Archive:Weekly news 92
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Welcome to issue # 92 of openSUSE Weekly News
In this Week:
- openSUSE News: Introducing the ‘openSUSE Boosters’ Team
- The Geek Stuff/Ramesh Natarajan: Unix Sed Tutorial: How To Write to a File Using Sed
- Martin Vidner: WebYaST Beta 1
- openSUSE Forums: openSUSE 11.2 will support live updates
- KDE 4.3.2 Stabilizes Free Desktop
Announcements
- openSUSE News: Introducing the ‘openSUSE Boosters’ Team
- "Following its announcement in August, the dedicated openSUSE Boosters team held its inaugural meeting in Germany last week to plan its activities to promote the growth of openSUSE and its community. The openSUSE Boosters team is a hand-picked group of fifteen Novell employees with skills ranging all across the distribution, and who are dedicated to openSUSE development and working with the community. Since the team members are spread all over Europe and as far away as Mexico, we came together for a few days after the openSUSE Conference to get to know each other better and make plans."
In the Community
- Henne Vogelsang: openSUSE Boosters Kick-Off
- "What a week! The first ever openSUSE conference provided us, the multiplier team, with a great momentum to finally kick-off the team. So after a smooth Sunday on the conference with the nice lightning talks and Gianugo’s closing keynote we went for 4 days to some remote farm in the Franconian Switzerland to work on a plan of what we want to do and how we’re going to do it. This is my personal travelogue."
Status Updates
Distribution
- Joe Brockmeier: Comments on Trademark Guidelines?
- "it's been a while since we talked Trademarks. We're getting closer to 11.2 and so it's time to think about any revisions to the trademark guidelines. If you have any comments, please send them to me directly. I'll summarize the comments that I get and we'll go from there. Feel free to discuss on the list, but I am not making any commitment to try to collect comments out of a long discussion thread. :-) So, if you have thoughts on how the trademark guidelines should be improved, please send to me directly. I'm also not promising that every suggestion will be taken, but now that we've had the guidelines for nearly a year, we have some idea how well (or not) they're working."
- Early review of openSUSE 11.2
- "ZDNet’s Jason Perlow takes an early look at openSUSE 11.2, and finds it quite good: openSUSE’s implementation of KDE 4.3 finally gives the Open Source and Linux community something to brag about from a UI technology perspective, and in many ways I feel it is superior to both Windows 7, in both the underpinning technology and from a usability standpoint"
Build Service
- Stephan Kulow: About Patterns versus Packages
- "Just a quick note to everyone using factory and wonder what patterns-openSUSE-kde4_basis is all about: our patterns install packages now. To explain this change, I need to get a bit back in history: In openSUSE 11.0 we did a change that is still significant: we do no longer install patterns. In older releases, when you installed a “KDE Desktop” or a “GNOME Desktop”, yast would save that information as “pattern”. Patterns are basically groups of packages, but they can also depend on other patterns. ..."
- Build Team Meeting
- Minutes from the Meeting
Tips and Tricks
For Desktop Users
- Unixmen/M. Zinoune: Create your own MP3/media streaming server with GNUMP3d
- "If you want to share your music with your family , freinds or neighbours .. then GNUMP3d can do this job for you with one click. GNUMP3d is a streaming server for MP3s/, OGG vorbis files, movies and other media formats. In this tutorial we will try to setup a GNUMP3d server for mp3/media streaming."
- GNUMP3d packages for openSUSE are available from OBS.
- Make Tech Easier/Tavis J. Hampton: Master Dolphin in KDE 4
- "Dolphin is KDE 4’s default file manager, and is a departure from KDE 3, which relied on Konqueror for file management. Unlike Konqueror, which functions as a web browser and many other things, Dolphin is specifically used for file management. If you prefer to use Konqueror or any other file manager, you can change the KDE settings to use it by default."
- Raiden's Realm/Doug Bonnell: Tutorial: Using Cinelerra to create PIP videos
- "While the vast majority of my video editing is very simple "linear" editing to remove commercials, join in a title section, etc, there are times when I need to get a little more creative. Things such as Picture in Picture (PIP), split screen and multi-screen effects can be done fairly easily with Cinelerra. Cinelerra allows for multiple video tracks and can size/position each track as desired within the overall video frame."
- Cinelerra packages for openSUSE are available from PackMan.
- Sebastian Schöbinger: KDE Keyboard Layout
- "I am currently switching often between the US and the German keyboard layout. I found also a great solution for it, so I can easily change the layouts during writing."
For Commandline/Script Newbies
- Linux Journal/Mitch Frazier: More Bash Redirections
- "Everybody's seen redirection in bash commands, that's pretty common, but bash also allows you to define redirections when you define functions. This causes the redirections to be evaluated/executed whenever the function is called. This feature doesn't really give you any new features, just another way to express existing features."
