OpenSUSE Weekly News/96

opensuse-announce - Social Networking Hackfest for openSUSE

"As preliminarily announced last week, we will be having an online Social Networking Hackfest for openSUSE on Tuesday, November 3rd in #opensuse-marketing IRC channel on Freenode."

openSUSE News: Usability Concept for the openSUSE Wiki – Status Report #1

"Behind the scenes, the Wiki and Booster Teams are currently working hard to improve the Usability of the openSUSE Wiki to the openSUSE Community. The process started in early October 2009 and after some lively discussions at the opensuse-wiki mailinglist, we successfully passed our first Team-Meeting discussing the Usability Concept and assigning responsibilities for specific tasks we need to achieve. I herewith like to encourage interested people to join the efforts and to contribute by participating in the discussions at the opensuse-wiki mailinglist and/or the #opensuse-wiki IRC channel on Freenode. Every helping hands is very welcome!"

openSUSE Spotlight: Board Elections: (Re-)Apply for Membership now

"Were you a very good Member this year? Only 49 days until Santa is coming to town. You know whats better? 3 and a half days before that we will have the results of the openSUSE Board elections! But to actually get results all the cool, good looking and smart (pick any one) openSUSE Members have to vote for the candidates. If you already have applied as a Member in the past and got rejected we would like to strongly suggest to re-apply. Just because your contributions weren’t enough the last time it has to be true this time right? We have recently added the possibility to re-apply in users.opensuse.org, so just click on the “Reapply for membership” link."

openSUSE News: Vote for the openSUSE DVD Cover

"openSUSE 11.2 is scheduled to be officially released in about a week (give or take a few hours…) and, as usual, we’re gearing up to press a bunch of media for shows and the ambassadors. Typically Novell has created the artwork for the openSUSE DVDs, but this time around we had some really interesting and creative input from openSUSE contributors. Want to help choose the cover? Check out the entries and vote on your favorite!"

Call for Candidates: Board Election 2009

"As Andrew Wafaa announced in opensuse-announce Mailinglist we have an new Election this year. He wrotes: The time has come again for openSUSE Members to vote for new members to the Board. Stephen Shaw (decriptor) and Bryen Yunashko (suseROCKS) have completed their tenure on the Board, and their seats are up for election. There is also a new seat available to be occupied by a non-Novell member. Henne Vogelsang (henne) and Pascal Bleser (yaloki) have another year to complete and will remain, Michael Löffler (michl) as chairman will remain as well. This means that as of this year’s election the openSUSE Board will be made up of equal numbers of Novell and non-Novell employees, 2 seats+Chairperson and 3 seats respectively. Candidates for this election will be voted in for a two (2) year term, ensuring that there is continuity within the Board."

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Launch Parties (openSUSE 11.2)

Launch Parties

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Adrian Schröter: OBS Attribute System (not only for maintenance!)

"People who follow the openSUSE Build Service (OBS) developments might know it already, we work on an attribute system for OBS. But what it is good for at all ? Our current driver is to enable every OBS user to do maintenance for packages in the maintained products (which are currently openSUSE 11.0, 11.1 and a few days 11.2). The maintenance concept itself is described in a very first draft here."

Build Team Meeting

"Minutes from the Meeting"

Pavol Rusnak: Handling requests directly in the Build Service web client

"We had a listing of pending requests in the Build Service for a while. Unfortunately, it was mashed together with “My Projects” view and one couldn’t do anything with them. Few days ago, Jan Loeser added support for handling these requests directly in the web client. I liked the idea, so I decided to spend some time on it, too. I moved the request listing to a separate page and added some nifty Tango icons for the actions, so they wouldn’t take too much of the precious space. Also, the design doesn’t use tables-in-table anymore. You can view the result on the following image or directly in the Build Service."

