Archive:Weekly news 149

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Editors Note

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We are pleased to announce our 149 issue of the openSUSE Weekly News.

We hope that you will enjoy reading.


Announcements

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openSUSE News: openSUSE Announces Third Development Milestone Evaluating systemd

"Delayed by a week due to a critical bug that would have prevented testing, the openSUSE project today announces openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 3 (M3), the third of six milestone releases of what will become openSUSE 11.4. The bug, a crash in the software rasterizer of the Mesa OpenGL stack, was found by our automated test suite and the openSUSE XOrg developers swung into action so that KDE would work on systems without hardware acceleration, which includes most virtual machines. (...)"

openSUSE Forum has New News Editor

"The openSUSE Community News letter is published each week and the forum section has been edited since March 2009 by @caf4926. Starting issue 149 @knurpht (A Global Moderator for the openSUSE Forum) will be editing the Forum section of the news letter. @knurpht is well placed to find and list interesting threads from the forum. This should ensure the continuation of a great community news letter."

openSUSE News: openSUSE at Latinoware

"At Latinoware, a team of openSUSE contributors will come together, not only to promote openSUSE but also to talk with each other about the future plans for the major linux distribution in Brazil. openSUSE has some awesome technology and great people – both deserve more attention than they get and this is what the openSUSE ambassadors will talk about!

At the conference, you can expect the following talks by openSUSE people: A11y: Its about you! by Bryen “suseROCKs” Yunashko, international GNOME and openSUSE marketing and Accessibility expert; and “Why are you here?” by Jos Poortvliet, openSUSE community manager for Novell. He will be very friendly and the talk will feature kittens.

For those interested in educational software on linux, openSUSE ambassador Carlos Alberto dos Santos Ribeiro, one of the central openSUSE people in Brazil will talk about openSUSE Edu Li-f-e. There are two talks by ambassador Rogerio Ferreira: Xen for Dummies (about visualization on linux) and ”Automatizando Tarefas ao Extremo com Shell e Expect”. Conference co-organizer and all-round cool girl Izabel Cerqueira Valverde will talk about “GNOME Women & openSUSE Women – Mulheres e seus espaços”. Her brother, Ricardo Cerqueira Valverde will discuss “openSUSE apresenta Realidade Aumentada em Linux”. Silvio Palmieri talks about “LaboratĂłrio de A a Z”. And the openSUSE buildservice is covered by Alexandre Duarte Rogoski in ”openSUSE BuildService – Construindo Softwares para Diversas Plataformas e DistribuiçÔes”

On Friday the ambassadors will have a meeting with their international guests and anyone else who is interested in contributing to openSUSE."


Status Updates

Distribution

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Bugzilla

Important links:


SUSE Studio

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SUSE Studio: Desktop Notifications

"Today we deployed a little but very helpful feature: Desktop Notifications for finished builds.

If you're using a browser which supports desktop notifications (Chrome/Chromium and possibly some other webkit based browsers at the moment) you can get a notification when your build has finished directly to your screen: (...)"


Team Reports

Build Service Team

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Build Team Meeting

Meetingminutes

OBS 2.1.2 released

"Users of OBS 2.1.0 and 2.1.1 should update if they rely on the source read access protection. We fixed a security leak here.

This release is also fixing a regression of 2.1.1 for iChain users. New users were not able to register. (...)"

Build Service Statistics

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


Medical Team

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Sascha Manns: openSUSE medical team releases stable version 0.0.6

"Some month our team was busy, and so you hasn’t heard about us. But we are alive. We are pleased to announce our new openSUSE Distribution who still medical needs.

Whats happened? In the beginning of the project we tried to package some stuff just as beginning. Then we published 2 pre versions, but there we found some things to fix. We have worked hard for you, and now we are pleased to announce openSUSE medical version 0.0.6 with fresh packaged packages."


Mono Team

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Miguel de Icaza: New Mono Log Profiler

"Paolo has checked into Mono's GIT repository our brand-new profiler for Mono applications.

The new profiler is documented in detail here, and is available with Mono 2.9+ (this means: it is available if you build Mono from GIT, and will be part of the upcoming 2.10 release).

We would love to hear your feedback on it, and we hope to have a UI integrated into MonoDevelop soon. (...)"

Miguel de Icaza: F# Goes Open Source

"Last week, Don Syme announced that Microsoft has open sourced the F# compiler and the F# core libraries under the Apache 2 license.

In addition, on Tuesday, Don also announced a new release that fixes a handful of bugs specifically for users targeting Mono.

