Maybe not everybody knows it or it may be a bit too late, but nevertheless… the Calibre repository on home:thomas-schraitle:calibre has been moved to Documentation:Tools. It was necessary due to some internal reorganisation. The new location is now the official devel project.
Have fun! 🙂
ETHZ building
A group of 20 people met in ETHZ F26.3 room Friday afternoon (3pm to 7pm). To assist the Gnome 3 Launch party. We were expecting more people, but a so sunny weather, and a Monday off in Zürich doesn’t help to keep people inside after a long winter. 🙂
Marcus Moeller showed us a deep overview of the whole Gnome 3 desktop, with the strength and weakness (non yet finished features or controversial ones).
Then there’s some talks about features, what will happen unity/ubuntu/gnome etc …
On my side I did a late presentation about what’s openSUSE project is, and its associated SUPER COOL tools like OBS and susestudio.
It was supposed to last 15 minutes long. I was asked only Tuesday night to do it! But in fact we spend more than half an hour demoing obs and susestudio. Really was cool to do.
A special thanks to Biju Gopi Thilaka for setting up that party.
Biju Gopi was kind enough to share his slides with us, so keep reading …
Hi all,
For some time I wanted to check out GNOME3 and gnome-shell… My current chipset is ATI M92 RV710 and while the thermal performance with the proprietary driver is somewhat what I expect, the open source radeon driver does overheat my laptop a lot compared to flgrx. For the time being, fglrx isn’t really a choice because it just borgs the ‘activities’ bar on top… And until ATI fixes their driver, there’s no other choice than running with the standard radeon drm driver, which does provide a very pleasant experience with GNOME3 / gnome-shell.
For all that matters, KMS is to be enabled, period, full stop. And from this point… we have two options regarding power management:
1. Dynamic Frequency switching (not really working for me);
2. Profile based frequency switching (does provide what I need);
For all that matters regarding ‘profile based frequency switching’ we have 5 profiles available:
Now, what I did might not be an option to everyone, but for sure it does provide a nice solution for my problem… So be mindful of that… this is a personal preference based on the fact that I don’t require intensive GPU usage, neither I run intensive GPU requiring applications within GNOME3/gnome-shell (I have a normal openSUSE 11.4 with GNOME 2.32.x with fglrx dual boot config for those apps).
The first thing we might want to do is to switch to profile based frequency switching… how do we this? As root:
[code] echo profile > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_method[/code]
Now we have to pick one of those 5 profiles… and since I’ve already stated… I want the ‘low’ profile since I don’t really do much intensive GPU work…
[code] echo low > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile[/code]
Now… you might want to check out the different profiles and the different clocks used… this can be done through:
[code] cat /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/radeon_pm_info[/code]
and will report something like this:
[code]linux-331w:~ # cat /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/radeon_pm_info
default engine clock: 680000 kHz
current engine clock: 299530 kHz
default memory clock: 800000 kHz
current memory clock: 249750 kHz
voltage: 900 mV
PCIE lanes: 16[/code]
This one is using the ‘low’ profile… Feel free to test stuff around and find which one better answers your needs… Also there’s far more that can be done… I hope this helps ATI users with DRM driver to bring out the best of your system and improves your GNOME3 / gnome-shell experience, at so that you can run it with good thermal performance without fglrx.
NM
If you don’t get it already our 11.4 DVD and a great double faced poster are here
Linux-Maganize issue 126
(more…)
The voting on how to do the versioning is over and the “old school” has won by 55 per cent (of 98 participants). Thanks to all that participated in the two votes and the discussion around the topic.
As Coolo said in on the project list, we’d like to make a small change to the numbering:
We will not have a .0 release but only .1, .2, .3 release. Since we have releases in three months, the November
release is always the .1 release, the July release the .2 and the March release the .3.
So, the plan is that the next release will be called openSUSE 12.1 and launched on the 10th of November, 2011! Two years later – on the 14th of November, 2013 – we will then have the openSUSE 13.1 release.
So, the next four releases are called:
Detailed results for logged-in openSUSE members are available at the connect poll page and I have reproduced them here as well:
This is also consistent with the results of the first public voting.
Note that openSUSE does not have a major and minor numbering, even if it seems so. There is right now no difference in any way between what we would do for openSUSE 11.4 or 12.0 or 12.1 – and no sense to speak about openSUSE 11 or openSUSE 11 family. We also had in the past no process on how to name the next release (when to increase which parts of the number).
