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Editors Note

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Welcome to issue # 116 of openSUSE Weekly News. This twelveth Week of this year was very interesting. We've made a Call for Participation in translating our Weekly News into other Languages. And we've got many Feedback. So we're saying "Thanks for all". From the Weekly News Front we're discussing at the Moment on opensuse-marketing about the future of the Weekly News. Feel free to add your ideas on http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Weekly_News/Brainstorming, and help us to grow up.
So we wish all Readers an nice weekend, and many joy by reading the News.


Announcements

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openSUSE News: Planet SUSE Status

"Planet SUSE aggregates blog posts from the SUSE Linux universum, including openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise. It aggregates not only English blog posts but also as separate feeds German, Spanish, Polish, and Portuguese posts.
Planet SUSE has been unavailable for the last days due to some problems while renewing the domain. We have therefore setup an alternative DNS entry for the server under the openSUSE domain, you can reach the planet now as planet.openSUSE.org. The alternative name will stay, so feel free to change your bookmarks permantelty to it."

openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 4 Release

"The fourth of seven scheduled milestone releases for 11.3 was completed and released on schedule. Milestone 4 focuses on switching to upstart as init daemon.
Here’s what you may find interesting in the new release:
* OpenOffice.Org has been updated to 3.2.1 Beta1 with new features
* NetworkManager has been updated to version 0.8 with fixes to better support bluetooth and GSM.
* cups has been updated to version 1.4.2, it “adds over 67 changes and new features to CUPS 1.3.11, including improved Bonjour/DNS-SD support, supply level and status reporting for network printers via SNMP, an improved web interface, and the CUPS DDK tools.”
* The conntrack – network filtering system has been added. These are userspace tools that allow system administrators interact with the Connection Tracking System, which is the module that provides stateful packet inspection for iptables.
* The Mono stack has been updated to the bug fix release 2.6.3 together with MonoDevelop 2.2.2.
* Python was updated to the bug fix release 2.6.5 RC 2
* samba has been updated to version 3.5.1
* The Moblin team has started with the integration of the Moblin UI into the distribution and plan to have everything ready for the next milestone.
* The LiveCDs have virtualbox guest tools. Now features like screen resizing, seamless mode, and shared clipboards work fine and automatically after boot-up! Check this (~8,5MB) ogv video to see the guest addition features in action."


Status Updates

Build Service

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Build Team Meeting

Team Meeting Minutes

Pavol Rusnak: zypper – dependency graph

"Yesterday, we needed with darix to obtain a dependency graph of the package you are about to install. I knew that something similar was planned in zypper, so I went to Jano Kupec to check the status of it. Unfortunately, I learned that this feature is not implemented yet. I think it should not be very hard to enhance the zypper package list with some eye-candy, but I haven’t looked into it yet. I would love to have these outputs similar to Gentoo ones (colors and simple ASCII art dependency trees). Btw, zypper already has color support, so if you want to start hacking, there is source code in gitorious."


Wiki / Communication / Events

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Andreas Jaeger: FOSSCOMM 2010 in Thessaloniki, Greece

"This year, during the weekend of the 24th and 25th of April 2010, the city of Thessaloniki will be hosting one of the biggest Greek conferences of free and open source software (FOSSCOMM 2010). Communities as well as companies that develop open source code will participate. After the previous two successful fosscomm events in Athens and Larisa, to which more than 300 people attended, Thessaloniki’s turn has come! Those attending the conference are given the opportunity to become more informed about open source in general as well as exchange ideas with communities and companies in the open source world. Moreover, the event is a great opportunity for people to get to know open source software which can particularly help them with everyday as well as professional needs they might have. As always, the organization of the conference is based on volunteers and totally depends on sponsors. In addition entrance is free of charge for everyone throughout the event! There will be several booths, one of which will be dedicated to openSUSE Linux so that participants will be able to get cds/dvds and get informed about our beloved distro."

