Archive:Weekly news 87
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Welcome to issue # 87 of openSUSE Weekly News
In this Week:
- Keynote Update: Lenz Grimmer to Keynote openSUSE Conference
- Masim Sugianto: Indonesian openSUSE Event : Zimbra Community Training
- Pavol Rusnak: New RPM in openSUSE Factory
- Unixmen/M.Zinoune: Usefull extensions for openoffice
- Andrew Wafaa: Guide To Goblin
Announcements
- Power outage in Nuernberg office Sep. 12.-13.
- "Downtime is planned from 2009-09-11 20:00 CEST (18:00 UTC) until 2009-09-14 10:00 CEST (08:00 UTC). So it might become a long weekend for developers – but we plan to avoid restrictions for endusers during this downtime."
- Keynote Update: Lenz Grimmer to Keynote openSUSE Conference
- "The openSUSE Project is happy to announce that Lenz Grimmer will be delivering the opening keynote for the first-ever openSUSE Conference. The openSUSE Conference will be held September 17 through September 20 in Nürnberg, Germany. Register today!"
In the Community
- Masim Sugianto: Indonesian openSUSE Event : Zimbra Community Training
- "Last week, I went to Surabaya, a capital city of the province of East Java for attending Zimbra Mail Server & Collaboration Suite community training initiated by Indonesian openSUSE community, East Java branch. The training itself dedicated for openSUSE promotional event for server side. Beside my activity as Indonesian openSUSE member, I also become a founder for Indonesian Zimbra Community. I think it would be a good idea to make openSUSE as primary choice, both for desktop and server application. Zimbra has it’s own benefit. The combination between it’s feature and price (priceless for open source edition) making Zimbra as an attractive option for mail server."
- LenZ Grimmer: FrOSCon/OpenSQL Camp summary
- "It's almost two weeks now since FrOSCon and the OpenSQL Camp subconference have taken place in Sankt Augustin, Germany — about time for a summary and update from my side! First off, I would like to thank all of the participants and supporters, particularly my colleagues Regina Steyer and Iris Musiol for the perfect logistics and co-sponsoring as well as Uli Graef, Thorsten Frueauf, Matthias Schmidt, Alexander Rubin and Joerg Moellenkamp for manning the Sun booth and the help on site."
- Andreas Jaeger: Keysigning Party @ openSUSE Conference
- "Extend the web of trust! Take part at the Keysigning Party during openSUSE Conference. There will be two Keysigning Party sessions during the openSUSE Conference, so everybody has the chance to participate: ..."
Status Updates
Distribution
- openSUSE KDE meeting 20090903
- Minutes from the Meeting
- Andrea Florio: openSUSE-LXDE live CD now ready!
- "Yes, that’s true! After some develop and tests i finally completed the openSUSE-LXDE live installable iso based on openSUSE 11.1 made with SUSE-STUDIO. I provide now, only 32bit (i686) image because that may still need some testing."
Build Service
- Pavol Rusnak: New RPM in openSUSE Factory
- "Michael Schroeder has finally updated the RPM package in openSUSE to the latest upstream version 4.7.1. \o/ There were LOTS of bugfixes, enhancements and internal API changes which are probably not very interesting for mere mortals, but what do they mean for packagers? Here’s a list of important changes for them:..."
- Andreas Jaeger: Building against openSUSE:Factory
- "Magnus started recently a discussion on the openSUSE packaging mailing list (thread start is archived here) where he stated that it takes very long for him to build packages for openSUSE’s Factory distribution since the packages are only build once the complete distribution has been built. The solution that was proposed – and which should be used in general – is to build against the snapshot repository of openSUSE:Factory."
Tips and Tricks
For Desktop Users
- Ahmed Kamal: Google Chrome Multiple Home Pages
- "Recently I started using Google's browser Chrome (well technically chromium) on Linux for my browsing needs. It is very fast, low on CPU and Memory, I quite like it. I am now also sure Flash plugin is teh CPU hog pig :) Anyway, one really cool feature I missed from Firefox was the ability to set multiple pages as the homepage. The thing is, I follow quite a lot of tech news sites, and I need to check them every now and then. In firefox, I'd just click the Home button, and it would open all of them, I could not find this functionality out of the box with Chrome. What is a geek to do ? Well of course write some javascript :)"
- Make Tech Easier/Tavis J. Hampton: How to Use ‘remote:/’ KIO and KNetAttach
- "In my post two weeks ago, I introduced you to KDE’s KIO slaves and gave you a brief overview of the services they offer. One of the KIO protocols is remote:/, which relies on KNetAttach to create virtual network folders. With it, you can create folders for the following services: ..."
