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Verein Computerspende Hamburg and openSUSE

December 15th, 2010 by

This article of the German news magazine Der Spiegel made me aware of the Verein Computerspende Hamburg. A German verein is a non profit association, there are lots in Germany for sports, culture and these kind of stuff.

The Verein Computerspende Hamburg does something very useful: It takes used computer parts that other people do not longer need and refurbish them to working computers again. These computers are handed to people who happen to be in a difficult situation in life. They have to live from Hartz IV which is a kind German social security, following the unemployment benefit which ends after a short period. Hartz IV means very, very little money the people have to make their lives from, too little to buy a new computer.

On the other hand, an increasing amount of the job offerings are posted on the web, so people currently unemployed basically have to search the web, not speaking about preparing the resumes to apply for a job. So how would one do that without a computer?

Computing is not only hardware and well known operating systems and applications are far away from free, so it’s obvious that our great project is a perfect partner here: Not that we only offer a user friendly, easy to install, secure, feature rich and last but not least completely free Linux Distribution, we as a community are also able to help if problems come up, regardless if somebody has money or not and what kind of problem it might be. This is another very concrete example where free software and the FOSS communities help your neighbor, or you – as it is very easy to get into a difficult situation in life.

We sent 500 openSUSE 11.3 DVDs to Hamburg with our warm invitation and welcome to all new users to show up and join our community. So be aware of new kids on the block 🙂

And if you are in Hamburg or around and want to help, I am sure Verein Computerspende can make use of the help of more Geekos, such as installation, first hand user support and probably much more. And if you know of a similar interested initiative, let me know, I am sure I will find more DVDs 😉

Hermes Work

December 1st, 2010 by

Not every day is a sunshine day, also not in software development. This is my credo about the last few days which I spent debugging Hermes a bit, motivated by a kind bug report saying basically that the digest mails suck. Well, I had to kind of agree on that, so I revisited that topic.

Do you remember what Hermes is? We use Hermes in the openSUSE infrastructure to handle notifications. Since we do not want to send people emails they do not explicitly agree that they want it (otherwise it would be spamming, right?), we invented a system that recognizes all kinds of events that happen in the openSUSE world, than check if a certain user wants to know about it and finally send it to these users. The benefit the user of the system is that he can pick from a huge variety of events and control if and how he gets informed about. Hermes does not only serve users with email but also maintains RSS feeds, it Twitters and does even more. And as another bonus, it can collect similar events for you and later send a digest with a collection. That way, you for example can get a mail with a list of failed package builds in OBS each hour instead a mail every fife seconds for each and every failing package.

But back to my debugging fun: I was mainly fixing the appearance of the digest messages: They now in the subject tell you how many events are digested and how frequently the digest comes, such as hourly, minutely etc. In the mail body, you now find a numbered “table of contents” of the mail and the individual events nicely listed. So much more useful.

Unfortunately it wasn’t the most time efficient debugging session I ever had, I stumbled over some things that weren’t optimal now in an environment where Hermes processes between 40,000 and 70,000 events a day for more than 25,000 users. Some of the problems are ugly to identify. I got lost a bit which is not good for the overall mood, so I decided to cry at Susanne, one of our colleagues. She asked me quite a few questions and than she left home for dinner. Ten minutes later I could nail the bug.

So this is my strong suggestion: If in debugging trouble, talk to your friends. Tell about the problem, share your misfortune. A few question can guide you to the right path which you did not see before. Not new? Well, yes, of course we knew that already from other topics in live, talking helps 😉

The other suggestion I wanted to make: Check Hermes digests! Go to the Hermes Subscription Page and change one of your subscriptions to digest mode, will be fun. Let me know what you think.

10 obscure Linux office applications

November 9th, 2010 by

Last night I was trying to beauty up my Kraft Homepage a bit and while doing that I realised that half of the allowed transfer volume that is coming with the cheap hosting contract is already eaten up for November. Investigating how that could have happened I found out that Kraft was mentioned in a very nice blog called 10 obscure Linux office applications you need to try. It introduces some interesting apps out of the whole mass of all FOSS apps in that specific area. Kraft is mentioned there, which is of course nice, the author seems to like Kraft. I am, however, not really sure why the word obscure is in the headline of the blog, do you know 😉 ?

