The ownCloud community released ownCloud 6 a couple of days ago. That was another big release and we want to celebrate!

Please, everybody who is interested in ownCloud, like to learn more, give feedback or just want to meet other people from the community, you are invited to show up at Coworking Space in Nuremberg, Josephsplatz 8, on december 18th, 6pm.

We will have a relaxed evening with a little discussion, maybe short demos, cakes and stuff, and fun. No heavy talks and serious faces!

We are looking forward to meeting you.

There has been some some talk recently about the Flash situation on Android 4.4. While it’s no secret that Adobe discontinued support for Flash on Android a while back, there are still a lot of folks using it on a daily basis. The Firefox for Android team consistently gets feedback about it, so it didn’t take long to find out that things were amiss on KitKat.

I looked into the problem a few weeks ago in bug 935676, and found that some reserved functions were made virtual, breaking binary compatibility. I initially wanted to find a workaround that involved injecting the missing symbols, but that seems to be a bit of a dead end. I ended up making things work by unpacking the Flash APK with apktool, and modifying libflashplayer.so with a hex editor to replace the references to the missing symbols with something else. The functions in question aren’t actually being called, so changing them to anything that exists works (I think I used pipe). It was necessary to pad each field with null characters to keep the size of the symbol table unchanged. After that I just repacked with apktool, installed, and everything seemed to work.

There is apparently an APK floating around that makes Flash work in other browsers on KitKat, but not Firefox. The above solution should allow someone to make an APK that works everywhere, so give it a shot if you are so inclined. I am not going to publish my own APK because of reasons.

This week, the openSUSE team blog is written by Agustin, talking about the proposals the team has done for openSUSE development.

A few months ago the openSUSE Team started a journey that achieved an important milestone last Tuesday, Nov 26th 2013. We have worked on creating a picture of relevant areas of the project in 2016 together with some of the actions we think should be taken during the following months to achieve it. To stop working and raise your head once in a while to analyze what is around you and setting a direction is a very good exercise.

The process we followed

The first step was working on data mining. After many hours of analysis, we identified some clear trends that helped us to establish a solid starting point to begin to work with. Once that phase was over (this is an ongoing process, in fact), we worked for a few weeks/months in trying to define that future picture interviewing several dozens of people. We refined that first attempt through several iterations, including many of those who participated in the original round and others who didn’t. Susanne Oberhauser-Hirschoff was the person who drove that process with Agustin.

We soon realized that discussing high level ideas in a community used to “Get shit done” was going to be easier if we complement them with some more down to earth proposals, specially in technical aspects. We cannot forget that, after all, openSUSE is a technical (and very pragmatic) focused community.

So, in parallel with the already mentioned refinement of the big picture, we started discussing within the team the actions needed to take to make the big picture a reality, the openSUSE development version a.k.a Enhanced/New Factory. After many hours of (sometimes never ending) discussions, we agreed on the ideas we are currently being published, together with the motivations behind them.

Another aspect we tried to bring to the discussion has been a strong dose of realism, trying to ensure that whatever we came up to was compatible with the nature of the project. We have also put focus on making sure that the initial proposal is achievable. So as part of community, we understand very well we cannot succeed alone. We need to work with you. So we just opened with the community a process analogous to what we went through within the team. It might be different in form but similar in principles and goals.

What are we going through these days?

These days the proposals are being discussed in different mailing lists. We are collecting feedback, discussing it, summarizing it, adapting the proposal to it … trying to reach agreements before defining what to do next.

What the proposal looks like?

We divided the proposal in a series of smaller proposals we are publishing in the project mailing list, where the general community topics in openSUSE are discussed, and/or factory ML, where the more technical discussions take place.

1. openSUSE 2016: taking a picture of openSUSE today
   This mail summarizes the analysis phase we went through. We have tried to provide a simple picture of openSUSE today so the following articles can be justified to some extend.
2. openSUSE 2016 picture
   This text summarizes the proposed picture for the end of 2016 (in three years). The goal is to set a direction for openSUSE


openSUSE Development Workflow

3. O Factory – Where art Thou?
   Stephan Kulow summarizes the Action Plan for the first aspect pointed in the previous picture: the new Development process (Factory).

The following articles describe in more detail some relevant (also new) elements pointed in the previous article, since they are new or modify the current process significantly. Some of the articles are in the queue to be published.

