Archive:Weekly news 86

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Welcome to issue # 86 of openSUSE Weekly News

In this Week:

Announcements

openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 6 Released: "The openSUSE Project is happy to announce that the openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 6 (M6) is available for download. This release includes new packages on the GNOME and KDE live CDs, Python 3.1, and Linux kernel 2.6.31-rc6.; This is a Milestone Release, one of several that lead up to the 11.2 final release in November. It may not be suitable for production systems, but is ready for contributors who want to help with testing and development for 11.2."
Apache Foundation’s Gianugo Rabellino to Keynote openSUSE Conference: "The openSUSE Project is pleased to announce its second confirmed keynote for the first-ever openSUSE Conference. Our closing keynote will be delivered by Gianugo Rabellino, Chief Executive Officer of Sourcesense and member of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). Rabellino serves as Vice President of the Apache XML Project Management Committee, is a committer on several ASF projects including Cocoon, Xindice, and Jackrabbit, as well as mentor of a number of projects currently in development at the ASF Incubator."

In the Community

Jan Weber: Summary of openSUSE @ FrOSCon 2009: "Last weekend the FrOSCon took place in Sankt Augustin and again this year openSUSE was present with a booth! For the first time in germany the booth was driven only by Ambassadors and users, AFAIK. So for this reason the event already was a huge success for openSUSE!"

Status Updates

Board

Call for Election committee members: "As we'll have a re-election of two seats of the openSUSE Board this year in autumn I'd like to invite people to step up for participation in the Election Committee."

Distribution

Joe Brockmeier: openSUSE 11.2 launch plan: "Looking for contributions, suggestions, etc. for the 11.2 launch plan. The skeleton draft is up on the wiki, here: http://en.opensuse.org/Marketing/Team/11_2_Launch "

Tips and Tricks

For Desktop Users

Linux Loop: 3 Gimp Plugins For Photographers: "In the age of digital photography, almost everyone performs at least a few edits on their photos. For simple thing, programs like F-Spot or Google’s Picasa may be enough, but you may also need something more. That’s where Gimp does an excellent job, offering more tools for editing your photos. As with many applications, though, Gimp’s most powerful features come from plugins that let you do more than you could with Gimp alone. Here are three excellent Gimp plugins for photographers."
TuxArena/Craciun Dan: 5 RSS Feed Readers for Linux: "Here are 5 of the most popular, standalone feed reader applications for Linux. I didn't include feed readers which come with applications like Firefox, Opera or Thunderbird for example, but these can also be considered a viable alternative to the ones below."
Make Tech Easier/Tavis J. Hampton: How to Configure File Associations in KDE: "Many Linux users, even the newest ones, love Linux because it is highly customizable. KDE in particular is one desktop environment that is very easy and fun to customize. Whether you want three panels and a rotating slideshow of wallpaper photos from your vacation in Peru, or simply want to make sure text files always open in your favorite text editor, KDE can deliver. One important customization features is file association."
Worldlabel.com/Nathan Willis: Labels from the command line with LabelNation (Linux): "Ever tire of laying out a sheet of address labels in OpenOffice.org or Word templates when you’re in a hurry? Karl Fogel’s LabelNation may be able to help. It is a small free software tool that whips out printer-ready label layouts from the command line. All you do is put the addresses in a plain text file and run LabelNation; the output is a standard PostScript file. And it’s not just fast; as a command-line tool it is easily integrated into scripts or other automated workflows."

For Commandline/Script Newbies

Linux Journal/Mitch Frazier: Reading Multiple Files with Bash: "Reading files is no big deal with bash: you just redirect the input to the script or pipe the output of another command into the script, or you could do it inside the script if the file names are pre-determined. You could also use process substitution to pass in the open files (command pipelines actually) from the command line. Another option, the one I describe here, is to just open the files and read (or write) them as you like, as you'd do in other programming languages."

For Developers and Programmers

Linux.com/RobDay: The Kernel Newbie Corner: Kernel Debugging with proc "Sequence" Files--Part 2: "Given the amount of material left to cover, we'll spend this week finishing off the issues related to the simpler, non-sequence proc files, and leave the complicated topic of sequenced writes for a final Part 3 next week, so this will be a relatively short column."
Jon Allen: Installing Perl modules without root access: "Over the last couple of years, Perl development has been transformed by exciting new technologies such as Catalyst, DBIx::Class, and Moose.; However, these and other such tools all have one thing in common - they are part of the CPAN, not part of the core Perl distribution. For users in certain environments, such as shared hosting, it can be difficult to install CPAN modules without root access to the system. Fortunately, there is a simple solution - local::lib."

