Archive:Weekly news 100
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Welcome to issue # 100 of openSUSE Weekly News
In this Week:
- openSUSE Board Election Update
- Egbert Eich: The Future of SaX2
- Ben Kevan: KDE 4.3.4 Released – openSUSE Build Service
- Linux Weekly News: Firefox locks down the components directory
- Linux.com/minaev: Linux Desktop Search Engines Compared
Editors Note
- Warm welcome to our Issue 100! You find in this issue some interesting Articles like an short Overview about the past, Congratulation-Messages from others and so on.
- We are also pleased to announce our new Twitteraccount for the openSUSE Weekly News. Just type "follow @opensusewn" and you're following us. Through this Account we're sending interesting Messages and links. You can send us your Congratulation Messages to this Account. Enjoy reading this issue.
Special 100th Issue
100 Issues are a lot of Work. If you would like to know more about our last Issues you can read our History:
We have recieved some nice Messages for our 100th Issue of Weekly News:
Announcements
- Will Stephenson: openSUSE 11.2 KDE KNetworkManager online update: please test!
- "If you've been paying attention at the back there, you'll know that openSUSE started using a new community-driven online update administration process for 11.2. As well as Novell employees, community people are taking care of the workflow of examining and approving online updates to buggy packages. Now I have a favour to ask of you - the online updates that are ready to go out need testing to make sure they don't inflict gross mischief on users' systems."
- openSUSE News: Update on openSUSE Board Election
- "For the current 2009 election of the openSUSE board, we have three seats for election and three candidates running unopposed. As our existing election rules did not anticipate this scenario, the Election Committee has made the following decision:
- The seats up for election include one Novell-employed position and two non-Novell-employed positions. Pavol Rusnak is running for the Novell-employed seat and Rupert Horstkötter and Bryen M Yunashko are running for the non-Novell seats.
- The election committee will declare the candidates as elected by end of Monday, 7th of December, if nobody else steps up in the respective group to run for the election. Otherwise we will have an election in that group"
- openSUSE News: Move of openSUSE Infrastructure Repositories
- "In the past, we had one central openSUSE subversion (svn) repository on Novell Forge for the openSUSE infrastructure including the openSUSE Build Service. This repository has grown over time. We’ have now split the repository in some smaller projects and some repositories are now using git."
Status Updates
Distribution
- Egbert Eich: The Future of SaX2
- "For many years now SUSE Linux came with a tool to configure the setup of the desktop which was second to none in the Linux and Free Software world: SaX2. It made it easy even for unexperienced users to configure video modes, screen layouts as well as keyboard and input devices for the X Window System."
Boosters Team
- Klaas Freitag: Week 48
- Petr Utzel: Work report puzel kw48
- Thomas Schmidt: week report #48
- Michal Hrusecky: Work report mhrusecky kw48
- Lubos Lunak: Work report llunak kw48
- Pavol Rusnak: Work report prusnak kw48
- Will Stephenson: work report kw48 wstephenson
- Egbert Eich: Egbert's Weeks 46 + 48
- Stephan Kulow: work report kw48 coolo
- Henne Vogelsang: Minutes Sprint Meeting 2009-12-02
Tips and Tricks
For Desktop Users
- Ghacks/Jack Wallen: Acetone: Mount and manage your CD/DVD ISOs
- "I have been working with the Acetone ISO manager and have been in awe at how much this tool can do. The creators of Acetone call it a CD/DVD image manager, but from my perspective it is much more than that. Acetone is more like an emulator for different types of ISOs that can allow the user to do many things with ISO images: Mount, split, convert, compress, encrypt, and more. Acetone even allows the user to download videos from Youtube and burn them to CD/DVD."
- Linux.com/Jack Wallen: Extend OpenOffice.org with Toolbars
- "OpenOffice.org has risen to quite a place of prominence among office workers, home users, students, and just about every category in between. Why? Well, the obvious (and most quoted) reason is that it is free. But OpenOffice.org it not just free--it's robust, reliable, flexible, and very extend-able. One way to extend the features of any OpenOffice.org application is with the help of toolbars. With the various included toolbars you can add numerous functions and features to your OpenOffice.org experience that will make your working life much easier. And if you don't see a toolbar that suits your needs, you can always customize one."
