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Archive for 2009

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Trying to bring Russian community together

March 6th, 2009 by

Tomorrow(07.03.09) we have scheduled meeting of Russian community.

Meeting will take place at 19:00 (GMT+3 (MSK)) on
#opensuse.ru channel (Freenode)

We are going to:

*Discuss some terms. And choose which translation of which term are more appropriate for translation.

*Fill up the glossary.

*Cleanup ru.opensuse.org wiki .

*Choose candidates for “Spokesperson program” from Russia.

*Discuss what’s wrong with wiki. Why peoples creating another suse portals. (like open-suse.ru, suseclub.ru,suseclub2.ru)

*Discuss what we can do to involve more users in community life.

I’m glad to see all interested Russian users on #opensuse.ru channel tomorrow.

Posted in Documentation, Localization, Wiki | Comments Off on Trying to bring Russian community together

YaST Qt UI with Context Menus

March 6th, 2009 by

Context menus are supported by almost all UI frameworks and most people got used to them. Therefore it’s high time to provide context menus in the YaST Qt UI as well. yast2-qt-2.18.6 offers this feature, packages are available in my build service repository.

contextmenu

In four simple steps YCP programmers can benefit from this new feature:

Step 1:
Create a widget and tell via `opt(`contextMenu) that a ContextMenuActivated Event should be emitted when the user right clicks the widget:

`SelectionBox( `id(`sport), `opt(`notify,`immediate, `contextMenu),
"Open a context menu:",
[
"Item1",
"Item2",
"Item3"
] );

Step 2:
Wait and analyze events:
event = UI::WaitForEvent( ... );
...
if ( event["EventReason"]:"" == "ContextMenuActivated" )
...

Step 3:
Open a context menu. The argument of OpenContextMenu() describes the menu structure:

UI::OpenContextMenu( `menu(
[ `item(`id(`folder), "&Folder"  ),
`menu( "&Document",
[ `item(`id(`text),
"&Text File" ),
`item(`id(`image),
"&Image"     ) ]) ]  ));
Step 4:
Analyze the returned `id and trigger an action. An example called ContextMenu.ycp is included in the package yast2-ycp-ui-bindings.

Usability
A Context menu provides shortcuts to actions for a certain widget or item. This features improves usability when it’s used properly. Application programmers should avoid making certain features only using context menus because users might not find them.
Please keep in mind that YaST ncurses doesn’t provide context menus. Each operation that is only available via a context menu is useless in YaST ncurses because the user cannot select it.

Posted in Miscellaneous, Usability, YaST | 4 Comments »

New/Updated Applications @ home:saigkill

March 4th, 2009 by

Hello Folks,

now following an List from my last updated/worked Packages:

  1. boinc-client 6.4.5 (last stable and recommended Version)
  2. boinctray 2.3
  3. kde4-skrooge 0.2.4 (also published in openSUSE:Factory:contrib and KDE:KDE4:Community)
  4. libatlas3 3.8.2 (also published in Education)
  5. libdbus++ 0.6.0
  6. libtinyxml0 2.5.3 (also published in openSUSE:Factory:contrib)
  7. libtktray1 1.1
  8. lynis 1.2.3 (also published in openSUSE:Factory:contrib)
  9. mountmanager 0.2.6 (also published in openSUSE:Factory:contrib and KDE:KDE4:Community)
  10. necpp 1.2.6+cvs20070816
  11. python-iCalendar 1.2 (also published in openSUSE_Factory:contrib)
  12. qantenna 0.2.1
  13. rkhunter 1.3.4 (also published in openSUSE:Factory:contrib)

Have a lot of Fun 🙂

Tags: , ,
Posted in Build Service, Contrib, KDE, lizards.openSUSE.org, Miscellaneous, Packaging | 1 Comment »

OSF Status Report #3

March 3rd, 2009 by

Let me present you the openSUSE forums statistics for February 2009.

Up to the 28th of February 2009, we achieved a membership of 23.464 (+2.142) members, 23.463 (+2.390) threads and 136.684 (+13.989) posts. The number in brackets shows the increase of the corresponding measurement compared to the last snapshot taken on the 31st of January 2009. The user activity, i.e. the number of individual visits to the openSUSE forums, was 12.382 for the observed period. 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.

osffebruarystats

Kudos to our Top5 posters during February 2009

  • oldcpu – 566
  • caf4926 – 560
  • ken_yap – 362
  • mingus725 – 254
  • Malcolm – 223

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

If you haven’t signed up for the openSUSE forums yet, please consider doing so. It’s a great way to contribute to the openSUSE community in a non-developing capacity.

Any contribution to the recently announced “experts approach” collaboration between the openSUSE forums and the openSUSE Weekly Newsletter is much appreciated. If you’re interested to participate, please don’t hesitate to contact me for further information. Any comments and suggestions of the community about the OSF status reports is much appreciated by the openSUSE forums team. We’re certainly interested to know what the community would like to be covered in coming issues.

Posted in Marketing | Comments Off on OSF Status Report #3

OpenOffice_org 3.1 alpha1 available

March 2nd, 2009 by

I’m happy to announce that OpenOffice.org 3.1 alpha1 packages are available in the Build Service OpenOffice:org:UNSTABLE project.

