Larry Lessig has a fantastic presentation, in the very best Larry Lessig style, of why he supports Obama over Hillary. Chris has a transcript of the presentation for those reading blogs from work.

While reading CNN summary:

But the two-term senator from New York surpassed the one-term senator from Illinois when voters were asked about experience, with 91 percent of voters saying she "has the right experience," versus just 5 percent who said the same thing about Obama.

Both John F Kennedy and Bill Clinton were younger than Obama is today when they became presidents. It seems odd that this factoid is not mentioned more often.

And Wonkette goes through the checklist: Hillary Pre-Election Day Cry For Points: Check:

With Super Tuesday coming tomorrow, and polls showing Hillary Clinton in a dead heat with Barack Obama in states like, let’s see... Connecticut... it seemed like a good opportunity to CRY again. Not that this has anything to do with anything, but Hillary Clinton did cry in New Haven today while discussing children’s health care, one of the various things that she cares about. We’re ashamed at Hillary for this: If she had planned it around mid-afternoon, it might be a fresher topic for the evening news cycle.

Which is at odds with the speech I heard from her appearance in Massachusetts two nights ago when I jumped in a taxi. She was yelling repeatedly "am ready to lead" with a loud and strident voice. Which makes the perfect timing for the crying all too suspicious.

Larry Lessig's post underlines an important point about the way that Obama is conducting his campaign vs the way Hillary is. Hillary will have a debt with all the lobbyist, there will be favors to repay, concesions to make, special initiatives to pass through congress.

The video with Hillary's position on taking lobbyist's money is educational. Not only she is very happy taking their money, but she also twists facts when she says "They represent real Americans, they actually do". She should have added "The top 1% of Americans", you know, the Americans that actually count.

This is the complete context for the debate where the previous video was taken from. Edwards and Obama interventions are brilliant, "we do not have to start for the next election to start reforming, we need to start a grass roots movement to start reform today". Edwards and Obama went down this path: they did not take lobbyist money. Watch the full thing.

Obama as a president would not have those ties, he refuses to take money from the lobbyists.

• Up early, poked mail - what fun, sent Jon some hints on swampy bits in the toolkit/vcl interaction. Read Kohei's nice ScCompiler patch - finally, perhaps we can get the English to like entering formulae into calc =SUM(1,2,3) (without hurting our continental friends of course).
• Never realised that Stephen Fry grasped technology issues as well as begin rather a fine comedian.
• Thought I'd publish a (cryptic) internal presentation on vtable relocations I must say, the new chart color scheme is better - with a bit of gradient and some prettier borders the result would it'd look incredible. I'm looking forward to Armin's drawing-layer re-work landing.
• Reported / updated various bugs, extraordinary mail thread with mba, chased an X server issue.

In case you missed them, there were a couple of online stories this week in leading business publications based on interviews with our CEO, Ron Hovsepian. On Monday, the Wall Street Journal’s Ben Worthen posted this blog. Yesterday, BusinessWeek put up this piece. Novell’s business story is gaining visibility.

My most recent applied czechnology: the CPU heatsink on my desktop is held by 4 clip-on curtain holders after the original plastic broke on transport.

Go check it out.  Nothing more to say.

Whether you are using Linux or not, Thunderbird is a great email client. It’s been around awhile, and works well. But what if we want more than what Thunderbird offers stock? What can we do so that we can share address books between users on completely different computers? Is there a way to use calendars? Can we then share the calendars so other users can access them? With fresh-from-the-box Thunderbird, good luck. Fortunately, the folks at Mozilla have given us the ability to create extensions for this great email client. Because of this, we have a bunch of slick extensions that can provide us with some cool features. Mainly, if we don’t want to pay huge fees for proprietary solutions, but we still want to be able to share address books and calendars, we can do it with Thunderbird. We just need to know which extensions to use.

Well fasten your seatbelts. The list I’m about to give you could overhaul the way you do email. It’s a list of extensions that allow you to turn Thunderbird into a full-on communications center. Here we go…

1 - Addressbooks Synchronizer - sync your address books to multiple machines

This plugin gives you the ability to synchronize whatever address books you have in Thunderbird. You can sync between home, office, and laptop. You can sync between all your users at the office. It’s a snap to install and configure, unlike a shared directory. Especially if said directory is on a proprietary solution.

Once you get it installed, and you restart Thunderbird, go to the TOOLS menu, and select ADD-ONS. In the list that appears, select “Addressbooks Synchronizer”, and then click the PREFERENCES button.

To set up synchronization, select the SYNCHRONIZE tab at the top. In the “Addressbooks to sync” box, tick the addressbooks that you want to sync. Below that, select the “Remote” tab. Select “Synchronize with remote files”, and then the protocol you wish to use. FTP works great for me. Put in the host, username, and password, and then the path you will use to house your addressbook files. Configure your preferences below that. I just do sync on startup and shutdown, but set it to whatever works for you. Take a look:

2 - Lightning - manage your time and tasks with extensive calendaring features

Lightning is one of those extensions that, once you use it, you cannot live without. You can use it to schedule appointments and maintain your entire calendar. It shows you a summary of what events you have today, tomorrow, and soon. Another great feature is that it provides task management. It also offers configurable event notification reminders. Quick peek:

3 - Lightning Nightly Updater (Unofficial) - From the download page : “Quickly get to the latest nightly builds of Lightning relevant to the version of Thunderbird and the OS you’re on.”

