Archive:weekly news 111
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Welcome to issue # 111 of openSUSE Weekly News
In this Week:
- openSUSE News: Number Two Always Tries Harder: openSUSE Milestone 2
- Linux User & Developer/Kunal Deo: Another ten essential Python tips
- Gabriel Burt: Banshee Community Extensions
- How to Make sure I didn't get a Virus?
- Jason McDonald: Qt 4.6.2 Released
Announcements
- openSUSE News: Attention All KDE Users
- "KDE SC 4.3.5 is about to become available for openSUSE 11.2 as an online update (from 4.3.1). This release fixes many bugs, so we decided to push it as an online update instead of making it an optional update in the Build Service, and by fixing bugs we give our KDE contributors more time to work for openSUSE 11.3.
- This makes the Build Service KDE:43 repository redundant, so it is being removed. KDE:43 users should remove this repository from their installation sources."
- openSUSE News: Number Two Always Tries Harder: openSUSE Milestone 2
- "Late last month we released the first milestone of openSUSE 11.3, now we follow up with the second. Milestone 2 is part of the milestones where we track new releases in the open source universe and test the building of our various distribution images with them. While milestone 1 introduced various pre-release versions of free and open source projects (KDE 4.4 RC1, OpenOffice 3.2 Beta4 or VirtualBox 3.1 beta 1) into our development distribution openSUSE Factory, this milestone is characterized by final releases of those projects. We are also preparing everything to switch to GCC 4.5.0 as the default compiler. Currently our staging version of Factory already builds with it and our compiler people document/fix the most serious issues, they aim at milestone 3 for the switch. To learn more about the benefits of GCC 4.5.0 check the Development Tools section below. As you can see, although we are steadily moving forward, there is still a lot to come!"
Status Updates
Boosters Team
- Henne Vogelsang: Standup Meeting 2010/02/16
- "This sprint was going from February 4th to February 16th. Even though it included going to FOSDEM over the weekend we were able to reach one milestone: Buildservice Project Overview Page (a.k.a. factory.o.o) hurray! The wiki milestone finally moved forward again and the umbrella milestone got a new push with limiting it's scope to the Bentoo theme. All in all a pretty successful sprint!"
Build Service
- Build Team Meeting
- Minutes from the Meeting
Tips and Tricks
For Desktop Users
- Pascal Bleser: Generate a moderately secure random password
- This Article explains, how to create an secure Password with the Shell.
- Ghacks.net/Jack Wallen: Easy folder sharing in KDE 4.4
- "Once more unto the KDE topic my friends, once more. This time, however, we take a look at a very useful feature that allows you to easily share out folders with a few clicks. These folders will be shared with the help of Samba and not a single line of a configuration file will have to be edited by the user. It’s a pretty sweet feature, so let’s start sharing."
For Developers and Programmers
- Linux User & Developer/Kunal Deo: Another ten essential Python tips
- "Python is one of the most popular programming languages in the open source space. Look around and you will find it running everywhere, from various configuration tools to XML parsing. To compliment our ‘ten essential Python tips for beginners‘ and ‘ten more essential Python tips‘ features, we’ve compiled yet another collection of ten gems to make your Python experience that much more worthwhile… Any bets on whether we’ll do another?"
New/Updated Applications @ openSUSE
- Packman: Performous 0.5.1-0.pm.1.12
- "Performous is a free cross-platform clone of the Playstation 2 game Singstar."
- Packman: k3b 1.70.0-40.pm.41.4
- "K3b is a CD burning application that supports Ogg Vorbis, MP3 audio files, DVD burning, CDDB, and much more."
- Packman: kmymoney4 3.96.0-42.pm.42.1
- "KMyMoney is the Personal Finance Manager for KDE4. It operates similar to Quicken, supports various account types, categorization of expenses, multiple currencies, online banking support via QIF, OFX and HBCI, budgeting and a rich set of reports."
- OBS openSUSE:11.2:Update/flash-player
- Updated to Version install_flash_player_10_r45.2_linux.tar.bz2
Projects Corner
The corner for introducing activities of sub project *inside* openSUSE.
KDE Project
- openSUSE KDE meeting minutes
- Minutes from the Meeting
Mono Project
- Miguel de Icaza: What have we been up to?