The packages are alpha 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. We are especially interested into the testing of SMB access and file locking.

Other information and plans:

The next version will have hopefully the beta quality. It should include an initial implementation of the OOXML export filters and thus improve the interoperability with MS Office 2007. It should be done the openSUSE-11.1-like split build way and thus provide also the most important extensions. I hope that it will be available by the end of the following week.

I am going to update the OOo-3.0.1 packages in the OpenOffice:org:STABLE project. It should include even better fix for the update problem on openSUSE-11.1 (bug #471280). It will include few more important fixes. It should be available by the end of this week.

(more…)

Posted in Desktop, OpenOffice.org | 1 Comment »

Reading EBooks With Calibre

March 1st, 2009 by

Back in the (should I say: old?) days books were created from dead trees. Now, with the raise of different reading devices, we can read them digitally. Thanks to Kovid Goyal we can enjoy ebooks with the Calibre reader also on your ordinary PC or laptop.

(more…)

Tags: , ,
Posted in Documentation | 10 Comments »

Low bandwith for openSUSE-Education

March 1st, 2009 by

Since July 2008, there’s a known problem with the sponsored server hosting the frozen openSUSE-Education repositories: our provider limits the bandwith for up- and downloads if more than 1 TB data is transfered per month. …and this is the case around the 25th of each month since this time.

People using HTTP requests to download packages are sadly very affected by this limitation at the end of each month, and I apologise for the trouble caused. Thanks to the FTP-Server Admins of openSUSE, we’ve already a place to host our ISO-Images, containing the same files as the frozen repositories. We’ve also a FTP (ftp://ftp.opensuse-education.org/) and a RSync-Server up and running (rsync rsync.opensuse-education.org::download/) – which should make it a bit easier until we’ve the final decision from the new openSUSE-Board, if they can provide some space for us.

Until then, feel free to offer additional space for our repositories. We’ve already an offer from Peter Poeml to help us configuring a “Mirrorbrain” setup.

Tags: ,
Posted in Distribution, Miscellaneous, Server | 1 Comment »

{lizards,news,zonker}.opensuse.org updated to WordPress 2.7.1

February 26th, 2009 by

Our WordPress instances have been updated to the latest release.  For readers of {news,zonker,lizards}.o.o nothing should be different.  People blogging will now see a new and improved interface which should  “take fewer clicks and be faster”.  Full details are available at the WordPress blog

I’d like to say a big “THANK YOU” to Stephan Binner for his continued maintenance of these services and for the flawless update to the new version.  He drove this with some help from the Novell IS&T folks whom I’d like to thank as well!

Posted in lizards.openSUSE.org | 2 Comments »

openSUSE-like update repositories for third party projects

February 22nd, 2009 by

Starting with 11.0, the openSUSE-Education project hosts it’s own, separate update repository. This is our solution for the strategic decision not to use the openSUSE Build Service as repository for endusers but for development only.

So for production purposes, we always recommend to use our frozen repositories on http://download.opensuse-education.org/. But as “frozen” implies, the repositories there are frozen at the time, the openSUSE-Education team declares them as “Goldmaster” (which is the case for all except the 11.1 repo at the moment) – and no package update or changes happens for this repositories.

The openSUSE-Education team has relatively long development and testing cycles – but as everywhere, shi* happens, and so it might be that some of the packages in the frozen repository are broken or need a security fix. For this, we have created update repositories (for at least 11.0 and the upcomming 11.1 Edu-Release) which are disabled per default, but added to the system during installation of the openSUSE-Education-release  package. (Reason behind this decision: if an administrator installs openSUSE-Education in a school, he wants to “mirror” the update repositories and not point every client to the official ones. All a user has to do is to enable this update repository via YaST or via “zypper mr -e ‘openSUSE-Education Updates'”.

We’re using the “updateinfo.xml” file formal described in the openSUSE-Wiki. Currently, we’ve 5 package updates/fixes for 11.0 in the update repository – and this might grow over the time. The updates are shown in the current online-update-applets as “normal” updates like the openSUSE ones. Interestingly, the user can’t see if an update is from the official openSUSE or the openSUSE-Education update repository – even if we use a different “from” tag. Perhaps we have to “play” with the “release” or other tags: testing is needed as it looks like nobody tries this before…

Tags: , ,
Posted in Build Service, Packaging, Software Management | 2 Comments »

Status russian mirrors

February 19th, 2009 by

Some times ago Russian and Ukrainian users noticed strange connection drops from Yandex. I can’t solve this problem, because I’m not Yandex employee.

Russian mirrors problems are mostly solved by introducing new mirror (Thanks to Yuri xnu!! Tsarev). This mirror have all openSUSE related stuff, 100 Mbit connection, 1Tb storage drive. After testing period now we can see that mirror is ready for main workload. So we adjust priorities and if you are try to access download.opensuse.org from Russian IP you should be redirected to this new mirror.

Due problems with foreign bandwidth we can’t serve Ukrainian users with Peter Poeml help we switch they directly to German mirrors.

If you have problems with Russian mirror accessing via download.opensuse.org please contact me directly. I’ll try to solve this

Posted in Build Service, Software Management | 4 Comments »

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