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Archive for 2008

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Extract and Compress Right Click Menu on KDE4

July 12th, 2008 by

One of the functional menu that make my life more easier with KDE 3 are the Compress and Extract Menu. With this function, I could make an archive or extract zip file with Konqueror without opening Ark for manually extract or compress the file. Now, I enjoy the KDE 4 on openSUSE 11.0, with Kwin desktop effect and a lot improvement in various area, but I still missing the above menu.

How to add the similar function to KDE 4 so we could compress some file or folder, or extract a zip file both in Dolphin and Konqueror ? Here is the tips :

  1. Download the plugin here :
    http://www.kde-apps.org/content/download.php?content=84206&id=1&tan=96989998
  2. Open konsole / terminal
  3. Extract the plugin
  4. Go to the extract folder
  5. Copy all of .desktop file into /usr/share/kde4/services/ServiceMenus
  6. Copy the content of script folder into /usr/bin
  7. Test with dolphin or kde4

Compress and Extract

The above tips will make a system wide configuration. If you wish to make a local changes, just execute INSTALL_1.0.sh on the extract folder.

NOTE : The programs p7zip, bunzip2, bzip2, gzip, rar, unrar, tar, zip and unzip must be installed.

I don’t know if the function will be added into KDE 4.1 by default, but I hope so 😉

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Posted in KDE, Usability | 8 Comments »

Buildservice and L3

July 10th, 2008 by

These days some people from various teams spent a lot of time the last days discussing topics around L3. L3 means Level-3 support and is one of the services that we offer for our enterprise product series. It is about bugs which are not solvable through our support organisation but require developer eyes to stroll through source code.

What that has to do with openSUSE you might wonder. Well, since we’re currently working on switching our internal build process to a Buildservice based solution, L3 comes into play as well as other parts that are hardly visible for the community but important for the business.

L3 is a really tough game: Customers are paying money for the service and if they call they expect premium service quickly. Often enough enterprise operations are endangered by L3 bugs (or it is said that it is 😉 and clearification is needed quickly to relax the situation.

For the brave guys offering this service that means that they need to replay the customer situation quickly, debug, find the bug and if needed provide a fix for the customer.

The customer of course can tell more or less accurate which system he is running on which hardware. But than it’s getting rough for us: Finding the correct source for this constellation might sound easy, but if one adds up the amount of products that we maintain, it’s subflavours and service packs and also considers the lots of maintenance updates that the customer is expected to install, it becomes clearer that there are lots of possibilities and huge hard drives with content ;-).
Having found the correct source debugging (often together with the customer under time preasure), fixing and providing a fixed package begins.

L3 is an impressive bussiness for me, done by courageous guys.

Even more nice that the Buildservice helps a lot here because it makes at least building of debug info packages and fixes easy. A well thought through project structure in the Buildservice linked together with sourcelinks and aggregrations (which is a science for itself which one where 😉 eases (at least) the source organisation a lot. Other things also sound promising.

There is still some work to do until all peaces fit together but we are looking forward to helping the L3 collegues to improve their processes with the Buildservice and maybe some other tools.
I know, this is not exactly related to community questions but I thought it might be interesting to read about these things from time to time as well…

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Posted in Build Service | Comments Off on Buildservice and L3

new osc package released

July 10th, 2008 by

After two or three weeks of coding (not mine mostly, but by Marcus and Dirk), a lot of good stuff has accumulated in the osc development tree. Time to release a new package. It is a particularly good moment because today the 1.0 release of the Build Service has been announced.

