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Archive for 2008

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Hamradio packages ready !

June 19th, 2008 by

Tim and I updated the Amateur radio (hamradio) packages and made them ready for 11.0 .

Amateur radio (also Hamradio) is both a hobby and a service in which participants, called “hams”, use various types of radio communications equipment (also homebrew) to communicate with other radio amateurs for public service, recreation and self-training.

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

You can also install single packages via the 1-click-Installer of the software-search-portal at http://software.opensuse.org/search or add the repository to YaST2/zypper.

YaST2:

Open the repository editor and add http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/hamradio/<your distribution version>

Example: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/hamradio/openSUSE_11.0/

zypper:

10.1: zypper ar -r http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/hamradio/SUSE_Linux_10.1/hamradio.repo

10.2: zypper ar -r http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/hamradio/openSUSE_10.2/hamradio.repo

10.3: zypper ar -r http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/hamradio/openSUSE_10.3/hamradio.repo

11.0 zypper ar -r http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/hamradio/openSUSE_11.0/hamradio.repo

Here’s a list of available packages:

7plus
acfax
aldo
aprsd
as296-tty
ax25-apps
ax25-doc
ax25spyd
ax25-tools
axssh
axw3
baken
baycomepp
conlogv
cwdaemon
digi_ned
dpbox
dxc
fbbdoc
fbbsrv
fldigi
fltk
fpac
glfer
gmfsk
gnuradio
gpredict
gpsk31
gpsman
gpsmanshp
grig
HamFax
hamlib
hamlog
hf
ibp
kamplus
klog
kpsk
kptc
ktrack
libax25
libgdal
libgeos
libgeotiff
libhdf4
libproj4
linkt
linrad
minimuf
mtrack
multimon
node
qgrid
qrq
qsstv
rspfd
sdcc
shapelib
soundmodem
spandsp
splat
svxlink
tfkiss
tkconv
tlf
tnt
twpsk
unixcw
wxapt
xastir
xcall
xcircuit
xconvers
xdemorse
xdx
xfhell
xlog
xoscope
xsmc-calc
xwxapt
yfklog
z8530drv-utils

Thats > 80 packages in our repository.

I you find a bug you can report it HERE .

vy 73 es 55 de

DG7GT es DL9PF

Posted in Build Service, Desktop, Miscellaneous, Packaging | 1 Comment »

Garden Party

June 19th, 2008 by

Yes folks, it’s Thursday which means it must be time for us fun loveing GNOME people to have another meet.  I appreciate that openSUSE 11.0 is released today, but whilst you download why not join us in the fun (you can think of it as an on-line Release Party 😉 )

To quote the most casual programmers who just so happens to be our MC:

Hi all GNOME addicts,

The next openSUSE-GNOME project meeting will take place at the official
#opensuse-gnome IRC channel on freenode
(irc://irc.freenode.net/openSUSE-gnome) on

upcoming Thursday: 2008/06/19 18:00 CEST (16:00 UTC)

For an overview what time this is in different timezones, use:

http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?day=19&month=06&year=2008&hour=16&min=0&sec=0&p1=0

This meeting is meant to discuss the latest developments in and around
openSUSE-GNOME. Please review your topics on the meeting wiki page at:

http://en.opensuse.org/GNOME/Meetings/20080612

as soon as possible.

For general info about our IRC meetings read:

http://en.opensuse.org/Meetings/About

For a general technical introduction to IRC (Internet Relay Chat) see

http://www.irchelp.org/ ;(not affiliated with openSUSE) or enter “IRC
help” into your preferred search engine.

The network we use is freenode – for more information on this, including
how to find a server, visit http://freenode.net/;(not affiliated with
openSUSE either).

Have a lot of fun ..

Casual J. Programmer

(on behalf of the openSUSE-GNOME team)

Posted in Events, GNOME | Comments Off on Garden Party

How to search more efficiently in Bugzilla with pybugz

June 19th, 2008 by

If you just want to search for bugs in Bugzilla, it’s (a bit?) painful: start the browser, type in the URL, insert your login and password and try to find out where to go. There is an easier way to do: pybugz for commandline lovers!

Thanks to Peter Poeml, get this very useful Python script from here. After you have installed it you need only two steps to configure it:

  1. Create a file ~/.bzuser and insert your Bugzilla login.

  2. Login into Bugzilla and insert your password. This creates the file ~/.bugz_cookie:

    $ /usr/bin/bugz-login

The script knows several subcommands, its interface is similar to CVS or Subversion. You can search, get, post, modify, attach and download an attachment, all with this utility. For example, if you want all bugs about “XML”, regardless of the product or component, you just type:

$ bugz search xml

That gives the following output:

 * Using https://bugzilla.novell.com/
 * Searching for 'XML'
 [ deleted a lot of lines ]

Maybe you want to narrow your search for KDE and specific products? No problem, here is an example:

$ bugz search KDE --product="openSUSE 11.0"
 * Using https://bugzilla.novell.com/
 * Searching for 'KDE' with the following options:
 * product = ['openSUSE 11.0']
113512 kde-maintainers Firefox in KDE - Only Uses GNOME Programs
170055 dmueller Firefox sets desktop background for Gnome under KDE
176179 kde-maintainers User can't edit properties for default notifications under KDE Storage Media and entries disepeared !
203548 sbrabec workrave-kde is an empty applet by default
[... and many more ...]