For System Administrators

Novell Cool Solutions/Aaron Burgemeister: LJDT: Installed RPM Size: "Sometimes I find myself wondering how big an installed RPM's files really are. Use a simple script to do all of the calculating of file sizes, plus see how to recreate the RPM from the system where the package is installed in the latest addition to Linux Just Does That."

New/Updated Applications @ openSUSE

OBS openSUSE:Factory/kdevelop4: "updated to kdevelop-3.9.95"
Ben Kevan: Google Chrome 4.0.202.2 Released – openSUSE 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/"
Ludwig Nussel: Firewall Zone Switcher Updated: "I have updated the Firewall Zone Switcher. It now starts with a main window by default instead of directly going to the system tray. There’s a settings dialog that allows to enable the system tray icon and optionally also enables starting the applet on log-in. Furthermore the daemon now uses PolicyKit for access control and the applet supports i18n."

Planet SUSE

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Will Stephenson: Sub-menus in KDE 4 panels and desktops are back: "The main openSUSE users' mailing list are a demanding bunch who know what they want. Over the last few months the KDE group have been asking them what they still miss from KDE 3 in KDE 4, and one of those things has been the ability to add a submenu of the main app launcher, whether Kickoff or traditional, to the panel as a button in its own right."
Carlos Gonçalves: Announcing ENOS 2009: "For the third consecutive year, all the Portuguese openSUSE community users will be meeting will the main goal of boosting the openSUSE project in Portugal.; ENOS 2009 is the third yearly edition of the event and will be held in the Institudo Português da Juventude (IPJ), Castelo Branco, Portugal on Saturday, 26 September."
Francis Giannaros: Create Minutes and Logs for your Meetings with bugbot: "We just completed our first openSUSE project meeting with a newly added plugin to bugbot called MeetBot. This plugin helps with meetings by:..."

openSUSE Forums

KDE4 Activities?: "This discussion is all about different Wallpapers and Activities on different desktops in kde4.3 - There is still some progress to be made here in KDE4. There seems to be no problem with the Wallpaper, but not so with say having different plasmoid activities on different desktops."
Google Chrome _64: "There is quite a bit going on in this thread with the _64 version of Google Chrome browser. Looks as if many users are giving it a go, and from the read it seems many are impressed. Check it out!"
Samba, Setting Up, Tweaking: "This could prove a useful reference. Quite a number out there are finding this a difficult one to master even with all the tutorials on the subject."
Hardware Main - Wiki Feature: "Including a feature from the Wiki came as a suggestion from one of our Forum Mod Team. We will feature more specific topics in future, but the Main Hardware Section is a great place to start looking for help. Can we encourage Forum Member to add to it if possible."

On the Web

Announcements

Free Software Foundation/Free Software Foundation will host a mini-summit on Women in Free Software: "The Free Software Foundation will host a mini-summit on Women in Free Software to discuss how the free software community can cultivate and increase participation by women in free software's development and activism communities."
The Linux Foundation/Jim Zemlin: The Perils of Linux Maturity: Torvalds Fakes Emerge in Twittersphere: "For the next few weeks, four FakeLinusTorvalds (#flt1, #flt2, #flt3 and #lft4) will be tweeting from our Identi.ca (linuxfoundation) and Twitter feeds (www.twitter.com/linuxfoundation), posing as the real Linus. I expect some of them to be dangerously outrageous, while others will just be downright funny. And, the real Linus has given them his blessing. No infringements here, folks!"
LinuxFoundation/LDN/Ben Martin: openSUSE Build System: Building Binary Packages for Many Linux Distributions at Once: "The openSUSE Build System can be used to build binary packages for many versions of many Linux distributions without the need for you to have all these distributions installed."

Call for participation

ABLEconf: Call for Presentations: "The Arizona Business and Liberty Experience Conference (ABLEconf) is soliciting presentations for its second annual conference. ABLEconf will take place on Saturday, October 24th, 2009 at the University of Advancing Technology in Tempe, Arizona."

