Archive:Weekly news 143

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Announcements

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openSUSE: Target Aquired

"Over the last week you have all given input on the new strategy document describing the target users of openSUSE. It saw quite a bit of rewriting and rephrasing but it seems the description fitted most of your perceptions. We have incorporated all the comments into the document and a new iteration can be found on co-ment.
Furthermore, the next piece of text has been added: What does openSUSE offer its users? Like with ā€œTarget Usersā€, we would really appreciate it if you could give your input on co-ment but we will accept any kind of input on any channel we can follow. So if co-ment isnā€™t your thing, feel free to comment below this post, on the forums or anywhere else. For those new to co-ment ā€“ it is a pretty awesome commenting tool under the GNU Affero GPL.
Giving your input on co-ment will make the discussion a bit more structured and easier for everyone to follow. How-to: select some text you want to comment on (a word, a few words, a sentence) and choose the little yellow + sign on the top-left of the page to add your comment. If you click a colored section of the text, you can see the comments which have been made to that section it and add your own voice to the discussion. Easy peasy!
You can find the document here. And for reference here the openSUSE Strategy portal on the wiki. Please have fun!"

OSC2010 Sneak Peaks ā€“ Take an LPI exam at openSUSE Conference 2010

"Thanks to the support of Linux Professional Institute (LPI) we are able to provide a number of the well known and useful LPI exams to be taken at the openSUSE Conference 2010. Examination day will be Saturday, October 23 from 9 to 11am.
Exams offered :
* LPIC-1 und LPIC-2 (101, 102, 201, 202) ā€“ in German and English
* LPIC-3 (301, 302, 303, 304) ā€“ English only
* Univention Certified Professional PrĆ¼fung (LPI 198) ā€“ German only
For further information and registration please visit our LPI page."


Status Updates

Distribution

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SUSE Studio: One-click WebYaST

"Everyone familiar with SUSE Linux will definitely know or at least have heard about YaST (Yet another Setup Tool). It is one of the many unique features SUSE has over other Linux distributions and makes the otherwise tricky system configuration a snap. These configurations include hardware, network, services, security, and many more.
YaST has evolved over the years to include many different front-ends, such as those for GNOME, KDE, and text consoles (ncurses). The most recent addition is a web-based front-end called WebYaST. It simplifies remote system administration and configuration - you don't have to SSH into the system anymore, all you need is a web browser.
It is now easy to include WebYaST in your Studio appliances. Simply go to the appliance editor and select the Enable WebYaST option under the additional options section of the configuration tab (for SLE11 SP1, openSUSE 11.3 only):"


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Bugzilla

Important links:


Team Reports

Build Service Team

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OBS-related blog posts at Dell Techcenter

"Thought people might be interested in two blog posts that are up on Dell TechCenter blog that are relevant to OBS/Kiwi.
I wrote the following blog post about how we use OBS to build Dell OpenManage. If people want to know more, I'm open to writing other blog posts. As long as they get readers, I'll keep writing them... :)"

Build Service Statistics

Statistics can be found at http://build.opensuse.org


GNOME Team

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Vincent Untz: GNOME 2.32 is out!

"After some unexpected last-minute action, GNOME 2.32 is out! It's a smaller release than usual, as we started this cycle with 3.0 as a target and decided to change the plans during GUADEC. So some modules just have bug fixes, with their cool new features incubating for 3.0. Still, there are some neat changes in there: for instance, metacontacts in Empathy will certainly make people happy, and the SyncTeX support in Evince is just amazing! With the inclusion of Rygel and gnome-color-manager, we also move GNOME closer to the perfect desktop ;-)"


KDE Team

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Michal HruÅ”eckĆ½: kde-obs-generator is looking for a new name!

"kde-obs-generator no longer depends on KDE, so the name doesn't really describe this tool well. So we are looking for a new name! Few ideas suggested so far are obs-generator and Packager-O-Matic. But we know that our community can be really creative - we got the name for our chameleon in Prague ZOO from our community - so we are asking for your help again. Please propose some names for this great tool in this questionare. And if you are going to openSUSE Conference or you know somebody going there and your proposal will be selected, then you can win plush Geeko! For more details read whole post face-wink.png "


openFATE Team

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#310621: Get rid of %suse_update_desktop_files

"In less than a month we will have the openSUSE Conference 2010 with the motto "Collaboration across Borders". So I think it's a good time to fix this.
The openSUSE Build Service is a great tool, and with mostly just some "Substitutes" you can have a single spec file, mostly without %if's, that will build in any RPM-based distro. Now in my experience one of the most problematic things is the %suse_update_desktop_files macro. That forces to add ugly "%if 0%{?suse_version}" to every package with a .desktop file. (...)"

