Archive:Weekly news 84
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Welcome to issue # 84 of openSUSE Weekly News
In this Week:
- openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 5 Released
- People of openSUSE: Marcus Schaefer
- Linux.com/Rob Day: The Kernel Newbie Corner: Kernel and Module Debugging with gdb
- Guillaume DE BURE (gdebure): More skrooge features
- h-online.com/Thorsten Leemhuis: Kernel Log - Coming in 2.6.31 - Part 2: Graphics, Audio and Video
Announcements
- openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 5 Released
- "openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 5 (M5) is now available for download. It includes several updates, new features, bugfixes, and other improvements. This milestone includes KDE 4.3 final, a kernel built specifically for desktop systems, and beta 1 of OpenOffice.org 3.1.1."
- Mirrors for openSUSE-Education
- "I’m proud to announce that the download area of http://www.opensuse-education.org/ is sponsored now by 6 (!) mirrors. A big “thank you” to each of them: ..."
- Roland Haidl: More Support for the openSUSE Project
- "Hi, this is my first public message to openSUSE project, and that means first I'd like to introduce myself: My name is Roland Haidl aka rhaidl, and I started to work in SUSE nearly ten years ago. In that time I managed the SUSE documentation, usability, design etc. After Novell having bought SUSE I took over several other management task.
- Now, while Novell/OPS engineering adopted to a new strategy regarding openSUSE, we decided that the people, who Novell dedicated to work in the openSUSE project, come under my responsibility."
- Advance notice of discontinuation of openSUSE 10.3
- "SUSE Security announces that openSUSE 10.3 will be discontinued soon. Having provided security-relevant fixes for two years, we will stop releasing updates after October 31st 2009."
- Change in maintenance for openSUSE 11.2 and future versions
- "With regards to the discontinuation mail for openSUSE 10.3 [1] sent out by Marcus the other day I'd like to clarify the changes in the maintenance period of openSUSE.
- openSUSE will shorten the maintenance period to 2 versions plus 2 months which translates with the current release cycle of 8 months to 18 months instead of 24 months we had with openSUSE 11.1 and previous releases."
- Creating a group of concerned Users and Novell partners/longer life time for openSUSE...
- "With the announcement today http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-announce/2009-08/msg00009.html that openSUSE is on a 18 month cycle, maybe we need to form a group..."
In the Community
- Jan-Simon Möller: openSUSE@ARM: GSoC status and final spurt
- "I was buried with work in the last couple of days, so whats new on my GSoC-project:..."
- Marcus Hüwe: GSoC - summary of this week’s meeting
- "Since the rails oauth-plugin got support for oauth 1.0a I started to migrate the front-end so that it also supports 1.0a. This was a nice exercise to learn how certain things are done with rails. Additionally I did some code cleanups, bugfixing etc."
- People of openSUSE: Marcus Schaefer
- "Marcus Schaefer is busy with Build Service, KIWI and SUSE Studio. Every openSUSE user, that tuned graphic, used SaX2. The xorg.conf created with SaX2 has this line: # Contact: Marcus Schaefer , 2005
- Of course the sax2 is the best known, or better to say the most popular part of his work, but there is much more. The most recent project is KIWI that allows relative painless creation of distribution images (CD, DVD, USB memory stick, … ), and the KIWI is what powers up the SUSE Studio, powerfull and easy to use image creation service."
- Interview with Greg Kroah-Hartmann
- "The openSUSE Weekly News are pleased to publish an little Interview with one of Novells Kernel-Hackers: Greg Kroah-Hartmann."
Status Updates
Distribution
- DesktopLinux.com/Eric Brown: KDE release adds 2,000 features
- "The KDE Community released the 4.3 version of its popular Linux/UNIX desktop environment, representing more than 63,000 code changes by 700 contributors, 10,000 bug-fixes, and 2,000 new features. KDE 4.3 adds numerous improvements to the Plasma Desktop Shell and Application Development Framework, among many other enhancements."
- Jeffrey Stedfast: QuakeLight in Moonlight
- "As we approach Moonlight 2.0 beta, more and more cool websites are starting to work under Moonlight. This week the team got QuakeLight working!"
Tips and Tricks
- Novell Cool Solutions/maggot62: A little BASH scripting to backup the MBRs of all your machine's Hard Drives
- "You may well have learned the DD command to back up the MBR of a disk. Most servers and some desktops will have more than one hard drive. Also the hard drive device names may vary from hda to sda etc. Here is a simple universal script to provide a backup solution for your Master Boot Records."
