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Archive for August, 2008

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Hackweek Days 2 and 3

August 28th, 2008 by

Jan-Simon and Stephan On tuesday a couple of developers met to discuss cross-platform building in the openSUSE build service.

In the evening we had a BBQ and there Jan-Simon and Stephan discussed the openSUSE weekly news that Jan-Simon then wrote on wednesday – this time from Nürnberg.

Pascal left on wednesday and told me that he really enjoyed “Chatweek”.  He – and others including myself – used the chance to meet each other for many discussions.

I took part on wednesday afternoon in a rather long discussion on the different security defaults of server and desktop products, e.g. how to setup a laptop so that it allows a logged in user to install patches and a server that only the admin can install patches – and do this right out of the box.

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Hackweek Visitor

August 28th, 2008 by

Yesterday afternoon, Hackweek III was running on full throttle, suddenly Jeff Jaffe, the CTO of Novell, stepped into our office. No meeting appointment, no big words, just a “What are you guys working on in Hackweek?”. Well, everybody who ever was working as an employee might understand that having the boss of the boss of the boss stepping into the office spontanously can be a bit exiting, but that is just the first two seconds. I think it is cool if executives do that.

In the company I worked before S.u.S.E. the owner always visited us on friday afternoons and sat on the developers desk. He was somehow geeky and was simply interested in tech talk. That made me nervous in the beginning, but later it was fun and informing. It was a great opportunity to present good ideas or concerns and on the other hand he gave a lot of first hand information what customers say, how the fairs went etc. In this kind of situation we convinced him finally that our under-cover Linux port of our solaris based product was way better for all customers than the Windows version most customers (and thus the executives) asked for.

I was hacking on my KDE application Kraft when Jeff asked, which is certainly not for the enterprise market. But given that applications are the key to pull people to linux we agreed that it is a cool Hackweek project 😉 I forgot to ask him what he is hacking on 🙂

Posted in Hackweek | 2 Comments »

Hackweek: Create a Condensed Monospace Font

August 27th, 2008 by

You see it every day, you normally don’t think about it, but it is nevertheless important: Fonts.

Obviously we need fonts to communicate with each other, especially in digital media. A whole industry create thousends of fonts for different task: for books, magazines, headlines, comics, funerals, weddings, and much, much more.

However, these fonts are not free and as such cost money. Unfortunately, in the past there was a lack of good looking, professional fonts. The situation nowadays are getter better and better as we have very promising open source fonts: DejaVu, Gentium, LinuxLibertine, to name a few. Without these, our world of characters would be very small and we would have a limited choice only. It’s a pity that all these beautiful fonts don’t have a condensed monospace version. This would be very useful, for example you can have more characters on a line and you don’t have to break them into pieces.

As I haven’t found a suitable font for me, I thought why not create one? Of course, I could have used one of the above, apply some transformations and be happy (or not). But this is not really creative, so I thought why not design something totally new? So I have chosen this project for Hackweek.

Let’s make it clear: It is really hard and nobody really know the time and sweat that goes into a font. To create a really good looking font it is really a challenge—and obviously not possible during Hackweek. But I think, to create something new and gain some experience, this can be a lot of fun. 🙂

So here is the rough procedure that I used for this font:

  1. Draw some sketches
  2. Scan it with a scanner
  3. Import the image into Fontforge into the background
  4. Rescale the image
  5. (Re)draw manually the lines, straight and curved. You could try to use a tool that automates this task, but the results were not very satisfying.
  6. Expand the lines and make the “flesh” of the glyph.
  7. Remove any overlaps
  8. Adjust the width, curve, etc.
  9. Make a print out, look at it, and repeat some of the steps…

As I learn more and more of FontForge, these tasks become (hopefully) easier. The font is similar to Dejavu Mono, but not identical. The result of all these steps is shown in this graphic (be warned, obscure text ahead):

Toms Mono

As you can see I have drawn the majuscules only. I will try to implement the minuscles and other characters too, at the latest of the next Hackweek. 😉

Funny, but jimmac is working also on a font too. Good luck to you! 🙂

I will publish the font when I think it is in a somehow useful state. It will be released under an open source license (probably Open Font License or GPL, I don’t know yet).