Wiki Team Meeting

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For Desktop Users

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For Commandline/Script Newbies

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For Developers and Programmers

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For System Administrators

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keytouch 2.4.1-0.pm.6.1 (openSUSE 11.2/x86_64)

"KeyTouch is a program which allows you to easily configure the extra function keys of your keyboard. This means that you can define, for every individual function key, what to do if it is pressed. When you buy a new keyboard a CD-ROM will probably included. This CD-ROM contains software to configure the extra function keys (the image above shows an example of extra function keys) of your keyboard with. The problem however is that most of the times the software is not available for Linux. Available in Packman Repo."

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KDE Project

Mark Kretschmann (markey): Amarok joins the Software Freedom Conservancy

"The Amarok project has joined the Software Freedom Conservancy. This move allows donors to give tax-deductible donations, and it increases the transparency in the spending of Amarok's funds. This greatly helps us to be more efficient, and focus on what we really do best: Creating kick-ass software. At the same time, we stay fully committed to the KDE project! Amarok is, and will always stay, a fully committed project under the KDE umbrella. We have coordinated this move with the KDE e.V. board, who approves of our endeavors. "

KDE 4.3.3 Out Now: Clockwork

"November 3rd, 2009. Like the ticking of a Swiss watch, every month the KDE team brings you a new release. November's edition of KDE is a bugfix and translation update to KDE 4.3. With the KDE 4 series picking up in popularity, we're happy to encourage even more people to give KDE 4 another spin -- or just upgrade your existing KDE to KDE 4.3.3. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. Users around the world will appreciate that KDE 4.3.3 is more completely translated. KDE 4 is already translated into more than 50 languages, with more to come."

Alexandra Leisse (troubalex): Organize a Booth and Keep Your Sanity

"After having a quick chat with Kévin Ottens on IRC we agreed that it would be useful to write up a a small how-to explaining the Art of Booth Organization™ as a follow up on the how-to for sprints I posted earlier. He has been poking me about it repeatedly, so voilà, Monsieur, finalement, c’est fait."

GNOME Project

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Boosters Team

Klaas Freitag: Booster Sprint Results

"The boosters team promised to talk about what happens in our sprints – the two week time boxes in which we work on our projects. The last sprint ended on october 27th and we still owe you what happened. Please understand this little report as usual as an invitation to ask, comment, suggest things and of course fire up your editor and contribute if you like. You find us on IRC in channel #opensuse-boosters or on the opensuse-boosters mailinglist."

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Nat Friedman: Idea: Book recommender

"You take a picture of your bookshelf and upload it to the site. The site OCRs all your book spines. Once it has data from enough users it can recommend books that you might like. ..."

Lubos Lunak (llunak): Firefox KDE Integration

"Now that the mention of the Firefox KDE integration I've done has reached also the dot, I guess it's time for a couple of things that don't quite fit into an article but I should probably say them somewhere anyway. First of all, this is nothing against Konqueror. I still use Konqueror. In fact when a couple of months back there was a wave of "let's ditch Konqueror" voices on the planet and kde-core-devel, I was one of the people opposing that (and I still think it's not an option, as Konqueror is still the best KDE browser there is - Aurora is Qt-only, Rekonq is at version 0.<somesmallnumber>). For the next openSUSE release we will evaluate the possibilities again and Konqy may end up as the default again if it's considered to be up to the job. Speaking of which, Konqueror has never really been 100% default in openSUSE, as the desktop icon, which is what the common user uses, has always been Firefox, so we can also say the we just fixed the inconsistency (and it's really simple to switch it back). But the real reason was that many people are simply not satisfied with Konqueror, so we decided to try to not ignore the reality for a change. I myself use Konqueror, but if somebody else wants to browse the net on my home machine, they get Firefox. I don't like this, but what the hell, c'est la vie."

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Who Else Hates Dolphin

"A negative view by one users brings in a volley of comments about Dolphin and other File Managers. We are spoilt for choice really."

Imagine there are Test Versions

"This is a complaint that users are not reporting Bugs, especially in Beta, but rather take the road of complaining. Actually, this is probably quite true to some degree."

Compiz for KDE in RC2 Issue

"A change in Compiz packages in RC2 leave it without compiz-kde and as a result the installer uses gnome packaging. Users who did 'dup' to RC2 describe the issue."

