Archive:Weekly news 146

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Editors Note

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We are pleased to announce our 146 issue of the openSUSE Weekly News.
We hope that you will enjoy reading.


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Nelson Marques: To Nuremberg!

"Next thursday Iā€™m flying to Nuremberg for the openSUSE Conference. Iā€™m arriving somewhere between 14:00 and 15:00 considering that nothing strange happens (ex: like a snow storm).

For me itā€™s the first time I attend to FOSS event from such caliber. Iā€™m having my own expectations about it, and it will for sure help me in the work Iā€™ve been doing. Iā€™m also looking forward to meet ā€˜_the_ā€™ people to which I have interacted with during the last times online. (...)"

Sirko Kemter: May I introduce you ā€¦..

"Marya Morevna, she is one of the attendees of openSUSE Conference. She helps me with my presentation on wednesday evening. She comes from Russia, she likes free software because she earned her live from a tool which is free software - SynfigStudio. (...)"

The third openSUSE Conference Keynote

"This Wednesday the 2nd openSUSE Conference 2010 opens its doors and we are very happy to announce the third keynote today.

The Desktop and the Cloud ā€“ Thoughts about Freedom on Thursday morning at 9:30 am. How relevant is the desktop in a world where computing is happening in the cloud?

The motto for our conference is one of the basic ideas of openSUSE: Collaboration across borders. This is why we are especially proud to have this subject addressed in a keynote by two key people from the free desktop world: Cornelius Schumacher, president of KDE e.V., and Vincent Untz, former president of the GNOME Foundation. (...)"

Sascha Manns: Live from the openSUSE Conference 2010 in Nuremberg

"Today it starts: The new openSUSE Conference. We have over 240 Registrations before start. Some Registrants sleeping in the Hotel from the Berufsbildungswerk. Iā€™m living in the third floor. And i am happy, a clean and convenient room.

Today the Conference starts at 09:30 with Henne Vogelsangs Talk ā€žGet your ass up!ā€œ. He motivates us, not just to talk about what is to do. We should just doing anything and have fun.

The next Talk iā€™ve listened was Lubos Lunaks talk about ā€žEasy multi ā€“ distribution package builds with the buid service. Lubos explained us, how to use the kde-obs-generator. This Program needs just a singe INFO File with the needed Inforations, and the Program creates from that a *.spec File and two debian*.control Files. So we have all for building Packages for Fedora, Mandriva, Debian and Ubuntu. This talk motivates me to try it out. Maybe i can support in Future my Packages who i maintain in more Destinations. (...)"

openSUSE ass-kickinā€™ keynote

"As 260 fans of openSUSE descended upon Nuremberg, the second annual openSUSE Conference began at 9:30 sharp with Hendrik ā€œHenneā€ Vogelsang delivering a very important and poignant message for us all..

In Henneā€™s keynote, ā€œGet your ass up!ā€, he talks about where we are and how we can move forward as a Project. ā€œWeā€™re in a unique positionā€, Henne said. He asked the audience how old they thought SUSE was. Nobody guessed correctly ā€“ it is 18 years. Debian is 17, Red hat 16 ā€“ SUSE really has been around a long time. Yet it has only been a really open project for a few years ā€“ Henne considers the opening of Factory during 2009 the real milestone here."

Adrian Schrƶter: Fotostream from openSUSE Conference 2010

"Yet another foto stream from the openSUSE conference. You see the desktop leads from KDE and Gnome (Cornelius Schumacher and Vincent Untz) giving a talk about the past and future of the free desktop, Stephan Kulow about the future of the distribution, Bernhard Wiedemann about QA testing and so on.

Most important may be the presentation of the openSUSE board (mainly by Pascal Bleser) how they plan to found an independent foundation for openSUSE as non-profit organization. An important rule of that foundation is that it is independent of any company (no majority of Novell here) but can handle sponsoring, partnering and trademark questions.

We had also very filled rooms during the OBS talks, but I was unable to take pictures at that point of time unfortunately ;)

You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed."

