Archive:Weekly news 1

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Welcome to the first ever issue of openSUSE Weekly News! For the week starting the 19-11-2007.

In this week:

  • YaST documentation now in public SVN
  • Joint GNOME/KDE public packaging day coming up
  • PulseAudio in the works for openSUSE
  • KWin Composite updates

Announcements

YaST Doc in External SVN

  • "It contains several scripts and XML files for generating XML documentation from sources, for building HTML from those XML files, etc. Some other add-on are there as well, such as tutorials. Several scripts still need to be adapted their new environment (external SVN)."

openSUSE KDE/GNOME Packaging Day: 30th November / 1st December

New openSUSE Packages: KDE 4.0 RC1, KOffice 2 Alpha5, Firefox 3.0 Beta

  • "The release of KDE 4.0 RC1, KOffice 2 Alpha 5, and Firefox 3.0 Beta 1 were all announced in the last week. As always, openSUSE packages are available in the openSUSE Build Service via 1-Click-Install. The openSUSE-based KDE development live CD “KDE Four Live” has also been updated."

Testing Updates - Looking for Heroes

  • "In an effort to improve the overall quality of updates, openSUSE's test update repositories are available in a public location now. All new pending updates will first land into one of these test-update repositories before being transferred directly to the standard and official respective update repository. "

openSUSE Education: First Milestones Reached!

  • "The openSUSE-Education project has been setup to support schools and universities using openSUSE. The project will create additional software packages, additional installation repositories and give community based support."

In the Community

People of openSUSE: Klaas Freitag

  • "The ‘People of openSUSE’ team had the pleasure to interview Klaas Freitag - a Novell employee working as an architect in the department responsible for the Build Service, and an active KDE contributor being a KDE e.V. board member."

Status Updates

Distribution

  • live CD saw another round, now that online updates are in better shape again. Now having a problem with gfx setup
  • driver update medium is kind of ready, I will upload it later for wider testing.
  • early testing of a snapshot release, possibly resulting in Alpha0 (we're not there yet, the gcc update is still causing some trouble)
  • public update test repos were announced, already found one regression. Yay!

Build Service

  • Working on openSUSE Shop
  • new OBS packages are ready to go
  • redesigned backend job status handling. This is intended to make the service more robust. Seems to work indeed, after fixing one typo messed it up completely ;)
  • openSUSE:Factory rpm update, including new gettext package name scheme
  • forwarded CentOS/RHEL base distro request to openSUSE board
  • lots of happy users due to the new 1-click install :)

Wiki / Communication / Events

To come.

Tips and Tricks

openSUSE Installation on MacMini (ppc)

This article describes a successful openSUSE 10.3 installation on Mac mini (ppc), with full and detailed instructions.

File:MacMini Install Hardware Overview.jpg

Screenlets

Screenlets are small owner-drawn applications (written in Python that can be described as "the virtual representation of things lying/standing around on your desk". Sticknotes, clocks, rulers, ... the possibilities are endless.

The goal of the Screenlets base-classes is to simplify the creation of fully themeable mini-apps that each solve basic desktop-work-related needs and generally improve the usability and eye-candy of the modern composited Linux-desktop.

You can now install them via 1-click from the openSUSE Build Service.

File:CPUMeterRulerMailcheck.jpg

Planet SUSE

Covering just a few posts from Planet SUSE, an aggregation of all SUSE contributors' blogs:

Lubos Lunak: News from Wobblyland, part 3.9999

  • "Most work recently has been going under the hood. Although there have been also new visual features like the Login and Logout effects, most work has gone into the usefulness and stability areas. The sooner being e.g. config dialogs or keyboard usage in PresentWindows and DesktopGrid effects, not shown in these old linked videos of course, but simply try hitting keys that make sense, like arrows or F<n>"

Jigish Gohil: PulseAudio: “Compiz for Sound” on openSUSE

  • "We’re jumping on to the PulseAudio bandwagon, same as Fedora (Interview with Lennart Poettering). To prepare the groundwork for that move, Rodrigo and I worked on porting all the required packages and getting it working on openSUSE."

Duncan Mac-Vicar: ycp is not only a language. YaST ruby bindings improvements

  • "After quite lot of hacking nights, I managed to get some yast2 ruby bindings improvements working. You might know that ycp is not only a language, but a component technology. Every component using the YaST2 technology can be reused from other YaST components no matter what language they are written in, as long as there are bindings for that. That was the original intention of the ruby bindings..."

Danny Kukawka: HAL patch collection (4)

  • Danny writes about several new patches sent upstream to HAL.

