Planet SUSE

Novell User Communities: SLES: Netconsole Howto: Send kernel boot messages over ethernet

Fri, 09 May 2008 19:18:44 +0000

jslezacek shares a tip on how to save Kernel boot messages after a server crash/hang when access to a serial console is not available.

Cool Solutions

Jigish Gohil: Simple-ccsm enhancements

Fri, 09 May 2008 17:29:17 +0000

Thanks to Rodrigo’s work, simple-ccsm now has a switch to easily enable/disable Compiz.

On openSUSE 11.0 users will not have to fiddle with any commandline, hack scripts or xorg.conf to enable Compiz. AIGLX is enabled by default on all the supported hardwares, and as soon as ATI/NVIDIA drivers are installed via 1-click, so all that is required is launch simple-ccsm (Desktop Effects) application and enable compiz.

In case you are wondering what theme I am using, it is just the default openSUSE gilouch theme, greened just the way I like it. Download and drag and drop the tarball on “Appearence” caplet if you want it too.

Andrew Wafaa: The Verdict Is

Fri, 09 May 2008 17:01:00 +0000

Monsoon

The voting went as follows:

*Monsoon = 8
*Transmission = 5
*No Preference = 5

This takes into account both the openSUSE GNOME meeting on irc and the web vote.

People, you had your chance to voice your opinion, hopefully now we can put this issue to bed. Don't forget if you don't like Monsoon for whatever reason you can deselect it and choose Transmission instead from the install media or from the GNOME:Community repo. This is also where the latest and greatest of many GNOME apps reside

Thank you to all those that took part.

Andrew Wafaa: Poll Reminder

Fri, 09 May 2008 13:33:57 +0000

Just a gentle reminder that the GNOME BitTorrent Client Poll closes in just under 2.5 hours. Just to clarify, there will be one client installed by default and the other one will be available on the installation media should users prefer the alternative.

There has been some good feedback already, so thanks in advance.

James Ogley: Google Summer of Code on Planet SUSE

Fri, 09 May 2008 09:12:00 +0000

Participants in the Google Summer of Code will now be recognised on Planet SUSE by having GSoC in front of their names at the top of their posts.

If you're a student on the GSoC and you don't see this with your posts, please drop me a line and let me know.

Mario Đanić: GSoC08 Bi-weekly report (21.04. - 05.05.)

Fri, 09 May 2008 04:07:31 +0000

Its about time I start writing reports so you can see what am I working on. First in the series is a bi-weekly one due to community bonding and learning period, but I intend to switch to regular weekly cycles once things settle down a bit.

played around with BuildService
tried playing around with openSUSE Beta1
learnt LaTeX
participated in various BuildService-related discussions
explored BuildService API
familiarized myself with osc
got to know various community members
helped some people with openSUSE problems

That would be all for now. Although according to GSoC timeline hacking starts on May 26, I hope to start writing some prototype code sooner. Hacking is fun

Kohei Yoshida: New sheet protection dialog

Fri, 09 May 2008 03:06:26 +0000

I’ve just finished designing a new dialog for Calc’s sheet protection functionality to allow optional sheet protection options. This was actually my first time designing a dialog from scratch instead of modifying an existing one, so I had to dig around and figure out how to add a dialog. It turns out that it is actually very simple once you know what to do. After several hours of creative designing process, I’ve come up with something I can show to people. So here it is:

One thing to note: obviously this dialog is inspired by the similar functionality offered by Excel, and Excel provides many more options for sheet protection than just the two I’m showing here. The reason I only have two at the moment is because I’ve only implemented support for those two options in Calc core. When we support more options in the core, we can easily add them to the dialog.

This work is on-going in scsheetprotection02 CWS. Aside from the new dialog and sheet protection options, this CWS contains my other work on the binary Excel export encryption as well as sheet and document password interoperability between Excel and Calc. I’m trying to wrap this up, so hopefully I can come up with something that people can try out soon.

Gabriel Stein: WTF?

Fri, 09 May 2008 02:28:12 +0000

PT_BR - Sorry english speakers.

