Archive:Weekly news 150

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Editors Note

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We are pleased to announce our 150 issue of the openSUSE Weekly News.

We hope that you will enjoy reading.


Status Updates

Distribution

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Schedules for the next Week

"openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 4 Release:
Milestone: snapshot release without agenda. We release it once we have several new key components in. Moved to friday as monday is a holiday. Thu, 25 Nov 2010 14:00:00 GMT"

Bugzilla

Important links:


Team Reports

Build Service Team

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Build Service Statistics

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


Medical Team

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Manu Gupta: Aloha openSUSE Medical

"A few minutes back Sascha Manns and his team released openSUSE Medical Version 0.0.6 and declared it stable. Kudos to them. This distribution is aimed at medical professionals and is packed with open source stuff targeted towards the medical community, for students, doctors and clinics. It includes FreeMedForms an ERP solution for clinical purposes. FreeDiams is a prescriber that can be used alone to prescribe and / or test drug interactions within a prescription. It can be linked to any application thanks to its command line parameters. FreeDiams can use several drugs databases. The GNUmed project builds free, liberated open source Electronic Medical Record software in multiple languages to assist and improve longitudinal care. So all in all, Sascha and his team provides a power pack for the Medical Community. (...)"


openFATE Team

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#310826: Keep last package version on update

"Zypper should implement an additional option "Keep last package Version" and a function "restore previous version"
If the user makes an update and the new package version makes problems he could simply reinstall the old version.
A good example is the current NVIDIA package which makes amarok crash (http://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-help-here/multimedia/449355-amarok-crashing.html)
Also there should be an option to delete all backup packages when the user is shure everything works as expected."

#310830: Pinta project added

"The mono-based graphics editor ought to be integrated with next OpenSUSE release:
http://pinta-project.com/
Ubuntu has dropped GIMP integration, which is not what I'm looking for."

#310831: Bépo keyboard layout - «first class citizen»

"The usual qwerty keyboard layout (and similar layouts like qwertz, azerty...) are known for being suboptimal. Better layouts are available, like dvorak. These layouts are often tied to a language : dvorak is better for english, while french users will prefer bépo. (...)"

#310832: add write permission to users on the fstab options

"It's more and more frequent to have a big partition shared by users for large data (video...).
Now one have to allow writing on these partitions with going root and making
chown :users <mount point>
chmod g+w <mount point>
It should be a good idea to add the option in the partitionner to make this. One more option "allow writing by users", for example."

#310835: Update Vim to 7.3

"openSUSE 11.3 includes Vim 7.2 that is 2 years old.

On August 2010, Vim 7.3 has been released and includes a few new features (Lua support, Python 3 support, Blowfish encryption, persistent undo/redo). But first and foremost, Vim 7.3 includes all patches that were released since the last 7.2 release two years ago."

#310836: add an option in YaST to comment out an entry

"I just notice that some Windows 7 entries in GRUB menu.lst as written by the openSUSE installer are very dangerous. On my HPE-311 desktop, I had 3 entries, for 3 windows partitions. The latter being the recovery partition, labelled "windows 3". (...)"

#310837: Enhance grub configuration for multiboot systems

"When installing Windows (version 7 with me), then openSUSE 11.3, and no partition is marked "active", then hibernating (suspend to disk) in Windows 7 does not work anymore after installing linux.
When activating the "activate" checkbox in the Windows section of the grub configuration, it works.
Could you change the intial(?) grub configuration or display a hint (flashing, big, ...)? (...)"

#310844: Fix the "Where do we need to improve?" topic of the board meeting

"The board meeting has a topic about where we do need to improve. This recieves too little attention from a too small group. We need to fix this."

#310845: Develop script to setup cacti with default settings

"can a script be developed to install the cacti package using default values [1].
[1] http://en.opensuse.org/Cacti "

Statistics

Feature statistics for openSUSE 11.4

More information on openFATE


Testing Team

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Larry Finger: Weekly News for November 19

"A Testing Core Team IRC meeting to discuss 11.4 Milestone 3 was held November 15.

We first discussed the latest developments in automated testing of installation. If those system builds that will not install are detected early, then users will be spared the effort wasted in downloading a product that will not run. The goal is to minimize user frustration, and maximize user time spent in tests that cannot be done automatically. For example, the virtual machines used in the automatic testing have very limited hardware, thus a lot of drivers are not tested.

