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Archive for 2010

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Qt 4.7.0 in openSUSE; KDE updates

September 22nd, 2010 by

With the release of Qt 4.7.0 it’s time to use it to build KDE packages destined for openSUSE 11.4. This means that Qt 4.7 will shortly land in KDE:Distro:Factory repositories. In a couple of months’ time it will be followed by betas of the KDE 4.6 releases. If you are using KDF just because it’s the latest KDE release, consider replacing it with KDE:Release:45 now, which will remain 4.5 and Qt 4.6 based.

You can get the latest Qt release with Qt Quick/QML and latest Qt Creator by staying with KDF.

In other KDE related news, Choqok in openSUSE Factory, 11.2 and 11.3 is being updated to 1.0rc3 to fix Twitter authentication. Amarok 2.3.2 is out and packaged in KDF, and will shortly be available for older versions in KDE:UpdatedApps. And KOffice 2.3beta1 is available for testing in KDE:Unstable:Playground. So if you’ve been admiring the Krita art showcase and think you can do better, grab your tablet and the latest code built for stable KDE releases and push some pixels! The new Bluetooth UI for KDE, BlueDevil is in testing in KDF, alongside the new PulseAudio UIs coming in 4.6, and  akonadi-googledata 1.2.0 is in KDE:Extra.

As usual use software.opensuse.org to find the right repo for the KDE version you use or ‘osc repourls <reponame>’ if you prefer not to click.

Posted in Desktop, Factory, KDE | 6 Comments »

frOSCamp 2010 – Zürich The day after – Event report

September 19th, 2010 by

After a good night of sleep, I’ve finish the Member/Ambassador report.

Gallery picture and mini-film : Here

Event Report : PDF or ODP

Others pictures : frOSCamp gallery

Report done by Sirko Kemter (aka gnokii) karl-tux-stadt.de

Posted in Boosters, Events, Marketing | 3 Comments »

frOSCamp Day II

September 19th, 2010 by

08h00 : ok Saturday morning : always rude to get wake up.

About the FreeBeer www.freebeer.ch after a mini pool it seems that Swiss love it, Germans doesn’t like it’s taste, Hungarians doesn’t drink beer ( oh really ? I mean those beer ). Me I really enjoy it and it’s open concept.

09:30 Not to much people here. Did we miss the adv part of it ?
10:00 Filling the ambassador event report … Updating the gallery with yesterday afternoon
11:00 Trying to record the Pavel talk about openSUSE Connect, with the video-cam, and badly discover that when the “rec record lamp” is not flashing it’s not recording. Too bad … Put frOSCamp guy recorded the voice, and the slide so they will be available soon.
11:00 – 17:00 Rescue an hp laptop bugging under 11.3 32 bits with not able to call mmio during boot. 64Bits version is working !
Demo install with KVM, show lxde desktop, kde desktop also the netbook interface.
16:45 All penguins are sold, transform the 50 CHF income to a FSFE donation.
17:00 I have to fill my feedback form, there’s a Nokia N900 to win 🙂
17:35 So the N900 is won by a Debian guy
18:00 Time to unset the booth.
18:30 All stuf in the car, gnokii too, start driving him back to his car.
19:30 we found the FUDCON dinner event place. ParkPlatz & Zürich, a real love story 🙂
20:45 Time to me to leave Fedora & openSUSE guys, if I stay for eating I will not start before 2 hours and a half.
23:15 At home !

Posted in Boosters, Events | Comments Off on frOSCamp Day II

frOsCamp day I

September 17th, 2010 by

So our little team found it’s way to Zürich yesterday.
Every body is here this morning.

More content will be coming, but I offer you an exclusive look & preview right now !

Album frOsCamp

ps : gnokii can you stop eating all sugus candies they are for visitors 🙂

Tags: , ,
Posted in Events | Comments Off on frOsCamp day I

Free BEER for free people

September 17th, 2010 by

When we call beer “free”, we mean that it respects the users’ essential freedoms: the freedom to drink it, to study and change it, and to return empties with or without some changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech”… but in this case also “free beer” too.

Why man have to choose a free beer? Because it’s open and free to use. Everybody can give some feedback on the freebeer’s twitter page.

The project was started by Wädi Bräu in Switzerland like “open source beer” project. On the home page you can get more information about this project, for example, news and last updates.

License: creative commons.
Alcogol vol: 4.8 %
Size: 0.33 L

Be free… drink free beer 😉

p.s. Who know, maybe Novell will be sponsored this great open source project (?) 😉

Tags: , ,
Posted in Events, Miscellaneous, Usability | 4 Comments »

Systems Management Zeitgeist

September 14th, 2010 by

Dear Lizards,
This recent release from IT World on the best Linux distributions out there caught my eye last weekend, as it declares “The package’s administration utility, YaST, is widely acknowledged as one of the best” in its entry on openSUSE and SLE (the documentation also drew praise, distinguishing itself as “some of the best printed documentation you’ll find for any distro“), and reminded me I wanted to share some of the positive feedback I collected during our 11.x development and after final release.  Ready? Here we go.

Some of the initial ‘Net commentary was all centered on performance and memory footprint, from Snorp’s “I don’t think it’s possible to overstate just how much of an improvement it really is” to Duncan’s benchmarks providing interesting numerical comparisons like  “Yum uses about 9 times more memory” (and takes several times longer).  This was refreshing given that at the same time Yum’s less-than-nimble footprint was drawing some interesting comments from Zed and Zbr.