- Ben Kevan: Creating Bootable FreeDOS USB – openSUSE Linux
- "I’ve been reading a story about the Dell Latitude E6500 BIOS and possible over throttling during normal operating conditions, and decided to upgrade my BIOS. Although this task for windows users is pretty straight forward (you download the .EXE binary, and run it). However, with Linux we don’t run the .EXE binary natively. So our option is to create a FreeDOS Bootable USB, to boot to and install the required BIOS update."
- Linux.com/Joe Brockmeier: Vim 301: Getting Adept at Vim
- "If you've read and worked with the previous two tutorials on Vim, you're probably getting reasonably comfortable with the editor. At this point, you should be able to get around very nicely. This time around, I'd like to look at some more advanced features and demonstrate briefly how to set up a Vim configuration file, and to get to the shell and use external commands from within Vim."
For Commandline/Script Newbies
- ITworld/Sandra Henry-Stocker: Unix How To: Repeating Commands in Bash
- "Making use of previously entered commands can help you remember the location of files previously edited, can remove the need to re-enter long path names and can save you a lot of typing mistakes. Whether you page back through your history with repetitions of up arrow presses or reuse commands by typing an exclamation point followed by the first few letters of the previously entered command, you can work faster and feel less annoyed by these useful time saving features of the Unix shell."
For Developers and Programmers
- BeginLinux.com: MySQL Database Creation for Virtual Accounts
- "There are a lot of uses for MySQL. Here are the steps to creating a user database that could be used with a FTP server, mail server or web server."
For System Administrators
- The Geek Stuff/Ramesh Natarajan: Ping Tutorial: 15 Effective Ping Command Examples
- "As you already know, ping command is used to find out whether the peer host/gateway is reachable.
- If you are thinking ping is such a simple command and why do I need 15 examples, you should read the rest of the article. "
- Stefan Seyfried: Recovering your data from clicfs (aka openSUSE Live USB stick)
- "Today I wanted to recover some of the data I had saved on my openSUSE 11.2 live USB stick, just to find out that it was not really trivial. It actually included reading the manpage of coolo’s clicfs, so I’ll write it down here to save others the hassle ;)"
- Enterprise Networking Planet/Charlie Schluting: Understanding NIC Bonding with Linux
- "Network card bonding is an effective way to increase the available bandwidth, if it is done carefully. Without a switch that supports 802.3ad, you must have the right hardware to make it work. In this article we will explain how bonding works so you can deploy the right mode for your situation."
- HowtoForge/Falko Timme: Installing Apache2 With PHP5 And MySQL Support On OpenSUSE 11.2 (LAMP)
- "LAMP is short for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. This tutorial shows how you can install an Apache2 webserver on an OpenSUSE 11.2 server with PHP5 support (mod_php) and MySQL support."
- Richard Bos: Kolab cyrus-imapd inherits from openSUSE base cyrus-imapd
- "This week kolab became one small step closer to realize feature request 307846: include Kolab in openSUSE. Although it will take lots and lots of more work to achieve this goal at all. The one step closer was realized in cooperation with the openSUSE cyrus-imapd maintainer R. The openSUSE cyrus-imapd spec file in the repository server:mail spec file has been extended with information about kolab, but the actual execution of the information has been switched off. ..."
- Packt/Markus Feilner: Installing OpenVPN on Linux and Unix Systems: Part 1
- "Installing OpenVPN is easy and platform independent. Modern Linux systems, such as SuSE, Red Hat, Debian, or Ubuntu, provide sophisticated installation and package management systems, and still offer other ways to install the software. In this two-part article by Markus Feilner, we will install it on different Linux versions and FreeBSD."
