We started our museum tour in the Albrecht Dürer Haus. That's a great place. The ghost of Dürer's wife is still in it and she answers all the questions you may have. What I liked most was Dürer's workshop with all the colours, animal paws, stones, shells, sketches. Wonderful. Would have liked to move in. But there was one room I have bad memories of. Edith and Antje hung me up on a cord and made a photograph. They used a peg and hung me up on my tail! They can be really cruel. Otherwise I enjoyed this museum. The kitchen was really cool. It even had a toilet in one corner. If the meal is chocolate-free you can unsuspiciously get rid of it. Really liked that. After an hour though I fell asleep as they tortured me with so many photographs.

When I woke up a woman in a costume was holding me in her hands. I thought I must have been put into a time machine. But then I saw Edith taking a photograph of me and this woman. The woman in the costume was nice. She really seemed to like me. There was a bunch of people looking at us. It turned out they were waiting for this woman to show them around in this castle we were in. But of course she found me more important than her visitors. After the shooting we went into a garden with funny and sad figures. They were made out of wood. One was looking so sad that I started talking to it. The figure told me it wanted to sit at the water front some steps away from the main path. But there was this other figure already. So the sad figure was there at the main path holding its head down as it not wanted to be stared at all the time. That's what it told me. But maybe there was something else. I wasn't sure. I was attracted by a figure sitting on a piece of wood. It was so calm and not irritated by anything. I told it to make contact with the sad one to cheer it up. Then I went to another one that was lying on its back. I couldn't figure out what it was doing. It looked like someone in the gym. I tried to imitate it but failed poorly. That's because I'm on wheels. I can't put my wheels up in the air. Then I was put down on a flower that made me sneeze. They are so unconsiderate sometimes. I almost fainted and they carried me to the next museum.

The Spielzeugmuseum was enjoyable. We weren't allowed to take photographs at all. Which was fine. But that also meant there was no reason for Edith and Antje to put me anywhere. I couldn't sit in the Puppenstubn or take place in the cowboy fort, letting redskins in. Otherwise sometimes I was really glad to be forced to stay inside the bag. Those puppets from centuries ago were really scary. They would beat out the shit of me. Most scaring was a whole family of zombies. At least that's what they looked like according to Edith. Amazingly she was right. We also saw many of Antje's childhood toys. She really got silent when she realized that she's so old that her own toys are to be found in a museum. Haha. What really amazed me was the discovery that mice always have been favourite toys. Of course the exhibits were uglier than me, but quite OK compared to some other figures. There was this Mainzelmännchen figure. Ted was his name. I'm not sure but I think he lost part of his ear. I'm sure that was Antje's Ted. She once told me she chew his ear and bit parts of it off. That was when she was young of course. What she no longer is. Haha. Edith didn't discover any of her childhood toys. That's what she pretended at least. Besides some bored kids, there were many elderly people in this museum. One of the mothers was asked by her daughter: 'Can you still buy that in a shop?' She sounded a bit weary when she answered: 'Of course. You can buy that in any shop you want.' It was one of her own childhood toys. I found that very entertaining. As well as all the American visitors who found everything very amazing. I heard Antje mumbling: 'What the fuck is amazing about my childhood toys? We're not looking at dinosaurs, are we?' And then I saw them. Cars. Many of them. Big enough for me to drive them. I sneaked out of the bag, asked the blonde sitting behind the wheel of the sports car to please get out and then I sat down. I crashed with some other cars, just because those ancient figures couldn't drive. So I jumped into the bag again and waited for the next entertainment to come my way. There it was. A big Merry-Go-Round. I wanted to sit down but it was protected by glass. That made me so furious that I fell asleep after some minutes of screaming and beating the floor.

The last place we visited was an exhibiton hall with paintings. When I saw all the cats and dogs from one of the painters I wondered why the hell Antje never paints me. She was only drawn towards two big blue paintings where you can make out neither head nor tail. I just don't get it. Fortunately we went all home then.

We are redesigning the YaST Expert Partitioner for openSUSE 11.1 and SLE11. The main idea is to have a navigation tree with all available storage devices on the left side and to display information on the right side along with buttons to perform appropriate actions. See the screenshot.

