Archive:Weekly news test
openSUSE Weekly News
Sascha Manns
editor in chief
Satoru Matsumoto
Editorial office
Gertjan Lettink
Forums section
Thomas HofstÀtter
Events & meetings
Thomas Schraitle
DocBook-Consultant 2010-12-04
Table of Contents
Announcements openSUSE Board Election 2010 Status Updates Board Distribution SUSE Studio Team Report In the Community Postings from the Community People of openSUSE Welcome new openSUSE Members Events & Meetings openSUSE for your Ears From Ambassadors Communication Contributors New/Updated Applications @ openSUSE Security Updates Kernel Review Tips and Tricks For Desktop Users For Commandline/Script Newbies For Developers and Programmers For System Administrators Planet SUSE openSUSE Forums On the Web Announcements Call for participation Reports Reviews and Essays Warning! LOL Feedback Translations Abstract
We are pleased to announce our 152 issue of the openSUSE Weekly News. Now this issue 152 is the first issue, who are completly written in XML/DocBook. This allows us to publish with some XML Files other Outputformats like PDF or HTML. In future versions we planning other features too. This new workaround simplifies the whole process. Now we hope that you will enjoy reading.
Header PictureAnnouncements
Announcing openSUSE Tumbleweed project
There's been many discussions over the past years about a "rolling update" version of openSUSE on lots of different mailing lists and in person a different conferences. So the time now is to stop talking about it, and actually trying to do it :) So, I'd like to propose "openSUSE Tumbleweed" a repo that is a rolling updated version of openSUSE containing the latest "stable" versions of packages for people to use. (...)
Other Sources: LWN LinuxJournal h-online
Figure 1. Geeko wants you
Third openSUSE Board Election 2010
We are pleased to announce the openSUSE Board Election 2010! The Election Committee this year is staffed by: geeko wants you Stathis Iosifidis , Sascha Manns, Satoru Matsumoto, Thomas Schmidt The Committee has prepared the timeline for this yearâs election. As last year the election process consists of 3 phases: (...)Figure 1, âGeeko wants youâ
Figure 2. openFATE Picture
Feature handling for openSUSE reworked
openFATE, the feature tracking tool used in openSUSE has been completely reworked and the new version is live now on features.opensuse.org. A team has started driving the handling of features and weâd like to update you with the current state and invite you to participate. The new version is now live and contains a long list of new features so that features can be handled completely with the new web user interface. The interface uses the new openSUSE Bento theme to fit in better in the openSUSE site family, has several search options to allow the screening team to find features easily, itâs possible to edit all fields and also the product states. Thanks to the openSUSE boosters, especially to Thomas Schmidt, for the new version. The new team has defined a workflow to handle features and described it in the openSUSE wiki. Figure 2, âopenFATE Pictureâ
openSUSE Announces Fourth Development Milestone with Kernel Interactivity Patch
On Monday, the openSUSE project released the fourth of six milestones in the development of openSUSE 11.4. Milestone 4 (M4) brings a wide range of updates, both major and minor. Kernel 2.6.37rc3 is the basis of M4, including the famous â200 lineâ per tty task groups patch to improve desktop interactivity, and featuring the removal of the so-called âBig Kernel Lockâ that will improve scalability. NetworkManager was updated to 0.8.2, seeing several last minute fixes in cooperation with upstream developers. Libzypp 8.8 adds support for metalinks, the multiple download URL specification. On the desktops, KDE makes the leap to version 4.6 beta 1. This includes a complete rewrite of Kontact and is undergoing heavy testing. GNOME 2.32.2 is the final version planned for openSUSE 11.4, which is notable for being the last stable release before GNOME 3 in March. Zeitgeist, the activity tracker, is updated to 0.6. KOffice is updated to 2.3beta1, bringing the exciting Krita natural media painting app to M4, while OpenOffice.org is removed, having been succeeded by LibreOffice in M3. Qt 4.7.1 and Qt Creator 2.1beta2 will allow improved Qt Quick development. Other major updates include the addition of the Midori lightweight browser, the Rosegarden musical notation editor in version 10.10 and monodevelop 2.4. Gnash, the free Flash viewer, comes in version 0.8.8, which has â100% Youtube supportâ and supports hardware acceleration. And finally, the prize for biggest version number leap goes to xmahjong, which went from 2006.8.10 to 2010.11.8. xmahjong fans will be happy to hear that the version bump is only due to a packaging change removing build support for SUSE versions earlier than 9.1. The graphics and gameplay remain as they were in 1990. A list of most annoying bugs is being compiled; please check it before installing. We look forward to your bug reports and test experiences too. Automated testing and the openSUSE Factory team have been active to ensure that your download of M4 will be at least minimally functional. The next milestone is scheduled for December 16. openSUSE 11.4 is planned to be released in March 2011.