New/Updated Applications @ openSUSE
- Sascha Manns: Updated Package for openSUSE: bleachbit 0.7.2
- "I’m pleased to announce my updated bleachbit Package for openSUSE. What’s new? The following changes have been made since 0.7.1: ..."
- Sascha Manns: Updated Package for openSUSE: rkhunter 1.3.6
- "I’m pleased to announce the new rkhunter Package for openSUSE. What’s new in this package? The Project says: This release offers more ease of use by adding more end-user configuration options and aids detection by adding and improving rootkit and malware checks."
- Petr Mladek: OpenOffice_org 3.2 beta3 available for openSUSE
- "I’m happy to announce OpenOffice.org 3.2 beta3 packages for openSUSE. They are available in the Build Service OpenOffice:org:UNSTABLE project and include many upstream and Go-oo fixes. See also overview of integrated features and enhancements. Please, look for more details about the openSUSE OOo build on the wiki page."
- Petr Mladek: OpenOffice_org 3.1.1 maintenance update available for openSUSE
- "I’m happy to announce that updated OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 packages in the Build Service OpenOffice:org:STABLE project. It includes many useful fixes. See also the original announce for more details about the 3.1.1 release."
- guayadeque 0.2.1-0.pm.1.1 updated
- "Music player with the aims to be intuitive and fast even for huge music collections. Guayadeque is a Music Player with the aims to be easy to use and fast even for huge music collections. Its developed in C++ to make it as faster as possible. The main features includes : - Play mp3, ogg, flac, wma, mpc, mp4, ape, etc - Read and write tags in all supported formats - Allow to catalogue your music using labels. ..." Available in Packman Repository
Projects Corner
The corner for introducing activities of sub project *inside* openSUSE.
KDE Project
- Lubos Lunak: openSUSE KDE bug squashing - take a part
- "So, openSUSE 11.2 is out, and that means a lot of people start using it and, well, occassionally run into bugs and sometimes even report them. As much as 11.2 appears to be a fine release, this is bound to happen now too, and that means that the number of KDE bugreports for openSUSE in the Novell bugzilla will grow again and will need to be handled."
- Ben Kevan: KDE 4.3.4 Released – openSUSE Build Service
- "Yesterday KDE 4.3.4 was released via kde.org: December 1st, 2009. Today, KDE has released a new version of the KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC). This month's edition of KDE SC is a bugfix and translation update to KDE SC 4.3. KDE SC 4.3.4 is a recommended upgrade for everyone running KDE 4.3.3 or earlier versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. Users around the world will appreciate that KDE SC 4.3.4 is more completely translated. KDE 4 is already translated into more than 50 languages, with more to come."
- KDE Software Compilation 4.4 Beta 1 Released
- "Today the KDE team makes available the first beta release of what will become KDE Software Collection 4.4. KDE SC 4.4 Beta 1 is the first step in the official 4.4 development release cycle, which will be completed in February 2010 with the release of KDE SC 4.4.0."
GNOME Project
- Vincent Untz: GUADEC 2010, and hackfests
- "The word just went out: GUADEC 2010 will be held in The Hague. You can read all the details in the press release, and you if you do so, you might find out that you know some of the organizers ;-) This is quite exciting news! And since it's really easy to travel to the Hague, I hope we'll be able to see again some people who couldn't attend last year; from what I can already hear here and there, it looks like it'll be the case. Lovely!"
Mono Project
- Ruben Vermeersch: Mono Developer Room at FOSDEM
- "As of now, you can submit your talk proposals! We want to make this a fun room and we want to accomodate all kinds of talks. For that reason, one thing we're experimenting with is having dynamic timeslots. Only want 15 minutes? That's okay! Need an hour? We'll see if we can squeeze it in! The most important factor is that it's interesting and fun."
- Miguel de Icaza: First MonoTouch Book is out!
- "This was fast! Wallace B. McClure has written the first e-book on getting started with Mono on the iPhone with MonoTouch. This is a short e-book, 42-pages in size, but it is also very cheap, it is only 6.99 USD and will help you get started in no time with MonoTouch."
