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Archive for 2008

Saschas Backtrace: Yabsc for Builder

December 1st, 2008 by

Today i tried out the Program called: yabsc. With http://software.opensuse.org/search?q=yabsc you can install the Program with one Klick. After the Installation the Program read the hints in the “.osc” Directory, and uses your Identity and Password for Checkin to Build Service API.

After the Program-Launch you see a Image like this:

yabsc1 Main Menue

On the left side you can see the Projects on your Watchlist. In the Center you see the Packages from the selected Project or Subproject. You can see the Buildlogs and Commitlogs directly.

On the second Tab “Workers”, you can see a image like this:

yabsc

Here you can see the “actual” Status in the openSUSE Buildservice. In this tab you can follow the Buildlog on the fly.  This is an very good thing 🙂

The third tab, labeld as “submit requests”, you can see your Requests. But for this Function i haven’t an image, so i haven’t actually submit requests.

Now i can say, this is an very good, and very short Programm. Try it out!

openSUSE @ FOSDEM 2009: CFP Started

December 1st, 2008 by

fosdem 2009

Today i received the confirmation that openSUSE will have a devroom @ FOSDEM 2009!

Yay! Because it’s a little bit earlier next year (2008-02-07/08), we should
start right now with the the planing.

Please head over to the opensuse-project list and read/comment this posting.

Smolt and openSUSE

December 1st, 2008 by

This morning I realised that openSUSE appears on the hardware database smolt the first time. We are introducing smolt with openSUSE 11.1 in the installation workflow. People can choose to send up their data to the smolt database. All that is of course done anonymously, the data is stored under a unique UUID which can not be tracked back to the submitter (Privacy Policy here.)

Smolt is a project started by Fedora to collect information about the hardware that is used with computers running Linux. We at (open-)SUSE were seeing this demand as well and also were discussing a solution. But it became clear quite quickly that it does not make sense to have a per-distro solution for that – if we want to have momentum with a hardware database a combined effort promisses the most.

On Linuxtag 2007 I was first time involved in meetings were people from the Fedora project offered us to participate in smolt. It became clear that the idea behind smolt is what we also wanted. The working athmosphere was (and still is) open, friendly and productive and thus we decided to join in. With openSUSE 11.0 we first time shipped a smolt client, but not in the installation workflow.

Smolt isn’t finished yet. While it is a stable infrastructure thanks to Mike McGrath and friends who work on it there are still some things that could be improved. Maybe there is somebody in the openSUSE community interesting in joining the smolt community and help? That would be great because the contributions from our side are still limited and I think it would be great if everybody would bring something to the party.

Smolt is not limited to Fedora and openSUSE btw. Other distros are invited to participate as well. With that I think smolt is a great thing for Linux overall. Hopefully some time in the future it will help us to convince more hardware manufacturers that supporting Linux is important for them.

An interesting read is also http://www.linux.com/feature/118322

Ah – yes, of course you should not forget to actually use smolt and send up your hardware data when installing openSUSE – we can still climb up in the OS list on http://smolts.org/static/stats/stats.html 🙂

Blog Themes

November 30th, 2008 by

Hello Folks,

now i changed all. In my old Blog i haved a themed Blog- The Themes was: “Saschas Insights”, a Theme with my personal thoughts about the world, the economy, the health and many more.

The second Theme was “Saschas Backtrace”, in this Blog i write about an newly or interesting Software, and how to work with it.

The last Theme was “Sascha and SuSI”. In Germany the Name SuSI is a Shortform for Susanne. But this part of my Blog not written to a new girlfriend. This Theme is for my experience with openSUSE.

And so i’m pleased to announce, that the Themes “Saschas Backtrace” and “Sascha & SuSI” moved to this Blog.

Have a lot of fun 🙂
cu Sascha

openSUSE-Education success history : OpenSource ECDL in Milan

November 29th, 2008 by

As i annunced on marketing mailing list this 21 November, in Milan (italy) as been presentated the OpenSource ECDL version.

Yes, your red well… OPEN-SOURCE. That means, instead talk about MS Windows and MS Office, it talk about an opensource Operating System and OpenOffice.org. This free operating system is openSUSE 😉 , improved with our Education Project. I was not in Milan, because if i have to say the true i was out of money, i live 1000 Km far, and i i wasn’t able to buy train ticket 🙁 . Mr. Carugo , the DIDASCA Rector told me about a “SOLD OUT”, 650 peoples in a room where only 500 was allowed… so.. a GREAT DAY!! Oh, i forgot.. Thanks to marketing team that sent me 50 Promo DVDs. Thanks

Test Post

November 27th, 2008 by

Hello, my Name is Sascha Manns from Germany. Now i try to post in lizards.

