As posted to the openSUSE-GNOME Mailing List.

---

Greetings!

Thanks to all who showed up to help on the bug day on
Friday, your efforts are greatly appreciated.

We started with just over 70 bugs and left the *obby
session available over the weekend.  By the end of the
weekend, we had reviewed 14 bugs (9 of which we closed).

These were all Critical and Major bugs listed for openSUSE
11.1.

I will be closing the *obby session this afternoon at about
1700 CDT.

Thanks again!
—
Christopher M. Hobbs [chobbs@siloamsprings.com]
Network Administrator, City of Siloam Springs

Because I feel a tad bit guilty about missing all of the Community Week sessions this week (school and work training, and before you ask, I’ve got more training all this weekend, so I can’t make those sessions either), I did decide to do a quick tour of the GNOME Shell, one of the integral parts of the GNOME 3 series, scheduled to be coming out in 2010 or so.

First, big thanks to Vincent Untz for packaging the GNOME Shell packages for openSUSE! I’m using these packages for my testing purposes

Here’s the quick tour:

First, here’s the openSUSE 11.1 desktop w/ GNOME 2.24 running GNOME Shell:

Note the Activity menu and the specially-capulated notification area. Good stuff. I al so like the stylized panel, but I don’t like it at the top. When  openSUSE adopts GNOME 3, I’d like to see it moved to the bottom.

Clicking on the Activity menu opens this menu. The desktop shrinks into a side (and you can create or remove as many as you wish, which is seriously awesome), and opens the most recent Applications and documents (I think). If you wish to open an application, double-click or drag the icon onto the desktop you wish it to open to.

Here I did a simple search for SUSE. Applications and documents that matched that search pop up (although I’m not sure what indexing service that is, I’m relatively sure it’s not Beagle, openSUSE’s desktop search indexer).

Here’s an expanded view of the search for apps with SUSE. The desktops slide out of the way, and a multi-column (and page) view pops up. To open, drag an icon over to the right (onto the desktop).

Overall, I like it. Combined with the new stuff coming next year in GNOME 3, this could be quite an interesting release. One of the most important things to note is that this interface seems incredibly tailored toward netbook’s small screens.

What do you think?

Tonight I stumbled upon the solution to a irritating little problem I have had for a long time. I use autologin and every time I log in I get prompted for my keyring password in order to access the wireless network. I have googled for this problem numerous times in the past without any luck. All the suggested solutions had to do with Ubuntu and a tool called libpam-keyring. This does not seem to work the same on openSuSE as on Ubuntu and did not help me much. Then I found this post. Towards the bottom of the thread is the instructions that have been evading me for so long. Hope this helps someone else.

Federico, give Tab Mix Plus a go. It lets you do what you're asking about, and more besides.

Picture (and even more so action) speaks louder than words. So ... voilà:



YaST partitioner can now (since feature #305691 is implemented) do ext4 and in addition to that (to really stress-test the feature and have possible bugs reported asap), ext4 has been made a default filesystem for openSUSE 11.2. And though I'm not in the position to really appreciate and make use of all the cool ext4 features, I'm sure there is bunch of our users that will.

Now don't thank me, thank captain Arvin as it was him who did the work and added ext4 support to the partitioner (in one afternoon, so to say). And while you're at it, you can send him some beer :) :D

Until the Build Service supports git natively (see the GSoC project) , here is what I use to track my changes locally:

#cat /usr/local/bin/osc  :

#!/bin/bash

/usr/bin/osc “$@”

if [ -e .osc/_files ]; then

if [ ! -d .git ] ; then  git init ; echo “.osc” > .gitignore ; echo “.gitignore” >> .gitignore ; fi
mydate=$(date)

git add `find -maxdepth 1 -type f | grep -v “.git”`
for i in $( git status | grep “deleted:” | cut -d” ” -f7 ) ; do
git rm $i;
done

git commit -a -m”$mydate”

fi

When Coolo looked into how to get rid of (Another) UnionFS for Live CDs and came up with the DoenerFS (now clicfs) idea, I remembered that my friend Arnd has workded on fake write support for cramfs. So I took his code and ported it to SquashFS to see how that goes. My expectation was that it might be faster than Coolo’s clicfs using FUSE. Here are some results using openSUSE-KDE4-LiveCD-i586-i686-Build0098 booting into runlevel 3:

• clicfs: 637MB ISO Image booting in 1:28 min (0:24 min from RAM)
• squashfs-rw: 751M ISO Image booting in 1:50 min (0:28 min from RAM)

The difference in the sizes of the ISO images are due to the fact that clicfs is using LZMA compression while SquashFS is still using the in-kernel GZIP implementation. Surprisingly the clicfs image isn’t only smaller but is also faster booting on real media and from RAM (using KVM). So even if we ignore the fact that clicfs is optimized for limiting the number of seeks on disk the SquashFS implementation is still slower. It would be interesting to see if it is just the LZMA compression that is making the difference or something completely different.

The patches for the SquashFS fake write support are here: http://git.infradead.org/users/jblunck/linux-2.6.git?a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/squashfs-rw-v1.

PSA sent to opensuse-gnome@opensuse.org, opensuse-project@opensuse.org, opensuse-announce@opensuse.org

---

Greetings!

Please join us for the openSUSE-GNOME BugDay code named “Community Effort” tomorrow
(Friday 14 MAY 2009) at 1100EDT/1500UTC.

We’ll be squashing blocker, critical, and major bugs in 11.1 related to GNOME.

More information can be found on the wiki:
http://en.opensuse.org/GNOME/BugDays/20090514

A Gobby session will be announced at the beginning of the meeting to assign/close
bugs. Should you have any questions, feel free to ask in #openSUSE-GNOME on Freenode,
or email me directly.

We hope to see you there!
—
Christopher M. Hobbs [chobbs@siloamsprings.com]
Network Administrator, City of Siloam Springs

As work on webinterface for YaST is in progress we must learn new technologies suitable for web development. WebYast will be written in ruby and ruby on rails framework. Also because WebYast is new interface it could contain AJAX features for better user comfort. Today I found that ajax support in RoR is on good level and with documentation it takes few minutes to create first example which show current used memory on server. It is not connected anyhow to YaST because I want to focus on AJAX.
And here is a code. It update page every fifth second (but not refresh only update div, on bigger page it is really significant):
/views/home/index.html.erb:
<%= javascript_include_tag :defaults %>
<h1>Hello world!</h1>
<%= periodically_call_remote(:url => { :action => 'get_averages' }, :update => 'avg',:frequency => '5') %>
<div id="avg">
Memory usage is X MB </div>
controllers/home_controller.rb:
class HomeController < ApplicationController
   def index
   end
   def get_averages
     output = `free -m` # bash solution - | sed 's/Mem:[^0-9]+[0-9]+[^0-9]+([0-9]+).*$/1/;2q;1d'`
     output = $1 if (output =~ /.*n(.*)n.*n.*n/) #let live second line
     output = $1 if (output =~ /.*:s+S+s+(S+)s+/) #second field
     render :text => "Usage mem is "+output+"MB RAM."
   end
end


And thats all to watch your server usage.

Today, the openSUSE Weekly Newsletter team will have the translation sessions for the special edition created yesterday.

Join us from 12:00 UTC to 15:00 UTC in #opensuse-newsletter on freenode. (Schedule)