OpenSUSE Weekly News/88

openSUSE Conference: Social Events

"The openSUSE Conference isn’t just an opportunity to work together —it’s also an opportunity to play together. During the conference, we’ll have several activities for attendees to get together and have a lot of fun!"

openSUSE 11.1 KDE4 Reloaded with Online Updates and KDE 4.3.1

"Although openSUSE 11.2 is still two months away updated openSUSE 11.1 KDE4 Reloaded images previewing some changes are available now. They are respins of openSUSE 11.1 including KDE 4.3.1, Firefox 3.5 and all the online updates which have been released for openSUSE 11.1."

Andrea Florio: Software Freedom Day Italy (Perugia)

"As last year FSUGitalia, with “Regione Umbria” support , and with the collaboration of ITC “A. Capitini – Vittorio Emanuele II” and OSSpg (http://www.osspg.net ) is working to organize the Software Freedom Day."

Feature Request: #307729: Officially Provide LXDE

"LXDE stands for L ightweight X 11 D esktop E nvironment.It is an extremely faster, performing and energy saving desktop environment. It is maintained by an international community of developers and comes with a beautiful interface, multi-language support, standard keyboard short cuts and additional features like tabbed file browsing. LXDE actually is lighter than xfce and it's stable and mature enought to stay into openSUSE. Actually big distros like mandriva already provides LXDE. Mandriva for example allow you to install LXDE from DVD media. The only "problem" that LXDE has is the Login Manager, xdm is quite ugly and SLIM looks to be no more developed. That "problem" will be hopefully fixed in few weeks, infact they are now developing their login manager, LXDM as you can see here: http://blog.lxde.org/?p=531. Will be wonderful to have LXDE officially supported by openSUSE and why not, even available into the installation media."

Gabriel Stein: Testing – openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 7

"Few days ago I received nice news. Now I’m part of Test Core Team. I will start with some posts about my tests. The first test will be the Automated Installation, with minimum setup, using Virtualbox. The same test with a real machine, on my Macbook Black, 4GB RAM."

Build Team Meeting

Minutes from the Meeting

Thomas Schmidt: Setting up a development buildservice instance

"This article explains how to setup all parts of the openSUSE buildservice. It will describe the needed steps to get it running with the latest sourcecode from svn, ready to use it and develop it."

For Desktop Users

Packt Publishing/Reynante Martinez: Creating Pseudo-3D Imagery with GIMP: Part 1

"In this two part article series by Reynante Martinez, we will learn how to digitally sketch/draw your scenes, give them subtle color shifts, add fake lighting, and apply filter effects to further emulate how 3D does its job in a step by step process. We will start off from scratch and move on to create a realistic 3D scene with just some 2D tools."

Linux Magazine/Dmitri Popov: Build a Personal Social Aggregator with Pubwich

"Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Flickr -- with new social services popping up almost every day, how do you make all your social activities easily accessible to your friends and followers?"

For Commandline/Script Newbies

Make Tech Easier/Joshua Price: 8 Useful and Interesting Bash Prompts

"Many people don’t think of their command prompt as a particularly useful thing, or even pay it much attention. To me, this is a bit of a shame, as a useful prompt can change the way you use the command line. Well I’ve scoured the Interwebs looking for the best, most useful, or sometimes most amusing bash prompts. Here, in no particular order, are the ones I’d be most likely to use on my computers."

IBM Developer Network/Ian Shields: Learn Linux, 101: The Linux command line

"GUIs are fine, but to unlock the real power of Linux, there's no substitute for the command line. In this article, Ian Shields introduces you to some of the major features of the bash shell, with an emphasis on the features that are important for LPI certification. By the end of this article, you will be comfortable using basic Linux commands like echo and exit, setting environment variables, and gathering system information."

Linux Journal/Mitch Frazier: Returning Values from Bash Functions

"Bash functions, unlike functions in most programming languages do not allow you to return a value to the caller. When a bash function ends its return value is its status: zero for success, non-zero for failure. To return values, you can set a global variable with the result, or use command substitution, or you can pass in the name of a variable to use as the result variable. The examples below describe these different mechanisms."

