Archive:Weekly news 140

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Editors Note

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We are pleased to announce our 140 issue of the openSUSE Weekly News.
We hope that you will enjoy reading.


Announcements

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openSUSE News: SUSE Studio Contest – you have until the end of this month!

"For those who didn’t know yet, about two weeks ago Novell introduced SUSE Gallery.com where you can submit your SUSE Studio Appliances for the world to see and download. Over the last year, the 400.000 appliances have have already been downloaded 3 million times and now they are available from the Gallery that number will surely skyrocket.
Together with the launch Novell started a contest with a grand prize of $10.000! Creative minds have until the end of this month to submit their crazy/cool/unique/useful appliance to SUSE Gallery.com and enter the contest. So those looking for Fame and Fortune, enter your software appliance into “The Disters” contest and see how you stack up to the rest!"

New Search for openSUSE Wiki

"Here is the news that a lot of you have been waiting for! The new wikis (en.opensuse.org, languages.opensuse.org, and dewiki.opensuse.org) have been switched to the new Lucene search engine. The legacy wikis are still running the old search, but they will start using Lucene as they are migrated to the new wiki system. So what should users expect with the new search?"


Status Updates

Distribution

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Status: Distribution

"The update to latest qt, kde and python at the same time was a bit too much, but the FTP tree building atm should have it all, in any case watch out for problems when you DUP.
Next step is kernel 2.6.36-rc3 and a new round of Xorg updates (including xeyes 1.1!)"

SUSE Studio: Import KIWI and AutoYaST configurations easily

"SUSE Studio offers nice user interface for configuring software appliances with many options. But what if you already had a configuration ready — for example a carefully tuned AutoYaST profile which your company uses for installing workstations? Or a KIWI configuration of your appliance exported from Studio (so that you could build that appliance on your machine) which you modified locally? Until now, there was no easy way how to apply it in Studio."

SUSE Studio: Featured appliance - BrowserBox

"This week's featured appliance is BrowserBox created by Jacob. It is a great appliance for web developers and people who need to test websites in different browsers."


Bugzilla

Important links:


Team Reports

Build Service Team

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Build Team Meeting

Meetingminutes

Nelson Marques: OBS: the final frontier…

"From a small chit chat on IRC the other day with Bryen and Sirko somehow I ended up with the task to providing an article about openSUSE Build Service. I have to say Sirko is awesome in Guerrilla Marketing, a cool proof could be the way how he got me into this. Anyway… though I’m not a journalist, every article should start with some basic research…"

Build Service Statistics

The Build Service Statistics can found at http://build.opensuse.org.


KDE Team

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KDE at openSUSE: KDE: Week 33-39

"Nepomuk+strigi as desktop search
In the last weeks I – once again – got fed-up with strigi/nepomuk being of no use to me. Since KDE 4.0 I long for a desktop search, i.e. some way of finding files and getting a result list such as google etc. has it, i.e. including some context around the string found in the document and not just a file list. Anything else would just be a faster version of kfind for that task. And since I do not use tags, it is the only desktop search task for me.
So the first thing why it did not work for me was that strigi+nepomuk never finished to index my files because strigi 0.7.2 crashes while it indexes several filetypes such as email, flac or rpms. Having a look at strigi’s website the project seemed dead. No news since 2008. This is a depressing first impression. Having a look at the SF project page continues with this, i.e. the latest available tarball is version 0.6.4 and the docs point to KDE’s playground svn repo if one wants to get strigi. The latter obviously fails because strigi is part of kdesupport."


Mono Team

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Miguel de Icaza: Great News for MonoTouch Users

"Apple has removed the restrictions that were introduced earlier this year (the famous section 3.3.1).
Although Apple had not blocked any MonoTouch applications since the new rules were introduced, many developers either took a wait-and-see approach, or switched their development. We never stopped working on MonoTouch, just yesterday we released MonoTouch support for the new iOS 4.1 APIs. We did this within eight hours of the new operating system going public."

Andrés G. Aragoneses: Version Tolerant Serialization with Mono

"During the last months I've kept working (with/on) Mono, but not working for Novell anymore.
Today I'm proud to blog about a bit of work I've done on Mono towards a better Binary Serialization experience:
* mono-api-info command now can output ABI instead of API if you append the flag --abi. It has been useful for us in LindenLab while working on binary serialization compatibility between versions (already upstream!, so will be available in Mono v2.8, even with a new man page).
If you ever wondered why your .NET code is no longer capable of deserializing some old binary object you had in your servers, instead of fixing the problem in a case-by-case basis, you can now see the whole picture by just diffing the output of mono-api-info --abi from your current and old codebase! A small TODO that I haven't completed yet is to deal with automatic properties (because we still don't use them) so that would be an exercise for the reader!
* Fix for upstream Mono to act as .NET in regards to Version Tolerant Serialization, a patch to which I have just added a lot more unit tests (soon to be pushed hopefully)."


openFATE Team

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#310487: provide a static build zypper

"Please provide a static build zypper for download in case a distribution upgrade failed."