This extension makes sure that you are aware of and can update to any new versions of Lightning that appear. The latest and greatest is what we like, so I highly recommend this extension.

4 - Provider for Google Calendar - connect to and sync with your Google calendar, which you can also share

This gives you the ability to sync with your Google calendars. There is no prefs box to set it up, but using it is simple. First, go ahead and install the extension. Next, you need to set up a Gmail account if you don’t already have one. Then go to http://www.google.com/calendar/render and make sure your calendar is working, maybe create an event or two. Next, go to your calendar’s settings:

A page will appear with the details of your calendar’s settings Go down to the PRIVATE ADDRESS, and right-click on the XML button. Select “Copy Link Location”:

You now have a link to your Google Calendar copied to your clipboard.

Back in Thunderbird, open the FILE menu, select NEW, and then select CALENDAR. You can also double-click or right-click in the calendar list to create a new calendar. The “Create a New Calendar” box comes up. Instead of “On My Computer,” we are going to select “On the Network”, and click NEXT:

In the next screen, select “Google Calendar”, and paste the Private Calendar URL into that box. Click NEXT:

The following screen allows you to select a name and a color for your calendar. Go ahead and set them as you wish and press NEXT.

Surprise! A calendar login appears:

You need to know the password of the account whose private calendar you are accessing. This means that you should do one of two things. First, you could set up a Gmail account that everyone in the group knows the password for. This way, they can all change things as necessary. Another alternative is to only share your calendar with people you trust. Either way, it’s a matter of preference. You could do a combination of the two, as you can have as many calendars in Thunderbird as you want. So fill in the password, check the box to remember it, and click OK.

You can now share the Calendar URL with whoever you need to. Point them to this tutorial on how to set it up for themselves.

5 - addressContext - An extension to add addressbook-related options to the context menu.

Email messages just about always have contacts associated with them. Such contacts are usually senders or recipients. This extension allows you to do things with the contact information associated with a given email message. It adds things to the context menu:

So, for example, let’s say the HR department where I work sends out an email with every email address in the company as a recipient. If I right-click on that message, I can add every recipient therein as an address book contact. Boom, instant employee directory.

6 - Contacts Sidebar - From the download page: “Displays the address books in a sidebar in Thunderbirds 3-pane window”

Gives you the ability to make the contacts in each of the different address books show up in the main Thunderbird window. Nice for quick access to contacts:

7 - Duplicate Contact Manager - From the download page: “Facilitates handling of duplicates in your address book(s).”

This extension is very nice. It helps remove or combine the duplicates in your address book. I use this thing all the time:

If you want to sync contacts and calendars between many computers, these extensions will give you this capacity. These are a small handful of the available extensions for Thunderbird. There are a bunch more available for your enjoyment or to boost productivity. Check them out when you get a moment.

If you want to give Thunderbird some visual appeal, take a look at the Top 10 Best Themes for Thunderbird.

When it comes to handling my work-related email, many people will probably conclude that I am an old fart in Linux terms: I still use the console-based Pine as my MUA of choice, as my fingers have been hardcoded to its key combinations over the years (my first encounter with Pine was around 1994 on a shared DEC Ultrix box in my university). So far, I have not found any other application that allows me to process email as quickly as by using this tool.

I admit that I do use Thunderbird for my personal email, though, to gather experience with it (and to toy around with the various extensions, especially Nostalgy is a gift from heaven for people like me!). And of course because the mail volume there is less critical to cope with! But I am not going to start a holy war here - this article is supposed to explain how I have configured my mail setup to rotate the log files that keep track of all my incoming mails.

Issue eight of openSUSE Weekly News is now out!

In this week’s issue:

• KDE News: KDE 4.0.1, openSUSE Live CD, New KDE Repo Layout
• openSUSE Welcomes Zonker - The New Community Manager
• Applications for openSUSE Membership Now Open
• Upcoming: openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 2, this Thursday

Fire up those IRC clients and head over to the #openSUSE-project channel on Freenode today at 17:00 GMT for the openSUSE Project meeting. One of the key topics we’ll be discussing this week is the proposed Code of Conduct. Given the importance of the CoC, I hope we’ll see a record turnout in IRC today to participate in the discussion.

There will also be an update on the status of Factory and the build service. The rest of the agenda is available on the wiki — you can post questions to be discussed during the meeting via the wiki, or ask tomorrow via IRC.

Be sure to watch the Meetings page, we keep a list of upcoming meetings there so everyone can keep track of the schedule and participate. We also have a KDE meeting coming up next week, February 13, at 19:00 GMT. Hope to see you there!

• A while ago Josselin Mouette made the file chooser use single-click to activate shortcuts. This was a very nice change; it made the file chooser seem more responsive. Unfortunately, it also revealed a bit of stupidity on my part from a long time ago.

  For some time I had the firm belief that the file chooser was very well "mouse-able", but that keyboard navigation was rather bad. So I made it do things that seemed reasonable at the time: make the focus change to the correct widget as you activate things, keep a focus beacon always visible...

  When you activated a shortcut in the left-hand pane of the file chooser, it would automatically focus the file list. This made sense at the time: "you went to the place you wanted to go, so you now want to select a file, right?"