For Developers and Programmers

Novell Cool Solutions/Domnic Mendes: How to check if Javascript is enabled on the client side using php

"You might be using validations for your form on client side using Javascript. It may arise that client side Javascript is disabled, given this scenario your validations will go for a toss.

You can check in your php if Javascript is enabled on client side using the following method. ..."

Linux Planet/Paul Ferrill: Zenity Brings a Little GUI Goodness to Linux Shell Scripts

"Adding a graphical user interface (GUI) component to any utility script is bound to make it more user friendly than a command-line only version. That's where Zenity comes in. Zenity is the command line interface to the GTK+ library of dialogs. It's a rewrite of the old gdialog utility but much more user friendly. The key to effectively using Zenity is to understand when and where to use it."

Zenity packages for openSUSE are available via 1-click install.

Hubfolio/Matthew Casperson: Creating a Chrome Extension

"One of the features that have made browsers like Firefox so popular is the ability to add additional functionality through addons and extensions. To date Chrome has not officially supported extensions, but the latest builds from the dev channel do now include an extensions framework. Here we will look at creating a simple Chrome extension that opens up a new page with an Altavista search showing the incoming links."

For System Administrators

Masim Sugianto: BigDump : Tips for Dumping Large MySQL Database

"One main problem while moving my blog or my web application to another web hosting are moving and dumping the MySQL database. It should be no problem for small database or if an ISP has strong backup and restore feature but it will get you into headache for large database."

IBM:developerWorks/Martin Brown: UNIX network performance analysis

"Knowing your UNIX® network layout will go a long way with understanding your network and how it operates. But what happens when the performance of your UNIX network and the speed at which you can transfer files or connect to services suddenly reduces? How do you diagnose the issues and work out where in your network the problems lie? This article looks at some quick methods for finding and identifying performance issues and the steps to start resolving them."

OBS openSUSE:Factory/virtualbox-ose r48 commited

"Update to VirtualBox-3.0.6-OSE"

Lenz Grimmer: mylvmbackup 0.13 has been released

"I am happy to announce that mylvmbackup version 0.13 has now been released. This release includes a fix for a nasty bug in on of the recently added Perl hooks (precleanup.pm) and some added functionality (better support for remote rsync backups)."

Aircrack-ng 1.0

"Aircrack-ng is the next generation of aircrack with lots of new features: * More cards/drivers supported * More OS and platforms supported * New WEP attack: PTW * WEP dictionary attack * Fragmentation attack * Improved cracking speed * Capture with multiple cards * New tools: airtun-ng, packetforge-ng (improved arpforge), wesside-ng, easside-ng, airserv-ng, airolib-ng, airdriver-ng and airbase-ng * Optimizations, other improvements and bug fixing"

Jeff Jaffe: Managing the Cloud

"Final in a series about Novell’s comprehensive approach to cloud computing"

Greg Kroah-Hartman: Staging tree status for the .32 kernel merge

"Here's a summary of the state of the drivers/staging/ tree, basically what will be coming in the 2.6.32 merge, and what the status of the different drivers are so far."

Brent McConnell: Collaboration Project Success in 5 Simple Steps

"Ever wonder why some collaboration projects take off and become successful but you can't get your company's users to use a simple wiki? Do your discussion forums in Sharepoint go unused? You did everything right... didn't you? Well, the honest truth is that there is no silver bullet to making something popular, but there are a few strategies you can use to deal with the biggest obstacle you face in collaboration which is User Discomfort. That's right, it's not your processes or your technology, it's not even your management. The biggest impediment to getting your collaboration project off the ground and making it popular is User Discomfort. Here's why ..."

Michal Hrušecký: Testing new opeSUSE safely?

"One member of openSUSE Community started very interesting project I want to inform you about. What is it about? It is publicly available virtual machine with openSUSE Milestone. So if you want to test how openSUSE 11.2 would look like without installing it on your computer or just want to show your friends why should they use openSUSE then this project let's you do so easily."

Pascal Bleser: Scripts for OBS monitoring

"Marcus "}-Tux-{" Hüwe and I have been busy the last weeks to set up an openSUSE Build Service instance for Packman. While doing so, I wrote a few little scripts to monitor what is going on as far as building, the scheduler queue and such are concerned."