I think this new versioning is still consistent with the old one but also an improvement since it’s now clear that we change the first digit every two year. The first poll showed that half of our users prefer a date based versioning and the other a consecutive numbering. So, depending on your point of view, you can see this as a mixture of both or as consecutive numbering 😉
So, time now to make openSUSE 12.1 a great release!
Wake up ! it’s today ! Happy celebration
Learn a bit more about Gnome 3 : gnome3.org
If you can join the Launch Party in Zürich Friday 8th April 2011, 15h00 to 19h00
Deeper informations : visit the info page, or read the full invitation letter
Remember Zürich is less than one hour flight away from any major city in Europe, and well desserve by train. Weather will be nice and warm. So you didn’t have an excuse to not come! 🙂
I will talk about openSUSE, and how to get Gnome3 in it, I really will be happy if any other geekos around could come and join
“One person can make a difference and every person should try.” – John Fitzgeral Kennedy
Dear all,
In the last elections I’ve had 23 votes, and it’s to those persons that I address mainly in this hour, one hard one for me, with a ‘broken heart’ regarding many things…
A few weeks ago, I’ve emailed “admin@opensuse.org” requesting some changes to my user account, and later I’ve informed the Board about the reasons behind revoking my status as openSUSE member, also making them aware that I would continue to submit regularly the packages I currently maintain for the project and that I would be continuing to keep working for GNOME:Ayatana. I don’t really require ‘membership’ status for it, neither I want to be agraciated or recognized for my work, which is mainly directed towards openSUSE users, because I mainly see them as the source of motivation for this.
People will still me around on GNOME Meetings (those I can attend), I will still be around on #opensuse-gnome and #opensuse-pt… In fact people will notice that really nothing has changed, besides loosing an IRC mask, being listed as member. The real change is that I’ll longer take part in strategical or political mailing lists, neither I will be involved in anything regarding the orientation of the project. I’d rather continue giving something back to the project in the form of packages and will cut down all the superfluous stuff.
Behind this are reasons, most of them personal, and an increasing demand for my time in my personal life… things needed to be prioritized and I need also some rest on my mind, and staying away from certain areas of the project seem the right way to get some peace in my mind. The time that I removed from openSUSE project is being redirected to support the marketing of a new initiative in Portugal, which is also done as volunteer pro-bono work. There’s a national uproar involving the Firefighters future in Portugal. This is where I’m going to apply in full many of the experiences that I’ve taken from open source marketing (specially regarding distribution of digital contents) with an endeavor focused on digital marketing and social networks. This is also my true area of expertise (Marketing Management), and through this project I expect nothing else than high visibility as a professional, serving a cause that I fully trust on.
I hope that the 23 people that shared a vote of trust in me won’t feel that I’ve walked away on them, I haven’t, but I’m seeing that openSUSE is marching in the right direction. I hope only that they revoke one decision from the previous board and show some benevolence towards a redeemed contributor.
openSUSE is stronger than ever, and will succeed! I hope to see as a user/contributor a more daring project claiming for what should be ours and fighting for becoming the most popular Linux distribution! Anything else that doesn’t place us on the top, shouldn’t be considered! That is my position regarding the future and what openSUSE should fight for! Honor our sponsors, honor our contributors and keep an endless fighting spirit until it reaches such point!
A warmth ‘Thank You’ for the awesome experiences that the project has allowed me to live, for all the fun I’ve had! And the best of luck for the future! I am sure everyone’s work will be rewarded!
Stand strong people!
Nelson Marques.
Just a quick note about the new version (2.0) we had tasted Friday 1st April in Zürich.
No April fool, here, even if by car Zürich is one of the worst city to drive. Hopefully, I’ve a driver who don’t drink Alcohol. One hour and a half to join Zurich, and one hour to find the place, and park the car.
Anyway, we found the HUB place, and enjoyed the new version of swiss freebeer, in the company of around forty people.
The new receipt is absolutely right for my taste, and I can assure to German & Czech previous testers, it’s really better. And no, it’s not a pils malt based one. Afterall we have Geeko’s beer for that.
Pascal Mages & Roland Studer made a quick and nice presentation about the idea, the concept, and the open philosophy behind the bottle. (avertas.ch)
Then Daniel Reichlin, the brewer, made a presentation about his brewery located in Winterthur. (website). We appreciate especially the serious during QA tests. 🙂
Dabu Fantastic (Acoustic Set) website fill our ears, during the time Daniel fill ours glasses.
