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Busy Oktober

November 10th, 2010 by

Last month I went to the Ovi and KDE sprint, Qt Developer Days 2010 -both in Münich- and the openSUSE Conference 2010 in Nüremberg. It was a busy Oktober. (pictures below!)

The Ovi and KDE sprint took place at Nokia’s Münich office, where we discussed why integration between KDE and Ovi would be beneficial for both (better user experience, exposure to a large userbase). There I had the pleasure to meet lots of KDE people; Leinir, Frank Karlitschek, Chani, Myriam Schweingruber, Sascha Peilicke, Sivan Greenberg, Mark Kretschmann, Rune Jensen, Arjen Hiemstra, Jonathan, Dinesh, Krzysiek, Knut Yrvin…
After the Ovi sprint, the Qt Developer Days 2010 began. The training sessions took place the first day. Even though some exercises were skipped, I liked it. Days 2 and 3 were focused on showing how cool Qt is. I never thought QML could be that easy, powerful and straightforward. Besides all of the presentations, we also had dinner with the Trolls, played the “fact or crap” game and tried some Meego-powered devices. So yepp, I enjoyed it and I’m looking forward for the 2011 edition 🙂
BTW, /me was wearing an openSUSE t-shirt which made Martin Mohring approach me and talk to me. That way I met him.

As I said, I also attended the openSUSE Conference 2010. Dan’s connecting flight was the same as mine (what a coincidence) so we took the Zürich-Nüremberg flight together. The same day we had dinner at Barfüsser with other people who had arrived earlier. Raymond Wooninck (tittiatcoke) drove 400 km in total to join us for the dinner only! Perhaps next time he can stay for a bit longer.
I stayed at the conference hotel. Having the conference and the hotel at the same place was a great idea. The location itself wasn’t that good since it was in the outskirts of Nüremberg but hey you can’t have everything. The very first day I met more fellow contributors… many interesting conversation took place in the hallways, between talks which made me skip some presentations. Besides that, there were some interesting talks taking place at the same time, so I had to choose between one or the other. Frank and I organised a workshop, “the Open-PC case” which went well. There were many attendees interested in getting an Open-PC. I also had the chance to meet and talk with many people: Adrian Schröter and I talked about obs, Nuno Pinheiro showed me some of his Inkscape techinques, I talked with Bruno Friedmann about many things -KDE/Factory too, of course-, I discussed artwork stuff with Gnokii (S. Kemter), Nuno Pinheiro, Robert Lihm and Kai-Uwe Behrmann, testing Factory with Bernhard Wiedeman, how to improve the documentation’s visibility with the Documentation team (Frank, Thomas, Katja, Jürgen) KDE stuff with the KDE people (there were lots of them at the conference),… speaking of KDE stuff, Thomas Thym brought some KDE merchandising to sell. 🙂
BTW, Gnokii’s Movie Night was nice. I really liked the free movies he played; not just software has to be made free!
This time I didn’t have time to go for a stroll in the city. From what I saw (little), Nüremberg seems to be a quiet and nice place.
I have to say that it was a great experience, I really enjoyed it and that I’m looking forward for next year’s openSUSE Conference. So yes, it was a big success 😀

Thanks to all the people who made these events possible!

Some pics:

Posted in Desktop, Events, KDE | 1 Comment »

/me is leaving

November 9th, 2010 by

Moin,

after 7 years with SUSE and Novell I’ve chosen to change something in my life – and decided to accept a new job and will lay down my duties in the openSUSE project. I’ve been with the openSUSE project already prior to its launch in August 2005 and experienced a number of highs and lows. Overall the project  has been shaping up nicely, we reached a lot of our goals and the just passed openSUSE conference reflects this pretty well in my opinion.

Just to stop any rumours – I leave Novell because I found a new job in the trade show management area close to Nuremberg. Trade show management is where my expertise is and where I worked prior to coming to openSUSE. While I enjoyed the work at openSUSE, organizing the openSUSE conference meant doing what I really love and my new job will give me many more conferences and trade shows to plan and organise.  As I will leave Novell before the end of December the project needs a new openSUSE chairman who should serve until the openSUSE foundation is created.

