Home Home > 2008 > 09
Sign up | Login

Deprecation notice: openSUSE Lizards user blog platform is deprecated, and will remain read only for the time being. Learn more...

Archive for September, 2008

Newer Entries »

HOW TO: Remove the annoying KDE error “kio_media_mounthelper” when unmounting usb device

September 6th, 2008 by

With KDE3 and with some usb sticks or drives, could happen that if you try to safely remove them, with the classic right click –> safely remove, you’ll get an error from kio_media_mounthelper.

The error say that: The device was correctly unmounted but couldn’t be ejected

This is only a really annoying warn because the media has been unmounted so we can safely remove it, but how can we remove that?

I found the fix on Mandriva bugzilla (bug #39762)

The solution is really easy, is infact enought download that script (kdeeject)

Once the script has been downloaded do the following as root:

chmod +x kdeeject
mv kdeeject /opt/kde3/bin/kdeeject

now we will get that warn no more!

Just for knowledge, that script ask to hal if the device could be ejected, if not the media is only unmounted, if yes it is ejected too.

I hopes that to be usefull for lots.

Andrea 😉

Posted in Desktop, KDE, Usability | Comments Off on HOW TO: Remove the annoying KDE error “kio_media_mounthelper” when unmounting usb device

Lizards HowTo for Blogger

September 6th, 2008 by

I have started to create an initial HowTo in the openSUSE wiki to explain how to blog on lizards.openSUSE.org.

If you’re a blogger using lizards.o.o, I hope this information is helpful  for you – and I’d ask you to update it with everything you find useful.

Posted in lizards.openSUSE.org | 1 Comment »

openSUSE Board Election Comments

September 6th, 2008 by

The first openSUSE board has been appointed a year ago and now the elections are starting.  We have formed an election committee that is organising it (see here for details – thanks to Marko, Andrew, Claas and Vincent for running the elections!).

I had some good discussions with Pascal, Andrew and Marco during hackweek about the board and Pascal and myself have the same vision for the board.  Both Pascal and myself committed to blog about the board elections and Pascal beat me to it (see here and here for his two posts).  I’m not blogging to refute what Pascal wrote, I’m writing this to give my personal view as well – as the current chairman of the board.

(more…)

Posted in Board, Elections | Comments Off on openSUSE Board Election Comments

Google Chrome on openSUSE

September 4th, 2008 by

As I guess everyone notice, Google has released their own Browser called Chrome. Based on Webkit (based on KHTML of KDE fame) it is a small, fast and foremost secure webbrowser. And if you are reading this, you likely know that it does not work on Linux, but only on Windows.

But wait … we have the Windows Emulator Wine and I am one of its developers…

This also explains the first comment from a colleague on Wednesday morning was: “Why don’t you have fixed Wine to run it yet?!?” We tried together to get the online installer to run, but not successful.

Over night however some other folks found out how to do it by using the offline installer.

So how to install Chrome:

1. Get the Wine 1.1.3 from the openSUSE buildservice Emulators:Wine repository.

Its available via the Community Repositories Module in YAST2 on openSUSE 10.3 and 11.0,
after adding this repository upgrade the wine package.

This piece of code run as root will do it on openSUSE 11.0:
zypper sa http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Emulators:/Wine/openSUSE_11.0/ Wine
zypper in wine

All other steps are done as desktop user from a regular shell.

2. Download the Chrome Offline Installer

wget http://gpdl.google.com/chrome/install/149.27/chrome_installer.exe

3. Install richedit native libraries.

While Wine contains richedit libraries they are not yet up to the task to help Chrome yet.
(This is likely to be fixed soon.)

To install them run:
winetricks riched20 riched30

3. Run Chrome Installer

wine chrome_installer.exe

This will popup a dialog where you can press return until Chrome itself starts.

Since we need to supply Chrome with some Options to make it work with current Wine, you need
to close it again. Click anyway any crash messageboxes.

4. Run Chrome itself

We need to supply Chrome with some additional commandline options to make it run with Wine,
so we need to do start it by hand (instead of clicking on the convenient Desktop Icon already there).

cd ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/profiles/*/*/*/Google/Chrome/Application
wine chrome.exe --new-http --in-process-plugins

5. Surf!

And of course the obligatory screenshot:chrome wine opensuse

Most of the funny workarounds above will actually vanish in the next Wine releases, now that the Wine developers can actively debug it.

The WineHQ Application database entry has the ongoing discussion of getting it to work and links to the Wine bugzilla entries.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Desktop | 4 Comments »

Funny Output For Some

September 3rd, 2008 by

Last week (aka Hackweek 3) I worked on a Linux From Scratch system.

A colleague dropped by and asked me what kind of power supply were sufficient for a certain machine. I thought “ok, let’s just ask lshal|grep battery
My hope was that the hardware would not only measure the voltage of the battery but also the current drained from it.

What I found was kinda funny from an Electrical Engineer’s point of view:

lshal output for laptop battery

So what? “voltage.current”? Voltage? Or current? Or multiplied?

After laughing a bit I thought seriously about bug report, but it isn’t a bug apparently.
I find those things funny, can’t help it. I therefore consider this an Easter Egg of HAL.

Still, if anyone knows if a laptop can tell me the current current (SCNR), let me know.

