openSUSE 11.0 with tons of impovement has been announced on June 19, 2008. Since then it was a busiest day for me : setting up a local mirror providing iso image for openSUSE fans in Indonesia, arrange openSUSE 11.0 release party and preparing Indonesian openSUSE community regular meeting on Saturday, June 21, 2008. We have planned all of these since last month but I must updated the planning with latest news and preparation.

Beside the planning, I also read some comments that noticed me with problem regarding openSUSE LiveUSB tutorial. The tutorial used openSUSE 11.0 RC1 and the modified initrd as noticed on the tutorial doesn’t fit with the GM version.

I have updated the initrdud that *should be*  applied with openSUSE 11.0 GM. I got it succeeded with my 2 GB USB Flash Disk. The overall process to make openSUSE 11.0 GM LiveUSB are same as described on the previous tutorial with RC1. The different thing is initrdud file.

Download the modified initrd file (called initrdud) from this link.

How to Modify the Initrd

Initrd modification needed to add nls_cp437.ko, module for mount vfat partition that commonly used by USB flash disk.

1. Preparing your LiveUSB ISO. In this example, I used openSUSE-11.0-KDE4-LiveCD-i386.iso. Change with your downloaded LiveCD ISO instead
2. Preparing, Extract and update the initrd

su
mkdir unpacked
mkdir /mnt/iso
mkdir /mnt/squash
mount -o loop openSUSE-11.0-KDE4-LiveCD-i386.iso /mnt/iso/
cd unpacked
gzip -dc /mnt/iso/boot/i386/loader/initrd | cpio -i
mount -o loop /mnt/iso/openSUSE-*read-only.* /mnt/squash/
cp /mnt/squash/lib/modules/*/kernel/fs/nls/nls_cp437.ko lib/modules/*/kernel/fs/nls/
cp /mnt/squash/lib/modules/*/kernel/fs/nls/nls_iso8859-1.ko lib/modules/*/kernel/fs/nls/
cp -r /mnt/squash/lib/modules/*/kernel/fs/vfat lib/modules/*/kernel/fs/
cp -r /mnt/squash/lib/modules/*/kernel/fs/fat lib/modules/*/kernel/fs/


3. Edit the linuxrc file and change /bin/sh on top of the file with /bin/sh -x. This used for verbose option while boot, every command will be display before executed so if there is a problem, it will more easier to resolve.
4. Modify the include file and change (replace) the function CDDevice with below code. This will change LiveCD to LiveUSB.

function CDDevice {
	# /.../
	# changed this function so that it finds config.isoclient on vfat disks, e.g. USB drives
	# ----
	find /lib/modules/*/kernel/fs/nls/nls* -exec insmod {} \; # needed for vfat filesystem
        find /lib/modules/*/kernel/fs/*fat/*.ko -exec insmod {} \; # needed for vfat filesystem
        insmod /lib/modules/*/kernel/drivers/usb/storage/usb-storage.ko # needed for USB
	sleep 5 # fixme; do this in a proper way
	cddevs=`/usr/sbin/hwinfo --disk | grep sd | grep "Device File:" | cut -f2 -d: | cut -f2 -d " "` # looks for disks instead of CDs
	echo cddevs $cddevs
	for i in $cddevs;do
		i=$i"1" # fixme; looks on the first partition only
		echo i $i
		if [ -b $i ];then
			test -z $cddev && cddev=$i || cddev=$cddev:$i
			echo cddev $cddev
		fi
	done
	if [ -z $cddev ]; then
		systemException \
			"Failed to detect CD drive !" \
		"reboot"
	fi
}

5. Repack the initrd. We will place the initrdud in root of cureent folder :

find . | cpio -o -H newc | gzip -9 > ../initrdud

Hope the above process solve the problem while making openSUSE 11.0 GM LiveUSB. Don’t forget to place a comment if you got any problem regarding this tutorial.

Wget is a great command line  for grabbing things from the web, but it doesn’t ship with macs. So if you want to install it here are a few steps:

1. download the source file: http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/wget/wget-1.11.tar.gz
2. compile and install it:

tar -zxvf wget-1.11.tar.gz
cd wget-1.11/
./configure
make
sudo make install

Now the binary file is located in /usr/local/bin/. If you use bash as your default shell then you can add:

PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin; export PATH

in your .bash_profile.

Or if you want, you can do a symbolic link to have it in /usr/bin/:

sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/wget /usr/bin/wget

That's all and ... happy downloading.

linux-1pi7:~ # yast lan list
0       79c970 [PCnet32 LANCE], Not configured

1       79c970 [PCnet32 LANCE], Not configured

linux-1pi7:~ # yast lan edit id=0 ip=2001:15c0:668e::5 prefix=48
Ethernet Network Card
MAC : 08:00:27:80:b5:07
Device Name: eth1
Started automatically at boot
IP address: 2001:15c0:668e::5/48


linux-1pi7:~ # yast lan list
0       Ethernet Network Card, 2001:15c0:668e::5

1       79c970 [PCnet32 LANCE], Not configured

linux-1pi7:~ #

For folks not that used to web interfaces, the openSUSE Forums team provides a secondary interface to our forums – NNTP. The intention of this post is to raise your attention on this possibility.

What is NNTP?

