Archive:Weekly news 98
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Welcome to issue # 98 of openSUSE Weekly News
In this Week:
- Board Election 2009 Startup
- openSUSE 11.2 Launchparties
- openSUSE Spotlight: What does the openSUSE Board do?
- Uwe Gansert: Interactive AutoYaST Rules
- openSUSE Forums: K3B and mp3 support
Announcements
- openSUSE Spotlight: Ye who enters hereā¦ Board Meetings now public
- "Ever wanted to know what the openSUSE Board is up to? Have you always wondered what the Board discusses and how it comes to decisions? Are you interested in how your elected representatives work with each other? Maybe you are even interested in running for a seat in the elections and want to know what duties that would bring with it?"
- Joe Brockmeier: Providing useful feedback
- "Release early, release often. That mantra has served open source really well because it provides an opportunity for developers to get in and provide feedback (and patches) through the lifecycle of a project, and not when something is completely finished and would require huge amounts of efforts to fix problems that could be caught early."
- Thomas Biege: X-MAS Wish List for the SuSE Security-Team
- "you may not have recognized it yet because of the bland climate (at least here in Germany) but X-MAS is approaching. It is the time of beginning, looking ahead, family and wishes. I am nipping hot tea from a big cup and want to hear about your wishes... the wishes from our openSUSE community, our SLES customers, the SUSE family if you like. What should the SuSE Security-Team improve for you and your business in the future?"
- Joe Brockmeier: openSUSE Kernel Repository is public
- "Want to help test the openSUSE kernel? Want the very latest and greatest openSUSE Linux kernel sources? We have good news for you! After several months of preparation, the kernel team has set up a public Git repository for hosting the openSUSE kernel sources. If youād like to work with the openSUSE Linux kernel as itās developed, please read Kernel Git on the openSUSE wiki, which explains how to clone the repository and use it."
Board Election 2009
- Joe Brockmeier: openSUSE Board Elections: Seeking excellent candidates!
- "The openSUSE Board Elections are fast approaching, and thereās still time to declare your candidacy, but not a lot. The last date to declare intent to run is November 23rd ā thatās one week away. If youāre still thinking about applying for membership in order to vote in the election, your time is running out there too. The board will continue considering membership after November 23rd, of course, but if you apply after that date you wonāt be eligible to vote in the 2009 election, even if approved."
- Bryen Yunashko: Iām not done yet!
- "A year ago, I was honored to be voted in as a new member of openSUSEās Community Board. That election had a stunning 75% voter turnout, and to have been a part of that historic occasion which also marked the beginning of the very first-ever community elected Board.
- A lot of things have happened in the past year and openSUSE continues its momentum in becoming a more community-driven project. Our stake in openSUSE has become more and more significant and our need to be continually involved in this great Project of ours is ever-more important."
- Andrew Wafaa: Reminder: Second openSUSE Board Election Deadline Approaching!
- "The time has come again for openSUSE Members to vote for new members to the Board. Stephen Shaw (decriptor) and Bryen Yunashko (suseROCKS) have completed their tenure on the Board, and their seats are up for election. There is also a new seat available to be occupied by a non-Novell member. Henne Vogelsang (henne) and Pascal Bleser (yaloki) have another year to complete and will remain, Michael Lƶffler (michl) as chairman will remain as well. This means that as of this yearās election the openSUSE Board will be made up of equal numbers of Novell and non-Novell employees, 2 seats+Chairperson and 3 seats respectively. Candidates for this election will be voted in for a two (2) year term, ensuring that there is continuity within the Board."
- Michael Lƶffler: openSUSE Board Election ā change of timeline
- "As Thomas just announced on the project mailing list the election committee has decided to extend the period for announcing candidacy by one week to November 30. Same applies to request openSUSE membership status which makes you eligible to vote. With this change the period for candidates to campaign gets shortened by one week to start just one week prior to opening of the ballots. Start date of the election stays Tuesday December 8."
- Pavol Rusnak: My Candidacy for the openSUSE Board
- "Iād like to announce my candidacy for openSUSE Board Elections 2009. My name is Pavol Rusnak and Iām 25 years old. I was born in Kosice, Slovakia, but for the last 7 years Iāve been living in Prague, Czech Republic, where I graduated from computer science at the Charles University"
In the Community
- Sirko Kemter: Pictures from the Chemnitz Launch Party
- Sirko Kemter: After the show is before the next show
- "A little report from the Launch Party in Chemnitz. First we had a little problem. 2 of our speakers was sick, thx the boosters team was an replacement for Will Stephenson found. Many thx to Michal HruÅ”eckĆ½ for help us in Chemnitz and travelling from Prague. But he wasnt not the only who travelled a long distance. Many of the guests travelled a long distance. We had guests from Dresden, Grimma or Wittenberg (that are 170km) here. I talked to this guy and he said that was the nearest party for him, he said next would be Mexico City."
