Archive:weekly news 110

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Welcome to issue # 110 of openSUSE Weekly News

In this Week:

Announcements

openSUSE News: openSUSE Survey 2010 – Participate now: "Participate in the openSUSE survey 2010 to give feedback to the openSUSE project about the distribution, the openSUSE tools environment and the project in general. Let us know where things are in good shape and areas where improvement is needed. There are also some questions to get some demographic knowledge about our users. The more we know in which direction our project shall move the better we can address this. The survey will take about 8 mins. The survey will be online till Feb 28, 2010 and we raffle amongst all participants some t-shirts, openSUSE 11.2 boxes and 1 one really neat device (most probably a Chumby). If you wanna participate in the raffle please provide your email address at the end, if not just skip it."
openSUSE News: Call for Volunteers in the German Wiki: "some of you have noticed, that we’re making a Cleanupsession in the German Wiki. Old Articles are to be deleted, other just to updated. Now we have created a new QA-Set with declarations of Styles, Formatting and Templates. All of this means many things to do. So we’re making an Call for Volunteers."
openSUSE News: openSUSE Build Service 1.7 now available: "Today, the openSUSE Build Service team released the latest version of the openSUSE Build Service, a tool that provides software developers with the ability to create and release software for openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise and other Linux distributions, including Fedora, Red Hat, Mandriva, Debian and Ubuntu. The openSUSE Build Service allows developers to create packages, software stacks or even a whole distribution as well as use and integrate them with other open source components."
openSUSE News: Meet The KDE Plasma Developers at SUSE, Feb 22: "On the evening of Monday the 22nd of February, the KDE Plasma, KWin and Oxygen developers will be holding a public event at the SUSE office in Nuremberg, Germany. All are welcome to come to the openSUSE Community Space to hear the KDE hackers present their vision of the state of the art in user interfaces."
openSUSE News: openSUSE Forum Team gets a Makeover: "The openSUSE Forum Team of Administrators and Moderators has had an overhaul following a review by the openSUSE board. The new team can be reviewed here: Forum team. The forum review has brought about the establishment of a New Administrator Triad who whilst working largely as Moderators will also act as the first point of contact between the openSUSE board and the forum team. Kim Kgroneman Kim will act as Technical Administrator, dealing with the overall web side function of the openSUSE forum. Users of the forum will also notice a number of new Global Moderators, who have been carefully selected for their outstanding participation and reputation in the forum.; New language forums have been recently established and have a compliment of Forum Moderators. Improvements in the Wiki: Revamp the openSUSE Wiki has had huge forum user involvement and a new section in the forum has been established for the Wiki: Wiki Forum Section.; A huge thank you goes out to Rupert Rupert Horstkötter who assisted the review process."

In the Community

Pascal Bleser: Packman for Factory: "We've started building and publishing a core set of multimedia/codec related packages at Packman for openSUSE Factory again, now that 11.3 M1 has been published.; Currently available packages include: MPlayer, ffmpeg, fluidsynth, lame, xine, twolame, vlc and xmms, as well as the gstreamer stack and a pile of additional libraries. We don't build all the stuff that's in our 11.2/11.1/11.0 repositories for Factory, as the frequent updates to openSUSE.org's Factory would cause havoc on our build servers. If you believe something essential is missing, please send us an email and we'll evaluate whether we'll add it or not."

Status Updates

Boosters Team

Stephan Kulow: Weekly Report
Will Stephenson: Weekly Report
Vincent Untz: Weekly Report
Henne Vogelsang: Weekly Report
Klaas Freitag: Weekly Report
Thomas Schmidt: Weekly Report

Build Service

Marcus Hüwe: new osc feature to review requests: "darix asked me to implement a new feature (and to blog about it :) ) to review requests interactively. How it works: ..."

Tips and Tricks

For Desktop Users

Duncan Mac-Vicar Prett: You don’t need Kopete Facebook plugin anymore: "In May 2008, Facebook announced that they were planning to add XMPP (a.k.a Jabber), the standard messaging protocol behind Google Talk and other chat programs, to their Facebook Chat solution.; In May 2009, seeing that nothing happened, I announced that I was working on Facebook support for Kopete and released a prototype on github. The plugin was not perfect, and it was talking to Facebook using non-standard ways (including html scrapping!), but allowed people to see their contacts and chat."