Maybe SUSE needs something like Ub*'s App Centre.

"A suggestion that Ub* has some feature that SUSE could use. Only, as it turns out - Ub* have just basically copied YaST, a fact which is pointed out to the OP."

Announcements

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Call for participation

EclipseCon 2010 Call for Papers

"The next EclipseCon conference will take place from the 22nd to the 25th of March, 2010 at the Santa Clara Hyatt. The event, organised by the Eclipse Foundation, is now accepting submissions for talks. All proposals must be submitted before the deadline of the 18th of December, 2009. Tutorials, Technical Talks and Panels will be chosen on the 8th of January."

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Reports

IBM Developer Networks/M. Tim Jones: Next-generation Linux file systems: NiLFS(2) and exofs

"Linux continues to innovate in the area of file systems. It supports the largest variety of file systems of any operating system. It also provides cutting-edge file system technology. Two new file systems that are making their way into Linux include the NiLFS(2) log-structured file system and the exofs object-based storage system. Discover the purpose behind these two new file systems and the advantages that they bring."

Linux Weekly News/Jonathan Corbes: The 2009 Linux Kernel Summit

"The 2009 Linux Kernel Summit was held in Tokyo, Japan on October 19 and 20. Jet-lagged developers from all over the world discussed a wide range of topics. LWN's Jonathan Corbet was there, and has written the following summaries."

h-online/Thorsten Leemhuis: Kernel - Log Discussions at the 2009 Kernel Summit, FatELF in the firing line, new graphics drivers

"This year's Kernel Summit saw Linux developers, led by Linus Torvalds, discussing the development process and gaining an insight into how Google uses the Linux kernel in-house. Ulrich Drepper and Alan Cox think universal binaries in Linux are a step in the wrong direction. Various graphics drivers have recently been updated to add new functionality."

Reviews and Essays

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Warning!

Hole in the Linux kernel allows root access

"A null pointer dereference in the Linux kernel can be exploited to access a system at root privilege level. The flaw has been fixed in RC6 of version 2.6.32. However, some distributions prevent the exploit from being successful, even without the patch"

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• October 29, 2009: Final openSUSE 11.2 Release Candidate Available
• November 4, 2009: Usability Concept for the openSUSE Wiki - Status Report #1
• November 5, 2009: Vote for the openSUSE DVD Cover

• November 12, 2009: openSUSE 11.2 Release
• November 14, 2009: New Mexico GNU/LinuxFest
• November 14, 2009: Launch Party Chemnitz

To view the security announcements in full, or to receive them as soon as they're released, refer to the openSUSE Security Announce mailing list.

• SUSE Security Announcement: Linux kernel (SUSE-SA:2009:051)
  
• Package: kernel
  
• Announcement ID: SUSE-SA:2009:051
  
• Date: Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:00:00 +0000
  
  
• SUSE Security Announcement: Mozilla Firefox (SUSE-SA:2009:052)
  
• Package: MozillaFirefox
  
• Announcement ID: SUSE-SA:2009:052
  
• Date: Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:00:00 +0000
  
  
• SUSE Security Announcement: IBM Java 6 (SUSE-SA:2009:053)
  
• Package: java-1_6_0-ibm
  
• Announcements ID: SUSE-SA:2009:053
  
• Date: Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:00:00 +0000
  
  

Communication
lists.opensuse.org has x (+x) non-unique subscribers to all mailing lists.
The openSUSE Forums have x (+x) registered users - Most users ever online was 10409, 24-Sep-2009 at 21:15.

Contributors
x (+x) of x (+x) registered contributors in the User Directory have signed the Guiding Principles. The board has acknowledged x members.

Build Service
The Build Service now hosts x (+x) projects, x (+x) packages, x (+x) repositories by x (+x) confirmed users.

Feature statistics for openSUSE 11.2:

• total: 0 (+0)
• unconfirmed: 0 (+0)
• new: 0 (+0)
• evaluation: 0 (+0)
• candidate: 0 (+0)
• done: 0 (+0)
• rejected: 0 (+0)
• duplicate: 0 (+0)

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