F# is a fascinating language, but I had not really spent much time with it as we could not really distribute it as an open source compiler limiting its usefulness in the Linux and Mac worlds. Now F# can become just another language that developers can use.

F# supports asynchronous programming today, and it was the inspiration for C# 5.0's async support. There is no need to wait for C# 5 to come out, you can start using async workflows today with F# everywhere. (...)"


openFATE Team

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Andreas Jaeger: openFATE Screening Meeting

"With the progress the boosters made on the openFATE preview instance, we can now edit features and handle them. A screening team has been formed some time ago and now it’s possible to really start working on features. (...)"

Newly requested features

#310794 Please add Python Turbogears to OBS

"I think its very useful to add Turbogears Python Framework
http://turbogears.org/
to the following repo
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/languages:/python/"

#310801 Jargon File package

"Use The Jargon File sources to create a Jargon File package for openSUSE. Originally intended to solve Bug #651899."

#310802 Hardware TestSuite + S.M.O.L.T Windows client

"Windows users always complain, there's no hardware compatybility on Linux. They even won't test LiveCD. LiveCD don't always can show full hardware support, like restricted drivers in action. (...)"

#310803 Compatibility package

"The idea is to avoid incompatybility without stop distribution changes. We can change everythink, what we need, and after few months releases compatybility package, which installs library & other compatybility layers to software distributed on internal media(or outside a repository). (...)"

#310804 Include Unity as alternative GNOME GUI

"Canonical introduced "Unity" with Ubuntu 10.10 as netbook GUI and plans to extend it for desktop use.
As Unity is FOSS (GPLv3), Unity can be made available as alternative GUI."

#310808 multi-arch RHEL/Fedora support

"When using x86_64 arch it's impossible to pull in the glibc-devel.i386 package which is needed to build gcc, llvm, path64 and any other compiler or various packages."

#310809 system repair from 11.2

"In OpenSuse 11.2 was installation option Repair. It helped often repair system and (more important!) repair Grub. In 11.3 there is no repair option. It is very important for users who use for example Windows XP and Suse, because after XP installation, Suse disappears and they don't have easy sollution to repair Grub. I'm a member of Polish Suse forum and we can see how often new people are give up to learn Linux because of missing easy solution at the beginning of using/installing system."

#310811 Enable touchpad "tap click" by default

"It seems in SUSE 11.3 the default setting was changed so that the touchpad no longer accepts tapping to click. At first I thought I had a driver issue or something was messed up. (...)"

#310819 Install Grub to MBR by default

"When installing openSUSE 11.3, right before copying the files to disk, one gets to choose where to install Grub - on a partition or in MBR. Installing on a partition is the default. (...)"

#310825 QTads in OpenSuSE Repository

"QTads is the only Linux program currently capable of running the full/multimedia version of interactive fiction games written in the TADS (Text Adventure Development System) code (see "why do we want this" reason for more info). At the moment, it's not available in any OpenSuSE repository, including the 3rd party Webpin-accessible or Build Service user home projects. Linux binaries are technically available but they're built off Debian Lenny and have enough version-specific dependencies for having it be in a repository strongly preferable, particularly for GNOME users and/or novices. "

Statistics

Feature statistics for openSUSE 11.4

More information on openFATE


Testing Team

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openSUSE-Testing Report for the Weekly News - November 12

"It has been some time since I wrote for the News. During the period between the release of 11.3 and the start of Milestone releases for 11.4, the Testing Core Team was essentially inactive - at least as a group. When M3 was released, I was away from home and missed an IRC meeting. From the transcript, I learned that the Xorg crashes made the system essentially unusable. That bug also delayed the release of M3 for almost a week, but it is now available.

The Testing Core Team will have an IRC meeting on November 15 at 17:00 UTC.
See http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Testing_meeting for details. Anyone that wishes may join us.

Next week I will cover the above meeting."


Translation Team

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Localization


In the Community

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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

Sirko Kemter: openSUSE A-Z Guide at BLIT 2010

"Yesterday I was in Potsdam at Brandenburger Linux-Infotag, it was my 7th visit at this event. Its one of the smaller events in Germany. They started with the event in the city Brandenburg and moved 3 years ago to Potsdam at the university there, since then the event grows up a little bit.

This year they had a bigger program with workshops, 3 tracks and 3 tracks with talks.

For me it was as I said my 7th visit and I had every year a talk or/and a workshop there. This year I had a talk “The openSUSE A-Z guide” there and of course an workshop about Inkscape. For my talk the worst case scenario did happen. I prepared my talk and put him on an usb stick, the stick crashed. I can be lucky that Pavol load up a older version of them to prezi, so I had some slides to show."