For Commandline/Script Newbies

ServerWatch/Juliet Kemp: Tweaking Linux Library Settings Within Readline: "Readline is the library that handles your Linux command-line input (and input for some other applications). The various customizable options for it are set either system-wide in /etc/inputrc or per-user in ~/.inputrc. Most of the time the default settings will work perfectly well, but there are a few you may wish to try out that will make slight changes to the way that tab-completion behaves."

Linux Magazine/Jerry Peek: Power Up Linux GUI Apps: "Windowing interfaces to Linux have lots of advantages. Once you find the programs you need, the menus and dialog boxes list your choices, and there’s often not much else to know about the interface.; One big disadvantage of GUI apps, though, is that you’re mostly limited to whatever the interface lets you do — unless you want to re-code the interface yourself, that is. For instance, how can you use a photo viewer to see all of the photos you put in various places on your disk this past Monday? If you know where the photos are stored and what their names are, you can navigate through your directories in a file browser like Nautilus, clicking on files to view them. But what a pain!"

Linux.com/Joe Brockmeier: Taking Command of the Terminal with GNU Screen: "GNU Screen is one of the most useful utilities you can have at your disposal if you spend any time at all working at the command line. Screen allows you to manage multiple shell sessions from one terminal window or console, view multiple shell sessions at the same time, and even log into the same session from more than one location at a time."

Linux Journal/Mitch Frazier: Determine If Shell Input is Coming From the Terminal or From a Pipe: "Working on a little script the other day I had the need to determine if the input to the script was coming from a pipe or from the terminal. Seems like a simple enough thing to determine but nothing jumped immediately to mind and a quick internet search didn't help much either. After a bit of pondering I came up with two solutions: the stat command and using information from the proc file system."

For System Administrators

Jigish Gohil: Cheat ocfs2-tools: "When running ocfs2 on cLVM, openais+pacemaker setup, you may run into something like described below.; The symptoms:

umount /data1
mspx1d0:~ # tunefs.ocfs2 –fs-features=sparse,unwritten /dev/system/data1
tunefs.ocfs2: Unable to access cluster service while opening device “/dev/system/data1″
mspx1d0:~ # mount /dev/system/data1 /data1
mspx1d0:~ # tunefs.ocfs2 –fs-features=sparse,unwritten /dev/system/data1
tunefs.ocfs2: Configuration error discovered while opening device “/dev/system/data1″

Jigish Gohil: Xen para-virtualized openSUSE 11.2: "I had to install Xen para-virtualized openSUSE 11.2 (PVM), lucky for me 11.2 DVD iso has broken xen kernel so it does not install, the live CDs do not have any xen kernel at all so they are not useful either. After reading up all the posts on the bugzilla and forums about the subject, found the way to get it done, here is a howto for anyone else who is looking for the solution."

Masim Sugianto: Installing Zimbra 6.0.5 64 bit on SLES 11 64 bit: "Zimbra has published a new update for Zimbra Mail Server & Collaboration Suite, Zimbra 5.0.22 and Zimbra 6.0.5. This is the first update since VMWare acquired Zimbra. I would like to test it to see whether status & logger problem on Zimbra 6.0.4 has been officially solved or not."

Web Upd8/Andrew: MultiCD Builds a Multi-boot CD / DVD With Many Different Linux Distributions And / Or Utilities: "multicd.sh is a shell script designed to build a multiboot CD / DVD image containing many different Linux distributions and/or utilities. You can use it for instance to burn Gparted Live, Clonezilla and Ubuntu, all on the same multiboot DVD. When booting the CD / DVD, you will be able to choose which Linux distribution you want to boot on."

New/Updated Applications @ openSUSE

Petr Mladek: OpenOffice_org 3.2 final available for openSUSE: "I’m happy to announce OpenOffice.org 3.2 final packages for openSUSE. They are available in the Build Service OpenOffice:org:STABLE project and include many upstream and Go-oo improvements and fixes. Please, check the wiki page for more details about the openSUSE OOo build.; The openSUSE OOo team hopes that you will be happy with this release. Though, any software contains bugs and we kindly ask you to report them, so that we could fixed them in the future releases."

Projects Corner

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The corner for introducing activities of sub project *inside* openSUSE.

KDE Project

KDE SC 4.4 in the openSUSE Build Service: "With the release of KDE SC 4.4, we're making some repository changes in the openSUSE Build Service, effective immediately: ..."
KDE bug squashing: Do you like bugs?: "The openSUSE KDE team is starting another round of KDE bug squashing. Now that openSUSE 11.2 has been out in the wild for a while and 11.3 is just around the corner, it's time to review many of the reported bugs. Many bug reports may be from obsolete versions or perhaps they are not valid anymore. These old bugs need to be sorted out to make way for incoming bug reports for the 11.3 Milestones."

