In January 2009, the openSUSE forums achieved the highest user activity ever since the launch in June 2008. The user activity measures the number of individual visits and is therefore an indicator for the vitality of the openSUSE forums.

Up to the 31st of January 2009, we achieved a membership of 21.322 (+2.550) members, 21.073 (+2.929) threads and 122.695 (+17.492) posts. The number in brackets shows the increase of the corresponding measurement compared to the last snapshot taken on the 31st of December 2008. Most users ever online still was 7.771 on the 2nd of December 2008.

The following diagram shows the monthly development of new user registrations, user activity, new threads and new posts since the launch in June 2008. We experienced 15.104 individual visits to the openSUSE forums in January 2009, which is an increase of 14% compared to December 2008 and is even 25% above average.

Kudos to our Top5 posters during January 2009

• caf4926 – 575
• ken_yap – 455
• oldcpu – 439
• Malcolm – 405
• Axeia – 405

Thanks as usual for making the openSUSE forums a worthwhile place to be.

Any comments about the OSF status reports are much appreciated by the openSUSE forums team.

Please join us for the GNOME Team meeting in #openSUSE-GNOME on
irc.freenode.net.

The current agenda can be found here:
http://en.opensuse.org/GNOME/Meetings/20090205

For time conversions, please see:
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?day=22&month=1&year=2009&hour=22&min=0&sec=0&p1=0

Thanks!

There’s been some discussion about Rails on openSUSE recently, so I thought I’d add to my Ruby articles with a Rails installation guide.

Getting started with Rails on openSUSE is a breeze.  In this particular article, I’ll quickly outline installation and startup of Rails on openSUSE 11.1.  You’ll need to install Ruby, ruby-sqlite, and ruby gems.  I’ve detailed these in my previous articles on ruby.

This is far easier than you might expect, so lets get started…

Use ruby gems to install Rails:

sudo gem install rails

That’s it!  After some work, Rails should be all installed and ready to go.  You can test it out by creating a new project:

rails foobar

And running the server script, then visit http://localhost:3000 in your web browser to verify that all is well:

cd foobar && ruby script/server

Note that this installation will use sqlite3 as it’s database by default if you’ve been following my other tutorials.  There’s information about getting Rails to work with MySQL (and other databases/platforms) over at the Rails Wiki:  http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/HowtosInstallation

Yeah the GNOME Team is already working hard on the 2.25.90 release. It will be a long day and we expect to end it with all the release done.
Vincent mentioned us (me, Magnus and Suman) but he is also doing an excelent working reviewing packages and upstreaming lot's of old patches.

After today (if everything went as expected) i'm going to make a SUSE Studio image so you can boot it as a livecd and VMware appliance. So you can test GNOME 2.25.90 on your desktop.

Come join us at #opensuse-gnome @ irc.freenode.net

PS: You can even get there and just say "Hi" or "How GNOME is cool!"

Spent the last days fixing Wine issues after a new Coverity run. Submitted ca 35 patches in a hack frenzy, but only 14 got in for now. But Wine is at 0 UNINSPECTED issues now!

GPhoto hacking wise not much work done.

Oh, and I bought a Nikon D90 (to upgrade the D70s) and a 50mm/1.8 lens (for better photos). Hopefully better photos will happen. :)


I will be on FOSDEM 2009 on the weekend, hold a talk on Wine and hang around the openSUSE booth. If you have cameras able to remote control drop by for debugging :)

Desktop files contain a lot of information about KDE/Gnome/X11 applications (e.g. names, icons).

Displaying this data in the package selector allows to provide a more detailed package description. The user can easily see which applications are included in an installed package.

Running these applications via mouse click is technically possible, but unfortunately security concerns don’t allow it. Please let me know if you have an idea how to solve this issue.

Today, I’d like to mention another rather hidden feature of openSUSE 11.1. The package management is finally able to keep multiple versions of packages, if they support installation of parallel versions. A typical example of this is of course kernel. A lot of people want to keep the old, functional, kernel around when installing a kernel update and now there is a way to do it.

