I’m happy to announce LibreOffice 3.3.1 bugfix release for openSUSE. The packages are available in the Build Service LibreOffice:Stable project. They fix various crashers, usability and translation problems, see the libreoffice-3.3.1.2 release news for more details. See also some notes about openSUSE LibreOffice build.

The openSUSE LO team hopes that you will be happy with this release. Though, any software contains bugs and we kindly ask you to report bugs. It will help us to fix them in the future releases.

Other information and plans:

This version will be in openSUSE-11.4 out of box. We are going to prepare official maintenance update for openSUSE-11.2 and 11.3.

There are already several fixes for the LO-3.3.2 bugfix release. You might expect 3.3.2-rc1 in the “LibreOffice:Unstable” repositories by the end of the following week.

Most developers are already concentrated on LO-3.4 release. I hope that the first beta packages will be ready in the beginning of April.

MonoDevelop often makes use of threads to run operations on the background. Although we make sure to invoke all GUI update methods through the main GUI thread, sometimes there is a bug and an update is done in the secondary thread, which causes all sort of random locks and crashes.

To make it easier to track down those bugs, I created a simple profiler module for Mono which can detect invocations to GTK# methods from a thread other than the main GUI thread. This module is available here:

https://github.com/slluis/gui-thread-check

To use it, build and install the module, and then run your application with
the command:

mono --profile=gui-thread-check yourapp.exe

If the profiler is properly installed, you'll see an output like this:

*** Running with gui-thread-check ***
*** GUI THREAD INITIALIZED: 2861676352

While the application is running, if the profiler detects a non-gui thread
invoking gtk methods, it will print a warning message together with a
stack trace. For example:

*** GTK CALL NOT IN GUI THREAD: Widget.gtk_widget_get_parent
Widget.get_Parent
SourceEditorWidget.get_TextEditor
SourceEditorWidget.get_Document
SourceEditorWidget.HandleParseInformationUpdaterWorkerThreadDoWork
BackgroundWorker.OnDoWork
BackgroundWorker.ProcessWorker

	I have a spleen for rather - say - exotic weekend activities (remember the R8 tour?). This time, two friends of mine and I went close to the middle of nowhere to the local blacksmith in Hallerstein (his web page is German only), for a two days forging course .
	The event was fantastic, apart from some major problems with the local power supply (the whole village went dark three times), so we had to setup a mobile power generator in order to power the fan for the smith's hearth. It went well, apart from the starter breaking on the first attempt to start up the generator (it was brand new ), but we were able to improvise.
	After a lot of hammering (also involving a pneumatic hammer we used for pattern welding for our Damascus steel knifes), and hours of grinding and polishing, every one of us was the proud owner of two self-forged knives, one of monosteel and one of Damascus steel.

It was an amazing experience, but you definitely need the help of an experienced blacksmith like our Axel, in order to get good results even on the first forging attempt. I guess I'll do it again, in the future. Maybe I will come home with a fully sized Katana next time .

I cocked up..

I forgot to monitor my ebay Auction - and well lets just say congratulations to Andrew Hussak from Summerseat, Bury, Lancashire who picked up a copy of openSUSE Retail for just £0.99p!!!

That will teach me to set a reserve price on the auction however with only a week until 11.4 perhaps I can recommend him to upgrade to a more up to date version very soon.

Next time I will figure a reserve price auction!!

He better leave me a review on Ebay and Qype!!

Thanks go to Christopher Edmunds from EcoHealth for joining our community..

The Flisol (Festival Latinoamericano de Instalación de Software Libre or  Free Software Installation Latin American Festival ) is the biggest Free Software diffusion event that is celebrated on 18 countries all over Latin America, from Mexico to Argentina simultaneously in more than 200 Cities.

The Idea of this Festival is spread the knowledge about Open Source in general and Linux in particular by installing it on the participants machines. I has been participating for the las 4 years by helping with talks, openSUSE DVDs, etc.

The FLISOL 2011 will be celebrated the next April 9. If you live in Latin America of will be in some of the countries that celebrates FLISOL, you can check where and at what time will be celebrated in the city that you will be.   Always is good to hangout with other people that wants to get to know about openSUSE and the Open Source  in General.

This Time I will be participating in Mexico City in about 3 different places with talks and giving away openSUSE DVDs and T-shirts.  Sorry but all the links are in Spanish, Google translate is your friend

This is an update to my previous post. Canonical asked the Banshee maintainers to join a conference call about an hour ago. They announced their new plan, calling past proposals mistakes:

• Banshee's Amazon store will remain enabled, with Canonical taking a 75% cut of all affiliate revenue; 25% on Ubuntu will now go to the GNOME Foundation.
• The Ubuntu One store for Banshee will remain enabled by default, but now Canonical will donate 25% of its revenue to GNOME. They will now do the same for Rhythmbox.

У меня две хороших новости.

Одна — скоро выходит новая версия любимой операционной системы, Opensuse 11.4.  Я так нечасто бываю на официальном сайте, что (о стыд!) подумал, что можно уже загружать. Ну, а осталось ждать всего две недели. Я доволен и текущей версией, но всегда ожидаешь нового, неизведанного. Так что уже скоро!

Второе — обновился WordPress до версии 3.1. Это не всем будет интересно, но вордпресс стал так часто обновляться! Раньше месяца четыре было без обновлений (когда я только его установил), а теперь каждый месяц почти обновления выходят. Ну и ладно, главное — чтобы хорошо работало

Удачи всем линуксоидам, линуксоюзерам и блоггерам!

As I mentioned in my previous post I can't mentor GSoC students myself and therefore are looking for a developer to jump in for me.

1. Store annotations in the PDF file.
2. If that is not enough apped support to modify the PDF (insert, delete pages etc.)

As I mentioned in my previous post I can't mentor GSoC students myself and therefore are looking for a developer to jump in for me.

Application/component: KDEPIM/KMail and Kleopatra

Brief explanation:
Signing and encrypting emails is very old, however only a minority is using it. One reason might be, that it is not easy enough for regular users to use it. The importance for private and business users is still high. Private companies started to sell proprietary, secure e-mail services (e.g. in Germany DE-Mail and e-brief). There are good key creation, signing and other key management functions present in KDE software. The goal of this proposal is to make it easy and fast to work with signed and encrypted emails.

Expected results:

1. Analyze and optimize the key creation, signing etc processes, make it dumb easy to create and use a key/signature. One way could be to add a button “Generate Key” (next to “Change”) in the KMail – Identity settings – Cryptographie; start the key creation wizard from Kleopatra and take the name and email address from that identity (at the moment you have to enter them manually). The user just has to enter the passphrase and is done. Offer a button “Save private key and revoke key on usb” or something like this and “send public key to server” / “Make key public”. Add the key creation (or import possibilities) into the identity / account creation wizard of KMail. Add the possibility to create revoke keys within the gui (when sending the key to the server, there is an information message yet.) 
2. Guide the user through the whole process of signing and encrypting/decrypting emails. Offer possibilities to learn about the topic in an easy and fast way (offline help, online help / wiki, videos, tutorials etc). Show how they use the keys, how they get their keys signed, how they sign other keys etc. 
3. Integrate other free/open services like CAcert. 

These are just some ideas. If there is someone interested I could go more into details if necessary.