Best wishes to the openSUSE project and the people behind it. I had a lot of fun over the past 7 years, met numerous outstanding people and learned a lot which will help me in my future life.

Best
Michael

Posted in Miscellaneous | 6 Comments »

10 obscure Linux office applications

November 9th, 2010 by

Last night I was trying to beauty up my Kraft Homepage a bit and while doing that I realised that half of the allowed transfer volume that is coming with the cheap hosting contract is already eaten up for November. Investigating how that could have happened I found out that Kraft was mentioned in a very nice blog called 10 obscure Linux office applications you need to try. It introduces some interesting apps out of the whole mass of all FOSS apps in that specific area. Kraft is mentioned there, which is of course nice, the author seems to like Kraft. I am, however, not really sure why the word obscure is in the headline of the blog, do you know 😉 ?

But the other nine applications are also really interesting, such as goldendict, which combines multiple dictionaries on the desktop or TOra which is a cool database GUI. We do not have them in Factory nor
Contrib.

The next openSUSE release 11.4 is slowly but surely coming up and I think it makes sense to add cool software now. Maybe the listed apps in the blog are ideas to spice up our distro a bit with good software? I volunteer to take care of Kraft 😉

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Posted in Boosters, Factory, KDE | 2 Comments »

openFATE Screening Meeting

November 8th, 2010 by

With the progress the boosters made on the openFATE preview instance, we can now edit features and handle them. A screening team has been formed some time ago and now it’s possible to really start working on features.

I’d like to invite everybody that’s interested to join the openFATE team and discuss how to handle features on Thursday, 11th of November, 16:00 UTC on IRC freenode, channel #openSUSE-project.

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Posted in Distribution, Factory | Comments Off on openFATE Screening Meeting

LiMobile – Linux SDK for Mobile’s APPLE.

November 7th, 2010 by

LiMobile is a Linux distribution (based on openSUSE and created in fantastic SUSE Studio) designed for developing applications for the iPhone and iPad without using Xcode compiler, the system and MacOSX MacBook notebook.

See video below.

Posted in Hackweek | Comments Off on LiMobile – Linux SDK for Mobile’s APPLE.

Merging SVN Repositories Explained

October 30th, 2010 by

Adding files to a SVN server is usually a task done in seconds. However, having several independent SVN repositories and wanting to “combine” them, this is not trivial—especially if you want to preserve the history.

The doc team had had three different, independent repositories on BerliOS (opensuse-ha-doc, opensuse-docmaker, and opensuse-lfl) all holding separate information. This was a bit silly, so my task was to consolidate them into opensuse-doc by keeping all history.

(more…)

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Posted in Documentation, Server, Systems Management | Comments Off on Merging SVN Repositories Explained

A new Flavor: openSUSE Invis Server

October 28th, 2010 by

Invis Server Beside many other amazing things which happened at the openSUSE Conference 2010, Stefan Schäfer gave a talk about his project called Invis Server. It is a very specific server solution for the small and medium business, based on the openSUSE distribution. The Invis Server is perfect software for all production installations in small business use cases, also to be maintained by consultants in that space.

All needed services such as printing, mail, web and file server, database and groupware are there and get preconfigured at installation. For daily operation in the users network, there is a simple yet powerful web interface.

In the discussion after the presentation it turned out that Stefan would be fine with moving the Invis Server Project nearer to the openSUSE project and get a larger community find together to power up the project on openSUSE distributions.

As a result we decided to found the openSUSE Invis Project. The idea is to create an openSUSE Distribution flavor with solid packages coming from openSUSE Factory together with some specifically packaged sources ready to power the Invis Server. The openSUSE Buildservice will be used to build the needed packages and create the product images. The first tasks will be to clean up the package list and do some packaging to be able to create a convenient openSUSE-Invis CD.

The openSUSE-Invis Mailinglist was set up and is waiting for your subscription. Please show up there soon to help us to move this idea forward.

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Posted in Boosters, Derivative, Distribution, Factory | 7 Comments »

Read The Fabulous Manual

October 26th, 2010 by

We have a new place where we collect static documentation like manuals, user guides, quick start pages, developer documentation … and so on.
This new place is: rtfm.opensuse.org doc.opensuse.org.
Our “fabulous manuals” are also accessible at: doc.opensuse.org (in case you don’t like the word “fabulous”).

A few days ago Thomas Schraitle already wrote about this site before it was in a state that we wanted to announce – so sorry for any confusion this might have created.

This site is not meant to be a competitor to the documentation in the wiki. It was rather born from the need to have a central place to publish generated static documentation. Content on rtfm is not meant to be edited. If you want to contribute documentation we very welcome this in the wiki and encourage  you to link back to rtfm where applicable. The pages on rtfm are static but however they will be updated automatically upon changes (new releases of a project or product).

Currently we have published some great user guides and quick start pages for openSUSE (KDE, Gnome, Security, …) and SLES (AppArmor, Admin Guide, kvm, Xen, Security, …) as well as a user and vendor guide for WebYaST. There is also developer documentation available for YaST and Zypp (libzypp, satsolver) development.
In the next days or weeks we will add more documentation as soon as it is ready to be published.

Update:
We changed the domain name of that site. To read the fabulous manuals please use and link only to doc.opensuse.org. The domain docs.opensuse.org will be alias for it – please only link to doc and do not use rtfm anymore. Thanks for your appreciation.

Posted in Distribution, Documentation | 3 Comments »

Cheat Cube openSUSE

October 26th, 2010 by

The formidable Carlos Ribeiro, researching tools and marketing resources used within the free software found one that deserves mention, the Cheat Cube project fedora. From this model fedora using inkscape and drew a cube version for openSUSE. Congratulations Carlos Jedi.

Posted in Artwork | 1 Comment »

OBS 2.1: Status of SuperH (sh4) support with QEMU

October 24th, 2010 by

With established ARM support in OBS the as well as emulated MIPS and PowerPC is getting more mature, the last big embedded architecture not working in OBS with QEMU user mode was SH4. QEMU developers community had done a lot of work in improving QEMU user mode during the last months, so I can proudly present with currently only a few patches to QEMU git master OBS builds working with the SH4 port of Debian Sid. The new QEMU 0.13 released recently is a big milestone for this.

Another news is that I had fixed the bugs in Virtual Machine builds (build script) when using them with some architectures like PowerPC 32bit and SH4. So now also the combination of using for example KVM (XEN should also work) in a worker together with ARM, MIPS, PowerPC and SH4 is working. The appropriate fixes are in one of the next build script releases (if not even released already now with OBS 2.1, I have to check that). You can select architecture “sh4” with OBS 2.1 and also start a scheduler with “sh4”.

With the use of the QEMU User Mode, you can build also accelerated native cross toolchains for your host architecture so time critical parts like the compiler can run without the emulator. This works with .deb as well as with .rpm based backages. The MeeGo Project as well as the openSUSE Port to ARM uses this technique to provide an optimum between compatibility and performance. It means you can mix natively build packages and use cross toolchains on it. The “CBinstall:” feature helps you to use native or cross builds automatically depending on if your build host is a native machine or a x86 machine with cross build. In summary, we have the current classics of linux embedded archs together now in OBS: ARM, x86, MIPS 32, PowerPC 32 and SH4.

I have uploaded the fixed QEMU package to the OBS project openSUSE:Tools:Unstable inside the package “qemu-devel” after some more testing. I have of course also a OBS meta prjconf file working with Debian Sid. The SH4 port of Debian Sid you can find at Debian Ports Site.

And last but not least I would like to thank Riku Voipio of the Debian Project, QEMU project and MeeGo project and other major contributors during the QEMU 0.13 development cycle for the restless work on QEMU user mode improvements. In case of KVM, QEMU is used even twice, with QEMU-KVM as well as QEMU User Mode. I am sure I had forgotten other important people, so thanks to them also.

Posted in Build Service, Distribution, Packaging, Toolchain, Virtualization | 3 Comments »

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