Team member Bernhard Wiedemann, who developed these testing procedures, has been granted access to a server at openSUSE for this purpose. For anyone interested in the details of how the tests function, please see https://lwn.net/Articles/414413/. To see the squashing of bugs over time, see http://openqa.opensuse.org/cgi-bin/currentresults. The links in the left-hand columns show details of the testing. To see visually what Bernhard is testing, look at the movie.

The meeting also discussed the handling of Bugzilla reports. The plan is to automate the scanning of the list to find those bugs that affect the pending release so that none of bugs found in testing are allowed to persist in the released version. Further discussion of bug handling will be reported here."


Translation Team

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Thomas Schraitle: Status Hungarian openSUSE Documentation

"As I wrote last time, I’ve migrated our documentation to a public SVN server on BerliOS. There you can get the English sources of the official openSUSE documentation and some business products too.

Apart from Russian, I’m very happy that the Hungarian translation of the openSUSE documentation is underway! Thanks to Kálmán Kéménczy, he will publish the Hungarian documentation soon. Currently, some translatation, proofreading, and polishing have to be done, so stay tuned (see https://svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/opensuse-doc/trunk/documents/distribution/hu.)
By the way, the Hungarian books from the 11.1 and 11.2 release can be downloaded in the Hungarian portal. (...)"

Localization


In the Community

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Nelson Marques: Yet another academical paper…

Nelson Marques are working on an interesting project. In the first Part of the Project, he wants to define what the openSUSE Project is, and what the Community is. The second part is a study. Enjoy reading.

Sirko Kemter: OpenRheinRuhr 2010

"Time to write a small report about the last weekend, another event happend there. I was at OpenRheinRuhr in Oberhausen. It was the second edition of this event. Last year it was in Bottrop, some maybe remember the sexy openSUSE booth girls ;) So this year the organizers changed the location and it was deifinitly a good decision, there was definitly more visitors because of that. The location was a museum for the industry there once was, so the social event had a really geeky style between really big gearwheels and such stuff. The hall was this year really big and a lot of place for the projects.

For the booth I had one of the big HP touchscreens, they are always good for events. People like to play “Numpty Physics” and when there stay some people others become curious and stop at the booth. But we played not only on the booth, thanks Jan we showed WebYasT on his machine at home, of course we had some conversations about and showings of SUSE Studio. Not many people asked for the openSUSE Buildservice, but thats ok there, it was an more user oriented event. For me I made an test there, we had some days ago a little discussion on the marketing mailinglist to market more such things like OBS and I began to make a new poster serie for that, so I tested with an beamer some of the new posters on a side wall. I think I prepare an slideshow with the motifes, when I have all posters have done, so that all ambassadors can do the same. Its an action thing and that does always make people curious. (...)"

Michal Hrušecký: openSUSE Conference 2010

"As you probably all know, few weeks ago was openSUSE Conference 2010. And it was great event and I'm glad I was able to attend it. Unfortunatelly I had some troubles with my blog, so I'm writing about it now. I had there a small "workshop" about KVM & libvirtd and about why you shouldn't be affraid of using them. Few slides that I came up with can be obtained here, but most of the time, it consisted from the discussion with people that attended it. But I want to write mainly about interesting things that I learned on conference. (...)"

Welcome new Members (Corner for new acknowledged Members)

Events & Meetings

Past:

Upcoming:

openSUSE for your ears

From Ambassadors

Greek openSUSE Ambassadors: Greek openSUSE community, Our first meeting

"Yesterday the Greek openSUSE community had it's first meeting. The purpose of this meeting was all of those who are interesting on participate to decide the next steps of our community together.
Me(Warlordfff) and Stathis(Diamond_gr) had no experience on how to organize such a meeting so we made a lot of mistakes,had many difficulties and many things went wrong but finally we managed to make some decisions about certain points and we decided to have another meeting exclusively at IRC this time,sometime next weekend. (...)"

openSUSE in $COUNTRY

"Details"

Communication

Contributors


New/Updated Applications @ openSUSE

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Packman: kmediafactory 0.8.0-3

"KMediafactory is easy to use template based dvd authoring tool. You can quickly create DVD menus for home videos and TV recordings in three simple steps."

Packman: gxine 0.5.905-2

"This is a GTK+ based GUI for the libxine video player library. It provides gxine, a media player that can play all the audio/video formats that libxine supports. Currently, this includes MPEG1/2, some AVI and Quicktime files, some network streaming methods and disc based media (VCD, SVCD, DVD). (...)"