The openSUSE Marketing Team is proud to host Collaboration Days during the month of December. Each designated day, we will focus on a specifc area related to marketing. The purpose of this is to get some work done on that topic to strengthen our ability to promote openSUSE to the world. It is a day that is meant to be busy and productive for the team as well as an opportunity for non-team members to stop by and offer their perspectives and help out as we hack away. As this is an open process, we encourage everyone to come join us, even if you are not directly related to openSUSE. All perspectives are important and we welcome you all. (EDITMARK)..
openSUSE Board Election 2010
Sebastian 'sebas' KĂŒgler: Running for the openSUSE Board.
Following up on the call for candidates, Iâd like to let you know that Iâm intending to run for the openSUSE Board.
In my dayjob, I am responsible for user experience at open-slx, and will be able to invest time on a regular basis into participating in the openSUSE board. I have a degree in business science, which gives me some formal insight into organisational processes, this has helped my work for the KDE e.V. in the past, and it will surely be benefitial for openSUSE. I am 34 years old, and live in Nijmegen, in the east of the Netherlands.
I have more than 4 years of experience in administering a Free software project (Iâm member of the KDE e.V. board since 2006), and during this period have helped turning the KDE e.V. into an effective community representation and supporting organisation, which in many ways acts as a role model to other, similar organisations. The Geeko in me is about 9 years old, it started with openSUSE 7.2, which got me hooked on Linux. After a period of trying all kinds of Linuxen, Iâm firmly back to openSUSE for about two years now.
openSUSE represents to me a technically excellent product with a friendly, helpful and skilled community around it that is failing to realise its potential, and in many ways is searching for orientation and a clear mission. Aside from organisational topics, this process Iâd like to facilitate.
My platform for the elections is to help set up the openSUSE e.V. (or rather a legal representation of the community, as outlined in the current plans), and to help the community through the process of becoming more independent from Novell, which in my opinion is important for the growth and sustainability of openSUSE as product and community. Iâm a Free software dude by heart, and the principle and ethics of the Free software community will be what drives my decisions as executive. My experience as "cat-herder" will be beneficial in the same way.
I do realise that my involvement in the openSUSE community has been fairly transparant, following things from the sideline, stepping in actively here and there, and certainly far from taking on any role as rock-star. I am planning to further ramp up my profile, since that a) will make the membersâ decision during the elections a lot easier, and b) it improves accessibility and visibility of the TOTRoS (The Organisation That Represents openSUSE).
This email is just to let you know in advance that Iâm intending to run for the board. As I /also/ intend to go on vacation on Friday, I might appear unresponsive until ~christmas. Still, I opted for letting everybody know early on that Iâm intending to run (rather than sending my note of intent to run after christmas), as planning will likely make the work of the election committee a bit easier. Surely, if youâve questions already, feel free to ask. I will, after returning from vacation be more outgoing about my involvement with openSUSE and my ideas and plans for the openSUSE board. Thanks for your attention, and your support.
Chuck Payne: Throwing my name as a candidate for board of openSUSE
I like to throw my name in as a candidate for board of openSUSE. For the past two years I have been helping out as Ambassador, but I have been a SUSE user since 5.3. I love my work with openSUSE, and I want to do more. I think my experince as System Administrator, End User, Mentor, and Ambassador, plus years of experience would be a big plus to board and to the community.
I started out with Linux in 96âČ as an end, tried of Mac OS, and fearing that it would died. This was before the return of Steve Jobs. Start with Slackware 96 then move to Red Hat and Turbo Linux, then moving to S.u.S.E and never leaving it.
