If you are working with MySQL as a DBA or developer, I'd like to encourage you to consider taking the MySQL Magazine Survey, which was compiled by Keith Murphy and Mark Schoonover.

The survey takes around 10-15 minutes to complete and runs until June 16th. The results will be published in the summer issue of MySQL Magazine, due on July 15th. The questions cover a broad range of topics, from details about your MySQL experience and job description over connectors and languages to operating systems and MySQL versions.

Thanks in advantage for your support and input! The results of this survey will be interesting for us as well.

Martin Lasarsch looks quite busy with his project, preparing openSUSE booth on Linux Tag at Berlin , and so do with us here in Indonesia, preparing openSUSE booth for IGOS Summit 2 event. IGOS stand for Indonesia goes Open Source and IGOS Summit 2 dedicated for open source promo and community building.

This is our first event for openSUSE promo on shopping mall . We invited by Ministry of Information & Technology of the Republic of Indonesia and we had a booth for free of charge .

I have a big problem for this event. It’s my personal problem, not with the community et all. The event hold on working day (Tuesday to Wednesday, May 27-28, 2008) and I cannot take any guarantee for attending the event due to my jobs and responsibility at work. I will take a moment for attending the event but it would be for a few hour only

Unfortunately, I got various support from community member. Some of them told me that they could help for booth set up and act as promotional guys. A friend of mine, Imron from Yayasan Air Putih lend us a set of PC server, Acces point and LCD monitor. Another member supported us by donating some cash for enclosed daily activity cost.

Thank you for helping us to make a successful booth on IGOS Summit 2. See you there…

Last week, Indonesian openSUSE community (openSUSE-ID) had a regular monthly meeting on Saturday, May 24, 2008. for promotional and marketing benefit, we choose Detik.com-currently biggest online newspaper in Indonesia) office at Aldevco Octagon Building Jakarta as our location for meeting. This is our sixth regular meeting since November 2007.

As scheduled on my previous post, this meeting covering up some agenda, ie : openSUSE 11.0 features preview, knowledge share about zypper package manager, our preparation for booth on IGOS Summit 2 event, openSUSE 11.0 release party and openSUSE on Live USB demo.

Meeting started on 09.30 am (GMT+7), opening by Vavai from openSUSE-ID and Andry S Huzain from Detik.com. Vavai describing about community in general, overview and next plan in 2008. Andry told us about the implementation of Linux project on Detik.com, beside his activity with Mac OS.

Next session fill in by Donnie S Bhayangkara (Poepil). He gave a presentation about zypper usage, from adding, modifying and removing repos to package modification with zypper. He show the different style between yast, smart and zypper and told us about zypper improvement on openSUSE 11.0.

Vavai enclosed the meeting with preview of OpenSUSE 11.0 features and OpenSUSE LiveUSB creator with KIWI.

Session of meeting activity could be found here and here

Senior American politician speaks the truth about Israel.

Well, for me and some other openSUSE guys it’s T-1, we going tomorrow to set up the booth.

(actually the picture is from last year .. :-)). So why should you come to Berlin?

get one of the new openSUSE stickers!

If you have no chance to go to Berlin, don’t worry. We will record all Talks, i will try to have streaming video from the booth, and you will find all Talks later on our wiki. But yes, you would miss the live feeling of Linuxtag …

Walking near Wotton in Surrey.

Very smuvelious fridge.

I'm totally late at announcing this, but well, it's never too late, is it? Our GNOME project hero, window management guru and former release manager Elijah left the release team after the GNOME 2.22.0 release. Everybody knows he's been a key member in the release team in the past few years, so we'll just pretend he was useless and we wanted to get rid of him (that's obviously not true and we miss him a lot, but it's easier to pretend we don't miss him ;-))

And since the release team people are all lazy people, we couldn't stay with a missing member. So the fantastic Lucas has joined us. The cool thing is that we can now delegate all the tasks to him and pretend that it's normal work he should do. I've heard from good sources that Lucas loves to do all the boring tasks anyway :-) Lucas, I'll buy you drinks in Istanbul!

We’re getting down to the wire now — with only 24 days to go (and counting…), it’s time to start planning release parties.

If your LUG or local openSUSE group is planning a release party, let us know! And if you’re not, why not? Throw an installfest, or just get all the openSUSE and Linux users you know together to talk about the latest release, have some refreshments, and be social. (Take plenty of pictures, too — we want to see you!)

Note that you don’t have to throw your release party the same day as the release — so if you’re working for a living, maybe June 19 isn’t the best day to go out — but the following Saturday is good too.

By the way, if you’re an openSUSE user in the Tampa area in Florida, drop me a line. We should definitely organize a shindig to celebrate the release of 11.0. It’s just a question of where and when.

I wanted to provide another update on the merged forums progress. As you might have noticed, we didn’t quite manage to launch the merged forums as we originally hoped to do in mid-May. Yes, I know, it’s the first time in the history of open source that a release date has slipped…

In case you’re wondering, the release date slipped because of problems with database imports from the various forums — as you might expect, this is a bit on the complex side, and the forum wizards have been working out the best way to import users and posts from the other forums.

We should be over that hurdle now and back on track. The current target date is now June 9. It’s particularly important to us to have working forums by the time openSUSE 11.0 is ready, so we’re not too far away now.

Once again, I want to thank the leaders of the individual forums (Keith Kastorff, Kim Groneman, and Wolfgang Koller) for all of the hard work they’ve put into this process, and I also want to thank Rupert Horstkötter for helping shepherd the process.

I’m at the Nuremberg office today, getting set to head to Berlin tomorrow for LinuxTag. This will be my first LinuxTag, so I’m pretty psyched about the show — I’ve heard about LinuxTag for years, so I think it’s pretty exciting to finally have a chance to see what all the fuss is about.

Don’t forget that, in addition to the booth at LinuxTag, we also have an openSUSE Day at LinuxTag on Saturday. We have some excellent talks — Adrian will be discussing the build service, Stephan Binner is going to be talking about KDE4, Henne Vogel is going to be talking about Multimedia with openSUSE, and quite a bit more — be sure to eyeball the schedule on the LinuxTag page to make sure you don’t miss something good!

And, of course, we will be at the openSUSE booth each day at LinuxTag, giving sneak peeks at openSUSE 11.0, so please be sure to drop by and say hello!

Dear Christian,

Please don't spread false rumors. Ice cream Deathmatches are the ultimate experience and wouldn't exist without confidence of all involved parties, which means that only truth can be told. And I shall reveal the truth. Andre and I first tried to organize a deathmatch on one of the early evenings, but we couldn't find any zmrzlina. Then, on a later evening, which you witnessed, Andre gave up because he had drunk too many beers -- he's not that solid after all. But it doesn't matter since GUADEC will most probably see the biggest Ice cream Deathmatch of all times.

Love,

Vincent

--

And hopefully, I'll be able to post something later today about my highlights of this week in Prague.

From May 28th-31st, the annual LinuxTag will take place in Berlin, Germany. I followed the growth and evolution of LinuxTag from the very early days and I have fond memories of the event back when it still took place at the University of Kaiserslautern and our SuSE "booth" was just a regular table taken from the lecture rooms...

Things have evolved a lot since then. Today, LinuxTag is one of the largest Linux/Open Source Events in Europe and my new employer Sun is a major sponsor this year. In addition to several talks and keynotes, there will be a large Sun booth in the exhibition area (Booth #205) and we will have a dedicated MySQL demo pod! Some of the things we plan to demo there are the upcoming MySQL Server releases (5.1, 6.0 with Falcon and Online Backup), MySQL Workbench, MySQL Enterprise Monitor as well as how to combine these with other Sun products like Glassfish, NetBeans, OpenSolaris or OpenOffice.

Some other stuff that we will be showcasing on the Sun booth:

• Be Brilliant Faster with OpenSolaris: Develop, Debug, Deploy Apps Faster with ZFS and Dtrace, OpenSolaris Live CD – Fast, Free, and Easy to Install
• Virtualize Your Business with xVM and VirtualBox: OpenSolaris, Windows, Linux & Mac OS X Virtualized, Develop on VirtualBox, Deploy on xVM, Free & Open
• Sun Studio Software for OpenSolaris and Linux: C/C++/Fortran Compilers and Tools, x86 and SPARC
• Cool New Features in OpenOffice.org 3.0: Importing PDFs and Managing Appointments, now with full support for MAC OS X (Aqua)
• Discovering Open High Availability Cluster: Overview about HA Clusters, Community Group Projects, Single Node Cluster – Service Failover between Zones
• GlassFish - the Open Source Java EE 5 Application Server: JRuby/ Rails, Ajax & Comet

I look forward to being there! Please contact me, if you are interested in visiting Linuxtag and would like to receive a free pass!

• National holiday. Lie in, took N. out for a treat with her Father: went to Ely, wandered around the Cathedral, had 'chips' for lunch at a local pub. Back to a playground in the grounds, and thence home.
• N. sickening on return home - perhaps too much wandering in the rain. Set too getting the new phone extension wired up, the conduit fitted, network connection point wired etc. A fair degree of success.
• Dinner, bed early; up to fetch Rodrigo from Stanstead rather late, returned home; bed again.

/       focus/select text in search bar
q       queue the selected tracks (works for podcasts!)
y       mark the selected podcast tracks as old
j/k     scroll selection down/up in the filter or track lists
space   pause/play
enter   play
ctrl-d  bookmark playing item at current position
F2      rename the selected source

I got some feedback from users about managing software.

Raúl Moratalla. who has been blogging about using 11.0 ZYpp/YaST in 10.3, suggests two changes:

• Updated packages filter.

Adding that feature is really easy. However, 11.0 is almost out.

• New packages filter

This shouldn’t be impossible, but I don’t have an idea on how to do it. I think we don’t have the information on when a package appears in a repository, and even worse, we don’t keep information about the previous refresh when finishing one.

John Tomas asks and suggests an easier way to remove applications. I think the use case is valid, but I don’t like the exact proposal, specifically, I don’t like user interfaces with trees. And adding more check boxes for repo removal clutters the interface more. Moreover, I think this usecase is just part of a more generic one, how to install applications, without worrying about “packages”. This problem is already being solved by, for example, Ubuntu Appinstaller.

This problem could be solved in various way.

• Packages could be “tagged” as such.

However that requires changing the current world, therefore it won’t work.

• Do a .desktop file -> package mapping.

Ubuntu appinstaller does this by scanning the complete distribution archive, and generating special metadata from it. This metadata is distributed as a package called appinstaller-data. This method is sane, but the approach of scanning the distribution archive won’t work with 3rd party repositories.

Stephan Binner has a prototype for the same concept on openSUSE, called app-installer.

Any other ideas on how to solve this problem?

• Mini lie-in for J. extreme potatoe & carrot peeling action. Off to NCC - DT speaking for the first time: caught some good stuff from the creche.
• Home for lunch with Elisabeth, Josh sadly flying, fine chicken crock pot; talked and played with the children for some time; watched Madeline.
• Dinner, Martin, DT & Zoe around to watch I am Legend in the evening: a surprisingly good film. Bed late.

An 8-inch or a 10-inch display processor speeds ranging from 1GHz to 1.5GHz, solid-state or 2.5-inch hard drive options, 1GB of RAM and either Linux or Windows operating systems. Battery life is reported to be in the region of 7 hours White or Pink. Available around June 2008

At SUSE I work in the incubation team. We are exploring new technologies, creating prototypes of future systems, and trying to find and shape some of the features that will be part of upcoming SUSE products and the ecosystem around that. It's a fascinating job, challenging, fun, and always exciting. For somebody like me who loves to create new things and enjoys working with an awesome team of innovative people this is a dream job.