Greek openSUSE Ambassadors: Thessaloniki's openSUSE 11.3 party report

Great Article from our Greek's Ambassadors.

Mike McCallister: Truly “Adventures with Geeko”

"Had a great time with the Madison Linux User Group Saturday. About a dozen folks skipped the second half of the Badger game (and a really nice fall day), and joined us at ITT Technical Institute for my Introduction to openSUSE presentation.

As most folks there use Ubuntu, I focused on the things that make openSUSE stand out, which was mainly YaST (the installer and system administration tool). I also spent a great deal of time showing off KDE SC 4.5—actually more time than I wanted to, as I managed to hang up my system! (...)"

openSUSE in $COUNTRY

"Details"

Communication

Contributors


New/Updated Applications @ openSUSE

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Packman: frinika 0.6.0-0

"Frinika is a free, complete music workstation software for Linux, Windows, Mac OSX Tiger and other operating systems running Java 1.5."

Packman: linphone 3.3.2-1

"Linphone is a Web phone with a GNOME interface. It lets you make two-party calls over IP networks such as the Internet. It uses the IETF protocols SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) and RTP (Realtime TransporT Protocol) to make calls, so it should be able to communicate with other SIP-based Web phones. With several codecs available, it can be used with high speed connections as well as 28k modems."

Packman: clementine 0.5.3-5.1

"Clementine is a modern music player and library organiser. Clementine is a port of Amarok 1.4, with some features rewritten to take advantage of Qt4."

Packman: mixxx 1.7.2-0

"Mixxx is designed for DJ'ing for both professional and semi-professional users.
Mixxx was started in early 2001 as one of the first digital DJ systems."

Michal HruĆĄeckĂœ: MariaDB 5.2.3 in openSUSE (Build Service)

"You maybe already noticed, that MariaDB folks released their new stable version 5.2.3 today. And as we've got our great openSUSE Build Service, we already have this version packaged and you can install it easilly on openSUSE. I didn't had much time to test it deeply, I just tried that it runs, and that I'm able to connect to it, so it is currently in serverface-smile-big.png atabase:UNSTABLE repository, but after some testing, it will proceed futher face-wink.png If you want to try it, make sure to backup your data first! So on openSUSE you can use one click install to get MariaDB 5.2.3. For others, you can just use one of the following repositories: (...)"

  • 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.

SUSE Security Announcement: Linux kernel (SUSE-SA:2010:057)

  • Package: kernel
  • Announcement ID: SUSE-SA:2010:057
  • Date: Thu, 11 Nov 2010 13:00:00 +0000
  • Affected Products: SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability
  • Extension 11 SP1
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 SP1
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP1
  • Vulnerability Type: local privilege escalation

SUSE Security Announcement: Mozilla suite (SUSE-SA:2010:056)

  • Package: MozillaFirefox,seamonkey,MozillaThunderbird
  • Announcement ID: SUSE-SA:2010:056
  • Date: Mon, 08 Nov 2010 09:00:00 +0000
  • Affected Products: openSUSE 11.1
  • openSUSE 11.2
  • openSUSE 11.3
  • SLE SDK 10 SP3
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 SP3
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP3
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Software Development Kit 11
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Software Development Kit 11 SP1
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 SP1
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP1

SUSE Security Announcement: flash-player (SUSE-SA:2010:055)

  • Package: flash-player
  • Announcement ID: SUSE-SA:2010:055
  • Date: Fri, 05 Nov 2010 10:00:00 +0000
  • Affected Products: openSUSE 11.1
  • openSUSE 11.2
  • openSUSE 11.3
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 SP1


Kernel Review

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Rares Aioanei: Kernel weekly news

"Kernel weekly news from 13 November."


Tips and Tricks

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For Desktop Users

Manu Gupta: Awesome bar on firefox 4.0b

"Well a few days back, I got the firefox 4.0b on my openSUSE system and really worked out of the box for me but I missed the awesome bar and maybe a few others like me might have missed it. So , I decided to get the awesome bar working. You can follow the following steps to get your awesome bar working (...)"


For Commandline/Script Newbies

nixCraft/Vivek Gite: Linux / UNIX: DNS Lookup Command

"How do I perform dns lookup under Linux or UNIX or Apple OS X operating systems without using 3rd party web sites for troubleshooting DNS usage?

