I've been publishing updates about Weblate on my blog for past seven years. Now the project has grown up enough to deserve own space to publish posts. Please update your bookmarks and RSS readers to new location directly on Weblate website.

The Weblate website will receive another updates in upcoming weeks, I'm really looking forward to these.

New address for Weblate blog is https://weblate.org/news/.

New address for the RSS feed is https://weblate.org/feed/.

Filed under: Debian English SUSE Weblate

The problem

Say you have a table that looks like this:

AGGREGATE_NEEDED    1
ARCH    x86_64
BASE_TEST_ISSUES    NUMBER
BUILD   :NUMBER:PACKAGE
DISTRI  DISTRIBUTION
FLAVOR  Server-DVD-Incidents-Install
INCIDENT_ID 99999

It’s just that it contains about 78 or more entries. Of course for a very skilled engineer or a person with a lot of tricks under the hood, this might be a very trivial task in vim or something like this, I guess that with a couple of replaces here and there, you’d get somewhere; but I’m not skilled, other than at eating.

The Solution

So I took my Key Value table saved it to a file and after googling a bit, now I’m more versed into awk :D:

    cat FILE.txt | \ 
    awk 'BEGIN { print "{" } \ 
        { printf "\"%s\":\"%s\",", $1,$2} \ 
        END { print "\"MANUALLY_GENERATED_ISO_POST\":1 }" }'
        | jq > x86_64-ready.json'"}'

I guess this could have been done easier and prettier, but fits my need and might save you too at some point. Just make sure you have jq installed ok?

Audio files in formats such as MP3, AAC, and Ogg Vorbis have made music ubiquitous and portable. With the explosive growth of storage capacity, you can store huge libraries of music. But how do you keep all that music organized? Just tag your music. Then you can access it easily locally and in the cloud. EasyTAG is a great choice for tagging music and is available in openSUSE.

Many audio file types support tagging, including:

• MP4, MP3, MP3, MP2
• Ogg Speex, Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Opus
• FLAC
• MusePack
• Monkey Audio

Installing EasyTAG

EasyTAG is easy to install from openSUSE repositories:

Or use Zypper in a terminal as Root:

# zypper install easytag

Then launch the program from the Software tool or the application menu for your desktop. EasyTAG’s straightforward interface works well in most desktop environments.

Tagging music

Select a folder where you have music you want to tag. By default, EasyTAG will also load subfolders. You can select each file and add tag information such as the artist, title, year, and so on. You can also add images to a file in JPG or PNG format, which most players understand.

Files you have altered appear in bold in the file listing. To save each, press Ctrl+S. You can also select the entire list and use Ctrl+Shift+S to save all the files at once.

One of the most powerful features of EasyTAG is the file scanner. The scanner recognizes patterns based on a template you provide. Once you provide the right template and scan files, EasyTAG automatically tags all of them for you. Then you can save them in bulk. This saves a lot of time and frustration when dealing with large libraries.

When you upload your tagged files to a cloud service, your tags allow you to quickly find and play the music you want anytime.

This article is an adaption of EasyTAG: Organize your music on Fedora under Creative Commons License.

Audiodateien in Formaten wie MP3, AAC und Ogg Vorbis haben Musik allgegenwärtig und tragbar gemacht. Mit dem explosionsartigen Wachstum der Speicherkapazität kannst du riesige Musikbibliotheken speichern. Aber wie hältst du all diese Musik organisiert? Tagge einfach deine Musik. Dann kannst du einfach lokal und in der Cloud darauf zugreifen. EasyTAG ist eine gute Wahl für die Kennzeichnung von Musik und ist unter openSUSE verfügbar.

Viele Audiodateitypen unterstützen das Tagging, einschließlich:

• MP4, MP3, MP3, MP2
• Ogg Speex, Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Opus
• FLAC
• MusePack
• Monkey Audio

Installation von EasyTAG

EasyTAG ist einfach aus openSUSE-Repositories zu installieren:

Oder benutze Zypper in einem Terminal als Root:

# zypper install easytag

Dann startest du das Programm über das Anwendungsmenü auf deinem Desktop. Die unkomplizierte Benutzeroberfläche von EasyTAG eignet sich für die meisten Desktop-Umgebungen.

