Archive:weekly news 112

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Welcome to issue # 112 of openSUSE Weekly News

In this Week:

Announcements

Honoring openSUSE Wiki Reviewing Contributions: "We previously put a lot of efforts into encouraging the community to contribute to our Wiki Usability Concept for both the English and the German Wiki, i.e. to participate in the Reviewing Process of currently existing pages in order to provide the best openSUSE documentation resources possible. That said, a lot has been done since we started this initiative and I’d like to take the opportunity to thank everyone already involved for their hard work. It’s awesome to see the engagement of both wiki- and forum members coming together in working for a better openSUSE wiki .. great community spirit!"
New site launched: "I just would like to inform the list about the launch of the http://opensuse.hu website. This is a small almost-static website to leads the users to the right place, find resources etc. (same functionality as opensuse.org)."

Status Updates

Distribution

Michal Hrušecký: Public openSUSE 11.3 virtual machine: "I really like our openSUSE Community. Do you remember that before 11.2 release there was a possibility to try new openSUSE without installing it? Well, our community member Jaromír Červenka did it again! Original blogpost in Czech can be found here. For those who don't speak Czech, some basic overview in English.; Once upon the time, there was a virtual machine. It was using KVM and it was managed by gentle libvirt. But it was kind of lonely. But as it was young and fresh new openSUSE, it wanted to see more people. So Červajz made a passage for it through the firewall. And now it runs ssh, vnc and even web service and it can talk to everybody."

Build Service

Build Team Meeting: "Minutes from the Meeting"
OBS 1.7.1 released: "The openSUSE Build Service team is proud to present a weekend gift, the OBS 1.7.1 release. You find it as usual in openSUSE:Tools project as rpms for openSUSE and SLE. The OBS Appliances have been updated as well."

Tips and Tricks

For Desktop Users

Ghacks.net/Jack Wallen: Tips to help users migrate to OpenOffice: "The office suite. Ah the importance you hold over the PC user. You help our business to flow, you help us to draft our papers and novels, and you help us communicate. But what of those users who previously were using Microsoft Office or any other office suite? How does one gain any sort of efficiency or familiarity with another office suite - especially when there is so little time to do so? It’s really not so difficult. After all, the features are, for the most part, all there."

For Developers and Programmers

Miguel de Icaza: Using MonoDevelop to Debug Executables with no Solution Files: "Every once in a while I need to debug some Mono program that does not come with a solution. Either a program that was compiled using a Makefile or an executable that I installed with RPM on my system.; Sometimes I would end up cretaing MonoDevelop solution that contained every source file, command line option and resource that I meticulously copied from the Makefile. In other words, I was in for a world of pain just to be able to use MonoDevelop's awesome debugger."

Database Journal/Rob Gravelle: MySQL Multi-Aggregated Rows in Crosstab Queries: "MySQL's crosstabs contain aggregate functions on two or more fields, presented in a tabular format. In a multi-aggregate crosstab query, two different functions can be applied to the same field or the same function can be applied to multiple fields on the same (row or column) axis. Rob Gravelle shows you how to apply two different functions to the same field in order to create grouping levels in the row axis."

For System Administrators

HowtoForge/Falko Timme: Installing Lighttpd With PHP5 And MySQL Support On OpenSUSE 11.2: "Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on an OpenSUSE 11.2 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support."

New/Updated Applications @ openSUSE

Packman: opensonic: "Open Sonic is a free open-source game based on the "Sonic the Hedgehog" universe.; It introduces a different style of gameplay called cooperative play, in which it's possible to control 3 characters simultaneously. Unlike most similar games, Open Sonic provides a greater level of interaction between the player and the levels. It's more than just a jump'n'run; the user must come up with some strategy in order to get through the levels."
Klaas Freitag: Kraft Document Templating System: "One of the most important objectives for Kraft is to create business documents of perfect quality. The docs are an important face to the customer and represent the business, so best is just good enough. The old times where invoices got printed on a 24 needle printer in ascii mode should finally be gone ;-); Documents should represent the ‘coorperate identity’, which in small size firms probably comes down to printed stationary with a company logo and some other information on it. Kraft has to print nicely on it. For that it is important that the layout can be configured at all and without compiling Kraft if the customer address should be printed fife millimeters higher for example."
Petr Mladek: OpenOffice_org 3.2 bugfix release available for openSUSE: "I’m happy to announce updated OpenOffice.org 3.2 packages for openSUSE. They are available in the Build Service OpenOffice:org:STABLE project and provide some useful fixes, the most critical one was the broken date editing in some locales. Please, check also the older announce for more details about OpenOffice.org 3.2 release."

Projects Corner

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

Mono Project

Miguel de Icaza: MeeGo Support in MonoDevelop: "We just landed the support on MonoDevelop's trunk to support developing applications that target MeeGo powered devices.; MeeGo is a Linux-based operating system designed to run on mobile computers, embedded systems, TVs and phones. Developers would not typically use a MeeGo device as a development platform, but as a deployment platform."