- IBM developerWorks/Ian Shields: Learn Linux, 101: File and directory management
- "You've probably heard that everything in Linux is a file, so start on the right path with a solid grounding in file and directory management -- finding, listing, moving, copying, and archiving. You can use this material in this article to study for the LPI® 101 exam for Linux system administrator certification, or just to learn for fun."
- The Geek Stuff/Ramesh Natarajan: Unix Sed Tutorial: How To Write to a File Using Sed
- "This article is part of Unix Sed Tutorial series. In previous articles, we discussed about sed print operation , sed delete operation and sed find and replace.
- In this article, let us review how to extract part of one file and write it to another file using sed."
For System Administrators
- Novell Cool Solutions: Set up a Local DNS Server to Have Access to Multiple DNS Zones
- "You want to have access (name resolution) for the internet and also for an internal network, but neither the name server for the internet (providers name server) nor the internal one take care of the other area."
For Developers and Programmers
- Linux.com/Rob Day: The Kernel Newbie Corner: "initrd" and "initramfs"--Some Unfinished Business
- "Since a few people seemed interested, I'm going to expand on last week's column on initramfs and initrd and summarize what we know so far, tie off a few loose ends and throw in a little more information at no extra charge."
New/Updated Applications @ openSUSE
- aMule 2.2.6 published
- "Available by Packman"
- FreeCAD 0.8.2237
- "Available by Packman"
Planet SUSE
- John Lange: SUSE Studio – First impression… WOW!
- "Someone finally took pity on me and sent me an invite for SUSE Studio. My first impression – Wow! SUSE Studio lets you build your own custom linux distribution using SUSE as the starting point. The process requires only a few mouse clicks and is so fast and simple any Geeko can do it ;)"
- Martin Vidner: WebYaST Beta 1
- "We have released Beta 1 of WebYaST. Just to prevent misunderstandings, it is intended for appliances (and Beta 1 is an appliance, a VMX for VirtualBox or VMWare), not for replacing YaST on the desktop."
- Federico Mena-Quintero: The vision behind Zeitgeist, part 1
- " Jon McCann recently asked me to clarify the vision behind Zeitgeist. Zeitgeist started when Seif Lotfy implemented the Journal idea that I presented during GUADEC 2008. With apologies to people who already saw this presentation, I'd like to review some of its ideas here. Let us start with a few well-known problems with computers and the traditional desktop paradigm. "
openSUSE Forums
- Cube Screens Needed!
- "User want to see some cube screens and gets a little help from the regulars. Nice looking thread!"
- KDE is Great!
- "Yes! We know. And contrary to popular opinion it is also more popular than opinion might suggest! Flashy desktop effects are great, but they are not needed for a workhorse office box."
- openSUSE 11.2 will support live updates.
- "The details of this revolve around distribution upgrade 'dup' to upgrade from one release to the next, eg; 11.1 to 11.2, change the repo's and do zypper dup, bit more to it than that, but a handy feature indeed."
- Slow-Unsteady Burning-k3b
- "Work in progress this one, but possibly a familiar scenario where more than one device is on the same cable."
On the Web
Announcements
- KDE 4.3.2 Stabilizes Free Desktop
- "October 6th, 2009. Another month has passed since the release of KDE 4.3.0, so today the KDE Community announces the immediate availability of KDE 4.3.2, a bugfix, translation and maintenance update for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop. KDE 4.3.2 is a monthly update to KDE 4.3. It ships with a desktop workspace and many cross-platform applications such as administration programs, network tools, educational applications, utilities, multimedia software, games, artwork, development tools and more. KDE's award-winning tools and applications are available in more than 50 languages."
- Opendesktop.org/Frank Karlitschek: The Social Desktop Winners
- "Today we are announcing the winners of the Social Desktop Contest. The Social Desktop Contest was launched in June with the goal to bring Web 2.0 ideas and our user and developer community closer to the desktop and foster community development and innovations around the OCS API. There have been many new ideas and innovations coming from the community in the Social Desktop area and we received a large number of really good submissions. This made it obviously hard for the jury, as you can have only so many winners."
Reports
- ComputerworldUK/Glyn Moody: Open Source Makes Big Gains at the London Stock Exchange
- "At first sight, news that the London Stock Exchange (LSE) is moving from the Microsoft .Net-based TradElect to the GNU/Linux-based MillenniumIT system, is just another win for free software. ..."
- LinuxDevices.com/Jonathan Angel: Autonomous robot runs Linux on Intel Atom
- "Vstone has announced a two-legged humanoid robot that sports an onboard, Intel Atom-based PC. The "Robovie-PC" can walk on joints that offer six degrees of freedom, offers an accelerometer and gyro sensors, includes a 1.3 megapixel webcam, and has a body padded with polyurethane foam, says the company."
