Just laptop and headphones, book and a bit eat/drink for trip time and of course rube’s cube are in my rucksack On last weekend I was on FOSDEM.

FOSDEM is probably the most developer-oriented European Free and Open Source conference/event. As usual it was in Bruxelles, Belgium on first weekend of February. I was there with another Novell/SUSE employees. Majority of they are responsible for work with community. For example, boosters team.

On 5th February we went from Nuremberg at 12 am (by bus) and was in Brussel at 9 pm. At half past ten we (Holgi, Dinar and me) were on the beer event. What can I say about this evening? It was really nice to meet and speak with another developers for a cup of beer

The main thing that happens on conferences is learning. This was main reason why I was there and why Novell/SUSE help me to visit FOSDEM. A lot of presentation/talks about KDE, or packaging (RPM), or BuildService or… a lot about another open source projects…

I like such events It’s not only interesting presentations through which you open/learn a lot of new, but also possibility to get acquainted with other developers or is simple with enthusiasts whom it is unconditional as bring the contribution to development free and open source software.

The next evening I have devoted to walk across Bruxelles. It was very interesting to speak with people there. I have made a lot of photos.

For sure, I’m going to visit FOSDEM in next year, but for next time it will be depends on money. Anyway I will recomend to visit this event for every Linux-/*BSD- user/developer.

I'm blue.  And not only that, I seem to suffer from writer's block. If there's something like "code-writer's block", I probably suffer from that, too (I believe there is, there was just no Stephen King to write a few horror books about it so far .... something I can consider doing when I retire).

I no longer feel the sense of accomplishment from the things I'm working on and I'm unhappy with the way where something I was always doing with passion (ie. YaST hacking) is heading. The fact that I can do absolutely nothing to change that further deepens my blues.

Most of the time, I tend to be the one trying to cheer up my colleagues and friends when they write blogposts like this by writing encouraging comments or pasting links to some feel-good stuff (my favourite one).  Unfortunately, I can't do the same now for myself. Oh well ... 

Space, the Final Frontier! This is the tale of one Amateur Astronomer that have found in openSUSE a terrific tool for public outreach, self-learning and teaching platform.

Ok, that was a bit exagerated.

But the truth is that I am enjoying the new SUSE Studio suite. And that’s because it is facilitating my job as an educator. I work with the Nicaraguan Amateur Astronomers Society (ANASA) in teaching basic astronomy to the public. Obviously, my workhorse is an openSUSE laptop, loaded with Stellarium, Celestia, KStars and Xephem (and many other tools for my personal job as an astronomer).

For a long time, I’ve been advocating the use of openSUSE as the reliable, user-friendly and safe Linux distribution that it is, but I face a big barrier: the big majority of people attending our astronomy lessons does not have the needed technical skill and knowledge to install a new operative system, specially one like Linux.

So, I’ve decided to build a Live CD using SUSE Studio, focused entirely in provide the same basic tools for learning the sky and their basic steps in Amateur Astronomy.

The name of the Project: AstroGarrobo

Garrobo is the Nicaraguan name for a male Iguana. The Nicaraguan Linux community have nicknamed our openSUSE mascot as Garrobo instead of the familiar Chameleon, because a Chameleon is a rare species here in my Nation.

So far, there is a Beta version available for download at SourceForge. I have received many valuable reports from Beta Testers from different parts o the world.

My goal here is to obtain a stable LiveCD, for free distribution, that may help others to obtain the tools needed to inspire, feed and motivate their love for Space.

I’ve written a more detailed explanation of this project in my Blog (in Spanish). I would appreciate any comments, insights and recommendations about AstroGarrobo.

Clear skies!

Задача: Установить Oracle на машину с OpenSuse 11.2. Решение: 1)Собственно скачиваем rpm Oracle XE с официального сайта. Далее все под рутом 2)zypper install oracle.rpm Вот тут важно не запускать конфигурационный скрипт, а то работать по странным причинам не будет. 3)passwd oracle 4)Вводим пароль 5)/etc/init.d/oracle-xe configure 6)Теперь выключаем в сервисах oracle-xe, и останавливаем его. 7)su oracle […]

Wow...What a really interesting and fulfilling event in so many ways. Being my first, my mind is still running in circles about the amount of meetings and presentations I attended through the course of the weekend. I had the chance to meet many of the founding members and proven leaders of the open source community and hear their experiences and better yet their ideas for the future. A truly amazing power networking event!!

