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Archive for January, 2011

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LibreOffice 3.3 rc4 available for openSUSE

January 21st, 2011 by

I’m happy to announce that LibreOffice 3.3 rc4 packages are available for openSUSE in the Build Service LibreOffice:Unstable project. They are based on the libreoffice-3.3.0.4 release. Please, look for more details about the openSUSE LibreOffice build on the wiki page.

The packages are based on LibreOffice release candidate sources. Though, they include some addons from the old Go-oo project.  They have not passed full QA round yet 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 against the product LibreOffice .

Known bugs

  • some packages were not renamed, .e.g. OpenOffice_org-thesaurus, …; they are not built from the main LibO sources; I will do soon.
  • SLED10 build is not available; need more love

More known bugs

Other information and plans:

First, I am sorry that I did not announce two older builds. I published rc2 build just before Christmas and the announce was forgot in the hurry. There were problems with building rc3. It was ready only one day before rc4, so it did not make sense to announce it.

There still might be some openSUSE-specific bugs that would need to be fixed. I hope that they do not break the base function but… I will continue with producing newer builds with more fixes from the stable libreoffice-3-3 branch. I will move the packages to a stable project once we finish testing of all the SUSE-specific addons. It should happen within the next few weeks.

Please be patient and thanks for understanding.

Posted in Desktop, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on LibreOffice 3.3 rc4 available for openSUSE

openQA is testing for you

January 20th, 2011 by

You might have read the announcement of the factory-tested repo (or not, because it did not go on planet.o.o). There have been many additions to the testing during the last eight weeks.

openQA.o.o is a machine running automated software tests all the time to decide if factory-tested can be updated. If you think, this was boring, you might find out that it is not, since every testrun generates a video of approx 4 minutes that can be conveniently viewed in firefox.

You can view those test results on the openQA page.

And those are the updates:

  • I have added testing of development repos, so that it is now possible to detect bugs before they even get into Factory (most of those tests have “devel” at the end of their name). In fact, this has already found two such bugs.
  • The test system’s hardware was upgraded with a sponsored SSD and the software adapted to allow running multiple tests in parallel (using make -j3)
  • I have updated the web-interface to use the nice Bento theme
  • And I found yet another cool use-case for automated testing: it allows to bisect bugs. I did a binary search in old results for a live-installer bug which made it really easy to find the causing commit. However, seeing how long such a bug went unnoticed, made me think, that it would be nice if more people would check the results for anomalies, since not all of those can easily be auto-detected. As this just needs a firefox and little time, this is pretty easy to do. Much easier than to actually setup a test-system in any case.
  • An IRC notification bot was added, keeping #opensuse-openqa updated with new test results
  • Then, I am looking for additional automatic test-scripts, that also work standalone on an openSUSE install. It is especially important to test high-impact things. Things that break often or block many users if they break. And it would be nice to have a small result range such as OK|fail|unknown or it should at least be mappable to such.
  • Jürgen Weigert has packaged sikuli, so it is easy to create GUI tests with it, that could then be included in the test-suite.

Then there are still some things on the ToDo list…

  • Hermes integration to get email alerts and RDF feeds for newsreaders
  • Have more test variants auto-scheduled (-live and -dup)
  • Find a way to have Add-On-Repos with custom priority (otherwise Factory packages might be used, as happened for kernel-default-2.6.37-rc7) – using linuxrc’s driverupdate feature could be one way.

your input is highly appreciated

Tags:
Posted in Factory, Quality Assurance | Comments Off on openQA is testing for you

Massive update on Ubuntu software…

January 20th, 2011 by

Screenshot using Radiance Light Theme and default Ubuntu indicator layout.

Some brief updates about the ongoing work towards bringing Ayatana Project software into openSUSE:

1. Software Updates

Canonical recently released a batch of updates which bring new functionality (Indicators seem to respond faster now) and very nice improvements, some of them contributed by down-streamers. From my humble experience I would risk to claim that Canonical is doing an excellent job as an upstreamer. I’ve updated all packages to the latest versions. This allowed to remove some patches.

2. Unity

Unity is now one step closer. For Unity I’ve started to package Compiz git snapshots from the correct branches pointed by Unity documentation. This brought something new to me, cmake. I’ve done this very slowly, reading some docs meanwhile about cmake. My packaging around Compiz is mainly based on OBS X11:Compiz repository, so pretty much all the credits should be for the original project Packagers which done an awesome job. Currently I’m missing only 3 packages to test Unity. Recently with kernel and mesa updates some issues around ATI hardware seem to have fixed for openSUSE Factory users, which enabled in my case FireGL, therefore I can test properly Unity now and check for the integration into openSUSE.

Unity by default uses the Ayatana’s Indicators, and if they are not present, it will fallback to GNOME’s applets. This is very nice and I’m thankful Canonical made it this way. This brings non-Ubuntu users the Unity experience at almost no trouble, since there isn’t actually much patching required to implement Unity.

