Archive:Weekly news 99
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Welcome to issue # 99 of openSUSE Weekly News
In this Week:
- Dominique Leuenberger: Compiz 0.8.4
- Michal Hrusecky: Status Report - Media Wiki Theme
- Linux.com/Joe Brockmeier: Vim 101: A Beginner's Guide to Vim
- Pavol Rusnak: Fedora and openSUSE Community Engagement
- Nmap 5.10BETA1 released
Status Updates
Distribution
- Dominique Leuenberger: openSUSE Factory / Compiz 0.8.4
- "Doubtless you’re all aware that openSUSE 11.2, as great and up to date it is with many packages, was shipped with an outdated version of compiz version 0.7.8. The reasoning behind this was that some patches for NOMAD just were not able to be forward ported in reasonable time. At one point I started fixing / backporting some fixes from 0.8.4 to 0.7.8 and was granted maintainer status for the compiz packages, which is a great honor to me. Nevertheless, this happened too late in the 11.2 release cycle to include more recent packages. We were already in version freeze and I could never get this through."
- Martin Schlander: openSUSE KDE meeting 20091126
- Meeting Minutes
Boosters Team
Build Service
- Pascal Bleser: osc and self-signed certificates the secure way
- "Obviously, a much more secure option to use the osc Build Service command-line client with your own server instances that have a self-signed certificate is to actually add that server certificate to the list of blessed ones.
- To do so, do as follows, all of that as root in a shell:
umask 0033 cd /etc/ssl/certs echo | openssl s_client -showcerts \ -connect YOUR.SERVER:SSL_PORT \ 2>&1 |sed -n '/^-----BEGIN/,/^-----END/p' \ > SOME_FILENAME.pem c_rehash .
- Build Team Meeting Minutes
- Minutes from the Meeting
Wiki / Communication / Events
- Michal Hrusecky: Status Report - Media Wiki Theme
- "As you may or may not know, I'm part of the openSUSE Boosters team and I'm working on umbrella project. Part of this project is to make all openSUSE pages look similar. What I was working on during last week was to addapt Roberts Bentoo theme for Media Wiki. And as I posted to my workreport that it is available internaly (as it is curently running on my machine only) I'm posting here sample screenshot face-wink.png "
- Petr Uzel: Report from openSUSE 11.2 Release Party in Prague
- "On November 20th, the Czech members of the openSUSE Boosters Team organized openSUSE 11.2 Release Party. The party took place in the nice building of Faculty of Mathematics and Physics."
- Martin Schlander: SSLUG and openSUSE on DR2
- "Some time ago Danish public television were doing a segment about how home users could save money with free software, for that purpose they filmed at our weekly SSLUG lug meeting in Copenhagen. Unfortunately the footage didn’t make the cut and wasn’t part of the show that was actually aired. However, this Friday there was a segment in international news program ‘DR2 Udland’ on DR2 (the “intellectual” niche channel of Danish public television), about the French police moving to free software – and public authorities in general saving money and benefitting from software freedom, and for this segment the footage was used."
- Klaas Freitag: Usability Symposium
- "On wednesday Will and me visited the Usability Symposium 2009 of the Network for User Oriented Software Design, a group which consists mainly of people from the Georg Simon Ohm University of Applied Sciences here in Nuernberg and people from local companies such as Astrum. It was the first symposium of this group and they gave three presentations about software usability."
Tips and Tricks
For Desktop Users
- Linux.com/Joe Brockmeier: Vim 101: A Beginner's Guide to Vim
- "Ever wanted to learn Vim, but weren't sure how to start? No problem. We have you covered! This will be the first of a four-part (possibly longer) series covering how to use Vim and where to start using the world's best text editor.
- Note that this is an article explicitly for beginners new to Vim. If you've been using Vim for a while, all of this should look entirely familiar--and you might wonder why some topics aren't covered. Patience. We'll get to everything in due time, but there's a lot to cover!"
- Linux.com/Joe Brockmeier: Vim 201: An Intermediate Guide to Vim
- "Ready to boost your Vim skills? Many use Vim, but don't make use of nearly all the features. In this guide, we'll take a look at some of the intermediate features offered by Vim, including abbreviations, word completion, and editing multiple documents in the same Vim session."