- Unixmen/M.Zinoune: Usefull extensions for openoffice
- "OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source open software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. You can adjust openoffice to your needs by adding more functionality with the help of extensions."
- Ghacks/Jack Wallen: Gain more battery life from your Linux-based laptop with powertop
- "If your laptop is running Linux you might not be happy with the battery life you are getting. There are numerous reasons for the possible extra drain on your battery. Some of the biggest issues are: Hard drive spin-downs, interrupts, and power management. Figuring out how to make these adjustments to your kernel (or subsystems) to gain a bit of extra battery life would take more time googling than you would probably prefer. Fortunately there is a single application available to take care of this for you. Powertop is one of those tools every user of Linux on a laptop should have installed – especially if your laptop depends primarily on its battery for life."
- TechRepublic/Vincent Danen: Mirroring Web sites with wget
- "Recently, one of my favorite security-related sites was almost shut down due to the operator’s lack of time to keep it up to date. The site provided proof-of-concept and exploit code for various security vulnerabilities in a wide range of products across multiple platforms. The site, milw0rm, is invaluable to security researchers, and not to have access to that data would have been a huge loss."
- Sebastian Schöbinger: Usefull Iconpanel
- Had you ever the feeling while working or so, that it is a bit nasty to go down to the Application Launcher, klick on it and then start the application? That is a quite nice way to avoid that. ;)
For Commandline/Script Newbies
- Linux Journal/Mitch Frazier: Bash Quoting
- "Quoting things in bash is quite simple... until it isn't. I've written scripts where I'd swear 90% of the effort was getting bash to quote things correctly."
- IBM developerWorks/Ian Shields: Learn Linux, 101: Text streams and filters
- "There's a lot more to text manipulation than cut and paste, particularly when you aren't using a GUI. Study for the Linux Professional Institute Certification (LPIC) 101 exam, or learn for fun. In this article, Ian Shields introduces you to text manipulation on Linux® using filters from the GNU textutils package. By the end of this article, you will be manipulating text like an expert."
For Developers and Programmers
- Linux Journal/Mike Diehl: Accessing SQLite in C
- "In my last article I wrote about accessing a PostgreSQL database in C/C++. In this article, I'm going to discuss performing the same functions in C against an SQLite database. Unlike Postgresql and the supporting libraries, SQLite creates completely self-contained databases that aren't dependant upon a client-server architecture. This feature makes SQLite ideal for use in applications that don't require the complexity of a server, yet can benefit from the flexibility of the SQL language."
For System Administrators
- LinuxPlanet/Akkana Peck: How do You Really Measure Linux Bloat?
- "In the last article, I talked about the different types of Linux memory and how deceptive values like Virtual Size and Resident Set Size can be. Today I'll talk about how you can get more useful numbers so you can figure out which programs really are hogging your computer's RAM."
New/Updated Applications @ openSUSE
- Ben Kevan: Google Chrome 4.0.203.2 Released – openSUSE RPM – True 64-Bit Support
- "Google Chrome 4.0.203.2 Released – openSUSE Fedora RPM – True 64-Bit Support. To follow updates I will provide for Chrome RPM packages please bookmark or check: http://www.benkevan.com/blog/tag/google-chrome/"
- Sascha Manns: Updated Package: kde4-skrooge
- kde4-skrooge updated to version 0.5.0. The ChangeLog can found in this Blogentry.
- Petr Mladek: OpenOffice_org 3.1.1 final available for openSUSE
- "I’m happy to announce OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 final packages for openSUSE. They are available in the Build Service OpenOffice:org:STABLE project and include many upstream and Go-oo fixes. Please, check the wiki page for more details about the openSUSE OOo build."
- Michal Hrušecký: Firebird in openSUSE Factory
- "I want to inform our users that thanks to the efforts of Philippe Makowski, we've got Firebird in openSUSE now. He took over the package we had in Build Service, rewrote spec file from scratch, fixed quite some errors and adjusted package in many ways. And as the result Firebird package was finally accepted yesterday (1st of September) into openSUSE Factory.
- What is Firebird and why you should be interested? Firebird is open source RDBMS (relational database management system) and it is derived from Borland InterBase 6.0. It won SourceForge 4th Annual Community Choice Award in category Best Project for the Enterprise and was nominated in other categories as well. I can continue and mention features it has, but I think that the best approach will be to point you out to the following web page: ..."
Planet SUSE
- Lluis Sanchez: .NET/Mono Code Camp in Tarragona: Call for Papers
- "We have started planning the sessions for the .NET/Mono Code Camp in Tarragona (Spain). The sessions are being organized in two tracks: a Mono track and an MSDN track. I plan to give at least a couple of talks: one about the upcoming release of MonoDevelop, and one about application extensibility based on Mono.Addins."
