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Archive for December, 2009

openSUSE Edu Li-f-e at FOSS.in

December 8th, 2009 by

Last week was one of the biggest gathering of FOSS geeks from all over India and some from abroad at foss.in in Bangalore.  Unfortunately it was not as big as I had expected. Here are some of the pictures from the event, also managed to get some “FOSS celebrities” to pose with our DVD. It was fun meeting many people only known to me via IRC nick or Planet India. Over 250 Li-f-e DVDs were distributed, many students from various parts of India were also part of the event, students from DA-IICT and IIIT helped burn some DVDs too. Thanks Pradeepto and Srinivasa for KDE and GNOME t-shirts, it was great pleasure meeting again with openSUSE B’lore team, puthali, girishks, srinidhibs, ravim85, abharath and Ex-Novellite  Hardik Dalwadi(Cannonical).
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KIWI RELAX NG Schema Explained

December 6th, 2009 by

KIWI, invented by Marcus Schäfer, is a magnificent tool to build your own SUSE Linux distribution. It is also the backend of SUSE Studio.

For those who has used KIWI manually already know the details: KIWI’s configuration file is XML and based on a RELAX NG schema. This article give developers a little background of the history, a short overview of some design decisions around KIWI’s RELAX NG schema, and how to customize it to your needs.
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OpenOffice_org 3.1.1 maintenance update available for openSUSE

December 4th, 2009 by

I’m happy to announce that updated OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 packages in the Build Service OpenOffice:org:STABLE project.  It includes many useful fixes. See also the original announce for more details about the 3.1.1 release.

Also you might try the OOo-3.2-beta build that is available in the Build Service OpenOffice:org:UNSTABLE project. See the 3.2-beta3 announce for more details. The beta4 build should be available in the middle of the fillowing week.

Kolab cyrus-imapd inherits from openSUSE base cyrus-imapd

December 3rd, 2009 by

This week kolab became one small step closer to realize feature request 307846: include Kolab in openSUSE. Although it will take lots and lots of more work to achieve this goal at all. The one step closer was realized in cooperation with the openSUSE cyrus-imapd maintainer R. The openSUSE cyrus-imapd spec file in the repository server:mail spec file has been extended with information about kolab, but the actual execution of the information has been switched off. With the Build Service link functionality the package server:mail/cyrus-imapd has been linked to the package server:kolab:UNSTABLE/cyrus-imapd-kolab, where the kolab functionality gets built. This is achieved by activating the variable with_kolab in the project related configuration file:
# osc meta prjconf server:Kolab:UNSTABLE
%define with_kolab 1
Macros:
%with_kolab 1

See the Build_Service prjconf page in the openSUSE wiki for more information about this awesome functionality. This way the cyrus-imapd-kolab package inherits everything from the openSUSE base cyrus-imapd package.

One drawback for kolab administrators, you have to manually correct the currently installed kolab packages. Start with downgrading cyrus-imapd-kolab (it only downgrades the Build service version and not cyrus-imapd itself):
# zyp in cyrus-imapd-kolab
This will install the dependent package perl-Cyrus-IMAP-kolab instead of perl-Cyrus-IMAP and perl-Cyrus-SIEVE-managesieve-kolab instead of perl-Cyrus-SIEVE-managesieve and it might remove kolab and perl-kolab.

Now reinstall kolab with:
# zyp in kolab
that should be sufficient to be in sync with the repository again. Don’t forget to restart the services, with:
# rckolab restart

This week also showed the power of the build service, as I could install kolab within only some minutes after installing openSUSE-11.2 in Virtualbox, while I never installed openSUSE-11.2 before.

The kolab installation in openSUS-11.2 made some problems visible in kolabconf -n. The latter has been fixed, it was a general problem in kolabconf and did not have anything to do with openSUSE-11.2.

The kolabconf problem however required some debugging, with a resulted spin off that the spamassassin daemon spamd is no longer activated via the startup scripts, but as a library of amavisd instead. That is the way amavisd and spamd have been configured in kolab, but what was not honored in the kolab setup on openSUSE.

Due to the change in the amavisd and spamd deamons, the script kolabsrv has been extended, and can now show a list with services required by kolab and what their current status is (see screenshot):

kolabsrv list and status output

kolabsrv list and status output

The main task of kolabsrv is to convert the openpkg service names to the distribution dependent names.

The kolab project is heading towards a new release 2.2.3 with a planned release date in December 2009.

Sascha released a nice Brain Dump of the Week, giving a nice insight in the possible future of Kolab.

In one of the replies of Sasha’s brain dump, a references was made to project-builder, a project similar to the openSUSE build service. Although the OBS and project-builder may be similar, some people are wondering what the differences (1) and (2) are.

That’s quite a lot of information, but lots of things happened since my last blog entry about Kolab.

PS: many thanks that M. from Novell, who made my Lizards blog account working again. For the most part of this week, I’ve not been able to login to my blog account. After logging in with the correct credentials, I was referred back to the Lizards entry page. M. knows the details, so if this happens to you contact M. from Novell 🙂

Encrypted directory

December 3rd, 2009 by

I have notebook which contain private data and I don’t want anyone to read it even if my notebook will be stolen. Encrypted whole home partition is too much as my home directory contains also svn or git repositories which could anybody read. So I create encrypted directory in home directory which contain all private data and rest is normal accessible. So how to do it? (more…)