Feedback welcome! 🙂

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Posted in Artwork, Hackweek | 2 Comments »

Unifying Progress During Installation

August 27th, 2008 by

This might not be that useful, but it’s fun.

If you look at the openSUSE installer during the time it’s busy, you can see at least 4 types of progress bars shown:

  1. Disk preparation
  2. Image deployment
  3. Additional package installation
  4. Writing final configuration before reboot

My goal for this hackweek is to unify them as much as possible. So, now I have something to show. The prototype works on openSUSE 11.0 Alpha2 and unifies steps 1-3. Here is a screenshot:

Installer deploying images, switched to the details view

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Posted in Hackweek, YaST | 3 Comments »

HackWeek III Day 1 – Diary Of An Outsider

August 26th, 2008 by

After my disasterous attempt to travel out to Nurenberg on Sunday – I managed to get my passport stolen at security of all places 🙁 (I thought I had lost it, but nothing found yet).  I managed to travel out first thing on Monday.

Geekos and Tux

The timing was perfect, I managed to get to the SUSE offices in NUE just in time to drop my bags and meet up with Andreas for a little tour/familiarisation of the site.  This was great because we (openSUSE invited about 10 community members to NUE) got to see a load of the great folks that work on the project and see how they do it (including the ever elusive Beineri:

Stephan Binner

We then had a pleasant brunch, and afterwards sat down to start hacking on our respective projects.

So what is one doing for HackWeek? Well it isnt exactly hacking (well not initially although I may have to so I can get the end product out); I’m hoping to do some videos of HackWeek, both documentary style(ish) and some interviews.  Why do I say “hoping”? Well I’ve hardly filmed anything 🙁 I have been way too busy discussing and speaking about openSUSE with people.

Day 1 was very much a ChatWeek moment rather than HackWeek 🙂  The chatting took place all around the offices, and even in Meeting Rooms where we discussed many aspects of the project.  I continued chatting with fellow openSUSE peeps over dinner and well into the night:

Chatting over dinner

Chatting into the night

It isn’t all chatting though, some people did manage to get some coding done albeit in between chats 🙂  By the way Andreas isn’t laughing at the code quality and Benji isn’t playing an advanced level of nethack – honest!

Actually hacking

I’m certainly hoping to be able to get some video recorded on Day 2, but these people at SUSE are just so damned social that it’s really hard!! 😀

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Posted in Hackweek | Comments Off on HackWeek III Day 1 – Diary Of An Outsider

Build for Another System

August 26th, 2008 by

This is about what I did yesterday in the first day of hackweek:

hello world

It is a hello world program. No, the interesting thing about that is not that I am finally able to write a hello-world (which I copied from the internet anyway) but the system on which it is running is unusual for me. It is another system than Linux, it is Windows.

Still somehow boring to let run a hello world on Windows? Yes, but I did not build it on Windows. I build it on Linux on a free software stack. I yesterday set up a mingw compiler ready for cross compiling Windows binaries on Linux. Maybe this can be the first little step towards a Windows build target in the Buildservice.

What do you think?

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Posted in Build Service, Hackweek, Toolchain | 3 Comments »

Hackweek Day 1 in Nürnberg

August 26th, 2008 by

Yesterday hackweek in Nürnberg was for me not hacking but managing hackweek.  Let’s see whether I find time today to really hack on glibc as planned.

As I organised travels for some folks to come to Nürnberg, I welcomed everybody and showed them around in the office.  In the afternoon I talked with many folks about what they are doing at hackweek and like to point out some interesting projects:

  • Benji and Pascal are working on the software portal
  • Andreas and Robert have been using pen and paper the whole day – to discuss new designs for the openSUSE web server
  • Stefan is working on YaST as a service, this is basically the backend for e.g. a Webenabled YaST.
  • Sonja is working on a nice GUI for a vocabulary training program that uses some great algorithms but has a rather bad user interface.

We also discussed heavily the openSUSE project and what should be improved.  Pascal, Andrew, Marko and myself talked also about the board elections, it’s good that some members of election committee and of the board had the chance to meet face to face.

It was great to see so many openSUSE community members for the first time – and to see many people hacking happily on their projects.

