Archive:weekly news 109
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Welcome to issue # 109 of openSUSE Weekly News
In this Week:
- Its here! openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 1
- Sirko Kemter: First Art-Team meeting
- ars technica/Joe Brockmeier: Video editing in Linux: a look at PiTiVi and Kdenlive
- Jeffrey Stedfast: Weird bugs due to gcc 4.4 and strict aliasing
- KDE SC 4.4 RC3 Released
Announcements
- Its here! openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 1
- "Download Now!Its here! The first openSUSE 11.3 Milestone. This is the first step toward the next openSUSE release. The most important goal of this first milestone is to test the build interactions between newly added features in openSUSE Factory, also known as “get the snapshot to build”. It is in no way feature complete or ready for daily usage. There is no code freeze for any component yet, so many major changes are still to come."
In the Community
- Sirko Kemter: First Art-Team meeting
- "Since my first posting for the formation of a openSUSE art team has a lot done. There have been really in a short time, some Interested found. Thus, the idea is not for the kind of team again It was relatively fast asleep a meeting with interested parties to organize. For this, I’ve got a Doodlevoting for the best time placed. It turned out that it is not easy. For half of the prospective resident on the other side of the Globe. The one side is asleep, while the other is awake. Actually, I had hoped to be able to solve the problem a little, in I receive them into the Saturday with the election. Nevertheless, could only just under half of Interested to participate in the meeting."
Status Updates
Board
- Boardmeeting 27.01.10
- Minutes from the Meeting
Distribution
- Klaas Freitag: Hermes Twittering about openSUSE Factory
- "Last week we updated Hermes on our production servers, they’re running a version now which will become a first Hermes release. I hope to get it packaged and released this week to present it on FOSDEM where I’ll give a talk about Hermes. Don’t miss it if you’re interested in this useful technology.
- There went in a lot of technical improvement and bugfixes which one gets aware of if a system like Hermes runs in production for quite some time, such as missing indexes here and there which slow down the database and stuff like that. But that is another story."
- openSUSE Build Service 1.7.0 RC 1
- "We are happy to announce that we reached a state which can be considered as final version of 1.7.0. No more changes, except for the version number are planned until 1.7.0 final release next week."
Boosters Team
Work reports from Boosters Team.
Build Service
- Build Team Meeting
- Meeting Minutes
Tips and Tricks
For Desktop Users
- Andreas Stieger: irssi on freenode with SSL verification
- "Those of you who frequent openSUSE’s support channels on freenode might be interested to know that with the ircd SSL encryption in now available. However some users had problems verifying the SSL certificate on connection when using irssi. Here is an example working server configuration section for your ~/.irssi/config: ..."
- ars technica/Joe Brockmeier: Video editing in Linux: a look at PiTiVi and Kdenlive
- "Video editing on Linux has long gotten a bad rap. A few years ago, the only real options for video editing were either deeply limited in features and polish, or incredibly complex to set up and use.
- While Linux still lacks a direct competitor to tools like Apple's iMovie or Final Cut Pro, the current crop of video editing tools are much more capable and easy to use. Two tools in particular stand out: PiTiVi and Kdenlive. Both suites are under active development and look promising. In this article, we'll take a look at what both of these tools can and can't do."
- ars technica/Ryan Paul: Mozilla Weave 1.0: take your tabs and bookmarks everywhere
- "Mozilla Labs recently announced the official release of Weave Sync 1.0, an add-on for Firefox that can automatically synchronize browser settings and metadata between multiple computers over the Internet."
For Commandline/Script Newbies
- Zahid Irfan: Linux Newbie : Why grep almost never yields something productive
- "Every Linux newbie hears about power of grep sooner or later. But no sooner does newbie try to use the grep command the experiment ends badly. The reason grep almost never yields anything productive is because of a couple of issues. The basic problem is lack of knowledge of regular expressions and secondly knowledge of switches of grep. This realization should not deter a new user from using grep. A very nice detailed tutorial of regular expression (regex) is available here. ..."
For Developers and Programmers
- IBM developerWorks: An introduction to XML
- "An Introduction to XML provides students and entry-level professionals with demonstrations of the basics of learning XML, covering topics such as Web 2.0, AJAX, RSS, Web Services and managing XML data. These short Web-based video modules provide clear examples of XML as well as references to popular Web sites that use XML."
For System Administrators
- Andrew Wafaa: Storytelling with Storytlr
- "Storytelling with Storytlr - I thought it would be wise to document how I installed Storytlr as I feel the official documentation doesn't list everything.