- Linux.com/Rob Day: The Kernel Newbie Corner: Kernel and Module Debugging with gdb
- "This week, we're going to demonstrate how to do some very basic debugging of both your running kernel and a loaded module using the gdb debugger running in user space."
- Pavol Rusnak: Daisy Plasmoid – A dock for KDE 4
- "From time to time I use Mac OS X and I really like the application management with its dock. I came across several different implementations for KDE 4, but they were usually too immature and not very pretty. I was very surprised when I finally found a decent implementation called Daisy. I immediately dropped the default KDE taskbar and started to use Daisy in conjunction with desktop effects “Box Switch” and “Present Windows” a.k.a Exposé. You can look at my setup here (only bottom 64 pixels are shown, the rest is usually occupied with maximized application):..."
- Tips4Linux: Search Google.com from the Linux command line
- "You can search Google.com from the Linux command line without using a CLI web browser like lynx or Elinks. All you need is the curl and html2text packages installed. Then you issue the following command: ..."
- WebDeveloper's/Phillip Watts: Python Threads and Queues
- "Threads are a technique by which multiple paths of execution can be run in one program at "the same time." Actually the threads do not run at the same physical time. But they run concurrently and asynchronously. This can be a great help in program design. If two threads can be independent of each other, it frees the programmer from the need to know which steps have priority."
- Tips4Linux: Update your Twitter status from the Linux command line
- "You can easily update your Twitter status from the CLI by using this one simple command: curl -u user:password -d status=”Your status message” http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml where user is your username and password is your Twitter password entered in plaintext. Replace the text Your status message with anything you wish."
- Sebastian Schöbinger: A short round through KNetworkmanager KDE4
- "How to connect to a WEP encrypted router: I noticed that it doesn’t work if you enter the pass-phrase, because the router has a problem with the encrypted hash (you have to have a Windows or other OS from where you can get the hash)"
- IT News Today/Jeremy LaCroix: Seven Great Tips To Make KDE 4.3 More Friendly
- "There is some sort of tradition on my site regarding KDE. First, I review the latest version as soon as it’s released, and then I talk about my hopes for the future of the desktop. That tradition will continue this time too, though I thought I would take a break and talk about something else before I dive in to my usual semi annual KDE improvement article. This time I decided to reveal some of my favorite KDE tricks. This post is targeted specifically for KDE 4.3, though some of these may work in other versions. Also, these tips are probably geared more toward beginners so advanced users may not benefit. Still, you never know!"
New/Updated Applications @ openSUSE
- Ben Kevan: Google Chrome 3.0.198.1 Released – openSUSE Fedora RPM – Flash Support
- "Google Chrome 3.0.198.1 Released – openSUSE Fedora RPM – Flash Support. To follow updates I will provide for Chrome RPM packages please bookmark or check: http://www.benkevan.com/blog/tag/google-chrome/"
- OBS openSUSE:Factory/nmap r10 V5.00 commited
- "Updated to nmap-5.00"
- OBS openSUSE:Factory/ntop r12 3.3.10 commited
- "Updated to Version 3.3.10"
Planet SUSE
- Pavol Rusnak: openSUSE Users Collage
- "Today I stumbled upon blogpost by Andreas Gohr called identi.ca Mosaic. He took 30.000 avatars of identi.ca users and created a mosaic from them using the metapixel software. What a great idea! How about doing something similar for openSUSE folks?"
- Dmitry Serpokryl: Enlightenment is coming…
- "It’s scheduled to release Enlightenment-DR17 Desktop Shell as a Christmas gift and we glad to announce the update of SOAD to the version 3.2.0. It’s a current openSUSE-11.1 with all updates and Enlightenment set as a prime GUI."
- Guillaume DE BURE (gdebure): More skrooge features
- "As promised in a previous post, here are some more Skrooge features. I posted a first list a rather long time ago, but it was quite incomplete, and some more features have been added in between. Please note also that this post is heavily based on the Skrooge Handbook, because I'm such a lazy chap ;-)"
- Stephan Kulow: Cliced Hybrids
- "Marcus and me have been busy improving the USB experience. So here is how to use it: download the live cd of your choice from http://download.opensuse.org/factory/iso/ and make sure you grab build218 or later. And then do something like I did: ..."