Planet SUSE

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Vincent Untz: A few words about cups-pk-helper...: "It looks like I succeeded in never promoting cups-pk-helper... Let me try to fix this so that more distributions start to look at it :-); One year and a half ago, for openSUSE 11.1, we wanted to make it easy to configure printers. So naturally, we integrated system-config-printer since it works well, is well-maintained, and is adopted by other distributions. However, the security team didn't want to make the default cups configuration too permissive (for good reasons), and it resulted in lots of root password prompts by default, which is not so cool for end-users. And we thought: So if we don't want to make the whole cups configuration permissive, maybe we could have a mechanism to have fine-grained privileges... There's this cool little project called PolicyKit that could help. This is how cups-pk-helper was born."
Ben Kevan: openSUSE 11.2 Video – eWEEK Labs: "eWEEK Labs’ Jason Brooks and Andrew Garcia discuss Novell’s latest community-oriented Linux OS, OpenSUSE 11.2, which is packed with official OpenSUSE versions of the latest and greatest of what the open-source software world has to offer. Where OpenSUSE 11.2 sets itself apart from its Linux rivals is its focus on highlighting community software contributions alongside the official distribution-provided packages. This community software focus, combined with the long time “power user” orientation of SUSE distributions, makes OpenSUSE 11.2 a very configurable–but potentially confusing–Linux-based operating system option."
Jared Ottley: Alfresco PDF Toolkit: "A few weeks ago I made my first release of what I am calling the Alfresco PDF Toolkit on Google Code.; Alfresco PDF Toolkit, or as I originally named it, pdf-extension, has been around for a while. It was originally hosted on my SVN server and in then in my Alfresco SVN Repo. It was developed as a one-off side project at the request of an early Alfresco customer. The code has been sitting around with very few updates since that time. An occasional rebuild to make sure it would work with a new release of Alfresco but that was it. (I think it was original built for 2.1 or 2.2)"

openSUSE Forums

How to make Monitor refresh 120htz: "This is still a confusing area in Linux generally as the system will often display one thing (often something low like 50) yet nvidia config will be higher. Some good tips here anyway."
News about Dolphin/Nepomuk: "A good many users will be keeping any on this. It's been a troublesome subject and a probelm in kde on and off, mostly off! Hopefully we will see some stability here."
KDE4.4.0 Rollback?: "Actually No. it turned out to be a versioning change but users might want to 'dup' that repository to get everything in sync or it looks a bit messy in software management."
File Manager - Super User Mode?: "Needless to say this is a confusing one for new users or even recent converts from kde3 who will be familiar with it in kde3 and it just works so simply."

On the Web

Announcements

Nat Friedman: Hacker Medley #3: "Alex and I released the third episode of our podcast, Hacker Medley, a couple days ago. This one covers node.js, tornado and WebSockets. Check it out!; I’m really enjoying making a podcast so far. It’s nice to be at the very beginning of a totally new learning curve. Our model is Planet Money from NPR; a short, explanatory podcast that’s edifying and hopefully not too boring but also not packed with stupid in-jokes and gossip."
The Apache Software Foundation Announces the 15th Anniversary of the Apache HTTP Web Server: "FOREST HILL, MD, 23 February, 2010 -- The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) -- developers, stewards, and incubators of 138 Open Source projects -- today announced the 15th anniversary of the Apache HTTP Web Server.; The ASF's first project became the world's most popular Web server software within the first six months of its inception. The Apache HTTP Server today powers nearly 112 million Websites world-wide."

Call for participation

Guillaume DE BURE (gdebure): A call for testers KMyMoney: "As previously blogged before, we've been working on KMyMoney and gnucash imports lately. These features are available from the SVN version. We're looking for people volunteering in testing these imports, so if you're interested in the KDE Finances group, give it a try and let us know if you have issues.; By the way, a big thanks to the KMyMoney team for giving us a file we can play with for our tests :); On a related note, I'm going to attend the KDE Finance Sprint that Alvaro blogged about:"