- The basic requirements to get storytlr working are - Apache, MySQL, PHP5 (with php5-tidy, and php5-mcrypt). So once you have the basic system requirements met, the next step is to download the latest stable release from here and extract the tarball in your target directory."
- Sascha Manns: Change a Partition from ext3 to ext4
- "Since the last openSUSE Version we have the Option to make Partitions in ext4. In my case i have made the Rootpartition in ext4 and other Partitions in ext3. No i have found an HowTo for changing the other Partitions to ext4. I have changed the original Informations to the openSUSE needs.
- First of all, please change your Runlevel, through typing “init 3” into the Konsole. Then we have a clean Konsole. After logging in with “root“, we have the full Access to the Partitions."
- HowtoForge/Falko Timme: How To Set Up A USB-Over-IP Server And Client With OpenSUSE 11.2
- "This tutorial shows how to set up a USB-over-IP server with OpenSUSE 11.2 as well as a USB-over-IP client (also running OpenSUSE 11.2). The USB/IP Project aims to develop a general USB device sharing system over IP network. To share USB devices between computers with their full functionality, USB/IP encapsulates "USB I/O messages" into TCP/IP payloads and transmits them between computers. USB-over-IP can be useful for virtual machines, for example, that don't have access to the host system's hardware - USB-over-IP allows virtual machines to use remote USB devices."
New/Updated Applications @ openSUSE
- Packman: planeshift 0.4.00-1175.pm.1175.5
- "The objective of the PlaneShift project is to create a virtual fantasy world in which a player can start from humble beginnings and advance to greatness in whatever path they may choose. PlaneShift is a Role Playing Game - be sure to read our Roleplay guidelines! We will focus our efforts on the reproduction of a real world with politics, economy and many non-player-characters controlled by the server that will bring our world to life, even without players connected! We want to give FREE access to everyone, without the need to either purchase the game or pay a monthly fee. Servers and bandwidth will be donated by sponsors."
- Packman: vlc 1.0.5-1.pm.2.1
- "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: BilderHerunterlader 2.9.6-0.pm.1.1
- "BilderHerunterlader is a Program, which makes it easier to download images, hosted on image-host-websites. The plugin for Firefox is installed in /usr/share/BilderHerunterlader."
Projects Corner
The corner for introducing activities of sub project *inside* openSUSE
GNOME Project
- openSUSE GNOME News
- "Some news about what's going on the GNOME land of openSUSE"
Mono Project
- Miguel de Icaza: Moonlight 3.0 Preview 1
- "We have just released our first preview of Moonlight 3.0. This release contains many updates to our 3.0 support, mostly on the infrastructure level necessary to support the rest of the features."
Planet SUSE
- Jeffrey Stedfast: Weird bugs due to gcc 4.4 and strict aliasing
- "I was just running the unit tests for GMime and I got a couple of failures on my openSUSE 11.2 machine that I have never gotten before. I started debugging and I noticed something very odd. One of my functions that returned a linked-list of 'word' tokens was returning NULL for something that it should not be returning NULL from, especially since I had just stepped through that method and seen with my own eyes that it was creating and appending nodes to my linked list as it should!"
- Ben Kevan: Jeff Jaffe – Novell CTO Leaving
- "A few days after the news from Zonker, we get the news that Jeff Jaffe, Novells CTO, is also leaving the company for new ventures in life after 4 years. What does this mean to the company? What really is going on at Novell? Here’s some of the postings from Jeff’s Blog: ..."
- Wolfgang Rosenauer: Crashes anyone?
- "Starting with Firefox 3.6 I’ve enabled the Mozilla internal crashreporter for 32-bit builds. Some people have seen that already unfortunately ;-) But anyway that is still a good thing as it makes your and my life easier to analyze what’s going on. This is more kind of a testing phase currently but my plan is go that direction because Apport seems to be no efficient solution in openSUSE just yet and Mozilla was interested in helping distributors to use their infrastructure (they also have the advantage of having more crash data available on Linux systems).
- There are still some technical issues which are being worked on. There is no full 64-bit support in Gecko 1.9.2 and the breakpad implementation lacks DWARF support so if we support stabs+ debug symbols as used there we loose RPM’s feature of generating correct debuginfo packages.
- Both issues are almost fixed but it’s unclear if we can fully support it with Firefox 3.6 already."
- Kohei Yoshida: Two more enhancements are in
- "Today, I’d like to talk about two minor enhancements I just checked in to ooo-build master. They are not really earth-shuttering per se, but still worth mentioning & may be interesting to some users."
