I attended  HCC linux day on Saturday the 21st of May in Bunnick, The Netherlands. I have always wanted to see how the local communities present themselves at events in the NL, since I mainly attend the international events. HCC is one of the largest, if not the largest, communities in the NL comprised of members that use a variety of different distros and projects that support development within the FOSS ecosystem. This event's focus was on Security and was hosted at the Postillion Hotel.

I first arrived at the event at 10:00 and was quite impressed with the venue for such a small event. It was easy to get to (by car at least) and the hotel was quite new, which provided a quaint, by specialized feel. The presentation rooms were new and fitted with new equipment which gave the event an added feeling of style and prestige. I decided to attend some presentations held by Jos Poortvliet, the community manager for openSUSE whom introduced the new initiatives (OBS, SUSEStudio, Tumbleweed, Evergreen) and the different desktops that are supported in openSUSE latest release 11.4 within the course of two separate presentations. I also got a chance to visit the openSUSE booth, which seemed to have quite a buzz going around it and Jos was nice enough to introduce me to his local team which consisted of some new members who looked very enthusiastic about the event and being involved in the openSUSE community. I also had a chance to speak to some of the local contributors, some from Ubuntu and others who were developers, gamers and just interested users. Many of the people attending this event had been users of FOSS for quite a while, either as a hobby or in their work. I had a feeling that actually most could be classified as users and not your hardcore developer types. I see absolutely no problem with this as these users help spread the message and play a part in keeping the ecosystem alive.

Overall, I really liked the event since I was able to speak to people who are not quite your "normal" FOSSies and saw aspects of our communities from a different point of view, which is always refreshing. In addition, this was quite a low key event, so it also carried a very relaxed feeling to it :-) There is still a need for these types of events, as there are for the events on other levels, since these events provide access points for people of all types to get involved in FOSS. Especially the locals, whom cannot or do not want to travel far to get their questions answered and to hang out with those that share the same interest ;-)

Thanks again HCC, I enjoyed the event and look forward to attending another event of yours. Also a great thanks to Jos and the local Lizards for the constructive discussions, openness, and engagement demonstrated by the openSUSE team. 

Sorry about this post being quite belated, but I have been wanting to make this post for quite a while. This last May (11-14th) I attended LinuxTage in Berlin where it is hosted every year. It was my first time at the event and many of my hacker colleagues gave me mixes feelings about the event before I attended. There complaints with the event were that over the years that it has become more corporate oriented and that community presence has been less regarded over corporate interest when arranging and planning for community presence (booths, etc.).

I always try to keep and open mind when attending an event i which I have never been to before, so I arrived at the event on the 11th with a business colleague of mine to introduce him to the world of FOSS to see his thoughts on it, but more to try and give him a picture of what I have been investing a lot of my time into over the past 3 years. He, like many others, rarely see the point of FOSS and the meaning behind just having another operating system on your computer. As many others I have spoken to over the years, he had a hard time understanding why he should give FOSS a try when he had no problems with using Windows. My strategy was to just introduce him to the ecosystem and let him make his own assumptions on what he saw and then provide answers and support to the questions he had.

As we entered the exhibition hall, the first time, he was reluctant from the beginning and THEN he saw names of projects he was familiar with which he did not know stemmed from our ecosystem. Projects he used on windows, such as VLC, XMBC, to name a few. He then shifted his opinion to being a little less reluctant and began to open his mind a little more to this FOSS thing. We split up for a while, as I told him to get involved, ask questions, and just look around! In the meantime, I visited my old colleagues at the Fedora Project and CentOS to see how they are doing. Furthermore, I had a good talk with the Debian project about their plans, future development, and got all of of my questions answered in a nice informed way about the CUT/Rolling release initiative. In final, as always, I also had a chance to chat with some community managers and discuss some issues facing our communities and ecosystem and how we can improve cross-community collaboration.

Overall it was quite a decent event, I met some new people, got up to speed with the old and planted a seed in someones mind of what opportunities and tools FOSS can give the average individual and business person, but I will have to agree with my hacker colleagues, it was a little to corporate and presented itself as more of a hybrid event rather than a community one. Berlin, in itself is awesome, one of my favorite cities in the world, since there are just not too many places like it ;-) C-Base is also one of a kind hacker meeting place/lab which definitely demonstrates the unique qualities of this city and the local FOSS community in Berlin. Oh, and not to forget, my business colleague left with a greater understanding of our ecosystem and a smile on his face, so I think that speaks for itself ;-) Will be seeing you again shortly, Berlin, that I can guarantee!!

ACID test for Absolute Positioned Frames.

Based on the ACID test for Absolute Positioned Tables I created another test for Absolute Positioned Frames (APFs). Make sure you have the Ahem font installed. The test document renders as follows:

Again, here is what e.g. LibreOffice.org makes out of it:


Not to mention again that APFs are important for business documents since they are used in letter heads etc.

