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Archive for April 23rd, 2010

Guest Blog: Testing Team Minutes (Week 16)

April 23rd, 2010 by

Guest Blog from Larry Finger:

The openSUSE Testing Core Team (TCT) has been asked to contribute to the Weekly News on a regular basis. We are grateful for the opportunity.

The TCT is a group of 25 volunteers that are charged with helping the openSUSE developers test each new release. Our objectives and membership are given on our wiki site:

http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Testing_Core_Team

The TCT was organized in the middle of the 11.2 development cycle, thus we are still learning our role; however, it is clear that we need the involvement of the openSUSE community at large to conduct proper
testing. That is why we appreciate the invitation to participate here.

In particular, the community can help in the following ways:

* Publish Bug Reports in the Bugzilla (http://bugzilla.novell.com/).

* Inform us of testing that worked. With this, we have an idea of the
test coverage.

* Participate in our regular IRC meetings. See http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Testing_Core_Team/Meetings. During the  development phase of a new release, our meetings are held at 17:00 UTC on the Monday following the release of a new Milestone or Release Candidate. Accordingly, our next meeting will be on May 3, assuming that M6 is released during the week of April 26. The transcripts of previous meetings are posted on the site. If there is a topic you would like to see covered in an upcoming meeting, please send a private mail to user lwfinger on the openSUSE site. Our meetings are held on the
#opensuse-testing channel on the Freenode IRC Network -irc://irc.freenode.net/opensuse-testing. All are welcome.

Guest Blog: Kernel Review with openSUSE Flavor (Week 16)

April 23rd, 2010 by

Guest Blog from Rares Aioanai:

Howdy y’all! Welcome to this week’s edition of hot kernel news! Let’s get to it :

-Eric Anholt posted fixes for -rc2 – the drm-intel tree.
-Alex Elder pushed some fixes of the xfs tree regarding -rc5
-Len Brown posted patches for ACPI to apply to 2.6.34-rc4
-Also, git pull requests have been submitted to the following trees : iBFT, CFS, XFS, OLPC(viafb), DRM (Dave Airlie fixed some radeon stuff),  PCMCIA (for -rc5, RCU, tracing, eCryptfs.
-Christian Ludwig mailed the linux-kernel@ list to celebrate 5 years (17.04) of kernel development with git. See here for more info :  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntTpM8hfl_E
-Russell King sent a quick fix to a fs/built-in.o: In function `sys_inotify_init1′:summary.c:(.text+0x347a4): undefined reference to `anon_inode_getfd’ error.
-Samuel Thibault announced hwloc (Hardware Locality) vers. 1.0rc1 which is described by the author as following : “hwloc provides command line tools and a C API to obtain the hierarchical map of key computing elements, such as: NUMA memory nodes, shared caches, processor sockets, processor cores, and processor “threads”. hwloc also gathers various attributes such as cache and memory information, and is portable across a variety of different operating systems and platforms.”
-David Miller fixed some issues in the networking tree, including virtualization issues, TX lockups and iwliwifi active chain detection.
-LWN.net has an article about the release of 2.6.34-rc5 – http://lwn.net/Articles/384026/rss
– the official announcement from Linus sounds like this : “Another week, another -rc. This time there wasn’t some big nasty regression I was working on to hold things up, and it felt like a pretty  regular -rc release.
Random fixes all around. The most noticeable (for people who got hit by it) may be the fix for bootup problems that some people had (ACPI dividing by zero: kernel bugzilla 15749), but there’s stuff all over. The shortlog gives some idea.”
-Dave Airlie put out a single fix for the drm tree, namely an issue regarding KMS on radeon cards.
-In other fixes news, Ingo Molnar posted fixes for the perf tree and  David Miller has come up with some SPARC fixes.
-Dominik Brodowski mailed some PCMCIA bugfixes for the upcoming 2.6.34-rc6.
-OpenSUSE’s own Jan Kara posted fixes for the linux-fs tree, specifically quota fixes. Since we’re talking about fixes, other trees that received fixes are : ext4 (Theodore Ts’O), wireless (John W. Linville), m68knommu (Greg Ungerer), kvm – for -rc5 – (Avi Kivity), jfs (Dave Kleikamp), logfs (Joern Engel) and voltage regulator fixes by Liam Girdwood.
-Martin Schwidefsky has some s390 patches for -rc5, Tejun Heo announced patches for the slabh subtree (slab.h); other fixes were released for various trees as follows : scsi(James Bottomley)-for -rc5, driver-core
(Greg KH)-for 2.6.34-git, drm-intel(Eric Anholt)-for -rc4, libata(JeffGarzik), drm-radeon(Dave Airlie), perf probe for PPC(Paul Mackerras),  usb(Greg KH)-for 2.6.34-git,
-Theodore Ts’O announced the Call for Tracks for this year’s Linux Plumbers Conference, which will take place in Cambridge, Massachusetts between the 3rd and the 5th of November.
-OpenSUSE’s Greg (Kroah-Hartman) posted  reviews of 2.6.33-stable and 2.6.32.12-stable.
-mmotm patches against -rc5 were announced on the 22nd of April, containing a rather large plethora of fixes of different sorts and purposes.