Greg Kroah-Hartman: LinuxCon 2009 tutorial

"Somehow I got convinced to give a tutorial at LinuxCon this year, and it was originally scheduled to be my normal "Write a Real, Working, Linux Driver" tutorial I've been giving for the past 4 years or so (which happens to be online here, if you are bored and need something to fall asleep to.)"

Holger Sickenberg: openSUSE Core Test Team Established

"Our call to apply for the openSUSE Core Test Team end of July attract a great deal of attention. So we got applications from nearly 50 members out of the openSUSE community, much more than expected.

Caused by that large number of offers to move testing of openSUSE forward, we decided to increase the number of members for the new openSUSE Core Test Team from 15 to 25. A number that enables even more areas to be covered by the openSUSE Core Test Team."

What's New 2.6.31 vs 2.6.27 Kernel

"A discussion about due kernel changes, particularly in regard to openSUSE 11.2. Potential improvements as a result and possible difficulties to overcome. Good to plan ahead, you can always test it now of course."

Getting Sound Only from One Application when running Multiple.

"Users frequently ask about this, wanting to play music and then perhaps play a video from Youtube at the same time. Generally this doesn't work too well by default. @oldcpu steps in to assist here."

Handbrake - Best Video transcoder for Linux?!

"This is more of a question than a statement. At least, going by the way the thread continues it is. You'll find some useful info in here, which is what you would expect when @microchip8 is covering this topic as he is here."

Desktop Doesn't Refresh

"We are still addressing issues with the sometimes labeled defunct DE kde3. I have kde3 installed and have to say it's a little buggy these days and fixes are slow coming. Shame really, it's a crakin' DE."

Announcements

The Linux Foundation: VIA Technologies, Inc. Joins Linux Foundation

"SAN FRANCISCO, September 8, 2009 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that VIA Technologies, Inc. has become its newest member."

Qt 4.6 Technology Preview Released

"Oslo, 09 September 2009 – Nokia today released a Technology Preview of Qt 4.6 – the upcoming new version of its cross-platform application and UI framework for desktop, embedded and mobile development. Preview packages are now available to the Qt user community for download, testing and feedback. Qt 4.6 is scheduled for release in Q4 2009, with interim beta releases planned."

Reports

InternetNews.com/Sean Michael Kerner: Skype for Asterisk Debuts

"Two big forces in the world of VoIP are coming together in a new solution called Skype for Asterisk (SfA). The SfA solution, which entered general availability this week, combines the open source Asterisk VoIP PBX with the Skype VoIP network, providing benefits to both Skype and Asterisk users."

KDE.NEWS/Sebastian Kügler: Third Plasma Summit Lifts KDE Desktop To Higher Grounds

"Last week, the third Plasma developers meeting was held in the Swiss Alps. 15 developers from 3 continents came to Randa, Canton Wallis to work on Plasma's code, design new ideas and concepts and to strengthen their bonds as a sub-community within KDE. Topics of this third Plasma sprint, which is named after a plasma fusion reactor, included but were not limited to Plasma on mobile devices, network-enabled Plasma widgets and a richer user interface thanks to a new animation framework. ..."

h-online/Thorsten Leemhuis: Kernel Log – Extra round for 2.6.31, X.org 7.5 on the horizon, staging area to be cleaned up

"Linus Torvalds will release 2.6.31 a few days later than previously announced. After some delay, the development of X.org 7.5 is now going ahead at full steam. Greg Kroah-Hartman intends to give the staging area a good clean up"

Linux Magazine/Jeffrey B. Layton: Metadata Performance Exploration Part 2: XFS, JFS, ReiserFS, ext2, and Reiser4

"Last week we tested four Linux file systems — ext3, ext4, nilfs2, and btrfs — for metadata performance using a benchmark called fdtree. The point of the benchmarks was not really to comparison the performance of the file systems per say, although comparisons are inevitable. Rather, the benchmarks were performed as part of an exploration into the metadata performance of Linux file systems.

We’re using the same benchmark from the last article and applying it to additional Linux file systems - xfs, jfs, reiserfs, ext2, and resier4. ..."

