Archive:Weekly news 46
Welcome to issue #46 of openSUSE Weekly News!
In this week:
- openSUSE 11.1 Beta 5 Released
- Updated Build Service Roadmap
- KDE's Compositing in openSUSE 11.1
- SLES Now Easy for Users of RHEL and CentOS
- YaST Preview
Announcements
Development Release: openSUSE 11.1 Beta 5 Now Available
- "Greetings, openSUSE fans! We have another development release ready for your testing pleasure. openSUSE 11.1 beta 5 is now available for immediate download and testing. You may have noticed that we were scheduled to release RC 1 today. However, as Stephan Kulow mentioned on openSUSE-Factory list on Tuesday, we have several blocker bugs and 11 P1 bugs still present. While we’re ready to do another release today, we decided that it wasn’t ready to be called a release candidate. This shouldn’t push back the final release, but it will mean that we will only plan to have one release candidate. ..."
Banshee 1.4 hits the streets, packed with Awesome
- "After three months of hard work on feature additions, a slew of bug fixes, stability and performance improvements, and a small tangent on porting to Mac OS X, we have released Banshee 1.4 — the new stable series!"
In the Community
People of openSUSE: Claes Backstrom
- "This week on ‘People of openSUSE’ we have interviewed openSUSE Election Committee member, Senior Linux Trainer and VMware Trainer Claes Backstrom. Besides all these titles he has he still has time to package games on openSUSE Build Service, beta testing, and promoting openSUSE in his North European cold country, Sweden!..."
Kerry Kim: The results are in for SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time
- "Sometimes I get asked to explain the difference between a real time operating system, like SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time, and a general purpose operating system, like SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Most people can understand at a higher level that a real time operating system is recommended when predictability of service is important - and that a general purpose operating system can be used for everything else. But when I then start talking about the PREEMPT_RT patch set, and prioritized threads vs. fair scheduling, inevitably I’ll start to see some eyes glaze over. ..."
Status Updates
Board
Distribution
Build Service
Tips and Tricks
Jan Kupec: Zypper Command Reference
- "I needed an overview of all zypper's commands and options, so i created this little script that prints all the help texts. It can be used to search for options through all commands, or to create a reference sheet for printing like this... Read the full Article."
Sascha Manns: System-Helper Lynis
- "The Group that made "Rootkit Hunter", has released a new Systemtool. Now the Linux Community has a new Security and System Auditing Tool called "Lynis". Lynis is a Shell-Program, that uses Chkconfig, Readlink, Stat and Strigs. The Download is very easy, the RPM-Package is available in OpenSUSE-Build Service".
Jan-Simon-Möller: Developing with libyui/libzypp & python (part 4)
- "Let’s extend the application to make it even more useful!
- add support for YaST-Repositories
- add Support for different architectures
- use always a random temporary directory"
New/Updated Applications @openSUSE
- Midori, at less than 1/2 a megabyte installed, is a lightweight web browser based on WebKit and GTK+ and ideal for installing a slimmed-down openSUSE on those ever-popular itty-bitty netbooks. This package is available for download from the GNOME:Community repository.
- PeaZip "is a cross platform, desktop neutral file and archive manager. Full support: 7Z, 7Z-sfx, ARC/WRC, BZ2/TBZ2, Custom, GZ/TGZ, PAQ/LPAQ, PEA, QUAD/BALZ, split, TAR, UPX, ZIP. Open, browse, extract, test: ACE, ARJ, CAB, CHM, COMPOUND (MSI, DOC, XLS, PPT), CPIO, ISO, Java (JAR, EAR, WAR), Linux (DEB, PET/PUP, RPM, SLP), LHA/LZH, LZMA, Mac (DMG/HFS), NSIS, Open Office files, PAK/PK3/PK4, RAR, SMZIP, U3P, UDF, WIM, XAR, XPI, Z/TZ (79 file types supported) Available in the Packman Repository."
Planet SUSE
Covering just a few posts from Planet SUSE, an aggregation of all SUSE contributors' blogs:
Lubos Lunak: KDE compositing in openSUSE11.1
- "As you might have noticed, KDE 4.1.3 has been released, codename "Change" (in line with other C- codenames recently, as a kind of a joke on all those people who fail to see that still writing comments with overuse of K after 10 years of KDE's existence can only be a sign of brain damage). Not many changes in KWin there though, the changelog part for KWin has just one change worth mentioning. But that is not the case for users of the openSUSE KDE:KDE4:Factory:Desktop packages, which are the packages that will be also used for openSUSE 11.1. This is because they include a special KWin branch, which contains both backports of various new features from other KWin developers from SVN trunk (Lucas' blog keeps track of many of those) that cannot be backported to the 4.1 branch by KDE rules but should be stable and safe enough, and new features developed specially for the needs of openSUSE11.1/SLED11."
Joe Brockmeier: Whats unique about openSUSE?
- "Because openSUSE ships a lot of the same software as other Linux distros, I was wondering what openSUSE users see as the unique and interesting features of openSUSE. Obviously, shipping GNOME, KDE, Firefox, and other software is pretty standard, so where does openSUSE stand apart?..."
