Archive:Weekly news 90
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Welcome to issue # 90 of openSUSE Weekly News
In this Week:
- Joe Brockmeier: Hundreds converge on Nuremberg for openSUSE Conference
- openSUSE Conference 2009
- How To Build A Self-hosted Wordpress Blog For Free
- Andrew Wafaa: Goblin 1Click
- Sascha Manns: OOo4kids: Special Version for Kids
Announcements
- Joe Brockmeier: Hundreds converge on Nuremberg for openSUSE Conference
- "The openSUSE Project drew more than 225 people to its first-ever conference last week in Nuremberg, Germany. Contributors from all over the world and press from all around Europe came to meet and talk about the openSUSE Project, distribution development, and the technologies that make up the openSUSE distribution."
In the Community
openSUSE Conference 2009
- Sascha Manns: Live from the openSUSE Conference in Nürnberg (2)
- "Now we’ve finished our third Day in the openSUSE Conference. I’ve started with hearing about Andreas Jaegers Talk “Overview about openSUSE”. After his talk i give my talk “Softwareprograms in Linux, Presentation important Software.” I’ve prepared my Slides, and have prepared some Programs for Presentation. But sadly my Notebook can’t connect with the Beamer :-( ..."
- Andreas Jaeger: openSUSE Conference Photos
- "I found so far the following galleries of photos from the openSUSE Conference (osc09):
- * gallery.opensuse.org
- * flickr osc09 group
- * Roger Whittaker’s photos
- * Coly Li’s photos
- The flickr photos are also shown on the osc09 twitterwall."
- Roger Whittaker: openSUSE Conference day 3
- "The atmosphere throughout has been very good, and the availability of unlimited amounts of coffee and excellent fruit juices throughout the day each day is really nice (unlike some events I've been at where the coffee comes out at 10:30 and disappears at 10:35). It turns out that although there's no wireless, there are enough chances to get hold of the end of an ethernet cable for everyone to connect when they need to, and in some ways this is good, as it helps make people more sociable as they cannot always be dealing with their remote concerns."
- Roger Whittaker: enSUSE Conference day 4
- "Sunday's programme began with Juergen Weigert on Legal Aspects of Distribution Development. Juergen made the usual sensible appeal to developers not to try to create their own licence but to use one of the (many) OSI-approved licences that are available. In passing he mentioned Poul Henning-Kemp's Beer-ware licence and the problems that it had caused with one large vendor. Most of the talk was devoted to how licences are accepted and verified in the build service, and a discussion of the correct form of licence strings to be included in spec files, with a demonstration of a new web-based tool (http://license.opensuse.org/) for creating the canonical form of licence strings. If more than one licence is used in a package, these can vary according to whether there is licence aggregation, licence choice or licence mix."
- Sascha Manns: Slides published
- "Now I would like to announce, that the Slides from the Talks which I held in the openSUSE Conference, are published. You can just go to the “Talks” Tab from this Blog :-)"
- Andreas Jaeger: osc09: Lightning Talks
- "Sunday morning of the openSUSE conference I took part in the Lightning Talks which were short talks on a variety of topics. I’ve took some brief notes of these:
- Myself: The unconference session on common desktop topics for GNOME and KDE discussed a better communication and coordination about future disruptive changes, suggested to remove noise from the mailing lists, e.g. test discussions from opensuse-factory, discussed how “osc collab” can be used by others (Vincent volunteered to enhance it so that more people can use it, just tell him), discussed some issues with the Build Service so that Adrian setup an extra session on it, talked that we miss a predictable behavior of applications on desktops and need volunteers especially with bug triage."
- Martin Vidner: OpenSUSE Conference 2009 - Notes from Thurday
- "Here are my notes from the first day of last week's openSUSE Cponference 2009. I am not happy with the form of the notes, but better now and imperfect than polished but 6 months later. Please notify me if you find errors. Thanks to all who stood up to talk about their work! Not only code matters."
