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Archive for 2009

openSUSE Edu Li-f-e at FOSS.in

December 8th, 2009 by

Last week was one of the biggest gathering of FOSS geeks from all over India and some from abroad at foss.in in Bangalore.  Unfortunately it was not as big as I had expected. Here are some of the pictures from the event, also managed to get some “FOSS celebrities” to pose with our DVD. It was fun meeting many people only known to me via IRC nick or Planet India. Over 250 Li-f-e DVDs were distributed, many students from various parts of India were also part of the event, students from DA-IICT and IIIT helped burn some DVDs too. Thanks Pradeepto and Srinivasa for KDE and GNOME t-shirts, it was great pleasure meeting again with openSUSE B’lore team, puthali, girishks, srinidhibs, ravim85, abharath and Ex-Novellite  Hardik Dalwadi(Cannonical).
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KIWI RELAX NG Schema Explained

December 6th, 2009 by

KIWI, invented by Marcus Schäfer, is a magnificent tool to build your own SUSE Linux distribution. It is also the backend of SUSE Studio.

For those who has used KIWI manually already know the details: KIWI’s configuration file is XML and based on a RELAX NG schema. This article give developers a little background of the history, a short overview of some design decisions around KIWI’s RELAX NG schema, and how to customize it to your needs.
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OpenOffice_org 3.1.1 maintenance update available for openSUSE

December 4th, 2009 by

I’m happy to announce that updated OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 packages in the Build Service OpenOffice:org:STABLE project.  It includes many useful fixes. See also the original announce for more details about the 3.1.1 release.

Also you might try the OOo-3.2-beta build that is available in the Build Service OpenOffice:org:UNSTABLE project. See the 3.2-beta3 announce for more details. The beta4 build should be available in the middle of the fillowing week.

Kolab cyrus-imapd inherits from openSUSE base cyrus-imapd

December 3rd, 2009 by

This week kolab became one small step closer to realize feature request 307846: include Kolab in openSUSE. Although it will take lots and lots of more work to achieve this goal at all. The one step closer was realized in cooperation with the openSUSE cyrus-imapd maintainer R. The openSUSE cyrus-imapd spec file in the repository server:mail spec file has been extended with information about kolab, but the actual execution of the information has been switched off. With the Build Service link functionality the package server:mail/cyrus-imapd has been linked to the package server:kolab:UNSTABLE/cyrus-imapd-kolab, where the kolab functionality gets built. This is achieved by activating the variable with_kolab in the project related configuration file:
# osc meta prjconf server:Kolab:UNSTABLE
%define with_kolab 1
Macros:
%with_kolab 1

See the Build_Service prjconf page in the openSUSE wiki for more information about this awesome functionality. This way the cyrus-imapd-kolab package inherits everything from the openSUSE base cyrus-imapd package.

One drawback for kolab administrators, you have to manually correct the currently installed kolab packages. Start with downgrading cyrus-imapd-kolab (it only downgrades the Build service version and not cyrus-imapd itself):
# zyp in cyrus-imapd-kolab
This will install the dependent package perl-Cyrus-IMAP-kolab instead of perl-Cyrus-IMAP and perl-Cyrus-SIEVE-managesieve-kolab instead of perl-Cyrus-SIEVE-managesieve and it might remove kolab and perl-kolab.

Now reinstall kolab with:
# zyp in kolab
that should be sufficient to be in sync with the repository again. Don’t forget to restart the services, with:
# rckolab restart

This week also showed the power of the build service, as I could install kolab within only some minutes after installing openSUSE-11.2 in Virtualbox, while I never installed openSUSE-11.2 before.

The kolab installation in openSUS-11.2 made some problems visible in kolabconf -n. The latter has been fixed, it was a general problem in kolabconf and did not have anything to do with openSUSE-11.2.