Estava pensando uma revista mais “consistente” com os fatos, que mostrasse mais coisas além de propaganda e achismos diversos, advinhações tolas…

Dai comecei… Newsweek, Times, Der Spiegel, Europe News….só olhando os sites das revistas, procurando um clipping ou form para assinar… dai olhando a Der Spiegel, eu encontro esse tipo de coisa:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/ - der Spiegel
http://www.honestreporting.co.uk/articles/critiques/Bowens_World.asp - Europe News.

Porque esse tipo de informação certeira não existe por aqui? Será que essa informação é tão superior para entendermos?

Joe Brockmeier: There’s more to Linux than support

Fri, 09 May 2008 00:33:29 +0000

If Oracle had its way, there’d be one Linux distro — but who would do the development? According to this post by Paula Rooney, Oracle’s Edward Screven says that Linux distro vendors should compete “purely on the support side of the business.”

That, of course, is complete nonsense.

The tension between Linux vendors to bring in customers through added features and continual development is what helps the Linux community move forward. Without that tension, Linux wouldn’t have matured as quickly as it did, and it wouldn’t continue to improve at such a rapid pace.

I’d also like to know which company is supposed to pick up the burden of development? Oracle isn’t doing it — they’re contributing to Kernel development upstream, but not doing much in the way of advancing Linux beyond that. While the multi-billion dollar company hitches a ride on Red Hat’s development infrastructure, Red Hat, Novell and other Linux vendors are investing in the future as well as supporting the here and now. Very nice for Oracle, not so nice for the rest of the community.

Even though Red Hat might be thrilled at the prospect of being the only Linux, I doubt they’d be thrilled about carrying the sole burden of developing everything to allow companies like Oracle to ride on their coattails.

If Novell adopted the Oracle model, we’d be able to save tons of money on development. We’d also be failing to hold up our responsibility as a Linux vendor to contribute to the foundation of our success. We’d also give Red Hat less incentive to innovate and work on new features. And we’d definitely be less interesting to our customers.

I also don’t fancy the idea of a single vendor in control of the operating system. Even when it’s open source — having multiple distributions is, while admittedly more challenging from the ISV standpoint — better for the market, and better for each vendor because they are not solely responsible for the entire development ecosystem.

Linux needs more contributors, not fewer contributors, and I don’t think all OS development or decision-making should rest in the hands of a single vendor. It’s too important to leave with one vendor or project. This is why I chastized Sun the other day for continuing to tilt at the Solaris windmill.

The Linux vendors do need to find ways to make it easier for ISVs like Oracle to target multiple Linux distros — and that’s why we support the Linux Standard Base — to find a standard that allows companies like Oracle to more easily support multiple distros, without doing away with actual development and advancement that Linux vendors provide.

Novell OpenPR Blog: SAP, HP, IBM and SUSE Linux Enterprise

Fri, 09 May 2008 00:02:00 +0000

Earlier this week, SAP announced additional Business All-in-One solutions, this time partnering with HP and IBM. Details on specific configurations with each partner are listed in those announcements, but a common thread is the SAP Business All-in-One solutions are based on SUSE Linux Enterprise from Novell. The integrated solutions are targeted at small to midsize enterprises to simplify deployment and lower costs.

Marek Stopka: The best distribution for R language?

Thu, 08 May 2008 22:02:27 +0000

I am working on CRAN packages in openSUSE buildservice for some time. I have more then 1300 CRAN packages there. This packages were created by my automatic creation script in BASH. But my script was not perfect. It is because DESCRIPTION file in this packages was not perfect as well. ...

Novell User Communities: SLES: Configuring Apache for Multiple Language Support on SLES 10

Thu, 08 May 2008 19:44:28 +0000

Mike Faris explains how to configure your Apache Web Server to allow for multiple languages.

Cool Solutions

Joe Brockmeier: Demise of the press release… Rise of the Lizards

Thu, 08 May 2008 18:34:59 +0000

This post by Melissa Shapiro of Mozilla illustrates (one of the reasons) why Firefox and the Mozilla Foundation is doing so well at getting the word out about Firefox and other news from the foundation — because they’re not relying on the press release as a sole means of getting the word out.

