Welcome to Planet openSUSE

This is a feed aggregator that collects what openSUSE contributors are writing in their respective blogs.

To have your blog added to this aggregator, please read the instructions.

Wednesday
08 September, 2010

Pavel Machek: 2km in 8minutes

@ 21:07 UTC

face

Can you beat that? Without using wheels :-)? And can you beat 600m in 2minutes?

And now, how do you generate such numbers from gpx track? No, gpsbabel is not tool for that job, and I could not find anything suitable. So there are now some tools in gtracks project, in the CVS.

I re-used existing "wherewasI" python script, and added custom "all_best_speeds" tool to generate "best speed on every possible distance" matrix. (Suggested usage is something like ./wherewasi.py --summary foo.gpx | ./delete_fast | ./all_best_speeds | sort -n | less). Closer look at all_best_speeds will reveal that it computes the matrix in something like O(N^3) time; I and of course the question is: can you figure out algorithm with better complexity?

And... is there some existing tool that can do this?

Andres Silva: Launching the Revolution: Kickoff's redesign ideas

@ 21:04 UTCmember

face

The launcher menu paradox has almost been around ever since graphical environments were created. They provided a simple method through which users could access their applications pertaining to a particular task. Before the start menu, users had a folder view, generally, with the applications in a list. Earlier environments had to omnipresent shell which launched programs by just typing the name.

Later, along came Linux and graphical environments for it. Some of them have kept the basic idea of a start menu, like the one on Windows 95. KDE did it, Gnome did it and many others, even the high end ones like Enlightenment, did it. It should be admitted though that this is a very clever idea to work with. It is fast, simple, and very visually engaging. However, this launching model by todays standards seems outdated. At least, this is something that frustrates me every now and then because it is so common. It is time for a revolution, a change.

The first thing that we need to do in order to change the start menu is to understand it. I am sure that a lot of people have decided that it is just OK to imitate what others have done. This is not a bad thing, the launcher menu is something that's very clever already, but I want to see innovation. It is time to rethink the way we work with a launcher menu. It is important to remember that these ideas have developed in great length overtime and I do not intend to cover 100% of what has been done, but rather, focus on the things that saw the day of light. I will point out their strengths and weaknesses to ultimately work with the strengths to come up with the best possible idea about how to improve the start menu for openSUSE.
 This is the main reason why I have decided to split this study into 4 parts. It is such a daunting task that as I was doing my research, I realized that it will take very long to work something out that is useful and better than what we already have available for Linux.
The first part will be an analysis of the many ideas and projects that launched "start menus." the second part will cover the good aspects developed for start menus; the third article will talk about the usability and design problems and finally I will conclude with a proposal for a launch menu. This will be my idea on what openSUSE should do with their Kickoff menu.

So, wait for this first article to come out. It will be soon.

Thank you for your support.

Anditosan

openSUSE News: SUSE Studio Contest – you have until the end of this month!

@ 20:55 UTC

face

For those who didn’t know yet, about two weeks ago Novell introduced SUSE Gallery.com where you can submit your SUSE Studio Appliances for the world to see and download. Over the last year, the 400.000 appliances have have already been downloaded 3 million times and now they are available from the Gallery that number will surely skyrocket.

Together with the launch Novell started a contest with a grand prize of $10.000! Creative minds have until the end of this month to submit their crazy/cool/unique/useful appliance to SUSE Gallery.com and enter the contest. So those looking for Fame and Fortune, enter your software appliance into “The Disters” contest and see how you stack up to the rest!

If you haven’t registered for a SUSE Studio account, be sure to request an invitation to get signed up. It’s a quick and easy process and you’ll be able to get started with your appliance in minutes!

Andrés G. Aragoneses: Version Tolerant Serialization with Mono

@ 18:05 UTC

face


(Zoot Woman - Lonely By Your Syde)

During the last months I've kept working {with|on} Mono, but not working for Novell anymore.

Today I'm proud to blog about a bit of work I've done on Mono towards a better Binary Serialization experience:

  • mono-api-info command now can output ABI instead of API if you append the flag --abi. It has been useful for us in LindenLab while working on binary serialization compatibility between versions (already upstream!, so will be available in Mono v2.8, even with a new man page).

    If you ever wondered why your .NET code is no longer capable of deserializing some old binary object you had in your servers, instead of fixing the problem in a case-by-case basis, you can now see the whole picture by just diffing the output of mono-api-info --abi from your current and old codebase! A small TODO that I haven't completed yet is to deal with automatic properties (because we still don't use them) so that would be an exercise for the reader!

  • Fix for upstream Mono to act as .NET in regards to Version Tolerant Serialization, a patch to which I have just added a lot more unit tests (soon to be pushed hopefully).