RPMs are available in the openSUSE Build Server in the repository home:aschnell. They are far from finished by you can already navigate in the tree and inspect you storage system. It should be possible to see where we are heading with the redesign. You can install them on your openSUSE 11.0 Beta 3.

Ever since zypper came along I hated it. It was slow, buggy, and used a ton of resources.

Well, I installed openSUSE 11.0b3 yesterday and the zypper/libzypp there is massively improved. I don’t think it’s possible to overstate just how much of an improvement it really is. Normally I just make rcd/rug work on whatever new release comes along and continue using that. Zypper and PackageKit are so good now that I’m giving that up. So congratulations to the zypp team — I know they caught a lot of flack in the past, but I think this release will finally put a lot of that to rest.

1. check if you have a processor that supports virtualization:

2. create the image to hold the guest OS (10G size in this case):

3. insert KVM kernel modules in the kernel if you compiled them as modules

4. copy opensuse dvd/cd on your hard disk:

5. install the quest:

6. start your new installed system:

Do you want more?
* use -m parameter to specify the ammount of RAM for virtual machine (default 128MB)
* use -incoming [protocol:params] if you want to move your virtual machine
on the other machine
* check http://kvm.qumranet.com for documentation

Long story

(Go to the short story if you're too lazy to read a lot.)

Some time ago I wrote about the usual confusion between the terms "commercial" and "propietary". FLOSS is commercial software because it's not only driven by the generosity of some developers with their spare time. A FLOSS developer can be paid by a software company, either by being employed (the most common case currently) or either by a consultancy/bounty basis. And there are still even open source companies which still indirectly refer to FLOSS as non-commercial when they compare both most popular development models nowadays by saying "open source VS commercial software".

And why the bounty system is not so popular? Well, because:
1) It's very project-driven: bounties are usually published in means very related to the project. This can be considered an advantage because only motivated/interested developers will apply, but sometimes the project is too small, too recent or not very popular, or with a lot of similar projects around.
2) There's no strong system to manage the bounty in respect to requirements, secure payment, trust system between parts, etc.
3) Many people don't advocate for it (or they advocate for a bounty system that works as a task exchange without money intervention: I fix this for you if you fix this for me) because, we know, one of the reasons of the excellence of free software is because developers love what they do without rewards. (But IMHO one of the big downsides is also because there are also important tasks in a project that nobody likes to do. Besides, I think people tend to spend less spare time on free software as their age grows.)

An exception to the 1st item could be bountycounty.org: a site that tries to announce bounties from free software projects. However, it seems to be an initiative that hasn't got much audience (the last bounty is 2 years old), either because the people that offer bounties forget to notify to this system, or, maybe because in the end the bounty development model doesn't work in FLOSS?

Well, I don't think this is the case, because there's a bounty system that is succeeding, and which is also an exception to the (2) item of the above list: Google Summer of Code.

However, GSoC has the following disadvantages to be "complete" for this matter:
a) Only students can apply.
b) All projects happen in the same time-frame and have the same duration (a summer).
c) All bounties are the same for each developer.
d) A concrete company controls all the process (because, it's true, they put the money).

But we need something similar to GSoC (similar in the "It Works" aspect) and that saves these problems and is not a mere "announcement" site like BountyCounty.org.

Some initiatives have appeared that tried to solve these situation: BountySource.com and SourceForge.net marketplace. The common problem to both is that they try to solve it by attracting the developers to host their projects, so this causes big and mature projects not to apply (because they have currently good hosting solutions, or are self-hosted, like Mozilla projects for instance).

One of the ideas is to implement a bounty system in our bug tracking system software, like Bugzilla. If I had time and liked Perl more, I would try to contribute something for it. Maybe we're in the chicken-egg problem here: we need a bounty system for that task.

Surprisingly, there's already a general purpose web-based service for this task: RentACoder.com. But I haven't seen any free software projects using it, because it seems very focused on propietary developments.

And then it happened: Some weeks ago a new FLOSS-oriented service was born: FOSS Factory. I wanted to start using it by publishing some mini-bounties (which hopefully would grow if other people are interested, similarly to voting systems in Bug Tracking software), but I got disappointed when even the project creation had a cost. But yesterday I received this e-mail:


Andres G. Aragoneses,

Thanks so much for your interest in FOSS Factory! As one of our early adopters, I wanted to keep you in the loop on two very important developments.