4. One of the options for staging projects
   In this mail Michal Hrusecky provides some details and examples on how the new staging projects might work in the future.
5. openQA in the new proposal
   This text, written by Ludwig Nussel, explains the principles that should drive the inclusion of openQA in the Factory development process, according with the proposed workflow.
6. Karma for all
   This mail, written by Ancor González, summarizes our ideas to include a social feature in the process to help achieving Factory goals.
7. Policies, or why it’s good to know how to change things
   The new process needs to be adaptive. Antonio Larrosa proposed a way, taking what other projects do in this regard as reference.

There might be an eighth article describing some smaller, still relevant, ideas. After publishing the “content”, we will release one last article providing a information about how to achieve these ideas, describing also our compromise in terms of effort and pointing out the challenges we perceive in the plan from the execution point of view.

We would like to invite you to the debate if you haven’t raised your opinions yet.

The time has come when The Document Foundation will elect a new Board of Directors. As you might already know, there are many good candidates. And since I clearly think I am the best of them, I am writing this to ask you to vote for me. Some of you might know me a bit already, but it is never bad to present myself.

My name is Fridrich Štrba, national of Switzerland and Slovakia, happily married with Susan since more then 12 years and father of 3 wonderful children: Patrick (9), Miriam (6) and Nathanael (3).

My story with LibreOffice started around 2004, with its predecessor, OpenOffice.org. I was just trying to contribute to libwpd which is the horse-power of our WordPerfect import and the OpenOffice.org integration was an interesting thing to contribute to. And since then, my love story with our project went through different stages, but we are still together and sometimes even happy.

I have been mentoring Google Summer of Code students since 2006 and recently I was co-responsible for several import filters for reverse-engineered formats (i.e. Visio, CorelDraw, MS Publisher). I can frankly say that my development and marketing work around the filters are a huge part of the reason why LibreOffice is called the "Swiss army knife of file-formats". We managed quite recently to bootstrap a vibrant community of filter-writers and the the amount of supported file-formats will only grow.

Between 2007 and 2013, I was highly blessed to be working on LO as my day-job, employed by Novell, then SUSE. Since September 2013, I am again a volunteer as many of you. This new-acquired independence is an advantage. I have no monetary interests of any kind in LibreOffice and, if elected, I will take decisions only and only considering the good of the project as such.

The advantage of my election would be that I am part of various native language communities. I speak several languages and can understand the aspirations of the corresponding communities. Besides that, I was part of the Membership Committee from 2010 and the last year, I was its Chairman. In this quality, I was able to push forward my vision of diverse and open and inclusive community that goes beyond personal sympathies or aversions. And this is the vision I desire to pursue if you give me your trust.

And since it is written "You don't have because you don't ask", with this message I ask you to cast your vote for me.

The time has come when The Document Foundation will elect a new Board of Directors. As you might already know, there are many good candidates. And since I clearly think I am the best of them, I am writing this to ask you to vote for me. Some of you might know me a bit already, but it is never bad to present myself.

My name is Fridrich Štrba, national of Switzerland and Slovakia, happily married with Susan since more then 12 years and father of 3 wonderful children: Patrick (9), Miriam (6) and Nathanael (3).

My story with LibreOffice started around 2004, with its predecessor, OpenOffice.org. I was just trying to contribute to libwpd which is the horse-power of our WordPerfect import and the OpenOffice.org integration was an interesting thing to contribute to. And since then, my love story with our project went through different stages, but we are still together and sometimes even happy.

I have been mentoring Google Summer of Code students since 2006 and recently I was co-responsible for several import filters for reverse-engineered formats (i.e. Visio, CorelDraw, MS Publisher). I can frankly say that my development and marketing work around the filters are a huge part of the reason why LibreOffice is called the "Swiss army knife of file-formats". We managed quite recently to bootstrap a vibrant community of filter-writers and the the amount of supported file-formats will only grow.

Between 2007 and 2013, I was highly blessed to be working on LO as my day-job, employed by Novell, then SUSE. Since September 2013, I am again a volunteer as many of you. This new-acquired independence is an advantage. I have no monetary interests of any kind in LibreOffice and, if elected, I will take decisions only and only considering the good of the project as such.

