or Protective vs. overprotective

One post on opensuse@opensuse.org made me think about what makes openSUSE a bit hard to chew for new computer users.

In particular the post was about NTFS usage.
There is a short article how to fix default settings:
http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:NTFS

I have packaged up the latest and greatest release (0.1.1.1) of the-boardfrom Lucas Rocha. If’ you want a bit more background have a look at my previous post. I also said that it was for 11.4/Factory only and that 11.3 was a WIP. Well the progress is complete (with huge help from Frederic Crozat, and his great GNOME3 repo). Yes, more people can have some of this cool shiny stuff. There is a but, and this is from upstream – it is still in development so you may loose a kitten or bunny, maybe even both ;-) So come and join the fun and try it out, I’ve not generated a single .

I have been using KVM a lot, but never took time to understand how kvm works. I used some time from this hackweek to get rid of that regret.

Virtual Machine eXtensions instructions allow trap-and-emulate virtualization. And KVM exposes VMX in a convenient way to userspace in Linux. Virtual Machine Monitors(VMM) like qemu-kvm use the KVM API exposed by linux to emulate virtualize software.

x86_64 processors boot in real-mode. In this mode it can use only 16-bit addresses, ie., upto 1MByte RAM. The execution would begin at physical address 0xFFFFFFF0. Then the software has to switch to protected mode where protection and paging is possible. Paging is optional, but almost all OSes use demand paging extensively. Now 4 GBytes of linear address space is used. And then CPU can be switched to long mode i.e., 64-bit mode. Paging should be disabled in 32-bit mode, before switching to long mode. There are also other modes of operation like virtual-8086 mode to allow executing legacy real-mode software from protected mode, SMM for OS transparent execution of OEM specific code.

I had limited time and very very limited skill at hand. So aiming for the sky was not an option. Hence wrote a very simple VMM that directly starts the guest at address 0H, in 32-bit protected mode with paging disabled. And supports only insb and outsb as the only form of interaction possible for the guest. The guest is a simple static linked 32-bit program that doesn't use any library, and linked to start from 0x0. The guest simply reads a byte using insb and sends byte+1 back via outsb. The guest would halt, when it gets the, "Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything". The VMM reads the byte value to pass to the guest from stdin and prints its response in stdout.

The KVM API is really very easy to understand and use. But some knowledge of the processor was required to make use of it. Intel manuals helped there. I don't have good understanding of things yet, but something is better than nothing.

I was occupied by quite a lot of things in life and work in the recent past. So I wasn't really planning to participate and make this a real hackweek. Also a National holiday for Republic day of India, bang in the middle of the week prevents this hackweek from being a long hackweek! But seeing videos of my colleagues from various parts of world having fun, I couldn't resist and decided to go for the virtual hackweek. I thank my employer for giving me this protected hackweek, and let me learn/do things protected from everyday work.

Arts, buffer, check, clutter, cobbler, colorblind, concurrent, convert, cook, crash, dialog, dump, expect, file, folks, fortune, genius, global, hello, indent, less, links, meanwhile, mirror, screen, sparse, suck, tree, units, words. What do these ordinary English words have in common? They are also names of software projects, which becomes a problem if you want to recognize package names in text. I understand that in the old days, the name of a command or application was only relevant in the context of the computer it ran on, and file names had to be short. Some of these names have allowed for a variety of jokes. But why, in the age of portable programs, WWW and search engines, can’t people come up with less ambiguous names? I mean, it’s not hard to join two words, or, at a minimum, prefix a word with a vowel, like, uhm, a round fruit does.

Oh, and did I mention that we have over 160 packages with a 2-3 letter name? The one mentioned in the title is a programming language, btw.

Tradução Livre do Artigo disponível em (http://ostatic.com/blog/one-package-manager-for-them-all)


Desenvolvedores da RedHat, Fedora, Debina, Ubuntu, OpenSUsE, Mandriva e Mageia reuniram-se num escritório da SUsE em Nürnberg para discutir como implementar esse instalador universal referindo-se a uma AppStore.

A ideia de um formato de pacotes para todas as distribuições linux não é nenhuma novidade. Um dos maiores exemplos é a idéia dos arquivos FatELF de Ryan C. Gordon. Foram várias as reações em contrátio. Contudo um time formado por representantes de várias as distribuições mais tradicionais pensam em implementar "uma API e infraestrutura comum de instalação de aplicações". Esta é uma resposta à crença de que os usuários finais não estão preocupados como bibliotecas, dependências, compatibilidade e outros detalhes técnicos. Eles pensam que usuários somente se interessam por screenshots, descrições básicas, avaliações etc. A ideia é definir como uma ferramenta pode encontrar e instalar aplicações.

A ideia de Ryan "icculus" Gordon para criar arquivos de pacotes de software precisava que módulos de kernel, dependências, bibliotecas e softwares fossem todos incluídos é um grande pacote.

