Home Home > 2009
Sign up | Login

Deprecation notice: openSUSE Lizards user blog platform is deprecated, and will remain read only for the time being. Learn more...

Archive for 2009

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Tabbed Browsing for Packages – Follow-up

January 27th, 2009 by

In last Friday’s blog entry about tabbed browsing for packages, I had asked for comments and opinions. There were quite a number of them, all of them very constructive. Thanks to all who participated!

The overall feedback was positive, welcoming the change. To us, this means that we will indeed merge that code branch (yes, it’s largely working already, it’s not just a mock-up) to the main development line, and you will see that new user interface appear in the next versions of the yast2-qt-pkg package on FACTORY.

There were a number of concerns and side issues that I’d like to summarize here:
(more…)

Posted in Software Management | 3 Comments »

100 packages in Contrib

January 26th, 2009 by

Last month we started a new project called Contrib. It’s a shiny new community repository for openSUSE. In opposite of specialized repository (eg. Security:), Contrib is universal. It doesn’t matters if your package is a desktop application, or a network tool. Every type of package is welcome.

Today, we celebrated a package number 100 (gparted)! Thanks to all involved folks!

One hundred packages doesn’t look like a big repository, but consider we are active about a month and half and this is an important milestone for us. The bigger repository should be more attractive for end users, and a package maintainers too.

Users wanted
Contrib release cycle is same as Factory, but we want to help users to use it now. So Contrib is also available for 11.1. So just add the repository and start to use it! It help us!

zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/openSUSE:/Factory:/Contrib/openSUSE_11.1/ openSUSE_Factory_Contrib

Package/rs wanted
If you maintain some interesting package in your home: project (or elsewhere), please follow instructions – New packages to Contrib and add your package to Contrib, so many users of openSUSE would use it!

Posted in Build Service, Contrib, Packaging | Comments Off on 100 packages in Contrib

Automatic Import Calendar news.opensuse.org > KOrganizer

January 24th, 2009 by

I’m very happy. Regularly i’m checkin the Calendar from news.opensuse.org for my work in OpenSUSE Weekly News. It is possible to Download the actual Calendar as *.ics File. But as i understand this, this is a Snapshot. The Calendar not updated himself regularly. So i tried this:

First of all we go to the KOrganizer. Click on the green Cross, left from the Calendararea. Add Calendar. Then we find an Menu similar this:

List of Resources

Then we klicking on “Filecalendar from Remote Computer” (I had translated this on the fly, i’m not shure, that it called so in english). After them we see the next Field:

Datafield

In this Field i edited :”http://news.opensuse.org/?ec3_ical”. I choosed regularly updating, but no Saving on the Remote Computer.

Now we have the Community Entrys in our Calendar. We see:

Resultspage

If i have understood all right, we have an automatic Calendar. Have fun…

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Documentation, KDE, lizards.openSUSE.org, Miscellaneous | Comments Off on Automatic Import Calendar news.opensuse.org > KOrganizer

Tabbed Browsing for Packages

January 23rd, 2009 by

There are many approaches to managing software packages. Some users like to use command line tools like zypper. Others prefer a GUI tool like the YaST2 package selector. And even within such a GUI tool, there are many ways to deal with the packages you’d like to install, update or remove: Install a bunch of packages that make up a functionality like “KDE desktop” or “web development”, find one specific package with a known name, or just look through packages that are available. That’s why there are different filter views for those different approaches.

How do you select any of those filter views? In previous versions of the (Qt) package selector, we used to have a combo box to do that:

That’s somewhat unusual, and there have always been critics who claimed that we should use tabs instead. Our standard reply was always that this would not really be helpful because there are so many of them; you’d run out of screen space quickly, and with the number of filter views we have, this would look overwhelming and confusing:

Ugh… not good. Not even at this screen resolution. Now think about 800×480 netbooks and more verbose languages like German, French or Hungarian. No way to make this fit on the screen. And left/right scroll buttons are the last thing you want for tabs.

So, what else could we do?
(more…)

Posted in Software Management, Systems Management, Usability, YaST | 22 Comments »

Smolt Popup

January 23rd, 2009 by

kupdateapplet shows a popup that asks the user to send his/her hardware profile to the smolt project.

I think kupdateapplet isn’t the appropriate application for showing this notification because smolt has nothing in common with update installation.
I’ve written a tiny python-qt script that shows the smolt popup.

You can find a package called smolt-qt in my build service home. Feel free to test and comment!

Posted in YaST | Comments Off on Smolt Popup

Novell Teaming on SLES

January 21st, 2009 by

As per the request of Andrew Wafaa, I thought I’d set up a quick guide to how I got teaming running on SLES.  The documentation for Teaming on the administrative end was relatively sparse, but the installation guide was sufficient for most purposes.