3. GNOME:Ayatana Repository

GNOME:Ayatana Repository will be populated during the next two weeks with the latest changes and will provide for the time being the Ayatana’s Indicators and Unity. I am currently working around libappindicator stack and it’s Indicators. Currently I’m testing the patches required on the GTK+ stack and this is pretty much the last barrier before going into #STAGE2, polishing and populating GNOME:Ayatana.

It’s not decided yet what packages are going to present on Factory. My wish is to push only Unity into Factory and it’s dependencies, this might not happen for 11.4 as I’m not sure about the freeze schedules and it might be too late already, but since we’re depending on Compiz upstream, we’ll see what happens. Even if Unity isn’t going to be available on Factory, I’m sure we can use KIWI or SUSE Studio to release a small openSUSE Unity Spin.

I’ve also decided that I (typo: previously would) wouldn’t like to see Unity available by openSUSE before the official release from Ubuntu, for which I wish all the success.

Since the very early start that I’ve been using pkg-config as much as I can. According to some information that I collected previously, this would be great for cross-distribution build. Depending on the time and work done, I might make the necessary modifications and enable cross-distribution building on this project, thus, making it available for other RPM distributions supported by OBS. This will require a bit of testing before, so it will be work to be done after 11.4 is released and during it’s lifecycle. Maybe by the time of openSUSE 12 gets released, we will have this project also available for other RPM based distributions. I have no knowledge on Debian packaging, but Ubuntu ships this software and Debian probably has it also available so… that won’t be a problem.

4. Artwork

I am providing on GNOME:Ayatana Ubuntu’s Light Themes (Ambiance and Radiance) and offering a patched version of Metacity that renders those themes perfectly. I’m not changing the original colors from the themes or modifying them in any way. So they might be a bit more of orange and not green.

I’ve contacted some people to ask if they would be willing to donate some artwork to make a small package with Wallpapers, some have answered yes, so I will make a small package with a couple of wallpapers for the traditional resolutions and distribute it alongside with this software as optional as always.

5. GTK2, GTK3 and QT

Implementation of GTK3 will be done within the next days, as I am also considering enabling QT support for KDE users (Indicators only for now).

That’s pretty much the result of the last days of work… more news to come in the nearby future.

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Posted in Desktop, GNOME | 1 Comment »

KDE Release Party in Madrid, 2nd edition

January 19th, 2011 by

We’re going to have lunch together to celebrate the release of KDE 4.6 😀
Come and join us! It’s going to be fun for sure 😉

Date/Time: 29th of January at 2:00pm
Place: Fass C/Rodríguez Marín 84. Mapa
(paralela al Paseo de la Castellana, a la altura del Santiago Bernabéu)
<Metro> Concha Espina

If you’re coming, please add your name to http://community.kde.org/Promo/ReleaseParties/4.6#Madrid

PS: Thanks a lot for this poster, Eugene and Nuno 😀

Posted in Desktop, Events, KDE | 1 Comment »

Configuring an IPv6 DSL connection

January 19th, 2011 by

The German company rh-tec offers free IPv6 internet connections for people that already have T-DSL. Configuring such a connection on openSUSE 11.3 is not as straight forward as with IPv4. It’s not hard either if you know where to put the settings though.

  1. start the yast2 DSL module
  2. follow the instructions of the wizard to set up a new PPPoE device. Enter your user name and password at the provider screen.
  3. At the “Connection Parameters” screen uncheck “Automatically Retrieve DNS”. Enter an arbitrary IPv4 address as first DNS server (yast doesn’t accept IPv6 there yet, bug 665516).
  4. finish the wizard and leave yast
  5. open /etc/sysconfig/network/providers/provider0 (or whatever name was chosen by yast) in an editor
  6. change DNS1 and DNS2 to the actual IPv6 addresses of your provider’s name servers
  7. add the following line to the file:
    PPPD_OPTIONS="noip +ipv6 ipv6cp-accept-local"
  8. save and quit
  9. Done! You may now use cinternet or qinternet to dial in and enjoy the (rather empty) IPv6 internet.

Posted in Network | Comments Off on Configuring an IPv6 DSL connection

Welcome to BITA 2011

January 19th, 2011 by

Hello Community

It is again that time of a year when we participate in our local IT mega event: Baroda IT Association Show 2011 (BITA 2011).

Drop in to see what we are up to if you happen to be around here during 23-26 January 2011.

There will of course be openSUSE Education Li-f-e DVDs available at our stall that is why BITA probably is green this time 😉

See you all there

Posted in Derivative, Distribution, Education, Events, Marketing | 1 Comment »

A brief update…

January 17th, 2011 by

In the last days I’ve been leaving my full attention to Compiz and the famous glib main loop. I’ve made a small perl script to compare my local builds with the ones available on launchpad… nothing too fancy, but it seems to work. During the last days Canonical updated a lot of software.

I’ve decided to start updating the on my test repository to the newer versions. A couple of new packages are required as dependencies (the most impressive one is utouch-evemu, which is a part of Canonical’s Multitouch uTouch stack).