OBS: OBS openSUSE:11.3:Update/java-1_6_0-openjdk r2 commited

"Updated to icedtea6-1.9.1"

SUSE Geek: Clementine Music Player in openSUSE 11.3

"Clementine is a free opensource Music player released under GPL v3 license. It is a port the Amarok music player taking advantage of Qt4 features focusing on a fast and easy-to-use interface for... (...)"

Holger Hetterich: SMB Traffic Analyzer 1.2 released

"We just released SMB Traffic Analyzer version 1.2.

After the release of version 1.1 we got immediate feedback that the configuration file is not being read correctly. The port number to connect to the VFS module was overwritten when a client port number was given (bnc#652755), in case a configuration file was used with smbtad. (...)"

Sascha Manns: New Package for packager: whohas

"Sometimes a packager asked himself, who has already packaged this Software? Maybe the Packagingfiles can help me to fix a error? Or maybe an other packager has a written a patch that i can use for my situation?
Philipp L. Wesche knows this situation, and he wrote a program, that allows to view in other Distributions and Repositories, who has a specific Software packaged. The commandline tool “whohas” supports Arch, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Mandriva, openSUSE, Slackware, linuxpackages.net, Source Mage, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Fink, MacPorts and Cygwin. Philipp wrote this tool in Perl and was designed to help package maintainers find ebuilds, pkgbuilds and similar package definitions to learn from. (...)"


  • 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 Summary Report: SUSE-SR:2010:021

  • Announcement ID: SUSE-SR:2010:021
  • Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2010 13:00:00 +0000
  • Cross-References: CVE-2008-7247, CVE-2009-4030, CVE-2010-1626
  • CVE-2010-1848, CVE-2010-1849, CVE-2010-2939
  • CVE-2010-3611, CVE-2010-3681, CVE-2010-3683
  • CVE-2010-4098, CVE-2010-4207, CVE-2010-4208
  • CVE-2010-4209


Kernel Review

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Phoronix/Michael Larabel: The ~200 Line Linux Kernel Patch That Does Wonders

"In recent weeks and months there has been quite a bit of work towards improving the responsiveness of the Linux desktop with some very significant milestones building up recently and new patches continuing to come. This work is greatly improving the experience of the Linux desktop when the computer is withstanding a great deal of CPU load and memory strain. Fortunately, the exciting improvements are far from over. There is a new patch that has not yet been merged but has undergone a few revisions over the past several weeks and it is quite small -- just over 200 lines of code -- but it does wonders for the Linux desktop. (...)"


Tips and Tricks

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For Desktop Users

MakeUseOf/Tim Brookes: What EXIF Photo Data Is, How To Find It & How To Understand It

"Since cameras went digital we’ve had a few more perks to enjoy alongside our usual photography habits. No longer do we need to pause and think “shall I take that shot?” with expensive film and processing costs giving way to re-usable memory cards.

Pretty much every digital camera available today (give or take the dodgy cheap Chinese ones found on eBay) records EXIF data within each image you take. This data is then useful for improving your photography plus can be quite interesting especially if you’re a bit of a geek. (...)"

Linux.com/Jack Wallen: How to Configure Wireless on Any Linux Desktop

"If you are a mobile Linux user one of the first things you need to do is to connect that mobile device to a wireless access point. By default, the standard Wi-Fi tools for the Linux desktops are straight-forward and reliable. That of course presumes you are using the standard desktops (GNOME or KDE). But what happens when you opt for a different desktop such as E17 or Fluxbox? Or what if the "default" standards aren't flexible enough or feature-rich enough for your needs. In those instances you need to take a look at a different toolset for connecting you to a wireless access point. (...)"


For Commandline/Script Newbies

BashShell.net: How To Search Using The Awk Utility

"You can do searches with awk by enclosing the search within forward slashes. Note awk is case sensitive. (...)"


For Developers and Programmers

Linux User & Developer/Kunal Deo: Open source programming for beginners

"Sometimes even experienced developers can be a bit overwhelmed by Linux’s extensive development capabilities. Sit back and soak up these tips to become a smarter and more productive Linux developer overnight… (...)"

Duncan Mac-Vicar: Realtime syntax checking with emacs

"One of the nice features of fat IDEs is that you get real time syntax checking. Some languages make it easy, some not.

For example Eclipse has access to the compiler as a service inside the IDE, and it checks the code as you type, even suggesting fixes.

I started to research what could be done on the emacs side to get a better experience, as when I am coding, I am usually thinking at the same time I write, and this means I make more syntax errors than the average guy. (...)"