- "Every once in a while I would run into someone that will ask me what exactly we are up to in Mono. As Mono becomes larger, and various big projects "land" into the trunk, we can no longer do releases on a monthly basis. Some of the work that we do is inherently very attractive, things like new features, new libraries, new UIs and new frameworks. But probably more important are the efforts to turn our code into programming system products: fixing bugs, testing it, packaging it, supporting it, writing documentation, test suites, improving error handling, scaling the software, making it faster, slimmer and backporting bug fixes."
Planet SUSE
- Gabriel Burt: Banshee Community Extensions
- "Writing a Banshee extension and getting it into users' hands has never been easier. We have started a new sub-project called Banshee Community Extensions (BCE), collecting various existing extensions under one source repo, bug tracker, and autobuild setup."
openSUSE Forums
- Mic Not Working Dell E6400
- "Getting sound working in it's various facets can be a problem for some. Even more so if you don't actually listen in the first place. Well maybe it was just lack of knowledge of the OS. Happily the OP here managed to get this going, principally with the help of @oldcpu."
- How to Make sure I didn't get a Virus?
- "Interesting little diversion this and if anything it's an example of the onslaught faced by M$ users. Good luck to them and thank goodness we use openSUSE."
- Miro troubles
- "If you are like me, you are thinking..what? 'Miro'? what..? Or maybe not. Anyway, by all accounts, it's not really ready or at least it's a real pain, so much so that it ain't worth the effort."
- Erased Everything by Mistake
- "This has to go down in the history books of record breaker 'I'm a bit of a plonker' threads. And on the other hand, let it be a warning of what NOT to do."
On the Web
Announcements
- Jason McDonald: Qt 4.6.2 Released
- "Earlier today, we released Qt 4.6.2 for Maemo5 to coincide with the opening of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Now I am pleased to announce that Qt 4.6.2 is also available for all of our other supported platforms.
- Qt 4.6.2 provides the usual mix of bug fixes, performance improvements and documentation fixes, but it also includes two new items. The first is the aforementioned Maemo5 support graduating from Beta to Release status (note that there is a separate qt-maemo5-opensource-src-4.6.2.tar.gz source package) and the second is the Nokia Smart Installer (see blog post here for the details)."
- LinuxMedNews/Sebastian Hilbert: Project GNUmed Live started
- "It all originated from the need to host GNUmed Live CDs, VMware images and so on. Nothing comes for free and there was no way we could host these images on the GNUmed servers. That is why we started the GNUmed Live project on sourceforge. This gives us the room we need to offer GNUmed in a form that allows users to try GNUmed without going through the whole installation process. Head over to sourceforge.net to see for yourself and grab a CD image."
Call for participation
- KDE.news/Aaron J. Seigo: Plasma Javascript Jam Session Contest
- "We are pleased to announce the Plasma Javascript Jam Session. This friendly competition will reward creators of the most original, interesting and beautiful Plasma widgets (Plasmoids) written in Javascript with some great prizes and community recognition."
Reports
- h-online/Thorsten Leemhuis: Kernel Log: Coming in 2.6.33 (Part 5) - Drivers
- "Enhancements to the ALSA code for HD audio codecs, a V4L/DVB driver for the Mantis TV chip, drivers for MSI laptops and drivers for newer AMD CPUs are just some of the improvements to Linux hardware support. Android drivers have now been escorted from the staging area, while Ramzswap (formerly Compcache) framework for compressing RAM has been added"
- Pavol Rusnak: FOSDEM 2010 Report
- "Last weekend I attended FOSDEM 2010 and it was a blast! I’ve never seen such a high number of tracks on a conference. Kudos to the organization team! During these two days I was sending a short messages via identica and twitter, because as @amedee said “the crew provided a fiber optic network, so people can compress their thoughts in char[140] blurbs”. :-) I still decided to write a short report, because not everything could fit into these blurbs and not everyone uses these microblogging services. So here we go!"
Reviews and Essays
- TechCrunch/Erick Schonfeld: Twiangulate Who You Share In Common With Other People On Twitter
- "Here’s a good virtual parlor game. Pick any two or three Twitter users, and Twiangulate which friends or followers they have in common. Twiangulate is a site that shows the overlap between your social graph and any tow other people on Twitter. It shows the resulting names as a list or an interactive social map."
- ars technica/Ryan Paul: Hands-on: semantic desktop starts to show in KDE SC 4.4
- "Last week, the KDE community officially released KDE Software Compilation 4.4, a significant update of the open source desktop environment and its associated application stack. The new version delivers some user interface improvements, enhanced usability, new features, additional software, and a number of important bug fixes."
