Because of my thesis i've been away from development. But i'm still involved with openSUSE-GNOME since it's my natural environment for work.

GNOME on openSUSE 11.2 is very stable it's was build around 2.28.0 with upstream fixes, there's so many cool features for 11.2 that it feels like a new openSUSE and it's really fast compared to 11.1. Now i found zypper much more user friendly, fast (i feel that it's faster than apt) and support live upgrades just like other distros. Of course openSUSE 11.2 become faster on boot mostly because of the new kernel and ext4 (i'm not sure if some tweaks from goblin team went to the initscripts).

I encourage people to try openSUSE 11.2 (specially GNOME developers) because OBS which makes building packages easier and faster, the team is really tied to upstream (no obscure patches and downstream work without going upstream), the GNOME community is really cool and friendly and because the whole distro is stable and fast.

I tried the fprint_demo utility. Get fprint_demo for 11.2 / Factory / 11.1 But the finger print reader in Lenovo T60p doesn’t export the image. So if you have a different finger print reader on your machine, it seems you can get the images from it!

Regenerate a new keypair

The old keypair served me well during those past 8 years, but I managed to screw it up in the process of upgrading to opensuse 11.2 rc1. Here's the new public part:

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG v2.0.12 (GNU/Linux)

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Community,

for everyone not subscribed (yet) to the opensuse-project mailinglist: here is my candidacy announcement for Board Member of the openSUSE Community Board once again.

Community, Election Committee,

I herewith announce my candidacy for Board Member of the openSUSE
Community Board.

My name is Rupert, I’m 28 and I’m currently on the home stretch of
studying business administration and electrical engineering at
Darmstadt University of Technology.

I have been involved with the openSUSE Project for several years. I
started using Linux with the release of SUSE Linux 9.1 and became an
active contributor to the Project during my Internship in Product
Management at Novell/SUSE in 2007/2008. In January 2008, I have been
approved as an official openSUSE member. As an employee and afterwards
as a community volunteer, I served as the Project Manager of the
openSUSE forums merge and contributed as a moderator to the openSUSE
community until May 2009. As a Workstudent for Community Architecture,
I worked on several forums-internal projects and contributed to the
openSUSE Weekly Newsletter in 2008/2009.

Currently I’m involved in the efforts to come up with a sufficient
usability concept for the openSUSE Wiki in co-work with the Wiki- and
Booster Teams.

My contributions to the openSUSE Project so far imho reflect clearly
that I’m an organizing and coordinating kind of person and that I’m
focused on the social components of building and growing an
Open-Source Community. From my perspective, having a strong marketing
focus and thus providing sufficient support- and documentation
resources to the end user is just as important to the success of the
openSUSE Project as contributing to the distribution in a developing
capacity actually is. Just to make clear where I’m coming from.

Thanks,
Rupert

Thanks a lot for listening,
Rupert

Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften is an event to show all kinds of science in a simple way to the public. Many education facilities and companies in the Nuernberg area participated. It took place last Saturday and we had a rather long but very successful night. Our room at Georg-Simon Ohm Hochschule (technical university) was pretty well visited over the whole evening. We could welcome visitors with all kind of technology level – from pure beginners, long time Linux users to developers with deep technical knowledge. We served them 4 different dishes:

• openSUSE Education
  Lars showed the benefits openSUSE Education has for schools and students and got in contact with a Nuernberg school which now want to move 30 clients to openSUSE Education.
  
• Games on Linux
  Andreas and Marco from live.linuX-gamers.net project showed impressively what games they offer from a Live-USB stick and received pretty many “wows” and “ahhs”. To them a special thanks for supporting the openSUSE project.
• openSUSE 11.2/Desktop
  Here Juergen showed the strength of GIMP by merging two ancient city maps of Nuernberg into one. With that he was a real visitor magnet.
  Will demonstrated the latest KDE and GNOME desktops. People were impressed by Digikam’s photo management capabilities, and interested to learn how the default KDE 4 desktop can be customized to resemble a more traditional KDE 3 or GNOME desktop, and that you can install thousands of different programs with YaST instead of having to download them from some website.
• Build Service, Participation etc.
  Pretty many visitors asked how they can contribute to openSUSE and were happy that they don’t have to be a developer to contribute. Wiki edits, translation and bug reports is sufficient. The more technical audience were impressed by the opportunities the Build Service offers them for their daily work.