Read on to learn more about Teaming and SLES…

(more…)

Posted in Documentation, Miscellaneous, Server | Comments Off on Novell Teaming on SLES

Controlling your minions with Ruby and Capistrano

January 21st, 2009 by

Welcome to yet another installment of our Ruby mini-series.  Capistrano (http://capify.org/) is a DSL written in Ruby for automating common tasks.  While Capistrano is more often used for Rails deployment, it can easily be used for system automation as well.

A while back, I put together a presentation for the local Ruby user’s group.  The presentation covers a very brief intro to Capistrano for simple system automation.  You can download it here.  I’m aware of at least one typo (a missing single quote) in the slides, there may be others.

Rather than repeat myself here, I’ll let the PDF do the talking.  For the official documentation, see http://capify.org/getting-started

Posted in Documentation, Systems Management, Usability | Comments Off on Controlling your minions with Ruby and Capistrano

Flashrom Utility for LINUX (part1)

January 21st, 2009 by

This blog entry is a little bit OffTopic. I’m writing not about an openSUSE Theme, but about
Linux. Last week i’ve chatted with the guys in #coreboot @ freenode and it was very
interesting. This article based on an collaborative PR Project from Carl-Daniel Hailfinger. This first Part of the Article presents Flashrom. The next Article presents Coreboot. The web site of that project is:

http://www.coreboot.org/

The flash utility is known as “Flashrom”.

Flashrom is a universal flash programming utility used to detect, read, erase, or write BIOS
chips (parallel, LPC, FWH and SPI technologies) in various packages (DIP, PLCC, SOIC).
It can be used to flash firmware images such as traditional BIOS or coreboot or to back up
the existing firmware.

Everybody who does not want to boot DOS or Windows just to perform a BIOS update can use
flashrom. It does not require a graphics card, monitor or keyboard and can even be used
over SSH on a remote machine. You do not have to reboot to run flashrom, but it is recommended
to reboot after a successful update. Many people are using flashrom as a replacement for
the various AMI/Award/Phoenix BIOS flashing tools out there.

Flashrom supports over 100 flash chips and it is really easy to add support for a new chip
if your board happens to have an unsupported chip.

Flashrom has its own home page: http://www.coreboot.org/Flashrom

It is free software released under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2.

Flashrom is a “normal” user space application, but it requires superuser privileges.
Some hardened kernels (which deny access to physical memory) do not support flashrom, but
most distributions out there work fine.

Of course, the usual requirements for BIOS updates apply here as well. You should have a
stable power supply. Switching the machine off during flashing will make your machine
unbootable. Since flashrom treats BIOS files as opaque blobs, you usually do not get any
of the failover/dual BIOS features advertised on some boards.

Backup the current BIOS image into a file:

$ flashrom -r backup.bin

For other usage instructions, please refer to the flashrom home page or the man page.

In case something goes wrong, do NOT reboot, but join #coreboot @freenode and tell the
flashrom developers about it. As long as the machine is still running, there is a good
chance that everything can be fixed.

Tags: ,
Posted in Documentation | 2 Comments »

openFATE

January 21st, 2009 by

openFATE is now up and running for a few days. openFATE is, in case you missed the announcement, the community accessible feature- and requirements tracking for the openSUSE distribution. We developed and used the FATE system (which has some more components than just openFATE) before internally, but since we want to really open up development it was a logical decision to find a good way to let the community participate.

openFATE is not a stand alone system. The openSUSE distribution is as you know the base for our enterprise products. That means that discussions we do around openSUSE features sometimes have impact on what happens in the enterprise products later on, or vice versa. If features become important for SLE that also might have importance for openSUSE.

That is implemented in openFATE. It is connected to a common database which holds all information about features for all products. A chain of tools filters out information that can not go public.

It is basically about the SUSE Linux product family, where the openSUSE distribution and the SLE products are part of. If a community member gives input on a feature which has a product context for the SLE product, the input
is seen by the SLE product- and project manager as well as the involved developers. I think it is important to realise that this is part of our understanding of open development. openSUSE is not cut off the things we’re doing for SLE, but can have a direct influence.

So far we nearly had 300 changes to existing features and a whole bunch of new feature requests from the community. That is a very good result for the first few days I think. Please keep on giving your input. We are happy to see people involved in product planing, eg. for openSUSE 11.2 .

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Contrib, Distribution | Comments Off on openFATE

Graph of Storage Devices

January 19th, 2009 by

With openSUSE 11.1 on the road we developers can use some time for new ideas. One idea on my mind for month was to show the dependencies of storage devices in a graph. Using graphviz and QGraphicsScene a first version was running within few days.

It’s far from finished. Some items still missing are:

  • Use different shapes and colors for different devices types.
  • Some basic user-interaction.

Will be available in Factory within the next weeks. Further improvements are welcome.

Posted in Systems Management, Usability, YaST | 8 Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »