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Another outlet for openSUSE TV

April 24th, 2010 by

At one of the project meetings, it was highlighted that our selected video service provider isn’t the easiest to reach from some parts of the world. So I was assigned the task of finding an alternative/complimentary service that would be acceptable.

The decision I came to, and confirmed with others that they were happy, was to use YouTube as a complimentary service to BlipTV. So yes people we now have an Official YouTube channel. I’d like to say a huge thanks to Leslie Hawthorn for enabling this for us, and the fine folks over at Google & YoutTube. There is very little content on there at the moment, but that will change shortly as I will sync the content from BlipTV across.

The rationale for keeping BlipTV as our primary provider is:
* They allow people to download the original video file without having to login etc. This is great as it means we can keep providing video in open formats for all to consume.
* It provides us with the means of centralising distribution of all the videos. We upload to BlipTV and they take care of adding it to YouTube and anywhere else we want (should we upload to Facebook too?)
* They’re a great bunch of guys & gals who are very responsive to support requests and general queries – their customer service is superb!
* Oh and last but by no means least, they’re big OpenSourcers using Linux (granted it’s Gentoo but we like the Gentoo community don’t we? 🙂 ), and a wealth of open source software (ffmpeg, gstreamer etc).

This means that the likes of tube.o.o may well be removed in the near future, as all the content will be stored online and offered to the widest possible audience, without a strain on any resources on openSUSE’s end. If anyone has any issues with either service please let me know.

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Posted in Marketing | 1 Comment »

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.

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Posted in Distribution, Factory | Comments Off on Guest Blog: Testing Team Minutes (Week 16)

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. 🙂

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Posted in Kernel | 1 Comment »

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.

Posted in Miscellaneous | Comments Off on What people search 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

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Posted in Events | Comments Off on FLISOL 2010 Guayaquil-Ecuador : 1 day before

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 😉

Posted in Security | Comments Off on Encrypt your files quick n’ dirty

osc 0.126

April 22nd, 2010 by

Hi,

I just submitted the new osc 0.126 release to the openSUSE:Tools
project. The new packages should be available soon at
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/openSUSE:/Tools

(user visible) Changes:
0.126

  • – added VM autosetup to osc. This requires appropriate OBS version and build script version.
  • – enhanced QEMU cross build support with ‘armv4l’ ‘armv5el’ ‘armv6el’ ‘armv7el’ ‘armv8el’ ‘mips’ ‘mips64’ ‘ppc’ ‘ppc64’ ‘sh4’ arch strings now supported on x86 host
  • – suggest git, svn, … if indicated, after oscerr.NoWorkingCopy
  • – “osc cat” & “osc ls” now auto-expands through link.
  • – fixed “osc add” after “osc delete”.
  • – fix “osc patchinfo” command (crashed before)
  • – fixed SSL proxy support
  • – fixed meta attribute create and set calls
  • – osc remotebuildlog supports a buildlogurl
  • – Allow –prefer-pkgs to parse repodata
  • – new “osc build –no-service” option to skip source service update
  • – fix linktobranch apiurl usage
  • – “maintained package” search is telling relevant projects now
  • * requires OBS 1.7.2 or 2.0
  • – added “osc chroot” command
  • – fixed #547005 (“osc co could show download progress”)
  • – added “–interactive” option to “osc request”
  • – store commit message so it doesn’t get lost on failure
  • – added “–cpio-bulk-download” and “–download-api-only” options to “osc build”
  • – added “osc localbuildlog” command
  • – added “–build-uid uid:gid|caller” option to “osc build” to specify abuild id in chroot
  • – verify files using rpm bindings and keys supplied by buildservice
  • – added “–exclude-target-project <prj>” option to “osc rq list”
  • – added “–message” option to “osc branch”
  • – added “osc config” command to set/get/delete a config option
  • – added “–binary” and “–baseproject” options to “osc search”
  • – added “-o/–offline” and “-l/–preload” options to osc build
  • – osc build -l standard i586 foo.spec (to cache all dependencies)
  • – osc build -o standard i586 foo.spec (to build without contacting the api)

Thanks to everyone who contributed to osc!

Posted in Build Service | Comments Off on osc 0.126

Novell Client on openSUSE 11.2

April 20th, 2010 by

This has been covered on a couple of forums out there, but I’ve yet to find a decent comprehensive post. This is for 32bit systems, it’s easily modified for 64bit setups.

First off, search your favorite RPM repo for binutils-2.19-9.3. I like to use http://rpm.pbone.net, but at the time of writing, they happen to be down.

Get a copy of the Novell Client ISO from http://download.novell.com and mount it:

sudo mount -o loop novell-client-2.0-sp2-sle11-i586.iso /mnt

Extract the files from the RPM:

rpm2cpio binutils-2.19-9.3.i586.rpm | cpio -idv

This should create a “usr” directory in your present working directory. Go ahead and copy it’s contents to your filesystem:

sudo cp -R usr/* /usr/

Change directories to wherever you mounted your ISO (in this case “/mnt”) and run the installer:

cd /mnt && sudo ./ncl_install

As the packages attempt to install, you’ll be given options and warnings concerning libbfd and several other packages. Choose option “2” for everything (“Break dependencies”). Don’t worry about actually breaking anything, just roll with option 2.

Lastly, issue ldconfig as root and reboot:

sudo /sbin/ldconfig
sudo /sbin/reboot

That should get you up and running. You can run “ncl_tray” directly from the command line, or create a shortcut to the client. If you’re having connection issues, make sure that openSLP is configured.

The only issues I’ve had so far is the inability to browse trees, which turned out to be a DNS problem on my end. Occasionally I get warnings on login about novfs kernel modules not being properly loaded, but this appears to be benign.

Posted in Desktop, Documentation, GNOME, KDE, Network, Usability | 5 Comments »

Check your WPA2 Enterprise setup

April 20th, 2010 by

Do you have to enter user name and password to establish a link with
your wireless network? If so chances are good that WPA2 Enterprise
with EAP-TTLS or PEAP are used. Sounds familiar? Better check your
setup then. An attacker might easily impersonate your access point
and steal your password if the client you are using isn’t configured
properly.
You are likely vulnerable if you’ve disabled certificate checks
or you’ve checked some button to use a public CA but didn’t specify
any “Subject” or “Common Name” that has to match. NetworkManager for
example doesn’t even allow to enter the latter.
Read more in the paper I’ve written.

Posted in Security | 1 Comment »

Only a few days for the FLISOL in Venezuela

April 19th, 2010 by

Venezuelan Linux community is finishing all the preparations for the April 24, the day that all Latin America celebrate the FLISOL, Latin American Festival of  Free Software Installation.

Through the sponsorship of Novell, the collaboration of ambassadors from other distributions, and GoSVe, the user group from Venezuela openSUSE, our distro will be present in all the sites of the great event of free software in the region, giving away DVD’s, LiveCD’s, stickers, t-shirts, and more.

In the city of Merida, we will be giving talks and demonstrations of our distribution and giving away all the material of that will be common in all the sites and stuffed animals for those that choose to “free” their computers and install openSUSE Linux.

Next to come: A lot of pictures 😉

FLISOL Mérida 2010

Posted in Events | Comments Off on Only a few days for the FLISOL in Venezuela

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