But the other nine applications are also really interesting, such as goldendict, which combines multiple dictionaries on the desktop or TOra which is a cool database GUI. We do not have them in Factory nor
Contrib.

The next openSUSE release 11.4 is slowly but surely coming up and I think it makes sense to add cool software now. Maybe the listed apps in the blog are ideas to spice up our distro a bit with good software? I volunteer to take care of Kraft 😉

A new Flavor: openSUSE Invis Server

October 28th, 2010 by

Invis Server Beside many other amazing things which happened at the openSUSE Conference 2010, Stefan Schäfer gave a talk about his project called Invis Server. It is a very specific server solution for the small and medium business, based on the openSUSE distribution. The Invis Server is perfect software for all production installations in small business use cases, also to be maintained by consultants in that space.

All needed services such as printing, mail, web and file server, database and groupware are there and get preconfigured at installation. For daily operation in the users network, there is a simple yet powerful web interface.

In the discussion after the presentation it turned out that Stefan would be fine with moving the Invis Server Project nearer to the openSUSE project and get a larger community find together to power up the project on openSUSE distributions.

As a result we decided to found the openSUSE Invis Project. The idea is to create an openSUSE Distribution flavor with solid packages coming from openSUSE Factory together with some specifically packaged sources ready to power the Invis Server. The openSUSE Buildservice will be used to build the needed packages and create the product images. The first tasks will be to clean up the package list and do some packaging to be able to create a convenient openSUSE-Invis CD.

The openSUSE-Invis Mailinglist was set up and is waiting for your subscription. Please show up there soon to help us to move this idea forward.

openSUSE Conference

October 23rd, 2010 by

I am home from the openSUSE Conference 2010 and finally landed on the sofa. I don’t know why conferences are so exhausting, but they are for me. My brain slowly becomes sorted again and starts to reflect what happened on the conference. Wow, I can say that I didn’t expect it to become such a great event. There were so many interesting and enthusiastic discussions about topics concerning the openSUSE distribution or about things you can do under the openSUSE umbrella.

The fun side of community and technology was inspiring people all over, in opposite to some situations I remember on the last years conference where we had to deal with unpleasant topics. This seemed to have completely went away, instead people were aiming to solve problems together in a constructive way or, even more fun, worked on new things without so called stop-energy.

It seems to me that a kind of openSUSE core-community stabilizes. People know each other, it has sorted who finally really is interested in openSUSE and continously contributes. That builds trust, and to that adds the self confidence which results out of the good quality of the recent distros we as a community were able to release. This nicely turned out for me in the strategy discussion lead by Jos. People were supportive, sorted out issues here and there, but moved ahead and came to decisions together on a topic which had endless and partly unpleasant discussions on mailinglists before. The power of meeting face to face on the one hand, but also signs that we learned from the last years and grew up.

From the talk quality the conference for me personally was one of the best FOSS conferences I have attended until now. All keynotes were done with great passion, uniquely and addressed specifically on current topics in our community. Hennes on the first day painted a good frame for the whole conference in his unique style. Cornelius and Vincent on day two were also great, they did not play friends just to let the sun shine on the conference, but for me they proofed that the openSUSE community has built a fundament were we not only accept each other but can work together werever it makes sense to tackle the higher challenges. Gerald speaking on Friday was repeating facts of the relationship between Novell and openSUSE. It was good hear it again that Novell wholeheartly supports the openess of the openSUSE project and what that means from a corporate point of view. Today Frank was introducing the project Brezen which will increase the ease of use of openSUSE a lot for the user and free software developers. Great that there is already code, I am really looking forward to see stuff coming into our distro.

You see, quite a lot happened on osc10. I will continue writing but I am too tired now…

It’s good to visit Conferences

October 8th, 2010 by

This post is about why one should visit a conference at all and hopefully is a good read for people who haven’t been on a FOSS conference yet. For oldtimers this might be unbelieveable, but I remember perfectly how I thought “This conference sounds interesting, but its probably only for checkers, long term contributors, not for me”. Thanks god I had somebody convincing me that that’s wrong and pulled me to my first Akademy which was a great experience as well as all the other conferences I have been later.