Nikanth Karthikesan: Back from National Free Software Conference - 2010

"I, along with Chen, the Maintainer of Gnome Evolution project gave a talk in National Free Software Conference - 2010, Bangalore. Our talk was titled "Developing a Free software, Inside story"
I talked about who all are developing Linux Kernel, and how one can get started etc... Then Chen talked from his perspective. It was an inspiring speech, even I felt greatly motivated by him. He started with how he was excited, when he made changes to the software he used and showed it to his friends when he was new to open-source. Later he talked about Gnome and Evolution community. In the end he had lot of fans around him, and it took him nearly an hour to leave the hall after the talk!"

Bryen Yunashko: GNOME A11y Hackfest and CSUN Conference 2010

"It’s Friday night, and as usual, I’ve waited until the last minute to get ready and packed for a two week trip to California. This promises to be one BUSY two weeks for me. In other words, I haven’t left home yet, and already I’m looking forward to the rest when I get home!  :-) Like I said, there’s lots to do. What’s going on?
Well, in terms of FOSS, we’re flying in from all points of the world, as far away as Italy and China to participate in the GNOME A11y team’s hackfest in San Diego, CA on Tuesday, March 23rd. You can see the full details here on our team wiki pages, but in a nutshell we’re going to spend part of the day in a phone conference with the good folks of AEGIS in Europe led by Peter Korn from Oracle."

Thomas Biege: Being in Prague for a "Secure Development" Training

"This is our last day in Prague. My wife, Marcus and I traveled to Prague on Monday to meet our colleagues and for holding a lecture about secure application design and secure coding in Ruby on Rails."


Tips and Tricks

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For Desktop Users

Packt/Bethany Hiitola: Recording an Interview with Skype using Audacity 1.3

"In a previous article we described everything that you need to know about recording voice tracks. In this article by Bethany Hiitola, author of Getting started with Audacity 1.3, we will learn all the details of using third-party internet telephony software such as Skype to record telephone interviews. We will also cover how to set up a timed recording."

For Commandline/Script Newbies

Alex Barrios: Solving typical problems of BCM4312 802.11b/g

"The problem 1: I have a new Broadcom Wireless that doesn’t work with the driver B43, even when I download the firmware.
The problem 2: I don’t wanna use the Broadcom WL driver because its buggy, closed source, and doesn’t support aircrack.
The solution: After a while working with this solution, i must say that the wireless range its improve and everything else working perfectly."

Linux Magazine/Jerry Peek: There’s a Lot in the Dot: Filesystem Permissions and Pathnames (Part 1)

"Linux filesystem permissions and pathnames can cause lots of confusion. Users type long pathnames when a short one would do as well, and set wide-open access permissios when a more-secure setting would be easy if the concepts were more clear.
This article and the next take a unique approach: understanding the dot (.) that you’ve probably seen in directory listings."
Part 2

Dedoimedo: Linux cool hacks - Part II

"Time for the second article of highly useful, cool and fun utilities, commands, and tricks that should help you gain better productivity and understand your system better. In the first part, we learned about a whole bunch of great things, including top in batch mode, how to read process account logs, how to measure system activity with a range of programs, and how to write a simple UDP server-client.
Now, let's see a few more tricks that will help you master a higher, cooler level of Linux knowledge and allow you to impress you significant others, including your boss."

For Developers and Programmers

Andreas Jaeger: How to Add New Packages to the openSUSE Distribution

"I’ve added a new package (grub2) to the openSUSE distribution and like to share with you what needs to be done for it, I’m using the package “grub2″ as example. To get a package in the distribution, it needs to be in the openSUSE:Factory project in the openSUSE Build Service."

For System Administrators

Linux Magazine/Ken Hess: Five Easy Ways to Secure Your Linux System

"On the heels of last week’s entry on using DenyHosts, and Nikto the week before that; I thought it appropriate to continue in the security vein with five more simple techniques that you can use to protect your systems. These include using account locking, limiting cron use, using DENY access to services, refusing root SSH logins and changing SSHD’s default port."