You can use any one of the following dns lookup utility under Linux / UNIX. You can skip all 3rd party websites and use the following to debug your dns servers and lookup issues: (...)"


For Developers and Programmers

Nettuts+/Ludovico Fischer: A Beginner’s Introduction to HTTP and REST

"The HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the life of the Web. It’s used every time you transfer a document, or make an AJAX request. But HTTP is a relative unknown among web developers. This introduction will demonstrate how the set of design principles, known as REST, underpin HTTP, and allow you to embrace its fullest power by building interfaces which can be used from almost any device or operating system. (...)"


For System Administrators

Sankar P: Detecting Memory Leaks in Kernel

"This blog post has two sections. Firstly, a section covering "Memory Leak detection in the Linux kernel in 10 easy steps" and the next section is about, "Implementing operating systems in managed code (like C#/Java)". Feel free to goto any section you prefer. (...)"

IBM developerWorks/M. Tim Jones: Virtual networking in Linux

"With the explosive growth of platform virtualization, it's not surprising that other parts of the enterprise ecosystem are being virtualized, as well. One of the more recent areas is virtual networking. Early implementations of platform virtualization created virtual NICs, but today, larger portions of the network are being virtualized, such as switches that support communication among VMs on a server or distributed among servers. Explore the ideas behind virtual networking, with a focus on NIC and switch virtualization. (...)"

ServerWatch/Joe Brockmeier: Adding Users and Aliases for Postfix

"Postfix is a great mailer, but if you're new to administering Postfix, finding your way around can be difficult. For example, just finding information on adding users to a Postfix system can be quite a trial.

In part, this is because Postfix can be set up in a number of ways. Some installations use Postfix alone, others use Postfix in conjunction with other apps and store user information in MySQL. You can have users who have actual accounts on a system, or you can have users on virtual domains that don't have a login but still receive mail. Or you might want aliases that include several users, so everybody on the "marketing" list gets mail or all folks in sales, legal or development can receive messages."


Planet SUSE

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Holger Hetterich: SMB Traffic Analyzer 1.1 released

"The team just released SMB Traffic Analyzer version 1.1. Among many uncounted small fixes and updates, this release features the following:

The configuration file support in smbtad was incomplete, it did not support all available options. The 1.1 code fixes this (bnc#651800). The resolving of this bug was a requirement to enable LSB compatible start / stop scripts for smbtad (bnc#651112). Therefore, you can now control smbtad with the “rcsmbtad” script, and currently it allows “rcsmbtad start”, “rcsmbtad stop”, and “rcsmbtad status”. This also brings us a step closer to build appliances for SMB Traffic Analyzer. And then we had a compile issue with distributions that include older versions of talloc. The 1.1 code fixes this by providing a missing define should it not exist (bnc#649840) to the smbtad and the smbtatools packages. Therefore we can announce two more distributions to be supported by SMB Traffic Analyzer, that is openSUSE 11.1, and SLES11-SP1 (as well as SLES11). Just check the download page which has been updated with one-click install links for these distributions! Finally we have updated the documentation (bnc#651823) to reflect the configuration news for smbtad and its control through the rcsmbtad script. (...)"

Nelson Marques: Some thoughts


"I’ve started doing some packaging of some popular themes on OBS (openSUSE Build Service), starting with those that have a friendly license and 5K+ downloads. I’ve picked for starters Lucidity, which is somehow related to Ubuntu (yeah yeah, I already know how polemical I am).

At first, the License was CC BY-NC-SA, which is a problem for some distro’s, the example I’m familiar with is Fedora, as ‘NC’ means you can’t push it to Fedora. I’ve contacted the author who promptly helped and swapped the license, now it became CC BY-SA, which should be pretty much compatible with every Linux distro out there. (...)"

Jos Poortvliet: beep-beep from Brazil!

"A few days ago I blogged about a dutch conference I was at and the talk I gave there. I realize it is not very smart to announce your talk at a conf after it is over. However, mistakes help with the learning. I learn a lot and to prove it, hereby tell you all that I will be at Latinoware. I realize Latinoware will start tomorrow, hence I did not improve my communication enough yet - but I will keep working on it. (...)"

Michael Löffler: /me is leaving

"Moin, after 7 years with SUSE and Novell I’ve chosen to change something in my life – and decided to accept a new job and will lay down my duties in the openSUSE project. I’ve been with the openSUSE project already prior to its launch in August 2005 and experienced a number of highs and lows. Overall the project has been shaping up nicely, we reached a lot of our goals and the just passed openSUSE conference reflects this pretty well in my opinion. (...)"

