Greek openSUSE community, Translation of openSUSE Weekly news in Greek(issue 175)

Hello out there,

I am very pleased to announce the new issue (175) of openSUSE Weekly
News in Greek. In this one you will read about:

* openSUSE 11.2 has reached end of SUSE support – 11.2 Evergreen goes on!
* Sebastian Kügler: What’s new in Plasma Active?
* Thanasis Rous: Medical Report
* Nelson Marques: Unknown Horizons, a nice strategy game, now on openSUSE
* jun auza: 7 Nifty Tricks to Get the Most out of LibreOffice Writer

And of course many many interesting news about openSUSE, plus usefull
advice for making our lives easier.

Enough… read more at: own.opensuse.gr or at
http://el.opensuse.org/Weekly_news.

Looking forward to hearing your comments, advice and anything you would
like to read about at the next issue.

Enjoy it!
Efstathios Agrapidis (efagra)

Well, have you?  Not the satisfying expulsion of excess gas, but the simplest way you can materially contribute to openSUSE.

I was just hanging in the #active channel, watching my KDE chums make their new touchscreen interface (video), when somebody complained that shared-desktop-ontologies does not yet contain the latest release needed by KDE git master.  And instead of updating the package myself, I suggested they just BURP:

• Branch,
• Update,
• Request,
• the Package

And by doing so we all get the latest versions in the devel project and soon in Tumbleweed and openSUSE Factory.  So ambassadors, boosters and motivated contributors know how to do that right?  Now you can use this glib little acronym to persuade friends and colleagues to do the same.

Happy BURPing!

As Christian Boltz and myself held a quite successful talk on Wine on the 2010 openSUSE conference, we decided to again hold a talk at Germanys largest Linux fair, Linux Tag 2011 in Berlin.

We again ran the pun talk “Wine” (not) the Emulator vs “Wine” the beverage, with Christian talking about life and work at a vineyard and his wine grower community at Deutsches Weintor.

Included in this talk was a Wine tasting of 4 different kinds of Wine, as grown in the area were Christian lives.

His stories on Vineyard activities and the processing from grape to wine interluded with myself talking about Wine the Emulator, its historical and statistical parts, game support and futures.

Around 70 people  enjoyed our light hearted wrap up talk of this Linux Tag conference.

Images: by hueck2342 at flickr.com, licensed as Creative Commons  – Share Alike, Attribute, Non Commercial http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/

Funny question eh? :)

Let me take a step back first. There are quite a few packages that the openSUSE project cannot publish on their main infrastructure, not because of legal reasons, but for reasons of potential software patent infringements. That, combined with the fact that the main sponsor of the openSUSE project (Attachmate, formerly Novell) also sponsors almost all the IT infrastructure, the fact that Attachmate (and Novell before them) is a business in the USA, and that the USA has the most ludicrous legal precedents regarding software patents (hey, the market regulates itself, right ?), puts us into such a situation. It isn't different for most other distributions by the way, except for a very few which probably only get away with it because they remain rather small and under the radar.

What am I talking about? Well, packages such as gstreamer-0_10-plugins-bad, MPlayer, vlc, xine, libmad, etc... Typically because they contain implementations of multimedia codecs such as for MP3 or H.264 which are heavily covered with software patents.

The Packman project and repository provides many of those packages (amongst other things) for openSUSE, hosted in a country where software patents do not apply. Now, don't confuse software patents and copyright: copyright is well established, precise and there are no groups of people on the planet who respect copyright more than open source and Free software developers, specifically because copyrights such as the GPL, BSD or ASL (to name just a few) protect our work and our ideals. Hence, what we are doing is not illegal in any way. As an example, the mad library might be subject to software patent infringement where applicable, but is under the GPL.

Okay, now back to the actual topic. The libraries of the gstreamer framework are maintained by several contributors of the openSUSE project in the multimedia:libs project in our famous openSUSE Build Service. However, as explained above, the download repositories of multimedia:libs may not host the packages that might infringe on software patents (where applicable). So what we are doing, is to link those packages on our Build Service instance at Packman (yes, the Build Service can do that, awesome feature :)). The difference is that on Packman, due to some macros, we do build those parts that potentially infringe on software patents, and also host them in our repository and its mirrors. The trick is that they're subpackages that end in "-orig-addon". For example, for the package "gstreamer-0_10-plugins-bad", its companion is "gstreamer-0_10-plugins-bad-addon-orig" (yes, I agree, the suffix "orig-addon" is stupid, too "geeky" and not intuitive in any way.)

So, to see whether you have those installed, first open a shell as root, then do the following:

It will probably result in something like this:

In order to install those bits, do the following:

On a side note: if those results don't show up when doing the search, then add the Packman repository with the following command and try again: