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Archive for April 21st, 2009

Dropbox on openSUSE 11.1

April 21st, 2009 by

Today I discovered Dropbox, an online storage and synchronization tool. It offers 2 GB of free storage to its users and is available for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. I’ve tested it on Linux and Windows so far and it’s working great. If you’re tired of carrying around USB sticks to share files between different workstations, be sure to check it out. Hint: by clicking on the link above you (and me) will get 250 MB of free online storage as a bonus.

Installation and Setup on openSUSE 11.1 is a breeze

  • 1-click install is available in Gnome:Community
  • Logout from your GNOME Session and login again
  • Run “Dropbox” from the GNOME menu to link your workstation to your Dropbox account

Currently there’s a plugin for nautilus available. Hopefully some KDE coders more experienced than me will come up with a Dolphin plugin soon. Where the Dropbox daemon is proprietary software, the nautilus plugin is released under GPL and its sourcecode should provide the required information about the Dropbox daemon’s API to port it to KDE/Dolphin as well.

Have fun!

OpenOffice_org 3.1 beta5 available

April 21st, 2009 by

I’m happy to announce that OpenOffice.org 3.1 beta5 packages are available in the Build Service OpenOffice:org:UNSTABLE project. They include many upstream and Go-oo fixes. Please, look for more details about the openSUSE OOo build on the wiki page.

The packages are beta versions and might include even serious bugs. Therefore they are not intended for data-critical usage. A good practice is to archive any important data before an use, …

We kindly ask any interested beta testers to try the package and report bugs. See also the known blocker bugs below.

This build finally includes the alpha version of OpenXML export filters (DOCX, XLSX, PPTX). There are still many serious bugs, e.g. bnc#496431, bnc#492896. We also added many fixes to the OpenXML import filters. These changes affected also the import and export filters of the old binary file formats (DOC, XLS, PPT). So we kindly ask anyone to try this functionality and report bugs especially in the import and export of the old binary file formats.

Known blocker bugs:

  • Word DOC with the table of connt is read only (bnc#400884)
  • Report builder extension does not work (bnc#496747)
  • Other information and plans:

    I would like to provide beta5 or rc1 build the following week. I expect the final release in the first half of May. We will be slightly delayed after the upstream release.

    How to track changes in packages: osc vc

    April 21st, 2009 by

    As you may know, SUSE was originally based on Slackware. And some some relics from those early days if SUSE survives to present. The biggest example visible for end-users was packaging of desktop environment to /opt. Gnome was switched few years ago and KDE3 packages still remains in it, because packagers decided to focus on KDE4, so only those packages are comfortable with FHS and are installed into /usr.

    With opening of SUSE development towards community via BuildService’s collaboration, or Contrib, the another relict of Slackware days was raised – which I mentioned in my previous post – a .changes file.

    This file is used in SUSE for tracing of package changes and rpm %changelog is created from this file during build. As it has a consistent format, we used an internal command called vc for add a new entry to it and this tool generates a proper header of changes file. So after my last patch, implementation of osc vc was a logical (but not straightforward) job.

    After some discussions with Ludwig Nussel and on opensuse-buildservice mailing lists, I implemented and committed an osc vc command. This is based on buildvc script written by Ludwig and is available in build.rpm (from version 2009.04.17). It has the same behavior as an old vc command.

    Basic usage of this command is simple:

    user@host:some:project/package/ $ osc vc
    

    Command will find a changes file, open it in EDITOR (default is vim) and fill a header. You can also use it in non-interactive mode using -m MESSAGE. You can also specify a file to edit, or edit a file in other directory than current, … – see osc vc –help

    The main difference between buildvc and osc variant is in e-mail address handling. The osc implementation has more sources of it, so it try to

    1. use content of mailaddr variable (same as buildvc)
    2. read a configuration from ~/.oscrc
    3. read an email from user’s metadata (see osc meta user your_login)

    This is because many users want to use a different e-mail for changelogs than iChain one, so osc allows configure an email for each instance of BuildService. Appropriate part of ~/.oscrc looks like

    [https://api.opensuse.org/]
    user = login
    pass = password
    email = user@defined.email