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Archive for February, 2009

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OpenOffice_org 3.0.1 final available

February 10th, 2009 by

I’m happy to announce that OpenOffice.org 3.0.1 final packages are available in the Build Service OpenOffice:org:STABLE project.

I wish everyone got only positive experience with this new version.

I am sorry for the later announce. We have discovered an update problem on openSUSE-11.1 too late and it took some time until the fixed packages appeared. I am really sorry that it caused troubles to some people.

Plans:

I would like to put OOo-3.1-alpha1 into the OpenOffice:org:UNSTABLE project within the next two weeks. The first build will be done the older way. The next alpha should be done the openSUSE-11.1 (split-build) way and should finally provide also the extensions even for older products.

(more…)

Posted in Desktop, OpenOffice.org | 2 Comments »

New/Updated Software

February 10th, 2009 by

Hello Mates,

now following new/updated and published Software:

* Repo: openSUSE:Factory:Contrib:
kde4-skrooge
lynis
python-icalendar
rkhunter

* Repo: KDE/KDE4/Community
kde4-skrooge

* Repo: home:saigkill
boinctray
tktray

Tags: ,
Posted in Build Service, Contrib, KDE, lizards.openSUSE.org | Comments Off on New/Updated Software

USB EVDO (Alltel UM175AL) under SLED 10

February 9th, 2009 by

This was a bit of a bear, but I’ve inhereted a generic looking USB EVDO stick at the office. After some research and elbow grease, I’ve managed to get it working. In this post, I’ll detail EVDO configuration under SLED 10. I’ll leave out most of the gory technical details as others have covered that for me. I’ll link to the appropriate reference where necessary.

(more…)

Posted in Documentation, Miscellaneous, Usability | Comments Off on USB EVDO (Alltel UM175AL) under SLED 10

Registering your shiny new HP Mini-Note 2133

February 6th, 2009 by

So you just got an HP Mini-Note 2133 pre-loaded with SLED 10?  Great, right?

Well…  It’s not been so great for a lot of people.  It seems that HP simply put this laptop together, half-assed a SLED load and sent it out into the wild.  I’ve had a ton of problems with it, the two major ones being that I couldn’t register the machine with the Novell Customer Center (not even with my site license) it ships with a non-working wireless card.

My wifi fix was simple, buy a new usb wifi dongle…  Registration, however, was a little easier to fix (after some wailing, gnashing of teeth, and chat in #opensuse-GNOME… thanks captiain_magnus!).

If you attempt to use YaST to register you copy of SLED on the 2133, you’ll be re-directed to a “special” Novell Customer Center login.  It’s a little different than the normal one in that it wants an HP license, not any other SLED license you may have.  The biggest difference, however, is that it’s broke.  It simply refreshes the page when you click submit and sends nothing to Novell.

They’re pretty sneaky about hiding your license number as well.  It happens to be on your restore DVD.  It’s located on the right hand side below the HP logo and the “2133” text.  It’s in a series something like NNNNNN-XNN, where N’s are numbers and X is some letter.

To get around the registration bug, have your license number handy and fire up your terminal.  Use ‘sudo’ or just ‘su to root and issue the following command:

suse_register -n -a serial-hp=NNNNNN-XNN

Where “NNNNNN-XNN” is your registration code.  Sit back and wait, it took almost 20 minutes for this command to finish for me and you’ll receive absolutely no indication that it’s functioning.  Once it’s done, you’ll simply be returned to your prompt.  Fire up YaST or your favorite terminal emulator and check your repositories.  You should now have a Novell repository added.

Enjoy!

Posted in Base System, Distribution, Miscellaneous, Systems Management, Usability | 2 Comments »

Linking Buildservice packages with exact revisions

February 6th, 2009 by

During the “cleanup” of the HP-Education repository, I used a very interesting feature of the openSUSE Build Service: linking against revisions.

Sometimes, you want to patch a package from another repository to build with special features enabled or disabled. The Build Service allows you to link the package from this other repository (and avoid wasting space by duplicating the sources) and add your patches.

Now think about a patch against a special version of a package – and you know that you don’t want a package with a newer version in your repository for a foreseeable time. But if you use the plain link command of the Build Service, the linked package in your repository will get updated if the original package in the original project is updated.

