After quite some time I went on a trip to Ireland again. The first two days I stayed in Longford and went on a sight-seeing tour, i.e., a friend drove me around. Finally I could see the river Shannon and Mount St. Patrick. From the statue which is some meters up the hill we had a lovely view over the little islands below. There was Achill as well where I once ambitiously wanted to take part in a half-marathon. Needless to say I had some excuses not to go there. I think we also went to Westport. Nice tourist town with colourful houses. On our way back and before going to Lord of the Dance in Roscommon we drove through uninhabited valleys and came to the only fjord in Ireland. Somehow the whole journey reminded me a bit of the volcanoe tour on Lanzarote. It's a bizarre and lovely landscape. After Lord of the Dance there was dense fog and we could only crawl back to Longford. There were no houses on miles on end, no cars either. Only thick fog. But then it approached. The Gritter (not the Critter as I first thought). I could see huge yellow lights subdued by the fog on the other lane. My friend said: I think that's The Gritter. He seemed somehow agitated and excited. He repeated several times: I think this is The Gritter. I didn't dare asking. My friend slowed down even more and I thought he's going to stop for an encounter with The Gritter. I still didn't dare asking. Little stones were making noises when hitting the car. And then it was gone. The Gritter. The Gritter is the creature that grits salt on the street. Somehow I was relieved when it was gone. I felt like in this film 'The Fog' and the gritter being a lost soul coming out from the fog to have its revenge.
I was really lucky in Dublin then on my walk to the lighthouse. There was sun and almost no wind at all.

The River Shannon


The Fjord





Dublin Bay





Bay with Lighthouse



The Lighthouse



Lighthouse Walk



A Seagull on the Salty Beach

It is cold outside ... but for the ones longing for spring or summer, well there is time for every season and sunny cold winter is better than rainy fall.

Just the cold feet suck.

Relaxed a lot between the holidays, spent new years eve at colleagues with yummy food and relaxed chatting, watched various of 25c3 talks, but did not visit Berlin.

At work since 5th of January again, with the 6th being a public holiday here.

On the 6th we ventured to Pottenstein, where they hold a catholic procession through town ... and burn hundreds of fires around the valley... The latter is the reason for the large number of visitors :) Took and uploaded some pictures (go right in the photostream).
Pretty cold there, nice fires, but well .. i like easter fires more :)

Wine 1.1.12 packages published, lots of security updates released as usual.

Relaxation mostly gone after 4 days of work. :/

Update: Situation is again under control. Benji Weber, Masim Sugianto and Andre Duffeck have setup mirrors (THANKS!) - see MIRRORS file. Temporarily the Live CDs (not the USBs) will be automatically redirected to Benji's.

---

Since the release announcement of the Unofficial KDE 3.5 Live CD for openSUSE 11.1 the server where the ISOs are hosted at has been running out of bandwidth due to the huge amount of requests for downloading those files, and since the server also host other important client accounts, the sysadmin offered me two choices:

1. disable the account
2. get mirrors around
   

In the meantime I was forced to move the files away and wait for some mirrors to fight back all the download requests. So, whoever can provide mirroring of these files please contact me (comment, email or IRC)! Torrents are also allowed and recommended!

My apologies for any inconvenience caused...

P.S.: I didn't expected all this traffic around the ISOs... the openSUSE 11.0 KDE3 Live CDs didn't get that many attention. Well, it's a good sign though ;-)

Quoting "Unofficial KDE 3.5 Live CD for openSUSE 11.1" story from openSUSE News:

Want classic KDE on openSUSE, without the full DVD download? Carlos Goncalves has you covered. openSUSE 11.1 Live CDs and USB images featuring KDE 3.5 are now available for download.

Created by openSUSE community member Carlos Goncalves, the KDE 3.5 Live CD and USB images contain openSUSE 11.1 plus several key updates.

In addition to KDE 3.5, the Live CD offers OpenOffice.org 3.0, Smolt, Amarok 1.4.10, KDEPIM3, Firefox 3.0.4, K3b, and many other useful applications. You can see the entire package list here: package-lists-openSUSE

And, of course, openSUSE has the current KDE releases covered as well. You can download the official openSUSE 11.1 KDE4 Live CDs based on KDE 4.1.3, or if you want to follow KDE development, Stephan Binner has created a KDE Four Live CD featuring KDE 4.2 Beta 2.

Note that the KDE 3.5 live CD is an "unofficial" release. Even though it's not a formal release, we're excited by the work Carlos has put into supporting KDE 3.5 and showing what can be done with the build service. Want to create your own Live CD featuring openSUSE? See Carlos Build Service Live CD project on creating a Live CD here: home:cgoncalves:LiveCD, and Masim's "How to Make openSUSE 11.1 KDE 3.5 LiveCD or LiveDVD" article.

Download

openSUSE 11.1 KDE3 Live CD and USB are available for i686 and x86_64 architectures:

• openSUSE 11.1 KDE3 Live CD: i686 (md5, sha1), x86_64 (md5, sha1)
• openSUSE 11.1 KDE3 Live USB: i686 (md5, sha1), x86_64 (md5, sha1) (instructions)

If you want to report any bug found use Novell's Bugzilla for better tracking. Feedback can be sent via email, IRC and comment in here.

A huge thanks to Stephan 'Beineri' Binner, Stephan 'coolo' Kulow, and Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier for their assistance and effort!