Lee Romero: Community Of Practice Metrics And Membership, Part 4
- "So, I’ve now provided some insight on some of the basic insights we can gain about community members within our communities of practice program and also the kinds of demographics we can look at. In this post, I’ll go into how we have used some of the activity data we collect from mailing lists. In my mind, this is more valuable than the basic membership data because it represents someone looking for or sharing knowledge with their fellow community members and, from my experience, gets closer (but still is not quite “there”) to the idea of an engaged / core team member. ..."
Ben Kevan: opeSUSE 11.1 YaST Preview - Whats the next step?
- "With the latest builds of YaST, I would have to say it is far from “Yet another Setup Tool”. I consider it “The ultimate Setup Tool”. That’s right, I think YaST which ships with openSUSE is the most complete, and comprehensive configuration / management tool. Furthermore in openSUSE 11.1 YaST is being shipped with many enhancemnts in the printer, software repositories, partitioner and more. ..."
Marko Jung: My first week with KDE4
- "Being a Gnome user in my department made me a kind of outsider. Nearly all my colleagues use or even develop KDE. After half a year harassment, I finally decided to switch to KDE4 with my update to openSUSE 11.1 Beta 4."
Scott Morris: Transition to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server now easy for users of RHEL and CentOS
- "For awhile now, I’ve thought that Novell should offer a way for people to migrate to their enterprise products. Well, according to their press release, “Novell Announces New Program to Aid Transition to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server,” apparently, they’ve caught the vision. It’s nice to see that they’re actually maneuvering and strategizing. For a long time, it seemed like they were just kind of slowly dying off. But with their actions of recent years, such as buying SuSE, their partnership with Microsoft (not that I approve of this, of course), and now their latest move, it seems that they’re serious about business. From the press release:"
Past Events/Meetings
12. November 2008: KDE Team Meeting
Upcoming Events/Meetings
16. November 2008: openSUSE-Education for 11.1 Beta1
18. November 2008: openSUSE-Education Team Meeting
19. November 2008: openSUSE Project Meeting
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.
SUSE Security Summary Report: SUSE-SR:2008:024
- Packages: yelp, apache2, enscript, libcdaudio
- Date: Fri, 07 Nov 2008 14:00:00 +0000
On the Web
OStatic: openSUSE 11.1's New Partitioning Module
- "openSUSE 11.1 is moving ever closer to its December release date. The fourth beta release became available Monday, with some new bug fixes, updated versions of GNOME, Banshee and the kernel, and webcam support re-enabled. One of the changes long time openSUSE users will notice right away is the new YaST disk partitioner. ..."
Simple Thoughts: 11 Prime Features of openSUSE 11.1 - A Comprehensive Review
- "But we are not finished yet. Open Suse is coming out with their new version of 11.1 and we are at it. openSUSE 11.1 beta 4 is just released, while the official launch of the final version is on 18 December, 2008. We took a detailed look into openSUSE 11.1 beta 4 and here are the gems we found. ..."
internetnews.com: Is Smolt the Key to Counting Linux Users?
- "Linux users are not an easy bunch to profile or to count. Many Linux users download the operating system for free and never perform any kind of systems registration to enumerate their hardware. That's where Smolt may be able to help fill the gap. Smolt is an open source hardware profiling technology that is already being used by Red Hat's Fedora and is set for inclusion in the upcoming Novell OpenSUSE 11.1 release. ..."
openSUSE 11.1 Beta 4 Initial Impressions
- "Even if I wasn't such an openSUSE devotee, I think I might find a lot of good things to say about this Linux product. Clearly, the development team continue to anneal and case harden an otherwise good product in openSUSE 11.0 such that this beta 4 is almost stable enough for production use."
openSUSE 11.1 Beta4 Screenshots
Statistics
Numbers in brackets show the changes compared to last week.
Communication
lists.opensuse.org has 36148 (+98) non-unique subscribers to all mailing lists. The openSUSE Forums have 15290 (+509) registered users - most users including guests ever online was 1642, 07-Oct-2008 at 21:24.
Contributors
1783 (+34) of 3114 (+53) registered contributors in the User Directory have signed the Guiding Principles. The board has acknowledged 212 members.
Build Service
The Build Service now hosts 4421 (+86) projects, 51616 (+329) packages, 8733 (+203) repositories by 10235 (+157) confirmed users.
Bugzilla
The numbers for all openSUSE project products are this week:
- All Open Reports: 4403 (-23)
- Blocker: 14 (-6)
- Critical: 246 (-9)
- Major: 721 (+4)
- Normal: 2374 (-4)
- Minor: 445 (+6)
- Enhancements: 603 (-14)
Detailed Bugzilla Report – Submitting Bug Reports – Bug Reporting FAQ
Translations
Daily updated translation statistics are available on the openSUSE Localization Portal.
Trunk Top-List – Localization Guide
Feedback / Communicate / Get Involved
Do you have any comments on any of the things mentioned in this article? Then head right over to the news.openSUSE.org story comment section and let us know! Communicate with or get help from the wider openSUSE community -- via IRC, forums, or mailing lists -- see Communicate.
If you would like to be a part of the openSUSE Weekly news, then please send an email over to opensuse-project@opensuse.org (you need to subscribe first).
You can subscribe to the openSUSE Weekly News RSS feed at http://news.opensuse.org/category/weekly-news/?feed=rss2