As always during this type of events, it’s cool to meet people, discuss about free/open world, our beloved distributions, etc
They publish some numbers, and it seems we drink (driver excluded) 80 Liters during the event.
ps: if someone near Delémont want to drink one, I’ve bring back some of them at home 🙂
Catherine Lippuner, who get some pictures, was kind enough to share some with us.
Roland Studer (back) from avertas.ch / Daniel Reichlin (front) brewer
people drinking freebeer, and watching brewer's presentation
Public during presentation of open concept
attentive audience
Please refer to my previous article where all the installation procedure is explained.
I’ve clean up all previous version which are not xpic, so everybody can easily know which drivers he has to install.
All credits to Sebastian Siebert (freespacer) : 11.3 article
Users have reported that version 8.831 of catalyst 11.3 compile correctly under Tumbleweed with 2.6.38 kernel, so until xorg change too much, installing the 11.4 version should work
For factory, I’ve build a repository (see previous article) that can be used, and fglrx build
| Month | Unique IP | Number of visits | Pages | Hits | Bandwidth |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 2011 | 2355 | 6411 | 19688 | 35263 | 16.63 GB |
| Feb 2011 | 2906 | 7719 | 26383 | 41142 | 22.37 GB |
| Mar 2011 | 8055 | 21157 | 228494 | 258613 | 59.13 GB |
All served by openSUSE powered server!
Today we want to present the current development of snapper, a tool for managing btrfs snapshots.
For years we had the request to provide rollbacks for YaST and zypper but things never got far due to various technical problems. With the rise of btrfs snapshots we finally saw the possibility for a usable solution. The basic idea is to create a snapshot before and after running YaST or zypper, compare the two snapshots and finally provide a tool to revert the differences between the two snapshots. That was the birth of snapper. Soon the idea was extended to create hourly snapshots as a backup system against general user mistakes.
The tool is now in a state where you can play with it. On the other hand there is still room and time for modifications and new features.
We provide a command line tool and a YaST UI module. Here is a brief tour:
First we manually create a snapshot:
# snapper create --description "initial"
Running YaST automatically creates two snapshots:
# yast2 users
Now we can list our snapshots:
# snapper list Type  | # | Pre # | Date                    | Cleanup | Description -------+---+-------+--------------------------+----------+------------- single | 0 |      |                         |         | current single | 1 |      | Wed Mar 30 14:52:17 2011 |         | initial pre   | 2 |      | Wed Mar 30 14:57:10 2011 | number  | yast users post  | 3 | 2    | Wed Mar 30 14:57:35 2011 | number  | single | 4 |      | Wed Mar 30 15:00:01 2011 | timeline | timeline
Snapshot #0 always refers to the current system. Snapshot #2 and #3 were created by YaST. Snapshot #4 was created by an hourly cronjob.
Getting the list of modified files between to snapshots is easy:
# snapper diff 2 3 c... /etc/group c... /etc/group.YaST2save c... /etc/passwd c... /etc/passwd.YaST2save c... /etc/shadow c... /etc/shadow.YaST2save c... /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager c... /var/tmp/kdecache-linux/icon-cache.kcache c... /var/tmp/kdecache-linux/plasma_theme_openSUSEdefault.kcache
You can also compare a single file between two snapshots:
# snapper diff --file /etc/passwd 2 3 --- /snapshots/2/snapshot/etc/passwd   2011-03-30 14:41:45.943000001 +0200 +++ /snapshots/3/snapshot/etc/passwd   2011-03-30 14:57:33.916000003 +0200 @@ -22,3 +22,4 @@ uucp:x:10:14:Unix-to-Unix CoPy system:/etc/uucp:/bin/bash wwwrun:x:30:8:WWW daemon apache:/var/lib/wwwrun:/bin/false linux:x:1000:100:linux:/home/linux:/bin/bash +tux:x:1001:100:tux:/home/tux:/bin/bash
The main feature of course is to revert the changes between two snapshots:
# snapper rollback 2 3
Finally yast2-snapper provides a YaST UI for snapper.
Playing with snapper should only be done on test machines. Both btrfs and snapper are not finished and included known bugs. Here is a step-by-step manual for installing and configuring snapper for openSUSE 11.4.
We would like to get feedback, esp. about general problems and further ideas. There are also tasks everybody can work on, e.g. the snapper wiki page or a man-page for snapper.
For the time being there is no dedicated mailing-list so just use opensuse-factory@opensuse.org.
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