Funny question eh? :)

Let me take a step back first. There are quite a few packages that the openSUSE project cannot publish on their main infrastructure, not because of legal reasons, but for reasons of potential software patent infringements. That, combined with the fact that the main sponsor of the openSUSE project (Attachmate, formerly Novell) also sponsors almost all the IT infrastructure, the fact that Attachmate (and Novell before them) is a business in the USA, and that the USA has the most ludicrous legal precedents regarding software patents (hey, the market regulates itself, right ?), puts us into such a situation. It isn't different for most other distributions by the way, except for a very few which probably only get away with it because they remain rather small and under the radar.

What am I talking about? Well, packages such as gstreamer-0_10-plugins-bad, MPlayer, vlc, xine, libmad, etc... Typically because they contain implementations of multimedia codecs such as for MP3 or H.264 which are heavily covered with software patents.

The Packman project and repository provides many of those packages (amongst other things) for openSUSE, hosted in a country where software patents do not apply. Now, don't confuse software patents and copyright: copyright is well established, precise and there are no groups of people on the planet who respect copyright more than open source and Free software developers, specifically because copyrights such as the GPL, BSD or ASL (to name just a few) protect our work and our ideals. Hence, what we are doing is not illegal in any way. As an example, the mad library might be subject to software patent infringement where applicable, but is under the GPL.

Okay, now back to the actual topic. The libraries of the gstreamer framework are maintained by several contributors of the openSUSE project in the multimedia:libs project in our famous openSUSE Build Service. However, as explained above, the download repositories of multimedia:libs may not host the packages that might infringe on software patents (where applicable). So what we are doing, is to link those packages on our Build Service instance at Packman (yes, the Build Service can do that, awesome feature :)). The difference is that on Packman, due to some macros, we do build those parts that potentially infringe on software patents, and also host them in our repository and its mirrors. The trick is that they're subpackages that end in "-orig-addon". For example, for the package "gstreamer-0_10-plugins-bad", its companion is "gstreamer-0_10-plugins-bad-addon-orig" (yes, I agree, the suffix "orig-addon" is stupid, too "geeky" and not intuitive in any way.)

So, to see whether you have those installed, first open a shell as root, then do the following:

It will probably result in something like this:

In order to install those bits, do the following:

On a side note: if those results don't show up when doing the search, then add the Packman repository with the following command and try again:

Due to the FOSSCOMM conference (the majority of the greek openSUSE community was there staying asleep) we delayed (a lot) starting the translating procedure. However I am very pleased to announce the new issue (174) of openSUSE Weekly News in Greek in (almost) time.

A lot of thanks to the translators for their speed and efforts.

In this one you will read about:

* Alex Eftimie: GSoC 2011: PackageKit and AppStream integration for Software Center
* Sebastian Kügler: Plasma Active at Tokamak 5
* openSUSE Ambassadors are rocking all over the world
* h-online/Thorsten Leemhuis: Kernel Log: Coming in 2.6.39 (Part 3) – Architecture and infrastructure
* Greek openSUSE Ambassadors: openSUSE in Fosscomm 2011

And of course many many interesting news about openSUSE, plus usefull
advice for making our lives easier.

Enough… read more at: own.opensuse.gr or at
http://el.opensuse.org/Weekly_news.

Looking forward to hearing your comments, advice and anything you would
like to read about at the next issue.

Enjoy it!
Efstathios Agrapidis (efagra)

Что бы не говорили о небезопасности использования skype, пользуются им большое количество людей. И я в том числе   Поэтому когда слетела (по моей неосторожности) моя система opensuse 11.3, и бэкапов к сожалению я не делал, я перебрался на запасной аэродром — экспериментальную, обновленную с 11.3 систему opensuse 11.4 с установленными lxde u kde3 (kde4 я до сих пор недолюбливаю).

Все в порядке, все работает — но скайп я не устанавливал. И опять начались танцы с бубном — определение пакетов, которых не хватает (автоматом они не опеределялись, так как 64-разрядные пакеты этих программ уже были в системе установлены).

Так вот, теперь для себя ( а может и еще кому-нибудь поможет) я выкладываю список 32-битных пакетов, необходимых для установки skype. Он небольшой, часть пакетов (большая) подхватывается зависимостями этих.

xorg-x11-libXv-32bit
libqt4-32bit
libqt4-x11-32bit
libpng12-0-32bit

@Banshee is finally on twitter, where we'll always keep you up to date and sometimes entertained if you follow us.

We also just released Banshee 2.0.1, a stable, bug-fix-only follow on to 2.0.0!

We've got 2.1.x releases scheduled leading up to 2.2 in September. We'll be porting to Gtk# 3 and dropping a bunch of legacy deps in the process, while still supporting users on older distros. I e-mailed banshee-list more about what that means and how we'll do it.

Hello out there,

I am very pleased to announce the new issue (172) of openSUSE Weekly
News in Greek.

At this point I want to thank all the people for the quality of their work on the translations they send. Also, I would like to congratulate the «usual suspects» of the translating work not only for the quality of their translations but also for the improvement of their work that I have personally observed. Geeckossss, keep up the good work! Finally, I want to welcome the new volunteers to our team for their interest and offcourse for their priceless help.

In this issue you will read about:

* Greg Kroah-Hartman: openSUSE Tumbleweed status for the week of April 22, 2011
* MakeUseOf/Justin Pot: Super Mario Brothers X: The Best Fan-Made Mario Game Ever
* DarkDuck: How To: Page Numbering in Open Source Text Processors
* HowtoForge/Falko Timme: Virtualization With KVM On An OpenSUSE 11.4 Server
* How to upgrade to openSUSE 11.4 Tumbleweed

And of course many many interesting news about openSUSE, plus usefull
advice for making our lives easier.

Enough… read more at: own.opensuse.gr or at
http://el.opensuse.org/Weekly_news.

Looking forward to hearing your comments, advice and anything you would
like to read about at the next issue.

Enjoy it!
Efstathios Agrapidis (efagra)

• GNOME 3.0.1 is now available for openSUSE 11.4, in GNOME:STABLE:3.0 repository. See http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:GNOME_3.0 on how to use this repository.
• Live image has been regenerated to use GNOME 3.0.1. It is available at http://www.gnome.org/getting-gnome/ (version 1.2.0)