Archive:weekly news 123

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Editors Note

Welcome to issue # 123 of openSUSE Weekly News. Now the nineteenth Week goes to the End, and we are pleased to announce our new issue.

This Week was very busy. In the next Week we have the Release of the Milestone 7. This will be the last Milestone. After that we have just the Release Canidates. I'm very happy of that.

The other Place i´m working is the new Wiki. The Reviewing Process goes on. If anyone speak the english Language, you are welcome to help out in the Reviewing Process. If you are interested, just send a Mail to opensuse-wiki@opensuse.org. But this is a closed list, you have to subscribe first.

So we're hoping, that you like the new Weekly News. We wish you many joy by reading it...

Status Updates

Distribution

Schedules for the next Week

"21st May:

   openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 7 release
   * Milestone: First localized build
   * Milestone: Localization testing starts
   * Milestone: Only major/critical/blocker bugfixes allowed."

Bugzilla

The numbers for all openSUSE project products are this week:

All Open Reports: 4909 (-10)
Blocker: 3 (+0)
Critical: 274 (-2)
Major: 901 (+2)
Normal: 2776 (-10)
Minor: 390 (+3)
Enhancements: 565 (-3)
Detailed Bugzilla Report – Submitting Bug Reports – Bug Reporting FAQ

Team Reports

Boosters Team

Standup Meeting 2010/05/10

"Much of the team was absent due to other commitments.

The wiki squad continues to make good progress.

Others are blocked by their existing responsibilities"

Build Service Team

Build Service Statistics

The Build Service now hosts 12689 (+99) projects, 93529 (+163) packages, 22101 (+119) repositories by 23108 (+118) confirmed users.

KDE Team

openSUSE KDE meeting 20100513

Minutes from the Meeting

Mono Team

Miguel de Icaza: Group Completion in MonoDevelop 2.4

"In our Beta for MonoDevelop 2.4 we introduced a new feature designed to help developers better explore a new API.

Many developers use the IDE code-completion as a way of quickly navigate and explore an API. There is no need to flip through the documentation or Google for every possible issue, they start writing code and instantiating classes and the IDE offers completion for possible methods, properties and events to use as well as small text snippets describing what each completion does as well as parameter documentation: ..."

openFATE Team

Provide an easy way to find Factory devel package with unsubmitted changes

Create Spacewalk compliance

Update to GRUB v2

update digikam

Statistics

Feature statistics for openSUSE 11.3:

total: 640 (+6)
unconfirmed: 401 (+5)
new: 14 (+0)
evaluation: 98 (+0)
candidate: 4 (+0)
done: 38 (+0)
rejected: 66 (+1)
duplicate: 19 (+0)

More information on openFATE

Testing Team

Larry Finger: Testing Team Informations

"The openSUSE Testing Core Team has been busy working with the 11.3 M6

release. Although there are a few problems, the latest version is quite usable. For example, my original tests were so encouraging that I mounted my /home partition and have been using M6 as my standard operating system.

Whatever testing that you do, please report any bugs that you find to

the openSUSE Bugzilla."

Translation Team

Guiseppe Gran: Italian Wiki home updated

"i want you to advice that i have updated the Italian Wiki's home page with the template of the English one.

http://it.opensuse.org/Benvenuto_su_openSUSE.org"

Localization

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

Wiki-Team

Sascha Manns: Move Weekly News to new Instance

"atm i´m busy with moving Weekly News to the new Instance. Now we located in http://wiki.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Weekly_News."

In the Community

Andrew Wafaa: Community Discussion - Part 7

"Yes I'm still at it, trying to get YOU the openSUSE community talking about what is important to you. This time round I'd like to hear your opinions and thoughts about something. I'm going to keep my views on the matter quiet until we get some dialogue going, so if you want to hear my thoughts (and let's face it who doesn't? ;-) ) best you start airing your opinions.

So what is the topic? That of Community Manager. As many are aware, Novell have started interviewing for a replacement. Some were not happy with how the role was done in the past and some and some were, but the key part of that statement is PAST! Let's move on and look to the future, and as part of that looking forward to the future I would like to hear what YOU would like from the new Community Manager?"

Events

Past:

Upcoming:

You can find more informations on other events at:
openSUSE News/Events – Local events

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.