I have worked in the IT field as System Administrator since 98. My first job, I was able to get S.u.S.E 6.2 in to replace Red Hat 6.0. Personally I have used it since 5.3 as server. It was until openSUSE 10.2 that I started using as a Desktop replacement at work for daily to daily, replacing Windows XP and Macintosh OS X OSâes. I can be honest, I still use Mac OS for some desktop publishing, but I use my openSUSE desktop for the other 90%.
When the call came for people to become Ambassador back in 2008, I jumped at the chance to give back to openSUSE in return for everything it has giving to me. I have been to three linux fest. Give a couple of number of talks to local user group. I have even wrote for a Polish Linux this summer called Linux Identity. I have even done a video for the OSC, which was the best but did put some faces to aliases. I am working on other projects that once are done I will show the community.
The other thing I am doing currently for openSUSE is I help with the Facebook page. Trying to post links and events. And I have even set up a twitter account for the openSUSE Ambassador that I hope in the furture and help get out their great work to community and others.
I am currently rebuilding the Georgia openSUSE User Group. I am active in ALE. And love to go to Linux Fest and help spread the word about openSUSE and open source software to the masses.
My daily-to-daily life, I am System Administrator for a start company called Vocalocity that does a lot with SIP/Telecommunications in their NOC team. Before that I worked at Travel Channel Media. I am married. I am very much international. I know that a lot of people donâ t think that of American. But I have lived in Japan for three and half years and taught English Communications. My wife is Turkish. I do travel from here to there no as much as I would like. I have a six year son that know I love Linux and every time he see a penguin points out that, âThere that software you work with Daddyâ. I also have a black cat that loves to sit in my lap while I am computer working. I am a bit old I think than most, I am 43 but with that I bring a lot of experience to the table, one not being a developer, but as a end user, a system administrator. Which covers both every day-to-day users and business.
Jos Poortvliet: openSUSE Board elections
Awesomeness. I just heard that already 3 people stepped up for the 2010 openSUSE Board elections. And Sascha posted the announcement only yesterday!
Really, this is something that shows how openSUSE is a healthy community. We have plenty of people who are able and willing to do this - which is really great. Thanks to those who stepped up - there are only 2 positions, but even the act of stepping forward and saying you're willing to do this is very important!
The openSUSE Board work is very important and becoming more so. Currently work is being done on setting up an openSUSE Foundation - and the board plays a crucial role there. We need people with some experience and willingness to work hard on this, there is a lot of work. If you fit that bill - apply! (EDITMARK)
Header PictureStatus Updates
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Rajko Matovic: Bug days in openSUSE
We had quite successful openSUSE Bug Day organized by A. Naumov on Saturday, November 27, and once rolling we continued through Sunday. The goal was to clear old bugs that refused to die for quite some time. You can see what is done in the wiki article. November 28th, evening by US Central Time:
- openSUSE 10.2: Start 40 bugs now we have 14 bugs left.
- openSUSE 10.3: Start 162 bugs now is 87 bugs left.
- openSUSE 11.0: Start 526 bugs now is 346 bugs left.
We started with 728 bugs and now we have 447, which is 281 bug lesser. I hope that A. Naumov will repeat call for the next Bug Day right next weekend. (EDITMARK)
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Important Links
Header PictureSUSE Studio
Interesting article
blah laber
Team Report
Header PictureArt Team
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Header PictureBoosters Team
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Header PictureBuild Service Team
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 afterwardsâŠ
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! (âŠ)
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. (âŠ)
Build Service Statistics. Statistics can found at Buildservice
Header PictureEducation Team
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Header PictureForums Team
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Header PictureGNOME Team
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, FrĂ©dĂ©ricP, Michael from the GNOME-FR conspiracycommunity, as well as our friends from Mageia, and more). (âŠ)
Header PictureKDE Team
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.
Header PictureMarketing Team
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Header PictureopenFATE Team
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Feature Statistics
- Statistics for openSUSE 11.4 in openFATE
Header PictureOpenOffice Team
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Header PictureTranslation Team
- Daily updated translation statistics are available on the openSUSE Localization Portal.
- Trunk Top-List â Localization Guide
Header PictureWiki Team
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Header PictureYaST Team
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Header PictureIn the Community
Postings from the Community
Insert Titel
Insert Text
People of openSUSE
This Week: xyz
Good Guy. Glows in the night.