  Unfortunately, this made the code pretty complex. Focusing the file list may cause a file to be actually selected. This can in turn wipe out what is in the Location entry and replace it with the newly-focused file. The effect is that the file chooser pulls the rug from under your feet at various times.

  I just made a simple change that makes the file chooser not focus the file list when you activate a shortcut. This gives surprisingly good results... now, shortcut navigation seems smooth and predictable. These changes are now in the gtk+-2.12 branch and in the development branch.

  Moral number 1: get the keyboard focus right, but don't try to be too smart about it.

  Moral number 2: keyboard-able and mouse-able UIs are surprisingly hard to get right.

• Up, slightly better, talked to Duncan, poked at the yast2-web-wt prototype, interesting. Dug at mail. Installed 11.0 Alpha1 to poke at yast2-gtk a little, Coolo has kindly been doing a great job of keeping it building.
• Pleased that Joe Brockmeier's joining Novell got announced, we have a cool / new OpenSUSE community manager, neat. Team meeting.

The openSUSE News story has the same title and I don't want to repeat everything here, just add some bits:

The new KDE Four Live CD will hopefully work also on some computers whose broken BIOS had problems finding the boot code in certain sectors before.

Our KDE 4.0.1 packages have meanwhile quite some patches to improve Kickoff, for creating a nice familiar desktop setup and several Plasma features backported from trunk (eg taskbar features and panel size/location configuration):

The obligatory link for openSUSE 10.3 users to install/upgrade KDE 4.0.1 and register the new KDE4 build service repositories:

Afterwards please unregister the KDE:KDE4 repository, it will be removed soon.

Craig Murray comments on the "bugging story". Most of the discussion of this has centered around the idea that it's wrong that an MP should be bugged by the police.

Very little has been reported about who Babar Ahmad is and the extraordinary circumstances of his case. Whatever the Americans accuse him of was done in this country, but the authorities in the UK have not seen fit to charge him (though the police did beat him up).

But the Americans claim a legal right under a treaty negotiated by "poodle" Blair to have him extradited without their having to produce evidence against him in a British court.

It is of course quite possible that Babar Ahmad could have been involved in planning terrorist acts, but if that is so, why has he never been charged with offences in this country? Rumours that have been reported to the press about his activities have clearly been leaked to them: that does not make them true. Indeed if what is alleged in the Telegraph report is true, then the UK authorities must be grossly negligent if they have not charged him with an offence.

The right to use encryption technologies such as PGP without being assumed to have criminal intent is also a factor in this case. (Like the right to seal your envelopes before you post them...)

See also:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7229219.stm
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?&xml=/news/2008/02/05/nbugged405.xml
http://disruptive.org.uk/2006/07/12/babar_ahmad_3.html
http://disruptive.org.uk/2005/05/17/babar_ahmad_2.html
http://www.freebabarahmad.com/.

One of the strengths of openSUSE is that configuration tools written using the YaST platform do not have to be re-written to fit within a different desktop environment. For example here is the same printer configuration dialogue being drawn using the Qt/GTK and ncurses user interface toolkits.

If this configuration tool had been written as a KDE application it would appear out of place on GNOME, and if it were written as a GNOME application it would appear out of place in KDE.

The user interface for the One Click Install handler was implemented using YaST, which meant that GNOME users could benefit from it without having to depend on a KDE application KDE , GNOME . In other distributions new features may be focused on one particular desktop, and users of another desktop, may be left to wait until someone ports the features.

It also helps to allow the desktop teams to focus on working on KDE or GNOME rather than only writing and fixing configuration tools.

While this is a great strength, it is perhaps simultaneously a great weakness. Most other distributions which are targetted at end users have a default desktop environment, for example:

• Ubuntu: GNOME
• Debian: GNOME
• Red Hat: GNOME
• Mandriva: KDE
• PCLOS: KDE
• Freespire: KDE

etc.. (no need to list them all)

This is all very sensible, quite apart from allowing them to focus their development resource, it also allows them to market the distribution as a complete product. Take the main product description page for ubuntu for example , they are able to give a flavour of what the product looks and feels like because they recognise that the desktop environment is part of the product, perhaps the most important part. It also means users can install from an ubuntu install cd without having to understand what a desktop environment is. It also allows them to arrange deals to install the product on OEM machines.

Historically SUSE Linux was much the same as these others, the default desktop environment was KDE, there were personal and professional boxed sets of the SUSE Linux operating system. There was also an enterprise version SLD . SUSE Linux built up a significant userbase, primarily of KDE users. Even now, as of last count there are 70% KDE users vs 20% GNOME . These historical users being the most experienced, are perhaps the most likely to get involved with openSUSE development.

Since the Novell purchase of SUSE political pressures, presumably partly from ex-ximian people, led to the switch of the enterprise desktop product to GNOME as the default desktop environment. The thinking, apparently, was that SUSE’s niche as a great KDE based OS was insufficient and there was a better chance competing against Red Hat directly by copying exactly what Red Hat were doing.

After this the openSUSE default desktop was also changed, but not to GNOME, instead to have no default at all. Instead, users are now presented with a confusing step during installation , during which they have to choose which desktop environment they wish to use (Or an equally confusing download page if using 1cd install) . This is an impossible choice to make for someone who does not know what a desktop environment is, and the politically correct descriptive text does nothing to help. (Efforts have been made to improve the descriptions of the desktop environments shown during installation, and to show previews of each desktop, but these do not really solve any problems, only slightly alleviates them.)