Musik taggen

Wähle einen Ordner aus, in dem du Musik hast, die du markieren möchtest. Standardmäßig lädt EasyTAG auch Unterordner. Du kannst jede Datei auswählen und Tag-Informationen wie Künstler, Titel, Jahr usw. hinzufügen. Du kannst auch Bilder im JPG- oder PNG-Format zu einer Datei hinzufügen, was die meisten Player auch verstehen.

Von dir geänderte Dateien werden in der Dateiliste fett gedruckt. Um alle zu speichern, drückst du Strg+S. Du kannst auch die gesamte Liste auswählen und mit Strg+Shift+S alle Dateien auf einmal speichern.

Eine der leistungsfähigsten Funktionen von EasyTAG ist der Dateiscanner. Der Scanner erkennt Muster auf der Grundlage einer von dir bereitgestellten Vorlage. Sobald du die richtigen Vorlagen und Scan-Dateien zur Verfügung gestellt hast, markiert EasyTAG automatisch alle für dich. Dann kannst du sie in großen Mengen speichern. Das spart viel Zeit und Frustration im Umgang mit großen Bibliotheken.

Wenn du deine getaggten Dateien zu einem Cloud-Service hochlädst, ermöglichen dir deine Tags, die gewünschte Musik jederzeit schnell zu finden und abzuspielen.

Dieser Artikel ist eine Adaption & Übersetzung von EasyTAG: Organize your music on Fedora unter der Creative Commons Lizenz.

openSUSE Leap 15.1 is almost ready for release! (1) This is always a high point of the year for me. I started researching what was new in this release. However, there is not much buzz around this release. I found only a few articles on Softpedia (2), Phoronix (3) and the announcement by Ludwig Nussel (4).

When I tried to establish what was new (5) in Leap 15.1, I started to understand why. Leap 15.1 mostly features minor updates. Still there are updates that are noteworthy. In the table below I highlighted in green the updated packages that are really new. In blue, I highlighted new packages that are also present in updated Leap 15 installations.

Software package updates

Calibre is updated to 3.40 and includes some improvements to Kobo drivers, support for the Kindle Whitepaper 2018, a bunch of improvement for the Edit book functionality, the Content station has a new “Copy to library” function and some usability improvements of the Tag browser.

Darktable is updated to 2.6, including a new retouch module, a new filmic module, a new module to handle duplicates in the darkroom, you can now change the cropped area in the perspective correction module, the mask blur feature has been extended with a guided-filter to fine tune it and the color balance module has two new modes based on ProPhotoRGB and HSL.

Digikam is updated to 6.0. This means that you can now manage video files in the same way as you would manage photos. In the album management, you can now use virtual folders (RAW/JPG/PNG) to sort items in a list. Digikam 6.0 uses libraw 0.19, which enables support for over 200 new RAW files. This includes support for iPhone 8, 8+ and X and support for Samsung S7, S7 Edge and S8. There are also many improvements for connecting with external web services. Finally, Digikam now uses a separate database for fussy and duplicate search, improving performance and reliability.

Flatpack is updated to 1.2.3, which includes many security improvements.

KDE applications got a big update to 18.12. Dolphin (file manager) received many improvements, including the ability to hide the Places panel and dock the Terminal panel. The folder view and settings dialog have been updated. Ocular (PDF and document viewer) has a new typewriter annotation feature that enables you to type everywhere on a page. Konsole (terminal application) now has full support for emoji. The Gwenview (image viewer) has seen many improvements, including the crop tool, the reduce red eye tool, improved zooming and better drag and drop functionality. Spectacle (screenshot tool) gained the ability to sequentially number screenshot files and now remembers the lastest save settings. With the rectangular region selection mode, you can select a part of the screen . Ark (unzip tool) now supports the tar.zst archive file standard.

Krita is updated to 4.1.8 and introduces the new reference images tool that lets you place and edit a reference image to help you with drawing. Another help with drawing is provided by the improved vanishing point assistant. Krita 4.1 features many animation improvements and a better color picker tool.

LibreOffice 6.1 offers 2 new icon themes ‘Colibre’ and ‘Karasa Jaga’, it loads documents with many images faster, the gradient tool has been improved and new fill gradients are available, you can now add page numbers and page counts in the header and footer sections of Writer, you can insert a Signature line in Writer, you can now sort images anchored to cells in Calc, the merge cells dialog box has become much clearer in Calc, you can now use CSVs as data sources in Calc and a new page menu has been added in Impress.

Linux kernel has received some back-ports of Graphics hardware from the Linux kernel 4.19, including better support for AMD Vega cards.