Our room in the university was well attended till 11pm or so and we gave a talk each hour about different topics like “Introduction to openSUSE 11.2”, “Open Source philosophy”, openSUSE Education, Games on Linux and others. We handed out more then 500 openSUSE DVDs and had way more than 500 people attending our room.

People are interested in Linux and Linux is very well received. After a few focused questions which all started with “Does this … work with Linux?” people left our room, taking a DVD and saying, “If its that good, I’ll give it a try”. Most frequent question that evening was “How do you earn money?”. As many people know at which cost a Windows license or Windows Word come its not easy to understand that our products come for free and we charge for maintenance and support.

With our room at the university where several other events took place we could take advantage of an attractive venue for visitors. Thanks to that and thanks to our people who spent a Saturday night supporting openSUSE this was a successful participation and we should continue participate at “Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften” to fill the saying “From the local to the Global”.

Hanging around on developer IRC channels and quite some mailing lists, I have answered "How do I create driver update disk?" question many times already. Usually a person asking was given RPM package with the fix and was asked to test it by creating driver update disk. Unfortunately, existing documentation leaves that poor fellow pretty helpless as for how it can be done.

There is this (almost) fossil how-to created by Henne and though it still holds up to these days, things were incredibly simplified in the meantime and now anyone can use driver update disk without any advanced technical knowledge. This post is an attempt to make up for missing documentation on the subject.

What is driver update disk and why do I need it?

Driver update disk is a mechanism to add or replace some functionality (binary, library, script, ...) in the minimalistic system of 1st stage of installation (inst-sys). Historically, it was a real physical media (CD/DVD) often used to extend inst-sys by new hardware drivers. Nowadays, its usage is neither limited to physical media, nor to deployment of device drivers.

Usually you would use driver update disk in one of following two situations:

1. Something in inst-sys is broken and you want to replace it with functional version
2. Something is not in inst-sys at all and you want to use it during installation anyway (e.g. a proprietary device driver).

OK, now how do I do it?

We will have a look at two use-cases - creating driver update disk from 1 RPM package (easy) and from two or more RPM packages (a bit more complicated, but still fairly easy), as the procedure slightly differs. We will need:

• replacement/additional RPM package(s)
• HTTP/FTP installation repository (no NFS/CIFS at the moment, sorry)

One package driver update disk

Example: during installation, you want to create /home partition with CrapwareFS which is already supported by YaST, but it fails because of bug in parted. A new parted-x.y-z.rpm seems to contain a fix for the bug. HTTP installation repository is on http://your.server.net/11.2/

1. Place fixed RPM package to HTTP installation repository (e.g. to its root directory)
2. Pass the path to fixed package (which will be one and the only component of our driver update disk) to the installer as follows:
   

   
   dud=http://your.server.net/11.2/parted-x.y-z.rpm
   

   (see picture below where exactly to type it in the installation screen)
3. Launch the installation and enjoy it, provided that updated package really fixes the bug

N packages driver update disk

Example: you have seen package slide show during installation many times already and in order not to be bored while packages are being installed, you would like to play chess (a bit artificially constructed example, but it serves the purpose of showing driver update with more packages fairly well :) ). You have already downloaded xboard-a.b-c, gnuchess-d.e-f and xorg-X11-fonts-g.h-i from contrib or other online repositories. HTTP installation repository is again on http://your.server.net/11.2