Sebastian KĆ¼gler: openSUSE conference 2010

"These October days, Iā€™m spending in NĆ¼rnberg in Southern Germany to attend the openSUSE conference. My role here is three-fold, first and foremost I am here as a representative of open-slx, my employer who sells products and services based on top of openSUSE. Then, Iā€™m a KDE ambassador. Finally, Iā€™m also getting more and more involved with the openSUSE team, getting to know many people and learning about challenges and opportunities this community faces. (...)"

OSC2010 Key note ā€“ From Developers to Users and back

"Frank Karlitschek will show us on Saturday at 9:30 the project heā€™s working on to simplify the way software gets to users. Frank has deep knowledge in open source communities as member of the KDE e.V. Board of Directors and eg. as driver behind the open-PC project and some more activities heā€™s doing. (...)"

Vincent Untz: openSUSE Conference Party

"I'm in Nuremberg since Sunday, and the openSUSE Conference started yesterday. So I have already tons of interesting bits to tell. But the really important part is:

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Thanks to B1 Systems for sponsoring the party tonight!"

Jos Poortvliet: oSC party fun

"Wow, third day of the openSUSE conference already. Feels like the conference started an hour ago, every second has been busy. Well, almost. I'm currently enjoying my morning-thee, feeling a bit bad about the fact that 5 minutes ago the Friday keynote started... Will get a cab soon to not miss all of it ;-)

Last night we had the party - which was very, very cool. Green lighting, red and green drinks and I've met many nice 'old toads' (the openSUSE branded beer). Which contributes to me really loving my thee right now. (...)"

Will Stephenson: Video: KDE people at openSUSE Conference 2010

"I couldn't resist snapping as many KDE folk at the openSUSE conference as I could, and editing them together into: a short video. (...)"

Smeegol at oSC

"Wednesday at the conference, Smeegol master Andrew ā€œFunkypenguinā€ Wafaa was given the stage by Michael Meeks who was supposed to talk about MeeGo. Meeks claimed that heā€™d rather have someone on the stage who actually knew what he was talking about, hence Andrew had to explain himself to the audience. (...)"

Klaas Freitag: openSUSE Conference

"I am home from the openSUSE Conference 2010 and finally landed on the sofa. I donā€™t know why conferences are so exhausting, but they are for me. My brain slowly becomes sorted again and starts to reflect what happened on the conference. Wow, I can say that I didnā€™t expect it to become such a great event. There were so many interesting and enthusiastic discussions about topics concerning the openSUSE distribution or about things you can do under the openSUSE umbrella. (...)"

Will Stephenson: Upstream holiday

"The openSUSE Conference went really well last week. There was an amazing range of material and the audienceā€™s participation in every talk I attended showed that the openSUSE project has moved past the show-and-tell presentations of a company and its customers to a community using the event to share knowledge between its members and develop. As part of the openSUSE Boosters team, I was in it up to my neck. On Wednesday I started with a talk on image building for application authors which was well attended but I think I should tweak towards usersā€™ needs as there werenā€™t many app authors present. I gave a talk about the upcoming KDE features that will be in openSUSE 11.4 on Thursday, because openSUSE 11.3 had KDE 4.4 but due to the 3 month difference in both projectsā€™ release cycles, openSUSE 11.4 will have the KDE 4.6 releases of platform, workspaces and apps. That equals a lot of changes, so I summarized them for people who donā€™t read Planet KDE as avidly as I do. The Lizard Lounge event in the SUSE building on Thursday night gave everyone a chance to catch their breath drinking limited edition Old Toad SUSE beer. (...)"

Sirko Kemter: openSUSE Conference 2010

"I am finally home from openSUSE Conference v2.0 and now I have time to write an article about it. Conference started for me on tuesday with my arrival. I have only 240km ride to Nuremberg but with train you need nearly 4 hours. For the first evening I joined one of the planned social dinners. So I went with some others to a chinese restaurant nearby. (...)"