We hope that the openSUSE community will find it useful and have a lot of fun with KDE 3.5!

Mirrors administrators around the world, I think I will need your help! Please mirror these files and let me know the URL so I can point people out to your mirrors instead ;-)

This is just a short reminder that in openSUSE 11.1, it is possible to search online for packages in YaST as described in this blog (thanks to Lukas and Bubli for making this reality!).

In short, just type on command line:

/sbin/yast2 webpin_package_search

and you will get this UI for an online search and install of packages:

Enjoy!

People interested in openSUSE and kernel development probably know about the existence of the Kernel Of The Day (KOTD). This is the latest and greatest code from the internal kernel source repository that is build once a day and synced out to ftp.suse.com. The intention of the KOTD is to ease the testing and running of development snapshots that likely become the next maintenance update.

Some people might have noticed the Kernel: projects that produce a quite heavy load on the build farm. These are KOTD projects that are mirrored to the openSUSE Build Service every night around 4pm CET if there are changes in the internal source repositories.

Currently the following KOTD projects exist:

• Kernel:HEAD is the KOTD of openSUSE:Factory
• Kernel:SL111_BRANCH is the KOTD of openSUSE 11.1
• Kernel:SL110_BRANCH is the KOTD of openSUSE 11.0
• Kernel:SL103_BRANCH is the KOTD of openSUSE 10.3

Additionally there are two projects that are related to upstream kernel development:

• Kernel:Vanilla includes the latest sources from Linus Torvalds’ linux-2.6 GIT tree
• Kernel:linux-next includes the latest sources from Stephen Rothwell’s linux-next GIT tree

With the help of the openSUSE Build Service running the KOTD became even more convenient since the project repository can be added to zypper. Besides that it is now very easy to build external kernel modules (KMP) matching the KOTD.

Today, I’ve played a bit with an idea to allow starting of YaST Server module from the YaST System Services module.

The only visible difference is the additional “Configure…’ button at the bottom of the dialog. This button would be active only if there is a YaST module associated with the entry. After clicking it, the respective YaST module would be started:

With this simple principle, the YaST control center ‘Network Services’ section would be reduced to:

And all those YaST modules would be available from ‘System’ section:

This approach could be used even further. You can see that the ‘Network Services’ section contents do not really match the section name anymore. In fact, most of the items could be moved to other modules as well. E.g. introducing a module for authentication/authorization, which would cover Kerberos client, LDAP client, etc. The NFS client is in fact a part of the new Disk Partitioning module already. So, the section could vaporize completely.

However, there are drawbacks. The biggest one I see is a ‘starting point’ problem. Just imagine you want to have a Apache2 running in your system. Until now, the YaST HTTP module is installed and can be used to bootstrap your configuration – it will install the packages and help to set up the basics. But with the new approach, the apache2 package is not installed, therefore System Services module would not see the apache2 service (init script) and does not show it at all! I’m not sure how to address this. Maybe the best would be to attach the YaST  module to apache2 package or HTTP server pattern and the Software Management module would become such starting point. Would it be better? I don’t know.

Then, there is an issue of a quick access – if you are moderately experienced user, you know what you are looking for and you start a proper module right away. But to figure out what is the configuration starting point if it’s hidden in another module, that might be a blocker.

I’m sure there are more problems. Anyway, I find the idea quite useful for reducing the number of YaST modules. What do you think?

So first of all, happy new year!
I'm proud to announce the Brasero 0.9.0 release, i've build openSUSE 11.1 packages on my build service home, Mandriva also updated on cooker and i'm sure the other distros will follow as well.

The other good news is that after Brasero proposal for inclusion on GNOME 2.26, Brasero will follow some of the tips said by another fellow developers and it's going to be split into a library. This means we will have language bindings and support for another applications. The action is on trunk now.

Release notes for 0.9.0:

Updated dependencies:
GTK+ 2.14
no more libgnomeui dependency

New features:
New option not to replace symlinks by their targets
Many small and big improvement when brasero is spawned from an application plugi
n
Improved session handling

Bugs fixed:
Many fixes (to be backported in a 0.8.5 release) for video project
See ChangeLog for other ones

New translations:
latvian: Raivis Dejus <orvils@gmail.com>

Updated translations:
et.po: Translation updated by Mattias Põldaru
sv.po: Daniel Nylander <po@danielnylander.se>
de.po: Mario Blättermann <mariobl@svn.gnome.org>
es.po: Jorge Gonzalez <jorgegonz@svn.gnome.org>
hu.po: Gabor Kelemen <kelemeng@gnome.hu>
zh_CN.po: 甘露(Gan Lu) <rhythm.gan@gmail.com>
sr.po, sr@latin.po: Updated Serbian Translation (by Miloš Popović).
da.po: Kenneth Nielsen <k.nielsen81@gmail.com>
sl.po: Matej Urbančič <mateju@svn.gnome.org>

Thanks to all the people who contributed to this release through patches, transl
ations, advices, artwork, bug reports.

Homepage: http://www.gnome.org/projects/brasero

Please report bugs to: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/browse.cgi?product=brasero

Mailing List for User and Developer discussion: brasero-list@gnome.org

Svn Repository: http://svn.gnome.org/viewcvs/brasero/

Thanks to all the people who contributed to this release through patches, transl
ation, advices, artwork, bug reports.