    You can see the patch of this quite old mono bug here. Disclaimer: to be honest you will only need the previous --abi tool if you use a Mono version prior this fix, because from my testing VTS in MS.NET works as if every new field had an [OptionalField] attached! (At least the BinaryFormatter, the TODO here for the reader is to test the SoapFormatter ;) )


On a totally unrelated note: kudos to the MonoDevelop team for making such a great releases lately (and fixing the bugs I report so promptly). I've been testing it the last months on Windows and I can say it's a great experience to see your favorite IDE working cross-platform and making you not depend on VS anymore if you need to work on Windows from time to time (I know the Express versions are free, and are great! but they do not support plugins :( ). BTW, I've been lately experimenting with the C language support in this IDE, and have had some problems, but the real culprit seems to lay behind some wierd behaviour of my gdb in opensuse. Taking advantage that I'm in opensuse planet, can I do a couple of lazyweb requests?:

a) If you're quite familiar with gdb, can you take a look at these 2 bugs in case it rings any bell for you? BNC#588175, BNC#459274

b) Can you try to reproduce those bugs in openSUSE 11.3? (I haven't migrated yet from 11.2 because I fear about the HALlessness of it :) )

PS: Wondered why the video on the top? Well, I like the trend that some people have about posting random photos in their blog posts even when they may be completely unrelated …

read more

SUSE Studio: Import KIWI and AutoYaST configurations easily

@ 13:16 UTC

face

SUSE Studio offers nice user interface for configuring software appliances with many options. But what if you already had a configuration ready — for example a carefully tuned AutoYaST profile which your company uses for installing workstations? Or a KIWI configuration of your appliance exported from Studio (so that you could build that appliance on your machine) which you modified locally? Until now, there was no easy way how to apply it in Studio.

This is why we prepared a brand new KIWI and AutoYaST configuration import feature. If you enable it (more about that below), you can easily create an appliance based on your settings. Just go to your Studio home page, click the Create new appliance... button and select the Import icon instead of one of the templates.

Import icon

You can then upload your KIWI configuration or AutoYaST profile. Studio will automatically detect which one you used and create a new appliance with the configuration settings applied.

Supported settings

KIWI and AutoYaST imports support the following settings:

Setting KIWI AutoYaST
Name X –
Architecture X (1)
Base system X (1)
Users X X
Repositories X X
Pacakges X X
Patterns – X
Network settings X –
Boot settings X –
Build scripts X –
Logos X –
Background theming X –
Overlay files X X

(1) The architecture and base system are selected by the user during the import. This information is not contained in the AutoYaST profile as the profiles are designed to be generic.

What about the settings Studio can’t import? In case of AutoYaST, we apply the unimported settings using AutoYaST itself when the appliance boots for the first time. You can edit the applied profile (with already imported settings stripped) in the Configuration → Scripts tab in the appliance configuration.

Enabling the imports

The KIWI and AutoYaST imports are still in beta — which means they aren’t enabled by default. To enable them, go to your profile page and click on the Enable experimental features button (this will give you access to all beta features we introduce).

As with all software still in beta, bugs are expected. If you’ll note anything not working as expected, let us know so we can look at the issue and fix it.

Jigish Gohil: KIWI-LTSP multiple image support improvements

@ 08:40 UTCmember

face

Savin Alex has been busy working on improving kiwi-ltsp lately. The basic idea behind the new development is easier management of multiple LTSP images that can be served over NBD or AOE. Earlier Shrenik Bhura had added multiple image support for AOE, now it is also supported when using NBD.

For example, with very powerful hardware available, images of KDE, GNOME desktops or any other profile of your choice  can be served as  LTSP_FATCLIENT, this will enable images to use resources on the clients’ local hardware instead of traditional LTSP way of running all the client sessions on the server. Advantage of this way is making use of local hardware resources and central management of OS deployed in the entire network. LTSP can also be clustered to load balance and in case one of the servers fail.

New development also include easier way of managing PXE boot menu. See kiwi-ltsp-setup –intro for more.

Check out the detailed  howto for using multiple LTSP images here.  Start here to know more about LTSP and how you can get started with it in your network. openSUSE Education Li-f-e DVD comes bundled with KIWI-LTSP server and takes just a few clicks to get it up and running.

Tuesday
07 September, 2010

Nelson Marques: OBS: the final frontier…

@ 17:14 UTC

face

From a small chit chat on IRC the other day with Bryen and Sirko somehow I ended up with the task to providing an article about openSUSE Build Service. I have to say Sirko is awesome in Guerrilla Marketing, a cool proof could be the way how he got me into this. Anyway… though I’m not a journalist, every article should start with some basic research…

  • Checked out Build Service Portal;
  • Signed on opensuse-buildservice mailing lists;
  • Got 2 software packages not so visible on openSUSE:
  • Packaged the stuff with my narrow knowledge (keep in mind that my stuff is actually marketing management and not computer science);
  • Consulted the opensuse-buildservice mailing list to get some feedback about the specs (DimStar was most helpful on this).

This was done so far… as personal interest and also as a way to get some qualitative research and knowledge about the topic I’m writing. I understand that there is some tremendous potential on openSUSE Build Service and that it can bring much to the openSUSE Community and to openSUSE as a GNU/Linux distribution (yes, I know some might not like the terminology from RMS, but I do).