TechRepublic/Vincent Danen: Replace a failed drive in Linux RAID

"A few weeks ago I had the distinct displeasure of waking up to a series of emails indicating that a series of RAID arrays on a remote system had degraded. The remote system was still running, but one of the hard drives was pretty much dead.
Upon logging in, it was found that four out of six RAID devices for a particular drive match were running in degraded mode: four partitions of the /dev/sdf device had failed; the two operational partitions still working were the /boot and swap partitions (the system is running three RAID1 mirrored drives; a total of six physical drives)."

Linux Journal/Mitch Frazier: Use ssh_config To Simplify Your Life

"When using multiple systems the indispensable tool is, as we all know, ssh. Using ssh you can login to other (remote) systems and work with them as if you were sitting in front of them. Even if some of your systems exist behind firewalls you can still get to them with ssh, but getting there can end up requiring a number of command line options and the more systems you have the more difficult it gets to remember them. However, you don't have to remember them, at least not more than once: you can just enter them into ssh's config file and be done with it."

Novell Cool Solutions: XEN live migration over encrypted connection (ssh tunnel)

"As XEN only has limited authorization capability for its live migration and all the communication is unencrypted, this solution shows how to set up live migration over an ssh tunnel."


New/Updated Applications @ openSUSE

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Packman: k3b 1.91.0_rc2

"K3b is a CD burning application that supports Ogg Vorbis, MP3 audio files, DVD burning, CDDB, and much more."

Packman: kmymoney4 3.96.1

"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."

Packman: FreeCAD 0.9.2646

"FreeCAD will be a general purpose 3D CAD modeler. The development will be completely Open Source. As with many modern 3D CAD modelers it will have a 2D component in order to extract design detail from the 3D model to create 2D production drawings, although 2D (e.g. AutoCAD LT) is not the focus, neither are animation and organic shapes (e.g. Maya, 3D StudioMAX and Cinema 4D)."
  • You can find other interesting Packages at:
  • Packman – OBS


Projects Corner

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

Education Project

openSUSE Education Li-f-e Update

"The openSUSE Education team is happy to announce the availability of the updated openSUSE Education Li-f-e DVD iso. The Linux for Education (Li-f-e) contains a wide selection of education, development, office, as well as multimedia packs to meet all possible computing needs of students, teachers and parents."

Mono Project

Miguel de Icaza: Microsoft and .NET

"It seems that David's article on Windows strategy tax on .NET lacked enough context for my actual quotes in there.
When David contacted me, he was writing a piece on the evolution of .NET and since he was speaking to Microsoft, he wanted to get feedback from other people on what we thought Microsoft got right and what they got wrong. This is how my email to David started:

Well, I am a bit of a fan of large portions of .NET, so I might not be entirely objective. You might want to also get some feedback from a sworn enemy of Microsoft, but you should get at least the statements from a sworn enemy that has tried .NET, as opposed to most people that have strong opinions but have never used it.

David said: Given your familiarity with the framework, are there any iterative changes that you find questionable or you feel require some explanation?

There are certain areas that I do not quite like about .NET, they are not major issues as they can be either worked around or ignored (to some extent), but here are some."


Planet SUSE

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Kohei Yoshida: The book has arrived!

"This is the 2nd edition of the classic Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment book. I’m a happy owner of the 1st edition, and ever since the 2nd edition was published I had the urge to go ahead and order a copy. I had been fighting off that urge, but last week I had finally given up fighting and decided to place an order.
The 1st edition truly opened up my eyes on the power of UNIX programming. Like the 1st edition, I am looking forward to discovering what this book offers, and how the UNIX system (most notably Linux) has evolved since the 1st edition was published."

