This was a special moment for me since i'm involved on GNOME project, it marks a new era for GNOME. Over this years i contributed on Brasero, Zenity, other modules, distro packages, being a tester and now contributing for the marketing team where i admin the GNOME Facebook page.
Looking forward to contribute to 3.x release cycles and i hope i'll be here for GNOME 4.0. Special thanks to everyone that made GNOME 3.0 possible.

See you soon :)

Hi everybody,

just in time for GNOME 3.0 release, I'm please to announce GNOME 3 Live Image version 1.0.0 release.

As you might expect, this release is built with GNOME 3.0.0. Other features, compared to latest image release :

• radeon KMS should be fixed (it was preventing GNOME Shell to start since version 0.3.1)
• speech-dispatcher is used for speech synthesis (ie Orca)
• tracker is installed on the image
• more fonts are installed by default

Live installer is also available from the running image, just search for "live" in GNOME-Shell overview panel (or you can still start the live install by adding liveinstall to boot command line).

As always, you can download the image from http://gnome3.org/tryit.html

For openSUSE 11.4 users, we will soon make a stable repository available with GNOME 3.0, watch this space for more info ;)


As a side note, I'd like to thanks my employer (Novell) and my managers who allowed me to work on GNOME 3 for weeks fulltime.

Enjoy.

We are thrilled to announce the release of Banshee 2.0! It's the culmination of six months' work by 36 developers and dozens of translators, documenters, bug reporters, and testers. It is a stable release, the successor to Banshee 1.8.

New Features:

• Artist/Album Browser Track Actions
• Play After Queue Options
• Sleeker UI, Less Wasted Space
• Video Subtitle Support
• Lots of new devices supported
• Amazon Cloud Player download support
• Hundreds (277, to be exact) of bugs fixed, and dozens more minor enhancements!

View the release notes for much more information, or head straight to the download page.

The Banshee community has come a long way in the last six months.

• We now support Windows in addition to Linux and OS X. Our Windows installer has been downloaded by 12,729 unique IPs.
• We are donating $1,200 USD per month to the GNOME Foundation — that's over $15,000 annually, or 5% of GNOME's 2009 budget.
• And Ubuntu decided to make us their default music player, joining the ranks of openSUSE and Foresight Linux.

Congratulations and many thanks to everybody who made all this possible! If you want to learn more about Banshee, how you can contribute, get in touch, get help, etc, head over to our website.

The voting on how to do the versioning is over and the “old school” has won by 55 per cent (of 98 participants). Thanks to all that participated in the two votes and the discussion around the topic.

As Coolo said in on the project list,  we’d like to make a small change to the numbering:

We will not have a .0 release but only .1, .2, .3 release. Since we have releases in three months, the November
release is always the .1 release, the July release the .2 and the March release the .3.

So, the plan is that the next release will be called openSUSE 12.1 and launched on the 10th of November, 2011! Two years later – on the 14th of November, 2013 – we will then have the openSUSE 13.1 release.

So, the next four releases are called:

• November 2011: openSUSE 12.1
• July 2012: openSUSE 12.2
• March 2013: openSUSE 12.3
• November 2013: openSUSE 13.1

Detailed results for logged-in openSUSE members are available at the connect poll page and I have reproduced them here as well:

• A: “old school”: Like currently but only counting the right number until 3:
  55% (54 votes)
• B: “Fedora style”: Just integers:
  29 % (28 votes)
• C: “Ubuntu style”: YY.MM:
  16 % (16 votes)

This is also consistent with the results of the first public voting.

Note that openSUSE does not have a major and minor numbering, even if it seems so. There is right now no difference in any way between what we would do for openSUSE 11.4 or 12.0 or 12.1 – and no sense to speak about openSUSE 11 or openSUSE 11 family. We also had in the past no process on how to name the next release (when to increase which parts of the number).

I think this new versioning is still consistent with the old one but also an improvement since it’s now clear that we change the first digit every two year. The first poll showed that half of our users prefer a date based versioning and the other a consecutive numbering. So, depending on your point of view, you can see this as a mixture of both or as consecutive numbering

So, time now to make openSUSE 12.1 a great release!

Dear All


Well what can I say? 4 sales in on calendar week, and 2 sales to kick start April and this ain't no fool!!

