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Archive for May, 2008

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Wiki on a Stick

May 14th, 2008 by

Have you ever had the problem that you start writing something in a wiki, take some time to think, drink coffee and do other things and finally press Save in your browser and realise that your session with the wiki has already ended?

There is a very cool thing that helps here, I saw it on Christian Hüllers screen recently: woas or Wiki on a Stick. This is a single (not simple 😉 html file that you open in your browser and it comes up as client side wiki that allows to edit documentation offline in wiki syntax with a browser based editor etc.

The nice thing is that the result is still one file. It is not really nice because of tons of styles and javascript functions in it, but it is just one non binary. That allows to check it into a source controll system and the problem “Maintaining the docs in Wiki or at the source” is a bit easier to decide now. Nice.

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Posted in Miscellaneous | Comments Off on Wiki on a Stick

Discussing Garden Ornaments

May 14th, 2008 by

Well, it’s more the ornaments of the garden having a discussion 🙂

The GNOME Team are holding their meeting tomorrow Thursday 15th May at 1600GMT/UTC/ZULU (or translate it into your local time).  As always you can get sight of the agenda,the main themes for this week are PulseAudio, PackageKit, and installation patterns.

So if you have any suggestions, questions or complaints please join in on irc and get you voice heard.  Remember we are a community that like to work together.  If you want to try and influence anything within openSUSE then don’t be passive and sit in the background grumbling, stand up and join in.  This goes for all aspects of openSUSE, not just GNOME.  We won’t bite, but we may disagree.  From that disagreement we can hopefully get to an amicable compromise, or at the very least explain the decisions that have been made.

So please join use tomorrow and try and make GNOME even better under openSUSE 🙂  As it happens the KDE Team have their meeting today at 1800GMT/UTC/ZULU (translation to local).

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Posted in Events, GNOME | Comments Off on Discussing Garden Ornaments

Hamradio packages for openSUSE 11.0

May 13th, 2008 by

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 …

Edit: The repository is http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/hamradio/

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Posted in Build Service, Desktop, Packaging | 2 Comments »

Open Soap Box

May 7th, 2008 by

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 😉

Posted in GNOME, Mono | 4 Comments »

Talking bootloader – heard in Beta2

May 7th, 2008 by

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!

Posted in Accessibility, Base System | Comments Off on Talking bootloader – heard in Beta2

Easy OBS Web Client Development

May 7th, 2008 by

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.

Posted in Build Service | 3 Comments »

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