Andrew Wafaa: Blogged about: Community Discussion - Part 2

"t's been a couple of weeks since my first Discussion with the Community, so as a follow on I thought I would cover the topic of Tools for the community. In my mind I split tools into two groups - hard & soft. What I mean by this is "hard" = infrastructure based, and "soft" = software based.
Some may seem pretty obvious to you, and some may seem like they aren't tools at all. So to clarify what my definition of a tool is - something that enables or facilitates the completion of a task. So that gives the "Tool" a pretty big scope :-)"

Francis Giannaros: Iris Recognition Project: Success with Qt

"So we just managed to finish our group software project (as part of my course), which I have to say was extremely interesting from start to finish. It was essentially a small project on creating an iris recognition application.
The final application could read in an 8-bit greyscale image (as iris recognition devices usually take infra-red greyscale pictures), make an attempt at auto-detecting the pupil, iris and eyelids. Then it will encode the iris into a database, and allow you to compare other irides to it in the future."


openSUSE Forums

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Dual Booting Windows 7

"There are still many users booting like this and there are some sensible questions in this thread. Certainly worthy of note anyway and it may prove helpful to others, particularly in view of pending Service Packs for W7 which could be a problem for some users."

Broadcom Wireless issue

"An interesting thread because there are some changes in the pipeline as newer kernel bring support directly. If you have broadcom wireless it might be worth a read."

A New Install

"A new user seeks a little help in the forum and gets put on the right track. Hope it continues going well for them."

11.3 Milestone 4 Results

"Comments and feedback on the latest Milestone release of openSUSE's development version. I'm personally using this and find it to be very steady once installed. Read about here anyway and consider testing yourself."


On the Web

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Announcements

Technical Preview of PySide-Shiboken

"Today we got the Shiboken generated PySide bindings in a good enough shape to do a proper release with tarballs and all the required niceties, instead of rough git urls. Keep in mind that this is an alfa release, or a "technical preview" as the kids in my lawn are used to say, some modules are missing and bugs are not hard to find."

Linux Foundation Announces 2010 Linux.com Linux Gurus

"SAN FRANCISCO, March 23, 2010 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced the Top Five 2010 Linux.com Linux Gurus, including the Ultimate Linux Guru who is the Linux.com member who accumulated the most contribution and participation points over the last year."

Free Software Awards Announced

"BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA -- March 23, 2010 -- The Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced the winners of the annual free software awards at a ceremony on Saturday March 20, held during the LibrePlanet conference at Harvard Science Center in Cambridge, MA.
The award for the Advancement of Free Software was won by John Gilmore. The award for Project of Social Benefit was won by the Internet Archive. The awards were presented by FSF president and founder Richard M. Stallman."

Reports

Miguel de Icaza: OData Client goes Open Source

"Microsoft is trying to succeed where web services failed before with their new Open Data Protocol (oData).
A few years ago, I had an epiphany when listening to Don Box talk about data services and web services. Web services and web sites are merely public facades to your internal databases. Web sites expose your database rendered as HTML while web services expose them in some sort of data format, defined on a case-by-case basis.
With Web Services, developers need to define what bits of information should be exposed and how it is exposed (this applies to both SOAP and REST-based services). The problem is that developers might not have the time to spend on exposing every possible bit of interesting information that you maintain in your databases. Most importantly, there are very few web services that provide server-side queries making the information harder to mine."

h-online/Thorsten Leemhuis: Kernel Log: Ceph file system in 2.6.34, kernel and KVM presentations at the CLT2010

"Linus Torvalds has integrated the Ceph distributed network file system and released the second release candidate of 2.6.34. Slides of the presentations at the Chemnitz Linux Days provide background information about kernel and KVM topics. Ubuntu has been given an AMD graphics driver which cooperates with series 1.7 X Servers"

h-online/Dj Walker-Morgan: OpenSUSE gets an Upstart

"The openSUSE developers have released the fourth milestone of openSUSE 11.3. The most important development in this release is the shift from booting with the traditional System V init scheme to the newer Upstart system. Many other distributions, including Ubuntu and Fedora, use Upstart by default, or as with Debian, can be easily switched to using it. For more information about Upstart, see The H feature Faster booting with Upstart."

