As many who follow the LibreOffice mailing lists know, soon we will have the elections for the Bord of Directors again. Without doubt, there will be a lot of good candidates and the choice will be difficult. Different competencies, personalities, sensibilities. As many parameters as there could ever be. Nonetheless, there is one parameter that was eliminated from before the first election: the corporate pressure.

From the very beginning of The Document Foundation, the Steering Committee and the initial Membership Committee knew that while corporations can contribute a lot to open source, they can also in some moments try to use the community bodies for their own interest. That is the reason that all elected bodies of The Document Foundation have the 30 per cent rule, where no more then 30 per cent of any body can have the same affiliation. In the same spirit, the election system was designed the way that it is technically impossible for anybody to know how a given member voted. From the experience with the "old good times" of OpenOffice.org, it was obvious that corporate influence can do a lot of harm and skew the elections in a considerable way. And even if the rule of 30 per cent is in place, it might be hard for a election officer or for a MC member to stand strong before a corporate pressure. And this was the reason why we chose a design that makes it impossible even for the election officer to know whom you voted for. This information is known only to you.

$ alien -rv --scripts xmind-linux-3.4.0.201311050558_i386.de

# rpm -ivh xmind-3.4.0-2.i386.rpm

# A fatal error has been detected by the Java Runtime Environment:

#

#  SIGSEGV (0xb) at pc=0x933a737d, pid=5596, tid=3076298496

#

# JRE version: Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (7.0_45-b18) (build 1.7.0_45-b18)

# Java VM: Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (24.45-b08 mixed mode linux-x86 )

# Problematic frame:

# C  [libsoup-2.4.so.1+0x5837d]  soup_session_feature_detach+0x1d

-Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.DefaultType=mozilla

# sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-325.15.run --apply-patch kernel_v3.11.patch

• 節 1, “雜項”：這些項目是由 openFATE，即特色與需求管理系統 (http://features.opensuse.org)自動引入。
N/A
• 節 2, “安裝”：若您想從頭開始安裝系統，請閱讀本節。
• 節 3, “一般說明”：每位使用者都應閱讀的資訊。
• 節 4, “系統昇級”：若您是透過系統更新來從舊版本昇級到新版的 openSUSE，本節包含了昇級過程的相關議題。
• 節 5, “技術議題”：本節包含一些技術上的變化與改進，提供給進階使用者參考。

• yast2-autofs
• yast2-dbus-client
• yast2-dirinstall
• yast2-fingerprint-reader
• yast2-irda
• yast2-mouse
• yast2-phone-services
• yast2-power-management
• yast2-profile-manager
• yast2-sshd
• yast2-tv

tmpfs   /dev/shm

devpts  /dev/pts

sysfs   /sys sysfs

proc    /proc proc

sudo /usr/sbin/grub2-mkconfig --output=/boot/grub2/grub.cfg

/etc/cron.daily/mlocate.cron

PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60 skype

Long time not see, dear friends. But that does not mean that there is nothing to speak about. So, hence a new blog post for those that were wondering what was happenning in the reverse-straight engineering partnership.

After the moments in August and September, where I transitioned from working on LibreOffice to working on SuSE Linux Enterprise and after some breathing pause to give to the Cesar (or also known as family) what is belonging to Cesar, the activity on LibreOffice related stuff restarted in October. Just this time, during nights, weekends and other free time.

Sample Keynote presentation in LibreOffice 4.2

It is with a huge pleasure that I realized that we start to have a vibrant developer community around the libwpd/libwpg family, as well as around Valek's reverse-engineering framework. SUSE Hackweek 10 helped me to produce an initial importer for Freehand file-format. Close to that, David Tardon of RedHat fame added a library to parse Keynote files and a library to convert different e-book file-formats. Laurent Alonso works like a bee on importing Microsoft Works spreadsheets (*.wks). Many exciting things in the pipeline, as you can see.

