Archive:Weekly news 50

Welcome to issue # 50 of openSUSE Weekly News!

In this week:

• Pre-order openSUSE 11.1
• Wanted: Tester from SUSE Studio
• Password Protect for GRUB
• KDE4-Repository changes
• SELinux in openSUSE 11.1

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Announcements

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Pre-order openSUSE 11.1 box

• "openSUSE 11.1 is gold, and the boxed edition available for pre-order! The release date is still the 18th of December, just in time to have some fun over the holidays … So what do you get for your money?..."

HOT! Upcoming o p e n S U S E 1 1 . 1

• "The release is on Thursday! Get it!"

Wanted: Participants for usability tests of SUSE Studio

• "Hi all,We still need participants for our usability tests of SUSE Studio.The tests will take place here in Nuremberg are one-time tests and will take about one hour each.You should have knowledge in building Linux packages, but should preferably be unexperienced with SUSE Studio."

New YaST Documentation Available!

• "I've just uploaded the newest (final) YaST-Development documentation for openSUSE 11.1 to the official documentation repository."

In the Community

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openSUSE 11.1 Launch Party Locations

• There will be Launch Parties allover the globe. Check your location !

Nuremberg openSUSE 11.1 release party

• "Just a reminder, we will have a party on the release day in Nuremberg. If you are nearby, don’t miss it! We plan to have some demo systems, burn service and of course some food and drinks. It’s on December, 18th, 18:00-21:00 CET."

Provo openSUSE 11.1 release party

• "Just a quick post letting everyone know that there is a release party here in Provo, Utah. The link with details is here."

Status Updates

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Distribution

• GMC LiveCDs Seek Testers
• Czech Team Meeting minutes
• Nürnberg YaST2 team meeting
• Prague YaST2 team meeting

Build Service

• Czech Contrib repository notes
• Build Team Meeting minutes

Wiki / Communication / Events

• Wanted: Sneak peeks!

Tips and Tricks

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Penguinway: Password Protect Your GRUB Bootloader

• "I thought I might write a little post about adding a little security to your Ubuntu box. You can use a program within GRUB called md5crypt for this task. You choose a password and md5crypt will generate an encrypted string hash for you. Plug this into your GRUB menu entries and you will be prompted for a password when you try to boot one of those entries."
  • advanced - not for beginners ...

Jordi Massaguer: Configuring Vodafone Spain 3G and openSUSE 11.0

• "After looking at google and some docs like http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:HUAWEI_E220_Support I did not succeed to configure my Vodafone 3G modem (HUAWEI) with opensuse 11.0 until I looked at the configuration on a windows machine. "

Stephan Binner: openSUSE Lizards - Creating Custom Feeds

• "This is likely interesting for more openSUSE Members blogging on lizards.opensuse.org: WordPress allows to create custom feeds."

New/Updated Applications @ openSUSE

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• "Scratch-the easy programming language. Some german teacher point me to “Scratch” a few weeks ago. This week, I tried to create a package for openSUSE. The good news: Ubuntu people already tried to package scratch for debian - but they use a perl script, which installs scratch for each user - again, and again, and again…. ..."

• "Amarok 2.0 is the first release of the KDE4 port of the popular powerful music player for KDE."

• "KOffice 1.9.83 is the fourth Beta of the upcoming KOffice 2.0, the integrated office suite for KDE4."

• "GSmartControl is a graphical user interface for smartctl (from Smartmontools, which is a tool for querying and controlling SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) data on modern hard disk drives. It allows you to inspect the drive's SMART data to determine its health, as well as run various tests on it. Read on..."

Planet SUSE

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

James Ogley: Mintmenu on openSUSE

• "Recently, Magnus asked for views on some Main Menu improvements. Among the responses were references to MintMenu (which is based on Ubuntu's version). I've spent some time this week beating this into an openSUSE shape and have produced a rather large (265 lines) patch. ..."

Stephan Binner: openSUSE Build Service KDE:KDE4:* Repository Changes

• "openSUSE 11.1 will reach Goldmaster status within the next days which also means that things move around in the KDE:KDE4 Build Service repositories"

Scott Morris: Linux Worthy of Any Economy

• "I found this spectacular article on reasons to consider Linux in a down economy. Actually, they work in any economy. Take a look: "

Johan Kotze: Setting up a simple router

• "Today I spent the best part of the morning to configure a SLES 10 SP2 server as a simple router. I googled quite a lot and could not find a nice and concise post on how to configure SLES 10 as a simple router, so I thought I’ll write up my experiences in the hopes that it will help someone. Although this was done on SLES 10 I am pretty sure it will apply to openSUSE as well. ..."