The kolabconf problem however required some debugging, with a resulted spin off that the spamassassin daemon spamd is no longer activated via the startup scripts, but as a library of amavisd instead. That is the way amavisd and spamd have been configured in kolab, but what was not honored in the kolab setup on openSUSE.

Due to the change in the amavisd and spamd deamons, the script kolabsrv has been extended, and can now show a list with services required by kolab and what their current status is (see screenshot):

kolabsrv list and status output

kolabsrv list and status output

The main task of kolabsrv is to convert the openpkg service names to the distribution dependent names.

The kolab project is heading towards a new release 2.2.3 with a planned release date in December 2009.

Sascha released a nice Brain Dump of the Week, giving a nice insight in the possible future of Kolab.

In one of the replies of Sasha’s brain dump, a references was made to project-builder, a project similar to the openSUSE build service. Although the OBS and project-builder may be similar, some people are wondering what the differences (1) and (2) are.

That’s quite a lot of information, but lots of things happened since my last blog entry about Kolab.

PS: many thanks that M. from Novell, who made my Lizards blog account working again. For the most part of this week, I’ve not been able to login to my blog account. After logging in with the correct credentials, I was referred back to the Lizards entry page. M. knows the details, so if this happens to you contact M. from Novell 🙂

Encrypted directory

December 3rd, 2009 by

I have notebook which contain private data and I don’t want anyone to read it even if my notebook will be stolen. Encrypted whole home partition is too much as my home directory contains also svn or git repositories which could anybody read. So I create encrypted directory in home directory which contain all private data and rest is normal accessible. So how to do it? (more…)

OpenOffice_org 3.2 beta3 available for openSUSE

November 30th, 2009 by

I’m happy to announce OpenOffice.org 3.2 beta3 packages for openSUSE. They are available in the Build Service OpenOffice:org:UNSTABLE project and include many upstream and Go-oo fixes. See also overview of integrated features and enhancements. Please, look for more details about the openSUSE OOo build on the wiki page.

The package is a beta version 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, …

As usual, we kindly ask any interested beta testers to try the package and report bugs. See also the list of known bugs.

Other information and plans:

The next beta4 build should be available one week from now. Hopefully, it will be the last beta before the release candidate. There is still a theoretical chance that the final release might be available before Christmas but you we will most likely need to wait until the first half of January.

Usability Symposium

November 27th, 2009 by

On wednesday Will and me visited the Usability Symposium 2009 of the Network for User Oriented Software Design, a group which consists mainly of people from the Georg Simon Ohm University of Applied Sciences here in Nuernberg and people from local companies such as Astrum. It was the first symposium of this group and they gave three presentations about software usability.

One of the presentations were given by Evamaria Fuchs and Dr. Sigi Olschner, both former SUSE employees who worked in the usability lab. They presented about the development of the KDE KickOff menu that we shipped in version 10-something for KDE 3. Its successor became the KDE 4 default menu. Eva and Sigi presented how consequent usability work which goes along with the development effort can improve the quality measurable. They also gave a very good insight on free software and open source development in general, taking into account that most people from the audience did not have any experience with it. It was a very nice talk.

While Will was presenting KDE 4 to some interested people Sigi gave me some lessons on how to set up and use the eye tracking device that we have in the Boosters team now. We certainly need another lesson and much more knowledge about usability in general but that was a good start – thank you Sigi 🙂

Usability experts out there – our Eye Tracker is ready to be used by you for the good of free software! I am wondering when we will have the first session where we try to examine user experience of our software with that device.

New pm-utils for openSUSE

November 25th, 2009 by

The current SUSE version of pm-utils is pretty old. Rpm -q said somethink like 0.99.4.20071229. And it also contains a hacked support for s2ram, which is nowadays in upstream version. There has been also a bnc#378883 – Need an updated pm-utils I started a work on this week.