Posted in Hackweek | Comments Off on Hackweek Day 1 in Nürnberg

Linux Distribution Popularity Across the Globe

August 22nd, 2008 by

openSUSE popularity around the world

Royal Pingdom has issued an article about “Linux Distribution Popularity Across the Globe”. They have included eight common Linux distributions in their survey: Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Fedora, Debian, Red Hat, Mandriva, Slackware and Gentoo and used Google Insights for Search, for determining the results.

Below is the summary from their results :

  • Ubuntu is most popular in Italy and Cuba.
  • OpenSUSE is most popular in Russia and the Czech Republic.
  • Red Hat is most popular in Bangladesh and Nepal.
  • Debian is most popular in Cuba.
  • Cuba is in the top five (interest-wise) of three of the eight distributions in this survey.
  • Indonesia is in the top five of four of the distributions.
  • Russia and the Czech Republic are in the top five of five of the distributions.
  • The United States is not in the top five of any of the distributions.

There is an interesting result, Rusia, Czech and Moldova beating Germany about openSUSE popularity 😉 . Oh, of course this is not complete survey, and it is not the weakness of openSUSE itself. In the other side, the survey show us that openSUSE gained much popularity in outside Germany.

Another interesting result, congratulation for Indonesian openSUSE Community, Indonesia is in top five (number #5 of 5) of openSUSE popularity in the world and Indonesian openSUSE Community contributed in the survey results to make Indonesia as top five of four of the distributions.

Please navigate to the survey results for another interesting results and detail statictics.

Posted in Miscellaneous | Comments Off on Linux Distribution Popularity Across the Globe

Get Read/Write support to external NTFS Hard Drives

August 21st, 2008 by

Hi Lizards, that’s my first post here! 🙂 so… Thanks for reading!

Well let’s start.

I Red lots of times that users have problems with NTFS usb hard drives. Of course i’m talking about read/write support and ntfs-3g.

Touch and works with /etc/fstab is not a nice idea, also because device name could change and a static mount point will be unusefull.

The solution is to write an hal rule. In this case, all we need is the following:

With you favourite editor create like root that file:

/usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/20-ntfs-config-write-policy.fdi

and past in it that lines:

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!-- -*- SGML -*- -->
<!--
   Allow read/write mounting of external NTFS devices with ntfs-3g.
    /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/
-->
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
  <device>
    <match key="volume.fstype" string="ntfs">
      <match key="@block.storage_device:storage.hotpluggable" bool="true">
          <merge key="volume.fstype" type="string">ntfs-3g</merge>
          <merge key="volume.policy.mount_filesystem" type="string">ntfs-3g</merge>
          <append key="volume.mount.valid_options" type="strlist">locale=</append>
      </match>
    </match>
  </device>
</deviceinfo>

than restart, as root, hal daemon with

hald restart

to make changes working.

If you want you could use my ntfs-3g package on my home repository

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/anubisg1/openSUSE_10.2/
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/anubisg1/openSUSE_10.3/
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/anubisg1/openSUSE_11.0/

it is always the last stable ntfs-3g released (right now is 1.2812) and include also the hal rule wrote before.

I hopes that to be usefull for lots.

Andrea 🙂

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Posted in Usability | 4 Comments »

openSUSE TV update

August 21st, 2008 by

Ok now that my tubes to the net are back with gusto, I have been able to get all of tube.o.o onto openSUSE TV.  Actually oTV has some videos that aren’t on tube.o.o 🙂

With HackWeek 3 coming up this week, I’m hoping to get more videos up there.  So calling all Geecko Stations, if your make some videos of you escapades, please let me know and we’ll get them uploaded.  As it isn’t an official corporate sponsored site rules are a touch looser, e.g: video format doesn’t have to be in OGG, yes it would be preferable but not final.  I have a HackWeek project relating to the openSUSE Broadcasting Corporation, so the weeks after HackWeek should hopefully be good.  I’m hoping to be able to do some updates during the week too, but they may have to wait.

Remember if you have any suggestions or (preferably) any content to share with folk about openSUSE and it’s ecosystem please let me know.  You can get hold of me by leaving a comment here or mail me (you may need to edit the address 😉 ).

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Posted in Marketing | Comments Off on openSUSE TV update

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