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Archive for December, 2009

openSUSE Build Service 1.7 Beta 1

December 23rd, 2009 by

The openSUSE Build Service (OBS) team just announced the Beta 1 version of the upcomming 1.7 release. Most of the features are already accessable in the Build Service instance which is used by the opensuse.org project.

Please find a more detailed announcement here.

The final release is planed early next year.

OpenOffice_org 3.2 rc1 available for openSUSE

December 23rd, 2009 by

I’m happy to announce OpenOffice.org 3.2 rc1 packages for openSUSE. They are available in the Build Service OpenOffice:org:UNSTABLE project and include many upstream and Go-oo fixes. See also overview of integrated features and enhancements. Please, look for more details about the openSUSE OOo build on the wiki page.

The packages are release candidates. Though, they have not passed the full QA test and might still 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, …

As usual, we kindly ask any interested beta testers to try the package and report bugs. See also the list of known bugs.

Other information and plans:

There are already known blocker bugs, so we will need to produce rc2 . I expect that it will be available the second week in January. The final release should be available one week after the last working release candidate. I hope that rc2 will be the final one but …

The rc1 build is still in progress for SLED11 x86_64. I hope that it will be available later today but I can’t guarantee it.

Quick tip: Novell Bugzilla and Klipper

December 22nd, 2009 by

Klipper from KDE has a set of predefined actions triggered by content of the clipboard. So when you have it enabled, it show up the popup menu with all available browsers when you copy the URL. In my job I open many bugs and the bug numbers have the well defined format bnc#number. So why don’t define automatic action triggered by this regular expression?

Because Klipper expects only oneliner as an action, I wrote the short bash script obug.sh which expects one argument with a bugzilla string.

#!/bin/bash

[ -z "${1}" ] && {
  echo "bug number required"
  exit 1
}

regex='^(bnc|bug)?#[0-9]+$'
[[ "${1}" =~ ${regex} ]] || {
  echo "${1} did not match ${regex}"
  exit 2
}

firefox https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=${1#*#}

It’s obvious how it works – it checks if the argument exists and if matches the pattern and then opens a firefox (it’d be a xdg-open, but I use firefox for Novell Bugzilla). There should be only one strange expression – ${1#*#}. It is a Shell Parameter Expansion. This expression removes all characters from the beginning of the string including first #, so it convert bnc#1234 to 1234.

Then I defined a new action in Klipper triggered by ^(bnc|bug)?#[0-9]+$, which calls obug.sh %s, where %s is the content of clipboard.
Klipper config

And after that all I selected the bnc#1234 by mouse and then the following popup appeared.

One disadvantage of this method is that Klipper opens popup window only near its status icon in systemtray. It would be more useful to show it near current mouse position.

First post / First whishes

December 20th, 2009 by

Dear Santa-Claus, can you provide us a real full kvm solutions for next year.
So I didn’t have to fight with Esx .

openSUSE Wiki Changes

December 19th, 2009 by

There was a lot of dicussion in the openSUSE project about the project wiki which was suffering from something all successful projects in some point of time experience: There is a huge amount of documentation in the Wiki, however it seems a bit unstructured, sometimes outdated or not really maintained.

The brave openSUSE wiki team stepped up to change that. The decision is to set up a new wiki with a well selected set of extensions and now the content of the old wiki is going to be transfered to the new wiki. Of course there will be a rigorous quality check of the articles, as well as a new thought through structure. The goal of this huge amount of work is to provide a outstanding good and well consumable source of information for all people in and interested in the openSUSE project. That is a high goal and I admire the energy and dedication of the wiki team.

The new wiki is now in place. So if you also want to help, either with the motivation of a developer telling how things work, or from the upstream perspective using the openSUSE vehicle to push the project or simply because you want to help openSUSE to become even better, first read the Transition Guidelines and subscribe on the wiki mailinglist, since most of the coordination happens there.
There is also a Forum Thread going on around that.

Please help to make this a success – thanks 🙂

WebYaST Status Module

December 15th, 2009 by

After releasing WebYaST 1.0 last week we have had a look to the status module again and have come to the conclusion that we can do it better. 🙂

The current version looks more like a medical monitoring system that no one understand:

current status page

Technical background

The system data will be collected by a service called collectd (www.collectd.org). This data will be stored in a rrd-database which is located in

/var/lib/collectd/<system-name>/[cpu-0|cpu-1|df|interface|load|memory|….]