GNOME Project

Joe Brockmeier: What's New with Banshee: "The Banshee Project released 1.5.3 on January 27th. This release brings a slew of improvements to the already impressive media player that gives iTunes a run for its money, if not hype.; For those not familiar with Banshee, it’s a media player written in C# on the Mono platform, started by Aaron Bockover. Since its debut in 2005, Banshee has seen contributions from nearly 100 developers. Banshee is Free Software, licensed under the MIT/X11 license, and has been packaged for ‘all major Linux distributions' as well as recent releases for Mac OS X. The most recent Mac OS X release removes the requirement for the Mono and GTK frameworks, bundling everything in one binary for installation on Mac OS X. Note that Mac builds are beta quality and may be missing some features present in Linux releases, or may not be quite as stable."
Aaron Bockover: Banshee + GNOME 3.0: "I spent a little time this weekend doing one of the things I've wanted to do for years - eradicate one of the oldest files in Banshee: banshee-dialogs.glade. The vast majority of Banshee's UI is custom widgetry that is laid out dynamically at runtime. The main window and the preferences dialog hasn't been restricted by Glade for a couple of years, but all the other dialogs were defined in part in Glade: ..."

Mono Project

Winter Olympics on Linux: "The amazing Moonlight Team lead by Chris Toshok just released Preview 2 of Moonlight 3 just in time for the Winter Olympics' broadcast: [...] The player has some nice features like live streaming, Tivo-like "jump-back", accelerated playback and slow motion and it does this using Smooth Streaming which adjusts the quality of your video feed based on your bandwidth availability.

Thanks to Tom Taylor, Brian Goldfarb and the rest of the team at Microsoft for assisting us with test suites and early access to some of the technologies in use at NBC Olympics. With their help we were able to make sure that Moonlight 3 would work on time for the event (with full 24 hours and 14 minutes still to burn!). "

Planet SUSE

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How to submit a Story to the openSUSE Weekly News?: "Sometimes some guys are asking, how to submit a Story to the openSUSE Weekly News. In short: This Process are not magic ;-) First of all i can say, that EVERYONE can submit an Story. If you have an interesting thing, you can go to: http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Weekly_News/Dashboard . Inside the Dashboard we have Subtitles (eg PlanetSUSE, Projects Corner ,…). In the Document: http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Weekly_News/Section_Content we have manifested, which Section to choose. Please read this Document and then you can place your Content into your choosed Section.; BTW: In the Section “Projects Corner” we place just Stuff inside openSUSE. Other not openSUSE related Stuff, like KDE/GNOME or so, we’re using the “On the Web” Section. In the Section “Planet SUSE” we place Stuff inside openSUSE. But not just Posts from PlanetSUSE. We can place other openSUSE related Stuff there."
Charlotte Betterley: Novell and VMware join forces with Unified Certification for ISVs: "Novell and VMware are making it easier for independent software vendors (ISVs) to optimize their applications for SUSE Linux Enterprise and VMware ESX. Novell is the first operating system vendor to offer Unified Certification for ISVs with VMware.; Unified Certification status means that applications tested and certified on SUSE Linux Enterprise within a virtual machine are automatically certified to run in a VMware virtualized environment with no modifications. Participating ISVs will be able to utilize each company’s partner programs, meaning expanded market opportunities through these extensive ecosystems. This offering complements Novell’s VMware Ready status–a certification that ensures optimal performance for virtual appliances built through the SUSE Appliance Program, the fastest and easiest way for ISVs to create and manage software appliances–and deployed within the VMware virtualized environment."
Charlotte Betterley: SUSE Appliance Program powers software appliances: "Last week, another ISV announced a software appliance built as part of the SUSE Appliance Program from Novell. ROC Software has released the ROC EasySpooler SUSE-powered appliance, based on the company’s ROC EasySpooler core technology and a fully-supported version of SUSE Linux Enterprise from Novell. ROC Software joins the ranks of GroundWork Open Source and Zmanda, ISVs who also recently announced SUSE-powered appliances."
Pascal Bleser: Call for testing openSUSE 11.2 with newer aria2: "As you might now, Zypp (the package management stack of openSUSE) uses the very powerful aria2 application to perform its downloads, both for repository metadata and RPM files. Before that, it used curl.Since openSUSE 11.2, the Zypp stack defaults to using aria2 (unless the environment variable ZYPP_ARIA2C is set to 0, in which case it falls back to curl). But currently, we have two issues with..."