- openSUSE News/Michael Loeffler: openSUSE Conference is Over – Some Wrap Up
- "On Sunday the first openSUSE conference (osc09) finished in Nuernberg, Germany. Overall it was great success and brought people face to face together. Participants were motivated and enthusiastic and we’d like to just show some comments on twitter/blog:..."
- openSUSE Spotlight/Joe Brockmeier: What I Learned at the openSUSE Conference
- "Has it really been a week since the openSUSE conference kicked off? The time passed far too quickly! Since I didn’t have a chance to participate in the “what I learned” lightning talks, I thought I’d write a few thoughts down on my blog. I’ve taken a few days to reflect on the conference while I was attending the Linux Foundation’s initial LinuxCon (more on that later)."
Status Updates
Distribution
- Unconference session report: 11.2 and Maintenance
- coolo's "heads up" for m8
Build Service
- Czech Packagers Team meeting minutes 2009-09-25
- Minutes from the Meeting
Wiki / Communication / Events
- Mariano Iumiento: Software Freedom Day 2009, Italy
- "I'm glad to share some feedbacks from the Software Freedom Day 2009 event held in Perugia, Italy, on last Saturday (http://lizards.opensuse.org/2009/09/10/software-freedom-day-italy-perugia/) All three Italian ambassadors have attended and made themselves available to curious people."
- Linux.com/Brian Proffitt: Linuxcon: The little things make all the difference
- "The first day of LinuxCon proved to be a big hit amongst many attendees, not just for the quality of content but for the extracurricular activities the event has provided. Last night, the main event was the well-attended Linux Foundation bowling party across the river at Grand Central Bowling, which was designed to raise money for Defenders of Wildlife. The event was a big success, with teams comprised of friends old and new who banded together for a common cause. A lot like open source, come to think of it."
- Chuck Payne: Report from Atlanta Linux Fest
- "I am happy to say that the Atlanta Linux Fest was a great hit. They were planning for only fewer than 500 people, but ended up with a turn out of 600+. I am happy to say that all the stuff that Zonker sent was all passed out and we still had people wanting more. We answer all the questions they has. Demo the 11.1 for a bit until my laptop died (there was no power on the wall we were on)."
Tips and Tricks
For Desktop Users
- Ghacks/Jack Wallen: Create, sign, and publish your PGP key with Seahorse
- "I have espoused encryption on Ghacks plenty of times. I find most users do not employ encryption, of any kind, which is somewhat surprising given the constant rate at which data is stolen. With the help of encryption your data is much safer than it would be in plain text. To deal with encryption you have to use encryption keys. This means you will giving and getting keys to/from various people (or within a business, different departments). If the amount of keys you manage gets too large, key management can become rather challenging. Fortunately there are tools out there to aid you in this task."
- MakeUseOf.com/Jeffry Thurana: How To Build A Self-hosted Wordpress Blog For Free
- "A blog is a layman-friendly variation of a website, and having a blog is one of the many ways to state your presence in the virtual world. While there are many hassle-free blog services out there that will take care of everything except automatically blog for you – like Blogger.com and Wordpress.com, nothing can beat a self-hosted blog in the terms of customization and self pride."
For Developers and Programmers
- tuxradar.com: Learn Qt programming with our free tutorials
- "We've put up three tutorials using Qt, and we think you should try them. Why? Because they use Nokia's awesome new Qt Creator tool for quick design. Because Qt is easy to learn, cross-platform, super fast and lots of fun. Because each of those tutorials is a complete, finished project that does something useful and is easily extended to fit your needs. But most of all because coding is fun and everyone should give it a try at least once!"
- KDE Developer's Journals/Richard Dale: Writing Plasma PopupApplets in Ruby and C#
- "Several people have wanted to be able to write Plasma PopupApplets in scripting languages. I'm pleased to announce that for KDE 4.3 you will be able to write them in Ruby and C#."