It’s also because Mozilla views marketing as a conversation rather than as a one-way street that begins with a press release and ends with a “did you get our press release” call to a reporter in the hopes that they’ll do all the work in spreading Mozilla’s story.

How does this related to openSUSE? (Aside from the fact that most of us run Firefox and include it in the distro, of course…) I’m talking about the news that we’ve launched lizards.opensuse.org.

The lizards site is a multi-author WordPress blog to help encourage openSUSE members to blog about what they’re doing. Many members have stepped up already and are aggregated on Planet openSUSE, and our blogging Lizards will be as well, but we also recognized that we needed to give some of our community a little extra nudge to get blogging.

Note that lizards is a platform for openSUSE-related discussions only — let’s leave the lolcats to personal blogs and whatnot — but we should look forward to a lot more discussion of the great work that’s going into openSUSE.

(I couldn’t help whipping up a lolcat to go with the discussion…)

Getting back to the press release… as a project, we still need to put out announcements and the occasional press release — as a non-practicing journalist, I can attest to the importance of a press release for reference purposes when writing stories, but I’ve rarely been moved to write a story because of one.

However, in conjunction with announcements and releases, we need to supplement that kind of communication heavily with discussion on our blogs and using other means to reach the openSUSE community and beyond with news and information that will help build our community and add to it.

So, I look forward to watching the lizard grow fat and happy with posts about what’s going on in openSUSE. Thanks much to the openSUSE contributors who have already started posting on the site!

Gabriel Burt: Banshee Podcast Support Coming in Beta 2

Thu, 08 May 2008 17:45:36 +0000

First, a quick note to people using the Ubuntu Banshee 1.0 PPA packages. Unfortunately, the packager messed up and at first released packages without iPod or MTP support. And now it has come to my attention (via comments and bugs from disappointed users) that the packages include the podcast extension, when it is pre-alpha and should not have been included. Hopefully the Ubuntu guys will get fixed packages out soon, and be more careful with packaging in the future. Jorge is working to make things right.

We do expect to have the podcast extension ready by Beta 2. And Beta 2 will have auto-rip support which I just committed last night. After enabling it in your Preferences, whenever you insert a CD it will automatically begin importing it, if it's not already in your library and if MusicBrainz information can be found for it. Very useful if you are ripping many CDs.

Michael Meeks: 2008-05-08: Thursday

Thu, 08 May 2008 17:39:08 +0000

Awoke in the morning, to discover a crushed mouse in the "better mousetrap", the part-time vegan (have to one-up Miguel) in me not inconsiderably upset by this; binned it.
To work, phone call with Noel - who has isolated a most interesting 64bit compiler bug afflicting the OO.o test-tool: nice. Dug at mail. Filed bugs, played with Soeren's display properties capplet, and was unfeasibly pleased to see it working so nicely.
Amused by Philip's extraordinary analysis of BS 1363 as Wikipedia says This plug is often described as the safest in the world. What is meant by this concern for static electricity is quite unclear to me; by design (as is common), the earth pin is connected before the live & neutral pins are so the device casing is earthed: ie. it should not be possible to have a device (even with a live -> earth fault) whose casing is live & un-earthed. Consequently - you can touch the earth pin as much as you like (or drop tin foil on it or whatever) and if you get a static shock - this is because you have a nylon carpet you were just shuffling about on: you would get the same effect from the tap, a lamp-post, or well anything good earth.
Call with Florian, lunch with Lydia. Booted the Gnome Live-CD on x86_64 - looks beautiful, configured my awkward monitor correctly too: nice. Did the install with yast-ncurses to avoid the now fixed yast2-gtk live installer bug.
Chased nasty nautilus bug a bit; played with the babes; conference call with Greg & crew on the OSRB - interesting. Installed all the good stuff onto the x86_64 live CD install system: the joy of zypper etc.

Andrew Wafaa: A Call For Your Votes

Thu, 08 May 2008 17:26:00 +0000

So this isn't the primaries in the US, but the openSUSE GNOME team need your input.