Eventually, the improvements rolled over to the press, with Jason Perlow proclaiming 11 RC1 the Mercedes-Benz to Ubuntu’s Wolkswagen. Jason had plenty of praise in his review, but I am singling out “the most beautiful installer program I have ever seen” and “quite impressed with how fast the package repository management works” since this is the Systems Management team’s ticker-tape parade, after all.  Our then Community Ambassador Zonker followed up with his Package Keeper piece on the special that Linux Pro Magazine issued for the 11.0 release, focusing on package management as “one of the most impressive advances” in the release (link sadly missing as article still paywalled).   Linux Format retorted with “One of our favorite features of SUSE is the one-click install system” and “faster than any other package manager we’ve seen, and on top of that it looks great, too” in their What SUSE Does Best review (no link, as LXF requires subscription).

Finally, with the release of our Enterprise distribution, the commentary rolled over to our corporate customers, as I previously reported when one customer I like to track personally as particularly representative reported a 300% speed improvement in rolling updates to production.

Afterwards, we have moved up live distro upgrade (more famously known as zypper dup) to fully supported status, quickly receiving loud praise from a Linux Journal editor with clearly too many Debian-using friends.  We do relate to his plight, in a tongue-in-cheek manner, and are happy to help.  Indeed, other distributions have started adopting Zypper as well, with Ark leading the way.

So what is next for us? Well, with Btrfs around the corner, integrating snapshot and rollback into the update system stands clearly out from the crowd: an undo button to painlessly bring back the system to where it was before your last upgrade. Stay tuned!

The package’s administration utility, YaST, is widely acknowledged as one of the best,The package’s administration utility, YaST, is widely acknowledged as one of the best,

Posted in Boosters, Documentation, Software Management, Systems Management, YaST | Comments Off on Systems Management Zeitgeist

Another openSUSE kernel git repo

September 14th, 2010 by

The mirror of the openSUSE kernel-source repository has been around for several months already, now there is something new: A repository that is actually usable :-). The current kernel-source repository is a series of patches managed in git, which has some upsides, like the ability to easily cherry-pick a patch and port it to a different branch or send it upstream. But it is quite painful if you want to work with the code itself and not with patch files. A task as simple as determining if drivers/…/foo.c in openSUSE-11.3 has or does not have a certain change requires checking out the branch and running the sequence-patch script to be able to look at the file. If you need to know when was the file changed, you have to run ‘quilt patches <file>’ to find out what patches touched the file and then ask git about the history of these patches. Neither convenient nor efficient. That’s why we have a second repository, that contains the mainline tree with all the suse patches applied. It’s located at http://gitorious.org/opensuse/kernel, the clone url is git://gitorious.org/opensuse/kernel.git. If you already have a clone of the mainline tree, then you can download just the differences with

git remote add suse git://gitorious.org/opensuse/kernel.git
git remote update suse
git checkout suse/master

The above task is then solved by opening the required file in an editor or typing ‘git show branch:file’. And you don’t even need to clone the tree to quickly check something in the source, just use the web viewer. Also, bisecting is much easier, because you avoid the sequence-patch step now. There are some gotchas though:

  • Not every commit to the kernel-source repository results in a change in the kernel repository. For instance updating config files in the kernel-source repository results in a commit that has no text changes. The gitorious viewer is confused by this and tells you that you are viewing the initial commit. In a local clone, you can exclude such commits with ‘git log .’ (note the dot).
  • When the patch series does not apply, there isn’t much to show in the kernel repository. In such case, the commit only adds a ‘BROKEN’ file to the toplevel directory and uses the tree from the previous commit. When using a bisect script, you can skip such commits with e.g. ‘test -e BROKEN && exit 125’.
  • When patches such as xen are temporarily disabled while updating to newer upstream versions and later enabled, it generates huge diffs back and forth. That’s usually not a problem unless you are bisecting something xen-related.

Anyway, I’m sure this will be useful for anyone who needs to debug something in the openSUSE kernel.

Posted in Kernel | Comments Off on Another openSUSE kernel git repo

On-Access virus scanning on openSUSE 11.3

September 14th, 2010 by

One of the most useful deployment scenario for Linux in enterprise or educational environment is a fileserver with on access virus scanning, to serve Windows PCs on the network of course. Long ago there used to be samba-vscan that worked very nicely, it went missing in openSUSE 11.2 so dazuko kernel module worked in its place. On 11.3 dazuko is no longer available, enter dazukofs.

(more…)

Posted in Documentation, Education, Samba, Security, Server | 4 Comments »

Build Service Cheat Sheet

September 13th, 2010 by

Last week I had some discussions with colleagues about the build service and Berthold and Darix suggested to create some kind of reference card for the build service.

So, I’ve sat down, learned how others do sheat cheets, e.g. via XML or in OpenOffice.org and then decided to go the easy route with columns using an OpenOffice.org text document.

The first version is now available for download.  It describes building packages for Factory, reviewing of package submissions, maintenance, package editing, miscellaneous commands and osc installation. The file is supposed to be printed on two sides of a paper – and then cut the paper to A5.

Please send me corrections, the odt is available as well from me (will upload it later to the wiki).

You can get the current version here.

Thanks to reviews and suggestions by Adrian, Berthold, Darix, Jan and Thorsten.

Posted in Build Service | Comments Off on Build Service Cheat Sheet

KDE bug triage report

September 12th, 2010 by

Last month there was a KDE bug triage (sorry for the late report) and we squashed 60 bugs 😀
Thanks to all the people who contributed in making the KDE experience a bit better, especially Stephen Dunn and Christian Trippe. 😉
Remember, this hasn’t finished here. Going through the bug reports always helps!
http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Bug_Squashing_KDE_bugreports
http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Bug_Squashing_KDE

So, here’s the proof:


Source: Bugzilla

Posted in Desktop, KDE | Comments Off on KDE bug triage report

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