Together with Tim Fischer I’m packaging hamradio-related software in the “hamradio”-repository in openSUSE Build Service. We are now prepairing updates and start of packaging for upcoming openSUSE 11.0 .

If you are interested in helping us, feel free to contact us! Also if you miss a package in our repo.

I’ll blog on the progress here …

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

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…

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!

The web interface of the openSUSE Build Service behind http://build.opensuse.org is written with Ruby on Rails. The good thing about this is that you can easily setup an own instance of the web interface on your workstation using the server behind http://api.opensuse.org. All what you need is to checkout the sources, install the ruby on rails packages and run the server.

Installing the Ruby framework in matching release can be done as root user via:

# zypper sa http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/openSUSE:Tools/YOUR_DISTRO openSUSE:Tools
# zypper install rubygem-rails-2_0

Getting the source code is easy just by anonymous checkout from svn:

# svn co https://forgesvn1.novell.com/svn/opensuse/trunk/buildservice/

Running the web interface is really easy now just by running

# cd buildservice/src/webclient
# ruby script/server

This runs a local instance where you can connect with any web browser using http://0.0.0.0:3000/ URL. So there is no need to install a full build service, no database administration, just checkout and run it You can easily edit files esp. below the app/ directory and customize or improve the web interface for your needs.

Of course it is easy to get svn write access, if you provide a useful patch

Have fun.

Thanks to the Switzerland Novell colleagues openSUSE is again on the biggest computer event in Switzerland. I will be there on a openSUSE demopoint at the Novell booth, showing the latest beta version. If you don’t belive that the package management is superfast now or want to see the new pretty installation without testing it yourself, here you have the chance …

If you are in Zürich, don’t miss it!

More information on the webpage: German, English