This has the following implications:

• The potential userbase is limited to those few who know what a “desktop environment” is.

Others won’t even get over the installation hurdle.

• Reviewers assume the de-facto default desktop environment is GNOME.

As it is the default for the enterprise version, and also listed first. Consequently the poor quality GNOME desktop leads to bad reviews.

• openSUSE can’t be marketed as a product, just a collection of packages and choices.

• openSUSE can’t be installed on OEM systems without someone picking a desktop or forcing choice on users at first boot.

• openSUSE is relegated from being a product to simply a playground for testing packages.

Quotes from the GNOME team such as “If you want a stable system, there’s SLED”, in addition to frequently broken GNOME packages in openSUSE releases would seem to support this view. SLED is the only remaining desktop product.

• openSUSE quality decreases, can only be used by those who can fix the problems themselves.

• Novell have more to develop and support as openSUSE and SLE diverge.

Many desktop features were added first to SLED10, and then moved to openSUSE. Development ends up having to be done twice, once on the enterprise products, and then on openSUSE. The more the codebases diverge the more work there is to support security & bugfix updates on both openSUSE and SLE products.

• Only people who are interested in developing a distribution aimed at a geek niche will contribute to openSUSE.

None of which is good for the future of SUSE.

In my not-so humble opinion this situation is untenable, yet I can’t forsee any change. The de-facto SUSE Linux / openSUSE desktop has always been KDE by the user and developer base. Choosing GNOME would mean a loss of users/contributors as staunch KDE advocates move on. It possibly also means attracting few users as other distributors such as Red Hat/Fedora and Debian or Ubuntu already do much better jobs of shipping a GNOME desktop. Going back to KDE is unlikely to happen due to internal Novell politics & pressure from ex-ximian people. So most likely the situation will stay as it is now, with use slowly declining due to the problems above.

While some people have been complaining in recent weeks about kubuntu being a second class citizen to ubuntu, I see this as one of its greatest strengths. The alternative is like with openSUSE, the whole distribution ends up becoming the “second citizen”.

If I needed any affirmation that I’d made the right choice in joining Novell and the openSUSE team, I got it yesterday, in bulk. I got a ton of “welcome aboard” notes via IRC, IM, email, blog posts, and blog comments from Novell employees and openSUSE contributors and users wishing me good luck on the job — and, in many cases, asking when I’d be in [insert location here] so that we could meet face to face. I find it interesting, and reassuring, that even in a “virtual” community there’s a strong preference for meeting face to face.

The good news on that front is that I’ll be at SCALE this weekend, at FOSDEM ‘08 the 23rd and 24th, and visiting several Novell offices between now and the big Novell event, BrainShare. (And plenty more travel to come in 2008. Those are just the events on my immediate radar.) If you’re at one or more of these events, please come look for me — I’ll be at the openSUSE booth or wandering the show floor.

Thanks very much for all the support. It’s great to be welcomed so openly and graciously, and I hope that we will extend the same sort of enthusiasm to each new member of the openSUSE community. One of my major goals for this year is to help grow the openSUSE community by attracting more users and contributors. If new users and contributors are all greeted this warmly by the community members they encounter, I’m sure that it won’t be difficult at all to grow the community by leaps and bounds.

Just in time for the KDE 4.0.1 release, the openSUSE KDE team has updated the KDE 4 packages in the Build Service to the KDE 4.0.1 state, featuring several improvements over the plain KDE 4.0.1 release and including further integration fixes.

KDE Four Live 1.0.1

KDE Four Live, the openSUSE KDE4 Installable Live CD, has also been updated to contain these packages and changes.

KDE Repository Re-structuring

After a long discussion and feedback period, the openSUSE BuildService repository layout for KDE packages has finally been overhauled.

There are: latest, stable and regularly updated KDE 4.0.x packages as well as experimental KDE 4.1 packages available. The repositories are kept in a modular state so you can choose how much of your system you want to be possibly affected by selecting one of the stable or unstable Desktop, Extra or Community repositories. As a result, the current KDE:KDE4 repository has now been frozen and will be removed in the future, so please update your repositories accordingly.

Of course the Backports and KDE3 repositories, which do not update any of your system libraries, are still available and will be extended even further in the near future.

~ Dirk

Apart from the openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 2 release coming this Thursday, there are a couple of exciting things happening in the openSUSE world:

openSUSE Membership

For a long time the openSUSE project had no fully defined way of distinguishing active and continuously helpful people in the openSUSE project. If you’re in the project then it becomes quite palpable quickly who is doing a lot of great stuff and whatnot, but many people in the project echoed a need for better processes of handling, for example, @opensuse.org email addresses and IRC cloaks.

The result of this can be seen by what we think of as openSUSE Members (see the page for all the details). So, if you are doing great stuff for openSUSE, please do apply and let us know!

At the moment only the board members are listed, but during our next meeting I hope to publish a much longer list of openSUSE members. If you are an openSUSE member, please try to provide a wiki page or at least a page where you can specify your contributions so anyone else can easily find out about you.

openSUSE Community Manager: Joe Brockmeier

It’s great to see that after many months of interviews and work for a Chief openSUSE Linux Evangelist, openSUSE has a new community manager: Joe Brockmeier. One thing that has sorely been needed in the openSUSE project is extra marketing and community management. It’s wonderful to see both of these very key and essential issues being tackled and I’m confident now that Joe will do remarkable things for openSUSE.