First, in response to user feedback, we've removed all costs for creating FOSS Factory projects! Instead, we now charge a 5% transaction fee on payouts. This aligns our interests with yours by ensuring that we will only make money if your projects succeed. It also enables developers to post their own projects without having to spend money.

Second, we recently released our website source code under a FOSS license. You can now download the code from http://www.fossfactory.org/get-source.php. Our primary reason for doing this was so that we could take advantage of our own system to help improve the site. In case you're interested, we've already posted a few bounties for improvements that we haven't had time to implement ourselves: http://www.fossfactory.org/project.php?p=p30&tab=subprojects. Please feel free to participate.

If you have any questions or concerns, please either reply to this message, or email me directly at jjgignac {at} fossfactory {dot} org. Your feedback is very important to us!

Sincerely,

John-Paul Gignac
President and Founder
FOSS Factory Inc.

Unfortunately, there's a 5% transaction charge for each bounty, but hey, we need to support their service! Also, the software is PHP based, so I won't likely spend time on improving it (you know, I already fled from PHP and Perl some years ago ;) ).

But I like the initiative and I'll start to publish the bugs/features I consider interesting to have, but have no time/interest to hack on. Here are the first ones (take in account that, if every voter of the bug payed 10$, the bounty would be enough attractive for a developer I guess, because they are not very complicated):

- Thunderbird/Seamonkey feature Auto-watch threads you've posted to (21 votes)
- Thunderbird/Seamonkey regression Allow edit of unsent message (Unsent folder messages should open to a compose window when double click) (26 votes)
- Bugzilla's feature (or fix for highly confusing workflow for newcomers) Move all bug activity onto main bug screen (17 votes)
- Banshee's feature (currently handled by an outdated addin AFAIK) Banshee needs a way to cleanup (remove stale tracks) (reporter+4CC; no voting system in BGO)
- Banshee's feature (patch proposed but I guess someone should make it apply to trunk) [Patch] Automatically scan music folders for new songs (reporter+6CC; no voting system in BGO)
- Gnome's bug (someone wrote a patch but not sure if it will finally make it for 2.24...) The ``Replace File'' dialog should display the two file sizes, times, etc. (reporter+23CC; no voting system in BGO)
- Monsoon's crazy feature (maybe implies the creation of a new Gtk widget) When the option "Minimize to notification area on close" is not enabled, we should have a new widget on the title bar for that action (just me)
- Real fix for Mono's issue (because we already have a workaround) System.Windows.Forms dependency on GTK makes code to crash if it uses ATK# and GTK_MODULES contains 'atk-bridge'

The last of the issues affected our project until we found a workaround overriding environment variables. If we reach our milestones properly and nobody has fixed it at that time, we could have a try! Now we still have tons of work which Calvin and the team have perfectly outlined. Unfortunately I haven't helped in this doc effort because I was busy debugging the issues I mentioned in my last post, which turned out to be an invalid bug (but at least gave me an idea for a Gendarme Rule) and a GAPI parser bug that Mike fixed) and because on thursday afternoon I was affected by some small rock ;) and probably was the cause of me trying to debug something I didn't correctly updated on Friday (and maybe because of our dumb deployment methodology that Mike has already blamed). Well, I'll talk about this in a later entry...

Short story

Maybe this day will be remembered in the Free Software community as the day in which a first software draft is presented in order to fill some awesome ideas from devs like Nat Friedman about a general-purpose bounty system:

FOSS Factory

Especially interesing is their reasonings for its creation.

Update 12-AUG-2009: Another interesting service I found (while reading the comments of this blog entry) is COfundOS.org

Update 10-MAY-2010: Wow, it seems that a new project was born, which is getting a lot of press and support, to fund projects (but any kind of projects, not only software). It's called Kickstart and it's key feature is that people can pledge for a project but if it doesn't reach the amount required, the people are never charged. I wonder if there should be an option to have projects not have a deadline (more suitable to bugs in bugzillas ;) ). And after reading the FAQ I still cannot figure out how they judge if a project was successfull...

Update 16-SEP-2010: Over the last months I've been still thinking about all this and wondering why the FossFactory project didn't really see much adoption. Other initiatives such as Kickstart have had some success (for example the Diaspora is an example of a software project that just released something thanks to this kind of funding) but it doesn't fit very well to how small unit-of-progress would be rewarded (i.e. small bugs in bug tracking systems as opposed to whole projects) so I guess there's still some hope in micro-payment systems for this.