From Ambassadors

Sirko Kemter: Linuxwochen Vienna

"Last week I was with Pavol Rusnak and Michal Hrusecky in Vienna at the Linuxwochen, so we “boosted” openSUSE on this event. Linuxwochen is a interesting idea there are some events in the whole country its a kind of Linux roadshow. But they are not all on the same day and if you like u can visit every event. There was events in Krems, Graz, Eisenberg and Linz. This weekend take the event place in Eisenberg. Not all events there are the same, some of them have special interests so in Linz they are on the art akedemy and they are concentrated to doing artwork with free software. There is 4 days long every day a workshop for it. The organizers called me last year and asked if I can make one of them."

Pavol Rusnak: LinuxWochen Vienna 2010

"From Thursday to Saturday there was an event in Vienna held as a part of longer Austrian tour called LinuxWochen. This opportunity could not have been missed by openSUSE, so we formed a team consisting of me, Michal and Sirko.

All three days were packed with more than 70 talks and workshops. We had a stand directly next to Fedora’s one, handled by Fabian and Zoltan, so we also had an opportunity to talk about our distros and also to make fun about each other. :-)"

openSUSE in $COUNTRY

"Details"

Communication

lists.opensuse.org has 37224 (-39) non-unique subscribers to all mailing lists.
The openSUSE Forums have 45683 (+241) registered users - Most users ever online was 30559, 08-Jan-2010 at 13:06.

Contributors

4634 (+19) of 11948 (+44) registered contributors in the User Directory have signed the Guiding Principles. The board has acknowledged 395 members.

New/Updated Applications @ openSUSE

Dominique Leuenberger: Network Manager 0.8.1 Beta 1

"Many of you have eagerly been awaiting the release of NetworkManager 0.8.1. Well, it’s not completely done yet, but a first beta release just hit the mirrors about 12 hours ago.

I’m proud to announce that there are already packages for openSUSE available thanks to our great openSUSE Build Service. Packages exist currently for openSUSE 11.2 and openSUSE Factory.

A warning first: I did not even install the packages yet! So they might or might not work at all."

Packman: Miro 3.0.1-1.pm.1.5 (openSUSE 11.2/x86_64)

"Miro is a free application that turns your computer into an internet TV video player.

It's a free, open source Internet TV and video player that can automatically download videos from RSS-based channels. Features a built-in BitTorrent client."

Packman: decibel-audio-player 1.04-2.pm.2.1 (openSUSE 11.2/x86_64)

"Decibel Audio Player is a GTK+ open-source (GPL license) audio player designed for GNU/Linux, which aims at being very straightforward to use by mean of a very clean and user friendly interface. It is especially targeted at Gnome and will follow as closely as possible the Gnome HIG."

You can find other interesting Packages at:
Packman – OBS

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:2010:011

Announcement ID: SUSE-SR:2010:011
Date: Mon, 10 May 2010 14:00:00 +0000
Cross-References: CVE-2008-7247, CVE-2009-0547, CVE-2009-1955
CVE-2009-2412, CVE-2009-2625, CVE-2009-3297
CVE-2009-3555, CVE-2009-3560, CVE-2009-3720
CVE-2009-3995, CVE-2009-3996, CVE-2009-4019
CVE-2009-4028, CVE-2009-4030, CVE-2010-0082
CVE-2010-0084, CVE-2010-0085, CVE-2010-0088
CVE-2010-0091, CVE-2010-0092, CVE-2010-0093
CVE-2010-0094, CVE-2010-0095, CVE-2010-0205
CVE-2010-0624, CVE-2010-0745, CVE-2010-0789
CVE-2010-0837, CVE-2010-0838, CVE-2010-0840
CVE-2010-0845, CVE-2010-0847, CVE-2010-0848
CVE-2010-1155, CVE-2010-1156, CVE-2010-1192
CVE-2010-1194, CVE-2010-1431, CVE-2010-1613
CVE-2010-1614, CVE-2010-1615, CVE-2010-1616
CVE-2010-1617, CVE-2010-1618, CVE-2010-1619

SUSE Security Announcement: Linux kernel (SUSE-SA:2010:023)

Package: kernel
Announcement ID: SUSE-SA:2010:023
Date: Thu, 06 May 2010 13:00:00 +0000
Affected Products: SLE SDK 10 SP2
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 SP2
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP2
Vulnerability Type: remote denial of service
CVSS v2 Base Score: 7.8 (AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:C)

Kernel Review

h-online/Thorsten Leemhuis: Kernel Log: New stable kernels and drivers

"While new stable kernel releases seem to have become somewhat less frequent, they now include more changes. Although the most recent version of AMD's proprietary graphics drivers finally work with X Server 1.7, NVIDIA's drivers already work with version 1.8. Videos of the Linux Audio Conference and the Collaboration Summit provide insights into audio and kernel topics..."