openSUSE Forums

md5sum Error: "Actually involves creation of Live USB using 'dd' - I have had good success with this myself, I actually had a _64 live usb/cd booting and running in a 32 bit machine."
Windows fails after Suse Install: "Let this be a warning to you, whatever you do, don't use the installer from within windows. I can think of some expletives that could be used here but shall refrain. "
nvidia and kernel update testers needed!: "If you can load the test update repo and bring in the new kernel and try your nvidia driver it would be much appreciated. Only do this if you know what you are doing though, please."
Strange Behaviour - Password ByPass!?: "This ranked among the very odd/strange in my book and even though we found a solution, I don't know why it solved the problem. But an interesting one."

On the Web

Announcements

KDE.org Relaunched for Software Compilation 4.4: "The KDE web team is pleased to announce a major redesign of the KDE.org frontpage and buzz.kde.org, just in time for the pending release of our updated Workspace, Application and Development Platform compilation. The redesign is the result of many hours of work by artists, coders, writers and testers. Keep reading to gain some insight into the people and processes behind the retooling."

Call for participation

Sascha Manns: Valentine’s Day 2010: Let other show your Love for Free Software: "We all knowing, that on 14. February this Year we celebrating the Valentine’s Day. This is an goog Day to share you Love for Free Software with your Friends, This Campain is started by Free Software Foundation Europe. All Details of this Campain you can see under: http://www.fsfe.org/campaigns/valentine-2010/ Have alot of Fun :-)"
Linux for Devices/Eric Brown: Design contest launched for tiny Linux net server: "Lantronix announced a design contest based on its recently introduced XPort Pro, touted as the "world's smallest Linux networking server." Lantronix will award prizes of $6,000 and $3,000 to the two top entries for Best Linux Design, plus a separate $3,000 prize for the Best Student Linux Design, says the company."

Reports

OStatic/Joe Brockmeier: Making Thunderbird Financially Sustainable: How it Could Work: "Mozilla Messaging is looking forward to a big year in 2010 including Thunderbird 3.1 and figuring out how to make the project financially sustainable. Making Thunderbird better is the easier part. Figuring out how to make money as a project is another story entirely.; No doubt the next release of Thunderbird, currently code-named Lanikai, will do a lot to win users. Lanikai will focus on making the upgrade from Thunderbird 2 more gradual, and improving on the Thunderbird 3 platform. This means fixes for IMAP, stability and memory improvements, interface enhancements, and improvements to message filters and Smart Folders. The 3.1 release is avoiding disruptive changes and the team is shooting for a May release. The bigger challenge ahead for Moz Messaging is how to pay for itself."
h-online/Thorsten Leemhuis: Kernel Log: Coming in 2.6.33 (Part 4) - Architecture and virtualisation: "Several changes to the X86 and KVM code will speed up the kernel's own hypervisor. The kernel developers once again revised and considerably extended the still emerging tracing infrastructure. The Power and PowerPC code now also supports the Gamecube and Wii games consoles"
OStatic/Joe Brockmeier: OpenOffice.org 3.2: 10 Years in the Making: "If you look back on the history of OpenOffice.org, it makes the 3.2 release that came out on Thursday the 11th even more impressive. Nearly 10 years in the making, OpenOffice.org has evolved from a clunky proprietary offering that struggled to import Microsoft Office documents to a productivity powerhouse that is faster, supports a fully open document format (ODF) and handles most proprietary formats with grace.; Originally StarOffice, Sun purchased StarDivision in 1999 and released the first code for OpenOffice.org in July of 2000. The open source office suite has improved by leaps and bounds since its inception and is now good enough to satisfy millions of users around the world who prefer a free (in all senses of the word) office suite to paying hundreds of dollars for a proprietary suite."
Internet.com/Sean Michael Kerner: LPI Partners with Novell on Linux Certs: "From the "Buy One Get One Free" files:; As the economy is headed (hopefully) for recovery, I'd expect that the market for Linux jobs will also pick up momentum. While experience is always the key, some employers (you know who you are) like certifications.; Now thanks to a new partnership between Novell Inc. and The Linux Professional Institute (LPI) getting those certifications might be a bit easier."
Linux Magazine/Nils Magnus: FOSDEM 2010: Marketplace for Distros: "Feb 09, 2010 At FOSDEM 2010 in Brussels, software that was declared dead was resurrected (Hurd), known combatants sat down at the same table (openSUSE, Fedora and Debian) and almost forgotten entities raised their hands again (openSUSE for PowerPC)."
OStatic/Joe Brockmeier: Oracle Cuts Affect GNOME Accessibility Work: "Sun used to boast that it was one of the largest contributors to open source. That's being demonstrated now that Oracle has acquired the company. Oracle's acquisition of Sun, and subsequent layoffs, are having ripple effects on the open source community. The cuts are also hitting the GNOME accessibility (a11y) team and leading the project to think about the future of a11y efforts in GNOME."