Thomas Thym: openSUSE conference 2010 is over

"openSUSE conference is over. It was an amazing and exhausting time. And the most important thing I learned was: The openSUSE project is a commuity. Of cause I meet many community members employed by Novell. But also many contributors NOT payed by that sponsor. The project is moving more and more into the direction of independence (e.g. with it's community based new strategy).

I was suspisious myself when I choose my distro some time ago. Shall I really try openSUSE, with all the deals the main sponsor is doing? From now on I am sure that these prejudices were wrong. (...)"

Christian Boltz: Keysigning made easy

"At the openSUSE conference I heard many interesting talks and met lots of nice people from the openSUSE community. I also took part at the keysigning party. To avoid that everybody has to start from scratch, here is a HowTo sign keys efficiently with caff."

Thomas Thym: openSUSE conference 2010 is over

"openSUSE conference is over. It was an amazing and exhausting time. And the most important thing I learned was: The openSUSE project is a commuity. Of cause I meet many community members employed by Novell. But also many contributors NOT payed by that sponsor. The project is moving more and more into the direction of independence (e.g. with it's community based new strategy).

I was suspisious myself when I choose my distro some time ago. Shall I really try openSUSE, with all the deals the main sponsor is doing? From now on I am sure that these prejudices were wrong."


Announcements

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openSUSE News: The openSUSE Build Service 2.1 released

"The openSUSE Build Service ā€“ OBS ā€“ is now officially at release 2.1. Weā€™re delighted with the improvements in this release, including an enhanced web interface, integration with online code management systems and better access controls. (...)"

Jos Poortvliet: Almost time!

"After a slightly-too-big dinner last night your strategy team spend all day working on the strategy docs. We've spend most of that time trying to shorten it without loosing the essential information in there - trying to make it more readable. I think we did reasonable well - the results are on co-ment again. (...)"

Advance discontinuation notice for openSUSE 11.1

"SUSE Security announces that the SUSE Security Team will stop releasing updates for openSUSE 11.1 soon.
Having provided security-relevant fixes for the last two years, we will stop releasing updates after December 31st 2010.

As a consequence, the openSUSE 11.1 distribution directory on our server download.opensuse.org will be removed from /distribution/11.1/ to free space on our mirror sites. The 11.1 directory in the update tree /update/11.1 will follow, as soon as all updates have been published. Also the openSUSE buildservice repositories building openSUSE 11.1 will be removed. (...)"

Thomas Schraitle: RTFM!

"Before and during the openSUSE conference, some nice people (Jens-Daniel, JĆ¼rgen, Darix) created the following site for you:
http://rtfm.opensuse.org

Thank you guys! I like the thrilling name. ;-)

Itā€™s a static page (at the moment?) and collects the current documentation from several products and projects. Probably you will see more to come in the next weeks.

Have fun!"


Status Updates

Distribution


Team Reports

Build Service Team

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Jos Poortvliet: Notes on OBS

"Having an awesome time here at the conference - esp last night with the Movie Night, the Movies were cool. As was the beer during and afterwards...

During the day I followed talk by Lubos Lunak about the Build Service as I wanted to learn more about it. As I made notes I decided to share them :D

In the introduction Lubos shared that apparently you have to package each application by hand - however, automatic downloading of random tarballs from the internet and turning them into packages for all linux distributions on distrowatch.org is planned for OBS 3.0! (...)"

Martin Mohring: OBS 2.1: Status of SuperH (sh4) support with QEMU

"With established ARM support in OBS the as well as emulated MIPS and PowerPC is getting more mature, the last big embedded architecture not working in OBS with QEMU user mode was SH4. QEMU developers community had done a lot of work in improving QEMU user mode during the last months, so I can proudly present with currently only a few patches to QEMU git master OBS builds working with the SH4 port of Debian Sid. The new QEMU 0.13 released recently is a big milestone for this. (...)"