- Linux.com/Jack Wallen: Create a Database and Data Entry Form in OpenOffice.org Base
- "For many people the mere thought of having to create or use a database sends shivers down the spines of many users. But it doesn't have to. Creating a database and adding data to that database is actually a simple task in OpenOffice.org Base."
- BeginLinux.com: OpenSuse Nautilus File Manager
- "The Nautilus file manager on the OpenSuse desktop allows you to do more than just organize and open files.The Nautilus file manager allows users to create folders and documents, display your files and folders, search files, run scripts, launch applications, write files to CD/DVD, install and remove fonts and more."
- Packt Publishing/Jonathan Williamson: Creating a Text Logo in Blender
- "In this tutorial by Jonathan Williamson, we are going to examine the process behind creating a text-based logo in Blender. We will be looking at some modeling techniques mixed with several modifiers to create a background for the logo, and then we will move on to creating the actual text. Following that we will set up the lighting and render settings to produce our final image."
For Commandline/Script Newbies
- Stefan Seyfried: USB Boot Enabler
- "Since a few(?) releases, you can simply “dd” your openSUSE ISO-file onto an USB stick and boot from that, which is pretty cool and which I use a lot. But recently, I came across a machine that simply does not boot from the USB stick. No matter what settings I tried in the BIOS - no boot. I believe it will only boot from internal hdd, internal CDROM or internal floppy and via PXE."
- ServerWatch/Juliet Kemp: Dealing With Strange Filenames
- "Occasionally, usually due to an earlier typo, you end up with files with peculiar names. Usually these are easily removable, but if you have a file with a name starting - (e.g., -file, or even -f), the commandline:
- "rm -file"
- will not work. rm will treat this as indicating the use of the four options -f, -i, -l, and -e, and will die on -l, which isn't a valid option. ..."
For Developers and Programmers
- Linux Journal/Mitch Frazier: More Fun With Bash Quoting
- "I've written about bash quoting before, and yes, it's about as exciting as watching paint dry or listening to the corn grow. It can also be extremely frustrating when it doesn't do what you want, case in point: trying to script the updating of a field in a mysql table when the field to be changed contains quote characters."
- TechRepublic/Vincent Danen: Learn to use Git version control for added flexibility
- "Git is a distributed VCS (Version Control System) that is quickly gaining popularity among many companies and projects. Take a look at the GitHub site, and you’ll see a number of projects reside there."
- LinuxPlanet/Akkana Peck: Mastering Characters Sets in Linux (Weird Characters, part 2)
- "In the last article I talked about Unicode, character sets and encoding -- how accented and special characters are transferred in email and web pages, and why you sometimes see funny characters when the process goes wrong.
- But can you fix it when it does go wrong? And if you're a programmer, how should you be handling all these encodings?"
For System Administrators
- IBM developerWorks/Robert Bernier: Total security in a PostgreSQL database
- "Database security is the single biggest concern with today's Web-based applications. Without control, you risk exposing sensitive information about your company or, worse yet, your valuable customers. In this article, learn about security measures you can take to protect your PostgreSQL database."
New/Updated Applications @ openSUSE
- Michal Hrusecky: MySQL Unstable Builds
- "It's been some time already since I informed you about server: database: UNSTABLE repository in openSUSE Build Service. Today I want to mention what is going on there. As the name of the repository suggests, it's probably not the best idea to use anything from here on your production servers face-wink.png"
- MPlayer 1.0rc2_r29796-2.pm.2.6
- Available in Packman Repository
- kaffeine 0.8.8-1.pm.4.16 is out
- Available in Packman Repository.
Projects Corner
The corner for introducing activities of sub project *inside* openSUSE.
GNOME Project
- Sandy Armstrong: New Tomboy Releases with Ubuntu One support on all platforms, and other goodies in the Tomboy world
- "On Monday I announced our new stable release, Tomboy 1.0.1, and our new development release, Tomboy 1.1.0. They both share the following fixes:...
- ... For openSUSE users, packages are available in GNOME:Apps:Tomboy and GNOME:Apps:Tomboy:Unstable."