Reviews and Essays

jun auza: Best Linux Distributions of the Decade (2000-2009): "We've seen plenty of "Best of the Decade" lists around, but not one is related to Linux distribution. So it's only fitting that we will give credit to the best Linux distros that dominated the last decade (2000-2009), or most part of it."

Warning!

US-CERT Current Activity - Adobe Releases Security Bulletins for Acrobat, Reader, and Flash Player: "Adobe has released two security bulletins to address vulnerabilities in Adobe Acrobat, Reader, and Flash Player.

The first bulletin, APSB10-06, is a security update for Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR that addresses a critical vulnerability. Exploitation of these vulnerabilities may allow an attacker to make unauthorized cross-domain requests. The bulletin indicates that the update also addresses a potential denial-of-service issue."
h-online/Chris von Eitzen: Vulnerability in Samba provides access to files: "A vulnerability in the creation of symbolic links (symlinks) in the free Samba file and printer server can be exploited to attain access to files outside of predefined paths. Attackers can even get access to the system's root directory (/). To exploit the flaw (directory traversing), attackers first have to have an account on the Samba server that includes write access to at least one share. However, if a share is defined as writeable for guests, the hole can even be exploited remotely without such an account on the server. Under standard settings, no shares are writeable for guests.

LOL

Cool Lizard Sitting On A Couch: A bit OT, since it's not directly related to openSUSE, but the picture of Geeko relaxing on a couch is quite funny :-); by GreenGeeko

Upcoming Events & Meetings

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February 19-21: SCaLE, Southern California Linux Expo

Security Updates

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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:2010:003

Announcement ID: SUSE-SR:2010:003
Date: Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:00:00 +0000
Cross-References: CVE-2008-6123, CVE-2009-3297, CVE-2010-0295,
CVE-2009-4035

SUSE Security Announcement: Linux kernel (SUSE-SA:2010:010)

Package: kernel
Announcement ID: SUSE-SA:2010:010
Date: Mon, 08 Feb 2010 16:00:00 +0000
Affected Products: openSUSE 11.2
Vulnerability Type: remote denial of service
CVSS v2 Base Score: 6.8 (AV:A/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:P/A:C)
SUSE Default Package: yes
Cross-References: CVE-2009-3939, CVE-2009-4141, CVE-2009-4536
CVE-2009-4538, CVE-2010-0003, CVE-2010-0006
CVE-2010-0007, CVE-2010-0299

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

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Communication
lists.opensuse.org has 37340 (-14) non-unique subscribers to all mailing lists.
The openSUSE Forums have 41938 (+375) registered users - Most users ever online was 30559, 08-Jan-2010 at 14:06.

Contributors
4278 (+35) of 11112 (+100) 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 10766 (+211) projects, 92795 (+2573) packages, 19511 (+232) repositories by 21122 (+235) confirmed users.

openFATE

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Feature statistics for openSUSE 11.3:

total: 501 (+20)
unconfirmed: 321 (+9)
new: 32 (-12)
evaluation: 80 (+6)
candidate: 1 (+0)
done: 17 (+1)
rejected: 34 (+14)
duplicate: 16 (+2)

More information on openFATE

Bugzilla

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The numbers for all openSUSE project products are this week:

All Open Reports: 5040 (-10)
Blocker: 3 (+0)
Critical: 263 (+4)
Major: 876 (+16)
Normal: 2879 (-26)
Minor: 425 (-3)
Enhancements: 594 (-1)
Detailed Bugzilla Report – Submitting Bug Reports – Bug Reporting FAQ

Localization

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

openSUSE for your ears

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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

Do you have comments on any of the things mentioned in this article? Then head right over to the news.opensuse.org story comment section and let us know! Communicate with or get help from the wider openSUSE community -- via IRC, forums, or mailing lists -- see Communicate.

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.

Credits

saigkill ^{Talk - Contributions} Sascha Manns (Chief-Editor)
Dl9pf ^{Talk - Contributions} Jan-Simon Möller (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

Translations

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