My next steps are simple and will provide me the rest of the information I require to start writing the article:

  • Get a cool group for my 2 packages;
  • Try to push them into openSUSE:Contrib; (understanding that I will be responsible for their maintenance, lucky for me Canonical did a good job on them and I wont probably be subject of long wild goose chases… or bug hunts).

Once I get my reply from openSUSE:Contrib, this research process if finished for me, despite of the outcome, it really doesn’t matter if it’s accepted or not, the most important thing is to document it and take some qualitative feedback out of it.

I’ve also sent a small email to the openSUSE’s Marketing Team requiring help from Andreas Jaeger, the openSUSE Build Service liaison to get some materials that I am aware they exist and if possible to help me on this task.

My goal is to get this done shortly before the openSUSE Conference 2010. This project is my personal reply to Sirko claims that I’m a story teller! Thanks for the motivation Sirko.

Oh! I almost forgot… Do YOU have something useful for this article? Please feel free to share. My contacts are somewhere here.

Michael Meeks: 2010-09-07: Tuesday.

@ 13:02 UTCmember

face
  • Up too early, got babes practised with time to spare; packed them off to school. Reviewed a PackageKit / zypp backend bug or two, compiled a new Python so I could build gobject-introspection, and thus PK. Prodded and merged misc. fixes.
  • Lunch. Considered DOS on Dope as a platform for a Web Office suite, particularly with it's lack of known scalability problems (the time-wasting perils of twitter strike again).

Thomas Thym: Hello Planet SUSE

@ 06:12 UTC

face

Since many years I am an (open)SUSE user and spread openSUSE wherever I could in my private environment.
The openSUSE strategy discussion has scratched my itch and I started to contribute more to openSUSE.

What could you expect?
Don't expect much code from me. My experiences are more in the area of strategy, marketing and promotion. Perhaps I could also share some results from my researches during the last years about open source communities.

So be curios and stay tuned.
I am happy to join the openSUSE community and I am looking forward to know more of you.

Let's have a lot of fun!

Cheers,
Thomas

Monday
06 September, 2010

Michael Meeks: 2010-09-06: Monday.

@ 21:00 UTCmember

face
  • Overslept, not into the 6:45am waking routine from the holidays yet. Fed, and hurried babes off to school. M. looking so tiny and sweet in her new uniform.
  • Back to the mail hill, admin, Clarity, tested bootchart2 pieces, merged branches and pushed out a 0.12.4 - with memory graphing from Dave Martin at Linaro, and lots more nice fixes and features from Riccardo Magliocchetti.
  • Started slogging through abstracts: I know everyone wants their simple calculator-app to be 'more a platform than an app' but apparently they now want to be virtual platforms - perhaps fair enough if it has at least some tenuous link to virtualisation; but if not ?
  • Dinner, baby stories, more mail thrash. Finished LotR in the evening while J. painted.

OMG!SUSE! team: Want to write for OMG! SUSE!?

@ 16:18 UTC

face

We want YOU!

As you might have noticed, except for a couple of articles by a few others, I have largely been writing the majority of content for OMG! SUSE!. It has been tremendously fun but the volume of interesting content is very much dependent on the amount of free time I have on the weekends, which is when I do the majority of my writing.

There are some events coming up which will likely gobble up a few weekends this Autumn and I'd like to ensure that OMG! SUSE! stays up to date during that time. This means that we want you! I'm hoping to get some other regular contributors that can write while I'm otherwise indisposed.

If you have ideas for an articles or tutorials you'd like to write for OMG! SUSE!, drop me a line and let's get it published! Even if you don't have any ideas but feel like helping out covering recent events in the openSUSE community, that'd be appreciated too.

If all else fails, OMG! SUSE! might go quiet for a few weeks in early October which might not be the end of the world (but it sure will be boring!)

Note: Image courtesy of tuxparty.org

OMG!SUSE! team: 10 Awesome Free Games for openSUSE

@ 12:00 UTC

face

Back in "ye olde days" of Linux, there were no games. If you wanted to entertain yourself, you either played nethack or you tried to compile Gentoo, neither of them terrifically fun. (In those days I played a game called "learn to program" which was probably the most entertaining game on Linux at the time.)

Gaming on openSUSE, HIIIYAAAAH!

These days gaming on Linux is a completely different story, we now have everything from Minesweeper (KMines) to first-person shooters and flight simulators. While the gaming experience is far from perfect on the Linux Desktop, it's miles ahead of where it was just four years ago.

Today gaming on Linux is becoming increasingly popular, so much so that my pals over at OMG! Ubuntu! are launching a new site called Ubuntu Gamer before the year is out. I don't plan on launching a site called "openSUSE Gamer", but I did want to jot down a list of some pretty stellar games available for Linux users of all kinds.