- FabioMux: Some KDE 4 tips you should know
- "KDE 4 is definitively my daily desktop environment, although it’s not yet mature like the 3.5.x branch i consider it enough stable and usable, but sometime the default settings and the few time available, don’t help us to appreciate it, so let’s resume some little tip for beginners that feel lost with everything new and don’t want waste their time. ..."
openSUSE Forums
- What is utf8 - True - Mount -vfat?
- "A brief question/discussion raised by one of the forum moderators over character encoding options and how that should be best employed in the mounting detail. Some comparison is made with other OS's application of utf8."
- New Modprobe-d Naming Convention!
- "Milestone testing continues and @oldcpu our resident sound guru has noticed some naming policy changes relating to sound. It will be interesting to keep an eye on this one."
- How Can I put Web Site Files to the Apache Web Server.....?
- "One of our users seems to be using a combination of OS's and investigates the setting up of Dreamweaver in Windows and it syncing the web site folder contents with the Linux server. Samba, sftp, ftp, fish, all come in to the thread discussion."
- Proposed laptop Purchase 2 Core Duo?
- "A user proposes a purchase and discusses possible issues/compatibility. The end result leads to a HP unit which I would quite like myself, just that I'm not quite so flush with cash. If your considering a laptop, this is worth a read."
On the Web
- InfoWorld/Bill Snyder: Watch out, developers: Here come the lawyers
- "Developers who 'knowingly' ship buggy software may be held liable for damages. That might be good for users -- but a sloppy set of guidelines could hurt open source. ..."
- LinuxInsider/Katherine Noyes: Linux - The New 'Hot' Job Skill
- "Nationwide unemployment may be heading toward double-digits in the U.S., but among the skills that are in highest demand are those of a Linux sysadmin. That's partly due to the effects of the recession -- more companies are willing to experiment with lower-cost open source alternatives to proprietary software. Still, the good news is qualified: Many of those jobs can be done anywhere on the planet. ..."
- Linux.com/Jacqueline Emigh: Industry Heavy-Hitters Swing into Linux Word Processing
- "As word processors for Linux keep picking up in popularity, household names in the computer industry are getting into the act. Like Sun Microsystems, Novell and IBM Lotus are both offering word processors based on OpenOffice.org's open source Writer application, but none of these offerings is exactly alike. Meanwhile, Moblin--a Linux-based netbook environment first launched by Intel--is now on the verge of packing more power around word processing and other aspects of office productivity."
- h-online.com/Thorsten Leemhuis: Kernel Log - Coming in 2.6.31 - Part 2: Graphics, Audio and Video
- "Linux 2.6.31 will offer Kernel-Based Mode-Setting for Radeon graphics cards up to model X1950. The developers have included new drivers for X-Fi sound cards and for Intel's 'Next-Generation Graphics Device.' Many further improvements affect the drivers for webcams and TV hardware."
- Linux Journal/Bruce Byfield: OpenOffice.org - Cross-References Revisited
- "Four years ago, I wrote an article about OpenOffice.org writer called "Fielding Questions, Part 2 - Cross References and User-Defined Fields." I regularly receive mail about it, but these days I have to preface each reply by explaining that the article is obsolete. Repeating the explanation gets old quickly, so I decided that an update is necessary."
- TechRepublic/Jack Wallen: 10 reasons Linux should be your netbook operating system
- "Some users believe that Windows is the best netbook OS. But others - such as Jack Wallen - think Linux is a much better fit. Check out his reasons and see if you agree."
- Linux.com/Todd R. Weiss: How are Open Source Software Projects Surviving the Recession?
- "The challenging U.S. economic recession has hit just about every segment of our economy--so how's it been affecting open source software development projects and their contributors?
- Maybe not too badly, according to an anecdotal, unscientific survey of three well-known projects--KDE.org, GNOME.org and SourceForge.net."
- ZDNet/Jason Perlow: Geek Sheet: Virtualizing Free Linux Distributions in Windows Server 2008 R2
- "Some of you may be aware that the updated Hyper-V bare-metal hypervisor virtualization layer in Microsoft’s upcoming Windows Server 2008 R2 (Which is due to be released August 14th to MSDN and Technet customers) now has support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 (SLES) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 (RHEL). Additionally, Linux support and performance has greatly improved over the initial Hyper-V release. Microsoft also recently released it’s Hyper-V Linux Integration Components (LinuxIC) under the GPLv2 Open Source License."
- IT News Today/Jeremy B. LaCroix: SUSE Studio: Too Good To Be True?