The main thing that happens on conferences is learning. While sitting in workshops and presentations you can learn so much about technologies, and since you take the time to really listen to it, it sticks very good in your mind. If questions remain open, you can be sure to immediately find people who can help to clearify.

Learning often results in motivation because if you learned something you want to try it out. Since you again have time after the conference presentations and you are surrounded by others who are interested in the similar topics, the motivation grows to really put the hands on the keyboard and try things out.

Another motivational factor can be that people adjust your opinion about your own contribution, if you already did some. You might think your contribution is only small, not comparable and not so important. After having three people met who were thanking you for your work and telling you how important it was for them, you will feel the motivation boost. But attention – that sometimes works the other way round as well 😉

But that guides us to the most important thing: Meeting people in person, get to know each other, make friends. I know so many people from visiting conferences, and the quality of “knowing” is so much higher if a face, a smile, a good presentation or other things like funny clothes can be put to a name. Even people I do not know know me because I visited a conference once.

Working for and with people you know in person is much more pleasant as if you only know their email addresses. And we’re not talking about conflict situations which are so much easier to solve if you have met before.

openSUSE Conference 2010

Last but not least the possibility of influencing things must not be forgotten. Often on conferences things move forward, because the right people are on the same spot and discuss things and come to decisions. Believe it or not, it happens quickly that you end up in the circle of people if you want.

Ah yes, there is another reason why people like to come to conferences: It’s called ‘having fun’. I am not sure what is that about, but it must be cool 😉

Very soon the second international openSUSE Conference takes place in Nürnberg, Germany. If you are interested in the openSUSE project, the distribution or upstream projects, I really like to encourage you to conferencing give FOSS conferencing a try if you had never done it before. If you had, you will be there anyway 😉

Please do not hesitate and register now.

Status openFATE Milestone

August 6th, 2010 by

Recently Henne Greenrock sent a status report about the Boosters Standup-Meeting here he said that nothing happened to the openFATE sprint. Well, that’s only partly true, so it seems to be time to take a closer look and revitalize the project openFATE a bit.

What’s the matter with openFATE?

We did a good start with openFATE to involve everybody who is interested into product planning. However, after the screening team was formed it turned out that some parts of the process are not yet working well. The biggest problem is still that the screening team members can not move features from state UNCONFIRMED to NEW which turned out to be crucial for a fluent process. So the Boosters picked up the task since we think this is a huge blocker to work together as a community effectivly.

The openFATE Screening Page lists a few more details about the openFATE screening team and the issues.

How are we going to solve the issues?

The Screening Team Members need additional rights. We will create a user group “openFATE Screener” which gives people in it additional rights in openFATE. For the time being, the group will be maintained within openFATE. Once we have connect.opensuse.org in place, we will use it to maintain the group setting. The important bit here is to give the screeners group the ability to maintain itself, ie. add or remove members.

Being a screener will enable people to change status of a feature from UNCONFIRMED to NEW. That is a responsible task because being in state NEW, the feature goes through the whole mill of the process, also through product and project management for SLE products. We have to make sure to have high quality features here.

Futhermore the screeners will be able to add infoproviders to features in case they know who can help there which is also a very sensible task.

Another part to work on are notifications. People should be notified when they get added to a feature. We use Hermes for that (which is already working) so the only issue is that if people who get added to a feature are not subscribed to the certain notifications in Hermes, they do not receive anything. Which is per purpose as we want to leave the control to the users. The solution to that is to inform the screeners about the Hermes subscription status of the people added. If somebody is not subscribed, its on the screener to talk to the guy and convince him to join into the openFATE game. I don’t think it makes sense to subscribe users silently because that would take away control over their subscriptions and messages get ignored as spam in the end.

Last but not least we have to solve the “I am free, pick me!”-problem, which is about features that went through the decision process and would fit nicely into a product but have no developer implementing it yet. In the company process that means that a teamlead assigns a developer from his team on that. In the community we need to change that so that people can pick the feature themselves. That has some implications to the attached internal process, so that there are still some questions open. We have to investigate a bit on that.