I do not write blog posts very often, as you can see from my last post was over a year ago. That does not mean I have not been highly active within the FOSS ecosystem, but more so that the function I have and the topics I deal with (conflict management and community development) are not per say things I can freely speak about to those which are not directly involved. You might think, well, you are holding something back or being non-transparent, but that is not the case, it is more about trust. In open source, we all have our circles of trust. Those circles defined by who and what we trust and furthermore the level of trust that we have in these people or institutions. In my function, trust is at the highest level. I coordinate with many within our ecosystem to help resolve issues, some of these issue being highly sensitive for the parties involved. If I were to post these issues, I could foresee two things happening: a loss of trust from one or both parties, and furthermore, an escalation of the issue. Please remember that my function is compared to that of a doctor, just not a medical doctor, but an organizational doctor. Therefore, just as your doctor has ethical commitments to not share his/her patients information, the same goes for my function. 

That said, I can post about other things, that is true. I will post a couple more posts about the events that I have been to this year (something that has been on my list for a while) and some that I will attend in the near future.

I was asked the other day “What do you expect from the openSUSE Conference?” The simple answer is I only expect to have fun. Seriously, I expect nothing more, nothing less. I hope for a whole lot more, but I certainly don’t expect it. This may sound somewhat silly, but in all honesty that’s how I feel. This conference (as are most others) is a great way to meet the people you interact with online, there’s something satisfying to be able to replace the digital person with a real flesh and blood person.

An ACID test for Absolute Positioned Tables

Inspired by the first ACID test ACID1 also called Box Acid Test I created a simple document to test the handling of Absolute Positioned Tables (APTs). APTs are used a lot in letter heads of e.g. business documents.
The test is very simple. It uses the Ahem font from the CSS test suite. Make sure you have the font installed on your machine in order to run the test.
When successful this document is rendered as follows:

Here is what e.g. LibreOffice (3.4.2) makes out of it:

I really like these kind of tests because they are very visual and it is quite easy to understand whether the test worked or not.

Hello,

last week was very busy for me and also very exciting. The end of Google Summer of Code period overlapped the beginning of a new period of my life. During these days, i moved from Salamis(Greece) to Amsterdam(Netherlands) where i am going to study towards a master degree in Artificial Intelligence. As you may understand there were and still are many things for me to arrange, as a person in a total new place/city/country.

So enough about me, what is up with the project? Well, i am very glad to say that the project “ended” and reached a very satisfactory level, the merging functions are now working and i can say that the application is now in an alpha testing phase. There are of course things that always can be improved and a lot of testing to be done in order for this project to take its place and be useful and ready for use in openSUSE. This is the last GSoC report for this project.

Does the GSoC end means that this project is abandoned? Of course not,  as i have already said this may be  the last GSoC report, but this is definitely not the last report for the project. My intention from the beginning was to join the openSUSE developers society and contribute something back to the community. Therefore, I am planning and actually i am already working in order for the project to reach the next stage.  I’m going to keep posting updates on this web-site so if you are interested in the progress of the project please feel free to visit and check for new blog posts.

There couldn’t be a final GSoC report, without the necessary thanks. First of all i would like to thank Google and openSUSE for giving me this great opportunity to work on such an exciting project. I highly recommend on everyone to apply for the next year GSoC if they are able, it is an amazing experience. Not only you have the chance to learn new things, but you can also meet great people. The kind of people who open source communities are filled with. :). So speaking of people I would also like to thank my mentor Michal Hrušecký for his help, I strongly feel like I have gained a new friend after all these months of frequent communication! I would also like to thank Petr Gajdos and of course the Augeas developers for their help and support.

This is not a good-bye blog post, the real project is now beginning :))

So as always, till the next blog post,

Christos Bountalis

Petr Vanek and I are maintaining some packages for openSUSE (and SLE) that build against the Oracle Instant Client libraries (I mean Oracle the database). Now, those libraries are not open source in any way, but are available from the Oracle TechNet website.

There are a few open source projects that are of interest, at least for people who have to work with the Oracle database, and we do package a few of them and Petr makes them available in his repository.

As of now, they're all built against version 10.2 of Oracle Instant Client, for openSUSE 11.3, openSUSE 11.4, Factory (snapshot) and SLE 11.

Packages include ocilib, perl-DBD-Oracle (the Oracle database driver for Perl), php5-pecl-oci8 (the Oracle database driver for PHP5), python-cx_Oracle (a Python module to access Oracle databases), ruby-oci8 (the... you got he picture, this time for Ruby), as well as tora and tora-svn.

Why would we package that stuff, as it is not open source ? Well, actually, the software that we package is open source, it's just that the shared libraries and C headers they require are not. Oh, and we do not redistribute the Oracle Instant Client library RPMs there. That is something you must get from Oracle by yourself.

During our work in our preload department at SuSE we have to install our current image on several machines for each image version for smoke testing, which meant burning several DVDs per iteration (and there is typically one iteration per week!).
In order to ease this work flow I created a kiwi image for a CD or an USB stick for installing the latest image via network - the Network Image Installer. It's also capable of installing arbitrary openSUSE / Fedora / Ubuntu versions, so you never have to burn another DVD if you have a reasonably fast internet connection. Network detection is automatic, wireless requires the SSID etc. changed in a config file beforehand.

Find the sources on gitorious, I will eventually try to understand the functionality in the openSUSE build service to create images automatically, but for now you'll have to build the image yourself. I'll post when there is a downloadable image available.

Now I'm off to Fantasy Film Fest again .