Luckily, the buildservice allows you to link against a “frozen” state of a package: it’s source-revision. People already knowing any revision control systems like Subversion also know that the revision of a source is increased each time, a new change is submitted. And that’s what we need now: link against a special revision of the package from the other repository and apply our patch against it. The webclient currently doesn’t support such special features, but with osc it’s very easy.
(more…)

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Posted in Build Service | Comments Off on Linking Buildservice packages with exact revisions

OSF Status Report #2

February 5th, 2009 by

In January 2009, the openSUSE forums achieved the highest user activity ever since the launch in June 2008. The user activity measures the number of individual visits and is therefore an indicator for the vitality of the openSUSE forums.

Up to the 31st of January 2009, we achieved a membership of 21.322 (+2.550) members, 21.073 (+2.929) threads and 122.695 (+17.492) posts. The number in brackets shows the increase of the corresponding measurement compared to the last snapshot taken on the 31st of December 2008. Most users ever online still was 7.771 on the 2nd of December 2008.

The following diagram shows the monthly development of new user registrations, user activity, new threads and new posts since the launch in June 2008. We experienced 15.104 individual visits to the openSUSE forums in January 2009, which is an increase of 14% compared to December 2008 and is even 25% above average.

Kudos to our Top5 posters during January 2009

  • caf4926 – 575
  • ken_yap – 455
  • oldcpu – 439
  • Malcolm – 405
  • Axeia – 405

Thanks as usual for making the openSUSE forums a worthwhile place to be.

Any comments about the OSF status reports are much appreciated by the openSUSE forums team.

Posted in Marketing | Comments Off on OSF Status Report #2

openSUSE-GNOME Team Meeting Today (Timeshift) – 05 FEB 2009 2200 UTC

February 5th, 2009 by

Please join us for the GNOME Team meeting in #openSUSE-GNOME on
irc.freenode.net.

The current agenda can be found here:
http://en.opensuse.org/GNOME/Meetings/20090205

For time conversions, please see:
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?day=22&month=1&year=2009&hour=22&min=0&sec=0&p1=0

Thanks!

Posted in GNOME, Miscellaneous | Comments Off on openSUSE-GNOME Team Meeting Today (Timeshift) – 05 FEB 2009 2200 UTC

Thats how I roll: Installing Ruby on Rails on openSUSE

February 5th, 2009 by

There’s been some discussion about Rails on openSUSE recently, so I thought I’d add to my Ruby articles with a Rails installation guide.

Getting started with Rails on openSUSE is a breeze.  In this particular article, I’ll quickly outline installation and startup of Rails on openSUSE 11.1.  You’ll need to install Ruby, ruby-sqlite, and ruby gems.  I’ve detailed these in my previous articles on ruby.

(more…)

Posted in Documentation, Usability | 4 Comments »

Application Icons in the Package Selector

February 4th, 2009 by

Desktop files contain a lot of information about KDE/Gnome/X11 applications (e.g. names, icons).

Displaying this data in the package selector allows to provide a more detailed package description. The user can easily see which applications are included in an installed package.

Running these applications via mouse click is technically possible, but unfortunately security concerns don’t allow it. Please let me know if you have an idea how to solve this issue.

Posted in Desktop, GNOME, KDE, Usability, YaST | 9 Comments »

Do You Want Multiple Kernels on Your System?

February 3rd, 2009 by

Today, I’d like to mention another rather hidden feature of openSUSE 11.1. The package management is finally able to keep multiple versions of packages, if they support installation of parallel versions. A typical example of this is of course kernel. A lot of people want to keep the old, functional, kernel around when installing a kernel update and now there is a way to do it.

Open /etc/zypp/zypp.conf in your favorite editor and change this value:

multiversion = kernel-default,kernel-default-extra,kernel-default-base,kernel-source

The list contains names of packages to be installed via ‘rpm -i’ instead of ‘rpm -U’. Just adopt it to your the kernel flavor you are using.

Of course, there is a catch – there are no means to limit the number of package versions to be installed this way. The reasoning is that there is no automatic way to guess which versions to remove (in case of kernel, everyone has its own definition of working kernel) So you have to uninstall additional kernels you don’t need anymore manually.

Enjoy!

Posted in Kernel | 5 Comments »

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