Welcome new openSUSE Members
New Member: Stephan Barth (cyberiad)
He is involved in some openSUSE Build Service Projects, he is active in Bugreporting and is active in Wiki and IRC. (EDITMARK).
Events & Meetings
Past
- October 13, 2010: German Wiki Team Meeting
- October 14, 2010: ï»żopenSUSE KDE Team meeting
- October 20, 2010: openSUSE Board Meeting
- October 21, 2010: Lizard Lounge
- October 20-23, 2010: openSUSE Conference 2010 (Nuremberg, Germany)
Upcoming
- October 27, 2010: German Wiki Team Meeting
- November 6, 2010: Brandenburger Linuxinfotag (Germany)
- November 10-12, 2010: Latinoware 2010 (Brazil)
- November 13-14, 2010: OpenRheinRuhr (Germany)
You can find more informations on other events at: openSUSE News/Events. - Local Events
openSUSE for your Ears
The openSUSE Weekly News are available as livestream or podcast in German. You can hear it or download it on Radiotux.
From Ambassadors
Figure 3. Linux Day
Thomas Thym: LinuxDay in Dornbirn, AT ... or an extraordinary day of success stories
It is 11pm and I am on my way home from LinuxDay in Dornbirn, Austria. It was a long but amazing day. Myriam, Mark and myself were at the KDE and Amarok booth. Surprisingly Christoph (a local KDE on Gentoo user/hacker) supported us rather the whole day. We were demonstrating our software to potentially new users talked about upcoming awesome features with more experienced users; we were selling some KDE merchandise articles and were giving a way a lot of openSUSE 11.3 CDs. Furthermore it was an excellent possibility to intensify the cooperation with other projects. (EDITMARK)Figure 3, âLinux Dayâ
Communication
Contributors
Header PictureNew/Updated Applications @ openSUSE
OBS openSUSE:11.3:Update/clamav r2 commited
Updated to clamav-0.96.4.
Holger Hetterich: SMB Traffic Analyzer 1.2.1 released
The team is happy to announce the release of SMB Traffic Analyzer (SMBTA in the following) version 1.2.1. This is a very important release, as many fixes have been done for the build, making both smbtad and smbtatools much more portable. Also, the build has been adapted to work with libraries that are not installed at the usual places on the system (bnc#654930). On the feature side, we have two really cool things to say. First off, we are introducing rrddriver with this release. It is an interface to rrdtool, and allows to build a round robin database from the data smbtad is receiving, in real time. Having data in a rrdtool database allows you to create all the fancy graphics SMBTA was missing until today (bnc#655149). (...)
Packman: handbrake-unstable 0.9.4+3697-0
HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder.
Packman: lightspark 0.4.4-0.pm.1.6
Lightspark is a FLOSS Flash player entirely rewritten from scratch based on Adobe's released SWF documentation. Lightspark features:
- JIT compilation of Actionscript to native x86 bytecode using LLVM.
- Hardware accelerated rendering using OpenGL Shaders (GLSL).
- Very good and robust support for current-generation Actionscript3.
- A new, clean, codebase exploiting multithreading and optimized for modern hardware. Designed from scratch after the official Flash documentation was released.
Packman: FrostWire 4.20.6_svn1467-0.pm.1.9
FrostWire is a gnutella client written in Java. It supports a number of advanced features like ultrapeers (like FastTrack's supernodes), automatic download retries, freeloader punishment, etc. FrostWire is a fork of the very popular LimeWire Gnutella client. The purpose of FrostWire is to keep and maintain the freedoms that LimeWire LLC may be forced to withdraw.
VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, ...) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.
Packman: Scrabble 3.1.0rc8-0.pm.1.3
Play Scrabble against computer, other local or network connected player. Full configurable, different languages available and user editable, user defined libraries etc. Basically designed to develop a 3D version of the well known board game. (EDITMARK)
You can find other interesting Packages at:
Header PictureSecurity 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.
Header PictureKernel Review
h-online/Thorsten Leemhuis: Kernel Log: Coming in 2.6.37 (Part 1) - Graphics
The Nouveau driver now supports power management and can address the GeForce 320M, and the code for Intel graphics cores now supports the video units on Sandy Bridge processors, which are due to be released shortly. A number of changes to the Radeon KMS driver should improve its performance.