- Martin Schlander: opensuse-guide.org
- "Using openSUSE is incredibly easy, when you know how ā but figuring everything out by yourself with no prior knowledge of GNU/Linux is no small task. In fact, Iām sure that a very high percentage of the people who try to migrate fail and quit, and often the showstoppers are really very basic issues. Therefore Iāve written and maintained a beginnerās guide to openSUSE in Danish for every release since SUSE Linux 9.3, documenting the basics needed to getting started using openSUSE as a home desktop OS. For openSUSE 11.2 Iāve decided to maintain the guide in English instead. Youāll find it here: ...]
Status Updates
Board
- openSUSE Spotlight: What does the openSUSE Board do?
- "As weāre facing upcoming openSUSE Board election Iād like to share with you what the current Board normally does. This is especially for people which may run for a Board seat and so might know better what they can expect and how much time is needed for that. But for everybody else it should help to make a picture what those Board members are doing. Currently we do have bi-weekly meetings in IRC which are scheduled for 2 hours. In average Iād say we need those 2 hours. Apart of this fixed meeting we Board Members communicate ongoing via emails or IRC."
Distribution
- Joe Brockmeier: Whatās new in openSUSE 11.2
- "After nearly a year in development, openSUSE 11.2 is ready to be unleashed! A peek under the hood shows a lot of new and interesting changes since 11.1, including updated desktops and a preview of WebYaST. openSUSE 11.2 is finally out after 11 months of development. The openSUSE Project released openSUSE 11.2 with a bevy of updates and improvements over last yearās 11.1 release, including KDE 4.3, GNOME 2.28, a new Linux kernel, as well as the latest and greatest of your favorite open source applications. Whatās in this release? Letās take a look at the highlights."
- Joe Brockmeier: Enhancing openSUSE 11.2: Adding Repositories and Packages
- "So youāve got that shiny new openSUSE 11.2 system up and running. Now what? The default repositories have plenty of software, but thereās much more for openSUSE in community and semi-official repositories that you might find useful."
Boosters Team
Build Service
- Michael Schroeder: Build Team Meeting
- Minutes from the Meeting
- Pascal Bleser: webpin .= "11.2";
- "Just committed the webpin CLI client version 1.2.1, which only contains a single modification: it now also supports searching the Software Portal index for openSUSE 11.2."
Tips and Tricks
For Desktop Users
- The Geek Stuff/Ramesh Natarajan: 5 Easy Steps to Create a Flowchart Using Dia
- "Dia is a GTK+ based multi-platform diagram creation program. Dia is similar to the Visio program for Windows."
- Make Tech Easier/Tavis J. Hampton: Using Kate As a Web Editor
- "There are many applications out there that provide project-based web development tools and very feature-rich interfaces, but sometimes all you really need is a good text editor. For those times, there are few editors that can stand up to the KDE powerhouse called Kate."
- Uwe Gansert: Interactive AutoYaST Rules
- "This article describes a new feature of AutoYaST in openSUSE 11.3 (a backport for 11.2 is available too). The rules.xml file describes how AutoYaST creates the complete XML profile out of single XML snippet files. Like for example "if the main memory is more than 2GB, use kde.xml, else use windowmaker.xml", "if you find more than one harddisk, use lvm.xml, else use simple_partitioning.xml" ... and so on ... That's available since ages in AutoYaST what's new now is, that you can present all XML snippets you have to the users so they can select which ones to use on their own."
For Commandline/Script Newbies
- Linux Journal/Da A Feng: Tech Tip: Find Directories Over a Certain Size
- "It's fairly simple to find large files on your system using commands such as find, but if you're looking for directories over a certain size find won't help you. The Perl script presented here can help you track down those explosively large directories."
- A.P. Lawrence: Freeing disk space with ">"
- "I wrote this up after a forum discussion in which several posters didn't really understand why ">" can free disk space when "rm" cannot. The basic problem is that if another process has a file open (for reading or writing, it doesn't matter), the disk blocks are not freed by an "rm" until the process or process using the file quits (or stops using the file, at least). That part seems to be well understood."