Planet SUSE
- Jeff Jaffe: Product Quality – Metrics and Targets
- "Last month I began a series on product quality. I introduced our tenets of product quality and outlined additional topics I planned to address. I interrupted this for our exciting Novell Pulse launch, but it is now time to resume the discussion about quality."
- Stefan Seyfried: More ipw2200 eeprom fun
- "As written in my last post, I have packaged an ipw2200 kmp that enables writing to the eeprom. Incidentally, looking closer at one of my other machines, it turned out to have an ipw2200 that had the same problem as Obi’s, namely not being able to use all 13 11b/g channels that are allowed here:"
- James Ogley: Importing the Lectionary into Evolution
- "I know I'm not the only member of the clergy who uses Linux so I trust that this post may be of use to others. Also, the notes here may well apply to users of other open source calendars, I use Evolution so I know it works there. Your mileage may - or may not - vary. The lectionary that can be downloaded and imported into your calendar software is a great service but I've always had one problem with it which is that in Evolution, it shows the whole of every day as busy time - a little bit awkward. So I decided this year to hack the raw file before importing to make each entry an "all-day" event but with the time not showing as busy. Here are your steps to do so:"
- Kohei Yoshida: Updates on various stuff (OpenOffice.org)
- "Saving documents: There are two changes related to the document-saving functionality that I’d like to mention. The first one is the new icon in the document modified status window. As I blogged before, I had made a minor polish to the existing document modified status window, to show the status graphically instead of simply showing ‘*’ when the document is modified. The only problem was that the icon I used to fill that space was pretty lame and ugly. But thanks to jimmac, we now have a much better icon to show the modified status (see below)."
openSUSE Forums
- Help With Grub
- "Grub continues to play tricks on users, well it appears that way, but it can be tricky to set it up, especially with complicated setups. As is the case here."
- Screen Brightness in KDE4
- "Issues of one sort or another are surfacing in OS 11.2. This one is heading to a bug report and is similar to one I reported myself."
- What Makes SUSE SUSE to You
- "Some interesting snippets of personal feelings on the 11.2 release and openSUSE in general. Maybe you feel like adding your thoughts here too. Then we can all get that warm fuzzy feeling over something really good. "
- Resizing Partitions - GParted?
- "Partitioning is probably one of the scariest procedures for your average user, personally I love it, it's kind of like a maths puzzle sometimes."
On the Web
Announcements
- Linux Weekly News: Firefox locks down the components directory
- "Mozilla announced an important security change in the upcoming Firefox 3.6 that should prevent dangerous behavior caused by external applications bypassing the normal add-on installation process. Starting with 3.6, extensions, plugins, and third-party applications will no longer be able to install code in Firefox's components directory, where much of the browser's own code is housed and loaded automatically. Installing code into the directory was never an approved method, but because the lockdown is a change, Mozilla is providing add-on developers with technical assistance to transition their code to the approved, XPI-based installation scheme. For end users, the change should not adversely affect browsing, but may improve stability and should make for a more secure Firefox experience."
- Linux.com/Linus Torvalds: Linux 2.6.32 Released
- "This release _feels_ long overdue due to two empty weeks for me (kernel summit and thanksgiving week vacation), but it's actually less than three months since 2.6.31, so I guess it's actually not that far off the normal schedule.
- I've been merging a few things that were pending while I was offline, but it really seems to have been pretty quiet. The biggest thing since -rc8 is the horribly timed stability fixes for fscache, which caused some hickups and I really wish it hadn't happened that way, but apart from that it's mainly small updates (and mainly drivers)."
- Introducing Google Public DNS: A new DNS resolver from Google
- "Today, as part of our efforts to make the web faster, we are announcing Google Public DNS, a new experimental public DNS resolver.
- The DNS protocol is an important part of the web's infrastructure, serving as the Internet's "phone book". Every time you visit a website, your computer performs a DNS lookup. Complex pages often require multiple DNS lookups before they complete loading. As a result, the average Internet user performs hundreds of DNS lookups each day, that collectively can slow down his or her browsing experience."