If you want to find out a little more, take a look at a few of his recent interviews or articles about the new job-position:

• CIO.com: Interview: OpenSUSE’s New Tech Evangelist
• DownloadSquad: Interview: openSUSE’s new Community Manager, Joe Brockmeier
• ComputerWorldUK: OpenSUSE’s new tech evangelist spells it out
• Bruce Byfield: Zonker Brockmeier, openSUSE Community Manager

I arrived to college yesterday to find that the router had died so I've been offline for over 24 hours. Not a long time normally but, as my mail is downloading, I can see that there are a lot in my inbox that appear to need attention. A lot of those regard Planet SUSE. I've not had the chance to look at any of them yet but please be patient because I do also have other things to do while I'm here.

I thought it was cool to see another Linux adoption story, this time by the U.S. Army. One of the best quotes from this article:

“Red Hat 5 will link Linux with Microsoft and allow FCS forces to link with other brigade combat teams,” the Army official said. “This will be an interim solution because over the long haul, eventually all of the Army’s networks will be Linux-based.”

They plan eventually to have the whole thing running Linux.

Actually, Linux is being employed currently by all of the branches of the U.S. Military.

U.S. Army

Wind River wins Boeing deal with Army
Linux headed into Boeing antisub aircraft
Linux helps RTOS vendor win major defense contract
Linux in Camouflage
LynuxWorks: A case study in combat-ready Linux

U.S. Navy

Linux in Government: OSS in the US Navy?
Powerful Linux OS-based SGI system to serve as U.S. military computing prototype

U.S. Air Force and Marine Corps

Linux getting widespread support from government
The Penguin Continues Its March

U.S. Air Force and Army - Linux clusters gear up for simulated combat

U.S. Department of Defense - IBM To Build Supercomputer for US Military

Pentagon & Department of Defense - OF ARMS AND LINUX

Army National Guard - Army National Guard Using Linux

Autonomous Military Ground Vehicle

Linux powers autonomous military ground vehicle
Commercial Linux to power military drone

U.S. Military - US Military Testing IBM Speech Translation Technology

Linux helping reduce traffic congestion? Who would not be for that? MIT researchers are working on a device that will do just this. I know that where I live, getting out to the main freeway can take forever, and I can practically see it from my house. I would love to know which routes are the fastest.

This is a picture of the guys working on it:

Excerpts:

“At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), researchers are testing a Linux-based automotive telematics system intended to reduce traffic congestion. CarTel is a distributed, GPS-enabled mobile sensor network that uses WiFi ‘opportunistically’ to exploit brief windows of coverage to update a central traffic analysis program.”

“The CarTel portal provides a geo-spatial data visualization system based on Google Maps that stores and marks sensor data using GPS coordinates. The portal organizes data as ‘traces,’ linear sets of sensor readings collected during a drive. Users can query the system using a graphical query interface to select traces, and then visualize the traces combined with various summaries, statistics, and maps. The portal allows queries both on the driver’s own history, as well as the aggregate driving history of other drivers.”

Read “MIT researchers fight gridlock with Linux”

View the MIT Project Page

Read a Boston Globe article about the project

• Turning a rowdy wild-west saloon into a nice cafe with internet connection

  I'm happy to announce that the openSUSE Code of Conduct has been adopted by the project.

  This code is directly stolen from based on GNOME's Code of Conduct. Thanks to the people who made it possible!

Linus Torvalds believes that users of Linux have nothing to fear. M$ is bluffing. According to Linus:

“They have been sued for patents by other people, but I don’t think they’ve — not that I’ve gone through any huge amount of law cases — but I don’t think they’ve generally used patents as a weapon,” Torvalds said. “But they’re perfectly happy to use anything at all as fear, uncertainty and doubt in the marketplace, and patents is just one thing where they say, ‘Hey, isn’t this convenient? We can use this as a PR force.’”

Boy, one thing that I’ve always said, and it’s truer now than ever, is that M$ is a marketing company, not a software company. They understand people and how they respond and react to things. They will push the very bounds of what’s legal in order to intimidate and influence people. What’s funny is that your average person wants someone else to tell them what to do. Many people like to give away their power to choose. They don’t want the responsibility of thinking for themselves, and it’s too much effort anyway.

Anyway, it’s nice to see people starting to break out of that and turn their back on M$. Many governments are doing that around the world. By now you’ve likely heard that the French Police dumped Windows on 70,000 machines for Ubuntu Linux. I think that’s the biggest migration I’ve ever heard of.

Think outside the box. Learn something. Don’t be afraid of the Big Bad Wolf. Go Linux.

Powersave Daemon

I finally managed to release a new version of the powersave daemon, 0.15.20. This is a plain bugfix release. We’re some kind of feature complete, so I doubt that there will be anything else than bugfix releases in the future Sourceforge has the files.

QNotify

After almost 2 years of QNotify hacking abstinence, I finally managed to do what was on my TODO for so long. I removed the qnotifyd daemon which blew my machine with 100% CPU usage from time to time. Now the qnotify command line client manages multiple notification widget on the desktop on its own, by using a simple file locking mechanism. The outcome is qnotify-0.6. Again, Sourceforge is your friend. For a really cool video about what QNotify actually can be used for, have a look at this video.