The number of updates is quite impressive, the number of patches (even on some new updates) is equally impressive… I’ve just realized that GTK+-2.0 has been subjected of a couple of fun patches and gobject-introspection is becoming mind crushing… Either way, the work continues, and unfortunately for me I was planning to do a small open beta phase for Factory users soon… but all this changes will require much more work and a lot of packages will have dependency lists updated.

The next days free time will be spent around this massive update, I am sure it will pay off. If anyone is using my test repository on my home project, expect some turbulence during the next days. Since I’m on this, I’m already starting to enable GTK3 wherever I can do it in a safe way, nevertheless, it’s just to speed work for the time being, as much things are changing.

Posted in Desktop, GNOME | Comments Off on A brief update…

Questions for Board Applicants

January 17th, 2011 by

Today I’ve decided to send a couple of questions for Board candidates. To me it is important the answer to this questions, as through such answer it will be possible for me to sharp my opinion about some of the people behind the applications.

The questions aren’t all direct and involve a critical analysis of quotations provided. The thread can be visited on the openSUSE Project mailing list.

I’ve used quotations from 5 different people that should be familiar to most people.

* F. Nietzsche – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche
* Adam Smith – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Smith
* Daniel J. Bernstein – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_J._Bernstein
* Richard M. Stallman – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman
* Mahatma Gandhi – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohandas_Karamchand_Gandhi

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Questions for Board Applicants

openSUSE Factory: ATI FireGL 10.12

January 13th, 2011 by

I’ve had some problems in the past with openSUSE Factory and ATI support… even the normal radeon driver wasn’t worked properly. After the last updates, the radeon driver started working properly and I’ve decided to install the ATI FireGL driver which is actually something I need to continue testing and debug Unity implementation on openSUSE.

IT WORKS!

Here’s what you need (64 bit users):

* Install the required dependencies to compile the kernel module (currently on 2.6.37-rc5-12-desktop). 64bit users will require the following:
[code] zypper in kernel-source compat-32bit qt3-32bit libstdc++ libgcc xorg-x11-libs-32bit xorg-x11-devel-32bit Mesa-devel-32bit fontconfig-32bit expat-32bit freetype2-32bit zlib-32bit gcc make[/code].

* Download ATI FireGL driver (version 10.12) from ATI website (http://ati.amd.com).

* Extract the files using the command:
[code]sh ati-driver-installer-10-12-x86.x86_64.run –extract[/code]
This will create a small folder which starts with fglrx*. Change directory into that folder…

* Download the following patches:
– sema_init.patch
–  fglrx-2.6.36.patch
–  makefile_compat.patch

* Apply the patches (patch -p1 < file.patch).

* Run the following command:
[code]sh ati-installer.sh  8.801 –install[/code]

* Follow the installer instructions. Finally check /usr/share/ati/fglrx-install.log to check if everything is cool…

* Restart using your favorite method… mine is ‘shutdown now -frn’.

Enjoy FireGL on openSUSE Factory!

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Wallpaper Community Pack #1

January 13th, 2011 by

I’ve received some emails and some positive feedback about one wallpaper I used for a couple of screenshot’s I’ve used in the past, including also information requests about where that very same wallpaper could be found. I’m happy people liked my choice.

The wallpaper is question is the following, which can be found at gnome-look [dot] org:

Green Snake HD - by Kmurat @ gnome-art.org

It is clear to me at this stage that Artwork has good demand and it’s a ‘value +’ recognized by many users. Understanding this, I’ve decided two things:

* GNOME:Ayatana will have a small Artwork Package by the Community, I’m currently contacting Kmurat to check if he can change the licence on this artwork piece (with over 20.000 downloads on gnome-art) so I can use it for distribution. Currently it’s licensed as CC BY-NC-ND, in which the NC can be probably a problem. Let’s wait a couple of days and see… Either way for those who asked for the source of this wallpaper, click on the image above.

* I will create a small package with wallpapers from the community and make it available (for GNOME, KDE, etc) users.

My intentions are to include a set of wallpapers (4/3, 16/9 and 16/10) of around 5/7 wallpapers from several artists and community contributors. The first person I’ve contacted regarding this was Javier Llorente, a openSUSE Artwork Team and KDE contributor, which donated and pointed some artwork. I’ve also sent a small email to María ‘Tatica’ Leandro, a contributor of Fedora Design Team from South America asking if she had something that she could share with us for this community package (I did loved some of her submissions into Fedora Art). Additionally, I’m also going to nag Sirko Kemter (gnokii) for a contribution…

Once this is assembled (already have 5 wallpapers) I’m going to package it, run a sanity check and prepare it for distribution…

UPDATE: María ‘Tatica’ Leandro has answered positive to my email requesting for a donation, Sirko Kemter also answered positive.

Posted in Desktop, Distribution, GNOME, KDE, XFCE | 1 Comment »

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