- "I just built my own Linux distribution through my browser. It can be ran as a Live CD or installed on your system. No, you did read that correctly. I actually used Firefox to build my own SUSE-based distro. Sometimes technology throws curveballs at us that are so unbelievable you’d have to read the statement several times to realize that you aren’t hallucinating. Do you think I’m writing a piece of science fiction? Enter SUSE Studio."
- TuxRadar: Hands on with SUSE Studio
- "Novell has launched SUSE Studio, a service that allows anyone to create their own Linux distro respin using nothing more than their web browser. But did you know Novell already has plans to open source the new technology it contains? We spoke to Nat Friedman to get more information, then took it for a test drive ourselves..."
- Linux Journal/Justin Ryan: What's In A Name? That Which We Call Qt, By Any Other Name Would Code As Well...
- "Renaming a company can be a torturous process. Developing the new brand, getting the word out, and answering questions can be long and grueling, and at least some customers are bound to be upset, and possibly quite vocal about it. Not everyone is willing to brave these waters, though Nokia obviously is, as it announced today the renaming of its corporate Qt division, Qt Software."
- h-online.com: Mozilla launches "Test Pilot" program
- "The developers at the Mozilla Foundation are looking for volunteers to "test pilot" the Firefox browser as they travel the Web. A "Test Pilot" add-on for Firefox allows a user to try the newest features and enhancements for the browser before other users. The add-on collects data about the behaviour of the test pilots who are involved in the tests."
- Edmundo Carmona: Installing openSuSE: grub complaining on a hardware RAID
- "I'm a Kubuntu/Debian user (and intend to stay that way), however a few days ago I set myself to install openSuSE 11.1 (LiveCD based on KDE4). The thing is that this particular box has a hardware RAID set up."
- ZDNet Asia/Victoria Ho: Requests for Linux drivers flowing in
- "According to Greg Kroah-Hartman, Novell programmer and Linux Driver Project lead, the group of some 400 programmers at the Project receive requests to port existing closed-source drivers to open source drivers for Linux "all the time", and has been "doing a lot of work on this over the past few years"."
Past Events & Meetings
Upcoming Events & Meetings
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:2009:013
- Package: memcached, libtiff/libtiff3, nagios, libsndfile, gaim/finch, open-, strong, freeswan, libapr-util1, websphere-as_ce, libxml2
- Announcement ID: SUSE-SR:2009:013
- Date: Tue, 11 Aug 2009 14:31:20 +0200
- SUSE Security Announcement: subversion (SUSE-SA:2009:044)
- Package: subversion
- Announcement ID: SUSE-SA:2009:044
- Date: Fri, 14 Aug 2009 10:00:00 +0000
Statistics
Numbers in brackets show the changes compared to the previous week.
opensuse.org
Communication
lists.opensuse.org has 36989 (-9) non-unique subscribers to all mailing lists.
The openSUSE Forums have 32135 (+300) registered users - Most users ever online was 3270, 22-Jul-2009 at 20:00.
Contributors
3338 (+34) of 8648 (+160) registered contributors in the User Directory have signed the Guiding Principles. The board has acknowledged 330 (+0) members.
Build Service
The Build Service now hosts 7494 (+90) projects, 74154 (+724) packages, 13952 (+198) repositories by 16732 (+173) confirmed users.
openFATE
Feature statistics for openSUSE 11.2:
- total: 408 (+17)
- unconfirmed: 25 (-47)
- new: 1 (-9)
- evaluation: 75 (-49)
- candidate: 18 (+2)
- done: 45 (+8)
- rejected: 219 (+109)
- duplicate: 25 (+3)
Bugzilla
The numbers for all openSUSE project products are this week:
- All Open Reports: 4792 (+26)
- Blocker: 3 (-2)
- Critical: 236 (+2)
- Major: 834 (-5)
- Normal: 2730 (+28)
- Minor: 388 (+7)
- Enhancements: 601 (-4)
- Detailed Bugzilla Report – Submitting Bug Reports – Bug Reporting FAQ
Localization
- Daily updated translation statistics are available on the openSUSE Localization Portal.
- Trunk Top-List – Localization Guide
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 .
Feedback / Communicate / Get Involved
Do you have 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-marketing@opensuse.org (you need to subscribe first). Or you can go to the channel #opensuse-newsletter on irc.freenode.net.
Credits
- Jan-Simon Möller (Chief-Editor)
- Sascha Manns (Second Chief-Editor, Main-Newsletter)
- Carl Fletcher (Main-Newsletter, Forums Sec.)
- Sebastian Schöbinger (Tips/Tricks)