The full list of awesome Linux games after the jump

Shooters

  1. UrbanTerror Looking through the scope in Urban Terror is by far one of my all-time favorite Linux-based games. It feels like a slightly more dated version of Counter Strike with clients for Mac OS X, Linux and Windows. It continues to have a great online presence with hundreds of busy UrbanTerror (UrT) servers running around with plenty of skilled shooters and noobs galore. UrT offers a few different kinds of game play such as "Team Survivor" (when you die in a round, you're dead, last man standing wins), "Free for All" (no teams, everybody kills everybody), "Team Deathmatch" (two teams rack up kills against each other) and my favorite: Capture-the-Flag. The download is big and unfortunately not packaged for openSUSE but you can download 32-bit or 64-bit executables here.

  2. BZFlag is probably one of the oldest 3D games still played on the Unix platform, developed originally in 1992 it is likely the oldest game on this list. Similar to UrbanTerror, BZFlag has a online multiplayer component which allows you to connect to various servers for different kinds of game play, the most common of which being Capture-the-Flag. Unlike UrT however, in BZFlag you're cruising around in a tank shooting at people, and depending on the map, you tank may be capable of incredible power-ups or even jumping/flying abilities!


  3. Nexuiz is another first-person shooter based around a modified version of the Quake engine. Nexuiz offers very fast-paced but straight-forward deathmatch-style play, which I tend to suck at. If you ever dominated while playing Quake back in the day, Nexuiz might be for you.


  4. Warsow feels very similar to Nexuiz to my unsophisticated gaming palate, unlike Nexuiz, Warsow has taken the speed and movement aspect of the game to the extreme. Just watching other people play Warsow wears me out, the best players sprint through levels gobbling up power-ups and shooting their opponents. Similar to some of the other games, Warsow includes a Capture-the-Flag, Team Deathmatch and a few other …
read more

Sunday
05 September, 2010

Michael Meeks: 2010-09-05: Sunday.

@ 21:00 UTCmember

face
  • Up early, J. off to West Suffolk to have dressing changed, (why does she so frequently get ill when I'm away). Tended babes.
  • Off to NCC, ran the creche, which (despite the loss of M.) is more packed with fun-sized people than before.
  • Home for lunch, with Andre and Lottie - good to get to know them a little better. J. slept a while, while I disappeared into the Lord of the Rings and the babes watched cbeebies.
  • Dinner, put babes to bed and read to them; J. went out to meet up with Myriam, while I read ever more.

openSUSE News: openSUSE Weekly News, Issue 139 is out!

@ 10:36 UTC

face

Now we are ready. We’re pleased to announce our new openSUSE Weekly News #139. Enjoy it! :-)


Announcements

openSUSE News: Software Freedom Day is Coming!

“On September 18, it is international Software Freedom Day. Software Freedom Day aims to celebrate Free Software and the people behind it. It wants to spread the word about Free Software and help people find each other.”

openSUSE Announce First 11.4 Development Milestone With Improved Package Management Performance, New XOrg, KDE and GNOME

“openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 1 is available today, Thursday, September 2 for developers, testers and community members to test and participate in the development of openSUSE 11.4. M1 starts off openSUSE 11.4 development at a cracking pace with performance improvements in the package management network layer and version updates to major components. This milestone contains libzypp version 8.1, which has a new backend for http and ftp package downloads. MultiCurl replaces the old MediaAria backend, and brings support for zsync transfers and better Metalink download support. These will improve both repository refresh and package install and update performance. Metalink allows the multi-channel download of packages by downloading the individual blocks of a package in parallel from multiple servers. ZSync reduces the amount of data to download by only fetching the changed parts of a file instead of the whole file. This speeds up repository refreshes, since due to the way the repository data is structured, it is easy to locate the parts of the metadata that changed since the last update. The new Curl-based zypp backend also gives libzypp and therefore zypper and YaST better support for network proxies, by using the same proxy configuration as the rest of YaST instead of its own, and adds support for HTTP BASIC password-protected repositories. And as an added bonus, MultiCurl should eliminate slow and hanging package installations that occurred due to bugs in the old MediaAria backend.”

openSUSE Connect Beta

“As a result of the openSUSE Boosters’ ‘HackMeck‘ two weeks ago at FrOSCoN we are proud to present you with a new beta of openSUSE Connect. Connect is supposed to become the central user database for the openSUSE project. Sounds bland, don”t it? But you know the Boosters, everything we do comes with a grain of spice and Connect is no different. The spice here are a lot of nifty social network features like user profiles, friending, groups, an event calendar and possibly more. Thats possible because on top of the user database we use a Free Software social network framework called …

read more

Saturday
04 September, 2010

Michael Meeks: 2010-09-04: Saturday.

@ 21:00 UTCmember

face
  • Slept until midday, swapped places with J. who slept until rather later. Out to buy bread, lunch, played with babes.
  • Watched a new kids DVD, issue one of What's in the Bible, really rather good. Dinner, bed early.

Sascha Manns: Two new Packages for openSUSE [kpassgen, calibre]

@ 19:54 UTCmember

face

The last days i was a little bit busy. I worked on the moving og my Packages fro KDE:KDE4:Community to KDE:Extra. So i left my Packaagers chair for some little non needed Progs.

