Home Home > 2010 > 11 > 22
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 November 22nd, 2010

Please note…

November 22nd, 2010 by

I’m going on parental leave from December 14th to February 13th, 2011. My son was born in January and now it’s my time to help a bit more out at home. My wife has many plans for me and I have some myself as well including changing diapers, some work at the house, celebrating christmas, showing off our kids to their grandparents, aunts and uncles, getting my son settled in the daycare, building a snow man…

I hope some days of vacation will be in there as well so that I can be refreshed again when I return back to the Novell office to continue working for openSUSE.

Right now, I try to find some people that take over some of my responsibilities.

I will take care that everything I do which is important will be handled during the time, e.g. even better reaction to PromoDVD shipping – and silently hope that after the parental everything works far better without me than right now 😉

So, you all have a short break from me.  I don’t know how much time I’ll spend online but I know I will not be in the office and don’t want to be fully engaged during my leave.  I’m looking forward to both
the parental leave and also to return – and will read regularly the openSUSE planet to see what’s happening!

During my absence, Jacqueline Junghanns will take over and handle most of my responsibilities. Some of you might know Jacqueline from the openSUSE conferences which she helped to organize. I hand over the virtual mikrophone to Jacqueline to introduce herself:

Jacqueline

Jacqueline

“Hi, my name is Jacqueline Junghanns and I can say that I am a SUSE dinosaur as I had my ten year anniversary just a couple of weeks ago and I do not plan to extinct any time soon ;).  I am very much looking forward to dive into the openSUSE project because I already got the chance to help out “backstage” and I am glad about this new opportunity.  During my ten years I gathered experience in various areas such as hardware certification and right now as a team assistant for OPS.”

Sending of PromoDVDs

One thing I have handled in the past, is sending out of PromoDVDs and other promotional material for events. We do have a good stock of openSUSE 11.3 DVDs available and happily send them out for events. Please start using the address promodvds@opensuse.org to request them – and right now Jacqueline and myself will answer, later only Jacqueline.

LibreOffice 3.3 beta3 available for openSUSE

November 22nd, 2010 by

I’m happy to announce LibreOffice 3.3 beta3 packages for openSUSE. They are available in the Build Service LibreOffice:Unstable project. They are based on the libreoffice-3.2.99.3 release. Please, look for more details about the openSUSE LibreOffice 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, …

As usual, we kindly ask any interested beta testers to try the package and report bugs. The product LibreOffice should appear in the Novell bugzilla soon. In the meantime, please, use the OpenOffice.org product.

Known bugs

  • shell wrappers are still ooffice, oowriter, …; we need to discuss the new wrapper names with other distros first
  • extensions are not registered after the update from OpenOffice_org-* packages; a workaround is to reinstall the packages once again; We plan to remove the registration during installation; it will allow users to disable the extensions by themselves
  • some packages were not renamed, .e.g. OpenOffice_org-thesaurus, …; they are not built from the main LO sources; we will do it later
  • user configuration is stored into ~/.libreoffice/3-suse; we might try to share the directory ~/.libreoffice/3 after we fix the incompatible BerkleyDB; Well, we are not sure if it is enough and it is a good idea, so it will need some more testing
  • GNOME quickstarter is started by default; you might disable it in Tools/Options/OpenOffice.org/Memory/Enable systray Quickstarter
  • SLED10 build is not available; need more love

More known bugs

Other information and plans:

I am sorry if you had troubles with the LibreOffice:Unstable repository last week. It was sometimes inconsistent because I forgot to disable publishing before I fixed build of all packages. Everything should be fine now.

I have done another rebuild over the weekend that finally enabled non-English localizations.

The next build should be available within two weeks. It is still a bit unclear whether it would be another beta or the first release candidate.

BugDay

November 22nd, 2010 by

At the last openSUSE project meeting and after the discussion about “zombie” bugs on the opensuse-project mailing list, a small team of volunteers agreed to organize a Bug Day on Saturday, November 27th. What is a Bug Day? This is a day when many people from the community help to triage bugs in Bugzilla. It is a good and easy way to get involved in the openSUSE project!

Here is what you need to participate:
– a recent version of openSUSE (11.3 or a milestone of 11.4). It’s okay to run openSUSE in a virtual machine.
– an IRC client to interact with the other participants
– good mood 🙂

A small team will organize the event by providing lists of bugs, and will be available to guide new contributors if needed. So it will be easy to help!

For this specific Bug Day, we will focus on the “zombie” bug reports: those are reports against old versions of openSUSE (openSUSE 10.x and 11.0). As some reports might still be valid, we don’t want to close all of them automatically. We will therefore check all those reports to see if they are still valid in the latest version of openSUSE (11.3 or a milestone of 11.4). The goal is to close those bug reports if possible, or, if they are still valid, to move them to a current version of openSUSE so that they’re not lost in limbo. So during a full day, people come on irc and help each other triage bugs.

Please note that this is only for openSUSE bugs (living in bugzilla.novell.com), but a solution for some bugs might be to forward them upstream.

Come on #opensuse-bug (freenode) on a Saturday 27.11.2010, we’ll be glad to have you join the fun! 😉