What has happened so far?

I was able to change the keeperproxy, which is a security relevant proxy which filters data that is going to be exposed to the internet. Moreover I was kung-fuing through the Javascript in the openFATE webapp so that it is now possible to change the status if one is screener. I also added a screener attribute to the Person-Model in the openFATE rails app. Last but not least I added the basic API functionality to get and set subscriptions to Hermes.

What needs to be done?

Well, everything that is there is still rough and needs testing and polishing. Futhermore I added the remaining tasks to Retrospectiva, please check there.

As usual we’re happy about your input on this!

openSUSE Conference 2010

July 12th, 2010 by

This is a friendly reminder for all who haven’t send their talk proposals for the openSUSE Conference 2010 yet. The Call for Papers closes end of july and there are still slots available.

The second openSUSE conference takes place in Nuremberg, Germany from october, 20th to 23rd. After its great start last year, we will continue the concept of a user and developer conference around the openSUSE Project including talks, workshops and BOFs. Expect everything between technical workshops about bleeding edge linux distro technology over user presentations about software to inspiring discussions with other projects, especially since the motto for the conference is Collaboration across Borders.

The first conference has also shown how important the openSUSE Conference is for the steering of the openSUSE project. Lots of ideas could be discussed and implemented quickly but also difficult or controversal community internal topics came up in a very contructive way and are worked on since then, some until today.

That brings me to the core message of this post: You should be on the conference if you are interested in the openSUSE project in any way. If you want to help moving the project forward and influence where the journey is going, there is no better place to go.

Now is the time to shape the conference – be it with a talk proposal, a proposal for a workshop, some hack session or interact with other projects to make you project a half day track or so. Everything is possible, please approach the programm committee with your ideas!

Zippl – a Lightweigth Presentation Tool

June 11th, 2010 by

Recently people played around a lot with a new kind of presentations. The pages in the classical presentation tool sense seem to lie around on a large canvas and while the presentation running, the focus moves over the canvas and stops by interesting points. Zooming allows to go more in detail and other cool graphics effects make it fun to watch these presentations.

This week was the fifth Hackweek at Novell where we can pick an interesting topic and work on it. I am always interested in cool applications and I wanted to investigate a bit on Qts GraphicsView anyway so I decided to go for a proof of concept implementation of a lightweight but cool presentation tool following these concepts.

The tool is called Zippl (for no specific reason). It is implemented in C++ with Qt 4.6. Via a XML file the user can specify so called spots on the Zippl-canvas. During a presentation one after the other canvas is displayed with an animated move from one to the other.

Spots can consist of text in various fonts and sizes, geometric forms and images. Colors and line widths and stuff can be specified for each item. It is amazing what can already be done with these few elements.

But decide yourself by checking the following out, its the first little presentation done with Zippl:

With Qt its again fun to work on this kind of applications and the GraphicsView framework is awesome. If you want to see code, it is in the KDE svn, module playground/office.

What do you think? Is that something to investigate more on? You can give me feedback in openFATE about it if you want and rate it.

Novell Hackweek Five

May 28th, 2010 by

Hackweek Five LogoI am really looking forward to the next Hackweek that we have in Novell – it will be in the week from 7-11 of June 2010.
In that week, Novell allows a whole lot of people to spend the full work time (and more 😉 to work on whatever free software they want. That is really a huge thing, because we’re talking about hundrets of engineers.
What everybody is working on is as said not at all prescribed, except that it should benefit the idea of free software. There is a list maintained of ideas which people have for Hackweek Five in order to find somebody joining the team or to pick the idea up at all.
The good thing now is that of course openFATE is used to maintain this list and thus it is open for the openSUSE Community to also add ideas, comment or vote on whats already there. This is of course no guarantee that the idea is going to be picked up but still. So everybody who thinks she has an idea that will inspire someone on Hackweek Five, feel free to add it to openFATE and talk about.
Of course it is also possible and appreciated to work on Hackweek projects also as non Novell employee 🙂
Get in touch – it will be exciting!