Thomas Biege: SELinux on openSUSE 11.1

• "openSUSE release 11.1 will be available in a few ticks. I tried the beta5 and RC1 and it seems that 11.1 will run fast, stable and comes with a good set of new software. From the security perspective one thing would be really interesting: SELinux support"

Andreas Jaeger: Contrib Repository Kicked Off

• "During this week the so-called Contrib repository has been finally really started after the discussion come to a halt some time ago. Contrib (see here for details) is a repository managed by community members that will be frozen at release time to make more packages available for openSUSE users. It is a kind of “Universal” repository for third-party packages."

openSUSE Forums

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Hot topics and assorted threads from the forums.

apm04: Send an SMS message to a cellphone with Kontact/kaddressbook

• "Forum member apm04 explains how to send SMS messages using Kontact/kaddressbook in combination with Skype"

googlehelper: December 2008 Screenshot Thread

• "Have a look at our monthly screenshot thread and share your own screenshot of openSUSE with the community"

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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:2008:057)

• Package: kernel
• Announcement ID: SUSE-SA:2008:057
• Date: Thu, 04 Dec 2008 15:00:00 +0000
• Affected Products: SUSE SLES 9
• Novell Linux Desktop 9
• Novell Linux POS 9
• Vulnerability Type: denial of service
• Severity (1-10): 6

SUSE Security Summary Report: SUSE-SR:2008:027

• Announcement ID: SUSE-SR:2008:027
• Date: Tue, 09 Dec 2008 15:00:00 +0000
• Cross-References: CVE-2008-2379, CVE-2008-2829, CVE-2008-3825
• CVE-2008-3834, CVE-2008-4094, CVE-2008-4314
• CVE-2008-4989, CVE-2008-5189, CVE-2008-5277
• Content of this advisory:
• 1) Solved Security Vulnerabilities:

SUSE Security Announcement: Kernel (SUSE-SA:2008:056)

• Package: kernel
• Announcement ID: SUSE-SA:2008:056
• Date: Wed, 03 Dec 2008 09:00:00 +0000
• Affected Products: SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 SP1
• SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 SP1 DEBUGINFO
• SLE SDK 10 SP1
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1
• Vulnerability Type: denial of service

On the Web

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Matthew Hopson: Linux Comparison - openSUSE

• "Previous to writing this comparison, I have only ever used Ubuntu and Fedora. Considering Ubuntu's popularity and reputation for being easy to use, I was expecting openSUSE to be nowhere near as good. From the moment I was greeted with "Welcome" as the LiveCD booted, I knew I was going to be proven wrong."

kev009: More Linux File Systems

• "It seems I caught the wave of interest in Linux file systems. Here are some articles worth checking out: ..."

bin-false.org: openSUSE 11.1 Review

• "I’ve been a long time SuSE user, I enjoyed the old boxed sets with the big manuals and CD books full of software. With that view I have always looked forward to every release of the distribution. ..."

Jimmy Atkinson: Top 25 Linux Games

• "If you’re interested in games for a Linux platform, then you know that game probably is open source, free from cost in most cases, and free to modify. The latter attribute is why Linux games are so popular…a developer can take a great game and make it even better, share it with the world, and become a hero. So, why waste your time and money on proprietary games when so many great Linux games are available? ..."

Leo Laporte: FLOSS Weekly 48 - OpenSUSE

• "Guest: Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier Novell's community manager for OpenSUSE"

Statistics

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Numbers in brackets show the changes compared to last week.

Communication

lists.opensuse.org has 36291 (+62) non-unique subscribers to all mailing lists. The openSUSE Forums have 16845 (+474) registered users - most users including guests ever online was 7771, 02-Dec-2008 at 17:31.

Contributors

1909 (+39) of 3333 (+77) registered contributors in the User Directory have signed the Guiding Principles. The board has acknowledged 249 members.

Build Service

The Build Service now hosts 4678 (+79) projects, 57490 (+827) packages, 8755 (-474) repositories by 10755 (+156) confirmed users.

Bugzilla

The numbers for all openSUSE project products are this week:

• All Open Reports: 4446 (-48)
• Blocker: 13
• Critical: 225 (-9)
• Major: 707 (-31)
• Normal: 2382 (-11)
• Minor: 464 (-14)
• Enhancements: 655 (+16)

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

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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.

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Credits

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• Jan-Simon Möller (Chief-Editor)
• Sascha Manns (Second Chief Editor, Main-Newsletter)
• Stephan Binner (Main-Newsletter and Statistics)
• Rupert Horstkötter (Main-Newsletter, openSUSE-Forums)

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