#310490: Develop and add a GTK smolt client to openSUSE

"Smolt is a project that is picking stats about openSUSE installs. Currently smolt-gui developed upstream is written in Qt and it difficult to add this client to GNOME installation of openSUSE. So it's required to have a GNOME integration to ship on the default install.
It's important to have a GTK client similar to smolt-gui and ksmolt (which is the notification service launched on KDE)."

#310491: Add dracut to openSUSE

"Dracut is suppose to be a replacement for the old initrd tools like mkinitrd.
From the project description, dracut is an initramfs infrastructure. Unlike previous initramfs systems, Dracut aims to have as little as possible hard-coded into the initramfs.
It contains specific configuration files for init drivers and includes plymouth support. Dracut advantage seems to be a modern replacement to generate initrd and it's suppose to be easy to use/manage."

#310504: Gnome Desktop Wallpaper Slideshow

"Gnome is lacking a easy to impliment Desktop Wallpaper Slideshow. KDE offers an easy option of just selecting a folder. Couldn't this be done in gnome?"

#310506: Tighter integration of kerberos in YaST

"YaST is able to create a kerberos server (with LDAP backend), and configure a client to use kerberos as an authentication backend. However, there is no obvious way to create principals for users or keytab for services through YaST. (...)"

#310507: Repo-Changing Notifications in Updater Applet

"Recently, the repository KDE:Community was taken offline and the packages in there were apparently distributed into other repos. As a user of openSUSE, the onyl way I discovered this was via a constant error in my updater applet that told me it was unavailable. Then I went to the forums with the error and was informed why. I was also told that there had been advance notice on some mailing list (a list that people who download and install openSUSE will nto be a member of automatically). This is a very poor way of handling this for users of openSUSE! (...)"

#310508: Tech-Support Desktop Widget

"It's not usually included in reviews of OS's but the community behind an OS is actually pretty important. Especially since most people needing help on linux will not be able to just call a "geek squad" to fix things. openSUSE has a strong community but most people might not know to go to the web forums, so I think it would be VERY powerful to build it in to the OS. (...)"

Statistics

openFATE Statistics can found there: openSUSE 11.4

More information on openFATE


Translation Team

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Localization


In the Community

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Events & Meetings

Past:

Upcoming:


openSUSE for your ears

From Ambassadors

Chun-Hung "sakana" Huang: Some picture for Nagios with openSUSE 11.3 seminar at Taiwan -- Taichung

"There are some pictures for openSUSE 11.3 with Nagios at Taiwan -- Taichung
http://picasaweb.google.com/maxsakana/20100821NagiosWithOpenSUSE#
http://www.flickr.com/photos/studyarea/sets/72157624680922057/
They feel good with one click install and YaST ^__^
We will still go on"

Jean-Daniel Dodin: small local event in Ramonville

"We had in the town hosting my LUG (Ramonville, Toulouse suburb) a "forum des association", that is the yearly fair for volunteer activities, and I was glad to present there openSUSE dvd's, 11.2 (some spare) and the new 11.3
http://dodin.org/piwigo/index.php?/category/1677
and specially that one:
http://dodin.org/piwigo/picture.php?/22268/category/1677
I'm not on the images (because I was holding the camera :-). The shot was taken at the very beginning (not yet many attending people), because when the public come I have no more time to shoot :-))"

openSUSE in $COUNTRY

"Details"

Communication

Contributors


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: kernel (SUSE-SA:2010:038)

  • Package: kernel
  • Announcement ID: SUSE-SA:2010:038
  • Date: Fri, 03 Sep 2010 12:00:00 +0000
  • Affected Products: SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 SP3
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP3
  • Vulnerability Type: local privilege escalation
  • CVSS v2 Base Score: 7.2 (AV:L/AC:L/Au:N/C:C/I:C/A:C)
  • SUSE Default Package: yes

SUSE Security Announcement: Linux kernel (SUSE-SA:2010:039)

  • Package: kernel
  • Announcement ID: SUSE-SA:2010:039
  • Date: Wed, 08 Sep 2010 15:00:00 +0000
  • Affected Products: openSUSE 11.3
  • Vulnerability Type: local privilege escalation
  • CVSS v2 Base Score: 6.9 (AV:L/AC:M/Au:N/C:C/I:C/A:C)
  • SUSE Default Package: yes


Kernel Review

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h-online/Thorsten Leemhuis: Kernel Log: Videos from LinuxCon and end to maintenance of 2.4 and 2.6.27 nears

"Videos and presentations from LinuxCon and the Embedded Linux Conference provide information about the development status of Btrfs and about problems between kernel hackers and the makers of Android. With the latest stable kernels, Linux 2.6.34 has reached the end of its life; furthermore, there are signs that maintenance of 2.4 and 2.6.27 will soon be discontinued or reduced."