The advantage of my election would be that I am part of various native language communities. I speak several languages and can understand the aspirations of the corresponding communities. Besides that, I was part of the Membership Committee from 2010 and the last year, I was its Chairman. In this quality, I was able to push forward my vision of diverse and open and inclusive community that goes beyond personal sympathies or aversions. And this is the vision I desire to pursue if you give me your trust.

And since it is written "You don't have because you don't ask", with this message I ask you to cast your vote for me.

Το Steam έχει βγει στο Linux εδώ και πολύ καιρό. Ένα από τα παιχνίδια που αναπτύσσει η Valve είναι το Dota 2 το οποίο μαζί με πολλούς άλλους τίτλους έγινε σχεδόν αμέσως διαθέσιμο για Linux. Όσοι το δοκίμασαν ίσως ν’ αντιμετώπισαν προβλήματα όπως να μην τους εμφανίζονται οι ήρωες, τα δέντρα στο χάρτη και άλλα. Παρακάτω υπάρχει ένας οδηγός ο οποίος θα σας βοηθήσει να λύσετε τα προβλήματα αυτά.

Τα ίδια βήματα δουλεύουν και σε openSUSE 13.1 που είναι η πιο πρόσφατη έκδοση online!

– Εγκαταστήστε το Steam από το Yast

– Εγκαταστήστε το Dota 2 από το Steam

– Τρέξτε το Dota 2 και θα σας βγάλει S3TC error

– Εγκαταστήστε το libtxc_dxtn από το Yast, όπως σας λέει και το error

Καθώς παίζετε Dota 2, εάν δεν εμφανίζονται οι ήρωες ή τα δέντρα:

– Εγκαταστήστε το mesa 9.2.2 από εδώ.

– Στην διαχείριση πακέτων και προγραμμάτων στο Yast, ψάξτε την λέξη mesa και αναβαθμίστε όλα τ’ αποτελέσματα στην έκδοση 9.2.2

– Επανεκκινήστε τον υπολογιστή σας και το παιχνίδι θα παίζει κανονικά!

Have you ever wondered why openSUSE is the platform for development? Because it offers all that is needed for professional development, also if development goes beyond the basics.

A nice proof that openSUSE has more than others was posted here by our friend Thomas, a convinced Debian user. He writes about setting up openSUSE in vagrant to be easily able to build (master build) the ownCloud Client for Win32 in it. Very easy and cool stuff. But that can be even easier without vagrant through this link ;-).

Btw, there is an appliance in SUSE Studio to ease experiments with vagrant with openSUSE as base. I haven’t tested yet, experiences?

您需要知道
1. (GNOME way)
  GNOME 3 自 3.6 版開始就整合了 ibus 成為預設的輸入法平台。
  而 openSUSE 13.1 開始所搭載的 GNOME 3.10 就包含了 ibus 整合。
2. (openSUSE way)
  openSUSE 有一套自有的啟動輸入法流程，
  並根據社群的意見針對不同的語系預設不同的輸入法平台。
  預設是根據 /etc/X11/xim.d/{您的語系}/數字-{輸入法}
  數字愈小優先等級愈高。
  也可以使用環境變數 INPUT_METHOD 來自訂所需的輸入法
  (是的，目前沒有圖形使用者介面)
  例如 zh_TW (繁體中文)使用 gcin, 而 zh_CN (簡體中文)使用 fcitx。
3. (Don't Conflict)
  這兩種方法要使他們不衝突才能正常使用輸入法。

4. 檢查 (openSUSE way) 為您啟動了什麼輸入法？
檢查 ~/.xsession-errors 或 .xsession-errors-\:0 之類的檔案
找到

/etc/X11/xim.d/zh_TW/30-gcin started sucessfully

再這個例子中，啟動的就是 gcin

5. 你想用什麼輸入法？
決定您要用的輸入法框架： ibus ? gcin ? fcitx ? scim ?