Build Service Statistics

Statistics can found at http://build.opensuse.org


GNOME Team

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Vincent Untz: JDLL 2010

"Last Friday, I headed to Lyon for the JDLL 2010. It's an event that feels always a bit special for me since the JDLL was the first event I attended a long while ago. Even though it's not the biggest event in France, for some reason, all the usual suspects from the french-speaking free software community is coming. So a good place to be to catch up with various people (Alexandre, Didier, FrƩdƩricP, Michael from the GNOME-FR conspiracycommunity, as well as our friends from Mageia, and more). (...)"


KDE Team

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Andreas Demmer: Dashboard animation

"Yesterday evening, I added the first animation to the KWin dashboard effect: Saturation and brightness of the background do now change over a configurable time span when the dashboard appears. The smooth fade of the background adds some eye candy without being to obstrusive (hopefully).

I posted the according patch to the KDE review board. If everything works out fine, the patch will be in trunk for KDE SC 4.6 before code freeze."


Marketing Team

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Jos Poortvliet: Ambassador video's

"A couple of days ago Chuck came up with a (brilliant) idea to bring our ambassadors a bit closer to the openSUSE conference, even if they can't physically be there: let's all record a greeting message!

So that idea is awesome, and Bruno just announced some space to put the video's.

So, if you're an openSUSE ambassador and you won't make it to the conference, record a video and put it live :D (...)"


Mono Team

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Lluis Sanchez: Cydin source published

"I just published the source code of Cydin in github. Cydin is an add-in repository for applications based on Mono.Addins. The latest version is currently running the MonoDevelop add-in repo. I have many ideas to keep improving Cydin. Here are a few: (...)"


openFATE Team

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#310721: Pkg-Config with Packagekit/Zypper integration

"This idea is made to make installing from source easiest as possible. Many tools to generating makefile (configure) uses pkg-config a lot. Pkg-config returns complirer flags and path to include files.

When the package devel/header files isn't insralled, pkg-config only returns error code. We should modify pkg-config to search devel packages in the repository(like cnf). We can integrated zypper, but integrating PackageKit instead is also a good choice. The behaviour can be simply: displaying package name to install on error out. Not always package name are matched to name suggested by configuration script.

I can also imagine to write complete replacement for make, which modify system path to directory with special wrapper for compilers/pkg-config."

#310722: Update xconfig in kernel to use QT4

"Since QT3 is unsupported now should the kernels xconfig now utilize QT4 instead of QT3?"

#310739: Explain how to "disable" pam-config, if manual pam configuration is in place

"pam-config write the files /etc/pam.d/common-***-pc. If a user want to use its own configuration, he has to remove the symlink from /etc/pam.d/common-*** to the -pc files and create the common-*** file with his configuration to prevent pam-config from removing his configuration.

But this is nowhere explained. It should be added to the pam-config manpage.

Additionally we should think about a way to prevent overwriting manual changes to the service files, if --service is used."

Statistics

Feature statistics for openSUSE 11.4

More information on openFATE


OpenOffice.org Team

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Mike McCallister: More LibreOffice: Infrastructure Expands, Beta 2 Released, and Oracle Gets Hostile

"A couple weeks into the LibreOffice project, and the room is really beginning to come together. Letā€™s try to summarize whatā€™s been happening:

  • October 13 marked the 10th anniversary of Sun freeing the StarOffice source code and creating the OpenOffice.org project. Luis Suarez-Potts sent this email on behalf of the OpenOffice.org community. The Document Foundation released The Next Decade Manifesto, outlining the goals of the foundation and the LibreOffice project.
  • LibreOffice Beta 2 was released on October 14. (...)"


Translation Team

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Localization


In the Community

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Events & Meetings

Past:


Upcoming:


openSUSE for your ears

From Ambassadors

Mohammad Edwin Zakaria: Geeko Comes to Schools

"Yogyakarta is one of the tourism destination in Indonesia. The unique Javanise tradition blend with some acculturation from outside culture. Recently I was asked by the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology and Office of Education, Youth and Sport of Yogyakarta to help them to prepare the computer lab for elementary and junior high school in Yogyakarta Province ā€“ Indonesia.