For System Administrators
- Linux Journal/Mohammed hisamuddin: Tech Tip: Really Simple HTTP Server with Python
- "If you need a quick web server running and you don't want to mess with setting up apache or something similar, then Python can help. Python comes with a simple builtin HTTP server. With the help of this little HTTP server you can turn any directory in your system into your web server directory. The only thing you need to have installed is Python."
- Levent Serinol: I/O usage per process on Linux
- "Linux kernel 2.6.20 and later supports per process I/O accounting. You can access every process/thread's I/O read/write values by using /proc filesystem. You can check if your kernel has built with I/O account by just simply checking /proc/self/io file. If it exists then you have I/O accounting built-in."
- Web Developer's Virtual Library/Marc Plotz: Crontab Basics
- "Cron Tab (CRON TABle) is a very cool little thing that allows you to execute scripts at certain times and dates without actually having to be around to do the work. Think of it as setting an alarm to go off at certain intervals, and every time that alarm goes off a certain script is run on your website, for instance. ..."
New/Updated Applications @ openSUSE
- OBS openSUSE:Factory/ipsec-tools updated
- "Updated to ipsec-tools-0.7.3"
- DVDStyler updated
- "DVDStyler is a gui frontend for using dvdauthor and dvd-slideshow scripts to easily build DVD menus and assemble the DVD VOB files." Packman updated this Package. Follow the white rabbit ;-)
- OBS openSUSE:Factory/kmymoney updated
- updated to kmymoney2-1.0.1
Planet SUSE
- Chenthill P: Evolution 2.28.0 released!!
- "Evolution team is happy and proud to announce the evolution 2.28.0 release. To give an overview of what the release provides, ..."
- Brent McConnell: What They Don't Teach Community Managers
- "There seems to be a misconception about what's required to build a vibrant open source community and it's not "community management". Community management focuses on providing infrastructure and facilitating communication for a community. This includes setting up events, maintaining TO-DO lists, keeping forums under control, making announcements, etc. And that's all well and good, in fact it's vital. However, although this role is important it will likely not lead to any significant growth in your community. Communities need Leadership in order to grow because leaders create a vision of the future that draws people to their communities and motivates them into action."
- Andrew Wafaa: Goblin 1Click
- "One of the issues of installing the Moblin UI on an existing machine is that there are a heck of a lot of packages needed to get the full experience, so I present to you here the Goblin 1Click. Yes I know 1Click is a bit of a misnomer, but hey it's an easy way to install a packages set without knowing the repo or package names :-) For those of you wondering why I'm still calling this Goblin rather than Moblin well you should have attened Michael Meeks talk at the openSUSE Conference to understand that the name "Moblin" actually stands for several things. So I use "Goblin - openSUSE powered Moblin" or "Goblin" for short to differentiate."
- Mecworks.com/Marc Christensen: SLLUG meeting this Wednesday (Sept 23, 2009): Introduction to SUSE Studio
- "This month's Salt Lake Linux Users Group (SLLUG) meeting will be an introduction to SUSE Studio. Have you ever wanted to make your own live CD? A specialty Linux Appliance? A bootable USB Linux distro or virtual machine image customized to exactly what you want? SUSE Studio makes it incredibly easy to do."
openSUSE Forums
- USB Flash not showing Any More
- "Sometimes the answer is simpler than we think. With most folks having more than One Computer in the home and often also a Windows PC. Some simple tests might save some time!"
- Can't see Content of NTFS Partition.
- "Poorly removed NTFS drives have been a regular reason for questions asked in the forum. We'll probably be forever plagued by M$ issues. Good to know we have capable members to hand to assist."
- My Experience with Linux
- "Linux is a rather generalized statement, we are interested in the openSUSE part. The forum can have a part in making user experiences Good (or Bad). We want more positive feedback, so we need to maintain high standards in the forum."
- Okular not Opening PDF's
- "I guess we are to expect this sort of behaviour from time to time. Unfortunately the solution in this case was to use adobe reader for linux, against my better principles, I haven't installed that since 10.0. Maybe there is some new mix out there in the adobe world?!"