6. 若您要使用 ibus
(1) 檢查 ~/.xsession-errors 確定 ibus 已成功啟動，
如果不是啟動 ibus ，請在 ~/.profile 加上

export INPUT_METHOD=ibus

(2) 到設定值--地區和語言--輸入來源--加入英文和中文輸入法

寄件者 openSUSE 13.1

(3) 使用 Super+space 切換中英文輸入

寄件者 openSUSE 13.1

(4) ibus 的優點：與gnome整合，工具列上有圖示顯示輸入狀態，佈景主題搭配

寄件者 openSUSE 13.1

(5) ibus 的缺點：中英文切換反應慢，可能導致漏字

(6) ibus 的設定：要更改快速鍵，必須由設定值--鍵盤--快捷鍵--輸入 更改
（在 ibus 偏好中的設定仍會影響其他桌面環境）

7. 若您要使用 gcin （或 fcitx 或 scim）
(1) 檢查 檢查 ~/.xsession-errors 確定 gcin 或其他您選擇的輸入法已成功啟動，
如果不是啟動 gcin ，請在 ~/.profile 加上

export INPUT_METHOD=gcin

(2)如果您的 設定值--地區和語言--輸入來源 未做任何變動(尚未選擇輸入來源)
 

寄件者 openSUSE 13.1

這時您已經可以使用您選用的輸入法輸入了
如果您已驚動到了該設定， ibus-daemon 會啟動，和您已經啟動的輸入法衝突
導致無法使用任何輸入法。
請執行以下命令來回復預設值

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.input-sources sources "[]"

(3)用 Ctrl+space 切換即可在 gtk2 和 gtk3 應用程式中輸入(？)
因為 gnome-settings-daemon 重新設定了 QT_IM_MODULE 和 XMODIFIERS 環境變數
導致無法在非 gtk 的程式中輸入
請參考：https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=853063

(4)要解決 (3)的問題，有個簡單的方法：移除 ibus

(5)但如果你的電腦是多人使用，可能有人比較喜歡 ibus
困難的方法：你必須駭一下 gnome-settings-daemon ...
我不會寫程式，我只是刪除了我認為不需要在 openSUSE 系統做的那兩句，
如果您也不會寫程式，膽子和我一樣大，
你可以到 http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/swyear/openSUSE_13.1/
(在 i586 或 x86_64 目錄中，視您的系統決定)找到修改過後的 gnome-settings-daemon。
警告：請不要加此套件庫，裏面都是一些測試，不保證任何品質。
下載後直接用 rpm 升級安裝

# rpm -Uvh gnome-settings-daemon-3.10.2-3.1.i586.rpm
警告：gnome-settings-daemon-3.10.2-3.1.i586.rpm: 表頭 V3 DSA/SHA1 Signature, key ID 86d89a42: NOKEY
正在準備…                       ################################# [100%]
Updating / installing...
   1:gnome-settings-daemon-3.10.2-3.1 ################################# [ 50%]
Cleaning up / removing...
   2:gnome-settings-daemon-3.10.1-1.1 ################################# [100%] 

重新登入後，就可以在 非 gtk 程式中輸入了
再次警告：任何後果自行負責

(6) gcin 的優點：符合台灣人的使用習慣，作者是台灣人，可以用中文要求功能與回報錯誤。
目前沒有發現無法輸入的情況。

寄件者 openSUSE 13.1

(7) gcin 的缺點：在 gnome 桌面搜尋無法跳出選字視窗，沒有預設系統匣圖示顯示(但你可以裝 TopIcons ，但有時圖示無法正常顯示)，在某些情況下有時跳出選字框會有殘像，有時會有選字視窗遮住輸入區的情形。

(8) fcitx 的優點：可自由迅速切換佈景主題（皮膚），支援新酷音，反應迅速，在簡體中文輸入法中評價最高。

寄件者 openSUSE 13.1

(9) fcitx 的缺點：和 gcin 一樣，若沒有安裝 TopIcons 無法顯示系統匣圖示，在 gnome 桌面搜尋的選字窗也一樣跳不出來。另因不明原因，無法在 gnome terminal 中輸入中文。
Edit:感謝 csslayer 大大在留言中的指導，fcitx 裝上 kimpanel 擴充套件，可以完全融入 GNOME 3 的佈景主題中，太酷了！

寄件者 openSUSE 13.1

GNOME 3.12 will feature an improved Software experience. Richard has been fearlessly working on making the backend snappy and Software app itself cleaner and more fun.

There are many great improvements to the App pages, where you can learn what the app is about and see it in action. Having a great overview of the apps showed just how many apps don't seem to care about their identities or didn't manage to attract any graphics designer and things aren't all rosy.