Of course, if you know the bug number you can retrieve it with:

$ bugz get 378240

and it will list all the details of the bug. Very useful! I haven’t tried the other subcommands yet, but I think they are also very convenient.

There are many more things to discover. So, when was your last time searching for bugs? 🙂

Tags: , ,
Posted in Accessibility, Quality Assurance, Usability | Comments Off on How to search more efficiently in Bugzilla with pybugz

NNTP Access to the openSUSE Forums

June 17th, 2008 by

For folks not that used to web interfaces, the openSUSE Forums team provides a secondary interface to our forums – NNTP. The intention of this post is to raise your attention on this possibility.

What is NNTP?

Using our NNTP interface, you’re able to participate in forums discussions without accessing the web interface at all. You’re able to use any newsreader supporting the RFC standard to read and even write posts. Actually your user-id gets recognized in the web interface if you set up your newsreader properly.

From my personal experience especially developers are in general more familiar in using mailing lists instead of browsing a web interface. One of our desires is to get more developers to the board. On the one hand, developers can provide competent assistance especially to our new users – on the other hand, the forums are able to provide a lot of feedback back to developers. The advantages are obvious!

The NNTP interface to the forums provides a neat way to browse significantly more content with less effort. You can get a quick overview about forums content using NNTP. Certainly you’ll not be able to see the great template created by Robert Lihm, but every choice has its drawback – Good to have a choice at least, isn’t it?

For detailed instructions on how to set up your newsreader properly to participate in forums discussions, be sure to check out the NNTP section within our forums FAQ.

We’re really looking forward to your contribution!

Posted in Marketing | 6 Comments »

Little Hermes

June 16th, 2008 by

some code was added to the buildservice backend already that generates Hermes notifications. That means that Hermes is getting closer, I will work this week to start a first test with Hermes on the production build service.

So let me introduce Hermes a bit.

Hermes is a system that helps it’s user to get back the decision about who is sending a message when and in which way. Using Hermes it is up to the user to decide if a message comes through at all, when and in which way. Hermes is going to be the central part of notifications in the openSUSE Buildservice.

Digest messages will be supported through Hermes. That means that messages (mostly automatically generated) of the same type coming regularly can be combined to one message combining all the bits. For example, imagine a notification about a package build fail. It might not make sense to send lets say 50 of them a day due to numerous rebuilds on different platforms that failed. It seems to be much more efficient to combine all these 50 to a digest message that lists all of the 50 fails. However, it’s users choice in Hermes.

The other important feature of Hermes is choice in the way of delivery. It is up to the user in which way the message comes through: Mail, RSS and jabber notification are already implemented in beta stadium, others may follow. It’s users choice based on the message type when and in which way the message is delivered.

Hermes LogoThe backend already has some code in it to notify Hermes. I hope I will be able to make let’s say some RSS feeds or mail running this week, especially for the submit requests. That would be another step into collaboration with the buildservice.

And since I seem to talk a lot about Hermes these days, Robert was cool enough to come up with a very cool logo for the (still little) Hermes. Do you like it? I think it is awesome – kind of 1960’s aircraft company 😉

Thank you very much, Robert!

More about Hermes to follow…

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Artwork, Build Service | Comments Off on Little Hermes

Carrying Community Radios

June 16th, 2008 by

Those folk from the UK based Podcast LUG Radio are holding their annual event LUG Radio Live on July the 19th and 20th.  I am attending and hopefully presenting a talk on openSUSE and our great community, but I would also like to see openSUSE have some other presence there.  The only problem is that LRL isn’t one of the big Open Source events, and as such the project can’t justify the expense of sending employees to the event especially as a fair few of them went to the US Show.

So I’m interested in knowing if there are any others going that would be interested in helping man a booth run by community members for the greater community?  If there are please let me know either by e-mailing the Marketing Mailing list or by commenting here.  Idealy we would need at least three people to man the booth, this way it would give people that are helping a chance to enjoy the event and not be shackled.