The list of changes is long, the NEWS file has it all. Overview:

  • version 0.105
  • easier usage of osc submitreq: It is less picky on commandline arguments, can be called in working copies or project directories, figures out which build service instance to use, and has improved output. Also, there is a osc submitreq delete action now (which only works if you have write permissions on the destination though)
  • osc search: added option -i|–involved, to show in which projects/packages a developer is involved
  • osc importsrcpkg: no signature check anymore
  • osc linkpac: –revision option added.
  • osc copypac: use the correct userid when copying to another api host
  • osc build: double check the buildinfo for local builds.
  • osc buildhist: change the output into a format which better matches actual RPM filenames.
  • osc commit: give commit message tempfiles a “.diff” suffix, so syntax highlighting automatically works in capable editors
  • don’t expand/unexpand if the working copy has local modifications – this is a workaround for #399247 but this way the working copy isn’t screwed up. Also, make sure no _linkerror files end up in working copies.
  • better error reporting in a whole number of cases, especially printing out more available detail. For instance, osc meta now prints out a concrete text why something you submitted was not accepted.

Have a lot of fun with it.

And just a note, remember that it is very easy to write osc plugins in order to extend or alter the functionality! Here’s the documentation.

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Posted in Build Service, Packaging | Comments Off on new osc package released

Moving Forward with openSUSE 11.1

July 4th, 2008 by

Since both Coolo and Michl are on vacation for two weeks, I’m a bit more involved with the openSUSE distribution.  Besides announcing the openSUSE 11.1 roadmap, I was busy to stabilize the factory trees and get an installable distribution  after quite some major changes have been checked into factory. The goal was to have a snapshot of factory as internal Alpha0 release to see what’s working and what’s broken.

Factory has received the following visible major updates after 11.0:

  • The GNOME team prepares for GNOME 2.24 and updated to the development release GNOME 2.23.4
  • Similarly, the KDE team prepares for KDE4.1 and updated to KDE 4.0.84 (4.0.83 was KDE 4.1 beta2, not sure what .84 corresponds exactly to)
  • Installation-Images now have support for IPv6 so that you can install with IPv6 remote hosts

Besides that a large number of packages were updated, renamed, or removed.  In our effort to create small JeOS images, cracklib now uses compressed passwords to save space.

A number of updates are already queued but did not go into factory yet since they missed the deadline for Alpha0, I’d like to point out the following:

  • OpenOffice.Org 3.0 Alpha2 – in preparation for the OpenOffice.Org 3.0 release
  • NetworkManager update to current svn

Alpha0 is not yet released, we’re still hunting some bugs but I hope the above gives some impression where openSUSE 11.1 will go.

Have a lot of fun!

Andreas

Posted in Distribution | 2 Comments »

Showing package dependencies

June 27th, 2008 by

In order to give an answer about “Why this package will be installed and who needs it?” I have added a new Dialog in the QT single package selector:

Select one item (pattern, package) in the single selection frame, use the right mouse button and select “Show solver information”. A solverrun will be made for this item and the result will be shown with this dialog.

  • Black arrow : This item will be required by….
  • Green arrow: This item will be recommended by…
  • Green boxes: This package is already installed
  • Grey boxes: This package will be installed
  • Blue boxes: Patterns

You can navigate through the tree via the overview frame:

After you have selected one item in the tree you can see more information about:

e.G. this item will install two further patterns due to the shown dependencies.

In order to decrease the complexity of the tree you can blind out:

  • already installed packages
  • recommended packages/patterns

So you will get a shrinked tree:

Technical Background:

This is a simple Qt Dialog widget which can be used in other programs too. ( Package libqdialogsolver1)

YaST uses this widget as a YaST plugin. So if this package is not available you will get a popup in single selection only.

Posted in Software Management | 4 Comments »

Get your openSUSE posters! Posters for everyone!

June 25th, 2008 by

These three openSUSE posters have been up for a while, but I now have the SVG files up so people can edit them, add their LUG or openSUSE Local User Group name/logo & address to them, change the design, etc. They are up on the Miscellaneous Artwork page, so our community can use them for flyers, posters, or to spam their neighbor’s mailboxes*. Comments, questions, or suggestions about the posters? Use that comment box below, folks ;-).

*Neither Kevin Dupuy, the openSUSE Project, nor Geeko endorse plastering people’s mailboxes with a bunch of openSUSE flyers. Save the trees, use email instead ;-).

Posted in Artwork, Marketing | 2 Comments »

openSUSE 11.0 At First Glance: It’s OK.