We've identified some key apps that are either featured in individual categories or are part of a set that needs a facelift as a group, such as the GNOME games. Number of apps that publish proper appdata is growing, so the todo list probably won't shrink any time soon. If you feel like helping us out, check out the guidelines and get in touch!

This is a copy of my openSUSE Election Platform, that I'm putting here with the shameless intention of doing my best to ensure as many people read my thoughts as possible. The original can be found on our official wiki

Introduction and Biography

Hi! I'm Richard Brown, 31 years old, and since last month living in Nürnberg in Germany.

Originally from London, England, I used to joke that I had been steadily moving south and was on my way to becoming French, however it seems once I crossed the Channel I turned left, skipped right past France, and ended up in a land of good Beer and Bratwurst :)

• Email: RBrownCCB at openSUSE.org
• IRC: ilmehtar on irc.freenode.org
• I'm @sysrich on twitter
• My Blog is here

 

I currently work as a QA Engineer for SUSE, the wonderful Enterprise Linux company that also is the main sponsor of our openSUSE Project.

Previously I worked as a Systems Manager for City College Brighton and Hove, a large UK further education college where we use a lot of openSUSE, SUSE, and other FOSS technologies. I was also the UK Representative on the Advisory Board of the TTP Academic User Group, an usergroup for sysadmins working in Academia that deals with SUSE, Novell, and NetIQ products, with good links to the developers and management teams in these companies and their partners. The TTP is very supportive of both SUSE & the openSUSE Project, and was proud to have a track of sessions during our oSC 12 conference in Prague.

I've used SUSE/openSUSE since 2003, and have found myself getting more involved as time has gone on.

I'm part of the team which maintains GNOME in openSUSE, as well as lead maintainer for the 'Branding' packages in openSUSE, which leads me to work very closely with our great Artwork team. I also am heavily involved in Marketing, as well as the Advocates & Local Coordinators Programmes, where I was involved in implementing many of the changes transforming the former 'Ambassadors' programme into its new structure.

I'm an active Advocate for our project, who regularly attends conferences where I do my best to to both evangelise about our work, but also gather ideas and feedback on how we could improve. My session at oSC 12 "Using openSUSE for Real Work" really helped gather feedback which shaped my efforts to improve our project over the last year. At oSC13 I gave talks about the transformation of the Ambassador programme into the Local Coordinator and Advocates groups, as well as a talk about the work involved in Branding openSUSE. I also led the organisation of openSUSE's presence at the last two FOSDEM conferences.

I'm a keen tester who especially enjoys the crunch in the weeks leading up to releases, frantically testing and packaging patches to try and get bugs big and small squashed out so our releases are as polished as possible. I'm also very interested in Power Management, and have done a lot of work finding ways to optimise Power consumption on Intel laptop chipsets

I spend a lot time in our IRC channels, where I go by the handle ilmehtar (a very obscure Lord of the Rings/JRR Tolkien reference, I'll owe a prize to anyone who figures it out)

I have very broad interests which finds me often getting involved in both the technical and more 'community' aspects of our project.
I'm always keen to help out, try and resolve issues, come up with ideas, and then get my hands dirty trying to implement them.
I'm very happy learning new things and trying to help out in areas outside of my 'comfort zone', such as this year where I was given the opportunity to join the openSUSE Board - and after a year of hard work and interesting challenges, I'm back again hoping for your votes so I can continue the work I started this year.

Issues

Managing Change - In the last few weeks the openSUSE team from SUSE have initiated a number of discussions (1), (2), (3) proposing changes to our projects goals and practical changes to our 'Factory' development distribution. Over these next few weeks and (if I am elected) into the early months of next year I intend to work hard to ensure that the discussions progress well and we, together as a cohesive project, find an exciting way forward.

I do not expect this to be a painless process, and I expect there will be occasions where some people will want things to develop in one direction, while others pull for another. This is precisely the sort of issue the Board is there to deal with, and I'm prepared to put in the work to make sure everyone can contribute to shaping the future of our Project and its Distribution(s).

Improve Working Relationship with the openSUSE Team @ SUSE - The Board have a responsibility to 'Facilitate communication with all areas of the community' - ie. We need to make sure all the Teams that make up our project have strong communication and therefore are able to work effectively with each other.