Please join in the fun and make sure people get the message that openSUSE is a real distro to contend with, this is an ideal opportunity for people who haven’t got much hacking prowess to help out 🙂

Posted in Events, Marketing | 1 Comment »

FirmwareUpdateKit

June 16th, 2008 by

[PS. I coudn’t resist. I just had to name the package ‘*Kit’. 😉 ]

Need to do a firmware update with a DOS program?

Can get tricky if you don’t have a DOS system around. We used to provide a bootable floppy image for that in the past (package dosbootdisk). But who has a floppy drive anyway?

So, here comes the new
FirmwareUpdateKit package. Install it and run run, e.g. fuk --grub foobar.exe That’s it. The next reboot gives you the option to start DOS and run foobar.exe.

fuk can also create bootable ISOs and, of course, even floppy images.

Posted in Systems Management | 5 Comments »

Converting Babylon Dictionaries to Stardict Format in OpenSuse

June 14th, 2008 by

This blog does not add any information to the documentation you can find around. Anyway, it is not too long since someone was able to make Babylon dictionaries usable by software other than the proprietary Babylon application. And they have been trying for years… so it has not been a trivial step 🙂

If you do not know Stardict, you can get it from Yast. This is the official site.

A few dictionaries are also linked – ready and free to use – at Stardict website. However, I used Babylon when I was a Windows user and i have to admit that their dictionaries remain unbeaten. Matters not what language you want, mono-language or bi-language, technical, general purpose etc etc… they just rock!

You can get tons of dictionaries for free from Babylon website:

Now, go to Yast Software Manager and search for dictconv. Alternatively, you can install from source (which is what I personally did).

Installing is very easy: ./configure and then make all install

Now you’re all set. To use it to convert:

cd to the directory where you have the .BGL dictionaries and type: dictconv INPUT_FILENAME.BGL -o OUTPUT_FILENAME.ifo

Pay attention to the extension: must be .ifo. This will generate 3 files for each BGL dictionary: .ifo, .idx, .dict

Place all these 3 files in /usr/share/stardict/dic/ creating a separate folder for each dictionary. Then rebook Stardict and go to Manage Dictionary (bottom right): there you can select what comes first, activate or deactivate etc etc

Nothing difficult but def worth, and not only for non native speakers.. there are lots of technical terminology Babylon dictionaries that may well come handy.

Notice that with Stardict you can also implement Pronunciations of the typed words: see Stardict site: “WyabdcRealPeopleTTS package make StarDict pronounce English words. It is just many .wav files. Extract(tar -xjvf) the tarball at /usr/share/”.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sooo well… Have fun ~ Buon divertimento ~ Viel Spaß ~ I que te diviertas ~ Maak plezier ~ ha så roligt [hmm i’m just hoping the dictionaries mentioned just above are not making me do some poor figure for these few transations of “Have Fun”.. cuz i have no idea for any language except Italian :D]

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Miscellaneous | 8 Comments »

Calling All Gardens

June 11th, 2008 by

It’s that time in the week again where the openSUSE GNOME Team hold their weekly shindig.  So to quote our illustrious casual Team MC:

Hi all GNOME addicts,

The next openSUSE-GNOME project meeting will take
place at the official #opensuse-gnome IRC channel on
freenode (irc://irc.freenode.net/openSUSE-gnome) on
upcoming Thursday: 2008/06/12 18:00 CEST (16:00 UTC)

For an overview what time this is in different
timezones, use:
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?day=12&month=06&year=2008&hour=16&min=0&sec=0&p1=0

This meeting is meant to discuss the latest
developments in and around openSUSE-GNOME. Please
review your topics on the meeting wiki page at:

http://en.opensuse.org/GNOME/Meetings/20080612

as soon as possible.

For general info about our IRC meetings read:

http://en.opensuse.org/Meetings/About

For a general technical introduction to IRC (Internet
Relay Chat) see

http://www.irchelp.org/ ;(not affiliated with
openSUSE) or enter “IRC help” into your preferred
search engine.

The network we use is freenode – for more information
on this, including how to find a server, visit
http://freenode.net/;(not affiliated with openSUSE
either).

Have a lot of fun ..

Casual J. Programmer

(on behalf of the openSUSE-GNOME team)

So come one come all, and join the fun!

Posted in Events, GNOME, Marketing | Comments Off on Calling All Gardens

Build Service 1.0 Release Candidate is out

June 11th, 2008 by

We just released the Build Service 1.0 release candidate. The final release is expected in two weeks.

Most important about this release are the improvements in source handling. Submissions to foreign projects are possible now. That does mean that after two years of development, direct work on openSUSE distribution becomes possible, without bugzilla in between ! You see, we need sometimes a bit longer, but we keep our promises 🙂

The Build Service at http://build.opensuse.org is already running it, so it can be already used for submissions. You just need the current osc from openSUSE:Tools project.

(more…)

Posted in Build Service | 1 Comment »

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