#310622: Run xserver without root privileges

"Now that we have KMS enabled in the distribution we are a step closer of being able to run the xserver with just user privileges, and thus making openSUSE more secure. About a year ago I read a blog post of a moblin developer stating that achieving this is not that hard, but I've yet to see another distro achieving it. Nevertheless I think we can start to think about it."

#310623: Please bring SCPM back to Suse

"SCPM is one of the major components (among others) for why I prefer to use Suse over other distros. I use SCPM for changing many configuration values for hardware and software cleanly, through one tool, instead of dozens, between when plugged into very different docking stations between work and home, when at home undocked, when roaming at coffee shops, when locked down for work or client sites, when broadcasting live shows at various locations, or when setting up different hardware profiles with different components connected and keeping the configuration consistent for that profile, printers, firewall rules, etc. (...)"

#310643: Easier System Configuration with KDE

"I'm not sure if this needs to be brought up on this forum, on a KDE project forum, or both. I find display monitor configuration navigation to be confusing and difficult in openSUSE 11.3 with KDE. I also find the inability to configure my Logitech mouse behavior (double-click speed etc.) to be a significant problem for some users. I have found openSUSE with Gnome to be much better in the area of mouse configuration."

#310646: Kernel 2.6.37 for opensuse 11.4

"I realise we are using a time based release, and no longer chase feature releases, but 2.6.37 will have some very interesting technologies according to phoronix:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODYyMw (...)"

#310649: Adjust kernel choice automatically for server-based-install

"As described here and discussed also here
Selecting the kernel-desktop during a minimal-server-install lead to more works for admin.
Can we just adjust the pattern, to select the kernel-default if 64bits install, or the kernel-pae if 32 bits."

#310652: Have an Etherpad install on openSUSE infrastructure

"Currently the marketing team in particular makes use of lots of piratepad's to work collaboratively on articles, announcements, plans and other things. Wiki's don't offer the ease and real-time collaboration features needed so piratepad is perfect. Except that it isn't. Piratepad has some serious issues (see "Why do we want this?"). So we would like to have an Etherpad install on openSUSE infrastructure. (...)"

#310658: bypass "partitioning" option for pre-partitioned installation targets

"Mandriva provides installation cmdline option that I always use: readonly=1 This causes normal partitioning steps to be bypassed. No creatiion, deletion, or modification of existing partitions is possible. Instead is presented a list of Linux native partitions for mountpoint selection, mount options selection, whether to format, and format to use. This is handy for both advanced users like myself, and for frequently repeated installs, such as development milestones. It can save significant time initializing an installation, and it can avoid some opportunities for mistakes in one of the more dangerous and difficult installation phases. It would be excellent for openSUSE to have a similar installation option."

#310659: specify whether bootloader is to be master bootloader for whole system

"Most of my systems are multiboot. As a consequence, some bootloader has already been installed. I should be able to specify that the new openSUSE bootloader being installed will only be used for the new openSUSE system and not any of those previously installed. This would keep the new openSUSE bootloader's menu much simpler, and prevent the need for the installer to hunt for stanzas to add to menu.lst, as well as saving me the often considerable time required to manually remove those unwanted stanzas. Furthermore, I would have NOT be preselected in any case that the new / or /boot is not on the first BIOS disk, and when the new / or /boot is a logical partition."

#310661: better facility to search for bugs

"openSUSE has really no bad bug support. However non-Suse users can never enfruit the benefits of openSUSE`s qa because there is no good way to search for bugs. This is even a problem for anyone who wants to check whether a problem is already reported before reporting it himself.
I believe openSUSE could gain a lot of users by a better bug search. Bug reports do often contain solutions to common problems. If bugs are findable they will become linked and will thus be found more often by Google instead of the standard Ubuntu-threads talking around the hot pap."

Statistics

Feature statistics for openSUSE 11.4

More information on openFATE


Translation Team

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Localization


YaST Team

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Uwe Gansert: AutoYaST and Image Creation/Installation

"In openSUSE 11.3 I enhanced the AutoYaST image installation feature a bit and I added a nice useable UI to configure it.
It's still quite beta because I was not able to test it the way I should have but I think that if you are interested in that topic, it's worth a look already.
Let's start immediately and create an AutoYaST image with the UI."


In the Community

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Nelson Marques: Marketing @ openSUSE Conference, Across Borders!