h-online/Thorsten Leemhuis: Kernel Log: Coming in 2.6.34 (Part 4) - Architecture and virtualisation

"Faster suspend and resume, better utilisation of power saving mechanisms for I/O devices and a range of performance enhancements are just some of the kernel infrastructure changes in Linux 2.6.34."

h-online/Thorsten Leemhuis:Kernel Log: Coming in 2.6.34 (Part 5) - Drivers

"In his release email for Linux 2.6.34-rc7 last weekend, Linus Torvalds indicated that version 2.6.34 of the Linux kernel will be released soon. The following article describes the advancements in terms of drivers and their infrastructure and concludes our "Coming in 2.6.34" mini series about the most important new features of Linux 2.6.34. The most important changes in the areas of network support, file systems, storage subsystem, graphics hardware and architecture as well as virtualisation were discussed in parts one, two, three and four of the series, along with the drivers associated with these kernel areas."

Rares Aioanei – Kernel News with openSUSE Flavor

"Greetings, and welcome!

-Starting this week’s news, The H Online have , since the 24th of March, a series of articles titled “What’s new in 2.6.34″. You can find it here: http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Linux-Kernel-2-6-34-tracking-962586.html

-Frederic Weisbecker posted perf fixes for 2.6.34, James Bottomley came up with SCSI fixes for -rc6, Paul E. McKenney had some RCU fixes for 2.6.35; perf fixes came also from Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo. (...)"

Tips and Tricks

For Desktop Users

Petr Baudis: pulseaudio – quick’n'dirty playback over the network

"The joyful lives of many Linux desktop users are clouded by many packages and frameworks that are well-intentioned and try to solve real and painful problems, but which are immature, not designed in the UNIX spirit, poorly documented and most importantly, do not really have a working implementation. Oh well. I have taken the stance of patience and ascetic acceptance of the new burdens – instead of trying to purge my systems of all that is unholy and evil, I spend that time trying to debug and fix up the problems they incur (often in vain). Sometimes I even file bugs, but that can be rather… unrewarding experience – more about that at another time."

For Commandline/Script Newbies

The Geek Stuff/Sasikala: Bash Positional Parameters Explained with 2 Example Shell Scripts

"A parameter is an entity that stores values. It can be a name, a number or some special characters. A variable is a parameter denoted by a name. Some variables are set for you already, and most of these cannot have values assigned to them.

These variables contain useful information, which can be used by a shell script to know about the environment in which it is running."

Gabriel Stein: Problems with Grub?

"Well, I posted a tutorial about clones, and who never forget some steps making a clone? After the end of the cloning process, grub just say “no way” for you. Important: just for cases which grub its installed on MBR.

There are many websites talking about specific errors, but I will give some hints which helped me sometimes.

Frequent Error: its the “Error 2″ on the stage 1.5 of grub loading. When this error occurs, please check your HDD configuration on FSTAB and MTAB. Normally when we change some old machines which use PATA HDDs to new SATA HDDs, Grub get confused with these devices. After check FSTAB(/etc/fstab) and MTAB(/etc/mtab) after a successful clone process, please pay attention on file device.map, usually at /boot/grub."

For Developers and Programmers

Tuxradar: Python + PyGTK + WebKit in 20 minutes

"In season 2 episode 7 of our podcast we laid down the simple challenge for each of the four podcasters - Andrew, Graham, Paul and Mike - to produce something original for the website. Paul - eager to show the world how much he, er, loves Python - has now finished his entry, and you'll find it below: a video talking you through how to get started with Python, PyGTK and WebKit. It's easier than you think!"

For System Administrators

Jiří Suchomel: Your own OEM configuration: YaST Firstboot

"Have you ever thought how users should configure their systems, deployed by AutoYaST or kiwi? One of possible answers is called YaST Firstboot.

The YaST firstboot utility is a special kind of configuration workflow that can be run after the basic system is installed. It is started on the first boot of the system and guides a user through a series of steps that allow for easier configuration of their desktops. YaST firstboot does not run by default and has to be configured to run by the user or the system administrator. It is useful for image deployments where the system in the image is already configured (read: AutoYaST, SUSE_Studio, KIWI), and end-user should do only the last few steps, like setting the root password."

Planet SUSE

Duncan Mac-Vicar: openSUSE as a ruby development platform

"In this post I would like to show what openSUSE has to offer to ruby enthusiasts.

The latest openSUSE version ships with ruby 1.8.7, rubygems 1.3.1 and rails 2.3.2. The latest two being not so recent, here is where the openSUSE project shines. Say hello to devel:languages:ruby and devel:languages:ruby:extensions build service projects.