- Joe Brockmeier: Corporate sponsors and event funding: Ask early, not often
- "If you’re hoping to get sponsorship funds for your event, it’s better to ask early than to ask often. And even better to ask professionally… For larger companies (i.e., the ones that actually do have a fair amount of cash for sponsorships) it is vitally important to ask early about sponsorships. Especially for events that are not yet established. Annual events like LinuxTag fall more easily into budget planning because you can establish a baseline for funding those events and plan year to year whether it’s worth attending and how much it actually costs. In addition to sponsorship, companies have to factor in travel, shipping, materials, etc. — the costs of participating in a conference are not limited to the funds that are put in for sponsorship."
- Andrew Wafaa: Guide To Goblin - Part 1
- "People have asked me in the past for some screenshots of Goblin, and who am I to deny you fine people an insight into the goodness that is Goblin. I'll be doing several posts to share the love, otherwise I'll get too many complaints for a huge post. Also it's good to prolong the love :-D
- So first things first, you can grab the image from here - make sure you read the README.FIRST file before doing anything! It gives you directions on how to get it onto your machine. This image is designed purely for use with a usb stick (2GB should do nicely, it's ~1.5GB), we are looking at moving to a hybrid iso based image but just not quite yet."
- Andrew Wafaa: Guide To Goblin - Part 2
- "So continuing from Part 1, let's take a look at the available "Web Services".
- Once you have a network connection to the outside world you can either go back to the MyZone tab and select the Web Services button or go to the Applications tab and search for 'web service'. You will then be presented with: ..."
- Masim Sugianto: Suggestion for SUSE Studio Usability
- "After playing with SUSE Studio for a while, I think I have 3 suggestion to increase the usability of SUSE Studio, based on my experience building Zimbra Appliance on openSUSE 11.1. Actually, I have send it using “send feedback” menu but I don’t know whether it has reached SUSE Studio team or the suggestion go nowhere because I haven’t received the response yet until now :-)"
- Klaas Freitag: Hermes Improvements
- "I did some interesting changes to the Hermes instance of openSUSE. There have been complaints that it is not possible to follow requests that have been originated by oneself, which can result in the weird situation that one does not get information what happened to a request. I fixed that by adding a new subscription called OBS Request Author to the Hermes start page that informs you about all changes to a request originated by you. All people who already had a subscription on the request change notifications have been automatically subscribed. The subscription can of course be removed on the Hermes page if it is not wanted."
- Masim Sugianto: Zimbra 6.0.0 GA has been Released
- "After the latest delay from August 31 to September 2, 2009, Zimbra.com has finally released their new product, Zimbra Collaboration Suite 6.0.0 GA. It’s the major upgrade since version 5.0.18. Click here for complete explanation about Zimbra Network Edition features and bug fixes. Release notes for Zimbra open source edition could be found on this link."
openSUSE Forums
- What's the difference between Free/Available/
- "Have you ever wondered how space is used / allocated on your HD/Partitions. It's always a good idea to keep an eye on Disk Usage - Check this for some details."
- Unable to Play Apple Trailers.
- "Some useful information here for you with a multi-media theme, featuring the Gecko Media Plugin. A must read if you need reliable playback via the web."
- KDE4.3.1 Released
- "Shortly after the announcement KDE4.3.1 was in the repos and users were reporting on it. You can read about their experiences in this thread. For KDE users OS11.2 is going to be a Milestone indeed!"
- KDE4.3 Desktop Box Gone
- "Getting use to the new way of managing the Desktop in KDE4 is going to take a little time. Users consistently find themselves in a bit of a muddle."
On the Web
Announcements
- opensourc3: Issue #2 of of Opensourc3 Magazine is available!
- "Welcome to the premier Unified Computing magazine for Information Technology Professionals. Published on a monthly basis, opensourc3 is available for FREE download in PDF format, or can be read on-line."
- Global Conference on Open Source
- "Since the signing of Indonesia, Go Open Source! Declaration on June 30 2004, Indonesia aspires to be a leading force in the movement to promote open source. Global Conference on Open Source (GCOS) aims to bring the global open source community together in order to address the growing demand for open source technology in every social spectrum. GCOS will generate an international collaboration among governments, businesses, academicians, and communities to strengthen the position of open source, making it more attractive and valuable for the society at large."