"Iā€™ll be conducting a small talk at openSUSE Conference 2010 in Nuremberg in the next 23rd October. My goal isnā€™t about teaching or lecturing anything, but instead make people more sensible to marketing activities and how it could be used more effectively within free software projects.
Iā€™ve called it ā€œThe Concept of Marketing and FOSS Communitiesā€. Thatā€™s where it starts for anyone who jumped in into Marketing. Historically, Marketing started being debated by the Academy around 150 years ago and some have very serious criticism about Marketing as a scienceā€¦ In fact Marketing is made of pieces from another sciences like Anthropology, Psychology, Management, etc. I skip this fight, itā€™s irrelevant. Historically, no one needed marketing when ā€˜offer < demandā€™ was verified, but when it changed to the opposite ā€˜offer > demandā€™, people started to look into Marketing. So far this hasnā€™t much to do with FOSS reality, though it might have for the future and being aware of this is always a good point, despite of the FOSS philosophy promoting a different set of values from those who are typically associated with ā€˜salesā€™."

Nelson Marques: my talk slides for openSUSE conferenceā€¦

"Iā€™ve made available my talk slides for openSUSE conference on my fedorapeople user space for anyone interested. Itā€™s a small 15 slide presentation about the Concept of Marketing and a possible approach to FOSS communities."

openSUSE Ambassadors rocking around the world!

"Last week our Ambassadors did what they do every week: promote openSUSE. They went to meetings, conferences and tradeshows for a talk or staffing a booth. And they organized meetings, gave students lessons in using openSUSE, handed out DVDā€™s and valuable knowledge.
Many visitors of this site have no idea how active our ambassadors really are. The amount of work they do is amazing and they deserve a bit more of a spotlight on what they do! Their reports are usually highlighted in our weekly news, be sure to check their work out each week.
Read on for a short selection of reports which came in over the last week by the openSUSE ambassadors. And note that we get reports like this almost every day! Some come in the form of text, others like this one by Bruno about attending FrOSCamp 2010 in ZĆ¼rich are in the form of a nice presentation (very much worth a look)."

Welcome new Members (Corner for new acknowledged Members)

We are pleased to announce our new openSUSE Members:

Events & Meetings

Past:

Upcoming:


openSUSE for your ears

From Ambassadors

Chuck Payne: event report

"Here is what you guys been asking for. I am sorry that I have been slow, but I will try to make up for it.
Over the past year I have been to three linux fest, I will give highlights of the three.
* Atlanta Linux Fest (ALF)
* Texas Linux Fest (TLF)
* Southeast Linux Fest (SELF) (...)"

Stathis Iosifidis: openSUSE Greek team @ Educational Lecture: "Kids and Internet"

"Greek team helped-participated to an Educational Lecture for medical doctors of the Paediatric Department of Ippokration General Hospital, Thessaloniki, Greece. The subject was Kids and Internet.
You can see a report at: http://opensuseambassadors.blogspot.com/2010/09/educational-lecture-kids-and-internet.html "

Kostas Koud: openSUSE Greek team at Xariseto free Festival

"On the 3rd of October openSUSE Greek ambassador Kostas Koudaras (warlordfff) will participate at Xariseto (means give away without charge-free) free Festival where he will inform people about openSUSE and give away openSUSE DVD's- Stickers and flyers, also there is a change for a last minute presentation of openSUSE but this will be mostly depend by the weather.
For more information about the Event: http://www.xariseto.gr "

openSUSE in $COUNTRY

"Details"

Communication

Contributors


New/Updated Applications @ openSUSE

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OMG!SUSE! team: Amarok 2.3.2 ready for mass consumption

"At the tail-end of my last post regarding Amarok 2.3.2 I mentioned that the package was currently the "KDE:Unstable:Playground repo" with a disclaimer about using the package from that repo.
As luck would have it, the turn-around was pretty short from the package appearing in the "unstable" repository to when it propagated to a more user-friendly repo like KDE:UpdatedApps."


  • You can find other interesting Packages at:
  • Packman – OBS


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.


Tips and Tricks

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For Desktop Users

Scott Photographics: Making a Watercolour-Paint Photograph in GIMP

"This tutorial requires a little bit of creativity and imagination for the painting step, but donā€™t worry it is all very easy to get the hang of and the rest is a breeze! (...)"

Tips4Linux.com: Use MPlayer to record live streams from the Internet

"All you need to record a live stream from the web is MPlayer. Use the -dumpstream argument to capture a MMS, ASF or Live WMV stream to a file called stream.dump. (...)"