Well, this is the tough job. I work with some expert, teacher and education strategist to prepare the e-learning system. We should prepare learning/teaching material in digital format, train the teacher to use authoring tools and operating system, and prepare the schools to be ready to receive the PCā€™s. This government initiative will involve 500 schools in 3 years. Every school that involve in this program will receive 21 PCs.

We select openSUSE Li-f-e as the operating system in every pc. The selection is not because Iā€™m an openSUSE member but we come to the conclusion that openSUSE Li-f-e is the most complete and well prepare distribution for education (well, I convince other expert, some of them are Ph.D, he..heā€¦). This year there are 110 schools involve in this program, this means another new 2310 openSUSE installation and more than 4000 new users if we assume that every PC will be used by 2 students. (...)"

KƔlmƔn KƩmƩnczy: Linux in Education (LOK) - Budapest, Hungary - Report

"Please find my report here.

Event: Linux in Education (LOK) - Budapest, Hungary.
Date: October 16th, 2010.
Location: Miklos Bercsenyi High School and College (...)"

KƔlmƔn KƩmƩnczy: Ambassador goal review - Hungary

"I like the boosters weekly review so I decide to do a bimonthly review for same reasons about the status of my/Hungarian community goals.
On the 11.3 release party in Budapest we set few goals in August:
http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-ambassadors/2010-08/msg00069.html (...)"

openSUSE in $COUNTRY

"Details"

Communication

Contributors


New/Updated Applications @ openSUSE

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Sankar P: Stunning Random Wallpapers for your "openSUSE GNOME" Desktop

"I came across an interesting project named Webilder. It is so awesome. Webilder can...

- download flickr photos that match tags (for example: beach,party)
- download photos from flickr users of your choice.
- download most interesting photos from flickr.
- download amazing daily proshots from Webshots (requires Webshots account).
- automatically download new photos for you.
- change your wallpaper every few minutes.
- import webshots collections (wbz or wbc formats).

(...)

openSUSE was not having rpms for this package. So I went ahead and created a build-service project for this. Go GRAB The RPM :-) (1-click install) (...)"

  • You can find other interesting Packages at:
  • PackmanOBS


Security Updates

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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.


Kernel Review

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Linus Torvalds: Linux 2.6.36

"So it's a week later than I wanted (plus all the days that added up from me having a few 8-day weeks during this release window), but it's out there now.

The delay means that the merge window that opens now would cover the upcoming kernel summit. However, I really hope that everybody sends me their patches and pull requests _before_ KS even starts. And if you're affected by the kernel summit you probably won't have time during it to finalize anything that week anyway, especially for those staying for plumbers afterwards, and... (...)"

h-online/Thorsten Leemhuis: What's new in Linux 2.6.36

"The new kernel version is notable because it hasn't grown in size ā€“ yet it contains hundreds of advancements which will be obvious to end users, who don't often notice changes in their Linux distribution's kernel.

After 80 days of development Linus Torvalds has released Linux version 2.6.36. It got the name "Flesh-Eating Bats with Fangs" with the eight pre-release; Torvalds was inspired by a bat that recently found its way into his house. The new Linux kernel is no larger than its immediate predecessor ā€“ a rarity, as over the past few years the kernel sources have grown by several hundred thousand lines of code with every new version released in the main development branch. (...)"

Rares Aioanei: Kernel Weekly News 23.10.2010

"Hello gals and guys and welcome! Since last time, we have a wave of interesting patches, updates and RFCs so letā€™s just get into it."


Tips and Tricks

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For Desktop Users

Make Tech Easier/Tavis J. Hampton: Advanced KDE Administration

"For general use, it is sufficient to configure KDE using the options provided in System Settings and in individual application settings. Nevertheless, to unlock the full power of KDE, you should learn some of the system administration tools that it provides. (...)"