June 20th, 2008 by

So I’m still running openSUSE 10.3 as my main desktop, and will be until next week when the pre-ordered boxed editions are supposed to ship. By then I’ll be able to do a full review of what I think about openSUSE 11.0, but I did download and install the GNOME Live CD yesterday, and so I wanted to just talk about a few points, good and bad.

Keep in mind, this is just me using this system for a few hours, and just talking about a few key points. If you’ve got comments about something I’ve said, please comment 😉

The Good

The art and look & feel of openSUSE 11.0 rocks! I really like the new GTK theme for the GNOME desktop, which gies the system a much needed refresh of the theme.

I also liked the GNOME live installer. Although it’s not the widely loved new installer from the DVD (which I’ll finally be able to use next week), it does look nice and do it’s job well. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have the world map included in the install, apparently it was included in response to a bug I filed in a late beta but came in too late for 11.0.

After the install and the reboot, I was brought to the login manager. It wasn’t the new login manager included in GNOME 2.22, but the older one. It still works, but I think in this day and age it’s time for people to be able to have a face browser. You know, 9 years after Mac OS 9 and Windows XP both included them.

On the desktop, I was shown the Greeter and a window asking for me to perform an online update. At the same time. Neither of which helped me, considering I have no internet access until I install the Madwifi driver. But if both windows are going to be shown at the same time, they should be a part of the same window, e.g. the user clicks out of the greeter, then the online update request is shown.

Setting up the online update was easy enough, although it still took a while. More on the online updating situation in the “The Bad” section below.

This was about the extention of the little playing around I did, so without further adieu…

The Bad

Yes, boo me if you will, but I unfortunatly found that the GNOME desktop seemed to regress in the polish department. The online update/greeter thing as mentioned earlier was one thing, but there are several other issues I have with 11.0. These may seem nit-picky, but these are things reviewers and users will take away from the system.

The first issue I noticed is something I filed a bug report about in 11.0, and that was the notification messages. They are over sized, obnoxious, and don’t fit in with the look and feel of openSUSE 11.0. For one, that little stripe is blue. 11.0 is green. Not a match, the board goes back. And it’s not even the shade of blue that matches the window decorations or the theme. And they are way too big. You can see the same message in 10.3 and 11.0, and the color and size difference. Worse than that, some applications change the color of the stripe for no apparent reason. NetworkManager is one, it makes it dark blue. PackageKit is another, making it this ugly shade of red. I’m sorry, this just doesn’t look professional to me.

Left is 10.3, Right is 11.0

Next, on the menu, is a button under Control Center for YaST. I don’t know when this was put in, but it had to have been late. It wasn’t in the last public release candidate, but it was snuck in in the later ones before gold, apparently. And it was a bad choice, considering YaST is already accessable from the Control Center. And it actually says YaST. Call me crazy, but if I’m a user looking to set up a new user, I’m probably not going to think, “well, I need to look for something called YaST”. Calling it Administrator Settings, as it was in 10.2 and 10.3 would work great. But it isn’t.

And another issue, in the Control Center, all but two of the Common Tasks are missing. And, the Show Administrator Settings (aka YaST) is missing. Meaning nowhere on the desktop is YaST referred to as anything but YaST. Bug report.

The 3D settings. I’m not sure making AIGLX default, and then not providing a way to switch on XGL for those people who AIGLX isn’t faster for, was the best option. Desktop Effects on my Intel graphics chip on 11.0 is really slow. Going into the console and switching on XGL works, but is that what you want to tell a new user who wants effects to actually work on his or her system to do?

Before I get to the big finish, I wanted to say: would it seriously have been a huge hit to the 11.0 development cycle to include at least a release candidate of Firefox 3, instead of Beta 5?