Ryan "icculus" Gordon's idea was to package software archives so that needed kernel modules, dependencies, libraries, and software files were all included in one larger package. Sua ideia era fornecer todas as arquiteturas para todas as distribuições. Ele explica "ele adiciona algumas informações de contabilidade no início do arquivo e depois inclui os binários ELF. FatELF permite incluir os binários em um único arquivo separados por OS ABI, versão do OS ABI, ordem de byte, tamanho da palavra, e o mais importante, arquitetura da CPU". Uma das principais ideias é que os pacotes de software devem ser bem semelhantes, da mesma forma que os instaladores de software Windows. Não demorou muito para a oposição suspender o projeto.

Mas a ideia está sendo retomada, de forma bem diferente. AppStream se baseia no Projeto Bretzn, que produz os pacotes para as várias arquiteturas e distribuições após o desenvolvedor enviar o código, publicar o pacote e enviar os anúncios de lançamento.



A equipe do AppStream considera o Ubuntu Software Center a interface ideal para o projeto e planeja migrá-lo para o PackageKit. Pensam em usar os servidores do Xapian para fornecer as buscas e o Open Collaboration Services para permitir as avaliações e revisões dos usuários. Metadados serão armazenados em servidores com as informações do pacote, localização de ícones, tipo e local do repositório entre outros. Um servidor extrai as informações do pacote de um arquivo .desktop (que as distribuições suportadas deverão fornecer para cada pacote) e a saída de todas as informações para um arquivo XML. A interface do AppStream será um Front-End para o PackageKit, que irá instruir o gerenciador de pacote da distribuição usada a instalar o pacote solicitado.





A diferença entre o FatELF e o AppStream é que o primeiro inclui todos os arquivos necessários para o pacote universal, enquanto que o segundo compila somente os metadados necessários para popular o instalador universal. Ele pode ser o principal ou único gerente gráfico de pacotes da maioria das distribuições, se desejar substituir (ou somado a), por exemplo, Synaptic ou RpmDrake da Mandriva


A meta principal é possuir uma experiência única de software para Linux como um todo, ou nas palavras da equipe da AppStream "para instalar e remover software no Linux".

Most of the important stuff has been already said, so without much ado, let me share some pictures from LibreOffice release party we threw yesterday at 12 a.m. sharp in Prague Novell office.

Prague hacker crowd waiting for the fun to start:


Ready to rock!


Kendy waving the LibreOffice flag:


... and the final baptism of this baby of ours:

Many thanks to everyone who participated! Another round of thanks to Kobliha for photodocumentation. No animals were harmed and no hackers got drunk while producing those pics.

On behalf of Jean-Baptiste Lallement:

We are pleased to announce the new development release of Mago.

This release has seen a lot of changes and improvements to make Linux
automated desktop testing easier and enable more people to contribute
writing tests and aiming to high quality desktop applications.

Key features included in this version:
- Separation between the framework and the tests
- Support for standard gnome dialogs and authentication
- Easy configuration of the tests with configuration files
- Support for the latest version of LDTP
- Direct interaction with Window Manager via XLib
- Image matching testing with XPresser
- Easy and flexible collect and run with Nose
- Testtools to extend python unittest
- The documentation now uses Sphinx
- Magomatic to generate application map

You want to contribute to the effort?
You can download the source from bazaar at https://launchpad.net/mago

The testsuite is available from lp:~mago-contributors/mago/mago-testsuite

Note that this version is not compatible with the previous version of
mago which is still available from lp:~mago-contributors/mago/mago-1.0

Mailing List:
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-testing-list

IRC:
#ubuntu-testing in irc.freenode.org
#gnome-testing in irc.gnome.org


Thanks to all the people who contributed fixes, features and lot of tests.

I’m happy to announce that LibreOffice 3.3 rc4 packages are available for openSUSE in the Build Service LibreOffice:Unstable project. They are based on the libreoffice-3.3.0.4 release. Please, look for more details about the openSUSE LibreOffice build on the wiki page.

The packages are based on LibreOffice release candidate sources. Though, they include some addons from the old Go-oo project.  They have not passed full QA round yet and might include even serious bugs. Therefore they are not intended for data-critical usage. A good practice is to archive any important data before an use, …

As usual, we kindly ask any interested beta testers to try the package and report bugs against the product LibreOffice .

Known bugs

• some packages were not renamed, .e.g. OpenOffice_org-thesaurus, …; they are not built from the main LibO sources; I will do soon.
• SLED10 build is not available; need more love

More known bugs

• Free Desktop bugzilla
• Novell bugzilla

Other information and plans:

First, I am sorry that I did not announce two older builds. I published rc2 build just before Christmas and the announce was forgot in the hurry. There were problems with building rc3. It was ready only one day before rc4, so it did not make sense to announce it.

There still might be some openSUSE-specific bugs that would need to be fixed. I hope that they do not break the base function but… I will continue with producing newer builds with more fixes from the stable libreoffice-3-3 branch. I will move the packages to a stable project once we finish testing of all the SUSE-specific addons. It should happen within the next few weeks.

Please be patient and thanks for understanding.

As many know, I have a few Android devices, and I know a lot of other openSUSE fans out there also have robot powered devices. I decided the other day to try something during my lunch break – create a widget to show how many days left till 11.4′s release. Yeah I know it isn’t an earth shattering application, but I’m not a code monkey, so any working code I generate is a serious plus for me ;-)