On a related note, does KDE4 actually have a companion piece to GNOME’s notification daemon? Does it look cool? May be I’ve to check again myself… If not, may be I finally manage to get a grip on myself and try to integrate libQNotify’s features into KDE4.

Update: KTray

And while we’re at it, just hacked in a user request feature into KTray. I was suprised that someone is actually still using it. Yes, there are users out there who don’t use KDE or GNOME, so they need ktray to use tray applications correctly. Sourceforge has version 0.2 which features:

• add cmd line option -r to use horizontal alignment
• add cmd line option -w to draw widget without borders
• add cmd line option -p to specify the window position

• H. to school, prodded the web. Burned old cruft to DVDs to clean up storage. Quick call with Jan wrt. translation. Read through the mass of bugzilla mail from the cleanup.
• Booked travel for FOSDEM possibly the best conference of the year, should be fun. Checked out a finance presentation. Caught the end of the ESC meeting, worked on a presentation for tomorrow. Felt grim all day. Chat with David in the evening - a skiing survivor.

Next week I will be in Paris for the Microsoft Tech Days talking about our work on Moonlight. JB Evain will be doing a tutorial on Moonlight on Monday as well. Sadly, due to all the work we have right now in Mono-land, I will only be in Paris for a very short time before I have to head back home. But hopefully Mono-ers and Opensourcers can have some dinner on Sunday night. Drop me an email.

I will also be speaking in depth at the Mix 08 about Moonlight. This will be a more detailed talk about Moonlight than the talk at Lang.NET which was more of a potpourri of Mono stories.

OpenSUSE Linux Community members, rejoice. We have a new community leader, Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier. I’m excited for this.

One of the major driving forces that makes a successful distribution is its sense of community. Where do you get tech support? The community. Where does the maintenance come from? The community. Who contributes patches? The community. To whom can you contribute if you want to help out? The community.

I’m sensing a pattern.

If you can take the concept of the community and reach out to them, you will likely enjoy more success than if you do not do this. People want to form communities, and will with or without a little guidance and direction. So, why not take someone who knows about communities, an operating system that thrives through communities, and people who want a community, and put them all together? That looks like exactly what they are doing with Mr Brockmeier. Go Zonker!

Excerpt:

“I’d like to give a warm welcome to Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier who joins the openSUSE project as “openSUSE community manager”. You can reach him directly at zonker@opensuse.org. He has his own openSUSE blog at http://zonker.opensuse.org, I advise to go over and see what he has to say himself!

He is a long time Linux user and does a lot of writing about Linux and open source for several publications and conributed to books as well. Prior to his new role as community manager for openSUSE he served Linux Magazine as Editor-in-Chief. His personal webpage is http://www.dissociatedpress.net.

The openSUSE community manager will act as community advocate and ombudsman thus relaying openSUSE community and users needs back to Novell. Therefore you will find Zonker on many community events. He will also drive marketing programs around openSUSE to make the project more successful and attract more developers and users.”

Read “openSUSE Welcomes Zonker - The New Community Manager

Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier just started work at Novell as openSUSE community manager, which is good news for Novell and the openSUSE community. Zonker’s job is to be an advocate for the community, to make sure the community’s needs are heard by Novell and the openSUSE board. He will also serve as a bridge from Novell to the open source community.

It’s his job to help the openSUSE project grow and to make sure the project can scale to handle that growth. Zonker is charged with communicating what’s going on in the project and promoting openSUSE and Linux in general.

He’s up to the task: Zonker has been a Linux geek since 1996 and has worked as a tech journalist covering Linux and open source since 1999, most recently as editor-in-chief of Linux Magazine. Welcome aboard, Zonk.

Only recently I found out about Mark Probst's MathMap plugin for the GIMP. I ran into it when he posted about a new feature in it called the MathMap Composer.

Check out this video demostration of MathMap's Composer.

I would have put a good screen capture of it, but Google Video seems to have regressed and no longer lets user skip over parts of the video.

[Post Comment] | [Comments]

• 16% of the the world population has some type of disability
• vision, hearing, mobility, cognative
• 20% of the average working age population has a disability
• United States
• 21% of working age population has a disability
• 60% of people with disabilities of working age are non-working
• Europe
• 14% of working age population has a disability
• 50% of people with disabilities of working age are non-working
• Japan
• 65% of people with disabilities of working age are non-working
• India
• 21.9 million people with disabilities
• Australia
• 18% of working age population has a disabilitiy

• More than 23% of people ages 65-74 were in the labor force in 2006 (19.6% in 2000)
• Number of "Boomers" will grow to 113 million by 2017 while the 18-to-49 demographic will increase less than 1% to 136 million.

Linux has a varied methodology of managing packages. RPMs are one of the most common. Some distros have source-based package management systems, such as Portage for Gentoo. Derivatives of Debian such as Ubuntu have packages in DEB format.

For the RPM-based distributions, the package manager tries to take care of resolving dependencies for you. Some of them do a great job at this. At some point, however, you’ll likely have to work directly with an RPM package on the command-line.

One thing I really like about YAST (and others) is that you can browse and search through the description, and view other package details. You can see the author, version, vendor, build date, build host, size, etc. You can also see a list of what files will be installed, and where they will be placed.

So how do we view all that info from the command line?