Focus: 50 Places Linux is Running That You Might Not Expect

"It was not long ago when Microsoft Windows had a tight stranglehold on the operating system market. Walk into a Circuit City or Staples, it seemed, and virtually any computer you took home would be running the most current flavor of Windows. Ditto for computers ordered direct from a manufacturer. In the last decade, though, the operating system market has begun to change. Slightly more than 5% of all computers now run Mac, according to NetMarketShare.com. Linux is hovering just beneath 1% of the overall market share in operating systems. And although that might sound like a small number, Linux is far more than just a fringe OS. In fact, it's running in quite a few more places than you probably suspect. Below are fifty places Linux is running today in place of Windows or Mac. For easy reading, they are divided amongst government, home, business, and educational usage."

Reviews and Essays

Shane Fagan: Linux Game Review

"Ok since I made my last post about my search for some good native games I went looking BTW im excluding FPS games because they are all awesome (Nexuiz is my fav though) :)"

OStatic/Joe Brockmeier: More Bad English, Please

"I'd like to see more bad English on mailing lists, and fewer apologies from non-native speakers about their poor English skills. There's nothing to be ashamed of in trying to communicate in a second, third, or fourth language and not being an expert. And it'd be a shame if non-native speakers let fear or embarrassment hold them back from making a vital contribution or asking a question that could help them succeed in contributing or using FLOSS tools."

Computerworld/Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: Now what, Novell?

"There's nothing like starting a technical conference, like Novell's BrainShare, off with a bang. Or, in this case telling Elliot Associates' unwelcome offer of not quite $2-billion for the company that Novell has no interest in selling out, not for that little anyway.
I think this was a smart move by Novell's management. I think if Elliot Associates were to buy Novell it would end up killing the company and its Linux distributions: SUSE Linux and openSUSE."

Novell Cool Solutions/Ian Roughley: Novell Pulse and Google Wave: Demonstrating Inter-company Collaboration

"For Novell Pulse, it was a pretty easy decision to adopt the Google Wave Federation Protocol. For many months before Google Wave was announced to the world, we had been working on solving exactly the same problems: how to collaborate instantly and on-demand; how to make collaboration easier for groups; how to expedite document workflow; and how to do it all in real-time. We had also come to many of the same conclusions, and if you look at the products side-by-side you can see this reflected through the interfaces. Not exactly, but certainly the big decisions."

Warning!

h-online/Chris von Eitzen: Firefox 3.6.2 closes critical security hole

"The Mozilla Foundation has released version 3.6.2 of its open source Firefox web browser. The developers say that, in addition to other holes, the most important vulnerability closed in Firefox 3.6.2 is a critical hole known since February, although details of this hole only became available recently. The new version of Firefox was originally scheduled for release on the 30th of March, but the developers have now brought forward its completion – partly because security firm Secunia rated the hole highly critical."


Past Events & Meetings

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Upcoming Events & Meetings

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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:2010:018)

  • Package: kernel
  • Announcement ID: SUSE-SA:2010:018
  • Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2010 16:00:00 +0000
  • Affected Products: openSUSE 11.2
  • Vulnerability Type: local privilege escalation, local information disclosure
  • CVSS v2 Base Score: 4.9 (AV:L/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:C)


Statistics

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

opensuse.org

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Communication
lists.opensuse.org has 37268 (-12) non-unique subscribers to all mailing lists.
The openSUSE Forums have 43937 (+275) registered users - Most users ever online was 30559, 08-Jan-2010 at 13:06.

Contributors
4459 (+22) of 11535 (+49) 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 11723 (+149) projects, 92875 (+879) packages, 20840 (+287) repositories by 22132 (+153) confirmed users.


openFATE

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Feature statistics for openSUSE 11.3:

  • total: 573 (+10)
  • unconfirmed: 349 (+6)
  • new: 10 (+0)
  • evaluation: 98 (+0)
  • candidate: 4 (+0)
  • done: 31 (+3)
  • rejected: 62 (+1)
  • duplicate: 19 (+0)
More information on openFATE


Bugzilla

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The numbers for all openSUSE project products are this week:


Localization

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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

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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

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Translations

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