Rares Aioanei: openSUSE kernel news – 11.09.2010

"Hello, people, and welcome! In this week’s news…."

LinuxUser & Developer/Jon Masters: The kernel column #91

"In this months kernel column John Masters discusses another eventful kernel cycle, not to mention the latest round of Linus Torvald (justified?) rants, the Kernel Summit 2010 and some pretty intense penguin-on-penguin action… "

h-online/Thorsten Leemhuis: Kernel Log: Coming in 2.6.36 (Part 1) - Graphics

"Various changes improve the performance and functionality of drivers for graphics chips in the latest Intel mobile processors. Nouveau now supports the Fermi chips used on recent GeForce graphics cards. The Radeon driver in 2.6.36 adds support for underscan, HyperZ and tiling. Extensions for the KDB debugger and Intel's KMS driver allow new debugging functionality."


Tips and Tricks

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For Desktop Users

Scott Photographics: Zoom Blur Effect in GIMP – GIMP Tutorial

"If you don’t have a zoom lens or you’d like to manipulate a certain image in this style then this tutorial for GIMP should help you achieve a similar effect! (...)"

Packt/Allan Brito: Blender 3D 2.9: Working with Textures

"In this article by Allan Brito, author of Blender 3D 2.9: Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery, we will take the realism of our scenes to a higher level using textures. With textures, the "magic" really happens! There are basically two types of textures, which are procedural and non-procedural textures. For us, the bitmap textures will be used most often, to allow us to create scenes with more realism. (...)"


For Commandline/Script Newbies

Linux.com/Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier: Manage Linux Downloads with wget

"Firefox, Chrome, and other browsers do an acceptable job of downloading a single file of reasonable size. But I don't like to trust a browser to grab ISO images and other files that are hundreds of megabytes, or larger. For that I prefer to turn to wget. You'll find that using wget provides some significant advantages over grabbing files with your browser. (...)"

Sankuru: Using ffmeg to batch convert cd audio files to mp3

"I guess quite a few joomla administrators regularly run into batch conversion issues. You have an entire folder of files in the one format, and now you need the same files, but in another format.
Today I ran into a batch conversion issue in a surprising way. My wife came home with a "Made in China" MD-602 set of speakers that accepts input from a mobile phone, a phone memory, or a USB memory stick. She wanted to play an audio CD on the device, by copying the songs to a USB memory stick. So, I grabbed the audio CD, and I saw that the tracks on an audio CD are supposedly encoded in .wav format. On the device's packaging, it lists the audio formats that the device accepts as input: .mp3 and .mp4.(...)"


For Developers and Programmers

Python4Kids: Trivial Lists

"Having gone through some arduous work on the previous tutorial, this one will be a little gentler. The task we’ve set ourselves this time is to write another game, a trivia game."

IBM developerWorks/Noah Gift: Porting Perl To Python

"Porting legacy Perl to Python can be a daunting task. In this article, learn some of the theory behind dealing with legacy code, including what not to do."


Planet SUSE

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OMG!SUSE! team: 10 Awesome Free Games for openSUSE

"Back in "ye olde days" of Linux, there were no games. If you wanted to entertain yourself, you either played nethack or you tried to compile Gentoo, neither of them terrifically fun. (In those days I played a game called "learn to program" which was probably the most entertaining game on Linux at the time.)
Gaming on openSUSE, HIIIYAAAAH!These days gaming on Linux is a completely different story, we now have everything from Minesweeper (KMines) to first-person shooters and flight simulators. While the gaming experience is far from perfect on the Linux Desktop, it's miles ahead of where it was just four years ago."

Jigish Gohil: KIWI-LTSP multiple image support improvements

"Savin Alex has been busy working on improving kiwi-ltsp lately. The basic idea behind the new development is easier management of multiple LTSP images that can be served over NBD or AOE. Earlier Shrenik Bhura had added multiple image support for AOE, now it is also supported when using NBD.
For example, with very powerful hardware available, images of KDE, GNOME desktops or any other profile of your choice can be served as LTSP_FATCLIENT, this will enable images to use resources on the clients’ local hardware instead of traditional LTSP way of running all the client sessions on the server. Advantage of this way is making use of local hardware resources and central management of OS deployed in the entire network. LTSP can also be clustered to load balance and in case one of the servers fail."

OMG!SUSE! team: QOTD: How do you surf on openSUSE?