This is fully possible by using the rpm command. Let’s say we are going to install vsftpd from an RPM from the command line. Using the rpm command, we add a few switches to display the information:

rpm -qpil vsftpd-2.0.5-78.x86_64.rpm

The ‘q’ is for ‘query’. The ‘p’ refers to querying a package file. ‘i’ means, “Display package information, including name, version, and description.” The ‘l’ tells the rpm command to list all the files in the package.

Output of this command would look something like the following:

[1116][scott@tomahawk:~/64-bit software/vsftpd]$ rpm -qpil vsftpd-2.0.5-78.x86_64.rpm
Name        : vsftpd                       Relocations: (not relocatable)
Version     : 2.0.5                             Vendor: SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Nuernberg, Germany
Release     : 78                            Build Date: Fri 21 Sep 2007 02:34:57 PM MDT
Install Date: (not installed)               Build Host: glinka.suse.de
Group       : Productivity/Networking/Ftp/Servers   Source RPM: vsftpd-2.0.5-78.src.rpm
Size        : 286006                           License: GPL v2 or later
Signature   : DSA/SHA1, Fri 21 Sep 2007 02:43:56 PM MDT, Key ID a84edae89c800aca
Packager    : http://bugs.opensuse.org
URL         : http://vsftpd.beasts.org
Summary     : Very Secure FTP Daemon - Written from Scratch
Description :
Vsftpd is an FTP server, or dæmon. The "vs" stands for Very Secure.
Obviously this is not a guarantee, but the entire codebase was written
with security in mind, and carefully designed to be resilient to
attack.

Recent evidence suggests that vsftpd is also extremely fast (and this
is before any explicit performance tuning!). In tests against wu-ftpd,
vsftpd was always faster, supporting over twice as many users in some
tests.

Authors:
--------
    Chris Evans 
Distribution: openSUSE 10.3 (X86-64)
/etc/init.d/vsftpd
/etc/logrotate.d/vsftpd
/etc/pam.d/vsftpd
/etc/sysconfig/SuSEfirewall2.d/services/vsftpd
/etc/vsftpd.conf
/etc/xinetd.d/vsftpd
/usr/sbin/rcvsftpd
/usr/sbin/vsftpd
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/AUDIT
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/BUGS
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/COPYING
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/Changelog
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/EXAMPLE
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/EXAMPLE/INTERNET_SITE
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/EXAMPLE/INTERNET_SITE/README
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/EXAMPLE/INTERNET_SITE/vsftpd.conf
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/EXAMPLE/INTERNET_SITE/vsftpd.xinetd
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/EXAMPLE/INTERNET_SITE_NOINETD
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/EXAMPLE/INTERNET_SITE_NOINETD/README
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/EXAMPLE/INTERNET_SITE_NOINETD/vsftpd.conf
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/EXAMPLE/PER_IP_CONFIG
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/EXAMPLE/PER_IP_CONFIG/README
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/EXAMPLE/PER_IP_CONFIG/hosts.allow
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/EXAMPLE/README
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/EXAMPLE/VIRTUAL_HOSTS
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/EXAMPLE/VIRTUAL_HOSTS/README
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/EXAMPLE/VIRTUAL_USERS
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/EXAMPLE/VIRTUAL_USERS/README
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/EXAMPLE/VIRTUAL_USERS/logins.txt
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/EXAMPLE/VIRTUAL_USERS/vsftpd.conf
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/EXAMPLE/VIRTUAL_USERS/vsftpd.pam
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/EXAMPLE/VIRTUAL_USERS_2
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/EXAMPLE/VIRTUAL_USERS_2/README
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/FAQ
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/INSTALL
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/LICENSE
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/README
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/README.SUSE
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/README.security
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/REWARD
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/SECURITY
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/SECURITY/DESIGN
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/SECURITY/IMPLEMENTATION
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/SECURITY/OVERVIEW
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/SECURITY/TRUST
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/SIZE
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/SPEED
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/TODO
/usr/share/doc/packages/vsftpd/TUNING
/usr/share/empty
/usr/share/man/man5/vsftpd.conf.5.gz
/usr/share/man/man8/vsftpd.8.gz
/usr/share/omc
/usr/share/omc/svcinfo.d
/usr/share/omc/svcinfo.d/vsftpd.xml
[1116][scott@tomahawk:~/64-bit software/vsftpd]$

Now, we can see where the binaries will be installed. We can see where the config file will be. We can see where the docs and man pages will be placed.

If you need to install an RPM from the command line, normally, you could issue a command such as:

rpm -i [packagename]

A better way to do this may be as follows:

rpm -Uvh [packagename]

The “U” means upgrade. In cases where you have an older version of an RPM installed, and you’re trying to install a newer version, the -i will not do this. You’d first have to erase the RPM with the -e switch. However, if you have dependencies that rely on that RPM, you won’t be able to erase the old version of the RPM unless you want to get even more hairy. It’s easier to just tell it to upgrade. In cases where you do not have an older version of the RPM installed, the command will still install the intended RPM.

The “v” is for verbose. This just provides more information about the installation process of the RPM.

The “h” option is for “show hashes.”

The problem here is that it doesn’t automatically install dependencies.