Reports
- Joe Brockmeier: The Linux Foundation: Gateway to all things Linux
- "Another Open Mic podcast is up on NetworkWorld. I had a chance a few weeks ago to talk to a longtime friend, Brian Proffitt. Brian's the community manager for the Linux Foundation and has been active in and around the Linux community for many, many years. Brian gives a status update on Linux.com following its acquisition by the Linux Foundation, and a look ahead to where it's going. Fun conversation, and Brian always has interesting things to say -- so be sure to check it out when you have a few minutes!"
- Ben Kevan: Ubuntu to Remove GIMP – Will more follow?
- "arstechnica.com recently discussed Ubuntu’s decision to remove GIMP (a GNU Image Manipulation Program that is popular among the Linux world) on the next release of Ubuntu slated for April 2010, and dubbed 10.04.
- Many people think it’s not the right thing to do, but if you think long and hard about the decision, it’s quite simple to realize, that it’s a niche product for a niche market and its removal from a default installation doesn’t seem like that bad of an idea, since it could be simply installed using aptitude, or apt-get."
- Ben Kevan: QT 4.6 Release – The Future Platform?
- "On Dec 1st, Nokia released QT 4.6. The major new improvements are: (from nokia’s website) Advanced Graphics Effects Opacity, drop-shadows, blur, colorization and many more graphics effects can now be used with Qt 4.6 to create more exciting UIs."
- OSOR.EU/Gijs Hillenius: DE: Open source professorship at University of Erlangen-Nuremberg
- "Germany's first open source professorship was established at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg.
- First professor of Open Source will be Dr. Dirk Riehle, MBA. The professorship and its research group will focus on the use of open source as a target for developers, and its application in enterprises."
Reviews and Essays
- Artur Souza (MoRpHeUz): Qt 4.6: Ow!
- "So, Qt 4.6.0 is out! It’s really a “big” release: QAnimation Framework, Symbian Release, Qt Creator 1.3, Maemo 5 Tech Preview and Qt Mobility. Ow! Basically we have been working with the trolls in this release for a year now and it was awesome to see how we got from 4.5 to 4.6. All the work done on the APIs, bug fixing, the release process and also making it more open. The LGPL license, the opening of repositories and bug tracker."
- Luc Verhaegen: Coreboot and Xorg DevRooms at FOSDEM!
- "Yeah, you read that correctly, there will be two close to the metal DevRooms at FOSDEM this year (or next year, Mr. Daenzer :)) FOSDEM 2010 runs on the 6th and 7th of February and in the AW building in room AW.124 there will be some really interesting things happening :)"
- eWEEK europe/Andrew Donoghue: US Air Force Upgrading Playstation 3 Linux Cluster
- "The US AirForce has revealed plans to purchase up to 2,200 PlayStation 3 games machines as part of a supercomputing project running on an in-house Linux distribution.
- According to reports, the Air Force plans to use the devices to expand an existing supercomputing project based on PS3 hardware. The machines use IBM's high-end Cell processor."
- eWEEK europe/Peter Judge: Microsoft 'Has Acknowledged The Enterprise Role Of Linux'
- "When Novell and Microsoft signed a deal to support Windows and Linux in the enterprise, it caused a furore. Three years on, the deal shows that Microsoft really does acknowledge the value of Linux in the enterprise - at least that's the view from the OpenSUSE community."
- polishlinux.org/Korneliusz Jarzębski: KDE 4.4 dev: What’s new?
- "I have managed to find some time to cover the recent changes in the development version of KDE 4.4. The number of changes is not impressive but they are interesting enough to write an article."
- Linux.com/minaev: Linux Desktop Search Engines Compared
- "I have a large electronic library (over 15,000 books) and I was looking for a way to cope with this mass of information. I didn't like the idea of a special catalog, since it would take a lot of manual work to enter the metadata. Besides, my books are in various formats, from HTML, to RTF, to DOC, to PDF, to DjVU. These files lack metadata way too often and I thought a local indexing service with a full-text search might solve my problem. I knew there are more options to choose from than just Google, but I could not find a good modern comparison. Even the table in Wikinfo's Comparison of desktop search software contained too many errors, as I discovered."