I look forward to putting those plans into action which many of us agreed to collaborate on and to also continue to innovate new ideas and concepts that will allow our community to grow and expand into new areas.

In addition, it was great to finally meet those members of the Fedora community where up until now I only knew a name. It was excellent to meet in person and put faces to those names.

Most of all, I would like to thank the ambassadors for the fun time we had and look forward to doing it all again next year :-)

Die Treiber für die DJ Controller von Hercules gibt es zwar in Paketen für so ziemlich alle Distributionsarten, aber leider nicht für die aktuellsten Version. Unter openSUSE 11.2 funktioniert der Treiber zunächst nicht, da dieses Kernel 2.6.31 verwendet, der Treiber aber eine ALSA-Funktion nutzen möchte welche in dieser Version aus dem Kernel flog. Ein kleiner Patch behebt das Problem indem er den entscheidenden Aufruf auf die neue Funktion ändert.

Hat man den Treiber nach der Anleitung auf der Webseite installiert, so kann man mit dkms status prüfen ob dieser im System erfolgreich installiert wurde. Auf System mit Kernel 2.6.30 aufwärt bekommt man hier nur die enttäuschende Meldung: hdjmod, 1.28: added. Wäre die installation erfolgreich gewesen müsste hier installed stehen.

Der nächste Schritt nach dem add ist der build. Ein Blick in das Logdatei /var/lib/dkms/hdjmod/1.28/build/make.log zeigt das Problem:

/var/lib/dkms/hdjmod/1.28/build/device.c:1663: error: implicit declaration of function ‘snd_card_new’

Der Patch behebt das Problem indem er für neuere Kernel den Funktionsaufruf durch auf die neue Funktion snd_card_create ändert. Um ihn anzuwenden wechselt man in das Verzeichnis /usr/src/hdjmod-1.28 und ruft dort sudo patch -p1 < /path/to/hdjmod_kernel_2.6.30.patch auf. Anschließen baut man mit sudo dkms build -m hdjmod -v 1.28 das Modul und installiert es mit sudo dkms install -m hdjmod -v 1.28.

Anschließend kann man im DJ Control Panel sehen, dass der Treiber beim Anschließen der Konsole erfolgreich geladen wird. Insgesamt ein gutes Beispiel dafür, wieso man Treiber Open Source halten sollte, aber leider auch ein gute Beispiel, wieso man Treiber nicht außerhalb des Kernels pflegen sollte.

>Hier kann man den Patch herunterladen<

Directly after the Fedora Activity Day,another exciting and necessary social event, from what I hear ;-) is the FOSDEM Beer event located here. This event will start on Friday the 5th at 18:00 and will be home to many of those from different projects and organizations whom are attending FOSDEM. I look forward to this activity to get a chance to see the F/OSS industry and it's members.

See you all there! And hope we survive to see Saturday morning:-)

FOSDEM will offically start on Saturday February 6, but the Fedora Ambassador team will be meeting here starting at 13:00 to discuss various topics on Friday February 5 at our Fedora Activity Day at FOSDEM. I will be attending and look forward to meeting those I know, but especially those I have not met yet since this is a new year with new initiatives. One of our project leaders whom spent some time developing the Fedora Project in the EMEA will be there as well as many others involved in board positions, as well as, various teams within the project. I look forward to seeing you all there and discussing future opportunities to support the Fedora community as well as the greater "Open" movement.

Suffice it to say, I’m actually enjoying my Storytlr install – maybe enjoy isn’t the right word but you get my drift, don’t you? Well I was determined to loose my coding virginity, and Storytlr’s plugin system seemed to be the safest way to do so. I chose to base my plugin on an existing plugin, and my two options were creating a Blip.tv plugin (based on the Vimeo plugin) or a Gitorious plugin based on the Github plugin).

If you are vim user and also use gpg to encrypt stuff, you might appreciate that you can teach vim to transparently open gpg encrypted files with vim gnupg plugin. Just install vim-plugin-gnupg from Contrib repository:

# zypper install vim-plugin-gnupg

Also, you should add following two lines to your .bashrc to make the plugin work properly:
GPG_TTY=`tty`
export GPG_TTY


Then, if you tell vim to open gpg encrypted file, it will ask for passphrase, transparently decrypts it and after you make changes, it will encrypt the file again.