Friday was an amazing day for Bolton Linux, 2 sales back to back took our sales to 4 for the week for the first time, all be it 2 on Wednesday and Two on Friday, it shows there is a market, and that it is growing.

To celebrate the launch of Gnome 3.0 (three point zero) Free Software UK are throwing a party in Manchester Next Sunday 10th April from 2pm till 5pm Bolton Linux will be giving a presentation on Gnome, Novel and openSUSE.

We would welcome everybody to join us.

This does mean that however, we will not be attending Sheffield market this month. Instead we will arrange for PC Centre North West to carry some stock on our behalf.

But I am sure you will all agree a party is better than hard slog at a market :)

Den Artikel Doppelmoppel – IPv6-Zugang fürs LAN nachrüsten in der aktuellen c't möchte ich nutzen um auf zwei Punkte hinzuweisen welche in den meisten Dokumentationen zum Thema leider fehlen, ohne die es unter openSUSE aber nicht funktioniert.

• Das mit dem LAN verbundene Netzwerkinterface benötigt eine gültige IPv6-Adresse aus dem LAN-Subnetz. Diese muss von Hand vergeben werden, da die Zuweisung per radvd am lokalen Interface nicht funktioniert.

  Diese Adresse kann man via ifconfig add <in radvd eingetragenes prefix>:<mac addresse>/64 vergeben. Ist die Link-lokale Addresse z.B. fe80::442b:39ff:f231:95cd/64 und das Prefix 2a01:498:4c8::/64 so wäre die Addresse 2a01:498:4c8:0:4a5b:39ff:feed:95cd/64.

  Hat das lokale Interface keine gültige IPv6 im LAN-Subnetz werden die aus dem LAN kommenden Pakete vom Router verworfen.

• Nutzt man die SuSEfirewall2 muss man diese so konfigurieren, dass sie Verbindungen vom LAN ins IPv6 zulässt. Per Default blockt die SuSEfirewall2 nämlich alle durchzuleitenden IPv6-Pakete.

  Hierzu editiert man die Datei /etc/sysconfig/SuSEfirewall2 und ändert den Wert FW_FORWARD auf "<lokales IPv6-Netz>,2000::/3". 2000::/3 bezeichnet alle gültigen IPv6-Adressen. Im obigen Beispiel wäre der Eintrag dann FW_FORWARD="2a01:498:4c8::/64,2000::/3". Wichtig bei diesem Eintrag ist die Reihenfolge, denn Verbindungen sind immer vom ersten zum zweiten möglich. Wer die Einträge vertauscht erlaubt also dem ganzen Internet Zugriff aufs LAN, kommt aber nicht raus.

Zum Abschluss möchte ich noch auf ein allgemeines Problem bei IPv6 hinweisen. Ein Teil der eigenen IPv6-Adresse wird aus der MAC-Adresse des eigenen Rechners abgeleitet. Dadurch ist man natürlich dauerhaft im Netz identifizierbar. Um das dadurch entstehende Datenschutzproblem zu entschärfen gibt es die IPv6 Privacy Extension, deren Aktivierung ich jedem ans Herz legen möchte. Wie das geht beschreibt ein ausführlicher Artikel bei Heise-Netze für alle Betriebssysteme. Ob die Aktivierung der Privacy Extensions erfolgreich war kann man z.B. durch den Aufruf von sixxs.net prüfen, welches oben rechts die aufrufende IPv6-Adresse anzeigt.

Today we want to present the current development of snapper, a tool for managing btrfs snapshots.

For years we had the request to provide rollbacks for YaST and zypper but things never got far due to various technical problems. With the rise of btrfs snapshots we finally saw the possibility for a usable solution. The basic idea is to create a snapshot before and after running YaST or zypper, compare the two snapshots and finally provide a tool to revert the differences between the two snapshots. That was the birth of snapper. Soon the idea was extended to create hourly snapshots as a backup system against general user mistakes.

The tool is now in a state where you can play with it. On the other hand there is still room and time for modifications and new features.

