called, so SLEEP_MODULE=”kernel uswsusp” will use kernel and if it fail, or not available, it call uswsusp. Please note that config files are read in C sort order, so names matters.

So please install new pm-utils and test it and tell me if you found any regression (please inform me about a regressions only, I cannot fix generic suspend problems).

 

 

On November 20th, the Czech members of the openSUSE Boosters Team organized openSUSE 11.2 Release Party. The party took place in the nice building of Faculty of Mathematics and Physics.

We have prepared installation DVDs, which we’ve burnt with Pavol the day before the party – about 20 32bit and the same amount of 64bit DVDs together with some promo DVDs. It was interesting that the 32bit DVDs were taken before the 64bit ones – we expected it to be the other way round. We had also some promotional stuff like T-shirts, caps, stickers etc. Everything disappeared in several minutes, so it seems that people enjoy wearing T-shirts with that little green creatures.

It was hard to estimate how many people will come – we have expected something around 20 participants. However, to our pleasant surprise, about 40 people showed up. Moreover, not only students and young people were present, but also two or three colleagues born a bit earlier.

After Pavol’s quick introduction of members of Czech openSUSE Boosters Team, Michal Hrusecky started his talk about new features in openSUSE 11.2 and new look and feel. Finally, Michal noted opening of Factory, new development model with devel projects, the Contrib repository and Junior Jobs.

After a short snack break, Lubos talked about new KDE in openSUSE 11.2. It seems that the rotating cube effect never bores, so Lubos was asked to rotate his desktop. After having some troubles with figuring out how to switch the cube on, he of course succeeded and the cube worked – WOW! Next, Lubos exhumed his about two years old presentation named ‘What will be new in KDE 4.0’ (or something like that) and retroactively evaluated what the KDE developers achieved or not.

The rest of the party was rather interactive. Boosters and other participants helped with installation of 11.2, solving problems, answered questions and helped with creating bugzilla accounts and reporting bugs in case we had no clue.

Our thanks belong to Faculty of Mathematics and Physics for allowing us to use classroom, SUSE CZ for sponsoring the promotional stuff and snacks and last but not least, to everybody who showed up at the party. Thanks!

For more photos from the party, please visit picasaweb.

On Monday I announced our new stable release, Tomboy 1.0.1, and our new development release, Tomboy 1.1.0. They both share the following fixes:

• Official support for Ubuntu One (and any other server that implements the Tomboy Web REST API and uses OAuth 1.0a...Snowy uses OAuth 1.0). This patch comes from friend and Canonical employee Rodrigo Moya.
  
• Always show note icons in the recent notes menu.
  
• Link to correct version of our help document on Windows and Mac.
  
• Translation updates, etc.

With Tomboy 1.1.0, you also get these fixes and features:

• New D-Bus methods for manipulating notebooks thanks to Clemens Buss.
  
• New Synchronize Notes menu item for the panel applet.
  
• Cleaned up the sync dialog so it shouldn't cut off text anymore.
  
• A ton of great fixes for Windows users from Stefan Cosma, and printing should now work on Windows Vista and Windows 7.
  
• Translation updates, other fixes, and another new D-Bus method from Matt Jones.

For openSUSE users, packages are available in GNOME:Apps:Tomboy and GNOME:Apps:Tomboy:Unstable. Ubuntu Jaunty and Karmic users can use packages from our stable PPA or our development PPA.

But the most exciting things happening in the Tomboy world right now aren't really about Tomboy at all. :-)

You may have already seen Eitan Isaacson's new Note Statistics add-in. It's not the first add-in like this, but it seems to be the most comprehensive, and it's up on github for added coolness. I'm trying to decide if I should add this to the upstream Tomboy add-ins, or use it to kick-start a community add-in repository. Any opinions?

Back on the subject of Ubuntu One and note synchronization, I want to first say that Snowy, the AGPL web service for Tomboy notes, is still an active project, and we still plan to have Tomboy Online in beta in the next few months. Having both main developers on the same team at Novell just means we both get busy with work at the same time. :-)



But recently, Manuel Holzleitner has posted some mockups for the following:

• A front page for Tomboy Online
  
• A new website for Tomboy
  
• A new project website for Snowy
  
• New logos for all
  
• (Somewhat hidden) A new layout for Snowy:

I'm not a designer or UI expert, but I'm a big fan of these mockups. For one thing, I've been wanting to revamp the Tomboy website for a long time now, and Manuel's idea of unifying the design of all of these sites seems obvious in retrospect. I also think the proposed logos are ridiculously cute and web-appropriate. There seem to be a few folks interested in helping us out with our HTML/CSS, etc, so I'm really looking forward to having a better-looking Snowy in the near future.

Once we expand our test suite a bit and work through our deployment story, I don't think there will be much standing in the way of a Tomboy Online alpha running Snowy.



Of course, in the mean time, people can use Ubuntu One, since those guys were awesome enough to use the same REST API for sync as Snowy uses. In fact, as I've mentioned before, Rodrigo and Stuart from Canonical both helped out with the design of this API, and even the implementation in Snowy. It's still proprietary software, but at least the guys working on it are awesome. ;-)

And if you have been wanting to get your notes from Tomboy to Ubuntu One to your Android device, there is now working code to do this in Tomdroid's web-sync branch. Thanks to Benoit Garret holding my hand, I was even able to contribute a patch. :-P With Benoit's latest code in bzr, you can now sync Tomdroid with Ubuntu One. There are still a few fixes needed to make this releasable, but for anyone who's looking to get involved in Android development, here's a fun project to hack on for you!

In a similar story, Cornelius Hald has been updating Conboy (a C port of Tomboy for Maemo devices) so that it, too, can sync with Ubuntu One. It already supported Snowy sync last I heard, so the only hurdle was (again) supporting the changes in OAuth 1.0a. Last week Cornelius got it working, so I wouldn't be surprised if he has a release soon.

In other fun news, about a month ago Mohanaraj Gopala Krishnan emailed me to discuss a presentation he was planning for the FOSS.my conference in Malaysia. The topic of the presentation was Tomboy, Snowy, web sync, Ubuntu One, etc etc. Go read his fun slides on his blog .

That's all for now! I'll talk to you again after non-Canadian Thanksgiving.

Rumor has it that, during latest UDS, Ubuntu planned to drop Gimp from the default distro and the LiveCD. I won't comment this decision as 1) I have no clue if that's a rumor or more, 2) it was already commented too much, 3) I'm not a whiner, 4) there's a rationale behind that decision and I think I understand it, 5) the full Gimp is only one apt-get away.

But some were concerned about the lack of basic image editing. Enters F-Spot, the loved Photo Manager and his little brother, the --view mode. The --view mode is a standalone application, which, on top of F-spot loaders and widgets, provide a simple (ala eog) image viewer, which only view the images, and let you browse the metadata. This is it. Or was it 1h30 ago. With very few code, I plugged the main F-Spot editors inside the single view mode. And that worked quite well !

Of course, F-Spot editors are nowhere close to Gimp's, and don't even aim too. But they cover 90% of your daily usage and are (probably) simpler to use than Gimp. And even more, you can write (read contribute) some additional ones in very few lines of code. e.g. the BlackAndWhite extension is 120 lines long with the UI, despite behing optimized to run on Simd !



Expect this to be available soon on git, and a bit later in a release !