Mono Project
- Miguel de Icaza: Silverlight: Universal GUI toolkit
- "The most important piece of news from last week's PDC was Microsoft's decision to turn Silverlight into the universal platform for building cross platform applications. The upcoming version of Silverlight will no longer be a Web-only technology. It will now be possible to build full desktop applications with Silverlight."
Planet SUSE
- Han Wen Kam: openSUSE 11.2 on EeePC 701: Wifi works!? Voodoo?
- "Luv openSUSE 11.2 so much, especially the default KDE 4.3 GUI... I find myself staring and admiring at it... this is big for me as I've not stopped and marvel at GUI for quite a while now... ...That was all the motivation I needed to install it onto my ASUS EeePC 701 (remember the very 1st netbook?) with 4GB SSD and 1GB RAM. Good news is everything works! Well, when I say 'everything', I meant"
- Pavol Rusnak: Fedora and openSUSE Community Engagement
- "The middle of November was very exciting for both Fedora and openSUSE communities. At first, openSUSE project unleashed its 11.2 release, which was followed by Fedora 12 a few days after. I thought it would be interesting to dig into bug reports which were filed during the development of these two releases in respective bugzillas...."
- Pavol Rusnak: GameStore’s got a brand new look
- "Today I applied the new Robert Lihm’s theme called Bento to GameStore web, so it doesn’t look like a quick hack anymore. This theme, which will be used across all openSUSE.org websites in the future, will also help to integrate GameStore into rest of the openSUSE infrastructure. You can visit the site by clicking on the mandatory screenshot below. :-)"
- Michal Vyskocil: New pm-utils for openSUSE
- "The current SUSE version of pm-utils is pretty old. Rpm -q said somethink like 0.99.4.20071229. And it also contains a hacked support for s2ram, which is nowadays in upstream version. There has been also a bnc#378883 – Need an updated pm-utils I started a work on this week."
openSUSE Forums
- Repository Questions
- "Actually became more to do with kde and amarok. The user followed advice with some success but then decided to re-install, which was probably unnecessary."
- Copy files from USB to HD
- "Interesting one this as it is later revealed by the user that the movement is over a network (VNC). I have had issue with odd files over ssh myself too."
- Installed 11.2 - Now Win7 will not sleep.
- "Probably nothing to do with openSUSE, but a solution is pending on this. It will be interesting to see the final result/conclusion."
- Generating ATI Catalyst .RPM's
- "This may prove useful for some of the ATI users. There seems to have been a bit of poor support from ATI on this release and users have been pounding out solutions left right and centre."
On the Web
Announcements
- Nmap 5.10BETA1 released
- "Hi folks. I'm happy to announce our first post-5.00 release! It contains the results of a full five months of work, since the 5.00 release candidate was branched off in June. Good work, everybody!"
- Adobe AIR 2 Beta for Linux Released
- "Adobe AIR 2 beta (runtime and SDK) has been simultaneously released for Windows, Mac, and Linux. AIR 2 builds on the success of AIR 1 by giving developers new capabilities and even tighter integration with the desktop."
Call for participation
- Lydia Pintscher: KDE Education Survey
- "The KDE-Edu team is looking for feedback from their users to improve their applications and to find out where to invest the limited time they have. If you are a student, teacher or just casual user of any of these applications we are looking for your feedback: ..."
Reports
- h-online/Thorsten Leemhuis: Kernel Log: Coming in 2.6.32 (Part 4) - Drivers
- "The forthcoming Linux version 2.6.32 comes with numerous new and improved drivers – for instance for the Hauppauge HVR 2200 and 2250, for some ThinkPad notebooks by IBM/Lenovo, and for the MSI Wind's fingerprint reader. The kernel developers have incorporated Microsoft's Hyper-V driver into the staging area."