Martin Vidner: ruby-dbus 0.5.0 is a Gem with Errors

"I have made a new release of ruby-dbus, a Ruby language binding for the D-Bus IPC system.
The main feature is a better binding of Ruby Exceptions to D-Bus Errors. See below for an excerpt of the documentation.
Perhaps more importantly, the library is now primarily packaged as a RubyGem (Issue#6). Also I converted the tutorial from Webgen to Markdown. (...)"

Pascal Bleser: sysstat 9.1.6

"Just finished packaging the latest version of sysstat (a very powerful monitoring tool), namely version 9.1.6, in the server:monitoring repository

If you are using sysstat to keep statistics of your host, be very, very careful before upgrading to this version, as upstream changed the format of the binary statistic logs in an incompatible way, which means that you will not be able to read your old stats any more. (...)"

Jos Poortvliet: First day of Latinoware

"So this is the morning of the second Latioware day. Last night, just before the party/rock concert Maddog told me he just finished a blog - which made me realize that I didn't... So my notes on Brazil, Latinoware and openSUSE here. (...)"

Javier Llorente: Busy Oktober

"Last month I went to the Ovi and KDE sprint, Qt Developer Days 2010 -both in MĂŒnich- and the openSUSE Conference 2010 in NĂŒremberg. It was a busy Oktober. (pictures below!)

The Ovi and KDE sprint took place at Nokia’s MĂŒnich office, where we discussed why integration between KDE and Ovi would be beneficial for both (better user experience, exposure to a large userbase). There I had the pleasure to meet lots of KDE people; Leinir, Frank Karlitschek, Chani, Myriam Schweingruber, Sascha Peilicke, Sivan Greenberg, Mark Kretschmann, Rune Jensen, Arjen Hiemstra, Jonathan, Dinesh, Krzysiek, Knut Yrvin

After the Ovi sprint, the Qt Developer Days 2010 began. The training sessions took place the first day. Even though some exercises were skipped, I liked it. Days 2 and 3 were focused on showing how cool Qt is. I never thought QML could be that easy, powerful and straightforward. Besides all of the presentations, we also had dinner with the Trolls, played the “fact or crap” game and tried some Meego-powered devices. So yepp, I enjoyed it and I’m looking forward for the 2011 edition :-) (...)"

Kai-Uwe Behrmann: new iccprofile mime icon

"Nuno Pinheiro is a artist, working among other things on KDEs icon set. We discussed on the openSUSE conference 2010 about the missing ICC profile mime type icon, and he created a simple, and very well recognizable SVG icon. Personally I like it much. (...)"

Bryen Yunashko: Talking Accessibility at LatinoWare

"Talking about Accessibility @ Latinoware

Day Three at LatinoWare in Iguassu Falls, Brazil and I’m having loads of fun meeting some interesting folks here in the Southern Hemisphere. I’m wearing two hats this week, representing openSUSE and GNOME-A11y Outreach. There’s a lot of stuff going on with the openSUSE Ambassadors here in Brazil and I’ll post that later on news.opensuse.org once I have gathered up all the photos and tagged them properly.

I came down to LatinoWare at the behest of Izabel Valverde, advocate extraordinaire of women in open source, accessibility and openSUSE here in Brazil, to talk about Accessibililty in open source. (...)"

Klaas Freitag: 10 obscure Linux office applications

"Last night I was trying to beauty up my Kraft Homepage a bit and while doing that I realised that half of the allowed transfer volume that is coming with the cheap hosting contract is already eaten up for November. Investigating how that could have happened I found out that Kraft was mentioned in a very nice blog called 10 obscure Linux office applications you need to try. It introduces some interesting apps out of the whole mass of all FOSS apps in that specific area. Kraft is mentioned there, which is of course nice, the author seems to like Kraft. I am, however, not really sure why the word obscure is in the headline of the blog, do you know ;-) ? (...)"


openSUSE Forums

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MP3 Player in Linux?

"This thread could potentially contain some useful and informative information for users. Especially if you are considering such a purchase. I suspect the MP3 and Cell phone have combined somewhat though."

USB Camera Issue

"I suspect this might be a non-starter and will probably end up being a Virtual Box solution. That or assign the Camera to scrap heap, which is pretty much where it belongs."

Join Multiple .avi's in to One file?

"Probably not something we do every day, but most of us will look at this at some point. Some good suggestions seems to have helped the OP here."

KDE systray Issue

"With KDE4.5.3 released this week, it seems fitting to have a news item on it. As it turns out, this user had the wrong repos in place."