On the Web
In the Press
- Expressindia/Anupam Chakravartty: Programmers make Gujarati Operating System a reality
- "Vadodara: A quiet revolution in the confines of a computer’s Disk Operating System (DOS) is causing a stir among the software enthusiasts across Gujarat. Linux and other parallel open source programmers from the state have finally made the dream of an Operating System (OS) in Gujarati a reality."
- The article says Open Suse, but read that as openSUSE-Edu Li-f-e: Linux for Education.
Announcements
- Made to Share! GNOME 2.28 Released!
- "The GNOME Community is excited to announce the immediate availability of GNOME 2.28. Hundreds of volunteers worldwide have worked over the past six months to deliver improvements to the GNOME Desktop and GNOME Developer Platform."
Reports
- Linux Magazine/Nils Magnus: OpenSUSE Conf 2009: OpenSUSE 11.2 with Microblogging, But Not WebYaST
- "On the outskirts of the OpenSUSE Conference, core developers revealed details on the new openSUSE version 11.2. Although it will have Kernel 2.6.31, browser users will have to wait a bit longer for YaST."
- h-online.com/Thorsten Leemhuis: Kernel Log - Devtmpfs in 2.6.32, more discussion about DRBD, new stable kernels
- "The development of Linux 2.6.32 is in full swing – although the integration of devtmpfs into the main development branch has caused considerable friction. The integration of DRBD, which already seemed certain, is also being debated again. X Server 7.5 is making progress as the developers release the first RC and several new drivers."
- Channel Regster/Austin Modine: IBM Linux chief: Chasing desktop Windows a 'dead-end'
- "Bob Sutor, IBM's vp of open source and Linux for IBM, opened the inaugural LinuxCon conference held in Portland, Oregon on Monday with predictions for the open source desktop, telling developers they won't thrive unless they specialize. Given his connections to Big Blue, Sutor unsurprisingly (and justifiably) praised Linux for its cloud, mainframe, and hardware-specific ubiquity. But he opined that winning hearts in the general market is a different story altogether."
- The Register/Austin Modine: Linus calls Linux 'bloated and huge'
- "LinuxCon 2009: Linux creator Linus Torvalds says the open source kernel has become "bloated and huge," with no midriff-slimming diet plan in sight."
- Sascha Manns: OOo4kids: Special Version for Kids
- "Today i found in interesting Project called “OpenOffice for Kids”. I have reviewed it and maked some Snapshots. First of all you must get your tar.gz File from: http://download.ooo4kids.org/ At the Moment existing the following Languages: English, Frensh, German, Portugues and Espagnol."
- The Register/Austin Modine: Does the Linux desktop need to be popular?
- "LinuxCon 2009: Does Linux desktop even need to be popular? There are, shall we say, differing options among the open source cognoscenti gathered in Portland, Oregon this week for the annual LinuxCon."
- InfoWorld/Paul Krill: Ellison: We won’t spin off MySQL
- "Undaunted by European Union concerns over Oracle's proposed ownership of the open source MySQL database, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison insisted Monday that he would not spin off MySQL to get EU approval of Oracle's planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems and that Oracle's database does not compete with MySQL."
- PC Pro: Firefox tidies up with Office 2007's Ribbon
- "Mozilla has announced that it plans to bring Office 2007's Ribbon interface to Firefox, as it looks to tidy up the cluttered browser."
- h-online.com: HP CommunityLinux portal
- "CommunityLinux.org is a new portal page aimed at enabling HP hardware users to share information about running different distributions of Linux. Currently, the site plans to cover information about the Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, openSUSE and Asianux Linux distributions."
- PC World/Agam Shah: Intel Ports Linux Netbook OS to Desktops
- "Intel has expanded the scope of Linux-based Moblin by porting the OS from netbooks to mobile devices and desktops, where it could compete with Microsoft's Windows OS.
- The company introduced a beta version of Moblin 2.1 at the Intel Developer Forum being held in San Francisco. The new version of the OS now builds in capabilities like native touchscreen input and gesture support, new user interface features, and support for more hardware drivers. It also includes incremental upgrades that expand the usability of the OS."