As per my previous post(s) - sorry about the double posting - we need a final decision on what will be the default BitTorrent app. In the meeting today we had a vote but we need more votes to be cast, especially from all you users both novice and pro and anything inbetween. Please oh please try and be objective and not belligerent, try and forget about the programming language etc and focus on the functions

The only problem with this is that I need to close the voting by tomorrow Friday 09 May 2008 @ 1600UTC/GMT/ZULU - or for those not quite with the whole "foreign" time thing try this. To do so please leave a comment here with your choice of:

1) Monsoon

2) Transmission

I will announce the results shortly after then. You have a voice and a vote, use them or loose them. Don't forget this is one way of contributing to the distro, and without your input evil maniacal dictators like myself will rule the world - help make it a happier place

Gabriel Stein: Review: openSUSE 11 Beta2

Thu, 08 May 2008 17:06:29 +0000

Well, on last two days I installed the openSUSE 11 Beta2 using a liveCD with KDE 4. Amazing. Congratulations openSUSE Team. Its really a great job! Is so easy to use the installer, with good interactivity.

But, nothing is perfect.

On the first reboot after liveCD Install, I received a shell prompt to login. WTF? Probably, the correct way on first restart after complete install is a runlevel 5 startup. But the openSUSE restarted on runlevel 3! I fixed this error on /etc/inittab, but to dummie user is so hard!

After, I start the “kdm”, and I received a KDE “already logged”. I started kdm! I need a login interface to choice my normal user login!

And finally, xorg.conf are using fbdev. I have a worst video card called Via Chrome 9 HC IGP, which I can´t turn on for now a correct drivers(yes, I found a correct repository for 10.3, but I don´t had success after install). I will try after install the correct driver, but I want the vesa driver on xorg.conf. Honestly, vesa works better.

For now, I´m really waiting the final release of openSUSE 11. Is the best designed and developed SuSe for me. On next year I will celebrate my first “10 years” using SuSE. And I will use more and more years.

openSUSE News: LinuxTag 2008

Thu, 08 May 2008 16:53:49 +0000

Please don’t forget the biggest Linux event in Germany, just a few weeks away! For the second time it will be in Berlin, from 28-31.05.2008. The location is slightly different, still at Messehalle Funkturm, but this time it’s hall 7 (south instead of east like last year).

Again we try to have an interesting program for you, let me be little bit more verbose …

- booth: meet the openSUSE community, talk with developers and see the latest openSUSE 11.0 beta/RC running. We will have decent hardware and big screens to show openSUSE in all it’s glory. We are happy that we have again a community project at our booth, this time it’s Linux-Club.de, a big German Linux forum. If you are interested in the Novell Enterprise products, we will have also a counter with SLE. You can also meet Zonker for the first time in Germany!

- openSUSE day: one day, packed with talks, this time on Saturday! Look at the schedule for more information, we think that there is something for everybody in it.

There are of course a lot of other interesting open-source projects at the LinuxTag, so if you are in Germany/Berlin, don’t miss it!

Some links:
Program schedule: http://www.linuxtag.org/2008/en/conf/events/vp-samstag.html
openSUSE page: http://en.opensuse.org/LinuxTag

Christopher Hobbs: openSUSE Guiding Principles

Thu, 08 May 2008 16:31:48 +0000

I just stumbled upon the Guiding Principles of the openSUSE project, located here: http://en.opensuse.org/Guiding_Principles

I like the fact that they’ve taken the initiative to lay out their direction and drive. I also don’t think that it’s a lot of feel-good fluff like missions statements sometimes tend to be. I really feel like the community is making a good attempt at following the list.

I’ve signed the guiding principles in support of the project and I’d like to encourage others to at least give them a read. If you support it, sign it with your Novell user account.

James Ogley: A haiku for a sunny summer day

Thu, 08 May 2008 15:48:00 +0000

In the summer time
When the pollen count is high
I wish plants would die.