This is important for every Team in our project, but especially so for the openSUSE Team at SUSE, because not only are they contributing to openSUSE to make it better for themselves as well as everyone else, but as paid employees of our primary sponsor (SUSE) they currently control some aspects of the project the 'wider community' have little or no involvement in. As has been mentioned on our mailing lists, over the last year, the working relationship between the openSUSE Team and the Board has become strained.

I have already begun working on this issue, and if I am elected, I intend to continue to work hard to improve the situation. I think the Board can do a better job of keeping the members of the openSUSE Team informed about the current needs, wants, desires and 'pain points' of our wider openSUSE community, and inversely, I think with improved communication between us, the Board will be in a better position to help the openSUSE Team at SUSE in their communications with the wider openSUSE community. We need to squash the feeling of 'us & them' which has started to creep into that narrative, we're all one Project and one Community, and it's down to the Board to keep it that way.

openSUSE Membership - I think the Project needs to start thinking about changing the way 'openSUSE Membership' works. With our growing maturity as an independent project, it's very important that we have a healthy way of making big decisions which impact the entire Project. I do not think our current system is wholly broken (it's certainly healthy enough for these elections), but I'm concerned about a number of areas, especially the growing number of 'former Members' who maintain full voting rights. If I am elected, I intend to begin the discussions to reform the openSUSE membership, focusing first on a suitable way of 'retiring' openSUSE members who are no longer involved in the project, and after that looking at other issues such as improving the selection/approval process and the 'perks' of becoming an openSUSE member.

Role of the board

Last year, I said that I wanted the board to become more approachable and more prepared to 'step in' and help resolve issues.
While I think we have been broadly successful in achieving this, there is always room for improvement, and I'm hoping will a fully staffed Board we'll be able to build on the improvements we've seen in these last 12 months.

I don't think leadership in a project like ours should be dictatorial. I feel the board should act as 'enablers', 'cheerleaders', 'champions', and troubleshooters. The board's job should be to help you (the community) by proactively identifying where the project is going wrong and help pull people together to steer it in the right direction.

The board should be the primary point of contact for contributors and users to raise issues that cant be addressed elsewhere, which is why our board needs to be active, visible, and accessible. I do not think enough of our community know the Board is there to address their issues, so I think we need to make a big push to advertise our purpose and availability.

The board should also be a source of new ideas and proposals for the community to consider, and should also encourage other contributors to field their own ideas and help keep the great green Geeko rolling forward

Why you should vote for me?

• I've worked hard for you all as a Board member this year, and would like the opportunity to continue to do so.
• SuSE/openSUSE is my first distribution and I've been a loyal user and contributor since 2003. I care a great deal about seeing our project continue and improve.
• I've provided both technical and non-technical contributions to the project, and so have a strong working knowledge both the technical and community aspects of our project.
• While I have my own opinions and will often argue passionately for them, I always listen to and consider the opinion of others, especially when they disagree with me. If I am elected I will continue to champion the desires of the community, not just my own agenda.
• My experience outside of openSUSE, especially as a board member of the TTP, give me skills and knowledge I think will help me here
• I enjoy learning and getting involved in new things, and see working on the board as an opportunity to get help out in parts of the project that I'd probably otherwise not see.

 

Aims/Goals

If elected I will strive to

• Continue the work I've started over the last year as a Board Member
• Investigate ways to better advertise the work the Board is doing for the project
• Be involved in the recently started discussions about the Future of our project to find a viable plan for our Project going forward, especially one that addresses the needs of both our users desiring stability and a moderate pace of change, and for those whom using the latest and greatest stable versions is more important.
• Listen to the our users and contributors as much as possible, to figure out what you want the Board to be doing

 

Endorsements

Michal '-miska-' Hrusecky
I know Richard for few years and he always cared a lot about openSUSE. He is active on our channels and whenever he sees some troubles, he steps up and do his best to help the project. Not only technically but also on ''boring'' organization tasks. I can imagine, that being part of the board is a hard work although not that appreciated and visible to the outside. But nevertheless it is important for the project and I believe that Richard will continue to represent us very well. What is also great about Richard as board candidate is that he is not a classical politician - he doesn't do long speeches without content and he prefers to cut to the chase.