- Michal Hrusecky: YaST on mobile phone
- "Linux can run almost everywhere. For some time I was participating in Hacking & Development project, but lately I didn't have enough time to keep up. But today I went to the SleepWalker's office to take a look at his new Zaurus (NetWalker) and he gave me kernel that can run on my Centro. I tried it and I was thinking what rootfs should I try... I have in my longterm todo to try openSUSE ARM port which is a result of Google Summer of Code project. So why not? I tried it and here are the results - YaST running on mobile phone."
- Amie Johnson: Novell on Aurora Breach – new threats to watch
- "Security folks have been saying for some time now that organizations need to take a long, hard look at how they think about information security. Now that intellectual property is the target of attacks, the stakes are higher. Organizations must start from the assumption that no endpoint is secure and build their security programs around that hypothesis. In this world, authentication is not enough—the underlying activities could still be malicious.
- In this podcast, I discuss with Novell security specialist, Ben Goodman, how the Aurora breach has shined a spotlight on the failure of the traditional perimeter security model. The response to these threats must be multi-faceted. Ultimately, we believe the solution may lie in systems that tie together all the information available within an enterprise. Mining that wealth of information for inconsistencies, and putting a lens to the fine-grained activities that are taking place will lead organizations to broad-based user-activity monitoring. Any time a valuable asset is accessed, systems will check to see if that access is consistent with what’s expected – anything out of the ordinary will trigger alarms or could shut down access completely."
openSUSE Forums
- Ugh to KDE4
- "Yeah, we already know there are many differing opinions on KDE4. But hear this folk: It's here to stay. You'll notice there are a host of comments from kde3 enthusiasts who are now ready to praise KDE4."
- 11.3 Milestone 1 Results
- "Here we go again. Milestone 1 and it's a cracker! We are sure to have plenty of activity in this pre-release section of the forum now. Keep an eye on it."
- KDE4 Search and Launch Desktop Activity
- "Have a gander at this new feature in the 4.4 release it's real treasure. Hidden away it almost goes unnoticed. But it's really slick. Try it out if you are using 4.4 from Factory."
- Downgrade to 11.2?
- "Intuition tells me this could be a thread with an unhappy ending. It seems there is no end to these mishaps with the Build Service repositories. We'll see what happens."
On the Web
Announcements
- KDE SC 4.4 RC3 Released
- "With the number of fixes still going into the 4.4 branch after RC2 last week, the release managers have decided to pop another release candidate in between. Last night, Dirk tagged KDE Software Compilation 4.4 RC3, and we're releasing it today already. Overall the release is shaping up nicely, with many bugs still being squashed even in this late phase. Thanks everybody for participating in making KDE SC 4.4 a solid release."
- Free Technology Academy: Free download : GNU/Linux Advanced Administration
- "The GNU/Linux systems have reached an important level of maturity, allowing to integrate them in almost any kind of work environment, from a desktop PC to the sever facilities of a big company.
- In the module called "The GNU/Linux operating system", the main contents are related with system administration. This book is the main documentation for the module."
Reports
- Greg Kroah-Hartman: Android and the Linux kernel community
- "As the Android kernel code is now gone from the Linux kernel, as of the 2.6.33 kernel release, I'm starting to get a lot of questions about what happened, and what to do next with regards to Android. So here's my opinion on the whole matter..."
- John Dragoon: The Apple iPad and Linux
- "Late last October I wrote a guest column for Forbes.com on “The Battle of the OS Titans” in which I described the complex and evolving landscape of operating system battles and how ultimately, we as consumers would be the real winners. Apple’s much anticipated and highly hyped launch of their latest computing form factor – the Apple iPad, serves as the latest example of what it will truly take to win the Operating System battle."
- h-online/Thorsten Leemhuis: Kernel Log: Coming in 2.6.33 (Part 3) - Graphics
- "The next version of Linux is not only the first to offer the Nouveau KMS graphics driver for NVIDIA graphics hardware, it also comes with a multitude of improvements for the two AMD/ATI and Intel graphics drivers which support Kernel-based Mode Setting (KMS)"
- h-online/Chris von Eitzen: Denmark to implement ODF document standard
- "Last Friday, after four years of deliberation, representatives of all parties in the Danish parliament (Folketing) reached an agreement to adopt the OpenDocument Format (ODF) as their official format for saving documents from April 2011. Initially, the decision will not affect any regional or communal authorities; a decision in this respect is to follow at a later stage. An official approval of the agreement by the Danish parliament is planned for next Tuesday, although this will apparently only be a formality."