That’s it for this week’s kernel news. Have a nice and pleasant weekend. 🙂

What people search for

April 23rd, 2010 by

http://software.opensuse.org/stage includes now a little box to show what other people search for. It was a little idea The Boosters had, but I found the results so far pretty suprising. I didn’t really expect subversion in the top 3, but perhaps it’s only the moment.

The results shown are from actual downloads, for that every download url is a little redirect to save the query the download was for.

FLISOL 2010 Guayaquil-Ecuador : 1 day before

April 23rd, 2010 by
Similar to more than 20 cities in Ecuador and 17 countries in Latin America, Guayaquil is preparing to join the celebration of FLISOL 2010. This year, the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of ESPOL will be the home of  the event in Guayaquil. The event is coordinated in Guayaquil by Prof. Dr. Daniel Ochoa, current leader of KOKOA (ESPOL’s Free Software Community). For this edition, there will be divided in four areas targeting different user interests.

Area 1: Talks

For this year we have on schedule around 22 talks (splited in 3 tracks) covering different topics of FLOSS. This year, the talks track will be featuring Jossie, a FLOSS CMS to develop accessible websites that developed in Ecuador. Another main talk is given by  Luis Galarraga explaining his experiences while leading the J!Research project, which is a Joomla extension that is being used by an increasing number of research-related institutions. Following by the presentation of the findings on using FLOSS on education. Something that I am happy to say is that the number of talks is increasing every year, so hopefully in 5 years the FLISOL event of Guayaquil might scale to a higher level.

Area 2: Workshops

This area  is aimed for different users, but most of them are oriented to experienced users. This year we have on schedule 6 workshops.

Area 3: Demo/Gaming room

This is a must-visit place for the young ones and a proof that “Hey!!! it is possible to play video games on GNU/Linux”.  This area will be the home of small tournaments in the games Frets on Fire, OpenArena and Super Tuxkart, where participants will be able to earn small FLOSS related prizes. In addition to this, visitors will be able to test some desktop environments and cool apps.

Area 4: Installation Party

Last but not the least, and the reason that drove FLISOL on first place, the installation Party. The  installation party is complemented by a cross-distro stand were users are explained the main features of each distro in  order to ease their decision in the moment of the installation party. During the installation, the users receive a brief introduction to GNU/Linux and are assisted on its installation. This year, the available distros are: openSUSE, Fedora, (k)ubuntu, CentOS and Debian.

In addition to this, for those who are not so sure if it’s their time to move to FLOSS, KOKOA prepare the KOKOA Toolkit, which is a CD with Free Software and tutorials that can be installed on windows. This gives the users the chance to taste the power of FLOSS and help in their transition decision :D.

The time keeps going and that moment in the year when all Latin America joins to celebrate a FLOSS party has arrived.

More info at:

http://flisolgye.espol.edu.ec/

http://flisol.net/FLISOL2010/Ecuador/Guayaquil

Encrypt your files quick n’ dirty

April 23rd, 2010 by

Encrypt a file can be useful when we want to keep sensitive information but do not trust the site is being stored.

GnuPG allows to quickly and easily create encrypted files without the use of public keys or complicated procedures, just run the following at a Linux terminal:

$ gpg -c test.txt _
Enter Password:
Repeat Password:
$ _

After you have run the command gpg -c, this will leave intact the original file and create another file called “test.gpg” in the same directory. This second file is the place where you want to prune without fear that information may be disclosed. You can then proceed to remove the original if needed.

To retrieve the contents of the file, perform the following process on the encrypted file:

$ gpg  test.gpg _
Enter Password:
Repeat Password:
$ _

GnuPG will automatically detect that it is an encrypted file, and request the key that first used.

Hope its useful 😉