Mashable/Amy-Mae Elliott: 10 Killer Firefox Tips, Tricks and Shortcuts

"One of the reasons for the popularity of the Firefox browser is the wealth of downloadable add-ons, and the customization options available via the about:config hacks. However, there are some tidy tricks you can employ from within the ā€œas isā€ browser that can greatly improve your web surfing experience. (...)"


For Commandline/Script Newbies

The Geek Stuff/Sasikala: 6 Useful Linux One Liners

"Individual Linux commands can be combined in the command line, to accomplish tasks that otherwise would require shell scripts to be written.
This article provides 6 linux one liners that will help you accomplish few useful tasks. (...)"

Techthrob: Softlinks vs. Hardlinks: A Quick Explanation

"I got this question in an email the other day, and I realized itā€™s something many people might be unfamiliar with. In Linux, there are two types of file links, hardlinks and softlinks. Here, Iā€™ll give a quick explanation of what these types of links are, and when you should use them. (...)"

Learning by examples: Bash Programming Tutorial 1 ā€“ A Quick Introduction

"Bash programming is a topic that can be dealt with in a couple of pages or hundreds of pages. Harold Rodriguez explains Bash programming in this 2 Part tutorial. His slick and excellent style of writing has enabled him to cover all the essential features of bash programing in a few pages. (...)"


For System Administrators

HowtoForge/Falko Timme: Virtual Hosting With PureFTPd And MySQL (Incl. Quota And Bandwidth Management) On OpenSUSE 11.3

"This document describes how to install a PureFTPd server that uses virtual users from a MySQL database instead of real system users. This is much more performant and allows to have thousands of ftp users on a single machine. In addition to that I will show the use of quota and upload/download bandwidth limits with this setup. Passwords will be stored encrypted as MD5 strings in the database. (...)"

Duncan Mac-Vicar: ZYpp, extensibility and services on steroids

"Two years ago we introduced the concept of services to the software management stack.
Services are basically a subscription to a remote server, that provide a list of repositories. So when the service is refreshed, the repositories belonging to this service are synced.
This is used for example for our enterprise customers, which are subscribed to the Novell Customer Center service, therefore they get automatically the repositories they are entitled to.
There are other potential use for services that I described in that blog post two years ago. However I want to present what we have been prototyping in the last days and what could be done with this."

Chun-Hung "sakana" Huang: Hadoop with openSUSE

"This document is for openSUSE users who want to use Hadoop. (...)"

Brent McConnell: Changing domain names for WPMU and lighttpd

"Ouch! I let one of my domain names expire on Tuesday and BAM someone pounced on it. Not normally a big deal unless itā€™s worth something, this one was. It wasnā€™t that it was valuable monetarily, however it was the primary domain I used for my Wordpress MU site. I suddenly found myself with a half working website, not good. Took me an hour or so to piece everything back together so I thought Iā€™d share it."


Planet SUSE

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Bryen Yunashko: A Special Thanks to Sponsorsā€¦

"Well, Iā€™m on the final 2 days of my brief stay in Barcelona. Going to make a push of seeing as much as I can after the rather unexpected interruption of yesterdayā€™s General Strike. Which was an interesting experience to some degree.  :-)
So.. Iā€™m actually in Europe to work! Not play. And Iā€™ll give dedicated posts to the two events Iā€™ll be at this month, but quickly, Iā€™m attending the GNOME-A11y hackfest/AEGIS Conference in Sevilla, Spain. This is a solid week of work. And later in October, Iā€™ll be headed up to Germany for the openSUSE conference.
Kinda hard to call this work when you know youā€™ll be around friends youā€™ve made online and have met previously. But for today, Iā€™d like to just take a moment to thank sponsors that are making these events accessible to me. Without them, I wouldnā€™t be able to enjoy the full benefits of the conferences and for that Iā€™m deeply grateful."

Andreas Jaeger: New design of lizards and avatars

"The new design of lizards.opensuse.org and news.opensuse.org is up and Iā€™d like to thank especially Henne and Robert for the fresh look!
I noticed one thing: Some users have besides their names a nice picture, the so-called avatar. The avatar is not only show here but also on other sides like build.opensuse.org. To show your avatar, go to the global avator side, register, upload a small picture and associate it with the email address you have given when registering for using the openSUSE infrastructure. Next time you visit, your avator should be shown besides your name."

