Archive:Weekly news 151
Editors Note
We are pleased to announce our 151 issue of the openSUSE Weekly News.
We hope that you will enjoy reading.
Announcements
Novell, Attachmate and openSUSE
"Is this thing on? *tap* *tap*. Good evening friends, this is your openSUSE Board speaking. If you didnāt hear yet, Novell has agreed to be acquired by Attachmate Corporation. What does that mean for the openSUSE Project? We donāt know exactly yet because our crystal ball is currently in the shop and therefore fortune-telling is not our greatest talent ;-) However, we have other talents: we are a software developer community and weāre here to work on one of the greatest GNU/Linux distributions and other world class software distribution tools to advance Free and Open Source software together with the global FOSS community! (...)"
- Official Announcements on this topic:
Where do we need to improve?
"Community, during our bi-weekly Board Meetings on IRC we have a regular agenda topic āWhere do we need to improve?ā. Weāre very much interested in ideas you may have to improve the inner workings of the Community/Project and we also like to provide an opportunity to step up and make us aware of complaints you may have with various aspects of the Community/Project. Weāre particular interested in addressing those issues that are both fast and easy to fix while providing a significant advantage to our success and the sake of our community. (...)"
Status Updates
Distribution
Team Reports
Build Service Team
New signing key in openSUSE:11.3:Contrib
"The old openSUSE:11.3:Contrib signing key got deleted by an accident, so we have to generate the new one and sign all packages in this repo with it. It is safe to accept key with the following fingerprint when yast/zypper ask you to do so:
4FC8 6B50 8808 B7D7 D36C 59E3 CC9C 2F60 7296 AFB2
Sorry for the inconvenience!"
Build Service Statistics
Statistics can be found at http://build.opensuse.org
openFATE Team
#310848: Allow select multiple in Package Manager (YaST module)
"Now I can select only 1 or only all packages in YaST package manager.
It would be logical to allow to mark several packages (more than 1, not all) by pressing Shift, Ctrl.
The marked packages could be manipulated with the same task: I select 3 packages, press right mouse, select to install (uninstall/tabu) these 3 packages."
#310855: Gnome Environment
"I often hear complains from users about the Gnome Environment,not its ability to work but the design of that,people love the 2 bar on Gnome Environment and I was thinking if we could change it on the upcoming 11.4. The currently Gnome menu is not usable enough.At list you can change that and make it more like Mint. I know its really easy for a user to make that change but those are the things that attract users,especially the new ones."
#310856: don't remove custom grub entries
"from https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=648565 (written by Nico Gruber):
Applying a kernel update will delete custom grub entries with this kernel and add a default one. (...)"
#310857: Fallback entry in GRUB for RAID systems
"GRUB supports a "fallback" entry that is booted if the default kernel is not available or bootable.
In short: that's exactly what you want on a system with RAID (at least RAID1, not sure if other RAID types are supported. (...)"
#310858: add apache2-mod_wsgi
"The package apache2-mod_python is discontinued. Please add apache2-mod_wsgi instead. Please add it to patterns-openSUSE-lamp_server."
#310866: Choose installation pattern on a the basis of type of usage
"openSUSE DVD has a lot of well selected packages. Currently what we do is offer choices to the consumer by his choices of Desktop. I would like we also offer choices on the basis of their use."
#310869: Yast module to manage classpath and enviroment variables
"There should a yast module which support managing and editing of classpaths and environment variables. This makes opensuse more user friendly when an application is extracted from tar files or it is compiled from sources."
#310870: Add WEEKLY_TIME for weekly crons
"When running cron jobs some of them can increase IO heavily, slowing the system down, like suse-updatedb from findutils-locate, doing a large find on the filesystems. On production servers being used by several users, these scripts have to be started at non working hours.
In /etc/sysconfig/cron we already have a variable called DAILY_TIME which controls at what time the scripts in /etc/cron.daily are being started by /usr/lib/cron/run-crons .