- h-online/Thorsten Leemhuis: Kernel Log: Coming in 2.6.32 (Part 5) - Architecture code, memory management, virtualisation and tracing
- "The forthcoming kernel version will support Intel's Moorestown platform, SFI - the alternative to ACPI, and the Trusted Execution Technology, (formerly "LaGrande Technology"). If required, the new KSM can now reduce memory loads by combining identical memory content in virtual machines. The new kernel also includes Timechart, a new tool for visualising what's going on in the system and kernel"
- h-online/Thorsten Leemhuis: Kernel Log: Coming in 2.6.32 (Part 6): Infrastructure
- "Devtmpfs, aka 'devfs 2.0' to its detractors, should allow the Linux kernel to start faster and run without udev. Support has been added for ACPI 4.0 and there are two new make targets which generate kernel configurations attuned to the running system. Changes to the power management subsystem increase data throughput and allow better use of runtime power saving features on modern I/O devices"
- Joe Brockmeier: Checking in on Mozilla's Financial Health
- "The Mozilla Foundation has posted its financial statements and tax info for 2008, and a FAQ on the topic for those of us with short attention spans. While plowing through financial statements may not be the most exciting topic for Free and Open Source advocates, it's worth taking a look at what Mozilla has achieved as an independent project, where it's going, and how other projects might be able to emulate Mozilla's success to fund more and more FOSS development."
Reviews and Essays
- Brent McConnell: It’s Not About Micro-Communication, It’s About Macro-Community
- "Twitter is the first communication mechanism I’ve been a part of that actually helps me build new relationships without any preexisting knowledge (or trust) with the other party. Much hoopla has been made about the micro-format of Twitter and how it enables new forms of communication, but the amazing power of Twitter comes from it’s ability to allow people to connect and develop new relationships seemingly out of nothing."
- Sascha Manns: Google Wave: Introduction
- "Since a few days i’m using Google Wave. But what is it? It is “a personal communication and collaboration tool”. It is a blend of Email, Instant Messaging, Chat and Blog. This allows Teams to make collaborative editing. The first Step is find an other User who uses Wave too. Then he can invite you. After Registration you come to your home-Place. Now you can open an new “Wave” and fill it with Informations. Your Mate can now access your Wave and you can both work on this Document."
- InfoWorld/Paul Krill: Making money from open source: Still an issue
- "Several years after open source began to take the world by storm, the question of how to make money in the genre still remains an issue, with a prominent Novell official Wednesday advising caution for those considering a move to open source."
Warning!
- net-security.org: Zero-day vulnerabilities in Firefox extensions discovered
- "One of the reasons behind Firefox's popularity is the availability of a vast library of extensions. Users use them to modify the browser to their liking and make their browsing experience easier and more pleasant. The problem is, unbeknown to them, these extensions are exposing them to risk."
- h-online: openSUSE kernels on 1&1 root servers may be out of date
- "According to a German IT service provider, users running 1&1 servers with openSUSE 11 as their distribution should check the version number of their Linux kernel. In order to guarantee full support for the hardware it uses, for openSUSE, 1&1 installs its own homemade kernel. Unfortunately this kernel disables the YAST auto-update function, with the result that, despite regular updates, the kernel (2.6.27.21) remains several months old – making it vulnerable to a range of root exploits involving null pointer dereference (NPD) and other vulnerabilities. Users relying on auto-updates could be in for an unpleasant surprise. At present it is not confirmed that this is also problem with 1&1 servers running English language versions of openSUSE, although it seems likely that it is."
Past 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 37445 (+21) non-unique subscribers to all mailing lists.
The openSUSE Forums have 38028 (+473) registered users - 15292, 16-Nov-2009 at 21:20.
Contributors
3925 (+41) of 10261 (+95) registered contributors in the User Directory have signed the Guiding Principles. The board has acknowledged 371 (+2) members.
Build Service
The Build Service now hosts 9121 (+0) projects, 85592 (+0) packages, 16284 (+0) repositories by 19478 (+0) confirmed users.
openFATE
Feature statistics for openSUSE 11.3:
- total: 352 (+22)
- unconfirmed: 213 (+18)
- new: 40 (+4)
- evaluation: 68 (+0)
- candidate: 1 (+0)
- done: 9 (+0)
- rejected: 13 (+0)
- duplicate: 8 (+0)
Bugzilla
The numbers for all openSUSE project products are this week:
- All Open Reports: 5323 (+27)
- Blocker: 5 (+0)
- Critical: 266 (-3)
- Major: 908 (+12)
- Normal: 3056 (+6)
- Minor: 463 (+2)
- Enhancements: 625 (+10)
- 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
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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
