I'm just back in from the first day the openSUSE conference. The day started badly when I woke up in a cold sweat dreaming that OpenOffice ate my presentation (again), but it was still there when I resumed my laptop and so I biked the 5km into the Berufsförderungswerk Nuernberg, the technical college where the conference is a guest. A good number of people were in for Lenz Grimmer's keynote on virtual development teamwork, which was a relief, then I sat in for a bit of the openSUSE Weekly News talk by Sascha Manns. Running a news magazine is an important and demanding part of a project's internal and external communications and I'm grateful that Sascha and team put in the effort, and hope they get more contributors. Then I earwigged at the back of the GNOME team meeting, while Andy Wafaa demoed me the SUSE Goblin image. It's impressively polished and will give the Plasma netbook interface a tough act to follow.

Over lunch I mingled with openSUSE users and developers old and new, and a good number of KDE people including Frank, Alexandra, Danimo and Frederik who had made the journey to Nuernberg. We had a cross-desktop meeting afterwards to figure out how to improve the general openSUSE desktop experience. Following the recent decision to set a desktop choice in openSUSE, I feared there might be some tension, but it was all very amicable and constructive. I had to leave early to give my talk, 'The Future of openSUSE KDE', moved forward from the weekend. OpenOffice behaved, nothing crashed, and I gave my manifesto for producing the best desktop distribution with exemplary cooperation with upstream projects. And interspersed it with previews from openSUSE 11.2, so nobody fell asleep. KNetworkManager4 drew the most questions, and even managed to detect Danimo's phone on hotplug, something I'd never tested.

Finally we had a BoF session led by Cornelius to plan a KDE Showcase image for use at shows and by reviewers, which has a lot of potential, if also to be a lot of work.

Tonight we're unwinding at Joe's Bar, a refactoring of the Novell/SUSE office as a den of iniquity, hosted by our Community Manager, Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier. Don't speak too loudly to me in the morning...

Some news, in no particular order:

F-Spot 0.6.1.2 was released a couple of minutes ago. It fixes db upgrade for the people who went in holidays in the far future. Now F-Spot can update a db with photos taken (or reported to be) after 2038. It also fixes a crash while running on gtk+ 2.14.

The LiveWebGallery extension is now merged into the main tree, and installable, from the Manage Extension dialog, on any F-spot > 0.6. The extension crashing on gtk+2.14 is part of the past too.

Ruben is MIA. Last time we heard from him, he was "in a park near a pond near a museum".

A new extension, allowing finer control over the BlackAndWhite conversion process is coming soon. It leverages the expensive CPU you paid big bucks for via Mono.Simd. Mandatory screenshot:
That's it for today.

Some weeks have passed since the announcement of kaveau. I’m really proud and happy about this project because I received a lot of positive feedback messages and it has been chosen as one of the best Hackweek’s projects.

In the meantime I kept working on kaveau, so let me show you what has changed:

• rdiff-backup has been replaced by rsync.
• the setup wizard has been improved according to the feedback messages I received.
• old backups are now automatically removed.
• the code has been refactored a lot.

The switch to rsync

Previously kaveau used rdiff-backup as backup back-end. rdiff-backup is a great program but unfortunately it relies on the outdated librsync library. The latest release of librsync is dated 2004. It has a couple of serious bugs still open and, while rsync has reached version three, this library is still stuck at version one.

These are the reasons of the switch from rdiff-backup to rsync. This choice breaks the compatibility with the previous backups but it introduces a lot of advantages. One of the most important improvements brought by the adoption of rsync is an easier restore procedure: now all the backups can be accessed using a standard file manager, while previously rdiff-backup was needed to access the old backups.

Backup directory structure

On the backup device everything is saved under the kaveau/hostname/username path.

The directory will have a similar structure:

drwxr-xr-x 3 flavio users 4096 2009-09-12 18:50 2009-09-12T18:50:19
drwxr-xr-x 3 flavio users 4096 2009-09-14 23:07 2009-09-14T23:07:46
drwxr-xr-x 3 flavio users 4096 2009-09-14 23:30 2009-09-14T23:30:36
lrwxrwxrwx 1 flavio users   19 2009-09-14 23:30 current -> 2009-09-14T23:30:36

As you can see there’s one directory per backup, plus a symlink called current pointing to the latest backup.

Old backup deletion

Nowadays big external storage devices are pretty cheap, but it’s always good to save some disk space. Now kaveau keeps:

• hourly backups for the past 24 hours.
• daily backups for the past month.
• weekly backups until the external disk is full. Thanks to hard links’ magic, old backups can be deleted without causing damages to the other ones.

Plans for the future

Before starting to work on the restore user interface I will spend some time figuring out how to add support for network devices.

A lot of users requested this feature, hence I want to make them happy :) .

I’m planning to use avahi to discover network shares (nfs, samba) or network machines running ssh and use them as backup devices. Honestly, I want to achieve something similar to Apple’s time capsule.

As usual, feedback messages are really appreciated.

Now that 11.2 gets closer and closer to the rc status being able to play mp3 becomes important in order to make the testing experience even nicer.

Here is my workaround to get that mp3 working in amarok. I do not know about the dvd’s as the only one that I own is to boring to use it for testing purposes

wget http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.1/repo/oss/suse/x86_64/libcdio7-0.80-5.30.x86_64.rpm
zypper in file:<Path-to>libcdio7-0.80-5.30.x86_64.rpm
wget http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.1/repo/oss/suse/x86_64/libiso9660-5-0.80-5.30.x86_64.rpm
zypper in file:<Path-to>libiso9660-5-0.80-5.30.x86_64.rpm
wget http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.1/repo/oss/suse/x86_64/libMagickCore1-6.4.3.6-5.3.x86_64.rpm
zypper in file:<Path-to>libMagickCore1-6.4.3.6-5.3.x86_64.rpm
wget http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.1/repo/oss/suse/x86_64/libMagickWand1-6.4.3.6-5.3.x86_64.rpm
zypper in file:<Path-to>libMagickWand1-6.4.3.6-5.3.x86_64.rpm
zypper in libxine1-codecs

So as you can see I just use the missing libs from 11.1.Of course I assumed that you added the 11.1 packman to your repos already.