Past Meetings

Dist Meeting 21-11-07

  • Patchrpms considered harmful
  • Stricter tests for updates
  • GNOME Team maintaining packages in the OBS

Project Meeting 2007-11-21 (transcript)

ZYpp Future Development Meeting

  • Plan of Action
  • Order of development: Cache Refactoring (speed-ups), SAT Solver, User Interface Layer...

openSUSE GNOME meeting (2007/11/22)

  • 100 10.2 bugs reviews in last squash, 70 left plus 10.1 remaining
  • Bug squash to be done on Wednesdays bi-weekly
  • PulseAudio integration working and ready for testing.
  • PackageKit: zypper backend’s basic things work

Xgl/Compiz Meeting

  • X team believes aiglx not ready as universal default
  • AI: add easy way to turn on
  • nvidia: use native video support where possible
  • multihead: need xrandr 1.2 in Xgl
  • more...

Upcoming Events/Meetings

openSUSE KDE community meeting 2007/11/28 22:00

  • "Stephan Binner wrote up a Challenges page and discussing meeting these is the main topic. Also, the pile of patches and improvements that we have vs vanilla KDE needs a strategy to port those or upstream them."

GNOME Meeting 2007/11/29 18:00 CEST

  • "This meeting is meant to discuss the latest developments in and around GNOME in openSUSE."

Open Source Developers' Conference, November 26th-29th

  • " The Open Source Developers' Conference 2007 is a conference designed by open source developers, for developers and business people. It covers numerous programming languages across a range of operating systems, and related topics such as business processes, licensing, and strategy. Talks vary from introductory pieces through to the deeply technical. This year, the conference travels to Brisbane and will be held at the Royal on the Park Hotel (opposite the City Botanical Gardens), aiming to further build on the huge success of OSDC 2004-2006 in Melbourne. OSDC 2007 expects to welcome over 200 delegates."

Security Updates

SUSE Security Summary Report SUSE-SR:2007:024

  • Solved Security Vulnerabilities:
    • cacti SQL injection bug
    • openldap2 remote denial of service
    • phpPgAdmin XSS problems
    • ruby SSL certificate verification process
    • perl regular expression buffer overflow
    • rubygem-activesupport XSS problem
    • yast2-core modules loaded from current directory
    • librpcsecgss also affected by GSSAPI problems
    • liblcms ICC profile parsing problem
  • Pending Vulnerabilities, Solutions, and Work-Arounds:
    • SUSE Linux 10.0 going towards end of support
    • Kernel Updates
  • Authenticity Verification and Additional Information

pcre (SUSE-SA:2007:062)

  • "Specially crafted regular expressions could lead to buffer overflows in the pcre library. Applications using pcre to process regular expressions from untrusted sources could therefore potentially be exploited by attackers to execute arbitrary code as the user running the application."

In the Press

Rohit Joshi: openSuSE 10.3 ROCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  • "openSuSE’s 10.3 was released on 4th October 2007, 10 months after openSuSE 10.2. I’ve been using SuSE since its version 10 and its getting better and better. I think its the only OS that is so professional in its approach and that is a perfect contender from the Community driven GNU/Linux OS projects against the desktop OS’s like Windows and the OS X variants (yup I include the latest Vista and Leopard)."

Linux.com: openSUSE goes live

Linux.com features a review of the recently-released live version of openSUSE 10.3. The review is very positive and praising:

  • "openSUSE has a clear and crisp desktop and includes the Novell variant of the KDE and GNOME menus, called Kickoff, which is designed to help users access common applications quickly. The customized GNOME menu is radically different from the traditional GNOME menu; if you're used to navigating through those menus, it could take you some time to get used to Kickoff. The customized KDE menu still has submenus, but instead of expanding to take up more screen space, submenus slide into the position of their parent menus.

On the hardware front, all versions of openSUSE 10.3, including the live CDs, work seamlessly on all my computers -- two Celeron laptops with clock speeds of 1.3GHz and 1.7GHz, and the two dual-core desktops, the 2.0GHz E4400 and the 1.8GHz E6300. openSUSE 10.3 is the first Linux distro that correctly identified and configured all components on my E6300 computer, which has Intel's DG965RY motherboard and a 19-inch wide-screen LCD monitor. Furthermore, openSUSE 10.3 detected all my USB devices (mice, portable disk drives, cameras) and a PCMCIA wireless card."

Feedback / Communicate / Get Involved

Got any comments on any of the things mentioned in this article? Then head right over to the talk page and let us know! To communicate and get help from the wider openSUSE community -- via IRC, forums, or mailing lists -- see Communicate.

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