- h-online.com: New encoder library for Ogg Theora open source video codec
- "The Xiph.org Foundation's open source developers have released version 1.1 ("Thusnelda") of their reference implementation of the libtheora encoder library. Thusnelda is said to offer considerable quality and performance improvements over version 1.0."
Reviews and Essays
- OStatic/Lisa Hoover: Linus Torvalds Comes Clean. Or Does He?
- "When someone regularly attracts the kind of media coverage that Linus Torvalds gets when he so much as blinks, you start to think you know everything about a person. If you've been following Linus on Twitter lately -- okay, the fake Linus -- then you've probably learned more about him in the last three weeks then you ever wanted to know."
- Linux Magazine/Britta Wuelfing: GPLv2 Less Popular
- "The software resource specialist Black Duck Software publishes daily updated data on the twenty most popular open source licenses on its homepage. Basis for the data is an in-house Knowledge Base with information on around 185.000 software projects. The latest version shows 49.5% GPLv2 users, which translates into about 100.000 projects. ..."
- ZDNet/Jason Perlow: Why I Can Never Be Exclusive to Linux and Open Source on the Desktop
- "My profession as a Systems Architect requires that I live in both the Windows and Linux worlds. But even if I wanted to run Linux exclusively, the file compatibility of the current productivity stack for Linux and the lack of a few key applications that I need for work requires at least a minimal virtualized Windows environment for me to get my work done."
- Computerworld/Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: Free Linux, Proprietary Linux
- "Linux's heart is open source. But developers can pick and choose how much, if any, proprietary software they want to include in their distribution. Recently, the Free Software Foundation announced its two latest additions to its listing of open-source purist distributions. This news lead me to thinking about both these distributions and the best of the distributions that go the other way and contain a great deal of proprietary programs."
- LWN.net/Valerie Aurora: POSIX v. reality: A position on O_PONIES
- "Sure, programmers (especially operating systems programmers) love their specifications. Clean, well-defined interfaces are a key element of scalable software development. But what is it about file systems, POSIX, and when file data is guaranteed to hit permanent storage that brings out the POSIX fundamentalist in all of us? The recent fsync()/rename()/O_PONIES controversy was the most heated in recent memory but not out of character for fsync()-related discussions. In this article, we'll explore the relationship between file systems developers, the POSIX file I/O standard, and people who just want to store their data."
Warning!
- InternetNews.com/Sean Michael Kerner: Is Linux Code Quality Improving?
- "Over the course of the last three years, more than 11,200 defects have been eliminated from over 180 open source projects. The defect reduction comes in part due to the Coverity Scan effort, originally funded by the U.S Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2006. DHS no longer funds the effort, but Coverity has continued to operate the scan project on its own."
Past Events & Meetings
Upcoming 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.
Statistics
Numbers in brackets show the changes compared to the previous week.
opensuse.org
Communication
lists.opensuse.org has 37264 (-7) non-unique subscribers to all mailing lists.
The openSUSE Forums have 34590 (+313) registered users - Most users ever online was 3270, 22-Jul-2009 at 20:00.
Contributors
3548 (+38) of 9400 (+108) registered contributors in the User Directory have signed the Guiding Principles. The board has acknowledged 351 (+0) members.
openFATE
Feature statistics for openSUSE 11.2:
- total: 410 (-1)
- unconfirmed: 27 (+0)
- new: 3 (+0)
- evaluation: 39 (-2)
- candidate: 17 (-1)
- done: 60 (+2)
- rejected: 238 (-1)
- duplicate: 26 (+1)
Bugzilla
The numbers for all openSUSE project products are this week:
- All Open Reports: 4903 (+69)
- Blocker: 5 (-2)
- Critical: 236 (+8)
- Major: 823 (+9)
- Normal: 2818 (+50)
- Minor: 411 (+7)
- Enhancements: 610 (-3)
- 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.
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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