SUSE Linux Enterprise in the Americas: SGI Takes SUSE Linux to the Moon

Thu, 08 May 2008 15:45:50 +0000

“The Register” reports NASA is working with SGI on acquiring a massive SGI Altix ICE supercomputer to assist with jobs for future manned missions and other aeronautical research.

Read on.

Jan Weber: Modules and even more modules

Thu, 08 May 2008 11:48:54 +0000

The approach towards the setup of an LTSP server changed today. LTSP GUI will be split in some modules. You will have an module for setting up the server, if your distro comes with the needed scripts. The other module will be there to edit the ltsp.conf file and help you to manage the configuration. And thanks to ogra i will implement the whole stuff flexible, so that in a future version it should be possible to manage more then one server.

Interesting things coming up on my radar, looking forward to more interesting stuff happening. The SoC adventure has just begun…

James Ogley: Making my life easier

Thu, 08 May 2008 08:26:00 +0000

For those who either have to use Windows occasionally or (poor, poor people) all the time, there are kick-ass OpenOffice.org 2.4.0 builds now available at Go-OO.org.

Why does this make my life easier? The presentation PC at church runs Windows and this means I can now upgrade the OOo install on it.

Andrew Wafaa: Open Soapbox

Thu, 08 May 2008 05:55:59 +0000

With openSUSE 11.0 GNOME gained a new default BitTorrent client - monsoon. This choice has been met with some criticism, which is fine.

Well the GNOME Team are holding their regular meeting today Thursday 08 May 2008 @ 1600UTC/GMT/ZULU - or for those not quite with the whole "foreign" time thing try this. One of the themes is the BitTorrent client, why am I saying this? Well for all those that have an opinion about it, please come along and let everyone know what that is, yes there may be a chance to get on your soap box and denounce the world and it's dog, and we can have a real-time discussion about it. If you don't tell someone (preferably someone that makes decisions) then no one knows and nothing happens, filing bugs also helps

A bit of background reading on why the choice of monsoon was made can be found here - yes I did indeed do the initial review of clients and made the recommendation, and I'm sticking to it! I did however get others to test it to confirm I'm not 100% insane. As with all applications your mileage may vary, but we are intent in trying to make your mileage be the same great journey as one would expect from openSUSE. So if you care, join in and you never know you may bring something to the table that no one thought of

Novell OpenPR Blog: Another NASA supercomputer with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server

Wed, 07 May 2008 23:45:29 +0000

NASA is getting its next supercomputer from SGI, specifically a 20,480-core SGI Altix ICE system, for those of you thinking of maybe getting one for the family. As you might have guessed, it will run SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell.

NASA’s new supercomputer will be one of the largest SGI Altix ICE systems ever deployed, joining the State of New Mexico’s Encanto, a 14,336-core SGI Altix ICE system which is currently ranked as the third most powerful supercomputer in the world. And yes, it also runs SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

Andrew Wafaa: Open Soap Box

Wed, 07 May 2008 23:43:37 +0000

With openSUSE 11.0 GNOME gained a new default BitTorrent client - monsoon. This choice has been met with some criticism, which is fine.

Well the GNOME Team are holding their regular meeting tomorrow Thursday 08 May 2008 @ 1600UTC/GMT/ZULU - or for those not quite with the whole “foreign” time thing try this. One of the themes is the BitTorrent client, why am I saying this? Well for all those that have an opinion about it, please come along and let everyone know what that is, yes there may be a chance to get on your soap box and denounce the world and it’s dog, and we can have a real-time discussion about it. If you don’t tell someone (preferably someone that makes decisions) then no one knows and nothing happens, filing bugs also helps

A bit of background reading on why the choice of monsoon was made can be found here - yes I did indeed do the initial review of clients and made the recommendation, and I’m sticking to it! I did however get others to test it to confirm I’m not 100% insane. As with all applications your mileage may vary, but we are intent in trying to make your mileage be the same great journey as one would expect from openSUSE. So if you care, join in and you never know you may bring something to the table that no one thought of

