Novell Account
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First of all, it is needed to Create an Useraccount from Novell. This Account is for the forums, buildservice, features and bugzilla. Just visit: https://secure-www.novell.com/selfreg/jsp/createOpenSuseAccount.jsp?target=http://www.opensuse.org and fill out the Form.

Login
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After them, go to en.opensuse.org and go to the right-top of the Site, and select “Login”. After you submitted your Username ans Password, you come to the Mainpage.

Userpage
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Now you can see your Username in the right-top of the Site.
Now klick on your Username. Now you see the editpage of your Username. Here you can Place some needful Information like your Name, your Emailadress and if present the Instant Messenger Informations.

Picture Uploading
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If you would like to add an Picture from you, you can go to http://en.opensuse.org/Special:Upload. The select the File and upload it. Now search the right Path from the Picture. At last you can bind in your Picture into your Userpage.

Have a lot of Fun !!!

I’m happy to announce OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 alpha2 packages for openSUSE. They are available in the Build Service OpenOffice:org:UNSTABLE project and include many upstream and Go-oo fixes. Please, look for more details about the openSUSE OOo build on the wiki page.

The packages are alpha versions and might include even serious bugs. Therefore they are not intended for data-critical usage. A good practice is to archive any important data before an use, …

We kindly ask any interested beta testers to try the package and report bugs.

Other information and plans:

The next build will be 3.1.1-beta1 and should be available 3-4 weeks from now. The final OOo-3.1.1 packages should be available at the beginning of September.

I have vacation the following two weeks and will not have access to the internet. I hope that the current alpha2 build is usable. If not, please report bugs and switch back to the stable build.

Sugarlabs, creators of Sugar desktop environment for children recently released Sugar on a Stick (SoaS) Strawberry flavor. Strawberry is based on Fedora 11.

openSUSE Education team have also been working on getting Sugared up openSUSE in various (yet to be named) flavors :). Thomas C Gilliard (satellit) has put up openSUSE-Sugar VMWare appliance, get it from here. Apart from VMWare appliance openSUSE-Sugar is also available in live CD and USB/flash stick version.

Here are the instructions for running VMWare appliance. To deploy USB stick image, download the image - openSUSE-Sugar-liveUSB-unstable.i686-0.X.X-BuildX.XX.raw.bz2. and run this command to deploy on the stick plugged in /dev/sdX.

bzcat imagename.raw.bz2 | dd of=/dev/sdX bs=4k

Run dmesg to find out where the USB is plugged in, replace /dev/sdX with the actual device, for example: /dev/sdb and umount it before running this command.

We also have openSUSE Li-f-e : Linux for Education DVD that has Sugar launcher right on the gnome desktop, it contains same number of activities as Sugar only flavors.

David Van Assche(nubae) and the Moodle team are putting together great numbers of useful courses on newly launched education portal http://linux-for-education.org. Here teachers and students can find courses that helps learning their preferred subject with the aid of Li-f-e and other educational distributions. Check out the courses on Sugar and Perfect openSUSE Education Desktop.

Happy learning…

I’m back now from attending Linuxtag 2009 in Berlin. On Saturday I gave a presentation about openSUSE 11.2 and we had some good discussions about it.  I demoed WebYaST which will be an exciting addition to openSUSE.  WebYaST allows remote - and also local - administration of your system.  The participants of the talk mentioned also that  “zypper dup” to update from 11.1 to 11.2 is an important addition.

Btw. to learn more about openSUSE 11.2, check this wiki page which is regularly updated.

Adrian took some photos and uploaded them to the gallery.

It was great to see the momentum behind the education project, I talked a bit with Jan (and listened to his excellent talk) and Lars about it.