GoodGearGuide/Juan Carlos Perez: Facebook releases real-time Web server tech as open source

"Facebook is releasing as open source a Web server technology because it wants to make it easier for developers to create applications that let users post status updates in real time, a functionality popularized by Twitter.

The Web server framework that Facebook will offer as open source is called Tornado, was written in the Python language and is designed for quickly processing thousands of simultaneous connections, the company said Thursday."

Reviews and Essays

Linux Journal/Bruce Byfield: OpenOffice.org: The Limits of Readability and Grammar Extensions

"As a professional writer, my software needs are simple. Give me a text editor -- preferrably Bluefish, but vim or OpenOffice.org Writer will do -- and I have all I need.

However, judging by the number of aids available for writers, I am obviously in the minority. Novel-plotting databases, daily word counters, character generators -- if you can imagine the software, you can probably find at least one example. I am fascinated by all the ingenuity, but most of the time I conclude that, if you know enough to use any of these tools without them leading you into greater difficulties, you can do without them. The OpenOffice.org extensions Readability Report and Language Tool are two applications that illustrate my point perfectly."

DaniWeb/Ron Miller: The Day Gmail Stood Still: A Tale of Horror

"A week ago today, the unthinkable happened. That's right, Gmail went down...for *two* hours. You would have thought, judging from the amount of chatter on Twitter that we were experiencing an epic attack, a horrible natural disaster, perhaps the end of life as we know it; but it was none of that. Just couldn't get our email for a couple of hours. I'm surprised the Obama administration didn't step in and declare a State of Emergency. It certainly seemed plausible based on the reaction to the outage."

Datamation/Bruce Byfield: Sexism: Open Source Software's Dirty Little Secret

"On September 19th, the GNOME Foundation and the Free Software Foundation will host a mini-summit on how to increase women's participation in the free and open source software (FOSS) communities. The summit is probably an effort to repair relationships between the two foundations after Richard Stallman was pilloried for sexism after his keynote in Gran Canaria a couple of months ago."

The Linux Foundation/Jim Zemlin: Protecting Linux from Microsoft (Yes, Microsoft Got Caught)

"Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal’s Nick Wingfield broke a story on Microsoft selling a group of patents to a third party. The end result of this story is good for Linux, even though it doesn’t placate fears of ongoing attacks by Microsoft. Open Invention Network, working with its members and the Linux Foundation, pulled off a coup, managing to acquire some of the very patents that seem to have been at the heart of recent Microsoft FUD campaigns against Linux. Break out your white hats: the good guys won."

Warning!

WordPress.org/Matt Mullenweg: How to Keep WordPress Secure

"Right now there is a worm making its way around old, unpatched versions of WordPress. This particular worm, like many before it, is clever: it registers a user, uses a security bug (fixed earlier in the year) to allow evaluated code to be executed through the permalink structure, makes itself an admin, then uses JavaScript to hide itself when you look at users page, attempts to clean up after itself, then goes quiet so you never notice while it inserts hidden spam and malware into your old posts."

internet.com/Webopedia: Twishing

"(twish´ing) (n.) Twishing is the act of sending a message to a Twitter user in an attempt to obtain his or her name and password. The message may instruct the recipient to visit a Web site where he or she is asked to log in. The Web site, however, is bogus and set up only to steal the user's information."

• September 9, 2009: openSUSE Project Team Meeting
• September 10, 2009: openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 7 Release
• September 12-13, 2009: Power Outage in Nuernberg Office

• September 17-20, 2009: openSUSE-Conference
• September 19, 2009: Software Freedom Day in Perugia/Italy

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.

• Daily updated translation statistics are available on the openSUSE Localization Portal.
• Trunk Top-List – Localization Guide

• 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 .

If you would like to be a part of the openSUSE Weekly news, then please send an email over to opensuse-marketing@opensuse.org (you need to subscribe first). Or you can go to the channel #opensuse-newsletter on irc.freenode.net.
You can subscribe to the openSUSE Weekly News RSS feed.

• 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

English Deutsch Español 日本語 Русский Polski Português Indonesia Magyar Italiano 简体中文 繁體中文 Français Svenska