Michael Meeks: 2008-05-07: Wednesday

Wed, 07 May 2008 23:00:00 +0000

Cycled H. to school. Sucked into bug mail somehow, ended up debugging evolution, ended up improving some debugging code in ORBit2, and chasing the problem a little further at least. Nice to see Ray fixing bonobo-activation lifecycle issues.
Lunch, knocked up a quick pattern lint tool for coolo to help avoid future factory breakage with broken patterns. Phoned letting agent to why 2007 was missing a month - Lizzy to investigate.
Enlightening call about artwork with Jakub and Garret, fixed nasty yast2 gtk bug killing popups from the second stage of the installer.
Cell group in the evening; back late. Lay in bed, admiring the wife, the ceiling, trying to sleep & that sort of thing Is that scratching noise you !? - discovered a mouse under the chaise-longue: cue sudden wifely exit & a most interesting bonding exercise: man with mouse - involving the ineffective persuit around the room of a tiny, fast (and remarkably sweet) little creature by a large, slow & clumsy me. Piled furniture on the bed to get a better view: confounded by it hiding under the edge of the carpet. Eventually lost it under the door into the rest of the house. Set traps, back to bed. It's comforting that it really preferred to scurry across the floor - perhaps the stereotypical women have the right idea standing on chairs to avoid them.

openSUSE News: openSUSE Weekly News, Issue 21

Wed, 07 May 2008 22:47:41 +0000

Issue #21 of openSUSE Weekly News is now out!

In this week’s issue:

openSUSE 11.0 Beta 2
People of openSUSE: Greg Kroah-Hartman
Jigish Gohil: Sliced sphere in compiz-fusion-git packages
arstechnica.com: Coming along strong: first look at openSUSE 11 beta 2

Pavel Machek: Kohjinsha wifi driver

Wed, 07 May 2008 20:52:54 +0000

Kohjinsha wifi driver is now updated to 2.6.26-rc1, and should be available in my work git-tree. I won't have Kohjinsha with me for next week, so don't expect any development. But if you want to clean up some really challenging code, feel free to help. Longer term, some testers would be very welcome.

SUSE Linux Enterprise in the Americas: Event in New York City: Be the Hero. Your Linux is Ready for Virtualization. (May 21)

Wed, 07 May 2008 18:57:39 +0000

Seminar: Novell & Total Tec Systems - Be the Hero. Your Linux is Ready for Virtualization.

May 21, 2008 @ New York, NY
It’s time to experience how the Xen virtualization functionality of SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server optimizes your data center and makes all your resources more efficient and cost effective. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell delivers rock-solid reliability, the highest-quality support, and a complete ecosystem of software, hardware, and services partners.
At the event, you will hear a market update from IDC analyst John Humphreys, experience demonstrations of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Xen virtualization, and interact with our experts during a panel Q&A discussion.
Guest Speaker: John Humphreys, Program Vice President, IDC’s Enterprise Platforms Group
Registration

More Upcoming Events…

SUSE Linux Enterprise in the Americas: Event in Baltimore MD: Saving IT Budget with Linux (May 20)

Wed, 07 May 2008 18:54:56 +0000

Executive Breakfast with Novell & Mavenspire - Saving IT Budget with Linux

May 20, 2008 @ Baltimore MD
Part of the “Maximizing IT Value” Executive Breakfast Series
Is your IT budget getting tighter? If so, come join us for breakfast and learn how you can leverage enterprise-grade Linux to save costs while maintaining high levels of service and availability. You’ll hear from industry professionals with decades of IT and data center experience—and squeeze in the most important meal of the day while you’re at it. Our experts will share their ideas about how Linux and its complementary solutions can help you stretch your IT budget. We’ll help you learn how to do more (with Linux) for less.
Registration
Space is extremely limited

More Upcoming Events…

SUSE Linux Enterprise in the Americas: Banshee 1.0 Beta 1 Released

Wed, 07 May 2008 17:21:12 +0000

This just in from our friendly Banshee hackers Gabriel Burt and Aaron Bockover (and many others). Banshee is of course our preferred media player at the OPS Americas blog and for good reason!

We have just released Banshee 1.0 Beta 1, aka 0.99.1! This release adds some major features and lots of polish.