But now i’m finished.

The first Candidate is kpassgen.

KPassgen is worked by Michael Daffin (james1479@googlemail.com). After a year of abscinence in kpassgen he gives us the brandnew Version 1.0.

What he has done since the last publishing? Michael says:

4 September 2010, Version 1.0:
- Rewrote almost everything :)
- New UI, cleaner/simpler and better organised
- Added a Unique Characters Only option
- Added a Ambiguous Option

As expected i’ve created Packages for openSUSE: For that you just need to add KDE:Extra (http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Extra/) into your Repository Manager. After that you can just type "kpassgen" and then you reached your goal.

The second Candidate is calibre

I like calibre since many Versions. A very good Book Reader & Manager.The both Calibre Package Maintainer have recieved the information about a new release of Calibre to Version 0.7.17. But what happened since the other Release?

The Developer Kovid Goyal gives us a first intro.

- New Features

o Content server: Show custom column data in the book listing

o Add preference to automatically set a tag when adding books (Preferences->General)

o Add a tweak to create compound search terms. Show error message in tooltip when user inputs an invalid search query.

o Managing multiple libraries: Allow renaming/deleting libraries from the Choose library menu

o Searching on series index is now possible. See the User Manual for details.

- Bug Fixes

o Fix regression in 0.7.16 that broke conversion of HTML files with preprocess turned on

o MOBI Output: When converting an input document that specifies an inline TOC in the but not in the , add it correctly. Fixes #6661 (Conversion to MOBI fails to create TOC)

o JetBook driver: Only use JetBook naming scheme for txt, pdf and fb2 files.

o Copy to library action now respects merge preferences

o Fix bug in email sending when using an SSL connection

o Kobo driver: Fix bug that prevented metadata caching from working correctly

o Fix regression in 0.7.16 that caused calibre to forget its preferences on each restart for new installs on linux

o News downloads: Cut off long downloaded from URLs

For all who like to test the new Version, just add http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/thomas-schraitle:/calibre/ as your Software Repository. So you should find after installing a Program like calibre. Then just enjoy it :-)


Fabio Mucciante: Recompiling wxRuby

@ 12:55 UTC

face

Who uses Ruby might be interested to try this interesting multiplatform library that allows the development of GUI (Graphic User Interface) with a considerable visual impact and compatible with the three most popular Operating Systems: Linux (via GTK) Windows (with Native controls) and OSX (via Aqua). (This article is also available for italian users)

Usually need install the wxGTK libraries and the gem wxruby (or wxruby-ruby19 if using ruby 1.9) and start creating your own scripts.

$ sudo zypper in wxGTK wxGTK-gl
$ sudo gem install wxruby

But sometimes we could find an Error for a wrong compatibilty between the installed version of the wxGTK libraries and the wrapper library included in the gem.

/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/wxruby-2.0.1-x86-linux/lib/wxruby2.so:
symbol _ZN13wxAuiNotebook14ShowWindowMenuEv, version WXU_2.8.5 not defined in file libwx_gtk2u_aui-2.8.so.0 with link time reference -
/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/wxruby-2.0.1-x86-linux/lib/wxruby2.so

When an error like this appear, the unique solution is recompile the gem.

What we need:

  • rubygems: Tool for manage the ruby’s gems;
  • rake: the Ruby’s version of the popular make, will help us to compile wxRuby;
  • wxGTK, wxGTK-gl, wxGTK-devel: Library and headers needed for run our scripts and produce the object’s file;
  • SWIG: Build the wrapper classes in Ruby from the C++ sources, wxRuby 2.0.1 need the version 1.3.8;
  • gcc-c++: The C++ compiler used for build the wrapper library;
  • wxRuby: We have to download the source’s package directly from Rubyforge.

Added the repository which contains the Ruby extensions (warning to the portion of the address that refers the version of openSUSE), we can proceed with the installation confirming the request of the dependent packages:

$ sudo zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/languages:/ruby:/extensions/openSUSE_11.3/ RubyExtensions
$ sudo zypper ref
$ sudo zypper install rubygems rubygem-rake gcc-c++ wxGTK-devel rubygem-ffi-swig-generator make

It’s time to download the sources of SWIG version 1.3.38 from sourceforge, then uncompress and install it:

tar -xvf swig-1.3.38.tar.gz
cd swig-1.3.38
./configure && make
sudo make install

All the packages are ready, we have to set some environment variables before continue:

export SWIG_CMD=/usr/local/bin/swig
export WXRUBY_EXCLUDED=GLCanvas
export WXRUBY_VERSION=2.0.1

The second instruction is important for ignore all the references to the openGL library, which are not availables in unicode version.