The other thing is that you can create your own installation repository (super easy) with createrepo. Install the createrepo package. Then, you create a directory which you will use as the repository, such as /my_inst_src. Dump the RPM in there. Then, you run the createrepo command, pointing it to the new repository:

createrepo /my_inst_src

You then go into YAST and add /my_inst_src as an installation source.

You should now be able to go into YAST and install it just like you do any other RPM. Dependencies should be resolved as usual, should any exist.

If you are interested in package management through YAST, there is just such an ebook available from suseblog.com. In the upper left corner, there is a place to grab some ebooks. One of them is called “YAST - Installation and Management of Software.” Take a look at that and see if it’s helpful for you.

I’d like to give a warm welcome to Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier who joins the openSUSE project as “openSUSE community manager”. You can reach him directly at zonker@opensuse.org. He has his own openSUSE blog at http://zonker.opensuse.org, I advise to go over and see what he has to say himself!

He is a long time Linux user and does a lot of writing about Linux and open source for several publications and conributed to books as well. Prior to his new role as community manager for openSUSE he served Linux Magazine as Editor-in-Chief. His personal webpage is http://www.dissociatedpress.net.

The openSUSE community manager will act as community advocate and ombudsman thus relaying openSUSE community and users needs back to Novell. Therefore you will find Zonker on many community events. He will also drive marketing programs around openSUSE to make the project more successful and attract more developers and users.

Zonker will be travelling the next weeks and you can meet him and other openSUSE members at these two venues:

• at SCALE from 8th to 10th February
• at FOSDEM from 23th to 24th February

For those that wonder what happened with the “openSUSE Chief evangelist” position that was opened in October: this is exactly the position, we just found it more suitable to change the title of Joe.

I have talked a lot with Zonker through the last weeks and look forward to working with him - and look forward meeting him soon in person here in Nürnberg!

Andreas

As you may have already read on news.opensuse.org (thanks, AJ, for the warm welcome!) or elsewhere, I’ve just joined Novell as the openSUSE community manager. I’m really jazzed about joining Novell and the openSUSE team, and excited to be getting started. I’d like to start off by saying a big thanks to AJ, Martin Lasarsch, Michael Loeffler, and Justin Steinman and other openSUSE and Novell folks for the information and help they’ve provided leading up to today. It’s already a group I feel comfortable with and look forward to working with.

Next, I’d like to talk about what this position will entail, and what I hope to accomplish over the short and long term. First, my main priority will be to serve as the openSUSE community’s advocate with Novell and make sure that it has what it needs to make openSUSE the best distro available. I think Max Spevack from Red Hat has done a great job along these lines, helping to transition Fedora into a much more community driven project than it was when it was originally split off from Red Hat Linux, and I’d like to take some cues from his work and apply them to openSUSE. I’ve had the opportunity to speak to many of Novell’s executive team, Ron Hovsepian, John Dragoon, Roger Levy, and Jeff Jaffe, and I think that Novell is seriously committed to making openSUSE a more independent and community driven project.

When I talk about the openSUSE community, I mean all of those involved in some way with openSUSE — the users (and potential users), the openSUSE contributors, and the upstream developers who work on projects that are part of openSUSE.

I’ll be attending a lot of conferences and meeting with the community in order to best get feedback from users and developers (SCALE and FOSDEM are the first two shows on my list) but I also would encourage you to send me an email and/or leave comments on my blog if you have thoughts about what openSUSE needs, or how to make it better — or what we’re doing right, so we know to keep doing it! I’ll also be meeting with the openSUSE board and developers to formulate a plan for world domination, er, growth and improvement.

I’m also going to be focusing my attention on getting the word out about openSUSE to more potential users, and trying to bring in more new users to openSUSE Linux. And by “new users,” I don’t mean people switching from another Linux distro — if someone is using another distro and is happy with Linux, that’s great. I want to reach the masses of Windows users who are looking for a better computing platform, and find ways to address their needs with Linux.

But, I think openSUSE has enormous potential, as a distro and as a community — so I want to make sure that we live up to that potential and give everyone a chance to use and contribute to openSUSE. I’m looking forward to getting started.

Last week we had a small problem at lists.opensuse.org which unsubscribed a couple of mailing list members by accident. We’re really sorry about this and hope that everybody subscribes again manually.

Henne our mailadmin wrote the following email and tried to send it out to everybody that might be affected:

there was a lists.opensuse.org maintenance process hanging (undetected) for a very long time. This process continued a couple of minutes ago.
Unfortunately because of the long delay some calculations went wrong (bounce times). This had the effect that the list software may have you
unsubscribed.

Please check your subscriptions. To do so you can simply subscribe again by sending a mail to <listname>+subscribe@opensuse.org. In case your are still subscribed the system will tell you about it. In case you are not anymore subscription is exactly what you want

Sorry for the inconvenience. The underlying problem has been fixed.

I noticed on the mailing lists that some people did not get Henne’s text above and therefore decided to publish it here again. So, if you miss traffic in your inbox for some mailing lists, please follow the instructions above.

Thanks - and sorry again for this,

Andreas

Dear Gmail,

I cannot read Chinese. I have never been able to read Chinese. I probably will never be able to read Chinese.

Every single mail I have ever received in Chinese I have marked as spam. All of them.

Why can’t you understand I don’t read Chinese? I would like you to automatically bin any message that is more than, say, 40% Chinese. Is that so hard?

Also Russian, Greek, and Turkish.

Kthxbye,
Joe