A similar approach would be very useful for the weekly crons, allowing a better control of the day and time when weekly cron jobs are started."
#310873: graphical environment for managing pendrive
"will be realy usefull a graphical environment for managing pendrive, where you can format, make partition, etc"
#310879: koffice 2.3 default office suite in opensuse 11.4
"koffice provides a very useful office suite that seamlessly integrates with kde"
Statistics
Feature statistics for openSUSE 11.4
More information on openFATE
Testing Team
Larry Finger: Weekly News for November 19
"The next Testing Core Team IRC meeting to discuss 11.4 Milestone 4 will be held December 6 at 1800 UTC.
The release of openSUSE 11.4 M4 has been delayed until Monday, November 29. The results of the automated testing implemented by Team member Bernhard Wiedermann indicated that Build 0906, which was a potential M4 candidate, was not suitable, but that Build 0908 would install without errors. Congratulations to Bernhard for his efforts. Trying to test a version that will not install is hardly the best way to encourage testing.
I have just begun to test M4 myself. Thus far, the NET install CD was used to upgrade from M3, and to build new installations on both real and virtual machines. My special interest is wireless networking - no serious problems found yet.
I hope the readers will test this version, and post bugs on the Novell Bugzilla."
Translation Team
Localization
- Daily updated translation statistics are available on the openSUSE Localization Portal.
- Trunk Top-List – Localization Guide
In the Community
Kostas Koudaras: Organize a booth for openSUSE at an event
"To be honest with you I just wrote that article for the openSUSE wiki but I liked it so much that I decided to blog it.
Well it's time to go and organize your booth. You did it all correctly so far:
- You announced the event on the mailing lists.
- You registered a booth.
- You got the promotional material you asked.
- You got all the items of the checklist bellow.
- You even found other people to participate with you in the booth. (...)"
Sascha Manns: New Rubrique in the openSUSE Weekly News
"We are planning a new Rubric "In the Community/Why iām using SUSE / openSUSE."
The please feel free to post here your experiences. Talk about why LINUX, and why openSUSE? Interesting Anektotes? What makes openSUSE better than other LINUX Distribution.
Now you can choose. One way for submit your Article is to put it in this Discussion field from our Facebook Site . As alternative you can send your Article to: own-submit@opensuse.org.
Please come to us and talk about yourself. We planning to publish each Week one of this collected experiences."
Andreas Jaeger: Please noteā¦
"Iām going on parental leave from December 14th to February 13th, 2011. My son was born in January and now itās my time to help a bit more out at home. My wife has many plans for me and I have some myself as well including changing diapers, some work at the house, celebrating christmas, showing off our kids to their grandparents, aunts and uncles, getting my son settled in the daycare, building a snow manā¦
I hope some days of vacation will be in there as well so that I can be refreshed again when I return back to the Novell office to continue working for openSUSE.
Right now, I try to find some people that take over some of my responsibilities.(...)"
Greek openSUSE community, Translation of our First issue of Weekly news in Greek(issue 150)
"The Greek openSUSE Team is pleased to inform you that the translation of openSUSE Weekly News issue 150 is a fact, take a look
http://el.opensuse.org/Weekly_news
Today is a Great day for the Greek Community, today after two meetings we made to show all (including ourselves) that we were not just big fat words and that we can make things happen as a team that is bigger than 3 or 4 people. We know we are late, we were not in a hurry, we wanted it done correctly. We made it and we are really proud of it. When we started creating the Greek community many people told us that it would end up a great failure. Today we say to them:
-You Are Wrong.
We know we have road ahead of us, but Every great journey must start with one small step."
From Ambassadors
Alex Barrios: Just a small story about my ambassador life
"Well, i know that i havenāt be so active in the last months here in lizards or the OWN but that doesnāt mean that i stop my ambassador work, and here is a small story about what i do to integrate the spread of the openSUSE word in my work.