And indeed there is. It turns out that I joined some months ago a new company that has an internal system to reward in this way (all is explained here -- the Love Machine), and even our CEO went away some months to develop this sole idea as a separate company. Now, the way he decided to pursue it is very interesting: develop a workflow system of little rewards that companies can adopt with their employees (or with their "contractors", because with this workflow they actually don't need to have fixed salaries... --which may be good or bad, and is subject for another discussion).

I don't know much about the success of that project actually. But what I know now is that a new service around the same idea was recently born is really having a lot of adoption, because it's actually not a product that can be deployed in a company, but just a product that is deployed by a company which hosts the service, and then anyone can send or receive micro-payments about anything so it's not a service from a company to a company but from a company to an end-user. And the real good idea behind this is that their micro-payment system makes them be the intermediary between you and the grant-receivers you want to donate to, every month. You don't ever need again to pay N subscriptions to donate to N causes/organizations you like, you just subscribe to them, and then every month (actually everyday) you decide where your money goes too.

Didn't I explain it correctly? Well, go to see the video which is more than a thousand words and more than a million images: FLATTR.

Update 18-FEB-2013: Lots of initiatives popping up now in regards to this, so just a simple update to list some of them:

• BountySource.com
• FreedomSponsors.org
• GitTip.com

Oeste Digital Network (ODN), a tech group part of a Portuguese association which I am involved in, some days ago was invited by ANAE (Education and Animation National Association) to join a *particularly* mini LAN party for children between 4 and 7 years old. This LAN party will take three days (Friday to Sunday, and afternoons only obviously) in June, and the goal is to ODN take care of the games. Therefore computer games will be needed!

Since ODN is trying more and more to put proprietary software out of the way we are looking for open source game solutions to run on the 15 laptops that will be available. Digging a while for this "requirement" it seemed to be more difficult than we thought it would be - most of the games aren't suitable for kids and others are not really playable or appealable judging by their point of view. Currently we are looking for three to five games, which at least one should be multiplayer.

So, please if you are aware of good open source games for this range of ages let me know!

P.S.: If you are still wondering why this event is so *particularly* then what would you think if I tell you that it will be hosted in a bus hã!? ;-) Yeah, that's right, in a BUS!!

In 10.3, zypper modifyrepo (mr) only allowed you to enable/disable one repository and enable/disable autorefresh for it. In 11.0 the options have grown in number a bit. Did i mention the nice help texts?

$ zypper help mr
modifyrepo (mr) <options> <alias|#|uri>
modifyrepo (mr) <options> <--all|--remote|--local|--medium-type>

Modify properties of repositories specified by alias, number or URI
or by the '--all, --remote, --local, --medium-type' aggregate options.

Command options:
-d, --disable             Disable the repository (but don't remove it).
-e, --enable              Enable a disabled repository.
-r, --refresh             Enable auto-refresh of the repository.
-R, --no-refresh          Disable auto-refresh of the repository.
-n, --name                Set a descriptive name for the repository.
-p, --priority <1-99>     Set priority of the repository.
-k, --keep-packages       Enable RPM files caching.
-K, --no-keep-packages    Disable RPM files caching.
-a, --all                 Apply changes to all repositories.
-l, --local               Apply changes to all local repositories.
-t, --remote              Apply changes to all remote repositories.
-m, --medium-type <type>  Apply changes to repositories of specified type.

This is what you will see in zypper 0.11.3. The aggregate options (and the -k options) were added just recently by our new colleague Josef Reidinger. Those familiar with 10.3 zypper, note that the --enable-autorefresh/-a and --disable-autorefresh options are now deprecated (-a shorthand even had to be removed because of conflict with --all) in favor of --refresh and --no-refresh options. This change was introduced for the sake of consistency with other commands' options. All the options will be described in more detail in the man page soon.

Few examples

To disable autorefresh for all repositories, do:

$ zypper mr -Ra
Nothing to change for repository 'openSUSE-DVD 11.0'.
Autorefresh has been disabled for repository 'fate'.
Nothing to change for repository 'factory'.
Nothing to change for repository 'packman'.
Autorefresh has been disabled for repository 'factory-nonoss'.
Autorefresh has been disabled for repository 'factory-debug'.
Nothing to change for repository 'vbox'.
Autorefresh has been disabled for repository 'zypp:svn'.