The next step is download the wxRuby’s source from Rubyforge and start to compile

tar -xvf wxruby-2.0.1.tar.gz
cd wxruby-2.0.1
rake

After this procedure end you can remove the old gem and build & install the new:

rake gem
sudo gem install wxruby-2.0.1-x86-linux.gem

Personally, I needed recompile wxRuby in openSUSE 11.2; with the new version (11.3) standard packages work fine, anyway i wished share my experience for someone could meet the same trouble in the future :) )

Pavel Machek: GPS track processing tools

@ 09:52 UTC

face

Ok, so I hava a young pony, and would like to train him a bit. For that, it would be useful to gain statistics such as average speed, maximum speed, fastest kilometer, etc.

Unfortunately, raw data from GPS contains lot of noise/errors, and is not really easy to process. There's viking which can do some processing, but it is a GUI application. Are there some command-line tools for .gpx processing? Even simple stuff like "get the total length of track", "get average speed" would be useful...

Friday
03 September, 2010

Michael Meeks: 2010-09-03: Friday.

@ 21:00 UTCmember

face
  • Up rather later, breakfast with Caolan & Kendy. To the conference, arrived a tad too late for Eike's well attended Calc talk,
  • Out for lunch with Ray, Marcel & Kendy. Taxi to the airport, plane home. Lovely to see the wonderful wife, and sleeping babies again.

openSUSE News: Strategy sucks

@ 19:48 UTC

face
strategy statement from team

Hi all,

Over the last weeks there has been a lot of disussion, both internally and externally, about the strategies which have been proposed. However, we also missed a lot of voices from our community. We take responsibility for leaving many of you behind by focusing on a very corporate-management solution to the initial question which prompted this process. A question we think still is relevant: The identity of openSUSE both as a Community and as a Project.

Initially our goal was to answer: “Who is openSUSE and what does it (want to) do?” prompted by the discussion about the default desktop at the openSUSE conference last year. In five years the openSUSE project has evolved from a fully company-driven project to a communty project where everybody can contribute. This has brought uncertainty and a lack of direction. The current lack of a clear ‘story behind it all’ is hampering our ability to establish a common identity and sense of security. From a marketing point of view, it becomes an uphill battle…

Throughout the process, we consulted some people and the discussion about a strategy started with the goal to solve this issue. However, many feel that ‘strategy’ and the approach to find one is not fitting our community. We lost most of you in the second paragraph of the strategy pages on the wiki – too much talk.

We would like to go back to the start and focus on describing who we are, as a community, instead of finding new ways to go. The input you all have given us by mail, forums, IRC and in person was valuable and we will use that. So that is what we will do:
  • Highlight the story behind openSUSE
  • Identify what users we target and illustrate what we offer to them,
  • Connect it with the issues that matter most to our community
And then we will document this story, image, direction, strategy – or however your call it ;) .

From you all – we will continue to seek your input on it once we post it. By mail, forum, IRC or in person – again. Without your help it won’t be much, so please think about that!

Greetings,

Your strategy team

Jos Poortvliet: Banshee & GNOME

@ 16:14 UTC

face

Since a couple of days I'm using the Banshee music player. Last sunday I installed openSUSE with GNOME on my desktop system to play around with it. Banshee surely stuck - I installed it on my laptop with Plasma desktop as well. It's a very nice player with only one weird thing: it really really likes Opeth. Often I set it to play some electronic music at random, then it suddenly starts moves to metal - Opeth usually. Not that I greatly dislike that, I just have no idea why it does it ;-)

Suusie GNOME being nice

Otherwise, openSUSE is treating me reasonably well. The NVIDIA drivers on my desktop are less of a hassle than Intel was on my laptop - they do make the screen fuzzy sometimes, and Compiz really works horrible so I had to disable desktop effects in GNOME. KWin works almost fine somehow... Just a tad slow. GNOME Shell does desktop effects best: completely sharp screen, good performance. It does seem to restart itself sometimes but only the screen goes to showing only the wallpaper for a few seconds.

(I know newer NVIDIA/Xorg/Kernel should solve these issues, btw, I'll just install newer versions once I feel they're stable enough)



Tracker is great - incredibly fast and very little effect on system resources as far as I could tell. Sorry for Nepomuk but when it comes to actually finding files - no dice, it just crashes a lot. Both fill my .xsession-errors up like crazy, however. Vuntz has asked for the tracker errors already :D

In general, GNOME is fast and lean. Only Banshee sometimes manages to sometimes use 161% cpu on my desktop - rather impressive. Luckily I have a nice quadcore :D

Evo less so

Evolution was quite painful, I stopped using it. With the treeview (flat lists don't work with more than 10 mails/day) it is almost impossible to see the individual messages - the 'tree' itself is completely hidden, only showing small triangles leaving you guessing what thread a message belongs to. I added this to the GNOME Pet Peeves Project page, hope someone can fix it... Of course, maybe I just couldn't find the configuration option, lemme know if that's the case and I'll say sorry :D

good


bad


The keyboard shortcuts don't work for me either - I am used to using the left and right arrow keys to go through the list of messages and the up and down to scroll through the message itself. And keys like A, R and L to reply to all, sender or a list. Not figured out how to configure that and for efficient use of my time, this is crucial. Same with Liferea, btw.