And finally, PackageKit. I’ve only used it a little, but I’m not a fan. Personally, I liked the GNOME openSUSE Updater from openSUSE 10.3, and with just a few improvements (such as showing what the updates are and allowing users to select or deselect them without loading up the YaST module), would have been a fine addition to 11.0. But instead, we’re using PackageKit’s updater, which is annoying and obnoxious, at least the time I used it. After getting online update set up, I get this blaring giant red notification message about 1 security update. I have the option of choosing to update it with a click of the button on the screen, so I click it. Then the root password dialog comes up, and after that another notification, this time in blue, comes up letting me know my system is being updated. After a minute, I get another notification, telling me it’s done. The icon goes away, I assume it’s finished. Then I try going into the Install Software, and I get a message that something else is accessing package management. What else is it? Well, PackageKit still has control over it, although it doesn’t tell me. At least with the openSUSE updater, you can see when it’s doing something.

I don’t see the value add for PackageKit vs. our own updater. Unless this is all about being as close to possible to GNOME upstream, in which case I don’t think that’s a case for which we need to be degrading user experiance. It is a desktop enviroment, we are supposed to be free to change it in whichever way we would like to make it better, and more openSUSE-ish. And although I’m reserving full judgement on openSUSE 11.0 GNOME until I get the full edition and live with it for a few days, I’m unfortunately not that impressed with it as of yet.

Posted in GNOME | 6 Comments »

How to Make openSUSE 11.0 GM Live USB

June 20th, 2008 by

openSUSE 11.0 with tons of impovement has been announced on June 19, 2008. Since then it was a busiest day for me : setting up a local mirror providing iso image for openSUSE fans in Indonesia, arrange openSUSE 11.0 release party and preparing Indonesian openSUSE community regular meeting on Saturday, June 21, 2008. We have planned all of these since last month but I must updated the planning with latest news and preparation.

Beside the planning, I also read some comments that noticed me with problem regarding openSUSE LiveUSB tutorial. The tutorial used openSUSE 11.0 RC1 and the modified initrd as noticed on the tutorial doesn’t fit with the GM version.

(more…)

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Posted in Documentation, KDE, Usability | 17 Comments »

Install openSUSE without burning CDs

June 20th, 2008 by

You run Linux already but want to install 11.0? DVD image takes too long to download? Don’t want to waste a CD for the mini iso? A router connects you to the internet?

Check out setupgrubfornfsinstall. It’s a dialog based shell script to prepare remote network installations. It was primarily made for use in LANs but now also supports direct installation from opensuse.org. Just run the script, select 11.0 and it will download the kernel and initrd used for installation. After that it adds an entry to your boot loaders’ config file with proper parameters. Reboot, select the new entry and the installation starts.

Posted in Systems Management | Comments Off on Install openSUSE without burning CDs

Hermes grows up

June 20th, 2008 by

As promised in my other blog about Hermes it grew up a bit since then. I was able to install it finally on the Buildservice production machines. Darix and Adrian helped me to get things underway. As the first process of the backend, the srcserver is notifying Hermes about things that happen: Commits to packages, udpates of packages etc.

Since starship is not yet in the shape that we really want to use it, we’re only offering RSS feeds so far, not yet personalized. Under the URL http://build.opensuse.org/feeds/allevents.rdf you find a RSS feed with all notifications the srcserver comes up with so far.

We realise that this feature is especially interesting for collaboration in general and especially for the new request stuff coming with the upcoming release 1.0. As a consequence we have created a feed that only contains the notifications about requests: Creation, change and deletion are reported to http://build.opensuse.org/feeds/requests.rdf

This is the first step with Hermes in production. Note that it is still beta and nothing one could expect proper functioning from. I am leaving to a two week vacation today and this is what I could still come up with before. Hope you enjoy it a bit – please give feedback, especially which notifications you would like to see coming through.

These are the areas where I would continue to work on after vacation if you don’t come up with other prios:

  • Starship – Message displaying, configuration of notification subscriptions.
  • Personalization – only show me notifications about projects where I am involved.
  • More output agents – mail, jabber, personal RSS
  • More usefull notifications, with help from the backend people

If you want to know more about Hermes find it in the infrastructure svn module (don’t miss the docu in the doc directory)

Posted in Build Service | 4 Comments »

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