- h-online/Chris von Eitzen: Study: > 21% of German PCs run OpenOffice
- "According to Webmasterpro.de, a German IT service provider, the open source OpenOffice suite and its derivatives, such as StarOffice or IBM's Lotus Symphony, are installed on more than 21% of German PCs. A sample of over one million German-speaking Internet users showed that 72% of users preferred Microsoft Office, while 2.7% preferred Corel's WordPerfect, 1.4% used Apple's iWork, 0.3% selected SoftMaker Office and 0.03% chose KOffice. Among the surveyed German speaking Internet users, 17.1% did not appear to have an Office suite installed."
Reviews and Essays
- LWN.net/Jonathan Corbet: LCA: How to destroy your community
- "Josh Berkus is well known as a PostgreSQL hacker, but, as it happens, he also picked up some valuable experience during his stint at "The Laboratory for the Destruction of Communities," otherwise known as Sun Microsystems. That experience has been distilled into a "patented ten-step method" on how to free a project of unwelcome community involvement. Josh's energetic linux.conf.au presentation on this topic was the first talk in the "business of open source" miniconf; it was well received by an enthusiastic crowd."
- ITworld/Brian Proffitt: Microsoft/Novell: Breaking Down the Coupon Numbers
- "Today I read a thought-provoking article over at SD Times, which detailed the state of the partnership between Novell and Microsoft.
- According to David Worthington's missive things are going pretty good for the two competitor/partners, though if you really read the piece there seems to be a key detail missing: what Microsoft is getting out of their investment in this partnership."
- Linux Magazine/Christopher Smart: The Greatest KDE Distro Ever: An Early Look at openSUSE 11.3
- "This week marks the first milestone release of openSUSE, on the road to 11.3. With their current stable release, 11.2, the distribution made KDE the official default desktop and thanks to their efforts, created the greatest implementation ever.
- Now, with version 4.4 on the way the KDE desktop experience from openSUSE is looking to be better than ever."
Warning!
- Andrew Wafaa: Story telling your Gitorious exploits
- "Story telling your Gitorious exploits - Suffice it to say, I'm actually enjoying my Storytlr install - maybe enjoy isn't the right word but you get my drift, don't you? Well I was determined to loose my coding virginity, and Storytlr's plugin system seemed to be the safest way to do so."
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.
SUSE Security Summary Report: SUSE-SR:2010:002
- Announcement ID: SUSE-SR:2010:002
- Date: Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:00:00 +0000
- Cross-References: CVE-2009-0758, CVE-2009-3940, CVE-2009-4012
- CVE-2009-4144, CVE-2009-4145, CVE-2009-4411
SUSE Security Announcement: Linux kernel (SUSE-SA:2010:009)
- Package: kernel
- Announcement ID: SUSE-SA:2010:009
- Date: Fri, 05 Feb 2010 10:00:00 +0000
- Affected Products: SLE SDK 10 SP2
- SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 SP2
- SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 SP2 DEBUGINFO
- SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP2
- Vulnerability Type: kernel remote denial of service
Statistics
Numbers in brackets show the changes compared to the previous week.
opensuse.org
Communication
lists.opensuse.org has 37354 (+1) non-unique subscribers to all mailing lists.
The openSUSE Forums have 41563 (+339) registered users - Most users ever online was 30559, 08-Jan-2010 at 14:06.
Contributors
4243 (+35) of 11012 (+87) registered contributors in the User Directory have signed the Guiding Principles. The board has acknowledged 395 (+0) members.
Build Service
The Build Service now hosts 10555 (+179) projects, 90222 (+308) packages, 19279 (+342) repositories by 20887 (+181) confirmed users.
openFATE
Feature statistics for openSUSE 11.3:
- total: 481 (+10)
- unconfirmed: 312 (+10)
- new: 44 (+0)
- evaluation: 74 (+0)
- candidate: 1 (+0)
- done: 16 (+0)
- rejected: 20 (+0)
- duplicate: 14 (+0)
Bugzilla
The numbers for all openSUSE project products are this week:
- All Open Reports: 5050 (-28)
- Blocker: 3 (+0)
- Critical: 259 (+0)
- Major: 860 (+5)
- Normal: 2905 (-14)
- Minor: 428 (-21)
- Enhancements: 595 (+2)
- 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
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Credits
- Dl9pf Talk - Contributions Jan-Simon Möller (Chief-Editor)
- saigkill Talk - Contributions Sascha Manns (Second Chief-Editor, Main-Newsletter)
- STS301 Talk - Contributions Sebastian Schöbinger (Tips/Tricks)
- HeliosReds Talk - Contributions Satoru Matsumoto (Editorial Office)
- Caf4926 Talk - Contributions Carl Fletcher (Main-Newsletter, Forums Sec.)
- Okuro Talk - Contributions Thomas Hofstätter (Events & Meetings)
- add translators