At the moment we are looking for some new team members. So if you are interested in joining a great team, working on technology from tomorrow, making Linux rock the world, see Nat's blog for more details. If you have questions please don't hesitate to contact me by email or talk to me in person next week at LinuxTag. I will be there from Wednesday to Saturday.

A year’s research on Novell and the openSUSE project is now published as a master’s thesis at the University of Oslo. “Managing Firm-Sponsored Open Source Communities” details the collaboration between Novell and the openSUSE community. Community members and employees in Novell have participated in the study.

The study deals with the tension between openness and control often found in projects that mesh corporate entities with the open source community. On the one hand, Novell wants to enable participation and contributions from external contributors, but cannot turn over full
control to the community because it produces its enterprise product from openSUSE.

The study finds that the relationship between the community and Novell is evolving rapidly, and how the relationship works and where it may go.

A summary of the study, the full thesis, and pictures are available at Jan Fredrik’s Weblog.

Jozef has posted a very cool solutions article describing how to build a highly-available load-balancing solution for any TCP-based network service (including mail, web, ftp, etcetera) using entirely Open Source components and of course all included with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP2 - Linux-HA, Linux Virtual Server, and ldirectord. Rock on!

Of course, you could buy an expensive appliance instead ...

Road rules: 1 in 6 drivers would flunk (CNN money)

About one in six U.S. drivers wouldn’t be able to pass a written driving test if they took it today, according to a new study.

Drivers in the Northeast continued to have the lowest scores and the highest failure rates, with New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia maintaining their three-year streak in the bottom five rankings.

SUVs plunge toward ‘endangered’ list (CNN)

Jorge Fernandez makes his way through the car lot littered with unwanted SUVs. “I’ve never seen it this bad,” the auto dealer says. With gas prices at an all-time high, one expert says SUVs and trucks as personal cars may soon be an “endangered species.”

I've passworded all galleries of Callum. If you want to be able to see the photos, drop me a line and I'll give you the authentication details.

People keep dropping off of Planet SUSE. Don't worry, they're not being assigned to some bizarre Deep Space Inter-Distro mission. What happens is that they embed code in their blogs. Now, of course they do it's a hackery type site but, because the site uses PHP (in order to be able to do the feed hiding), occasionally, PHP can't parse their entries because of the code. When this happens, I temporarily disable the syndication of their feed.

I'm looking into a way of not having to do this because ideally, I'd rather not have to.

• Up lateish; into town with N. to do the shopping variously. Lunch; out to Mepal Outdoor Centre - for assorted play-ground, climbing fun. Lots of child near-submergal experiences in the 1 metre deep ball-pool: quite fun.

Since I saw some comments/requests during openSUSE 11.0’s beta phase that Firefox is still at 3.0b5 level even as Firefox 3.0rc1 is already out I want to give a short comment on what the plans are.
In openSUSE’s roadmap there was a freeze for packages containing cryptographic algorithms at April 7th. At that point Firefox 3.0b5 was current and so it’s not allowed to make cryptographic changes after that date. As Firefox depends heavily on Mozilla’s NSS which holds these algorithms we have to keep them in sync to be sure everything works.
When openSUSE 11.0 gets finally released there will be an online update to the latest Firefox package.
If you want to test what actually will end up in that package you can subscribe to the buildservice repository mozilla:beta and get the latest package there.
You are welcome to report issues with that in Novell bugzilla’s Firefox component mentioning that you use the buildservice package.

Spend last week in our core development center in Provo, really useful - face to face meetings simply are more effective than conference calls, no way around that. The environment there is quite nice, the town lies right next to the Rocky Mountains, so even in May you have an extraordinary view on snowy mountain tops.