Linus Torvalds released the third pre-release version of Linux 2.6.37 ten days ago and then despite Thanksgiving and a trip to Tokyo, he kept to his usual tempo and the fourth pre-release version was released two days ago.
The final release of 2.6.37 will probably be in late December or early January next year. The current developer version already resembles the final version pretty closely, since kernel hackers have, as ever, used the merge window which opens the development cycle, to merge all major changes into the main development tree. The current stabilisation phase is reserved primarily for bug-fixes rather than major changes, to avoid introducing further bugs. (...) (EDITMARK)
Linux.com/Amanda McPherson: Our Annual Kernel Development Report: New (and Old) Faces
Today we are pleased to publish annual report on Linux kernel development, detailing who does the work, who sponsors it and how fast the Linux kernel is growing.
The paper documents how hard at work the Linux community has been. There have been 1.5 million lines of code added to the kernel since the 2009 update. Since that last paper, additions and changes translate to an amazing 9,058 lines added, 4,495 lines removed, and 1,978 lines changed every day, Â weekends and holidays included.
The other good news is that in the list of sponsoring entities we see more mobile and embedded companies participating in Linux kernel development. We see companies such as Nokia, Texas Instruments and Renasas moving up the list of companies who sponsor Linux development. This certainly should not be a surprise given the rise of Linux usage in devices over the last few years. This is great to see, even though the traditional Linux supporters are still at the top of the list: Red Hat, Intel, Novell and IBM.
This paper documents a bit less frenzied development than the last one, which was expected given all the new features of 2.6.30 (ext4, ftrace, btrfs, perf etc) as well as the peak of merged drivers from Linux stable tree. Regardless, this report continues to paint a picture of a very strong and vibrant development community.
Iâd like to congratulate Paul Mundt who had the most individual contributions to the kernel, equally 1.3%, since our paper last year, and give my heartfelt thanks to Jon Corbet and Greg Kroah-Hartman, kernel developers and members of our Technical Advisory Board, who really do all the work on this paper. This publication is an important one as it gives a rare glimpse into the world of kernel development. Without their knowledge of the participants and their technical tools to analyze the code, this analysis would not be possible. If youâre interested in kernel development and want to support the work of Jon, please consider buying a subscription at lwn.net.
Read more at News and Thoughts from Inside the Linux Foundation.
Header PictureTips and Tricks
For Desktop Users
Jared Ottley: Alfresco: Alfresco PDF Tool Kit â Insert PDF Action
Iâve taken a bit of Holiday time to update the Alfresco PDF Toolkit. Nate has been doing an outstanding job adding Watermarking, Digital Signatures, Encryption and cleaning up my messy code. But it was time to add a little bit myself. So I took sometime this evening to add in one of my planned actions: Insert PDF. This action allows you to insert a PDF into another PDF at a specific page. This is a pretty straight forward action to test: From the Document Details page of the PDF you want to insert content into, select Run Action (This action can also be run through the rules engine or scripted). (...)
Bruno Friedmann: GoogleEarth 6.0 running in opensuse 11.4 factory 64Bits
Sometimes we need some of those applications running under our favorite OS. If you can stick with marble. So the new googleearth 6.0 version hit the street. And if like me you want to give it a try, thereâs some tricks to make it installing under your 64bits opensuse factory. My first attempt just result in a nice crash ⊠(...) (EDITMARK)
For Commandline/Script Newbies
Full hack
do this...
For Developers and Programmers
super article
bin/sh
For System Administrators
Manu Gupta: Installing Broadcom Wireless â BCM43225 on openSUSE 11.3
Again I am with a blog post, this time I am troubleshooting the Broadcom driver, BCM 43225. Ok, to start with we need to do the following (...)