"A couple of weeks ago the new-fangled openSUSE Community Manager Jos Poortvlient emailed me about some quirk with the OMG! SUSE! site he noticed using Konqueror, apparently his web browser of choice. This got me thinking about all the varying ways openSUSE users might be browser the web, given the wide variety of desktop environments supported, there are a truck-full of web browsers you can install on your Geeko-powered machine."

OMG!SUSE! team: Geeko Gist - September

"When I first started working on OMG! SUSE! the openSUSE project didn't have a community manager filling the void left by Joe Brockenmeier (a.k.a Zonker), meaning I didn't have anybody to pester with all sorts of silly questions. Fortunately, Jos Poortvliet has stepped up as the community manager and even went so far as to volunteer to answer some questions for me!
I figure I'll call this segment the "Geeko Gist" which I'll be doing every now and chat with an openSUSE project member about what's going on. Without further ado, let's get to it."


openSUSE Forums

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Firefox not saving images with right click

"The OP has no offer to save image as, when right clicking an image in Firefox."

Milestone 1 of version 11.4

"Some early feedback on the latest Factory release of the next openSUSE version 11.4 - Major issues in KDE it seems."

Audio CD's not playing Fluently.

"Although an issue is reported here, I can find no problems on any of my installs, at least not once I have done the multi-media trick."

Upgrade?

"OP wants to Upgrade and is offered some advice. Differing views are expressed giving the user some options."


On the Web

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Call for participation

Packt: Welcome to the 2010 Open Source Awards

"The Open Source Awards is an annual online event held by Packt Publishing to distinguish excellence among Open Source projects.
Now in its fifth year, the Award, formerly known as the Open Source Content Management System (CMS) Award, is designed to encourage, support, recognize and reward not only CMSes but a wider range of Open Source projects. (...)"


Reports

h-online.com/Chris von Eitzen: GNU Debugger adds D language support

"The GNU Project Debugger release team has published the second point update to version 7.0 of its standard debugger for the GNU software system. The GDB debugger supports a wide variety of programming languages, including Ada, C, C++, Objective-C, FreePascal and Fortran, and, in the new release, adds support for the D programming language. (...)"

MWR InfoSecurity: Assessing the Tux Strength: Part 2 - Into the Kernel

"The previous article in this series on Linux security described different userspace protection mechanisms that can be applied to protect binaries on a Linux system. Unsurprisingly, without additional kernel settings and protections most of the previously described mechanisms cannot be utilised to their full extent. This article will therefore focus on kernel features that have a direct impact on security of running binaries. Specific security frameworks such as SELinux, Grsecurity RBAC, AppArmor and others will not be discussed here although they may feature in future articles. (...)"


Reviews and Essays

Free Software Magazine/Terry Hancock: My Quest for Free Licensed Japanese Pop Music with Wacca.Fm's XMLRPC API and Python's xmlrpclib

"This is my story about searching for Japanese pop music under a free culture license. It’s a little tricky, because the best sites for this are of course, in Japan, and not well advertised on the English web. I discovered how to use Python’s XMLRPC library to run searches using the web API for a Japanese music sharing site called “Wacca”. The results were very interesting — I found some of what I was looking for, though not all. (...)"

Network World/Joe Brockmeier: Linux desktop market share: Small no matter how you measure

"It doesn't give me any pleasure in saying this, but the evidence is overwhelming that Linux is not huge on the desktop. Saying it has maybe 1% of the desktop marketshare is probably not realistic, but not as far off the mark as we'd like.
Measuring Linux market share is not an easy task, especially not on the desktop. Most Linux users don't buy Linux pre-loaded, they download Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, openSUSE, or another distro from a series of mirrors, BitTorrents, or share CDs. No matter how you count up, though, the total number is pretty small compared to the number of desktops in use. (...)"

Bradford White: Choices Choices Choices

"In the beginning, there were a few different distributions. From a handful came hundreds. We are currently living with several hundreds. Many say that this is a bad thing. Many claim that the myriad offerings confuse people. Many claim that these distributions are often redundant. What's the deal? I have often talked about the lack of innovation in many distributions. The fact that people respin someone else's stuff and call it their own is somewhat unavoidable. It's going to happen. That aside, plurality is good. (...)"

pcworld/Phil Shapiro: Book review - Learn OpenOffice.org Spreadsheet Macros

"My name is John Dukovich. I'm with Green Moon Solutions, a small technology company in the Washington, DC, area. I've been working with Microsoft Office applications, basically since they came out, and I'm a heavy user of Excel macros and Visual Basic for Applications language. I do quite a few applications for clients and use macros in ways that a lot of people don't."


Feedback / Communicate / Get Involved

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Credits

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Translations

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openSUSE Weekly News is translated into many languages.Issue #140 of the openSUSE Weekly News is available in:

Delayed / to be translated:

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