- Ultra-thin All-in-One-PC with Linux operating system - openSUSE Linux 11.1 pre-configured and ready for immediate use
- "The just 3.6 cm thin X500V complete system is fitted with the latest version (11.1) of openSUSE Linux and can be expanded with open-source applications from the openSUSE website. 1-click package installation allows the system to be customised specifically to a wide range of user requirements."
- Linux Magazine/Britta Wuelfing: Linus Torvalds in Live Streaming from LinuxCon
- "Sep 01, 2009 - The Linux Foundation will be holding its first LinuxCon conference from September 21 through 23 in Portland, Oregon. Linus Torvalds and Mark Shuttleworth will be among the speakers, and Linux Pro Magazine Online will do a live stream, free for the keynotes."
- See also the time schedule.
- KDE 4.3.1 Release Announcement
- "September 1st, 2009. A month has passed since the release of KDE 4.3.0, so today the KDE Community announces the immediate availability of KDE 4.3.1, a bugfix, translation and maintenance update for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop. KDE 4.3.1 is a monthly update to KDE 4.3. ..."
- Turbocharge your Web experience with Opera 10
- "Opera Software today unveiled the final version of Opera 10. In a world of ordinary Web browsers, Opera 10 stands out from the crowd with innovative new features wrapped in an elegant, fresh interface. Opera 10 is absolutely free, comes in 43 languages, and works on Windows, Mac and Linux platforms. You can download the world’s most innovative browser from http://www.opera.com/."
- KDE.NEWS/Sebastian Kügler: Akademy 2010 in Tampere, Finland
- "The KDE community is proud to announce the location of next year's Akademy: Tampere, Finland. Akademy is the yearly world conference held by the KDE community to celebrate the Free Software desktop and work towards the future of KDE."
Reports
- PHP <? BUILDER ?>: A Twist In Namespaces - A New Revolution in PHP
- "With PHP5.3--which is in itself a precursor and somewhat of a teaser for PHP 6--comes something rather new to PHP: Namespaces. As object-oriented developers well know, the point of object-oriented development is to remove ambiguity from development and data access items. What this actually requires is finding common functionality and implementing them in a reusable framework--usually as classes. However, even the widest scope implementation will eventually start running into issues with naming conventions. This is where namespaces really shines."
- ITworld/Esther Schindler: Four Things Open Source Projects Should Know About Dealing with the Press
- "It's kind of funny that I led a panel at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention that I didn't mention at all in my OSCON conference coverage. Perhaps it was due to an unusual dose of modesty. However, in What Open Source Projects Need to Know About Interacting with the Press, which was also illuminated by Zonker Brockmeier, Jennifer Cloer, and Peter Galli, we spent most of an hour sharing advice about the mistakes that open source projects make when they interact with journalists. ..."
- Qt Labs/Thomas Zander: What is happening for KOffice2.1
- "Its been some months since we released KOffice2.0.0, the first official release for the new platform KOffice2. For common and certainly for advanced office users we made clear that 2.0 is missing features for them. What then, you may ask, is 2.1 going to change for them? Well, here is what we are working on and what has been integrated into what will become the 2.1 release in a month or two."
- Phoronix/Michael Larabel: Skype 2.1 Beta Brings New Features To Linux
- "For anyone that extensively uses Skype on Linux, you will probably want to head on over to the Linux Skype Developer page to fetch the latest beta. Skype has just rolled out the first 2.1 beta (2.1.0.47 Beta) of the Linux Skype client, which adds several new features and also brings a number of fixes and other improvements."
- LWN.net/Jake Edge: KDE struggles with feature requests
- "Sometimes developers have a prickly relationship with their users. Users may have unrealistic, or overly demanding, requests that can be difficult to respond to. The most vocal of these users are often unwilling to take "no"—or even "not yet"—for an answer. Some KDE developers are currently struggling with that problem, and trying to find ways to smooth the dialog between users and developers."
- iTWire/Jake Widman: Netbooks growing twice as fast as notebooks
- "According to a new report, the market for netbook computers grew 40 percent from the first to the second quarter of 2009, almost twice the rate of standard notebooks. Netbook shipments actually outstripped notebooks in Latin America and Greater China."
- h-online/Thorsten Leemhuis: Kernel Log: Coming in 2.6.31 - Part 5: CUSE, USB 3.0, FireWire networking and the rest
- "Linux 2.6.31 will support USB 3.0, although the corresponding hardware is not yet available. Distributions are to use the new FireWire stack that now offers LAN support. CUSE emulates the Open Sound System via a userspace program. Another new addition is a driver for Acer's Aspire One netbook."
- Linux Magazine: Fresh Roadmap for Firefox
- "The Mozilla Project has updated its roadmap for the coming versions of Firefox. The next big release, Firefox 4.0 with Geko1.9.4 underneath, is scheduled for the end of 2010."