Open /etc/zypp/zypp.conf in your favorite editor and change this value:

multiversion = kernel-default,kernel-default-extra,kernel-default-base,kernel-source

The list contains names of packages to be installed via ‘rpm -i’ instead of ‘rpm -U’. Just adopt it to your the kernel flavor you are using.

Of course, there is a catch – there are no means to limit the number of package versions to be installed this way. The reasoning is that there is no automatic way to guess which versions to remove (in case of kernel, everyone has its own definition of working kernel) So you have to uninstall additional kernels you don’t need anymore manually.

Enjoy!

Aim

First of all we want to provide an general web based interface with the
functionality which is already provided by the YaST command line interface.

This API is based on the REST (Representational state transfer) architecture. This is a
simple interface which transmits domain-specific data over HTTP.
Please have a look to

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer

for more information about REST.

The second aim is to provide a YaST Web UI which can be used by every
web browser.

The current state of the project is an existing YaST-Webservice on the
host side which provides the REST based interface.
On the client side we have the concerning YaST-Webclient which can be
used be any web browser.

YaST-Webservice and YaST-Webclient are running as a webserver
(currently lighttpd) on different or even the same computer.

So the aim is to configure a host via the internet in a simple and
safety way.

How does it work ?

The YaST Webclient communicate via HTTP(s) with the YaST Webservice. The
user has to authenticate ( username, password ) to the host via PAM
(Pluggable Authentication Modules) which is available on every linux system.

The YaST Webclient sends requests ( e.g. create a user, install patch) to
the YaST Webservice. This service checks if the user has the right to
execute this request via PolicyKit. For each kind of request there is
PolicyKit rule defined. These rights has to be granted to the concerning user.

After permission check the request will be send via DBUS to the SCR agent of
YaST. The return value will be given back to YaST-Webclient in XML or JSON
format.

Patches will be handled by PackageKit. These requests will also be sent from
the YaST Webservice to PackageKit via DBUS.

How to get it ?

Have a look the openSUSE buildservice project

YaST Webservice (home:schubi2)

There are all needed packages for version openSuSE 11.1 and above.

As some additional packages (e.g. lighttpd) are needed which are not on openSuSE 11.1 you should add a
repositories ( e.g. factory ) in order to provide these packages.
The simplest way for installation would be to use zypper:

zypper in yast2-core-2*.rpm
zypper in ruby-dbus-*.rpm
zypper in yast2-webservice-*.rpm
zypper in yast2-webclient-*.rpm

How to use the YaST-Webservice

After you have installed these packages you can start the YaST-Webservice-Server with

rcyastws start

The server is running as “localhost:8080” with which you can connect with a web browser:

http://localhost:8080

This “pure” web page shows the available modules which can be used via the REST interface.

This REST API is described under

http://localhost:8080/doc_interface.html

Additional configuration stuff like

– setup Hostname and Port
– setup HTTPS connection
– granting permissions for an single user
– AVAHI support

can be found here:
http://localhost:8080/doc_config.html

How to use the YaST-Webclient

After you have started the YaST-Webservice-Server you also can start the YaST-Webclient:

rcyastwc start

Now you can use any browser and connect with http://<name of your computer> to your
computer.
The default rights of the YaST Webservice are set to root only. So you can login with the root password
of that machine.

Following features are implemented:

– setting languages
– setting system time
– setting user permissions
– installing patches
– managing local users
– export user SSH-keys
– starting,stopping,status,… of services
– configuration of ntp server

Have a look to the following screen shot it order to give an overview how it looks like:

Known Bugs
-The first call of an menue entry will be slow cause an additional process will be started.
The second one should be much more faster
-Permissions will sometime not be shown correctly (just click “search” again) Bug 470645

Next Thursday 5th February openSUSE GNOME team will have a packaging day to celebrate the GNOME 2.25.90 release. It's a good oportunity to learn more about GNOME on openSUSE and to get involved with this awesome team.
Just join us at #opensuse-gnome @ irc.freenode.net and learn how to get involved with the GNOME team.