An own file/database will for each value will be generated.

The upper screen shot shows that an own graphic will be shown for each value. This is not really user friendly. We would like to show only values which provides “really” interesting information for the sysadmin or user. These values should also be grouped in order to reduce the amount of graphs.

Another lack of information is the labeling of the graphs. There is no description what the values mean and in which period they have been evaluated.

The aim

would be to give the user a nice overview about the system status. Additional, there should be an alarm system available if system values are exceeded. E.g. there should be sent an email to the system administrator if no disk space is available anymore.
The Administrator should also be able to configure “his” needed system values in a nice way.

Suggestion for configuration

configure

There are three parts:

  • General
    General setting like period time of shown data, email address in the case of occurred errors and the color of displayed limits.
  • Graphics
    Defining graphs with

    • labels
    • scales
    • flag for cumulate values
      This means that the values in the graph are added. E.g. the component df of collectd returns two values of a partition (free, used). These values will be cumulated in the graph like this:
      collecdtd disk status
  • Enable Values/Limits
    • Defining which data of collectd will be shown in the graphics described above. This enable us to group data in one graph, defining color and label of each collectd value:
      collecdtd cpu2
    • Defining limits and send an email if the value is overstepped longer than the defined period (Alarm after (min.))

The Result

should be an amount of view graphs which include interesting data only. These values are checked periodically and an email will be sent if they exceed a defined limit.

I am asking for

your opinion about:

  • Do you know a much more fancy way for displaying system status data ?
  • Which kind of Data would be interesting for you (CPU, memory, disk-space,….)?
  • When and for which kind of data would you like to get an email if limits have been exceeded?

So, before changing this module we would like to ask you what you would like to see. 🙂

Thanks in advance.

OpenOffice_org 3.2 beta4 available for openSUSE

December 14th, 2009 by

I’m happy to announce OpenOffice.org 3.2 beta4 packages for openSUSE. They are available in the Build Service OpenOffice:org:UNSTABLE project and include many upstream and Go-oo fixes. See also overview of integrated features and enhancements. Please, look for more details about the openSUSE OOo build on the wiki page.

The package is a beta version 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, …

As usual, we kindly ask any interested beta testers to try the package and report bugs. See also the list of known bugs.

Other information and plans:

First, I am sorry for the late beta4. It has already been available since Thursday but I forgot to announce it.

The next build should be available within one week. Hopefully, it will be the first release candidate. Unfortunately, there is not enough time for testing before Christmas, so we will decide the first week in January whether rc1 is final or whether we would need another build.

How to activate Flash Plugin for Google Chrome on openSUSE 11.2

December 9th, 2009 by

A couple of days ago, Google release a Beta version of Google Chrome for Mac and Linux. After installing the RPM I has been notice that the flash player doesn’t work. For make it work do the following as root:

cd /opt/google/chrome

ln -s /usr/lib/browser-plugins/ plugins

Restart Chrome and you are ready to watch some videos on youtube 🙂

openSUSE celebrates X-mas in Nürnberg

December 8th, 2009 by

The openSUSE team in Nürnberg invites everybody interested in Linux and in particular in openSUSE to join our Christmas party on Wednesday December 16 in the basement of our office building in Nürnberg. We’ll give some presentation about openSUSE 11.2 in action, GIMP and how to participate at our project. Beside of the presentations we have some machines where especially openSUSE  Education and the openSUSE Build Service will be shown but openSUSE 11.2  is available too, of course. More information
We hope to reach out to many local people in the Nürnberg area.

Install Multiple Kernel Versions using the YaST Qt Package Manager

December 8th, 2009 by

You might want to install multiple kernel versions on your system.
The YaST Qt Package Selector provides a nice user interface that allows to manage multiple package versions now.

yast2-qt-pkg 2.18.19 or later supports this feature. You can find packages in my Build Service repository.

First of all you need to tell libzypp that your kernel is a package which is multiversion-enabled by adding this line to your /etc/zypp/zypp.conf:

multiversion = provides:multiversion(kernel)

Start your YaST Software Management. The versions tab shows check boxes for multiversion packages instead of radio buttons.
This enables you to install multiple versions of the same package.

There is also a package group of multiversion packages that list all packages that can be installed in multiple versions.

YaST Qt Package Manager with Multiversion Kernel Packages