SUSE Geek: BCM4311/4312/4321/4322 Wireless in openSUSE 11.3

"In openSUSE 11.3, laptops installed with the BCM4311/BCM4312/BCM4321/BCM4322 Wireless LAN cards like the Dell Inspiron 1525 do not have drivers installed and hence do not work out of the box. In Dell this Wireless card is labelled as ā€œDell 1395 Wireless cardā€. The broadcom-wl package which contain Broadcomā€™s IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n hybrid LinuxĀ® device driver for use with Broadcomā€™s BCM4311-, BCM4312-, BCM4321-, and BCM4322-based hardware doesnā€™t seem to work. (...)"


For Commandline/Script Newbies

Linux.com/Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier: Essentials of Bash Scripting: Using Loops

"An essential rule of system administration: If you need to do something often, try to write a script to do it for you. If you need to do something several times within a script, you'll need to be able to use loop statements to repeat something until done. With GNU Bash, you'll do this with for, while, and until statements. (...)"

SUSE Geek: How to send email with attachments from command line

"This is a quick tip for all those beginers on openSUSE, SUSE Linux or even for that matter on any Linux or Unix distros on how to send an email from command line with an attachment. This could be a text or an image file.
By default, mail messages can be encoded with the file content into the mail message body rather than adding the required file as an attachment. To send a file as an attachment use the ā€œuuencodeā€ utility as follows: (...)"


For Developers and Programmers

webreference/Leidago Noabeb: Create a Localized Web Page with PHP

"The process of making your applications/websites usable in many different locales is called internationalization, While customizing your code for different locales is called localization. Localization is the process of making your applications or websites local to where it is being viewed. For example, you can make a website more local to a particular place by converting its text to the predominate language of that location and by displaying the local time (e.g. German for people living in Germany or French for people living in France). (...)"

Linux User & Developer/Kunal Deo: Develop Apache HTTP Server Modules

"As of February 2010, Apache served over 54.46% of all websites and over 66% of the million busiest. It is available on a wide variety of platforms including Linux, Mac OS X, Windows and BSD. One of the key factors behind Apache HTTP Serverā€™s success is its modular architecture. The Apache HTTP Server core is very simple and doesnā€™t do much. The default distribution of HTTP Server contains the core and a set of core Apache Modules that handle most of the web-server-related operations. This modular architecture presents several benefits. For example, instead of running the full server, one can enable only the modules that one will use; this way one can run the most efficient version of the HTTP Server without changing the server code. Another benefit of modular architecture is extensibility. Apache as a web server community implements a defined feature set approved by the community, but that may or may not be enough for everybody. With extensible architecture, anybody can extend Apache HTTP Server according to their needs by developing Apache modules. (...)"


For System Administrators

SUSE Geek: How to configure Postfix to send emails in openSUSE and SUSE Linux

"Default installs of openSUSE and SUSE Linux will not be able to send emails. The following simple configuration procedure should help you setup postfix to send emails. Infact, this should work on most of the Linux distros. The config file for postfix is

/etc/postfix/main.cf

Edit this file and set the following values: (...)"

Han Wen Kam: Getting Started with KVM on SLES 11 SP1

"This blog post is long overdued and I apologized to those who had encouraged me to do so earlier and I procrastinated.

With SLES 11 SP1, officially available earlier in June 2010, KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is officially supported in addition to the more mature Xen virtualization (since 2006). You can install both hypervisors on the same installation of SLES 11 SP1 but you can only choose to use one or the other and not both at the same time (reboot required to switch)."


Planet SUSE

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Nelson Marques: openoffice.org and Libre Officeā€¦

"Yesterday Iā€™ve found an interesting piece on /., a bit sensationalist and maybe misleading, but nevertheless interesting with a flashy title. Iā€™ve closely look at the source of such article looking for a possible justification for the title, though unable to find one that could justify it. But this is not importantā€¦"

Miguel de Icaza: Shipping Smiles on the AppStore

"Happy days at Mono Central. Just a few months ago we decided that we should apply the lessons learned from MonoTouch to Mono on the Mac and we built a new set of .NET APIs for developing native Mac applications. We called this MonoMac. (...)"