For System Administrators
- tuxmachines.org/eco2geek: Hitch your wagon to a lizard: dist-upgrading openSUSE
- "For the first time, openSUSE now officially supports a "dist-upgrade" feature, similar to Debian's. Which is to say, if you've got openSUSE 11.1 installed, you should be able to upgrade to openSUSE 11.2 by updating your list of software repositories to point to providers of software for openSUSE 11.2, doing a distribution upgrade via the Internet, and have a reasonable chance of success."
New/Updated Applications @ openSUSE
- Gabriel Burt: PDF Mod 0.8
- "New Packages can be found here"
- Petr Mladek: OpenOffice_org 3.2 beta2 available for openSUSE
- "Iām happy to announce OpenOffice.org 3.2 beta2 packages for openSUSE. They are available in the Build Service OpenOffice:org:UNSTABLE project and include many upstream and Go-oo fixes. See also overview of integrated features and enhancements. Please, look for more details about the openSUSE OOo build on the wiki page."
- lx-office-crm
- "Office related Program. Available in Packman"
- Joe Brockmeier: Amarok Refreshed: Better, Stronger, Faster!
- "Even though itās a point release, the latest Amarok comes with some major new features and all the benefits of the 2.2.0 release. Dubbed āWeightless,ā the 2.2.1 release is full of bug fixes and polishing from 2.2.0 release as well as improvements to music management, podcasts, and the ability to update Amarok scripts."
- 2ManDVD 1.1.1-2
- Available in Packman
- new package named Attica is now available
- Available in OBS
Projects Corner
The corner for introducing activities of sub project *inside* openSUSE.
Education Project
- Jigish Gohil: openSUSE Edu Li-f-e : creating open minds
- "openSUSE Education community is proud to announce openSUSE-Edu Li-f-e: Linux for Education based on openSUSE 11.2 . Li-f-e flavor bundles the best of softwares openSUSE has to offer, such as most popular Desktop Environments, educational application, development suites, multimedia, great user experience out of the box, and a lot more that is expected in a modern Operating System."
GNOME Project
- kdw.org/sebp: GNOME DVB Daemon 0.1.13 is out
- "One month after the last release, I released version 0.1.13 of GNOME DVB Daemon today. It's mainly a bug fix release which fixes a couple of problems with recordings, especially if watching and recording took place at the same time. There are only two new features: You can now sort channels either by name or by group in Totem. Channels can be grouped in gnome-control-center under Edit -> Channel lists. In addition, a detailed description of a show will be display if you double click on an entry in the "What's on now" view. This release depends on gst-rtsp-server 0.10.5 and GStreamer 0.10.25."
Planet SUSE
- Pavol Rusnak: useradd and passwd vs. Kerberos
- "At work we use LDAP and Kerberos authentication for users. During the testing of openSUSE 11.2, me and my other two colleagues (mmarek and mseben) have encountered problem that one cannot change the local password of user added with useradd. Running passwd user jumps directly to setting krb5 password. This was reported as bnc#545724."
- Joerg Reuter: Upgrading from openSUSE 11.1 to 11.2
- "I've encountered some unusual obstacles during the upgrade from openSUSE 11.1 to 11.2. Apparently, my setup is a bit outside of the spec... This is what I had to do. ..."
- Cornelius Schumacher: openSUSE 11.2 and SUSE Studio
- "Last week we celebrated the release of openSUSE 11.2, the latest incarnation our fine green Linux distribution. It's a great release. People seem to like it. One quote: "OpenSuse stands out as a fine example of what a Linux desktop operating system can be."
- Here at the SUSE Studio team we got quite some requests when openSUSE 11.2 will be available in SUSE Studio. Rest assured: We are working on it. There is some infrasructure to adapt, importing repositories, updating templates, upgrading Kiwi, and we are also planning to add a feature to migrate openSUSE 11.1 appliances to openSUSE 11.2, so you don't have to start from scratch, when you want to make use of the latest openSUSE for your existing appliances. It will need a little bit of time, but we'll add the support over the next few weeks."
- John Lange: SUSE 11.2 Tweak ā Show all tasks on Gnome Panel
- "The Gnome desktop in OpenSUSE 11.2 is beautiful (much nicer than the clunky KDE IMHO), but there are a few things that I donāt like about the default settings. I use 8 virtual desktops to keep my desktop organized but I like the taskbar to show all tasks. By default, the gnome panelās task bar shows only the windows in the current workspace and for some reason you canāt just right-click the panel to change this setting."
- Ioan Vancea: Upgrading from 11.1 to 11.2. Yes, it is about openSUSE :)
- "A few days ago I upgraded openSUSE 11.1 to 11.2 on my sony vaio notebook. I used for that the dvd and I kept my luks encrypted home partition, and as well the encrypted swap partition. It seems that everything is working well, it is a great release with a lot of improvements and nice work."