For System Administrators

ServerWatch/Joe Brockmeier: Check Apache Server Status From a Web Page

"Sometimes you want to see how your server is doing without SSH'ing into the system. One way to do this is to set up a Web page that shows Apache status. Sound difficult? Not really, it's a default module for Apache and easy to enable. (...)"

HowtoForge/Falko Timme: How To Configure PureFTPd To Accept TLS Sessions On OpenSUSE 11.3

"FTP is a very insecure protocol because all passwords and all data are transferred in clear text. By using TLS, the whole communication can be encrypted, thus making FTP much more secure. This article explains how to configure PureFTPd to accept TLS sessions on an OpenSUSE 11.3 server. (...)"

LinuxPlanet/Paul Ferrill: Linux Protects Your Servers with Scapy (part 1)

"Guarding your private network from the perils of the Internet is no easy task. The basics are pretty much the same from a defensive standpoint no matter how you slice it. Firewalls of one type or another protect an internal network by using two separate Ethernet connections with a software proxy filtering the traffic between the two ports. Linux serves as a great platform for this role with tools like netfilter/iptables. (...)"

Bruno Friedmann: Make vmware 7.1.2 running with opensuse 11.4 (kernel 2.6.36)

"So there’s a solution to make the kernel modules building under openSUSE factory (11.4) and the kernel 2.6.36 (...)"


Planet SUSE

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Nelson Marques: Oxygen: .spec mime type?

"I have to say… Nuno Pinheiro keeps surprising people all the time… This time, with a cool .spec mime type: (...)"

Sebastian Kügler: we are out of househacking

"I’ve just returned from our local microbrewery, Brouwerij de Hemel in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, the place where I live after a nice dinner with my fellow KDE e.V. Board Member members. Friday and Saturday we had planned to hold a two+ day board meeting here in Nijmegen. Kim and me have moved into our new house in Nijmegen two weeks ago and we’re now mostly settled, meaning all critical parts of infrastructure work and are in place, and we can pick up our lives again, after two months of updating, maintaining and facelifting it from the inside. We’re now fully settled. We’ve moved inside Nijmegen from a rather nice flat into a larger house. We got the keys to the new house two months ago, and have spent this year’s september and october on painting, wallpapering, insulating and other facelift and maintainance work. Luckily, many of our friends and families came by to help us here and there. (...)"

Thomas Schraitle: Checking EPUBs

"EPUBs are getting more and more important thesedays. If you believe the essays from well-informed magazines, they will develop into a standard for book and text consumption as MP3 did for audio.

Today, lots of e-book readers are available and more will be ready in the future. Apart from the problem, if an e-book reader supports EPUB, the EPUB file itself has to adhere to certain specifications. This is the task for epubcheck, a commandline utility which validates an EPUB file. (...)"

Michal Hrušecký: openSUSE Paste: Never expire

"This is just a small update regarding openSUSE Paste. Some time ago Gertjan Lettink from openSUSE Forums team asked me, whether it would be possible to add possibility to keep pastes forever on openSUSE Paste. I wasn't really fan of that saying that 3 years is almost forever... But I asked Jaromír Červenka who is providing hosting for this service and he said that he don't mind. So I promissed that I will look at it later (as I was quite overloaded with other things at that time)... And quite some time later I received another e-mail asking about the progress. And it's done now. So from now on, you can use openSUSE Paste to store pastes forever. I also set one week as a default expiration time on the web. I'm sorry that it took so long, I admit, that I almost forgot about that. But what you can learn from this story is not to be afraid to remind people about things that you are waiting for ;-)"

Kohei Yoshida: Working with a branch using git-new-workdir

"Git package contains a script named git-new-workdir, which allows you to work in a branch in a separate directory on the file system. This differs from cloning a repository in that git-new-workdir doesn’t duplicate the git history from the original repository and shares it instead, and that when you commit something to the branch that commit goes directly into the history of the original repository without explicitly pushing to the original repository. On top of that, creating a new branch work directory happens very much instantly. It’s fast, and it’s efficient. It’s an absolute time saver for those of us who work on many branches at any given moment without bloating the disk space. (...)"

Manu Gupta: First OSC and now Latinoware

"Looks like openSUSE is making a lot of presence all over the world and I kinda envy a few guys who just get to meet the wonderful days, meeting wonderful people and are having awesome fun over there. So I hope if I have enough money, then next year perhaps I can attend one of these events.

However, kudos to all those guys who are making it a big success. OSC no doubt as everyone knows was a huge success and the team at Brazil says people are just loving openSUSE. One of my very good friend Carlos and one of the major ambassadors in Brazil said we are one of the most popular distros in Brazil and people are loving it. Hats OFF Team Brazil!!