Cheers,
Jan

Posted in Hackweek, Miscellaneous | Comments Off on Funny Output For Some

Unifying Progress During Installation – Continued…

September 3rd, 2008 by

So, my code from the hackweek is now in the YaST Subversion and the packages submitted for build.

Now the fun part begins, as some YaST developers noticed very quickly. There are several parts of YaST that got broken – e.g. YaST Partitioner on the running system spotted by Arvin, or sw_single not really adapted spotted by Bubli, …

Thanks to those I’m working with Kobliha to fix the issues as they come. So, if there is a progress in YaST (typically related to package installation) that does not behave as expected, it is certainly worth a bug report.

Posted in YaST | 2 Comments »

arm worker on i586 host

September 1st, 2008 by

Last week I joined the obs-cross “task-force” 😉 and Martin Mohring posted two nice articles about it ([1] [2]).

Today I played with it and got a i586 worker to build for arm.

Here’s a summary what I did:

  • Installed a cross-obs, as done in Martin’s article
  • Copied init_basesystem and build from /usr/lib/build/ to /usr/obs/server/build (to have the same changes as for ‘osc build’ for the worker)
  • search for “my %cando” in bs_dispatch, bs_repserver and bs_worker and change 2 lines to:


    • 'i586' => ['i586', 'armv4l'],
    'i686' => ['i586', 'i686', 'armv4l'],

  • (note: this is just a hack to get it running – our obs-experts are already working on a smarter solution)
  • update: not needed anymore!: added BUILD_USER=root at line 1201 in file /usr/obs/server/build/build to make dh_testroot happy (HACK!)
  • update: use this! Edit /usr/lib/obs/server/build/build , uncomment line with “-rfakeroot” and comment out next line. Also replace “-rfakeroot” with “-rfakeroot-tcp”
  • run sh /usr/sbin/qemu-binfmt-conf.sh
  • start the worker (on the same machine! – otherwise at least install the mentioned qemu!)

    • Now the worker gets a job assigned and does the same magic arm-build as shown in Martin’s posts.

    An enhancement would be to let the workers advertise their “cando”-archs and assign the jobs according to the info recieved by the workers.

    Posted in Build Service, Hackweek | Comments Off on arm worker on i586 host

    Hackweek review

    September 1st, 2008 by

    Tnx to Andreas Jaeger I could join the Hackweek crew for the cross-obs on Tuesday and also talk to several others on Wednesday. E.g. me and Beineri visited Andreas Bauer got him to include the link to the Monitor-page on “My Projects” (r4789).
    Atm I’m looking at how kiwi can/could work with cross-obs.

    And for all – Here’s a collage of some of AJ’s pictures from Tuesday:
    collage

    Posted in Build Service, Hackweek | Comments Off on Hackweek review

    HackWeek III Day 5 – Diary Of An Outsider

    September 1st, 2008 by

    And so the fun ends, as today is the last day of HackWeek III and also my last day (hopefully not ever) here in the Nurenberg Offices 🙁

    HW3 Poster

    I managed to grab Will Stephenson for a brief chat on camera about KDE and how it fits in with openSUSE, many thanks Will.  I also had some discussions with several people just to make sure I squeezed the last out of “ChatWeek”.  I spoke with Marko Jung about the upcoming Board Elections for a fair while, and we can’t stress enough how important this event is for the whole openSUSE Project.  For those that are keen to stand for election, please follow the Notification instructions here.  Also, those that do wish to stand, you will have to fund your own election campaign as neither Novell nor SUSE have the budget to fund a campaign like Obama or McCain.  The one advantage that we do have over the US elections is we won’t be anywhere near as long and drawn out, also we’ll be a lot friendlier (I hope).

    I would like to thank everyone at SUSE and Novell for inviting so many external community members to Nurenberg for HackWeek III, this was the largest by far and was an absolute winner!  I would like to especially thank Andreas Jaeger and Michael Loeffler for co-ordinating the event for us; Martin Lasarsch who even though he was feeling decidedly crappy thanks to a persistent cold was able to perform his host duties impecably; Sonja Krause-Harder for allowing me to occupy part of her office, Marco Michna for being that great shadow that appears when you need him; and also to the un-related to openSUSE but just as important to me AirBerlin, a mighty fine example of how flying can still be enjoyable, in this day and age of tight fisted, service void, unpleasent airlines.

    I am currently working on editing the video that I have, and will try and get something out ASAP, honest.  If there are any animation supremos out there that would like to do a bit of animation wizardry, please let me know!

    Posted in Hackweek | Comments Off on HackWeek III Day 5 – Diary Of An Outsider

    Hackweek Day 3: cross-build with OBS Part 2

    September 1st, 2008 by

    This is the second part of my article series about the Hackweek Project “cross-build in the OBS”. The first part can be found here.

    Before I come back to our Hackweek project, some information about the qemu emulator. As a preparation to Hackweek, I talked with Uli Hecht and Jan Kiszka. Uli Hecht is the Novell/SUSE Maintainer of the qemu packages in openSUSE:Factory/qemu and maintainer of the OBS project Emulators, where every emulator you can imagine is maintained for a couple of linux distributions. Also I consulted Jan Kiszka, one of the reviewers and maintainers of the qemu upstream project about the status of the qemu in general, “User Mode” and status of important architectures specifily.

    (more…)

    Posted in Build Service, Hackweek, Toolchain, Virtualization | Comments Off on Hackweek Day 3: cross-build with OBS Part 2

    Newer Entries »