Joe Shaw: linux input ecosystem

"Over the past couple of days, Iā€™ve been trying to figure out how input in Linux works on modern systems. There are lots of small pieces at various levels, and itā€™s hard to understand how they all interact. Things are not helped by the fact that things have changed quite a bit over the past couple of years as HAL ā€” which I helped write ā€” has been giving way to udev, and existing literature is largely out of date. This is my attempt at understanding how things work today, in the Ubuntu Lucid release."

Sirko Kemter: Sintel is out but not only

"Today was ā€œSintelā€ released the newest movie of the Blender Foundation. You can download it here but please use the torrent, share! You can also watch it at Youtube. When u watch it so look in the Gold-Sponsor Section, there you can found KommKino Nuremberg. Visitors of last years openSUSE Conference maybe remember the Open Movie Night in this cinema. On the end of the night they asked for donations and now you can see for what the money was used."


openSUSE Forums

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Install/Remove Software Locked

"One of a number of posts this week actually related to the Packman inode repo which became dead. More than a few users had trouble figuring this issue out."

Replicate Old Desktop

"You spend forever getting everything just the way you like it and then it's time to install the latest and greatest. How do you get back that look?"

Repair System not in 11.3

"Not the first time this has been raised in the forum. Though I personally never found use for this feature, it seems quite a number miss it, so I guess it must have worked."

How to Roll Back part of Update?

"It seems Updates have been causing all manner of problems this week and if it wasn't the kernel, then it was ATI or a combination of the two."


On the Web

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Announcements

OpenOffice.org Community announces The Document Foundation

"The Internet, September 28, 2010 - The community of volunteers who develop and promote OpenOffice.org, the leading free office software, announce a major change in the projectā€™s structure. After ten yearsā€™ successful growth with Sun Microsystems as founding and principal sponsor, the project launches an independent foundation called "The Document Foundation", to fulfil the promise of independence written in the original charter.
(...)
The Foundation will coordinate and oversee the development of LibreOffice, which is available in beta version at the placeholder site: http://www.libreoffice.org. Developers are invited to join the project and contribute to the code in the new friendly and open environment, to shape the future of office productivity suites alongside contributors who translate, test, document, support, and promote the software. (...)"


Reports

Phoronix/Michael Larabel: Running The X.Org Server Without Root Privileges

"Besides talking about the X.Org Server development process and the X.Org Server 1.10 plans, Keith Packard also talked about not running the X.Org Server as root (also sometimes referred to as a "root-less X Server") during XDS Toulouse.
Thanks to kernel mode-setting and other improvements to the X.Org Server, we are basically there, but it's something that has been said for over a year. Moblin though has been running the X.Org Server as a user since their Moblin 2.0 release and now with the MeeGo operating system while others are now looking to get in on the root-free action. (...)"

Linux.com/Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier: Five Enterprise Features in PostgreSQL 9

" The PostgreSQL Global Development Group recently released PostgreSQL 9.0, with major new features and more than 200 addons and improvements for the popular database.
If you look at the release notes you'll find a ton of new features and enhancements to existing features. For example, this release brings better error messages for unique constraints, improvements in PL languages for stored procedures, and a lot more. Wading through the PostgreSQL 9.0 release notes is a DBA's delight, but what are the top features in this release? I pinged PostgreSQL core team member Josh Berkus and got some input on the most important features for PostgreSQL 9."


Reviews and Essays

Ghacks/Jack Wallen: A walk around the GNOME desktop

"Recently I had a reader request a bit of a ā€œhow toā€ on the GNOME desktop. After giving it some thought, and at first wondering why anyone would need a walk around for the GNOME desktop, I realized that some users simply donā€™t have the ability to look at the computer desktop from the same vantage point as those of us who ā€œget itā€. With that thought in mind, I thought it would be a good idea to give a sort of walk through of the GNOME desktop from the perspective of the new user. (...)"

Ghacks/Jack Wallen: A walk around KDE 4.5

"Recently I did an introductory ā€œwalk aroundā€ GNOME (see ā€œA walk around the GNOME desktopā€œ) which offered the new users to Linux a look from the ground level at one of the most popular of the Linux desktops. This time around, I will do the same service to the KDE desktop. I will focus on KDE 4.5 (since that is the most recent release) with the goal of showing you just how user-friendly KDE makes the Linux desktop. (...)"


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 comment section and let us know!
Or if you would like to be part of the openSUSE:Weekly news team then check out our team page and join!
Or Communicate with or get help from the wider openSUSE community -- via IRC, forums, or mailing lists -- see Communicate.


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Credits

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Translations

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openSUSE Weekly News is translated into many languages.Issue #143 of the openSUSE Weekly News is available in:

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