Wireframe of shapes from a sample Freehand drawing in LibreOffice 4.2

With the extension to presentations and spreadsheets, we decided that the time has come to simply break the super-stable libwpd/libwpg API and profit to make it even more future-proof and in the same token solve some of the API issues that were preventing us from importing correctly several features; most notable of which the Visio connectors.

librevenge

We decided to diminish drastically dupplication of code and we extracted from libwpd, libwpg and from libetonyek the API classes along with the used types. We created a new library, librevenge where we also added as sub-libraries the (structured) stream implementations that used to be in libwpd-stream, as well as several classes that the libraries used to copy and paste between them. The structured stream implementations support now both OLE2 and Zip containers and the relevant libraries assume this. That means that we will have to eventually extend the WPXSvStream implementation in LibreOffice's "writerperfect" module to cater for Zip too.

A new sub-library, librevenge-generators has the simple implementations of the interface classes that we use to convert documents into html, text, or that we use to see the raw API calls for the purpose of regression testing. The exception is the RVNGSVGDrawingGenerator class. In the current stable branches, all of the libraries that convert graphics file-formats contain an SVG generator and they rely on its presence in several cases for things like fills with vector graphics. This class is thus not part of the librevenge-generators library, but of the base librevenge, which is a hard dependency of all of the converter libraries.

RVNGPropertyList

The base type for passing information using the API callbacks is RVNGPropertyList, which was born from libwpd's WPXPropertyList. We modified the design of this class the way that each atrribute can have as a value either a simple property or an array of RVNGPropertyList element. This allows us to do more or less all that JSON is able to do. The API classes are even more flexible and future-proof, since extending the information passed in the different callbacks will not modify function signatures.

Quality improvement

Although the relevant libraries were quite extensively regression-tested in the past, the new librevenge extends the coverage of unit tests. We hope that this helps us to keep under control the basic functionalities without having to use the heavy regression tests on each commit.

Other effort is to avoid to copy in the API calls huge data structures. This effort will result in some performance improvements especially if a document contains a lot of shapes that are filled by different bitmap fills.

When will it be ready?

When it is ready! But seriously, we are trying to take our time and get the APIs right. Like this we intend to prevent gratuitous breakages of binary compatibility in the future. So, it will not be in LibreOffice 4.2 for sure.

If this is interesting for you, please drop by at #libreoffice-dev channel at irc.freenode.net in order to meet us. We cannot promise you that you will become rich, but we can guarantee you fame and eternal gratitude

This morning during a cup of coffee I wanted to do something adventurous. I put the raspberry which I bought recently (without having very much played with it because of my light apt-* allergy) on the table and thought I will try to install the openSUSE distribution.

I remembered awesome Bernhard was blogging about that topic recently. On that page one can find this link where raspberrypi images can be found. Oh, surprise, there is even a file from november 10th, so I downloaded that. People always recommend the latest stuff.

Following this Howto I quickly had the RaspberryPi running in my home network, surprisingly enough identifying itself as powered by openSUSE 13.1 :-)

Well, that was easy and far away from adventure which I was looking for. So I remembered that the cool kids on the block have an ownCloud server running on the RaspberryPi. Would that be as easy? There are no official packages for the Pi yet, so what could I do?

Well, ownCloud is noarch, because it is plain PHP. So I downloaded the two ownCloud server packages owncloud and owncloud-3rdparty from our ownCloud nightly build repository on OBS and installed them with

zypper in owncloud owncloud-3rdparty

I was (adventure!) ignoring all the warnings and stuff, what you should never do! Just for a test, before the coffee is cold.

After having started apache, what should I say? It simply worked. No need for antihistamine, all nice green around, and ownCloud running after having finished it’s setup page.

That really pushed me for the day! It was such a smart experience having that running within a couple of minutes, with absolutely no fiddling around. This is cool stuff! Thanks to Bernhard and all the other openSUSE guys for doing that!

My congrats for the 13.1 release! I really hope that people will understand (again) how awesome the openSUSE distribution and the project is, especially for the more nerdy folks! Really, you wanna run the Geeko these days.

Enough praise, now, maybe there is somebody who will help me in OBS to provide proper ownCloud packages for ARM? I am sure there is not much missing.

And if you want to run ownCloud on your “normal” PC, this is the repository of the latest stable version which we actively maintain…