After a really bad month for the economic point of view, i had to refocus all the goals of my company to jump out the hole where i fall thanks to the changes in the economy of my country (Venezuela), so i came out with the idea of give on-line courses about system security, hacking, pen-testing and that kind of stuff, including the usual Web Dev, Sys Admin courses. (...)"
Greek openSUSE Ambassadors: GeoDataCamp 2010
"November 19th-20th 2010 at National Technical University (NTUA), Athens there was a conference, GeoDataCamp 2010 (page in Greek) organized by OKXE.
openSUSE Greek team member Angelos Tzotsos made a presentation as member of OSGeo.
The conference was successful. More than 300 participants.
For all the presentations of the conference, his openSUSE laptop was used. Many people were interested and he gave about 20-30 PromoDVDs. Official GeoDataCamp 2010 WiKi page (in Greek). (...)"
Welcome new Members (Corner for new acknowledged Members)
- Efstathios (Stathis) Iosifidis (Diamond_gr): Active Marketing guy
Events & Meetings
Past:
Upcoming:
- November 30, 2010: openSUSE Marketing Team Meeting
- December 1, 2010: openSUSE Project Meeting (12:00)
- December 1, 2010: German Wiki Team Meeting (15:30)
- December 1, 2010: openSUSE Board Meeting (19:00)
- You can find more informations on other events at:
openSUSE for your ears
- The openSUSE Weekly News are available as Livestream or Podcast in the German Language. You can hear it or download it on http://blog.radiotux.de/podcast.
openSUSE in $COUNTRY
"Details"
Communication
Contributors
New/Updated Applications @ openSUSE
Petr Mladek: LibreOffice 3.3 beta3 available for openSUSE
"Iām happy to announce LibreOffice 3.3 beta3 packages for openSUSE. They are available in the Build Service LibreOffice:Unstable project. They are based on the libreoffice-3.2.99.3 release. Please, look for more details about the openSUSE LibreOffice build on the wiki page.
The packages are beta versions and might include even serious bugs. Therefore they are not intended for data-critical usage. A good practice is to archive any important data before an use, ā¦ (...)"
XBMC 9.11-1.pm.11.10
"XBMC is an award-winning free and open source (GPL) software media player and entertainment hub for digital media. XBMC is available for Linux, Mac OS X (Leopard, Tiger and Apple TV) and Microsoft Windows, as well as the original Xbox game console. Created in 2003 by a group of like minded programmers, XBMC is a non-profit project run and developed by volunteers located around the world. More than 50 software developers have contributed to XBMC, and 100-plus translators have worked to expand its reach, making it available in more than 30 languages."
Security Updates
To view the security announcements in full, or to receive them as soon as they're released, refer to the openSUSE Security Announce mailing list.
Kernel Review
Linux User & Developer/Jon Masters: The Kernel Column
"This month saw the final release of kernel 2.6.36, and the closing of the following āmerge windowā for new features to be merged into what will become the 2.6.37 kernel (more details about the latter in a moment). The 2.6.36 kernel features concurrency-managed workqueues, preliminary support for the fanotify mechanism discussed here in the past, final merging of the AppArmor security system used by some distributions for many years, and support for a new architecture, among many dozens of other significant improvements. The new kernel received patches from over 1,100 engineers for a total of nearly 11,000 changesets (collections of related changes to various kernel files) overall. (...)"
h-online/Thomas Leemhuis: Kernel Log: Fast response times via process groups
"The automatic creation of process groups should keep the desktop interface responsive even when a large number of processes are making the CPU sweat. Meanwhile, the development of 2.6.37 is in full swing, and new stable kernels replace their predecessors; 2.6.35, on the other hand, has reached the end of its life. (...)"