Ladies and Gents,
we’re glad to announce that SOAD Linux 3.2.1 is out and available for download.

This is a bugfix release mostly. Please read the changelog:
Changelog

Active mirrors are updated weekly, starting from Monday:
GWDG.DE
Yandex.ru

We do need your feedback about “Ecomorph” – some kind of auto configuration script is already managed (no manual adjustments are required before launch), but looks like some important parameters/values are still missed unfortunately. Already collected several “White Screen Compiz Bug” reports from owners of NVIDIA GPU’s and just wish to collect some more to get the reason how to improve it. Right now (for LiveCD/LiveUSB) “Ecomorph” should work with the modern NVIDIA (drivers already in) and with other video cards, where “Compiz” is supported by a current “Mesa”/(current Xorg drivers). The case here is to tweak some values to be sure that things could work “out from the box”.
Example: if we’re building/installing NVIDIA drivers manually from official *.run.sh – everything is just fine. If we’re using the “packaged” rpm’s with the same drivers – “White Screen” could happen with “Ecomorph”.

As a sweet eye-candy the work for “Restoration of a GANT iconset” has been started – hope you like it. Current status – a bit more then Alpha, works, but feedback is highly appreciated.

Soon we’re planning to update our Enlightenment repositories up to the current E-svn. QA is in progress. Unfortunately bleeding-edje svn code is not always stable enough :).

Regards,
sda

Our call to apply for the openSUSE Core Test Team end of July attract a great deal of attention. So we got applications from nearly 50 members out of the openSUSE community, much more than expected.

Caused by that large number of offers to move testing of openSUSE forward, we decided to increase the number of members for the new openSUSE Core Test Team from 15 to 25. A number that enables even more areas to be covered by the openSUSE Core Test Team.

Six weeks later – with the release of Milestone 7 of openSUSE 11.2 – the team is formed and already started his work to ensure that openSUSE will also be a rock-solid Linux distro in the future. First discussion about prioritizing tasks is already started and members of the team are planing their first real time meeting on IRC.

But everybody that is not (yet) part of the team is also able to take part in discussions of the openSUSE Core Test Team and contribute. The communication platform for the new team is the public opensuse-testing@opensuse.org mailing list (further information at http://en.opensuse.org/Testing). And of course you don’t have to be part of the Core Test Team to help the openSUSE project with testing of Milestone 7 and later releases (which are available at http://software.opensuse.org/developer).

I’m exited to see the team to carry the world before one.

Contributors Romain Tartière, Bertrand Lorentz, Robert Dyer, Andreu Correa Casablanca Features

• View Fullscreen option
• User docs translated into ca

Bugs Fixed

• Build fixes for *bsd
• Update recent files list after opening a document
• libdir expansion issue fixed in Hyena, depends on 0.2

Translations

• es (Andreu Correa Casablanca)
• pt (Filipe Gomes)
• sv (Daniel Nylander)

See the website for links to tarballs, git, packages, the mailing list, irc, bugzilla, and more. I'd like to thank Bertrand Lorentz for doing the actual release!

Last 3 weeks were spent with a week of vacation, a week of work, and another week of vacation.

First vacation week ... I went to the Linuxbierwanderung (Linux Beer Hike), this year happening in Helmbrechts, Upper Franconia, Bavaria, Germany. Nearly no Linux (except running on Laptops and in some smaller discussions), not much walking (for me personally no walks), but some sightseeing, and quite an amount of beer. Saw the German-German wall museum in Moedlareuth.

One week of busy work, including hurrying out another kernel fixing a new local root exploit.

And another week of vacation, this time going to Maurach at Achensee in Tirol, Austria with my best friend Bianca. Nice hotel with good food, wellness area and in easy distance from the lift. We spent two days walking in the mountain, one week of relaxing in the sea bath at the Achensee, and one day shopping in Innsbruck. Also took a ride with the local Steamrailroad. Nice and relaxing week, pictures here.

Recently lots of people asked me how to build QJson under Windows. Most of them reported build/link errors, so I decided to try personally.

The good news is that QJson can be successfully built under Window, I can show you proof ;)

{% img /images/qjson/qjson_windows_1.png %} {% img /images/qjson/qjson_windows_2.png %}

I have written the build instructions on QJson website: just take a look here.

One last note: if you have problems with QJson please subscribe to the developer mailing list and post a message.

We have started planning the sessions for the .NET/Mono Code Camp in Tarragona (Spain). The sessions are being organized in two tracks: a Mono track and an MSDN track. I plan to give at least a couple of talks: one about the upcoming release of MonoDevelop, and one about application extensibility based on Mono.Addins. If you are interested in giving a talk, it is now time let us know. You'll find here a form you can use to submit your proposal. We will select the proposals we find more interesting, and we plan to pay the travel expenses for all speakers. Update: sessions are going to be held in spanish. Update 2: we don't have a big budget, so we may not be able to pay full expenses to people coming from outside Spain. Update 3: the deadline for the call for papers is September 11th. I like how the Code Camp is shaping up so far. It will be a chance to meet with spanish Mono hackers and users, but it will also be a good chance to talk about Mono and Linux to an audience which typically is very Microsoft-centric.