Today we converted our 7th Member of the Public since the start of February to join the openSUSE community. congratulations Michael in Wiltshire, you made the right choice.

Не за горами выход openSUSE 11.4, уже вышел первый релиз-кандидат. Поэтому у сообщества осталась последняя возможность исправить оставшиеся ошибки. Нам нужна Ваша помощь!
В связи с этим в Воскресенье, 20 февраля, объявляется открытый Bugs-Day, где каждый желающий получит возможность принять участие в тестировании openSUSE 11.4 на наличие ошибок.

Что нужно для того, чтобы принять участие:

• Регистрация в bugzilla.novell.com
• Установленный дистрибутив openSUSE 11.4 RC1 или openSUSE Factory
• IRC клиент для взаимодействия с другими участниками на канале #opensuse-testing
• Хорошее настроение :)

Если вы испытываете трудности с сортировкой и выборкой ошибок из Bugzilla - обратитесь к организаторам, они предоставят Вам список ошибок, которые Вы сможете проверить.

Порядок работы:

• Поиск в Bugzilla ошибок, открытых в устаревших версиях (11.4 MS 1-5 или 11.4 Factory) 
• Попробуйте воспроизвести проблему на 11.4 RC1 
• Если неполадка все еще остается, обновите статус ошибки для текущей версии
• Если вы уверены, что проблема была устранена, установите статус ошибки в RESOLVED+FIXED
• Если вы чувствуете, что проблема была устранена, установите статус в RESOLVED+NORESPONSE

Today I completed the application form for Streamline credit card processing.  I delivered the package to the post office and sent it back, so 2 weeks from Tomorrow I should have my credit card machine.  I just hope it arrives before the 6th of March.  Keep your fingers crossed.

Bolton Linux has today sold 5 copies of openSUSE 11.3 since our Launch on 1st February 2011.

1 was sold at Sheffield Computer Market on the 6th February 2011, where a lot of Interest was generated.

1 was sold to my father which he has used to promote amongst his colleagues at work on Tuesday 8th February 2011.

You know its strange how both of his colleagues suffered computer failure at exactly the same time - coincidence or what without even testing openSUSE!!

2 were sold over the counter at Leeds Computer Market on Sunday 13th February 2011.

Today Tuesday 15th February 2011 we sold our first internet order via credit card payment, goods will be shipped out tomorrow and should be delivered to the customer on Thursday or Friday.

Background
The Banshee maintainers and community have been proud to support GNOME by sending 100% of our FOSS Amazon MP3 store's affiliate revenue to the Foundation. We're already on pace to contribute at the same level as a small company on the Advisory Board, $10,000 USD per year, and revenue is increasing every month.

Canonical's Proposals
After choosing Banshee as the next default player in Ubuntu, Canonical approached us, concerned with how our Amazon store would affect their Ubuntu One store. They proposed two options:

1. Canonical disables the Amazon store by default (you could enable it in a few easy steps) but leaves the affiliate code alone (100% still to GNOME), or
2. Canonical leaves the Amazon store enabled, but changes the affiliate code and takes a 75% cut.

Our Response
We are pleased that Canonical is willing to leave the affiliate code unaltered.

As maintainers of the Banshee project, we have opted unanimously to decline Canonical's revenue sharing proposal, so that our users who choose the Amazon store will continue supporting GNOME to the fullest extent. The GNOME Foundation's Board of Directors supports this decision.

The Banshee Maintainer Team
Aaron Bockover, Alexander Kojevnikov, Bertrand Lorentz, Gabriel Burt

Yes, you read that correct – I am going to try and port LibreOffice to Android! :-) Why? Simples, there are no ODF compatible products on Android for reading & writing. There is OpenOffice Document Reader which as the name suggests is just a reader, and also OOo is so 2009 ;-) Now if I was a half decent hacker, this may not have been such a big deal. Problem is I’m an absolutley crap hacker, with almost no experience or knowledge of Android or LibreOffice development.