Rapid Photo Downloader (from the Graphics repository) is updated to 0.9.14. Canon’s latest RAW file format CR3 is supported on systems that have ExifTool 10.87 or newer.

YaST has received several improvements and is updated to 4.1.68. YaST has improved the default partitioning proposal for systems with less than 12 GB, YaST received some UI improvements including better support for 4K monitors, the YaST Firewall module has been adapted to work with Firewalld, the Partitioner can now directly format full disks and create MD RAIDs on top of disks without partitions.

Installation options

Besides the standard installation options (full ISO, KDE live ISO, Gnome live ISO, network installer) there is now full support for Raspberry Pi installations. The server installation now features an option for a transactionally updated system. Furthermore there are the more traditional server installations for X86_64 and JeOS (the minimal server installation for the Cloud). You can find the Beta versions of Leap 15.1 here.

Published on: 4 May 2019

What is OpenSUSE Tumbleweed?

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is a cutting-edge Linux distribution from the OpenSUSE team. It uses the latest versions of software applications and the Linux kernel for those who want to see what will be coming up in other Linux distributions in 6-months to a year or more from the time that they appear in Tumbleweed. This means that there are bugs; lots of them. Things break, This is the price that you pay for having the very cutting edge or software technology.

What did Bryan Lunduke actually say?

Let’s break down his complaints. There are only two.

• SUSE Studio
• YaST (ugly, cumbersome, hard to use, stupid, bloated)

The first complaint is an application stack that doesn’t actually have anything directly to do with Tumbleweed. I never used it. It was going by the wayside when I started using OpenSUSE as my daily OS of choice. The source code is still out there and maybe it should be forked and brought back to life. I don’t know. I can’t argue with this point because it is a red herring and has nothing to do the OpenSUSE Tumbleweed distribution.

The second list of complaints is pretty vague, but his complaint is basically that YaST has issues that are causing it to bring does the entire distribution as a whole.

What is YaST?

YaST (Yet Another Setup Tool) is a set of system management tools that are grouped together in a single management application called YaST though they can be installed and run separately as needed.

The modules allow the user to easily control most administrative functions that might be needed. Not all of the modules are the same though. Some such as the printer and scanner modules suck. Other modules like the Software Management module are great. I consider this to be on par with Debian’s Synaptic package management tool which is freaking amazing. If unevenness in the quality of the modules is the reason why he dislikes it so much, then it’s not a completely wrong reason but it’s not a really good one either.

I say that it’s a given that some of the modules are out of date or need a fresh new rewrite, but that’s not specifically what he is saying. He keeps his complaints vague and oddly personal. I’m not privy to much of the inner-workings of the OpenSUSE distribution but I’ve seen from social media that there is some bad blood there between him and folks in OpenSUSE and I really hope this isn’t just a rant against them instead of really against the distribution.

With that aside, let’s talk about the real issue with YaST and any GUI based configuration tool. It is yet another level of abstraction away from actually working with the operating system. For example, YaST has an module called HTTP Server. If you run it, it will set up Apache and any modules like PHP for you and will give you some basic options for tuning it without actually needing to work with the command line or configuration files directly. If someone told me that they had been a system administrator for 5 years but they had only ever used YaST, I wouldn’t hire them because many times things break and they can’t be fixed with YaST. Tools like YaST should mainly be a time saver not a replacement for good configuration and I think that’s what it is currently.

Even with my own genuine complaints above, they don’t really co-inside with Bryan Lunduke’s complains (it’s ugly, cumbersome, hard to use, stupid, and bloated) because I can’t see all of that. It’s no more ugly than any other tool (besides real nerds care about function over form). Granted, some of the modules are cumbersome and hard to use, but not all of them. It’s “stupid, stupid and it’s stupid” what the heck is that supposed to mean? Use your words Lunduke! Don’t just emote. “It’s bloated.” There are currently 183 total YaST modules. Many will never be used by an end user because they are only used during installation. However if you were to install them all, it would take up 176MiB which would average out to .96MiB per module. There are some required Ruby libraries that I’m not taking into account here, but this really isn’t what I would call bloat. You can even uninstall the modules that you don’t want without causing a huge fuss.

Let’s Wrap Up

Bryan Lunduke is wrong when he says that OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is one of the worst distros out right now. He is wrong when he says that YaST is dragging down the entire distro. YaST has problems, but they aren’t what he says they are.