A new pm-utils package for openSUSE is available in home:mvyskocil:branches:Base:System. The HIBERNATE_METHOD is no longer supported, because upstream version contains something better – modules. There are three methods how to run software suspend on Linux

  1. kernel – plain echo something > /proc/something
  2. suspend – tool contains a lot of quirks needed on some HW
  3. tuxonice – kernel and userspace support for hibernate, not in upstream kernel, nor in openSUSE

Because there are too many ways in current Linux world, pm-utils simply support all by specific modules stored in /usr/lib/pm-utils/modules.d, which implements appropriate functions for suspend/hibernate and hybrid. The SUSE default is uswsusp module calls s2ram/s2disk/s2both from software suspend project, because it should be considered as a safe default.

If you want to use different module, you can add a config file somewhere to
/etc/pm/conf.d/
and set the value of SLEEP_MODULE.

# The default sleep/wake system to use. Valid values are:
# kernel The built-in kernel suspend/resume support.
# Use this if nothing else is supported on your system.
# uswsusp If your system has support for the userspace
# suspend programs (s2ram/s2disk/s2both), then use this.
# tuxonice If your system has support for tuxonice, use this.
#
# The system defaults to "kernel" if this is commented out.
SLEEP_MODULE="uswsusp"

You can type more methods, which will be called, so SLEEP_MODULE=”kernel uswsusp” will use kernel and if it fail, or not available, it call uswsusp. Please note that config files are read in C sort order, so names matters.

So please install new pm-utils and test it and tell me if you found any regression (please inform me about a regressions only, I cannot fix generic suspend problems).

Report from openSUSE 11.2 Release Party in Prague

November 24th, 2009 by

On November 20th, the Czech members of the openSUSE Boosters Team organized openSUSE 11.2 Release Party. The party took place in the nice building of Faculty of Mathematics and Physics.

MFF

We have prepared installation DVDs, which we’ve burnt with Pavol the day before the party – about 20 32bit and the same amount of 64bit DVDs together with some promo DVDs. It was interesting that the 32bit DVDs were taken before the 64bit ones – we expected it to be the other way round. We had also some promotional stuff like T-shirts, caps, stickers etc. Everything disappeared in several minutes, so it seems that people enjoy wearing T-shirts with that little green creatures. 😉

promo

It was hard to estimate how many people will come – we have expected something around 20 participants. However, to our pleasant surprise, about 40 people showed up. Moreover, not only students and young people were present, but also two or three colleagues born a bit earlier.

people

After Pavol’s quick introduction of members of Czech openSUSE Boosters Team, Michal Hrusecky started his talk about new features in openSUSE 11.2 and new look and feel. Finally, Michal noted opening of Factory, new development model with devel projects, the Contrib repository and Junior Jobs.

michal

After a short snack break, Lubos talked about new KDE in openSUSE 11.2. It seems that the rotating cube effect never bores, so Lubos was asked to rotate his desktop. After having some troubles with figuring out how to switch the cube on, he of course succeeded and the cube worked – WOW! Next, Lubos exhumed his about two years old presentation named ‘What will be new in KDE 4.0’ (or something like that) and retroactively evaluated what the KDE developers achieved or not.

lubos

The rest of the party was rather interactive. Boosters and other participants helped with installation of 11.2, solving problems, answered questions and helped with creating bugzilla accounts and reporting bugs in case we had no clue. 😉

int2

int1

Our thanks belong to Faculty of Mathematics and Physics for allowing us to use classroom, SUSE CZ for sponsoring the promotional stuff and snacks and last but not least, to everybody who showed up at the party. Thanks!

For more photos from the party, please visit picasaweb.

Playing With XPath Expressions in The xmllint Shell

November 23rd, 2009 by

When XML is transformed into something else, in most cases XSLT comes to play. One of the challenges of XSLT is to select just the nodes you are interested in. This task is done by XPath, “a query language for selecting nodes from a XML document.”

However, it can be tedious to create a XPath expression, run the transformation, and check if you got the expected result. After hours of debugging you find out: It’s the wrong XPath expression!

To make it easier: Test your XPath expressions in the internal xmllint shell!

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