Tips and Tricks
For Desktop Users
Linux.com/Jack Wallen: Creating Macros Without Scripting in LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org
"If you find yourself doing the same task over and over again in LibreOffice (or OpenOffice.org), you need to learn about macros. Whether it's inserting the same text over and over, formatting text, or any other task where multiple keystrokes or actions are necessary you can save time by creating a macro. LibreOffice (and OpenOffice.org before it) include an outstanding Macro tool that allows you to quickly create and manage macros that will ease the burden of repetitive tasks. (...)"
For Commandline/Script Newbies
Tips4Linux.com: Record Live Radio using only Mplayer
"Did you know that you only need MPlayer to record a live radio station? Use
mplayer http://ip:port/ -ao pcm:file=radio.wav -vo null -vc null
to dump a radio.wav file of the audio stream. You can later convert it to MP3 using LAME or Audacity."
Usama Hashimi: GNU find ā A Multidimensional Tool
"Beginners are mostly afraid of command prompt. Whenever they see a command prompt, they immediately say āits very difficultā. But itās not true. The Command prompt is as friendly as GUI (Graphical User Interface), provided if you use it with proper procedure.
Most people use GUI tools to search for files. They donāt realize that they can use command line tools to search for them as well! GNU āfindā is such like a tool which can not only search files but can even copy, move or delete these files on the fly.
So letās see that how āfindā works."
For System Administrators
LinuxPlanet/Juliet Kemp: Linux Server Troubleshooting With strace
"strace is a useful little utility ā installed by default on most Linux systems ā which allows you to find out what a program is doing under the hood by tracing the system calls it's making. strace is a great basic debugging tool; but it's also fascinating to use even when you're not tracing a problem. It can teach you a lot about how a Linux program works. (...)"
LinuxPlanet/Akkana Peck: Troubleshooting Linux Servers
"You thought you had it all working, didn't you? And then you find out that your process you thought was running and collecting data hasn't reported anything for two hours. Or maybe it's something on the desktop -- your browser has frozen and isn't responding. Or suddenly everything's gotten really slow and you're not sure why. And this happens every few days, and you're tired of it.
Planet SUSE
Michal HruÅ”eckĆ½: Pasting images
"As you probably know, I'm the one responsible for openSUSE Paste. So I'm receiving some requests for adding features and fixing thing and such. One of the request I received quite some time ago was from Sirko. He's artist and he's doing nice artwork. Sometimes he needs to quickly post what he has drawn somewhere to show it to the others and receive some feedback. He is currently using his own site, he could use some image pasting site, but he is our community member and he likes promoting openSUSE wherever he is, whatever he is doing. So I started working on image pasting support for our openSUSE Paste quite some time ago and this weekend I finally finished it. (...)"
Pascal Bleser: Attachmate acquires Novell: my 0.02EUR
"As we announced yesterday (and Henne did 90% of the work, btw), Novell is probably going to be acquired. Yes, probably, it's not a done deal yet, but is probably what is going to happen.
Now, my very personal 2 cents about it. Not the view of the entire openSUSE board, just me, from my very own experience and feelings.
So it's random conspiracy time again, not like we haven't been there before, did we (just google for "Novell Microsoft deal" and look at all those doomsday scenarios). (...)"
Ludwig Nussel: updated permissions handling in 11.4
"In addition to supporting file system capabilities (fate#307254) Iāve also updated the permissions handling in 11.4 slightly.
There have been complaints that every SuSEconfig run also calls SuSEconfig.permissions which leads to changed file permissions at unexpected times. Therefore Iāve modified SuSEconfig.permissions to only actually set permissions when called explicitly (ie SuSEconfig āmodule permissions). When called by a generic SuSEconfig run SuSEconfig.permissions now only shows files with wrong permissions but doesnāt actually fix them anymore. (...)"
Andres Silva: openSUSE Needs to Rebel
"Over the course of a few years, and after openSUSE was launched, the relationship of openSUSE internally has been one of constant rediscovery and also lethargy. openSUSE heaveily relies on the power of the community and their votes on certain issues, features, etc. Simply put, openSUSE is democratic. In a sense, this means that openSUSE has developed a system that slows down the process of innovation and has become an acolyte of other Linux distributions such as Fedora and Ubuntu. Fedora, on the one hand, has the fairly advanced support from the Red Hat giant. A company that has enough capacity to make changes which are matured enough and set examples for other distributions to follow. Then Ubuntu has Mark Shuttleworth. A character with a strong personality and defying attitude to break the routine of being a "common" Linux distribution. (...)"
Kostas Koudaras: openSUSE: A difficult Distribution or a user-friendly distribution? (Part 1).
"Finally what kind of distribution is openSUSE? Is it a distribution that demands from the user to have some basic knowledge around Linux? is it a distribution unmanageable or by now its development has reached that level that has become a stable but yet friendly to the user of every level? Finally is openSUSE a distribution that you would recommend to a user that starts now with FOSS?
openSUSE Forums
What download method is best for downloading openSUSE 11.3
Although the download page at http://opensuse.org contains quite some information on this subject, the question above is asked in the forums from time to time. Read the different suggestions to the OP, who has problems getting a correct download.
New Kernel speed up patch from Mike Galbraith
"After the breaking news of Mike Galbraith's patch of 233 lines of code to the linux kernel and the confirmation it was working by Linus Torvalds, naturally some threads were opened on the forums. This thread is one of them, where bits and bigger bits of info drop in, also the alternative for the patch."
Wife orders new PC with no OS ... possible openSUSE candidate
"This subject was posted in our General Chit-Chat forums, may originally have been intended as no more than just sharing, but the thread evolves into a vibrant one, full of suggestions, advice, do's and don'ts, and sharing of experiences"
Paste your output: paste.opensuse.org:
"A nice example of integration of various services offered by opensuse.org and it's community: paste,opensuse.org. Lots and lots of times help seekers are asked to post the output of commands invoked in a terminal window. This output can be very long in terms of number of lines, and thus make the post almost unreadable. Pasting the output at paste.opensuse.org gives a link you can copy in your post."
Novell to be sold to Attachmate
"After months of rumours, yet another big news story develops: Novell, owner of SUSE, gets sold to Attachmate. Read how users react on the news, what they think it's going to mean for the distro. As I am writing this, already three threads have been opened on this issue: one here, and one here also have some replies."
On the Web
Announcements
ownCloud 1.1 released
"10 minutes ago I released ownCloud 1.1
IĀ“m really happy with this release. Not only because we have a lot of new features and bugfixes but also because the ownCloud development team is growing and more and more people are contributing to ownCloud.
I gave several presentation about ownCloud in the last few month and IĀ“m trilled by the positive reactions I get. People really seams to like to idea behind ownCloud.
You can download ownCloud 1.1 now and run you own cloud storage on your own hardware. (...)"
Call for participation
KDE.news/Cornelius Schumacher: KDE Experts Needed for EU Research Project
"The EU research project, ALERT, is looking for KDE experts to assist research on free and open source software collaboration processes. The goal of the ALERT project is to develop methods and tools that improve FLOSS coordination by maintaining awareness of community activities through real-time, personalized, context-aware notification. KDE provides one use case for applying and evaluating these methods and tools. (...)"
Anne-Marie Mahfouf (annma): Bug Squashing: preparing the 4.6 release
"I'll carry on giving tips on how to make better bug reports but I would like to ask your participation at the bug squashing week which will start tomorrow and will last 7 days.
What is it? The aim is to detect and triage the more bugs possible so that the next beta already will benefit of an improved quality.
How? If you can install the beta, you have 2 possibilities: either run it in any possible way and report all the bugs you find. Or help triage and reproduce the bugs already reported.
Where? You can join on IRC Freenode #kde-bugs and you can ask there any question. There is also a Techbase Page to help you. (...)"
Reports
Phoronix/Michael Larabel: Running The Native ZFS Linux Kernel Module, Plus Benchmarks
"In August we delivered the news that Linux was soon to receive a native ZFS Linux kernel module. The Sun (now Oracle) ZFS file-system has long been sought after for Linux, though less now since Btrfs has emerged, but incompatibilities between the CDDL and GPL licenses have barred such support from entering the mainline Linux kernel. There has been ZFS-FUSE to run the ZFS file-system in user-space, but it comes with slow performance. There has also been work by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories in porting ZFS to Linux as a native Linux kernel module. This LLNL ZFS work though is incomplete but still progressing due to a US Department of Energy contract. It is though via this work that developers in India at KQ Infotech have made working a Linux kernel module for ZFS. In this article are some new details on KQ Infotech's ZFS kernel module and our results from testing out the ZFS file-system on Linux. (...)"
PCWorld/Joab Jackson: Open-source Social Network Diaspora Goes Live
"Diaspora, a widely anticipated social network site built on open-source code, has cracked open its doors for business today, at least for a handful of invited participants. (...)"
Cult of Mac/Adam Rosen: Cool News: Now Your Fridge Can Run Linux
"The range of devices running Linux grows every day. Now you can add one more to the list: Electrolux (Frigidaire) in Brazil has just announced the Infinity i-kitchen, a smart appliance running Linux on an embedded 400MHz Freescale i.MX25 processor. With 128MB RAM and a 480Ć800 touch panel, the i-kitchen provides the user with unparalleled control over his refrigerator operations. (...)"
LinuxDevices.com/Jonathan Angel: Toshiba spins shake-and-bake hard disk drives
"Toshiba announced a pair of 2.5-inch hard disk drives it claims offer the industry's widest temperature range for 24/7 operation. Suitable for ATMs, digital surveillance, automation, and other embedded devices, the MK1060GSCX and MK8050GACY spin at 4,200rpm and offer 100GB or 80GB capacities, respectively. (...)"
Network World/Stephen Spector: What Open Source Community is the Healthiest?
"When thinking of an open source developer, most us of probably think of a male in his 30ās, overweight, long beard, and socially awkward. While this is just a stereotype and not a true reflection of all open source developers, there is some truth in the weight category. (...)"
Reviews and Essays
Datamation/Bruce Byfield: Is Mobile Making Linux Menus Obsolete?
"Are menus starting to disappear from the Linux desktop? A survey of the alternatives suggests that, at the very least, menus seem to be evolving out of recognition in response to modern trends, particularly the effort to make workstation and laptop desktops more like mobile interfaces. Ask usability experts, and the unexamined assumption is that the classic menu needs improvement -- although whether users feel that way seems less clear. (...)"
KDE 4 Look Part 3: A Week of KDE 4.5
"So Iāve used KDE for about a work week. During that time Iāve pretty much gone to using the KDE versions of all my programs except Konqueror. Iām not sure if the Fedora 14 version of Konqueror is the one with Webkit, but last time I used Konqueror with KHTML it was mucking up a bunch of web pages including my blog. So I stuck with Google Chrome, which is what i use on Gnome, LXDE (Lubuntu on my laptop), and on my Windows 7 install. (Also, I stuck with gPodder for podcasts because thatās working perfectly) So how did it go?"
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Credits
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- STS301 Talk - Contributions Sebastian Schƶbinger (Tips/Tricks)
- HeliosReds Talk - Contributions Satoru Matsumoto (Editorial Office)
- Caf4926 Talk - Contributions Carl Fletcher (Main-Newsletter, Forums Sec.)
- Knurpht Talk - Contributions Gertjan Lettink (Forums)
- Okuro Talk - Contributions Thomas HofstƤtter (Events & Meetings)
- add translators
Translations
openSUSE Weekly News is translated into many languages.Issue #151 of the openSUSE Weekly News is available in:
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