Как-то раз, ещё до покупки роутера, мне понадобилось расшарить свое интернет подключение соседу по общежитию. В наличии имелся компьютер с 1 сетевым интерфейсом, подключенный к локальной сети с доступом в Интернет через шлюз, и компьютер в той же локальной сети, но без доступа к Интернету.
Самым простым решением на мой взгляд было настроить squid через Yast2, что и было сделано буквально в пять клтков. Всё бы ничего, веб-страницы заработали, но вот p2p программы, типо ICQ, Skype, Torrent-клиентов работать не пожелали. Было решено также поднять socks proxy.
В репозиториях я быстро нашел прокси сервер Dante и начал разбираться с настройками.
Все настройки хранятся в файле /etc/sockd.conf, который по доброй Unix традиции содержит подробные инструкции в виде комментариев. Ниже приведу откомментированный рабочий файл настройки, реализующий простейший прокси сервер, раздающий интернет одному клиенту без каких-либо ограничений и не требующий авторизации:

logoutput: /var/log/socks/socks.log # указываем файл для хранения логов

I am presenting and promoting open source software at various locations. It is much more impressive to show the power of KDE/Linux when you have some content with you; Amarok rocking the booth is much more attracting than a plain KDE Plasma Desktop (the plain Plasma Desktop is attracting anyway but it could be enriched :-) ). Interested people could play around by themselves if they find some data on the demo machine. You can't do much expect moving Dolphin windows with a blank system (unfortunately most live CDs don't provide content). We wanted to change that. So I submitted a couple of tasks during the Google Code in project.

Now
* we have cc music (which works with Amarok's Wikipedia, lyrics and CD cover downloads features,
* we have HQ blender videos (like sintel) to show multimedia power (moving pictures are always attracting),
* we have documents in ODF- and MS-formats to show the import/export capabilities,
* we have pictures for your favorite photo-management software (like digiKam or Gwenview).

The next step would be to create compressed archives to make it possible to download the whole packages but I haven't found a good place to put them.

You can download the content onto your promo machine (e.g. I put it into my demo-user home directory) or integrate the content onto live CDs (or more likely DVDs when talking about videos).
With Suse Studio you can create a live CD/DVD/USB-Stick within a couple of minutes. You can choose the applications you want to have included and you can upload all the demo content.

Perhaps the creators of live CDs find some space on their media to include at least parts of that demo content. IMHO it would significantly increase the experience for a our users / testers.

Here we are in 2011. Obviously, the year of the Linux desktop, right? You’d hope so. It’s not like there hasn’t been plenty of time to make it happen. Red Hat, Canonical, Novell, and many other companies and individuals have been working hard on it for quite a while. And yet, very few inroads have been made. Sure, Dell has been selling Ubuntu on some netbooks with limited success, but that is hardly a victory.

In 2007, Google unveiled the Linux-based Android smartphone platform. The first phone wasn’t released until a year later in 2008, along with the Android source code. Now, in Q4 2010, Android is the best-selling smartphone operating system in the world, surpassing Symbian, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and yes even iOS. In 2 years, it went from zero to total domination, with no signs of slowing down. Not everyone agrees that Android is the best smartphone OS (ahem, Gruber), but it’s impossible to say that it isn’t a success. And it uses Linux. In fact, I believe you could say that Android is the most successful and widely deployed Linux product ever. So why haven’t we standardized on it for other non-smartphone uses? It would require some work, but at least there is some chance it could work out.

Initially I was going to try to call out all of the infuriating things about developing on desktop Linux, but I got tired. All of that has been said elsewhere by people smarter than me. The main reason I’m really behind Android is that it dramatically reduces the amount of fragmentation. It’s just not possible for a hardware vendor like AMD or NVIDIA to support the multitude of distros out there. If you told those guys they only had to support a couple versions of Android, they would be able to deliver much higher quality of support.

The Eclipse IDE, Dalvik VM, and Android application framework are all great assets and deliver a far superior development experience over standard Linux. You get that for free. If Java isn’t your bag, though, you can always use the Native Development Kit to write in C, C++, C#, or whatever you want. I would love to see Clutter on Android, for instance. And Node.js/gjs. Or any number of other great projects.

It’s already possible to run Android on a PC via the Android-x86 project. They’ve added basic mouse support, as well as hardware accelerated OpenGL ES2 via Mesa (on Intel hardware). I have a Cr-48 running it here, and it works amazingly well. Even wifi works.