Holger Hetterich: SMBTA presentation @ Storage Developer Conference posted

"The slides from the presentation on SMB Traffic Analyzer I did at the Storage Developer Conference 2010 can be downloaded here:

SMB Traffic Analyzer

The SMB traffic analyzer software suite is a toolset aimed at visualizing the data flow on one or more Samba servers, providing statistics about the usage of Samba services. The long term goal of the SMB Traffic Analyzer project is to provide a universal remote debugging facility for Samba."

Pavol Rusnak: Why is pkg-config the best thing since sliced bread

"For those of you who havenā€™t met pkg-config yet a short introduction from its project page:

pkg-config is a helper tool used when compiling applications and libraries. It helps you insert the correct compiler options on the command line so an application can use gcc -o test test.c `pkg-config --libs --cflags glib-2.0` for instance, rather than hard-coding values on where to find glib (or other libraries). It is language-agnostic, so it can be used for defining the location of documentation tools, for instance.

More and more projects are using pkg-config already, but there is still a very high number of projects that donā€™t. This post tries to describe why using pkg-config is a good idea."

Sebastian KĆ¼gler: Schizophrenic clock effect

"On the train back from the openSUSE conference, I read an article about improvements in Plasma 4.5 in the German edition of Linux Magazin. The author noticed the re-designed notification area with its more consistent and clean look, but also mentioned that the clock looks visually somewhat outdated in the panel now. Fair enough, most of the notification area has seen a bunch of iterations over their looks, but the digital clock didnā€™t really receive much visual love other than bugfixes in alignment and layout of the clock. I thought a bit about what would make the digital clock look better, and identified two things: the full bleed color sticks out a bit, and the clock looks flat compared to its neighbours in the panel. (...)"

Andreas Demmer: So long, Flash!

"In various blog comments, my visitors kept complaining about the Flash headlines. This has come to an end right now!

When I relaunched the page for the last time, I have choosen the DIN font for the header, navigation and headlines. Because of DIN being a commercial font, the only valid way to use it was by embedding it as Flash font with the help of sIFR. This technology only had few drawbacks because it had full fallbacks for browsers without Flash and the headlines were selectable, too. Of course, a native solution would have been better. And this is, what I did yesterday!"


openSUSE Forums

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Freeze on Full Screen Streaming Video

"Going full screen on flash for some does seem to cause issue, particularly in Youtube HD, but a range of possible causes need to be addressed."

Video but No Audio

"This seems to crop up regular and often the fix is simple if the user just neglected to actually move the volume mixer so it's On. Other times it can be more complicated."

How to Enable Root Login

"This one sparked off some comments to say the least. As readers can imagine, you either agree with this practice or Not."

A Perfect Install with Win7

"User seeks advice to proceed with install of openSUSE along side Windows 7. It looks like all went OK, though there was a slight hiccup."


On the Web

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Announcements

Chromeless: Build your own Browser UI using HTML, CSS and JS

"The ā€œChromelessā€ project experiments with the idea of removing the current browser user interface and replacing it with a flexible platform which allows for the creation of new browser UI using standard Web technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript."


Call for participation

How are you handling AntiVirus issues? Take a survey and win a Kindle

"We are interested in knowing about the AntiVirus solutions being used by our customers. Take this short, 10-question survey and we'll enter you to win an Amazon Kindle. Don't be shy -- we want to hear from you.

Take the survey now >"


Reports

TildeHash/Jacob Barkdull: State of Firefox 4.0 on GNU+Linux

"So we've probably all seen the mock-ups for Firefox 4.0 by now, but has any of it been implemented? In the Windows version, yes. On the GNU+Linux version, partially. And it looks like it's going to stay that way. I'm going to show you what's different in the current development version (nightly 4.0b8pre) from 3.6.