Reviews and Essays
- Linux.com/Brian Proffitt: Four More Cool Word Processors
- "If you've seen one online word processor--or even a handful of them--you haven't seen them all, not by a longshot. In addition to Google Docs, Zoho Writer, and emerging competitors such as EtherPad, other online offerings you might want to try include AjaxWrite, Writeboard, picoWrite and MonkeyTeX, to name a few."
- h-online/Multi-booting over the internet
- "Many operating systems can already be booted over the net, especially so for the installation systems of the major Linux distributions, but the netboot.me web service offers a universal boot loader which presents them all in one menu. The boot loader can be installed on a USB stick, burned onto CD, or on a floppy disk. This allows users to start an always current selection of operating systems over the internet using one single boot medium."
- ostatic: Kristina Shoemaker: Using Social Networks to Foster Open Source Projects
- "Let's face it, open source software companies and projects have a wide variety of innovative platforms and methods to drum up awareness, business, and interest in development for the projects they create and support. The problem is, it's not always easy to quantify how much interest and awareness (or ultimately, new contributors, users, or customers) result from any specific method."
- Javier Llorente: Hosting in Germany
- "A few days ago, I was looking for a good hosting company that offered openSUSE. Shared hosting was too restrictive, a root server was too expensive and too powerful as well, so the right choice for me was a vps (virtual private server). And what I found were very good hosting offers in Germany."
- The VAR Guy: Skype Dials New Owner… And Open Source
- "Now that eBay has sold most of Skype to private investors, some pundits may wonder what markets Skype should tackle next. Actually, the answer has already emerged — and it involves Skype plugging into Asterisk, the open source IP PBX. Here’s the scoop and the implications for solutions providers."
- Paulo Dias: Amarok 2.2 – Reloaded, revamped, rethinked, reeverything!
- "I have a little secret to share with you, Amarok 2.2 Beta 1 is almost out!! shhhh, don’t tell anyone, it might scare the little puppy :)"
- Telegraph.co.uk/Matthew Moore: Internet celebrates 40th birthday: but what date should we be marking?
- "The midwives for the modern era of communication were scientists at the University of Los Angeles in California (UCLA), who connected the neighbouring machines with a 15ft grey cable."
Warning!
- The Apache Software Foundation: apache.org downtime - initial report
- "This is a short overview of what happened on Friday August 28 2009 to the apache.org services. A more detailed post will come at a later time after we complete the audit of all machines involved.
- On August 27th, starting at about 18:00 UTC an account used for automated backups for the ApacheCon website hosted on a 3rd party hosting provider was used to upload files to minotaur.apache.org. The account was accessed using SSH key authentication from this host."
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:2009:014
- Package: - dnsmasq, icu, libcurl3/libcurl2/curl/compat-curl2, Xerces-c/xerces-j2, tiff/libtiff, acroread_ja, xpdf, xemacs, mysql, squirrelmail, OpenEXR, wireshark
- Announcement ID: SUSE-SR:2009:014
- Date: Tue, 01 Sep 2009 15:08:25 +0200
Statistics
Numbers in brackets show the changes compared to the previous week.
opensuse.org
Communication
lists.opensuse.org has 37159 (+64) non-unique subscribers to all mailing lists.
The openSUSE Forums have 33678 (+332) registered users - Most users ever online was 3270, 22-Jul-2009 at 20:00.
Contributors
3444 (+38) of 9070 (+112) registered contributors in the User Directory have signed the Guiding Principles. The board has acknowledged 351 (+0) members.
Build Service
The Build Service now hosts 7798 (+100) projects, 76171 (+320) packages, 14615 (+275) repositories by 17239 (+157) confirmed users.
openFATE
Feature statistics for openSUSE 11.2:
- total: 411 (-1)
- unconfirmed: 27 (+0)
- new: 3 (+0)
- evaluation: 62 (-6)
- candidate: 22 (+4)
- done: 48 (+0)
- rejected: 224 (+1)
- duplicate: 25 (+0)
Bugzilla
The numbers for all openSUSE project products are this week:
- All Open Reports: 4889 (+21)
- Blocker: 4 (-2)
- Critical: 234 (-1)
- Major: 830 (-10)
- Normal: 2803 (+22)
- Minor: 407 (+8)
- Enhancements: 611 (+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)
- Sebastian Schöbinger (Tips/Tricks)
- Satoru Matsumoto (Editorial Office)
- Carl Fletcher (Main-Newsletter, Forums Sec.)
- Thomas Hofstätter (Events & Meetings)
- add translators