Hopefully we meet next year in person guys"


openSUSE Forums

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Blank screen at boot ....

"Here's a thread where a happy user suddenly meets trouble. Nice read to see how the problem gets analyzed first, then we see various approaches to solve the matter. "

Alt+F2 command to open "close session+change user" dialog?

"This user is looking for a way to logout and switch to another user, taking a shortcut. The replies give some very interesting and useful information on how to get this working both on Gnome and KDE"

LibreOffice ?

"Most of you may have read about the forking of OpenOffice.org into the Document Foundation and LibreOffice. Quite some users seem to be interested in running LibreOffice. This thread shows the entrance of LibreOffice for openSUSE, first way to install, and how things went from there on. "

Online Update does not connect to the internet

"A nice example of a thread where the solution is found by the OP, though already suggested before by several others. Sometimes it's hard to get clear what's expected, what's meant with "read carefully". There's a happy ending too."


On the Web

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Announcements

Baracus Project Delivers the Next Generation of System Boot and Build Management

"Novell today announced the release of and support for the Baracus project, an open source platform focused on delivering a feature rich, easy to use, highly customizable boot and build management solution. (...)"

Announcing a new utility: 'trace'

"We are pleased to announce a new tracing tool called 'trace'.

This tool follows up on Linus's (not so) recent observations that Linux tracing is still not really offering good tracing tools to ordinary users. There's no easy to use workflow and the tools that exist are not expressive enough to solve everyday problem. (...)"

Linux.com/Amanda McPherson: New Btrfs Free Tutorial and Request for End User Feedback on Btrfs

"Those who follow Linux have certainly heard of Btrfs, a relatively new high performance file system that has a lot of people excited about its potential. Two months ago during LinuxCon Japan, we were pleased to sit down with lead developer Chris Mason from Oracle to record a short webinar that focuses on demonstrating RAID5 and RAID6 as well as recently completed features in Btrfs. This tutorial would be valuable to anyone interested in the technical details of the filesystem. Please enjoy this free Btrfs Linux tutorial and let us know your feedback. Also, please enjoy the other free Linux training tutorials available as part of our Linux training program. (...)"


Call for participation

InfoWorld: The 2010 InfoWorld Geek IQ Test

"And we're back again for our annual tribute to the members of the Geek Tribe. Retape your glasses, take a big suck on that bucket of Red Bull next to your desk, and dig into the 20 questions below. Answer enough correctly, and we'll agree you've got your geek on. Answer too many wrong, and we may have to buy you some pom-poms. (...)"


Reports

h-online/Richard Hillesley: Health Check: openSUSE - Community before code

""One important thing about community is to have shared ideas. Communities aren't glued together by boundaries," explains Thomas Thym, an academic and KDE developer. "They are open. They are glued together by ideas, by visions, by values they have in common."

So in between the technical sessions, the sharing of code hacks and the general hubbub at the recent openSUSE Conference in Nuremberg, the talk was of strategy and a common vision, which is important, Thym says, "because it gives the community one direction it can orient around, and this was missing in the past." (...)"

Peter Penz: Dolphin Improvements for KDE SC 4.6

"As usual after the KDE feature freeze, I'd like to give an overview which improvements have been done in Dolphin for the next KDE SC. (...)"

Qt Labs/Thiago Macieira: MeeGo Conference 2010 wrap-up

"I’m now back home after a very successful MeeGo Conference 2010. Thankfully for me, the flight was short and it arrived ahead of time, even with a 10-minute delay on departure. The winds have been favourable to us (though the Harmattan wind doesn’t help airplanes — not yet anyway).

Upon arriving, I was reminded immediately why the conference shouldn’t be in Oslo in November, like someone suggested some time ago in the MeeGo Wiki: it’s cold here and snowing. Compared to Oslo, Dublin’s weather was comforting and warm. Add to that the welcoming social events that were organised for us and you see why it was a good reason to go — visiting the Guiness Storehouse and watching live Norway 2 x 1 Ireland was a nice touch! I even made a cameo appearence in Norway’s largest newspaper, in a weird fish-eye lens photo. (...)"



Reviews and Essays

PCWorld/Katherine Noyes: How to Choose a Linux Laptop

"Want to run Linux on a laptop, but not sure which hardware is best? This guide will help you zero in on the machine that’s right for you and the distribution you select. (...)"


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 #150 of the openSUSE Weekly News is available in:

Delayed / to be translated:

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