On the Web

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Announcements

Qt 4.7.1 and Qt Mobility 1.1.0 released

"An upgrade to Qt, Qt 4.7.1, and the final release of Qt Mobility 1.1.0 were released today. Both are now available for download. (...)"

One of the World's Largest Racing Organizations Standardizes on SUSE Linux Enterprise

"Novell today announced The Hong Kong Jockey Club (HKJC), one of the largest racing organizations in the world, has chosen SUSEÂź Linux Enterprise Server as the standard operating system for its recent deployments of core information dissemination, integration and access systems. (...)"

Allen Winter: KDEPIM 4.5 is Dead -- Here's to KDEPIM 4.6

"Well, the ramp-up for KDE SC 4.6 has begun now, with soft freezes taking effect yesterday and the first beta due in about 1 week.

So... we have decided that there is no point to putting any more effort into the long-awaited KDEPIM 4.5.

99.9% of the KDEPIM team's effort will go into the 4.6 release. 0.1% effort remains for a probable KDEPIM 4.4.8 at the end of this month.

KDEPIM 4.6 !"


Reports

Alan Coopersmith: Is Wayland going to replace X?

"The interwebs are full this morning of reports on Mark Shuttleworth’s announcement that someday he’d like to use Wayland instead of Xorg as Ubuntu’s primary display driver.

My favorite so far is Ryan Paul’s Ars Technica article for this dead-on estimate of the amount of effort it would take to completely replace X11:

Although the Linux ecosystem would benefit greatly from a lighter and more easily extensible alternative, a concerted effort to displace X11 on the Linux desktop hasn’t really emerged yet because the task of bringing drivers, third-party software, and all of the other layers of the stack into alignment with such a move would be prohibitively cumbersome. Like, in the sense that using only your toes to build a full-scale replica of the Statue of Liberty out of toothpicks is prohibitively cumbersome.

(...)"

The Register/Gavin Clarke: Oracle cooks up free and premium JVMs

"Oracle will deliver two Java Virtual Machines (JVMs) based on the OpenJDK project - one free and the other paid.

That's according to Tweets pouring thick and fast from an Oracle session at QCon San Francisco, where the database giant mostly repeated its earlier plans for Java.

Adam Messinger, Oracle vice president of development, told QCon that Oracle plans to offer a "premium" edition of the JDK in addition to the open-source JDK. (...)"


Reviews and Essays

Datamation/Bruce Byfield: Aerodynamic Elephants and Free Software Without Freedom

"As regular as a scheduled crontab job, the articles keep appearing: Armed only with common sense, the writer is going to set the free software community straight on how it needs to improve.

Typically, the articles are a mixture of demands for hardware support or new software and rejections of the way that the Linux community operates. Essentially the articles come down to a suggestion that free software needs to lose its interest in freedom and focus on function -- in other words, to eliminate the entire reason for free software in the first place. (...)"

ZDNET/Jack Wallen: Ten KDE tools for all types of Linux user

"Version 4.5 of the KDE desktop is impressive in its own right. But just wait until you try some of the KDE tools, says Jack Wallen. The KDE development team has made some impressive advances with version 4.5. After the abysmal 4.0 release, the desktop has turned out to be an environment that would make any Linux user happy. It's as stable and as responsive as Gnome and highly flexible.

Yet beyond the desktop itself, KDE has a number of excellent tools. I thought I'd highlight some of the best ones to pique your interest. They vary in function and should appeal to a wide range of user types. (...)"

How-To Geek: Use Your Linux PC to Teach Students Basic Science

"If you’ve ever experienced one of your kids saying “Mom, how do I solve this math problem? What should I do? I’m bored”, then you’ll appreciate KDE Edutainment to help you teach your kids basic mathematics and other sciences.

KDE edutainment software is designed to fill the gap in Linux’s shortcoming: that there is little software of an educational nature. It has been gaining recognition and has become a great tool to teach basic science to students on both Linux and Windows platform. Read the KDE Windows installation page to understand how to install KDE on Windows. (...)"


LOL

Vincent Sanders: Keeping kindling dry

"(...) One day last week I had an idea. I would make my own protective cover by crafting something I had wanted to do for ages. And the (unoriginal I am sure) project of a hollowed out book for housing my kindle was implemented. (...)"


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 #149 of the openSUSE Weekly News is available in:

Delayed / to be translated:

Retrieved from "https://en.opensuse.org/index.php?title=Archive:Weekly_news_149&oldid=30040"