I found out that Xchat didn't do what I needed from IRC (like putting names behind the nicks in the list and hiding part/join messages), neither did Empathy, but Pidgin is much more convenient. And to be honest, it looks better than …

read more

openSUSE News: openSUSE Connect Beta

@ 12:30 UTC

face

As a result of the openSUSE Boosters’ ‘HackMeck‘ two weeks ago at FrOSCoN we are proud to present you with a new beta of openSUSE Connect.

Connect is supposed to become the central user database for the openSUSE project. Sounds bland, don”t it? But you know the Boosters, everything we do comes with a grain of spice and Connect is no different. The spice here are a lot of nifty social network features like user profiles, friending, groups, an event calendar and possibly more. Thats possible because on top of the user database we use a Free Software social network framework called Elgg. Elgg will help us to go a step further in one of the most important areas of the openSUSE project: Connecting our community. We do a very good job connecting code at the moment but there is no central place for openSUSE users to mingle, form relationships and meet collaborators.

Try it!

Did we whet your appetite? Want to try it? No problem, just head over to our beta instance http://connect.opensuse.org and login as user geeko with the password opensuse to try it out. Make some friends, create a group or run a poll. This instance is regularly deployed with the newest code from our git repository so you will always get the latest and greatest. But please don’t forget that this is a beta :-) If you encounter any problems, guess what, make a bugreport in our bugzilla!

Help out!

Or how about you get your hands dirty? So far our experience with Elgg is wonderful. It’s a tidy, extensible and well designed piece of software. The community is very helpful and there is a lot (if not to say a butt-load) of functionality available. And if something is not there already we have found that we can easily add it. You could too you know? Elgg runs on a combination of Apache, MySQL and the PHP scripting language and as this is the most popular web server environment in the world we hope we can attract more people to help to fit Elgg to openSUSE’s needs. And on top of that it’s really easy to hack on it! The changes we did so far at the HackMeck and the last couple of weeks are self-contained in plugins that extend the basic functionality. The powerful data model and view system of Elgg make it possible to change it to openSUSE’s needs without ever touching the core functions. So if you are interested in helping, get to know Elgg and then get in contact with the openSUSE Boosters.

We hope you will enjoy this new openSUSE tool. And remember: Have a lot of fun…

OMG!SUSE! team: Bringing the tribes together to help each other

@ 12:00 UTC

face

Last July, following GUADEC there was some amount of controversy going on in the greater Linux community after Canonical, the company driving a large amount of Ubuntu development, was criticized for number of contributions it has made to the GNOME project. The resulting number of backlash amongst open source backlash-mongers led Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth to write a great post on tribalism.

The underlying point that I think Mark makes is very important: underneath our red hats, Meerkat and Lizard costumes, we all strive to build a stellar open-source operating system. Deep down, we're all penguins!

Mark's comments motivated one notable open-source contributor, Miguel de Icaza, the co-founder of both the GNOME and Mono projects, to help cut down on the tribalism. Shortly after the lobbing of insults calmed down, Miguel sent out a call to create a non-tribal version of StackOverflow for Unix and Linux users:

As we know, tribalism makes you stupid. So let us commit to the Linux and Unix Q&A site powered by StackOverflow that will help answer questions for Unix and Linux users of all distributions and blends.

It shouldn't be surprising but a huge number of folks registered their interest in the "StackExchange" site which is now open for (beta) business!

If you're unfamiliar with the whole StackOverflow/StackExchange concept, the gist of it is that the site is a community-specific question and answer site with community-driven feedback for questions and answers. In the ideal world, this means the most interesting/pressing questions are heavily upvoted, and then the best answers to those questions have a number of votes as well.

To visit the site you just need to bounce on over to unix.stackexchange.com

Image courtesy of mypenguintravels.com

Thursday
02 September, 2010

Michael Meeks: 2010-09-02: Thursday.

@ 21:00 UTCmember

face
  • Up, managed to forget to frank my ticket on the tram and get fined; sigh - if only the lady had been able to sell me a three day pass instead of three singles.
  • Met Kalman at the conference, and wandered the conference talking to misc. people. On to Stefan's test-ability talk, encouraging to see the unit testing work I prototyped in 2008 (and subsequently broken by the three-layer-izing of OO.o, and tons of stop-energy) is finally being taken seriously, and good progress being made.
  • Lunch with Rene & Kendy, on to Moritz' talk on bridge building - amusing. On to see some demos of the latest MS Office bling from Moritz (which is impressive), a few amusing bugs in OO.o. Prodded the horrible formula support in MSO 2010 - cut & paste a formula from Word to Excel, and re-size it: you get a low-res bitmap, complete with cleartype artifacts, fun.
  • Interviewed a great candidate for our OO.o team. Out for an interesting & pleasant dinner in the evening. Onto a pub for somedrinks, and back to our hotel room until insanely late.

Nelson Marques: Equinox GTK2 Engine – Updated, 1.30

@ 19:53 UTC

face

I have updated the following packages to version 1.30:

Updated to 1.30.1 and added i686 arch. Finally sorted mock problem out after some struggle!