- Unixmen/M. Zinoune: OpenOffice.org 3.2 will come with new chart features
- "Good news, openoffice 3.2 will have new chart features, the Chart module was exchanged completely on the way to OpenOffice.org 2.3 . Here are a list of new chart features in openoffice 3.2."
- PC World/Amanda Conroy: Worldskills competition puts IT students to the test
- "The Worldskills Australia regional competition in PC and Network Support took place at the Mount Druitt College, TAFE NSW Western Sydney Institute last week. Student Jesty Karl Salvatierra beat out his competitors in a close field, with contestants having seven hours to complete their infrastructure and IT systems configurations. Designed to test the competitors’ skills and abilities in the key areas of PC support and network maintenance in a ‘real world’ business environment, the participants had to install a guest operating system of SUSE Linux 10.2 onto a host running VMware Server."
- h-online.com/Thorsten Leemhuis: Kernel Log - Improved USB 3. 0 support, X.org drivers to move back into X Server
- "Linux 2.6.31.2 not only offers minor bug fixes, but also selected major changes. The X.org hackers have adapted their development strategy and, in the long term, plan to merge several drivers back into the X Server code."
Reviews and Essays
- Linux Magazine/Jon "Maddog" Hall: This takes the cake (and make mine chocolate!)
- "I heard recently, and could not really believe it until I saw it, that Microsoft was encouraging people to throw "Tupperware(R) parties" at their homes in order to launch the new version of Microsoft's products. That is right...plain old down-to-earth "homies" extolling the virtues of quickly going to Vista...er...ah...Windows 7. "
- LinuxSecurity.com/Bill Keys: Secure Nagios Server
- "Nagios is a monitoring software designed to let you know about problems on your hosts and networks quickly. You can configure it to be used on any network. Setting up a Nagios server on any Linux distribution is a very quick process however to make it a secure setup it takes some work. This article will not show you how to install Nagios since there are tons of them out there but it will show you in detail ways to improve your Nagios security."
- Linux Today/Carla Schroder: Linux Radio Ads a Success, Not a Failure
- "Ken Starks reported on his experiment with running Linux ads on the Kim Kommando radio show in Austin, Texas. Ken sounds a bit discouraged, but he shouldn't be-- it was a success and it proves that advertising Linux works. Let's take a closer look at what happened, and what the goals of any advertising campaign should be."
- Fierce Content Management/Ron Miller: Does the open-source label still matter?
- "Last week we reported that Cheryl McKinnon, left "proprietary" vendor Open Text and joined "open source" vendor Nuxeo. Nuxeo brought Cheryl on board to be their Chief Marketing Officer in order to take Nuxeo to a new level in the market place. That much is obvious since that is what marketing is all about, but it got me thinking how different life might be for Cheryl in the "open source" world, and after talking to her, I'm not entirely sure it will be that much different."
- Linux Magazine/Jeffrey B. Layton: I Have a Schedule to Keep - IO Schedulers
- "It almost goes without saying that the Linux kernel is a very complex piece of software. It is used in embedded devices that need real-time performance, hand-held devices, laptops, desktops, general servers, database servers, video servers, DNS systems, very large supercomputers, and on and on. All of these uses for the kernel have very different requirements. Some require the system be responsive to user input so you don’t interrupt streaming music or video or other interactivity. At the same time there are requirements for good IO performance (throughput, IOPS, etc.) and for some workloads, these requirements are very high. To make sure that there is balance within the system for all users and processes, there is a concept of schedulers within the kernel."
Warning!
- End of Life Announcement: ClamAV 0.94.x
- "Dear ClamAV users, all ClamAV releases older than 0.95 are affected by a bug in freshclam which prevents incremental updates from working with signatures longer than 980 bytes."
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.
Statistics
Numbers in brackets show the changes compared to the previous week.
opensuse.org
Communication
lists.opensuse.org has 37286 (-1) non-unique subscribers to all mailing lists.
The openSUSE Forums have 35159 (+300) registered users - Most users ever online was 10409, 24-Sep-2009 at 21:15.
Contributors
3615 (+37) of 9598 (+73) registered contributors in the User Directory have signed the Guiding Principles. The board has acknowledged 351 (+0) members.
openFATE
Feature statistics for openSUSE 11.2:
- total: 411 (+1)
- unconfirmed: 26 (-1)
- new: 3 (+0)
- evaluation: 39 (+0)
- candidate: 15 (+1)
- done: 65 (+2)
- rejected: 237 (-1)
- duplicate: 26 (+0)
Bugzilla
The numbers for all openSUSE project products are this week:
- All Open Reports: 4885 (+26)
- Blocker: 5 (+0)
- Critical: 237 (+0)
- Major: 819 (+4)
- Normal: 2801 (+23)
- Minor: 410 (+1)
- Enhancements: 613 (-2)
- 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 .
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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