Didn’t blog much lately - traveled to France, India, Canada, Finland - spent some time Boston USA*, and am in Atlanta now for the weekend. Next week we do a POC in Spain (Valencia), then it’s likely off to New Zealand again, and after that I continue my travel to Santa Cruz USA, where I will be living for three months this summer, if all works out as planned. Orchestrator is a fairly young product - but there is at least plenty of interest from all over the world for it, I’ll tell ya.

Also filed my first US patent yesterday. More on that later.

And I’m on facebook now - although that didn’t really bring me any good so far, but I guess it doesn’t hurt.

* I saw the Microsoft - Novell Interop lab with my own eyes - yes it really exists !

Today (Saturday, May 24, 2008), Indonesian openSUSE Community (openSUSE-ID) have a regular monthly meeting. Meeting for this month will be held on detik.com office, Jakarta.

We got about 30-40 registered members will be attending the meeting. It would reach more than 30 members because some of our regular meeting members didn’t submit their registration. The registration process itself only counted how much the attendees for better meeting room preparation.

This month, the agenda of meeting will cover up some discussion topics : openSUSE 11.0 features and highlight preview, presentation about zypper package manager, openSUSE on USB Live Stick demo, preparation for IGOS Summit 2 event (The event looks similar with FOSDEM in Europe. We have openSUSE booth at the event) and openSUSE 11.0 release party.

I’ll be update with some picts of our monthly meeting.

jslezacek shares a tip on how to build a high capacity load balancing cluster using open source tools like LVS and ldirectord with added redundancy and high availability provided by heartbeat 2.

read more

• SUSE rock-star Michael Matz made my whole month with his three line gdb patch to make debugging un-instrumented x86 binaries work again; nice.
• Gave up on hoping that Gnome would serve my blog sanely - apparently asking for it is a denial of service attack. Duplicated it at http://www.go-oo.org/~michael/blog/index.atom.
• To further confirm Michael Matz is my hero - I did a comparison of OO.o debugging. OO.o is interesting because the debuginfo package you need is 275Mb small - but of course, you actually need rather more than that: the glib debuginfo package and various other pieces. Here is the trace before the patch:

  (gdb) bt
  #0  0xffffe430 in __kernel_vsyscall ()
  #1  0xb6eb21d7 in *__GI___poll (fds=0x8641990, nfds=6, timeout=599) at ../sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/poll.c:87
  #2  0xb554f6f2 in ?? () from /usr/lib/libglib-2.0.so.0
  #3  0x08641990 in ?? ()
  #4  0x00000006 in ?? ()
  #5  0x00000257 in ?? ()
  #6  0x08641990 in ?? ()
  #7  0x00000006 in ?? ()
  #8  0x00000000 in ?? ()

  And afterwards:

  (gdb) bt
  #0  0xffffe430 in __kernel_vsyscall ()
  #1  0xb6eb21d7 in *__GI___poll (fds=0x8641990, nfds=6, timeout=599) at ../sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/poll.c:87
  #2  0xb554f6f2 in ?? () from /usr/lib/libglib-2.0.so.0
  #3  0xb554f9d8 in g_main_context_iteration () from /usr/lib/libglib-2.0.so.0
  #4  0xb5b3d68d in ?? () from /usr/lib/ooo-2.0/program/libvclplug_gtk680li.so
  #5  0xb54f4751 in X11SalInstance::Yield () from /usr/lib/ooo-2.0/program/libvclplug_gen680li.so
  #6  0xb7e06cf1 in Application::Yield () from /usr/lib/ooo-2.0/program/libvcl680li.so
  #7  0xb7e06d3f in Application::Execute () from /usr/lib/ooo-2.0/program/libvcl680li.so
  #8  0x08071c53 in desktop::Desktop::Main ()
  #9  0xb7e0a27e in ?? () from /usr/lib/ooo-2.0/program/libvcl680li.so
  #10 0xb7e0a41a in SVMain () from /usr/lib/ooo-2.0/program/libvcl680li.so
  #11 0x08066c60 in main ()

  Save your download bandwidth quota (and the planet too) by grabbing a new gdb for your OpenSUSE 11.0 from here.
• Discovered & filed a juicy gcc -Os crasher. Lunch - Tina and children visiting, good to meet her. Back to work, mail to chew. Finally got around to writing up some of my thoughts on how to make the OO.o Community Council more relevant, representative and frankly interesting to people, that Louis asked for; posted for discussion, though missing the drawings. Call with Kelli.