And the day came. After a six hours trip on bus, and a few minutes of sleep I got to Santiago de Chile. Francisco Toha picked me up so we headed to Universidad Andres Bello for the openSUSE Day. Huge building and plenty of room for everyone. The event started almost on time. I followed the first talk, a bit hoping to have a decent internet connection so I could show a live SUSE Studio test drive. OK, that didn’t happen. The internet traffic ratio was too slow like waiting 59 minutes to build an JeOS appliance was nuts so that was definitely the low aspect of the talk.
Again, huge thanks to Zonker for all the support. openSUSE 11.1 DVDs and stickers were cool and all loved it. Also big thanks everyone from Geeko’s, specially Enrique Herrera, Jose Muñoz, and Francisco Toha. Statistic and evaluation have not been finished yet. Anyway, some pictures here:
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The task for this week was to add support to the frontend so that desktop clients like osc can add the oauth specific parameters to the http “Authorization” header. The ruby library was already able to handle this and therefore I only needed to do a very small change in our urllib2 OAuthHandler which is used by osc.

Using the Authorization header has one drawback:
- the current flow looks like the following: a client makes an unauthorized API request, the API sends back a 401 to tell the client that it needs to authenticate. Therefore the response also contains the following http header: ‘WWW-Authenticate: basic realm=”Frontend login” ‘. This indicates that the client should use basic auth to authenticate with the API. The question is how we can tell the client that it could also use oauth? Sending back something like ‘WWW-Authenticate: basic, oauth realm=”Frontend login”‘ will probably break some clients. Fortunately darix had a great idea: the client simply tells the server which auth methods it supports. This can be done by adding a new http header like ‘Accept-Authentication: OpenID; OAuth;q=0.8, digest;q=0.7, Basic;q=0.5″ ‘ to each request (q indicates which method is preferred, see other http headers like ‘Accept-Language’ for the details). If the API needs authorization it looks at this header and picks the “preferred” method from this list and sends back ‘WWW-Authenticate: <preferred_and_supported_method>, realm=”Frontend login”‘ ‘. In case the Accept-Authentication header is omitted the application’s default method is used (in our case basic auth). Another thing which needs to be discussed is how the API should behave if the client only accepts methods which aren’t supported by the API (e.g. should the API send back a 401 or 406?).

Apart from thinking about this the other task for this week(end) is to add an UI for managing oauth tokens etc. The first part of this task is to decide which tasks the UI should support (like revoking tokens, authorize tokens etc.).

The next meeting will be on monday to discuss the first results.

Qt 4.5.2 and Qt Creator 1.2 released, availible on the qt homepage or in a repository.
Qt KDE repository overview
Specially for GNOME I didn’t find one, if you know one, please tell me.

Changes for Qt 4.5.2: here
Changes for Qt Creator 1.2: here

If you’re in Berlin or nearby, be sure to visit LinuxTag this week! LinuxTag runs through Saturday, June 27th. Don’t forget, Saturday is openSUSE Day at LinuxTag! We have great talks in store for everybody at LinuxTag, including presentations on LTSP in openSUSE, Wine on openSUSE, AppArmor, and what’s new in openSUSE 11.2.

Make sure you do not miss Easy-LTSP presentation by Jan Weber tomorrow, I have vested interest in that one

I will go on holiday next week, so today is my last day in the office. I have decided that the things I have to do today are too many and I should work in the train in my way to the office.

All good, start the computer, of course no internet, so I had to shutdown kontact to stop him crying about not being able to connect.

Being able to easy go to an offline mode  would be a very nice and useful feature to have in kontact, and kde applications in general. Checking that before you want to communicate with some third party that you actually have the phone instead complaining that he is not answer, would be a very good design decision, too.

Now being the holiday season I hope at least one of the kde/kontact developers would get hit by this missing feature and soon we will have it.

While “selling” openSUSE to a friend of mine, I tried to explain him all the steps of the installation and all the configuration options which I had changed. He was not any geek and it was his first time seeing Linux.

While most of the installation did not need much explanations, I definitely spent most of the time on partitioning. Not that initial proposal was not fine, unless one has special requirements, but there is one elementar input, which even newbies may want to set: How to split disk between Windows and Linux. The installation proposal works just fine, but if one needs to keep more or less space for Windows than proposed and does not have any skills, he is doomed - and so would have been he.

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