Jared Ottley: Alfresco: Simple File Diff
Iâve heard asked many times by customers and community members if there was a way to diff files in Alfresco and alas there isnât an OTB way to do this. A month ago the discussion came up again internally. And I thought it might be fun to tackle this as side project just to see if/what was possible. So I took an evening and hammered out a simple Java class that did a comparison between two text files. Once I saw that I had at least the basics (annotate the differences between two files) and had gotten the question of basic possibility/difficulty out of the way I moved on to other projects. Today almost the entire family is sick so I thought Iâd pick up the project again, moving the Java class to a Java Backed web script. The web script is a simple GET that takes the nodeRef of two files, or two versions of the same file and outputs a simple HTML page that highlights the differences between the two. There are no complex algorithms that take into account shifts in blocks or identifies just the text in a line that has changed. It is a simple line by line comparison of two pieces of content. It is not integrated in to Share or Explorer at this time. I might take that as a separate sick day project (or accept any code contributions to add that). (...) (EDITMARK)
Header PicturePlanet SUSE
Hi! It feels like ages since I blogged, so here goes. A lot has happened since my last blog - Latinoware is over (and was frickin' awesome), I had a week off which I enjoyed in Brazil and now I'm at the Nuremberg offices due to Michl who just left. We had some catching up to do before he went - same with AJ who has decided to enjoy some parental leave. And Jaqueline who will have to fill the shoes of these two fine gentlemen. Meanwhile I am trying to catch up to mail and news - there is a lot of both. Mail catching up has been limited quite a bit by the KDE Factory OBS repository for 11.3 upgrading to KDE's 4.6 release of platform (Akonadi!), apps (KMail2) and desktop workspace. The two I mentioned (Akonadi & kmail2) have been a royal pain in the ass, to be honest. The migration of my old accounts took a night (>100.000 mails) but didn't actually import those mails. Hence they had to be downloaded from gmail. With the VERY frequent disconnections and regular hanging of the Akonadi resource this has taken a while to say the least - lots of babysitting (restarting Akonadi etc) required. I hope the KDE Pim* dudes and dudettes can get this stable (and faster!) before the release... Oh, and Virtuoso-t keeps hogging 100% CPU untill I decide to just kill it - after which I don't notice any bad or strange behavior. Maybe I should auto-kill it on login ;-) but in the end, it's all working reasonably well now, albeit a bit slower than KMail1.x. Yay yay. (...)
Wolfgang Rosenauer: community powered long term support for openSUSE?
Just recently I found again that openSUSE is not really positioned for some usecases. In my personal case that is especially the usage as a web/mail/dns/etc server on hosted environments. IMHO it just doesnât make sense to roll out a distribution which is supported for only 18 months to a hosted system with limited access to it. I still have been doing that with previous openSUSE releases but itâs so annoying that I really regret it. Also the possibility to zypper dup doesnât really fix that issue for different reasons. Anyway this post is not about whining about that fact or to explain why I donât like to update these type of systems remotely every <= 18 months.
A possible solution? Sometime last year there was a discussion about options for something like an âopenSLEâ or âopenSUSE LTSâ distribution. There is an external page where some outcome was documented here. The dicussions stopped mainly because of health issues of the main initiator. There was done some planning and voting on the different options but no real results ever happened (as far as I know). So Iâm trying to resurrect that topic a bit once again: The amount of work related to such a project is the critical part and therefore my proposal is to try to start off with a âlightweightâ approach. (...)
Mike McCallister: The Future of openSUSE: Looks pretty bright to me
Iâll be the first to tell you I am close to clueless about business trends. Anyone whoâs ever read my reaction to the Novell-Microsoft agreement can figure that out pretty quickly. That said, itâs been a week since Attachmate âagreed to acquireâ (amazing phrase, that) Novell, the parent company of the SUSE Linux products, and unquestionably a major sponsor of the openSUSE community.
Since then, thereâs been a fair amount of activity among the openSUSE faithful:
The community board released this statement declaring (among other things) that âitâs business as usual and we are continuing to work on, rather than predicting, the future of this project and have a lot of fun!â
Last Saturday was Zombie Bug Squashing Day, where 10-15 volunteers combed through bugs for v10.2, 10.3 and 11.0 still marked Open in the Bugzilla database, anddisposed of something close to half of them, as reported to the opensuse-project mailing list. This project may continue soon.
Both theopenFATE feature request process and the openSUSE News page are becoming a bit more professional, with the help of still more volunteers.
And maybe Iâm a little too excited about this, but Greg Kroah-Hartman announced on Tuesday the beginning of a new âTumbleweedsâ project. Greg describes it like this:
a repo that is a rolling updated version of openSUSE containing the latest âstableâ versions of packages for people to use.
Iâd describe it like this: An âin-betweenâ version of openSUSE that offers packages that are a little bit more current than the most recent release, but not as buggy as the cutting-edge Factory repository. For those of us who like stability, but donât want to miss out on the latest.
So what does this have to do with the Attachmate-Novell hookup? It tells me that regardless of what happens at the corporate level, there is energy in our community. Thereâs reason to believe that energy can sustain this distribution for a long time. Got any thoughts about the future of openSUSE, and other community distributions with a major corporate sponsor? Add a comment here.
Not every day is a sunshine day, also not in software development. This is my credo about the last few days which I spent debugging Hermes a bit, motivated by a kind bug report saying basically that the digest mails suck. Well, I had to kind of agree on that, so I revisited that topic.
Do you remember what Hermes is? We use Hermes in the openSUSE infrastructure to handle notifications. Since we do not want to send people emails they do not explicitly agree that they want it (otherwise it would be spamming, right?), we invented a system that recognizes all kinds of events that happen in the openSUSE world, than check if a certain user wants to know about it and finally send it to these users. The benefit the user of the system is that he can pick from a huge variety of events and control if and how he gets informed about. Hermes does not only serve users with email but also maintains RSS feeds, it Twitters and does even more. And as another bonus, it can collect similar events for you and later send a digest with a collection. That way, you for example can get a mail with a list of failed package builds in OBS each hour instead a mail every fife seconds for each and every failing package.
But back to my debugging fun: I was mainly fixing the appearance of the digest messages: They now in the subject tell you how many events are digested and how frequently the digest comes, such as hourly, minutely etc. In the mail body, you now find a numbered âtable of contentsâ of the mail and the individual events nicely listed. So much more useful.
Unfortunately it wasnât the most time efficient debugging session I ever had, I stumbled over some things that werenât optimal now in an environment where Hermes processes between 40,000 and 70,000 events a day for more than 25,000 users. Some of the problems are ugly to identify. I got lost a bit which is not good for the overall mood, so I decided to cry at Susanne, one of our colleagues. She asked me quite a few questions and than she left home for dinner. Ten minutes later I could nail the bug.
So this is my strong suggestion: If in debugging trouble, talk to your friends. Tell about the problem, share your misfortune. A few question can guide you to the right path which you did not see before. Not new? Well, yes, of course we knew that already from other topics in live, talking helps ;-)
The other suggestion I wanted to make: Check Hermes digests! Go to the Hermes Subscription Page and change one of your subscriptions to digest mode, will be fun. Let me know what you think. (EDITMARK)
Header PictureopenSUSE Forums
On the 25th of december the KDE Team released beta 1 for KDE4 4.6. Read how users discuss the news, their first experiences with this beta release.
Can't login, file-system is full
Here's a user having trouble to logon to his system, because his root file system is full. Going through this thread will present you with a lot of info on how this could happen, and lots and lots of methods to solve the problems related to it.
Best driver for Intel Core i3 integrated graphics
Some video cards can be real troublemakers for linux users. Lots of times there's no problem at all, sometimes one has to go through quite a lot to get things working as they should. This user has an Intel i3 CPU with integrated graphics chip.
This week's subforum: Programming and Scripting
Many users of the openSUSE Forums are also involved in programming and scripting, in various kinds of projects. This subforum provides a place where they can discuss, help eachother. If one reads or searches the threads, tons of shared knowledge become available. Help is provided, approaches and techniques discussed. A very useful subforum for starters in the world of programming and scripting too.
Header PictureOn the Web
Announcements
h-online/Free Linux client released for Ryzom MMORPG game
A free Linux client for theRyzom massively multi-player online role-laying game (MMORPG) is now available for downloading. The program's development was supported by the Free Software Foundation after games vendor Winch Gate released the source code of the server and Windows client under the Affero General Public Licence back in May.