GNOME backports on openSUSE

November 27th, 2008 by

After several requests to get GNOME 2.24 built and made available the GNOME Team (well Magnus Boman really), took on the challenge of making it so.  Unfortunately we were a bit focused on the 11.1 release and didn’t actually think about doing any backports.  This has kind of bitten us squarely on the behind, yes we must bow to the KDE Team‘s backporting powers – make the most of it chaps 🙂

Unfortunately there are too many dependencies for the backport, and will involve a heck of a lot of maintenece – more so than normal.  After several attempts to coax things to work we must bow our heads in admission to being beaten 🙁 This doesn’t mean that we won’t be doing any backports in the future, the championship isn’t over just this match.  It does mean that there wont be a GNOME 2.24 for openSUSE 11.0 however, sorry to disappoint.

We have learnt our lesson and with the aim of not disapointing you again we have already instigated measures to ensure that your backporting needs are met.  We are already starting to build GNOME 2.25 against the current Factory and will continue to ensure that each release has the latest and greatest from the Enchanted Wood.  There may well be occaisons where things just won’t work, but we will do our utmost to minimise them and give you plenty of notice.

One thing we do need is your help.  Funny I always seem to be asking for help, but this time there is a really good reason (actually more than one 😉 ).  We need more people to run Factory to test things and ensure that bugs and issues/comments are reported back.  This doesn’t just apply to GNOME but openSUSE in general, please please test our latest releases and give us your feedback.  There are several ways you can do this – Bugzilla, IRC and Mailing Lists, oh and at events like the upcoming FOSDEM.

New software in build service

November 18th, 2008 by

I try testing xfce4 desktop and find some bugs. But I also find that some really interesting missing in opensuse build service, so I add two new applications to build service (gnome community repository…but now gaupol is available only in my personal repository, because in gnome pygtk wait for python 1.6) – osmo and gaupol.
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ARM support for openSUSE Buildservice and openSUSE

November 18th, 2008 by

ARM architecture going more to desktop style applications had been in press frequently during the last weeks. On top of were press releases of ARM and canonical officially announcing an ubuntu port in one of the next releases for the ARM architecture. Applications are more of type nettop or advanced PDA like the nokia n810, than what is currently known as traditional embedded applications (just to name a few examples).

This has been due to the fact that licensees of the ARM architecture, big semiconductor companies from the Top 10 list, have begun shipping a new generation of “mobile PC in the pocket” of System on a Chip semiconductors. They include now a really high clocked ARM core, DSPs for Video/Audio processing that can even decode HDTV streams, and OpenGL 2.0 capable HW engine and the peripherials included to build PDAs, mobile phones or nettops. All that within the energy budget of a mobile phone, and not of a Desktop PC. The google G1 phone had been one of the first products of this generation, although its software uses these features only in the beginnings.

What now does this all have to do with the openSUSE Buildservice and openSUSE distribution? As you might already guess it, we haven’t been sleeping either. And I am not a advocate of ubuntu on an .opensuse.org website. So read further what we have done so far.

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Updated python-turbogears to 1.0.7

November 17th, 2008 by

Last weekend I spent some time on getting python-turbogears to build for Factory. In the process, I came across a spec file error which was causing not only python-turbogears to fail on Factory, but also dozens of other python packages. The problem was the spec file line:

%{__python} setup.py install –prefix=%{_prefix} –root=$RPM_BUILD_ROOT –record-rpm=INSTALLED_FILES

Once I fixed this for python-turbogears and it’s dependent packages (the solution is to replace –record with –record-rpm), I was able to get version 1.0.6 building for Factory. There were a few other issues which needed to be resolved (some deprecated def as() functions in python-peak and python-ruledispatch were causing syntax errors on python 2.6 – because ‘as’ is a reserved keyword), but finally I got it sorted out.

Once python 1.0.6 was successfully building on Factory, I decided to update the package to the most recent stable version of the 1.0.x package line from http://www.turbogears.org – 1.0.7. I had to rewrite the infamous cherrypy2 patch for 1.0.7 and also had to update the python-elixir package (the older 0.5 Elixir was incompatible with python-sqlalchemy >= 5) but now it builds properly.
You can now download and install python-turbogears using:

zypper in python-turbogears

(if you have the devel:languages:python repository, of course).

Thanks to Peter Poeml for his help packaging and fixing bugs.