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From friendly blog  via Planet openSUSE   here is part of the old Linux joke.

 .... Disgruntled employees of all the other OS airlines decide to start their own airline. They build the planes, ticket counters, and pave the runways themselves. They charge a small fee to cover the cost of printing the ticket, but you can also download and print the ticket yourself. When you board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a copy of the Seat-HOWTO.html. Once settled, the fully adjustable seat is very comfortable, the plane leaves and arrives on time without a single problem, the in-flight meal is wonderful. You try to tell customers of the other airlines about the great trip, but all they can say is, "You had to do what with the seat?"

Heh, if that would be so simple like installing a seat, but it is very close, which every openSUSE user can confirm :)

As some might know, I am switching ("intermediate") employers, and i am going to do home-office from now on. Home-office probably has tons of advantages, but one disadvantage is that you need to own your own office hardware, like a printer and a scanner. Such beasts were sitting around in Belgium, but in the 3.5 years that i have been in Nuernberg, i have either depended on the office i was respectively working for, or i ran to the copyshop around the corner. The latter is extremely unpractical and becomes rather expensive.

So, today, a Canon Canoscan LiDE 110 arrived from amazon (plus a basic samsung laser), and i have just succeeded in getting it to work with openSuSE 11.1, albeit in a very unscientific way. Here is how.

Sane is divided in front and backends. openSuSE 11.1 requires just an updated backend.

For the LiDE 110, only very recent sane (git from halfway december 2010) supports the LiDE 110 and 210, so grab the git repo.

Then, grab a recent openSuSE sane-backends package, for instance from here. Get yourself the src.rpm, and install it.

A crude way of getting something our specfile can work with is to tar -jc up the sane-backends git repo, and to move that to /usr/src/packages/SOURCES

Then edit the specfile, make sure to bump the "Version" and/or "Release" directives. Then have the "Source0" directive is pointing to the correct tarball, and make sure that the line with "%setup" is pointing to the right %{name}-... directory.

If you are as lucky as i was today, the existing patches, which are mostly about integration, will apply rather cleanly, and rpmbuild will succeed.

Install the created files (you probably won't need -devel), and you should now be able configure your scanner using yast. If yast complains about hal, then run rchal restart.

Now scanimage -L should be happy, and then you're all set.

Happy scanning!

Well, it’s just a small announce… I was in Yemen for some time, around 16 days, for work. I wasn’t able to answer emails and work for openSUSE, and I’m really sorry for that. But I just went back Yesterday and tomorrow I’ll start to work again.

My first goal is to package XBMC that recently released a new version.. so… STAY TUNED!

Have a lot of fun, Andrea

Following up on my previous blogpost I would like to give a small update on what happened so far about a longer supported (open)SUSE release.

We had a longer discussion on the mailing list if an openSLES (a’la CentOS) or “openSUSE LTS” would be the better or easier solution. There are pros and cons for both while the required infrastructure differs a lot. I’m not diving into details here though. While I would find a SLES clone appealing I’m not in the position to drive such an effort. I also do not think that having both makes sense and therefore I decided to go on with the other approach for now trying to extend the lifetime of an existing openSUSE release.

People in the community came up with the project name Evergreen and I think that matches what we try to build pretty well. I proposed to give the whole effort a trial with openSUSE 11.1 which went unsupported with the new year. At the moment we still have organizational and technical issues and most likely won’t be able to utilize all the update features (deltarpms, zypp patches) but still we will try to deliver updates from a certain update repository. Because of the holiday season we couldn’t figure out the details yet but hopefully will get it sorted out in time. Stay tuned for further detailed information here and on the mailing lists.

Please note that this effort is in experimental state still and didn’t attract that many contributors yet unfortunately. So at the moment it’s still unclear if we will be able to deliver as we would like to.

If you are interested in this project feel free to join our (current) project list.

The first Kokoa and Friends meeting took place the 20th of December at the Computing and Electrical Department of ESPOL.
This meeting supported by the openSUSE community, gathered people from different levels of the Kokoa community and the ESPOL university. From students that are just getting interested in using FLOSS (a.k.a. newbies), students who are “candidates” to join the Kokoa community, the current “active” members and the experienced “senior” members.
In this event different topics were discussed covering FLOSS usage in the academia and the industry. Stories of success and guidelines were shared with people interested in going forward in the world of FLOSS.

Special thanks to Cristina Guerrero, Nervo Verdezoto, Marisol Villacrés, and from Jarflex, Adonis Figueroa and Jessica Zuñiga the speakers of this meeting and specially to Arturo Tumbaco, who helped me with the logistics to make this event possible.

Here some pictures about the meeting.

Поздравляю всех читателей этого дневника с наступающим Новым Годом! Желаю в наступающем году безглючного железа, безпроблемных пользователей! Также хочется пожелать успехов и в остальных сторонах жизни - материальной, личной, карьерной.

Надеюсь, что будущий год будет не хуже прошедшего по насыщенности событиями Linux-тематики. У нашего учебного центра тоже есть много интересных задумок, которые планируется реализовать. Но об этом я пока писать не могу :).

Еще раз успехов! И помните, пингвин птица полярная :)

Поздравляю всех читателей этого дневника с наступающим Новым Годом! Желаю в наступающем году безглючного железа, безпроблемных пользователей! Также хочется пожелать успехов и в остальных сторонах жизни - материальной, личной, карьерной.

Надеюсь, что будущий год будет не хуже прошедшего по насыщенности событиями Linux-тематики. У нашего учебного центра тоже есть много интересных задумок, которые планируется реализовать. Но об этом я пока писать не могу :).

Еще раз успехов! И помните, пингвин птица полярная :)

Поздравляю всех читателей этого дневника с наступающим Новым Годом! Желаю в наступающем году безглючного железа, безпроблемных пользователей! Также хочется пожелать успехов и в остальных сторонах жизни - материальной, личной, карьерной.

Надеюсь, что будущий год будет не хуже прошедшего по насыщенности событиями Linux-тематики. У нашего учебного центра тоже есть много интересных задумок, которые планируется реализовать. Но об этом я пока писать не могу :).

Еще раз успехов! И помните, пингвин птица полярная :)

On Dec. 13 our son Jonas was born. He and his mother are doing well. We are all happy that he is with us now.