- Datamation/Bruce Byfield: Open Source Projects and the Meritocracy Myth
- ""This is not a democracy, it's a meritocracy." - The statement comes from the Ubuntu Governance page, but you can find similar statements in the Fedora Release Notes, the Why Debian For Developers page, and just about anywhere else were free and open source software (FOSS) projects discuss their core values."
- Linux Journal/Doc Searls: Open Source Tweeting
- "Can we liberate tweeting from Twitter? It's an open question. And it's one that Dave Winer hopes we can answer, in response to his post We need: An open source Twitter shell. He begins,
- "It would do more or less exactly what the twitter.com website does. Same prefs, same commands, same user experience. Think Apache for the Twitter user interface.""
Past Events & Meetings
Security Updates
To view the security announcements in full, or to receive them as soon as they're released, refer to the openSUSE Security Announce mailing list.
- SUSE Security Announcement: bind (SUSE-SA:2009:059)
- Package: bind
- Announcement ID: SUSE-SA:2009:059
- Date: Wed, 02 Dec 2009 11:00:00 +0000
- SUSE Security Announcement: Linux Kernel (SUSE-SA:2009:060)
- Package: Linux Kernel
- Announcement ID: SUSE-SA:2009:060
- Date: Wed, 02 Dec 2009 17:15:31 +0100
Statistics
Numbers in brackets show the changes compared to the previous week.
opensuse.org
Communication
lists.opensuse.org has 37450 (+5) non-unique subscribers to all mailing lists.
The openSUSE Forums have 38444 (+416) registered users - Most users ever online was 15292, 16-Nov-2009 at 21:20.
Contributors
3964 (+39) of 10346 (+85) registered contributors in the User Directory have signed the Guiding Principles. The board has acknowledged 395 (+24) members.
Build Service
The Build Service now hosts 9267 (+146) projects, 86022 (+430) packages, 16696 (+412) repositories by 19644 (+166) confirmed users.
openFATE
Feature statistics for openSUSE 11.3:
- total: 375 (+23)
- unconfirmed: 233 (+20)
- new: 42 (+2)
- evaluation: 70 (+2)
- candidate: 1 (+0)
- done: 8 (-1)
- rejected: 13 (+0)
- duplicate: 8 (+0)
Bugzilla
The numbers for all openSUSE project products are this week:
- All Open Reports: 5304 (-19)
- Blocker: 5 (+0)
- Critical: 261 (-5)
- Major: 882 (-26)
- Normal: 3054 (-2)
- Minor: 477 (+14)
- Enhancements: 625 (+0)
- Detailed Bugzilla Report – Submitting Bug Reports – Bug Reporting FAQ
Localization
- Daily updated translation statistics are available on the openSUSE Localization Portal.
- Trunk Top-List – Localization Guide
openSUSE for your ears
- The openSUSE Weekly News are available as Livestream or Podcast in the German Language. You can hear it or download it on http://blog.radiotux.de/podcast .
Feedback / Communicate / Get Involved
Do you have comments on any of the things mentioned in this article? Then head right over to the news.opensuse.org story comment section and let us know! Communicate with or get help from the wider openSUSE community -- via IRC, forums, or mailing lists -- see Communicate.
If you would like to be a part of the openSUSE Weekly news, then please send an email over to opensuse-marketing@opensuse.org (you need to subscribe first). Or you can go to the channel #opensuse-newsletter on irc.freenode.net.
Credits
- Jan-Simon Möller (Chief-Editor)
- Sascha Manns (Second Chief-Editor, Main-Newsletter)
- Sebastian Schöbinger (Tips/Tricks)
- Satoru Matsumoto (Editorial Office)
- Carl Fletcher (Main-Newsletter, Forums Sec.)
- Thomas Hofstätter (Events & Meetings)
- add translators