To disable all cd/dvd repositories, do:

$ zypper mr -d -m cd -m dvd
Repository 'openSUSE-DVD 11.0' has been sucessfully disabled.

To enable RPM caching of RPM files for all remote (http/https/ftp) repositories, do:

$ zypper mr -kt
Nothing to change for repository 'factory'.
RPM files caching has been enabled for repository 'factory-debug'.
RPM files caching has been enabled for repository 'factory-nonoss'.
RPM files caching has been enabled for repository 'fate'.
Nothing to change for repository 'packman'.
RPM files caching has been enabled for repository 'vbox'.
RPM files caching has been enabled for repository 'zypp:svn'.

Of course don't forget to use zypper clean when you run out of free disk space then :O)

In case you just updated to Firefox 3 (openSUSE 11.0 beta2 includes Firefox 2.9.95 (Firefox 3 beta 5) and you wondered why are your bookmarks and history not working, here is the probable cause & solution. Firefox 3 uses sqlite back-end for history, bookmarks and other stuff. So doing zypper in libsqlite3-0 and restarting firefox should make them work again.

I said i would write about zypper's XML output almost two months ago. Hm... obviously other stuff gained higher priority (i will get back to the XML output later). In the openSUSE Updater applets, the focus has shifted from the zypp back-end to PackageKit and i focused on other zypper/libzypp features and fixes. I will write about them in the following few posts.

Just recently i re-enabled all the original zypper search functionality (except --match-all which will be hopefully comming soon). Apart from the original features, there is one frequently requested change in the presenation of the search results (and thanx to the zypp and sat-solver guys it is also fast :O).

The old zypper listed all available instances of a matching package, all versions from all repositories. But people are more often interested in what the package is about than what versions are available from each respository. Hence, since 0.11.1 you will see a list of packages grouped by their names and types with a summary column instead of repository and version column:

$ zypper search browser
Reading installed packages...

S | Name                | Summary                          | Type
--+---------------------+----------------------------------+--------
i | kim-browser         | CIM Browser for CIM-XML Protocol | package
  | mysql-query-browser | A Graphical MySQL Query Shell    | package
  | tvbrowser           | digital TV guide                 | package

This output caught a few users unprepared. I hope learning that --details/-s can turn on a detailed list similar to the old one satisfied most of them:

$ zypper search -s browser
Reading installed packages...

S | Name                | Type    | Version    | Arch   | Repository
--+---------------------+---------+------------+--------+-----------
i | kim-browser         | package | 0.3-208    | x86_64 | factory
v | kim-browser         | package | 0.3-208    | i586   | factory
  | mysql-query-browser | package | 5.0r12-183 | x86_64 | factory
  | mysql-query-browser | package | 5.0r12-183 | i586   | factory
  | tvbrowser           | package | 2.6.3-22   | noarch | factory

Since zypper 0.11.2 the summaries will be abbreviated as needed to fit the width of your console screen. This is how it looks on an 80 character wide console:

$ search music
Reading installed packages...

S | Name                  | Summary                                 | Type
--+-----------------------+-----------------------------------------+-----------
  | asc-music             | Music for Advanced Strategic Command--> | package
  | libmusicbrainz        | Library That Provides Access to the M-> | srcpackage
  | libmusicbrainz-devel  | Include Files and Libraries Mandatory-> | package
  | libmusicbrainz3       | Library That Provides Access to the M-> | srcpackage
  | libmusicbrainz3-6     | Library That Provides Access to the M-> | package
  | libmusicbrainz3-devel | Library That Provides Access to the M-> | package
i | libmusicbrainz4       | Library That Provides Access to the M-> | package
  | texlive-bin-musictex  | MusiXTeX and MusicTeX                   | package
  | texlive-musictex      | MusiXTeX and MusicTeX                   | package

Of course you can use --no-abbrev/-A global option to turn the abbreviation off - the output will be messy, but you can read the whole summaries. Another way to obtain this info is to use zypper info.

...and don't forget to try zypper help search, zypper has nice help texts :O) I'll be fixing zypper update and writing a lot of documentation in the meantime.