First up: Firefox 4.0 has great support for the new HTML5 specifications like CSS3, Canvas, Offline Web Applications, Drag-and-Drop interaction, Geolocation, SVG, Animated SVG, Video tag, Audio tag, WebM, and so much more. HTML5 is now very popular on the web, but because many people use older web browsers or web browsers that don't support such new features, web sites are designed to work despite a lack of support for HTML5. So while these are great features, you might not notice them or necessarily want to use them, I will not be talking about them much here. This is the state of Firefox 4.0 on GNU+Linux."

Techie Buzz/Ricky Laishram: Oracle Asks Founders Of The Documents Foundation To Leave

"After Oracle acquired SUN Microsystem, some leading members of the OpenOffice.org community forked OpenOffice.org as LibreOffice. They also set up The Document Foundation to continue the independent works of the OpenOffice.org community.

However, Oracle is not taking their move well. They want the founders of The Documents Foundation to leave the OpenOffice.org council. According to Oracle, their works with The Documents Foundation and LibreOffice will conflict with that of OpenOffice.org."

DaniWeb/Davey Winder: Web browser speed test: Chrome, Firefox, IE9, Opera and Safari head-to-head

"With Internet Explorer 9 being acclaimed as the fastest ever browser client from Microsoft, DaniWeb decided to put it to the test against Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari and see just how quick it really is in a real world test of web browsing speed. (...)"

LinuxPlanet/Sean Michael Kerner: Linux Kernel 2.6.36 Gets AppArmor

"After years of being outside of the mainline, the AppArmor security system is now finally part of the main Linux kernel.

Linux founder Linus Torvalds formally released the 2.6.36 kernel this week nearly three months after the release of the 2.6.35 kernel.

AppArmor has been in use by Linux distributions since at least 2006 when Novell first open sourced the code as a rival option to SELinux which has been championed by Red Hat. Ubuntu picked up AppArmor in 2007 with the 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon release. (...)"


Reviews and Essays

Linux.com/Helen South: Collaboration Across Borders at the openSUSE Conference

"It's a well-established truth in marketing that brands aren't about products or even experiences ā€” they are about people. Create a community in which your user feels at home, where their questions are answered,their voices heard and their contributions appreciated, and half of your marketing work is done. It doesn't matter how clever your social media feed is if you don't have a core of humanity at the centre of your project.

The openSUSE conference in NĆ¼rnberg, with a theme of "collaboration across borders," will highlight this pivotal aspect of Free and Open Source Software development. Although a distribution-sponsored conference, this event will involve an extended cross-section of the FOSS world, including other distributions, desktop projects and upstream developers. (...)"

internetnews.com/Sean Michael Kerner: IPv4 addresses fall below 5 percent. Is it time for IPv6 yet?

"From the 'Sky Isn't Falling' files:

The Number Resource Organization (NRO) announced today the less than 5 percent of the IPv4 address space now remains.

So what?

We've been hearing about IPv4 address space depletion for years and various organizations have kept trying to predict the year we'd 'run out' of address spaces. The reality is that year after year IPv4 has continued to stay alive - even as pundits proclaim its death. The fact that less than 5 percent of IPv4 address remain is not a cause for U.S. based enterprises or consumers to be concerned - the Internet is not running out of IP addresses as some mainstream media might proclaim - you can go about your business as usual. (...)"


Warning!

h-online/Chris von Eitzen: Root privileges through vulnerability in GNU C loader

"A vulnerability in the library loader of the GNU C library can be exploited to obtain root privileges under Linux and other systems. Attackers could exploit the hole, for instance, to gain full control of a system by escalating their privileges after breaking into a web server with restricted access rights. Various distributors are already working on updates. (...)"

h-online/Chris von Eitzen: Hole in Linux kernel provides root rights

"A flaw in the implementation of the Reliable Datagram Sockets protocol (RDS) in the Linux kernel can be exploited to gain root (also known as superuser) rights or permissions on a victim's system. Attackers can exploit the hole to get complete control remotely once they have broken into the system. Dan Rosenberg, who discovered the vulnerability, has published an exploit for demonstration purposes; in a test conducted by The H's associates at heise Security on Ubuntu 10.04 (64-bit), it opened a root shell. (...)"


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