The first is a project containing a more recent 1.87 ruby (p249 vs p72 in 11.2). However, as a build service project, it is built on top of multiple targets so you can add this repository not only to 11.2 but also to SLE and older openSUSE releases."

Andrea Florio: Lugaru is opensource – Lugaru is on packman

"Just a shot, Lugaru HD has been released as opensource, we can build and give it to all of you…

well.. done :D

i just packaged it, so just wait for servers to sync"

openSUSE Forums

openSUSE Super Laggy all of a sudden!

"Ideally you openSUSE installation should be snappy and responsive. Various reasons can be behind slowness and currently this thread seems to be heading in the graphics card direction. You guessed it 'ATI'"

openSUSE and Parted don't recognize my HD

"This has to be a perfect example of what you don't want to see. Typically we are seeing more of this because windows 7, is in many cases being shipped out by vendors with all the primary partitions already allocated. Sigh!"

Bouncing Icon - Program does not start!

"This possibly confuses new users as seems to be the case here. Needless to say, with a little advice from some of our regulars, things become clearer."

Amarok Crashing

"I'll be interested to see how this one turns out because so far at least, the usual fix routes have not worked. What's even more puzzling is that stuff like this never happens to me. Same with many issues posted in the forum."

On the Web

Announcements

Wine Reviews: Bordeaux 2.0.4 for Linux Released

"The Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 2.0.4 for Linux today. Bordeaux 2.0.4 is a maintenance release that fixes a number of small bugs. With this release we have changed the Bordeux UI from a GTKDialog to a GTKWindow, the "OK" button has also been re-named to "Install". We have upgraded our Wine bundle from 1.1.36 to 1.1.41, updated to the latest winetricks release, added support for the new Steam UI, and changed the progress bar back to Zenity."

Reports

Techsource/Jun Auza: 8 Best Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games (MMORPG) for Linux

"Massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) is a kind of computer role-playing games (RPG) that takes place in an online virtual world where a huge number of players interact with each other. Like in role-playing games, each player handles the role of a fictional character represented by an avatar and take control over many of that character's actions. MMORPG players utilizes a client to connect to a server that is typically run by the game publisher, which hosts the virtual world and stores or saves information about the player."

Linux Magazine/Dmitri Popov: Keep Your System Clean with BleachBit

"Keeping your system clean can be a time-consuming affair, unless you use specialized tools like BleachBit (thanks to Nick Lord for the pointer). With just a few mouse clicks, this nifty little utility can help you to purge all the junk produced by the system and installed applications. Packaged versions of BleachBit are available for many popular distributions, so you can easily install the utility using your distro's package manager. Once installed, you can run BleachBit either as a regular user or as root." Editors Note: bleachbit is available in openSUSE:Factory:Contrib Repository.

Datamation/Thor Olavsrud: Cloud Computing

"Cloud computing is a method of provisioning computing resources, including both hardware and software, that relies on sharing those resources rather than using local servers or personal devices to handle applications."

Thomas McGuire: Akonadi Meeting and the KDE SC 4.5 release

"We are at the Akonadi meeting at the KDAB offices in Berlin right now, which was quite nice so far. We had the first round of API review of new methods in KDEPIMLIBS for 4.5, and already cleaned up quite a bit. Having multiple eyes look at the API is a nice way to improve the overall quality of the API. We met with Andrey Moiseenko and Alvaro Manera of Nokia, who work on calendaring for the next Meego phone from Nokia. They use our KCal library, which they have forked/extended for some special requirements they have. We’re now making plans with them to integrate their changes back to our version of KCal, so that both sides will profit from changes and have a single point of maintenance"

Linux Gaming News/Maxim Bardin: Heroes Of Newerth Gone Retail !

"Today the DOTA mod remake Heroes Of Newerth from S2games has gone retail !

S2Games made GNU/Linux clients for their Savage series and HoN is no exception ! It runs pretty good on GNU/Linux and offer a native 64-bit client.

Although the Savage series is free to play (with an option to buy premium stuff) HoN will require one fee of $30 in order to play. (SEA residents can still play for free at the moment).

For an online game one payment for life is not much at all, some online games demand a monthly payment."

Reviews and Essays

Computerworld/Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: Running Windows games on Linux gets easier

"One constant complaint about the Linux desktop is that it doesn't have enough games. That's actually not true. Linux has plenty of games. What these people usually mean is that it doesn't have their favorite Windows games. Now that's changing."

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 at http://news.opensuse.org/category/weekly-news/?feed=rss2

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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