- The Linux Box/Sean Parsons: Comparing Browsers on Linux
- "Recently I decided to make a screencast comparing some of the more popular browsers that are currently available for Linux: Firefox, Epiphany, Konqueror, Opera, and Google-Chrome. Included is the screencast posted with the new HTML 5 video tag, a video download option, and for those that prefer reading, a short synopsis of the scenario. ..."
- The VAR Guy: BrainShare: Novell Pulse and SUSE Partners Take Center Stage
- "When Novell Brainshare 2010 kicks off March 21 in Salt Lake City, the company will put several initiatives in the spotlight. Among the top two priorities. Promoting Novell Pulse (a real-time communication and social messaging platform for enterprises) and promoting SUSE Linux software partners. Here are the details."
Warning!
- US-CERT Current Activity - Mozilla Releases Security Advisories
- "The Mozilla Foundation has released multiple security advisories to address vulnerabilities in Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird, and SeaMonkey. Exploitation of these vulnerabilities may allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code or bypass security restrictions."
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 Announcement: Linux kernel (SUSE-SA:2010:013)
- Package: kernel
- Announcement ID: SUSE-SA:2010:013
- Date: Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:00:00 +0000
- Affected Products: SUSE SLES 9
- Novell Linux POS 9
- Vulnerability Type: remote denial of service
- CVSS v2 Base Score: 7.8 (AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:C)
- SUSE Default Package: yes
SUSE Security Summary Report: SUSE-SR:2010:004
- Announcement ID: SUSE-SR:2010:004
- Date: Tue, 16 Feb 2010 11:00:00 +0000
- Cross-References: CVE-2009-1194, CVE-2009-2730, CVE-2009-3236
- CVE-2009-3237, CVE-2009-3297, CVE-2009-3701
- CVE-2009-4009, CVE-2009-4010, CVE-2009-4035
- CVE-2009-4297, CVE-2009-4298, CVE-2009-4299
- CVE-2009-4300, CVE-2009-4301, CVE-2009-4302
- CVE-2009-4303, CVE-2009-4304, CVE-2009-4305
- CVE-2009-4363, CVE-2010-0186, CVE-2010-0187
- CVE-2010-0285, CVE-2010-0414, CVE-2010-0422
SUSE Security Announcement: postfix (SUSE-SA:2010:011)
- Package: postfix
- Announcement ID: SUSE-SA:2010:011
- Date: Mon, 15 Feb 2010 14:00:00 +0000
- Affected Products: openSUSE 11.2
- Vulnerability Type: remote denial of service
- CVSS v2 Base Score: 5.0 (AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P)
- SUSE Default Package: yes
- Cross-References: CVE-2010-0230
SUSE Security Announcement: Linux kernel (SUSE-SA:2010:012)
- Package: kernel
- Announcement ID: SUSE-SA:2010:012
- Date: Mon, 15 Feb 2010 16:00:00 +0000
- Affected Products: openSUSE 11.0
- Vulnerability Type: local privilege escalation, remote denial of service
- CVSS v2 Base Score: 7.2 (AV:L/AC:L/Au:N/C:C/I:C/A:C)
- SUSE Default Package: yes
Statistics
Numbers in brackets show the changes compared to the previous week.
opensuse.org
Communication
lists.opensuse.org has 37331 (-9) non-unique subscribers to all mailing lists.
The openSUSE Forums have 42315 (+377) registered users - Most users ever online was 30559, 08-Jan-2010 at 14:06.
Contributors
4320 (+42) of 11195 (+83) 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 10931 (+165) projects, 90739 (-2056) packages, 19683 (+172) repositories by 21311 (+189) confirmed users.
openFATE
Feature statistics for openSUSE 11.3:
- total: 511 (+10)
- unconfirmed: 325 (+4)
- new: 31 (-1)
- evaluation: 82 (+2)
- candidate: 3 (+2)
- done: 18 (+1)
- rejected: 36 (+2)
- duplicate: 16 (+0)
Bugzilla
The numbers for all openSUSE project products are this week:
- All Open Reports: 4977 (-63)
- Blocker: 3 (+0)
- Critical: 256 (-7)
- Major: 868 (-8)
- Normal: 2841 (-38)
- Minor: 414 (-11)
- Enhancements: 595 (+1)
- 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
- 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