- openSUSE Spotlight: Creating an openSUSE Editorial Calendar for 11.2 through 11.3
- "The openSUSE 11.2 launch is over, but thereās still plenty to be done to promote openSUSE 11.2 and spread the word. One of the ways to get the word out is through social and traditional media ā the openSUSE main Web page, openSUSE News, Lizards, Twitter, Facebook, and the myriad of publications outside the openSUSE.org domain that cover Linux, open source, or technology in general."
- Sandy Armstrong: One-click install for Banshee Telepathy Sharing Extension 0.1.1
- "Over the course of the summer, you may have read Neil Loknath's various blog posts about his Summer of Code project that lets you share your Banshee music library with your Telepathy contacts."
openSUSE Forums
- Amarok 2.2
- "Amarok is in the headlines again and all is not so good from some users perspective. Keep an eye on these discussions because they often supply good solutions."
- Lost Ubuntu grub after Install
- "User looses ability to boot other OS (Ubuntu) - Advices given in the forum lead to a solution."
- KDE4 doesn't Unmount USB
- "KDE seems to be keeping hold of mounted devices in this thread. It will be interesting to an eye on this one to see how it works out."
- K3B and mp3 support
- "You need to use k3b from packman. But what's confusing is the package names differ between openSUSE and Packman. Worthy of note this one."
On the Web
Announcements
- Petr Baudis: ANNOUNCE Girocco hosting infrastructure v1.0
- "I would like to announce Girocco-1.0, the first stable release of a universal Git project hosting infrastructure. You guessed right, Girocco is the software repo.or.cz runs at; however, compared to the past, itās much cleaned up, cleanly packaged for easy re-deployment and fully configurable, thanks to sponsorship of Novartis and Novell. (Apologies for switching repo.or.cz to it and releasing it one year later than it shouldāve been done.)"
- Open Web Foundation/DeWitt Clinton: Introducing the Open Web Foundation Agreement
- "The Open Web Foundation is pleased to announce the availability of the Open Web Foundation Agreement (OWFa).
- The Open Web Foundation was founded to help developer communities collaborate and share technical innovation on the web, bringing to the world of formats and protocols the same successful grassroots approaches established by the open source community. Modeled after the Apache Software Foundation and Creative Commons, the Open Web Foundation seeks to facilitate the creation and implementation of specifications with legal agreements that make such work simple, safe, and sustainable."
- Google: Releasing the Chromium OS open source project
- "In July we announced that we were working on Google Chrome OS, an open source operating system for people who spend most of their time on the web.
- Today we are open-sourcing the project as Chromium OS. We are doing this early, a year before Google Chrome OS will be ready for users, because we are eager to engage with partners, the open source community and developers. As with the Google Chrome browser, development will be done in the open from this point on. This means the code is free, accessible to anyone and open for contributions. The Chromium OS project includes our current code base, user interface experiments and some initial designs for ongoing development. This is the initial sketch and we will color it in over the course of the next year."
Reports
- Tor Lillqvist: Photoshop filters in GIMP on Linux
- "GIMP can use 3rd-party Photoshop filters on Linux, too. Back in 2001, I wrote a piece of software called pspi, for PhotoShop Plug-in Interface. It's a GIMP plug-in that runs Photoshop plug-ins. (Just the "filter" kind of Photoshop plug-ins so far.) Photoshop filters can be found for free on the net, and on the cover CDs of various magazines. Many of them are just crap, or offer functionality already included with the GIMP. But some can be real gems. I am not a graphic artist and don't have any huge collection of them myself."
- CIO/Rodney Gedda: KDE 4.4 aims to take free desktop skyward
- "The final release of KDE 4.4 is due in early 2010, and not since the arrival of KDE 4.0 two years ago has an open source desktop environment been so highly anticipated by the free desktop community. Unlike the anti-climax that was the first KDE 4 release, however, KDE 4.4's developers say this new version will actually deliver on many of the original promises of this next-generation desktop environment -- and then some."
- h-online/Thorsten Leemhuis: Kernel Log: Coming in 2.6.32 (Part 3) - Storage
- "The kernel development team have enhanced various aspects of Btrfs, one effect of which is to significantly improve the experimental file system's write performance. A number of changes to the block layer promise better data throughputs and reactivity. There are also several new drivers for storage hardware."
Reviews and Essays
- Qt Labs/Jason McDonald: Qt 4.6.0 Release Candidate 1
- "Today, we move another step closer to the Qt 4.6.0 release, with the shipping of the first release candidate. This release improves on 4.6.0 Beta 1 by adding yet more bug fixes and documentation improvements, fine-tuning a couple of the new APIās, and incorporating various feedback from you, Qtās community of developers and users."