Overview

We provide a command line tool and a YaST UI module. Here is a brief tour:

First we manually create a snapshot:

# snapper create --description "initial"

Running YaST automatically creates two snapshots:

# yast2 users

Now we can list our snapshots:

# snapper list
Type   | # | Pre # | Date                     | Cleanup  | Description
-------+---+-------+--------------------------+----------+-------------
single | 0 |       |                          |          | current
single | 1 |       | Wed Mar 30 14:52:17 2011 |          | initial
pre    | 2 |       | Wed Mar 30 14:57:10 2011 | number   | yast users
post   | 3 | 2     | Wed Mar 30 14:57:35 2011 | number   |
single | 4 |       | Wed Mar 30 15:00:01 2011 | timeline | timeline

Snapshot #0 always refers to the current system. Snapshot #2 and #3 were created by YaST. Snapshot #4 was created by an hourly cronjob.

Getting the list of modified files between to snapshots is easy:

# snapper diff 2 3
c... /etc/group
c... /etc/group.YaST2save
c... /etc/passwd
c... /etc/passwd.YaST2save
c... /etc/shadow
c... /etc/shadow.YaST2save
c... /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager
c... /var/tmp/kdecache-linux/icon-cache.kcache
c... /var/tmp/kdecache-linux/plasma_theme_openSUSEdefault.kcache

You can also compare a single file between two snapshots:

# snapper diff --file /etc/passwd 2 3
--- /snapshots/2/snapshot/etc/passwd    2011-03-30 14:41:45.943000001 +0200
+++ /snapshots/3/snapshot/etc/passwd    2011-03-30 14:57:33.916000003 +0200
@@ -22,3 +22,4 @@
 uucp:x:10:14:Unix-to-Unix CoPy system:/etc/uucp:/bin/bash
 wwwrun:x:30:8:WWW daemon apache:/var/lib/wwwrun:/bin/false
 linux:x:1000:100:linux:/home/linux:/bin/bash
+tux:x:1001:100:tux:/home/tux:/bin/bash

The main feature of course is to revert the changes between two snapshots:

# snapper rollback 2 3

Finally yast2-snapper provides a YaST UI for snapper.

Testing

Playing with snapper should only be done on test machines. Both btrfs and snapper are not finished and included known bugs. Here is a step-by-step manual for installing and configuring snapper for openSUSE 11.4.

Feedback

We would like to get feedback, esp. about general problems and further ideas. There are also tasks everybody can work on, e.g. the snapper wiki page or a man-page for snapper.

For the time being there is no dedicated mailing-list so just use opensuse-factory@opensuse.org.

Following the announcement of the Canterbury distribution, there has been a lot of work about this in the background too. In order to provide developers with the easiest framework to package with, we are pleased to announce the availability of the Canterbury Rolling Application Platform.

No more tedious packaging, upstream won't have to deal with the idiosyncrasies of distributions any more. Just write your source code, use our framework, and it will automagically be turned into a craplet, which is the new name for artifacts in our distributed platform. It will just fly!

Unlike all efforts of packaging and distribution, our approach is truly revolutionary and provides instant and effortless scalability for the cloud through virtualization of provisioning for horizontal and vertical growth of your business.

At the center of this revolutionary platform lies our secret sauce, Publish Organic in the Open, which will enable you to quickly push out your stuff into the wide world of users of the new Canterbury Rolling Application Platform.

aprfoo@feci.es$ make_poo --dist=loo LibreOpenOffice
Preparing upstream organic ... [DONE]
Building craplet loo.crap ... [DONE]
Flushing buffers ... [DONE]
Pushing to canterbury.org ... [DONE]
Finishing up. Congratulations, your CRAP is flying at the loo !

We are expecting big vendor support behind this effort, with HP, Oracle, IBM and probably also Microsoft, as it would only be a natural fit for their .NET platform.

It is obviously written in Python (significant whitespace fits in naturally with our philosophy) and will be available in git repositories soon.

Hello again,


I just did a quick update to GNOME 3 live image, to fix some issues people discovered in previous images :

• radeon / r600g openGL drivers have been switched to use gallium : they should be more stable with GNOME-Shell
• GNOME Control Center system information correctly detects graphics card on your system
• Empathy accounts panel is back in GNOME Control Center

As always, you can download it from http://gnome3.org/tryit.html. If you want to install this image on a system, just add "liveinstall" on the boot command line.

Enjoy !