Reports

Phoronix/Michael Larabel: This Week: Linux Graphics Continue To Evolve: "For those that missed it, there was quite a bit happening this week in the Linux world when it comes to graphics drivers. The KMS page-flipping ioctl is ready for the Linux 2.6.32 kernel, KMS and GEM comes to the Neo FreeRunner, and the Assembly shader rework was merged into the mainline Mesa tree was among the open-source driver news. Also taking place this past week was the release of AMD Catalyst 9.8, which finally brought support for the Linux 2.6.29 and 2.6.30 kernels, but continues to lack real public support for XvBA. X.Org 7.5 was also supposed to be released, but to no surprise that did not happen. ..."
h-online/Thorsten Leemhuis: Kernel Log - Coming in 2.6.31 – Part 4: Tracing, architecture, virtualisation: "New performance counters allow developers to take a detailed look at the runtime behaviour of program code to target specific areas for optimisation. The recently introduced tracing infrastructure has been further modified and improved. Other changes affect the architecture, the memory subsystem, and various virtualisation solutions."
DesktopLinux.com/Eric Brown: Google prepping 64-bit browser for Linux: "Google's Chromium project announced it is working on its first 64-bit version of its Chrome web browser, which will will arrive first on Linux. Meanwhile, Linux is increasingly driving development of 64-bit software -- simply because Linux power users are demanding it, says an industry blog."
Phoronix/Michael Larabel: NVIDIA Pushes Out New Linux Driver Updates: "NVIDIA hasn't been updating their binary Linux drivers as frequently as they were earlier this year when it would be hard to go even just a week without seeing a new beta, an official update, or changes to either of their legacy drivers. However, there are some new NVIDIA Linux drivers to start off this week. For those sticking with the official NVIDIA driver releases there is now the 185.18.36 release while those willing to try out a beta driver there is the 190.25 build."

Reviews and Essays

Dion Moult (Moult): My OpenDesktop Competition Submission: Wipup: "Folks from PlanetKDE last heard me announcing my journey along the path to become a KDE developer. There are many ways to do this and unfortunately the path that involves learning a load of C++ and start developing applications is still making slow but steady progress and not (yet) eligible for public announcement. But – there are many ways to contribute!"
Jacob Lludkrab: Fullscreen flash video in GNU/Linux: "First, if you are unfamiliar with the problem, go to YouTube, pick any video, and double-click on the video, or click on the little fullscreen icon, and you’ll see that the video begins to get really slow, and choppy, from dropping frames."
Linux.com/Todd R. Weiss: Analysis: How Moonlight 2.0 Fits into Novell's Linux and Open Source Plans: "Now that Novell Inc.'s Mono open source project finally last week released the beta version of its Moonlight 2.0 code after several months of delays, what's its potential impact for Linux users and the open source community? It depends on whom you ask. ..."
TheRegister/Tony Smith: Man mods 25-year-old phone into media centre PC: "Most of us, if we had a 25-year-old mobile telephone - a Mobira Talkman, to be precise - hanging around, we'd flog it on eBay to some spotty kit collector. Not so one Finnish fellow - he turned it into a media PC.…"
Reviewed: Scribus 1.3.5: "We've reviewed Scribus a number of times in the past and even included a feature made using the tool in one of the back issues of Linux Format magazine. However, each revisit tends to throw up the same old problems: Scribus's lack of reliability and poor interface. Thankfully, after two years of solid development, these woes have been banished. Well, mostly - read on to find out what's changed."
LinuxWeeklyNews/Jonathan Corbet: Coming soon: KMyMoney 1.0: "Back in 2005, your editor wrote a review of personal finance tools for Linux, focusing on GnuCash, Grisbi, and KMyMoney. The conclusion at the end of that research was that GnuCash had the strongest feature set, but that KMyMoney looked to surpass it sometime in the near future. Four years later, KMyMoney 0.8 remains the current stable series, but that is about to change; the long-awaited KMyMoney 1.0 release is imminent. So it seems time to revisit this important piece of free software."
ZDNet/Christopher Dawson: linux-for-education.org = a huge resource: "Just a quick note tonight as I finished rebuilding our Active Directory and Windows Terminal Servers at the high school (humming along quite handily I might add, although we’ll see how things go when the students hit them first thing in the morning). If you need a break from Windows land (as I certainly do right about now), then linux-for-education.org provides a wealth of learning tools, both for the open source community and educators in general."
The VAR Guy/Novell vs. Red Hat: 9 Days to Watch: "From August 27 through September 4, The VAR Guy will pay particularly close attention to Novell and Red Hat. That nine-day period will provide a healthy reality check for the Linux market — and it may also reveal how open source initiatives are shaping up across the IT channel. Here’s why. ..."
Computerworld/Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: The SCO zombie wins one: "Oh the irony. Today, August 24th, a Federal Appeals Court ruled that while the walking dead SCO still owes Novell big bucks for selling Unix to Sun and Microsoft, the District Court overstepped its grounds in ruling that SCO had never bought Unix's IP (intellectual property) rights in the first place. What's funny about this is that it's only after SCO is dead for all practical purposes, that it finally manage to win one."
LinuxInsider/Katherine Noyes: The Joy of Linux Myth Debunking: "It was with much joy that the Linux community saw two harmful myths about open source get put in their places recently. Myth #1: Linux is bad for business. Linux Foundation: More than 70 percent of work on the kernel today is done by developers who are being paid for their efforts. Myth #2: Linux netbooks have a high rate of customer returns. Dell: No more so than Windows netbooks."
OSNews/David Adams: Linux User-Friendliness: "A reader asks: Why is Linux still not as user friendly as the two other main OSes with all the people developing for Linux? Is it because it is mainly developed by geeks? My initial feeling when reading this question was that it was kind of a throwaway, kind of a slam in disguise as a genuine question. But the more I thought about it, the more intrigued I felt. There truly are a large amount of resources being dedicated to the development of Linux and its operating system halo (DEs, drivers, apps, etc). Some of these resources are from large companies (IBM, Red Hat, Novell). Why isn't Linux more user-friendly? Is this an inherent limitation with open source software?"
Weird.com/Randy Alfred: Aug. 25, 1991: Kid From Helsinki Foments Linux Revolution: "1991: Linus Torvalds, a 21-year-old university student from Finland, writes a post to a user group asking for feedback on a little project he’s working on. He’s built a simple kernel for a Unix-like operating system that runs on an Intel 386 processor, and he wants to develop it further. The kernel eventually becomes Linux, which is released in 1994 and distributed over the internet for free."
Phoronix/Michael Larabel: Early Ubuntu 9.10, OpenSuSE 11.2, Mandriva 2010 Benchmarks: "Last week we provided benchmarks of Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 4, but Ubuntu is not the only Linux distribution preparing for a major update in the coming months. Also released in the past few days were OpenSuSE 11.2 Milestone 6 and Mandriva Linux 2010.0 Beta 1. To see how these three popular distributions compare, we set out to do our usual Linux benchmarking dance."