1. Place extra RPM packages to the root directory of HTTP repository (you may place it anywhere though, but then modify paths below accordingly)
2. Create a simple text file e.g. info.txt with one package per one line as follows:

   
   dud=http://your.server.net/11.2/xboard-a.b-c.rpm
   dud=http://your.server.net/11.2/gnuches-d.e-f.rpm
   dud=http://your.server.net/11.2/xorg-X11-fonts-g.h-i.rpm

3. Place info file to the root directory of HTTP repository
4. Point the installer to info file:
   

   
   info=http://your.server.net/11.2/info.txt
   





5. Launch the installation
6. As soon as you get bored, open xterm window (Ctrl-Alt-Shift-X), run xboard and play! :)

And we're done. Piece of cake, isn't it? :)

Some more notes: Currently, only HTTP and FTP repositories can handle these simplified driver updated discs. You can use, aside from RPM packages, cpio archives or fs images. If you find this functionality useful, send some beers to Steffen Winterfeld.

As you might know, Contrib is a universal repository for third-party packages. Branching of this repository to openSUSE:11.2:Contrib is going to happen on October, 30, so if you want to have your favorite application or tool included in openSUSE:11.2:Contrib, please submit your request as soon as possible.

If you already maintain some package(s) in Contrib, please spend a few minutes by checking that the package builds fine, has properly set metadata (maintainer, bugowner) etc.

Yes, I am going to Encuentro Linux 2009, and so does openSUSE!. This year the most important Linux event in Chile will be held in Valparaiso and Viña del Mar at the same time. I’ll be giving a presentation on SUSE Studio (if you didn’t already know ) on Saturday 24th, 10:00 – 11:10 AM. Of course I am taking all openSUSE 11.1 DVDs I have left, and will be a great oportunity to show on my notebook  what’s coming for 11.2.

More information (in spanish only) here. See you there!.

Kolab on openSUSE made some very good progress since my last blog update on this topic. The most visible thing to the system administrator is that all Kolab required packages are available on the build service for openSUSE_Factory which will become openSUSE_11.2 very soon and its and predecessors.

In the past Kolab depended on the project c-client for imap annotations, but about a year ago this project became less open source than it used to be. For this reason I started to look for an alternative, which was found by just removing the c-client project as a dependency for Kolab. This forces Kolab to use the php-pear-net_imap annotation code. It is perhaps not as fast as the c-client code, but I assume that this gives no problem on openSUSE based Kolab installations.

Getting rid of the c-client project has another very big advantage as it now no longer required to rebuild the php module php5-imap. This was always very very problematic, especially for the x86_64 architecture. So the current setup is really nice.

As usual with building packages, getting rid of the c-client looks easier than it actually was, as a bug in the php-pear-net_imap project resulted in a non working setup. It took quite some time, before the solution was found and Kolab started to behave correctly again

For openSUSE_11.2 the php package php5-pear-log was removed from the base distribution, which prevented many Kolab required php5-pear modules to be build. Once the package was added to the server:php:applications build repository all the required Kolab required php5-pear modules started to build properly.

So for the brave at heart, give Kolab on openSUSE-11.2 a try. For the less brave ones try Kolab on openSUSE-11.1.

Oh and don’t forget to vote for Kolab in openSUSE’s feature tracking system openFATE!

 First of all i didn't post a long an entry for a long time, so it's time to do it.  Today because it's my 25th birthday.
This is a special birthday for me because i feel my life changing constantly (which is awesome). I finished my degree in Physics Engineering last month and in 3 weeks i will deliver my masters thesis in Physics Engineering too, before the end of the year i will do the final presentation and get the masters degree. This is taking me lot's of time, so no time for contributing for GNOME and other projects (sorry last year will be better i hope). 

So for now, you can see some news from me on twitter or facebook (yes i ended up being a facebook addict mostly to get some fun around with my friends)


PS: Gwibber developers, please fix 100% CPU bug that is preventing me from running gwibber all the time

kthxbye :)