Jeffrey Stedfast: Microsoft Double Rainbow!

@ 19:10 UTC

face

Microsoft has just created a new commercial for its Windows Live Photo Gallery software that plays on the "Double Rainbow!" stoner guy. I have to give them props for trying to be hip and cool, but I'm too busy laughing my butt off right now. You've got to see this:


What I want to know is what kind of camera is that guy using? Never seen anything like it. A friend suggested it was this antique digital camera, but I'm not convinced. If you have any idea what that camera is, let me know in the comments - it is gonna bug me for days until I know what that was!

OMG!SUSE! team: Google Video Chat for openSUSE

@ 18:08 UTC

face

Thanks to a tip from our friend @decriptor, it looks like the Google Video Chat browser plugin is now available for openSUSE!.

If you visit the download page you can download an RPM for a 32-bit or a 64-bit openSUSE installation. The plugin should allow you to use video or voice chat to talk to all your GMail contacts straight from your web browser. Since I don't use GMail, I can't verify how well the plugin works, but I have successfully held a video chat with a friend using it via my n900.

Pretty spiffy!

openSUSE News: openSUSE Announce First 11.4 Development Milestone With Improved Package Management Performance, New XOrg, KDE and GNOME

@ 13:08 UTC

face
Broken-up chocolate bars symbolising parallel download of packages

Metalink multichannel download, so package candy melts your screen, not your internet connection.

openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 1 is available today, Thursday, September 2 for developers, testers and community members to test and participate in the development of openSUSE 11.4. M1 starts off openSUSE 11.4 development at a cracking pace with performance improvements in the package management network layer and version updates to major components.

This milestone contains libzypp version 8.1, which has a new backend for http and ftp package downloads. MultiCurl replaces the old MediaAria backend, and brings support for zsync transfers and better Metalink download support. These will improve both repository refresh and package install and update performance. Metalink allows the multi-channel download of packages by downloading the individual blocks of a package in parallel from multiple servers. ZSync reduces the amount of data to download by only fetching the changed parts of a file instead of the whole file. This speeds up repository refreshes, since due to the way the repository data is structured, it is easy to locate the parts of the metadata that changed since the last update. The new Curl-based zypp backend also gives libzypp and therefore zypper and YaST better support for network proxies, by using the same proxy configuration as the rest of YaST instead of its own, and adds support for HTTP BASIC password-protected repositories. And as an added bonus, MultiCurl should eliminate slow and hanging package installations that occurred due to bugs in the old MediaAria backend.

Broken up chocolate bars symbolising partial download of repo metadata

Zsync efficiently downloads only the changed metadata. Sweet!

Other major components that have received updates from upstream projects for Milestone 1 include XOrg 1.9, KDE 4.5 and GNOME 2.32.0 Beta 1. Automated testing and brave openSUSE Factory testers have been validating early builds to make sure that Milestone 1 is suitable for others to test, so please download Milestone 1 and report bugs – the earlier a bug is reported in the development cycle, the more likely it is that it will be fixed on release day, March 10, 2011.

The next milestone is scheduled for September 30.

OMG!SUSE! team: Inkscape updates abound!

@ 12:00 UTC

face

This is a cross-post from our sister site: OMG! Ubuntu!

Scalable Vector Graphic fans of the world rejoice – Open Source’s premier vector drawing application Inkscape has been bumped up to 0.48, adding lots of fixes and features for artists to get excited about in the process.

New & improved

The text tool in particular has received lots of attention and now has support for:

  • "Line Spacing:" Distance between baselines of adjacent lines
  • "Letter Spacing:" Spacing between letters
  • "Word Spacing:" Spacing between words
  • "Horizontal kerning"
  • "Vertical shift"
  • "Character rotation"

The new multi-mode spray tool allows users to quickly [create] effects that previously would take much longer to achieve.

Other changes include a handful of new extensions, improved exporting & select UI changes. More information can be found in the release notes.

Install Inkscape for openSUSE 11.3

OMG!SUSE! team: Sprichst du open source? Check out the openSUSE Conference

@ 10:00 UTC

face

openSUSE Conference hoorah!

This coming October in the beautiful German city of Nuremberg, the second international openSUSE conference will be held.

Before get out your jump to conclusions mat and assume this is just for openSUSE folks, it should be mentioned that the conference isn't just for lizard-lovers but also for all members of the open source community that can attend.

The "call for papers" has finished meaning the conference organizers are hard at work preparing the program for the event, which plans to bring folks together from various areas of the open source universe such as the Mozilla and Debian projects. The conference should be interesting for hackers and users alike with Bird-Of-a-Feather sessions, open discussions and of course, plenty of hacking on open source!

Unfortunately the conference details aren't all hammered out, but if you're on that side of the pond on October 20th through the 23rd, you should definitely mark it on your calendar. In the meantime, I suggest following @openSUSEConf to keep up with the conference preparation.

Older blog entries ->