Warning!

InternetNews.com/Andy Patrizio: First WEP, Now WPA Encryption Falls: "It's been known for years that the Wired Equivalent Privacy or WEP (define) protocol is easily broken, and that to be secure, wireless networks should use the more powerful protocol called Wi-Fi Protected Access, or WPA.; Now security experts say they've proven that WPA can be breached just as easily. A pair of researchers in Japan said that they developed a way to break WPA encryption in about one minute -- and will show how at a conference there next month."

Past Events & Meetings

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Upcoming Events & Meetings

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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:2009:046)
Package: kernel
Announcement ID: SUSE-SA:2009:046
Date: Fri, 28 Aug 2009 14:29:52 +0200

Statistics

Numbers in brackets show the changes compared to the previous week.

opensuse.org

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Communication
lists.opensuse.org has 37095 (-3) non-unique subscribers to all mailing lists.
The openSUSE Forums have 33346 (+327) registered users - Most users ever online was 3270, 22-Jul-2009 at 20:00.

Contributors
3406 (+27) of 8958 (+138) registered contributors in the User Directory have signed the Guiding Principles. The board has acknowledged 351 (+21) members.

Build Service
The Build Service now hosts 7698 (+113) projects, 75851 (+616) packages, 14340 (+234) repositories by 17082 (+161) confirmed users.

openFATE

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Feature statistics for openSUSE 11.2:

total: 412 (+0)
unconfirmed: 27 (+0)
new: 3 (+0)
evaluation: 68 (-1)
candidate: 18 (+1)
done: 48 (+0)
rejected: 223 (+0)
duplicate: 25 (+0)

More information on openFATE

Bugzilla

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The numbers for all openSUSE project products are this week:

All Open Reports: 4868 (+24)
Blocker: 6 (+3)
Critical: 235 (-14)
Major: 840 (+4)
Normal: 2781 (+23)
Minor: 399 (+4)
Enhancements: 607 (+4)
Detailed Bugzilla Report – Submitting Bug Reports – Bug Reporting FAQ

Localization

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Daily updated translation statistics are available on the openSUSE Localization Portal.
Trunk Top-List – Localization Guide

openSUSE for your ears

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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 .

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Credits

Jan-Simon Möller (Chief-Editor)
Sascha Manns (Second Chief-Editor)
Sebastian Schöbinger (Tips/Tricks)
Satoru Matsumoto (Editorial Office)
Carl Fletcher (Main-Newsletter, Forums Sec.)
Thomas Hofstätter (Events & Meetings)
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