Reports

h-online/Thorsten Leemhuis: Kernel Log: Linux and hard disks with 4-KByte sectors: "In future, fdisk will arrange partitions in such a way that the new hard disks with 4-KByte sectors can achieve optimum performance. The developers of Realtime Linux have released new kernel versions, and the completion of 2.6.32.9 and 2.6.33 is also approaching."
Bear454: openSUSE Community: The openSUSE Ecosystem, Part 2: "On Thursday, February 4th I gave a talk for the Bellingham Linux Users Group (BLUG), 'touring' openSUSE 11.2 as a desktop OS, and giving a broad overview of the projects and community that culminates in the openSUSE Linux distribution. For those who missed it, here's part two of the written interpretation of my discussion."
Klaas Freitag: Tokamak4: "For the last seven days we were hosting the KDE Plasma Team doing their developer meeting called Tokamak4 here in at the Nuremberg offices of Novell. It was great for SUSE to see the twentyfife KDE enthusiasts hacking on one of the most important parts of the KDE software compilation.; On monday we had the pleasure of a public event with four highly interesting talks given by the Plasmas in our allhands area in Maxtorhof. Will Stephenson was sheding some light on the old days where SuSE already was hosting a sprint for KDE. I guess in that days we still called it “developer meeting”, but it was basically the same concept. It happened in an office building called Schanz which was still SuSEs but not in use these days. Will had some cool photos of well known KDE developers, partly with more hair and less bally than nowadays, hacking on KDE3. I think the meeting was in 2003, so it is great to see how many people are still around in the community.For me that was the first KDE meeting I participated, working on my scan application called Kooka. Fun."
h-online/Linux kernel 2.6.33 released: "Linux kernel 2.6.33 has been released just two and a half months after 2.6.32. Highlights include a promising open source driver for NVIDIA graphics hardware, a replication solution to prevent server down times, "ATA Trim" support and a host of new and improved drivers."

Reviews and Essays

opensource.com/Chris Grams: A handbook for the open source way, written the open source way: "Remember the Seinfeld episode where Kramer had the idea to make a coffee table book about coffee tables? I always thought that was a pretty elegant idea. Well, a few months ago, some of the smart folks on Red Hat's community architecture team had a similarly elegant idea:; Write a book about building community the open source way... and write it with a community, the open source way. Meaning, open the text up, allow interested users to contribute, and see what happens."

DesktopLinux.com/Eric Brown: OpenSUSE 11.3 hits second milestone, features KDE 4.4 desktop: "The Novell-sponsored OpenSUSE project released Milestone 2 of its OpenSUSE 11.3, featuring Linux 2.6.33, GNOME 2.3 beta, and a new network security stack. OpenSUSE 11.3 Milestone 2 also debuts the new KDE 4.4 desktop, which adds a netbook interface, plus new tabbing and social networking features.; The OpenSUSE project, which acts as the community upstream source for Novell's SUSE Linux, released Milestone 1 of version 11.3 in late January. OpenSUSE 11.3, which is scheduled for final release in July, offers upgraded versions of open source software including Linux 2.6.33, OpenOffice 3.2 Beta4, VirtualBox 3.1 beta 1, and Mono 2.6."
guardian.co.uk/Bobbie Johnson: When using open source makes you an enemy of the state: "The US copyright lobby has long argued against open source software - now Indonesia's in the firing line for encouraging the idea in government departments ..."

LOL

TechSource/jun auza: World's Funniest Computer Pictures: "World's Funniest Computer Pictures: Humor time! Since a lot of you have enjoyed our list of funny computer quotes, I decided to keep the momentum going by posting some of the world's funniest computer-related pictures. Several of the funny images that I'm going to share to you have been collected over the years and have been stored in my hard drive for as long as I can remember. So I would expect that some of you may have already seen a few of these images, but I still hope that you'll have a good time. Without any more delay, here are some of the world's funniest computer pictures: ..."

Past Events & Meetings

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Upcoming Events & Meetings

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March 2-6, 2010: CeBIT 2010

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 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:2010:005

Announcement ID: SUSE-SR:2010:005
Date: Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:00:00 +0000
Cross-References: CVE-2008-5624, CVE-2008-5625, CVE-2008-5814
CVE-2008-7248, CVE-2009-2625, CVE-2009-2626
CVE-2009-2687, CVE-2009-3546, CVE-2009-3560
CVE-2009-3602, CVE-2009-4017, CVE-2009-4142
CVE-2009-4214, CVE-2010-0283, CVE-2010-0562

Statistics

Numbers in brackets show the changes compared to the previous week.

opensuse.org

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Communication
lists.opensuse.org has 37322 (-9) non-unique subscribers to all mailing lists.
The openSUSE Forums have 42666 (+351) registered users - Most users ever online was 30559, 08-Jan-2010 at 14:06.

Contributors
4356 (+36) of 11272 (+77) 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 11112 (+181) projects, 91190 (+451) packages, 19657 (-26) repositories by 21484 (+173) confirmed users.

openFATE

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Feature statistics for openSUSE 11.3:

total: 527 (+16)
unconfirmed: 339 (+14)
new: 32 (+1)
evaluation: 80 (-2)
candidate: 2 (-1)
done: 19 (+1)
rejected: 38 (+2)
duplicate: 17 (+1)

More information on openFATE

Bugzilla

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The numbers for all openSUSE project products are this week:

All Open Reports: 4939 (-38)
Blocker: 3 (+0)
Critical: 258 (+2)
Major: 867 (-1)
Normal: 2819 (-22)
Minor: 404 (-10)
Enhancements: 588 (-7)
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 .

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Credits

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