Using our NNTP interface, you’re able to participate in forums discussions without accessing the web interface at all. You’re able to use any newsreader supporting the RFC standard to read and even write posts. Actually your user-id gets recognized in the web interface if you set up your newsreader properly.

From my personal experience especially developers are in general more familiar in using mailing lists instead of browsing a web interface. One of our desires is to get more developers to the board. On the one hand, developers can provide competent assistance especially to our new users – on the other hand, the forums are able to provide a lot of feedback back to developers. The advantages are obvious!

The NNTP interface to the forums provides a neat way to browse significantly more content with less effort. You can get a quick overview about forums content using NNTP. Certainly you’ll not be able to see the great template created by Robert Lihm, but every choice has its drawback – Good to have a choice at least, isn’t it?

For detailed instructions on how to set up your newsreader properly to participate in forums discussions, be sure to check out the NNTP section within our forums FAQ.

We’re really looking forward to your contribution!

[PS. I coudn’t resist. I just had to name the package ‘*Kit’. ]

Need to do a firmware update with a DOS program?

Can get tricky if you don’t have a DOS system around. We used to provide a bootable floppy image for that in the past (package dosbootdisk). But who has a floppy drive anyway?

So, here comes the new
FirmwareUpdateKit package. Install it and run run, e.g. fuk --grub foobar.exe That’s it. The next reboot gives you the option to start DOS and run foobar.exe.

fuk can also create bootable ISOs and, of course, even floppy images.

This blog does not add any information to the documentation you can find around. Anyway, it is not too long since someone was able to make Babylon dictionaries usable by software other than the proprietary Babylon application. And they have been trying for years… so it has not been a trivial step

If you do not know Stardict, you can get it from Yast. This is the official site.

A few dictionaries are also linked – ready and free to use – at Stardict website. However, I used Babylon when I was a Windows user and i have to admit that their dictionaries remain unbeaten. Matters not what language you want, mono-language or bi-language, technical, general purpose etc etc… they just rock!

You can get tons of dictionaries for free from Babylon website:

Now, go to Yast Software Manager and search for dictconv. Alternatively, you can install from source (which is what I personally did).

Installing is very easy: ./configure and then make all install

Now you’re all set. To use it to convert:

cd to the directory where you have the .BGL dictionaries and type: dictconv INPUT_FILENAME.BGL -o OUTPUT_FILENAME.ifo

Pay attention to the extension: must be .ifo. This will generate 3 files for each BGL dictionary: .ifo, .idx, .dict

Place all these 3 files in /usr/share/stardict/dic/ creating a separate folder for each dictionary. Then rebook Stardict and go to Manage Dictionary (bottom right): there you can select what comes first, activate or deactivate etc etc

Nothing difficult but def worth, and not only for non native speakers.. there are lots of technical terminology Babylon dictionaries that may well come handy.

Notice that with Stardict you can also implement Pronunciations of the typed words: see Stardict site: “WyabdcRealPeopleTTS package make StarDict pronounce English words. It is just many .wav files. Extract(tar -xjvf) the tarball at /usr/share/”.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sooo well… Have fun ~ Buon divertimento ~ Viel Spaß ~ I que te diviertas ~ Maak plezier ~ ha så roligt [hmm i’m just hoping the dictionaries mentioned just above are not making me do some poor figure for these few transations of “Have Fun”.. cuz i have no idea for any language except Italian :D]

The Enthought Tool Suite (ETS) is a collection of components developed by Enthought to construct custom scientific applications. It includes a wide variety of components, including:

• an extensible application framework
• application building blocks
• 2-D and 3-D graphics libraries
• scientific and math libraries
• developer tools
• MayaVi Data Visualizer

It is available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows, but they don't provide binaries for OpenSUSE, I don't now why.

Here are just some steps to get it running on OpenSUSE 10.3. But, you have to install some packages, check here before to proceed:
My system:

ionut@vaio:~> cat /etc/SuSE-release
openSUSE 10.3 (X86-64)
VERSION = 10.3

I installed the suite in /usr/local/lib64/python2.5/site-packages so, let's create the directories:

sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/lib64/python2.5/site-packages

Get the souces for ets tool from their repository:

svn co https://svn.enthought.com/svn/enthought/ETSProjectTools/trunk ETSProjectTools

Build ets (it is a kind of wrapper for their repository), a tool that automates the checkout process.

cd ETSProjectTools
python setup.py install

Get the latest souces for the project files, and build the eggs for the components:

ets co ETS
cd ETS_3.0.0b1
svn export https://svn.enthought.com/svn/enthought/sandbox/egg_builder.py
python egg_builder.py

If the build was successful, you would not have received any errors (though there will be one warning at the end about not building egg.info files) and the built eggs would be residing in a directory called dist

Install the eggs in the directory which we created at the beginning:

sudo easy_install -f dist/ -H dist/ ETS

Now you can try some examples which are included:

• check if Traits is working:

python Traits_3.0.0b1/examples/demo/Applications/converter.py

• check if Mayavi is working:

python Mayavi_3.0.0a1/examples/mayavi/scatter_plot.py
python Mayavi_3.0.0a1/examples/mayavi/streamline.py

or just run mayavi2 command.

In my case everything is working fine, I hope that also for you. Here are some references:

• Installation on Ubuntu_7.10_i686
• Installation on Fedora_8_i686
• Source code