Long time openSUSE developer Klaus Kämpf joined former S.u.S.E nine years ago and since then never looked back being committed to his System Management Architect job at Novell.

Please enjoy this ‘People of openSUSE’ interview!

(more…)

NOTE:  HP offers SLED pre-loaded on several models of this laptop, the main page is simply the FEATURED models, if you click on ALL MODELS, you’ll see the (KX869AT) model that sports the 1.2GHz CPU and 120GB HD along with 1GB of RAM standard.

There’s a trend developing if you haven’t noticed… small, lightweight, but functional laptops.

• Asus Eee PC (read my impressions…)
• Macbook Air
• Lenovo X300
• …others…

…and now you can add a similar form-factor device from HP to the list - HP 2133 Mini-note PC. You can read the HP press-release here or review the entire HP press kit.

But what’s really interesting to readers of this blog is that one of the operating system options is to have SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) pre-loaded and fully supported on the HP 2133 Mini-note for as little as $499. If you want to buy one with Windows Vista Home, it’s going to cost you $100 more. Did I mention that the SLED version includes a fully operational MS Office compatible office suite (OpenOffice.org Novell Edition) whereas the Vista version comes with a MS Office trial edition. Get ready to add another $200-$300 to the tab!

It looks like you can buy them online here!

Whoo-hoo!!

HP joins the list of other (here and here) IHVs that pre-load SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED), so welcome fellas!

Say you wanted to update the BIOS on a colleague’s HP nc6230. You go to the HP website to find a “ROMPaq for HP Notebook System BIOS (68DTA) – FreeDOS Bootable Diskette”, which sounds exactly like what you’d want to download.
Well, follow that link and you’ll get a file called sp35281.exe. Does not look like a floppy image at all.
So let’s find out what it is:

~> file sp35281.exe
sp35281.exe: MS-DOS executable PE  for MS Windows (GUI) Intel 80386 32-bit

Damn. A Windows executable, just to create a floppy image…
But there is always wine, so we’ll start it with that…

…long story short: it is some kind of self-extracting archive, which extracts an executable (of course for Windows, not DOS…), which then will write the image to the floppy disk.

There would probably be the possibility to configure wine to use a floppy image as drive A:, but fortunately this was not necessary. Examining the rom.exe, not even too closely gives:

~> du -b .wine/drive_c/SWSetup/sp35281/rom.exe
1502208 .wine/drive_c/SWSetup/sp35281/rom.exe

Which is exactly the size of a floppy disk image (1474560 Bytes) plus 27kB.
Just guessing, i extracted the last 1440kB from the executable:

tux@d173:~> dd if=.wine/drive_c/SWSetup/sp35281/rom.exe of=floppy.img bs=1k skip=27
tux@d173:~> file floppy.img
floppy.img: DOS floppy 1440k, x86 hard disk boot sector

Voilá - a bootable floppy image. Now i only hope for HP to start recognizing that they are doing no favour to their customers by obfuscating their BIOS updates like that…

The increasing use of MP3 players, USB sticks and free wi-fi is creating a major security problem for organizations - the thumbsucking threat! With the growing use of these endpoint devices employees can be much more mobile and productive, however they could also expose corporate data to unauthorized eyes — or worse — malicious use.

In a recent CSO piece, Novell senior vice president and general manager, Joe Wagner outlines the risks and offers a few tips to help secure the enterprise. Check it out here.

Just back from a two day ZenWorks Linux Management training at Novell office in Bombay. On the third day, did a little bit of tourist thing, visited Kanheri Caves.

Here are some of the pictures.

Rest of the images here.