Winch Gate says it hopes that as many gamers as possible will try out the Linux client, which is available to download in binary and in source code form, and has launched an in-game contest as an incentive. The contest will close on the 10th of January. Participants who manage to find all seven Linux Steles that are scattered around the start island of Silan will be entered in a draw for a ZaReason Linux Terra-HD Netbook worth $450 (ÂŁ289) or its equivalent in cash.
h-online/Mozilla: Firefox 4 Beta 8 coming next Tuesday
Originally scheduled to arrive on the 30th of November, the Mozilla Project has confirmed that it plans to ship the eighth beta for version 4 of its open source Firefox web browser on Tuesday, the 7th of December. According to Mozilla's Platform Meeting Minutes, the developers criteria for release for Firefox 4 Beta 8 is "no stability regressions from previous beta". Mozilla says that Firefox 4 Beta 8 will ship at the same time as Firefox 4 Beta 3 for Mobile devices "in order to align on some sync changes" and that beta 8 will include stability fixes for graphics, JavaScript optimisations and various UI fixes related to the Add-ons manager. Based on the meeting notes from the 29th of November, the eight beta was being held by 29 blocker bugs. At the time of this writing, that number is now 18, two of them rated as critical. (...)
h-online/Flock 3.5 social web browser arrives
The Flock developers have announced the release of version 3.5 of their social web browser based on Google's open source Chromium platform â versions previous to the 3.x branch were based on Firefox. Flock is a popular cross-platform browser that automatically manages updates and media from several popular social services, including MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Digg, YouTube and Twitter.
Flock 3.5 is based on the 7.x branch of Chromium and features updates to new account creation, as well as support for the business-oriented LinkedIn social networking site. Also new in this version is support for Mac OS X â the previous version (3.0) was only available for Windows systems. Version 2.6.1 still seems to be available for Linux users, but Flock does not promote or support it. (...)
Facebook co-founder and former co-ordinator of Barack Obamaâs online presidential campaign Chris Hughes has today launched a new social network, with a charitable twist. The project is called Jumo, and after a soft launch in March of this year the site is now officially open for business with more than 3,500 ready and waiting causes for you to support. Once youâve connected your Facebook account to the service you must then outline which particular issues you feel strongly about. Youâre then able to follow, promote and receive updates from your findings and hopefully take your armchair activism out into the real world. (EDITMARK)
Call for participation
gfg
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Reports
Linux Planet/Sean Michael Kerner: Yes, Novell Owns Unix-Unix Ownership Settled
When Novell first announced that it was being acquired by Attachmate for $2.2 billion, the question of who would retain ownership over Unix copyrights was an open issue. As part of the Novell sale, the company also revealed that it is selling 882 patents to a Microsoft-led technology consortium for $450 million. Potential ownership of Unix by the Microsoft-led group could have led to a new round of patent battles between Microsoft and the open source community. In a terse statement, Novell has now publicly stated that it will not be selling Unix as part of the patent sale.
Datamation/Bruce Byfield Seven Improvements Needed in KDE
For the past eighteen months, KDE has been my primary desktop. I use it about two-thirds of the time, with the rest of my desktop usage divided between GNOME, Xfce, and occasionally other desktops like LXDE. You could call me a generally happy user -- but, as with any desktop not designed for me personally, KDE has one or two quirks or deficiencies that make my computing less than ideal. To be sure, KDE has made many improvements since the last time I complained about its shortcomings, in 2008.
Neowin/Brandon Boyce: A history of viruses on Linux
We recently gave you a brief history of viruses on the Mac and as requested by a user we wanted to give you a history of viruses on Linux. Given the tight security integrated into Linux, it is difficult to take advantage of a vulnerability on the computer, but some programmers have found ways around the security measures. There are several free options for anti-virus on Linux that you really should use, even if it isn't always running - a weekly or monthly scan doesn't hurt. Free anti-virus solutions include: ClamAV, AVG, Avast and F-Prot.
ostatic/Susan Linton: openSUSE to Offer a Rolling Release Repo
Although news of Ubuntu's switch to rolling release was denied, it seems another distribution thinks it just may be a good idea. Greg Kroah-Hartman, openSUSE kernel developer, today announced "openSUSE Tumbleweed."
Greg K-H, as he is commonly known, described openSUSE Tumbleweed as, "a repo that is a rolling updated version of openSUSE containing the latest "stable" versions of packages for people to use." In a post to the opensuse-project mailing list Kroah-Hartman offered further information in the form of a Q & A (EDITMARK).
Reviews and Essays
ert
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Warning!
dangerous games
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LOL
would you like to laugh? Look this
hihi :-)
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