View the release notes
Banshee 1.0 Beta 1 Source (bz2)
openSUSE 10.3 users can
Foresight 2.0 users: Use PackageKit or Conary to install banshee-1

MTP and iPod device support have landed! Both MTP and iPod support album artwork, on-the-fly transcoding (converting between file formats), and video support!

Banshee playing music, showing cover art, and transferring to an MTP device

Other features and fixes include:

Fullscreen video playback (go to Now Playing and press f or hit the Fullscreen button)
Extensions can be enabled and disabled in the new Mange Extensions tab within your Preferences.
Banshee can be scripted using Boo
Improved gstreamer error handling (for missing files, codecs, etc)
A bug with play counts, introduced in Alpha 3, has been fixed
Writing metadata to file was not working in the Alphas, is fixed
Issues with the play queue should all be resolved
Limiting smart playlists by file size or duration works
Shuffle and repeat are automatically disabled while playing Last.fm

Default Smart Playlists

This release also features default smart playlists, created for new users and users with zero smart playlists. There is a more extensive list of predefined smart playlists, including the defaults, available in the New Smart Playlist dialog.

Thanks to Aaron Bockover, Alexander Hixon, Bertrand Lorentz, Christopher Rogers, Scott Peterson, Sebastian Dröge, and Wouter Bolsterlee for code contributions for this release, and to Daniel Nylander (sv), Gabor Kelemen (hu), Jordi Mas (ca), and Wouter Bolsterlee (nl) for updated translations! And to Jorge Castro for testing and release notes help, and Michael Monreal and Andrew Conkling for testing and bugzilla work!

You can follow the posts of Banshee contributors on Planet Banshee. We are a friendly, vibrant community and always glad to have people join us! If you have been wanting to contribute back to free software and GNOME, I think you’ll find Banshee’s code and C# a pleasure to work in, and a healthy amount of support and encouragement from a very active community. Join us on our mailing list, in our IRC chatroom, and on our wiki!

Jan Weber: In the beginning there was…

Wed, 07 May 2008 17:14:55 +0000

…an empty Blog. But now the time has come to spread the word about The_Code having a project at the Google Summer of Code!

This Blog will be about my GSoC Project an LTSP GUI. I am proud of being chosen to do this project during the summer and looking forward to a great time.

For more information on the project come see the openSUSE GSoC idea page and my own page with some screens!

So come back more information to be available soon.

Stephan Binner: KDE 4.0.4, Codenamed Out-Of-Stuff-To-Tell

Wed, 07 May 2008 16:57:29 +0000

The usual monthly game: a new KDE bugfix release, openSUSE packages and a new Live-CD which as already said looks more and more less like KDE 4.0 but like our openSUSE 11.0 KDE4 desktop (while still being based on openSUSE 10.3):

Novell User Communities: SLES: How to migrate users from passwd to openLDAP, on a SLES 10 server

Wed, 07 May 2008 16:38:24 +0000

Fred Patterson shares a tip on how to turn your /etc/passwd, /etc/group and /etc/shadow files into a LDAP database.

Cool Solutions

SUSE Linux Enterprise in the Americas: Managing your iPod with RhythmBox & Linux

Wed, 07 May 2008 15:19:28 +0000

From the article:

This article shows how you can use an iPod on a Linux desktop with the Rhythmbox audio player. It covers how you can upload MP3 files from your desktop to your iPod and delete files on the iPod. Normally, Apple’s iTunes software is needed to manage an iPod, but iTunes is not available for Linux. Fortunately, there are Linux alternatives such as Rhythmbox that can handle the task.

Henne Vogelsang: mhonarc RSS feeds

Wed, 07 May 2008 15:17:52 +0000

Based on Dave Stragands mhonarc rss 2.0 config file and a slightly modified mha-preview i hacked up RSS feeds of our mailinglists. I just replaced the hand crafted HTML stripping in mha-preview with HTML::Entities::encode (i know HTML markup in RSS is considered evil, but so are kittens in some parts of the world!) and let it process the whole mail instead of an excerpt.

