Archive:Weekly news 2

Welcome to the second issue of openSUSE Weekly News! For the week starting the 26-11-2007. Read this article in: English, German.

In this week:

ATI RadeonHD Driver: First Release!
YaST Gets Ported to Qt4
FOSDEM Main tracks talks and developer rooms, with an openSUSE room and stand, announced
In Planet SUSE: Mono on OS X, openSUSE KDE Developments, KDE4 Desktop Effects Video Tour
In Tips and Tricks: Speed up Package Management

Announcements

ATI RadeonHD Driver: First Release!

"The X Window System developer team at SUSE has released version 1.0.0 of the ATI Radeon R5xx and R6xx chipset driver it has been developing over the past few months for Novell’s technology partner AMD...Packages can be found in the openSUSE Build Service"

In the Community

People of openSUSE: Keith Kastorff

"The ‘People of openSUSE’ publishes this week one more interesting interview, one of the most active openSUSE community members - Keith Kastorff - the man who has his own Beagle and spends his time helping people at SUSE Forums."

Novell Open Audio: AutoBuild/Build Service

"As part of their openSUSE release series, Novell Open Audio has talked to Michael Schröder and Andreas Bauer about the openSUSE Build Service, our powerful cross-distribution package build system. They discuss a bunch of updates which happened over the year since last coverage, what is being worked on currently and a little bit on how you can have your projects hosted on the service."

FOSDEM 2008: Call for Papers, Ideas

"We started last week the FOSDEM planing, so far we have some ideas about the talks and i try to get some money." Current ideas include:
Education
compiz fusion
1-Click
KDE4 (maybe a combined talk with KDE members)
GNOME (for example accessibility)
openSUSE 11.0
product creator/KIWI
LTSP

YaST Gets Ported to Qt4

Stephan Kulow writes on his blog to inform us about his successful attempts in getting YaST ported to Qt4:

"Certain voices claimed, porting Yast to Qt4 would be almost impossible due to the different event loops and threading and all that. But thanks to Thiago's little explanations on how things to go together, it was actually a job done pretty quickly (it was once tried in july, so I didn't start from scratch). Damn! Did I say, I have the rest of the year?"

Here's a screenshot of what can be done with a little editing of the styles:

File:Yast-qt4.png

Ever wanted to just drag all your settings, bookmarks or documents when moving over to openSUSE? Well Pavol Rusnak writes on the opensuse-factory mailing list to tell us about the new migration assistant for openSUSE:

"It helps users to migrate documents and settings from another OS present on system. Currently it supports Windows (XP and Vista) and Linux. We imagined that it would be nice feature to have also in SUSE, so I began investigating it."

This should be appearing into new openSUSE releases in the future, and you can test it out in the mean time by referring to the packages in the openSUSE build service, as described in the aforementioned mailing list post.

Status Updates

Build Service

Added support for signing with project sign keys. We now just need to generate keys for every "top level" project.
working on driver backport with the linux foundation
worked on web-fate version for opensuse

Tips and Tricks

Speed up Package Manager Stack

"Package Management is one part of the system where massive databases are thrown around, changed incrementally and is generally used heavily. Due to incremental nature of modifications it will cause the databases used to fragment, both internally (in the database blob) and externally (on the disk)."

With a little simple defragmentation it can in many cases be significantly improved.

Planet SUSE

Covering just a few posts from Planet SUSE, an aggregation of all SUSE contributors' blogs:

Egbert Eich: The first release of the ATI RadeonHD driver is out!

Egbert goes over many details and processes around getting the new Radeon driver, while also answering several FAQs about it.

Stephan Binner: openSUSE KDE Developments

"The KDE Wiki page has been spiffed up and should be now a good portal to inform everyone quickly about everything worth knowing about KDE on openSUSE."
"This includes better packaging documentation like a KDE spec file cookbook and description of used macros."
"It also mentions a long list of challenges we face - any help to accomplish as much of it as possible until next openSUSE release is welcome."
"We started to have biweekly scheduled meetings on our IRC channel, the next one will be on 12th December."
more...

Miguel de Icaza: Mono on OSX, Win32

"In general, the focus of the Mono team is on Unix system, and more specifically for open source versions of Unix (Linux and BSD) but we still provide provide some support for Win32, Solaris and OSX even if they are proprietary and OpenSolaris (even if its licensed for mininal collaboration and cross pollination with Linux)... In general, I do not like to support proprietary operating systems, but in the particular case of OSX, there is enough of a user-base that it made sense to bend backwards for the sole purpose of increasing the contributor and user bases."

Will Stephenson: Taking System Settings in hand

"One of the big things about KDE 4 at an app level was moving from KControl to System Settings. The major complaint about KDE (from non-KDE users) is that it is too configurable, where 'too' generally means they can't find the thing they want to configure. System Settings is the product of usability-led design, and kcontrol was dropped some months ago, but it seems very little has happened since it was ported to KDE 4. So rather than just give myself an ulcer about it, I've decided to take System Settings in hand and make it good."

Pascal Bleser: FOSDEM 2008: announcing keynote and main track speakers, announcing developer rooms

Pascal provides the official announcement and link of the main track talks and developer rooms for FOSDEM 2008, Europe's largest free and open source conference. The openSUSE Devroom and stand has once again been confirmed.

Francis Giannaros: KDE4 Desktop Effects (KWin Composite) Video Tour

"The desktop effects are coming along nicely, with many plugins available. You will no longer need to run Compiz to get many standard and convenient composite features: they will be available right inside KDE. In many cases the plugins improve window management (like “present windows” or Compiz’s “scale” plugin), provide a little eye-candy to the desktop (like translucent windows), or are just useful in various situations, like mouse mark (handy when doing a presentation)."

Past Meetings

KDE Meeting 2007/11/28 (transcript)

GNOME Meeting 2007/11/29 (transcript)

"This meeting is discussed the latest developments in and around GNOME in openSUSE."

Bug squash plans
Bug Plan Status
Task Review
Q&A - Non Developer
Theme Packaging
11.0 Development Update
Packaging Day Update
Q&A - Developer

Czech YaST2 team (Prague) meeting 2007-11-21

Mod-UI branch was merged into trunk, check your code a presence of obsolete widgets
Fixed desctructor, so zypp tmp files are correctly removed.
Installation proposal now contains the download sum from all ftp and http repositories (#331538).

Upcoming Events/Meetings

openSUSE project meeting - 2007/12/05 - 13:00 CET (12:00 GMT)

"The next openSUSE project meeting will take place at the official #opensuse-project IRC channel on freenode on Wednesday."

Security Updates

Linux kernel (SUSE-SA:2007:063)

The openSUSE 10.3 kernel was updated to fix various problems, both security and non-security bugs. It fixes the following security problems:

CVE-2007-5501: The tcp_sacktag_write_queue function in net/ipv4/tcp_input.c allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) via crafted TCP ACK responses that trigger a NULL pointer dereference. Please note that this problem only affects only Linux Kernels starting with 2.6.21, so only the openSUSE 10.3 code base is affected.
CVE-2007-5500: A buggy condition in the ptrace attach logic can be used by local attackers to hang the machine.
CVE-2007-5904: Multiple buffer overflows in CIFS VFS allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) and possibly execute arbitrary code via long SMB responses that trigger the overflows in the SendReceive function.

In the Press

linux.org: A Look at openSUSE 10.3

"If you're looking to get out of the grips of Bill Gates and company, than openSUSE is an excellent alternative. Add the fact that it's absolutely free, and you can't go wrong. If you've tried other versions of Linux then you might want to give openSUSE 10.3 a try. I think of it as Ubuntu with a bit more glamour. Whatever your motives for trying it, I'm sure you'll find openSUSE 10.3 to your liking."

eWeek: And the Best Community Linux Is…

"If you want a desktop that's great for business but you don't mind pushing the edge of the technology envelope a little, then OpenSUSE 10.3 is for you..."

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