- Linux Weekly News/Susan Linton: openSUSE 11.2
- "Right behind Mandriva and Ubuntu, openSUSE 11.2 arrived as scheduled after almost a year of development. This incremental version increase has enough new features to warrant a closer look. Sometimes adding so many new features between minor versions can backfire. Is that what happened this time with openSUSE 11.2? Or are we seeing some early effects of the newly sanctioned community contributions?"
- linuxjournal.com/Kyle Rankin: Nokia N900: First Look
- "The Nokia N900 has just started shipping and there are already a number of reviews of the device out on the net. I've had the opportunity evaluate a pre-release N900 for a few weeks now, and while you can expect a full review in an upcoming issue of Linux Journal, I wanted to give you a quick look into what the N900 is like from the perspective of your average Linux geek. If you've read any of my previous articles in Linux Journal, you'll know that I'm a vim-using, mutt-loving sysadmin who spends a lot of time on the command line, so hopefully I can provide a unique perspective on this device."
- Webmonkey/Scott Gilbertson: Great Documentation Is Key to Open Source Success
- "Listen up open source developers, if you want your project to succeed youāre going to have to do more than write great code; youāre going to have to document it, teach new users how it works and provide real-world examples of what you can do with it."
- Linux.com/Brian Proffitt: Bridging Open Source Enterprise and Community Collaboration
- "Open source software alone is not a magic wand for business. Organizations need to apply open technologies, processes, community participation, and innovative business models in order to get real change and positive results."
- LinuxPlanet/Bruce Byfield: Why 'Free as in Freedom' is More Important Than Ever for Linux Users
- "The Free Software Foundation is having a video contest on the subject "Why is free software important to you?" It's a timely topic, with Windows 7 just out and with the free software community's bickering so bitter as of late that common goals sometimes seem in danger of being forgotten."
Warning!
- LinuxSecurity.com/anthony: New Flash Attack Has No Real 'Fix'
- "Hacks/Cracks: Researchers show how Adobe Flash can be exploited in browsers when victim visits sites that accept user-generated content. Researchers have discovered a new attack that exploits the way browsers operate with Adobe Flash -- and there's no simple patch for it. The attack can occur on Websites that accept user-generated content -- anything from Webmail to social networking sites. An attacker basically takes advantage of the fact that a Flash object can be loaded as content onto a site and then can execute malware from that site to infect and steal information from visitors who view that content by clicking it."
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 Announcement: Linux kernel (SUSE-SA:2009:056)
- Package: Linux kernel
- Announcement ID: SUSE-SA:2009:056
- Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:00:00 +0000
- SUSE Security Announcement: openssl (SUSE-SA:2009:057)
- Package: openssl
- Announcement ID: SUSE-SA:2009:057
- Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:00:00 +0000
- SUSE Security Announcement: Sun Java 6 (SUSE-SA:2009:058)
- Package: Sun Java 6
- Announcement ID: SUSE-SA:2009:058
- Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:02:05 +0100
Statistics
Numbers in brackets show the changes compared to the previous week.
opensuse.org
Communication
lists.opensuse.org has 37424 (+3) non-unique subscribers to all mailing lists.
The openSUSE Forums have 37555 (+665) registered users - Most users ever online was 15292, 16-Nov-2009 at 21:20.
Contributors
3884 (+60) of 10166 (+115) registered contributors in the User Directory have signed the Guiding Principles. The board has acknowledged 369 (+9) members.
openFATE
Feature statistics for openSUSE 11.3:
- total: 330 (+30)
- unconfirmed: 195 (+26)
- new: 36 (+1)
- evaluation: 68 (+2)
- candidate: 1 (+0)
- done: 9 (+1)
- rejected: 13 (+0)
- duplicate: 8 (+0)
Bugzilla
The numbers for all openSUSE project products are this week:
- All Open Reports: 5296 (+106)
- Blocker: 5 (-2)
- Critical: 269 (+2)
- Major: 896 (+21)
- Normal: 3050 (+71)
- Minor: 461 (+12)
- Enhancements: 615 (+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 .
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 Mƶller (Chief-Editor)
- Sascha Manns (Second Chief-Editor, Main-Newsletter)
- Sebastian Schƶbinger (Tips/Tricks)
- Satoru Matsumoto (Editorial Office)
- Carl Fletcher (Main-Newsletter, Forums Sec.)
- Thomas HofstƤtter (Events & Meetings)
- add translators