The feeds are not always valid for now, the HTML::Entities encoding seems to miss some parts sometimes. Might be invalid input as well. This needs some further investigation but you can already beta test it. Just point your RSS aggregator to

http://lists.opensuse.org/$LISTNAME/mailinglist.rss

If you have any problems please contact me. Have fun…

Andreas Jaeger: Talking bootloader - heard in Beta2

Wed, 07 May 2008 13:47:35 +0000

Steffen announced today that as of openSUSE 11.0 beta2, the graphical bootloader (the one on the installation media) supports speech output via the pc-speaker - reading out all menu items, he says:

This feature is mainly there to aid visual impaired people.

It’s still experimental and I’d like to get your feedback whether it works or not on your machine.

To try it, simply press F9. (In the worst case, your machine will freeze at this point.)

I gave it a try and it worked fine. I just missed the German translations!

Great work, Steffen!

Jan Kupec: More options to modifyrepo

Wed, 07 May 2008 12:30:52 +0000

In 10.3, zypper modifyrepo (mr) only allowed you to enable/disable one repository and enable/disable autorefresh for it. In 11.0 the options have grown in number a bit. Did i mention the nice help texts?

$ zypper help mr
modifyrepo (mr) <options> <alias|#|uri>
modifyrepo (mr) <options> <--all|--remote|--local|--medium-type>

Modify properties of repositories specified by alias, number or URI
or by the '--all, --remote, --local, --medium-type' aggregate options.

Command options:
-d, --disable             Disable the repository (but don't remove it).
-e, --enable              Enable a disabled repository.
-r, --refresh             Enable auto-refresh of the repository.
-R, --no-refresh          Disable auto-refresh of the repository.
-n, --name                Set a descriptive name for the repository.
-p, --priority <1-99>     Set priority of the repository.
-k, --keep-packages       Enable RPM files caching.
-K, --no-keep-packages    Disable RPM files caching.
-a, --all                 Apply changes to all repositories.
-l, --local               Apply changes to all local repositories.
-t, --remote              Apply changes to all remote repositories.
-m, --medium-type <type>  Apply changes to repositories of specified type.

This is what you will see in zypper 0.11.3. The aggregate options (and the -k options) were added just recently by our new colleague Josef Reidinger. Those familiar with 10.3 zypper, note that the --enable-autorefresh/-a and --disable-autorefresh options are now deprecated (-a shorthand even had to be removed because of conflict with --all) in favor of --refresh and --no-refresh options. This change was introduced for the sake of consistency with other commands' options. All the options will be described in more detail in the man page soon.

Few examples

To disable autorefresh for all repositories, do:

$ zypper mr -Ra
Nothing to change for repository 'openSUSE-DVD 11.0'.
Autorefresh has been disabled for repository 'fate'.
Nothing to change for repository 'factory'.
Nothing to change for repository 'packman'.
Autorefresh has been disabled for repository 'factory-nonoss'.
Autorefresh has been disabled for repository 'factory-debug'.
Nothing to change for repository 'vbox'.
Autorefresh has been disabled for repository 'zypp:svn'.

To disable all cd/dvd repositories, do:

$ zypper mr -d -m cd -m dvd
Repository 'openSUSE-DVD 11.0' has been sucessfully disabled.

To enable RPM caching of RPM files for all remote (http/https/ftp) repositories, do:

$ zypper mr -kt
Nothing to change for repository 'factory'.
RPM files caching has been enabled for repository 'factory-debug'.
RPM files caching has been enabled for repository 'factory-nonoss'.
RPM files caching has been enabled for repository 'fate'.
Nothing to change for repository 'packman'.
RPM files caching has been enabled for repository 'vbox'.
RPM files caching has been enabled for repository 'zypp:svn'.

Of course don't forget to use zypper clean when you run out of free disk space then :O)

James Ogley: Green, scaley and oh so cute!

Wed, 07 May 2008 11:10:00 +0000

It's great to see openSUSE Lizards launched. People blogging on Lizards will soon start to appear on Planet SUSE (basically as soon as they start posting). Where they have an existing blog and both will continue to be active, their entries from Lizards will be prefixed with Lizards: