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Archive for 2011

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Zippl again – now in the package

July 12th, 2011 by
Zippl

lightweight presentations

some might remember my hackweek project Zippl. I blogged about it more than a year ago. Zippl is a lightweigt presentation tool, a bit like prezi, a hipp tool for that purpose, where all ‘slides’ sit on one large canvas and during the presentation a kind of camera moves over the canvas.

I liked the idea and did Zippl as I wanted to play with Qt’s QGraphicsView. It takes a simple xml file as input which describes the presentation and animates it as shown in the video in my older blog.

First I thought it doesn’t make sense to continue that project. But recently, somebody asked if I have built in the feature back to the previous spot as I promised almost a year ago, as he wanted to do a presentation with Zippl. I couldn’t believe, and so I spent an evening in the weekend to polish Zippl a bit. And because its easy with OBS, I quickly built an rpm package for various openSUSEs.

Now that I worked on it a bit again I found it could also make sense on tablet devices, for example to run cool Hello New User animations or small presentations for ant Tilly to get some sponsorship for the new bike. Could be fun.

If you want to check it, please install from my home repository.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Boosters, Desktop, KDE | 9 Comments »

Presentation resolution on netbooks

July 11th, 2011 by

I recently got ASUS Eee Netbook R051PX, nice little machine, however small annoyance it has when plugged to projectors for presentation is that the default mirrored resolution is just 800×600, the gnome-display-properties does not allow the selection of 1024×768, xrandr comes to the rescue:

Run the following as normal user in terminal to get the required resolution.

xrandr --output LVDS1 --panning 1024x768
xrandr --output VGA1 --mode 1024x768

Note: just in case wordpress eats up – character, there are 2 – before output, panning and mode.

Posted in GNOME, Miscellaneous | Comments Off on Presentation resolution on netbooks

[gsoc] osc code cleanup – summary of week 7

July 10th, 2011 by

Hi,

here’s a small summary of the 7th (coding) week. This week I spent
most my time with the project and package classes which manage osc’s
working copies.

Done:

  • basic working copy layout
  • checks to detect broken/corrupt working copies
  • locking support (in order to lock a working copy (for instance when
    doing a commit or an update))

TODO:

  • add “core” methods like update, commit, diff etc.
  • (auto-) repair methods (to fix broken working copies)

Marcus

Posted in Build Service, GSOC | Comments Off on [gsoc] osc code cleanup – summary of week 7

Open Hardware License released by CERN!

July 9th, 2011 by

A very nice complement to the Open Source Hardware Definition that the Open Hardware Summit team has been curating for the past year is the Open Hardware Initiative announced by CERN, including the Open Hardware Repository recently launched there.

A bit of a legalistic focus when there are real hardware specs to peruse (who knows, maybe even some of Cornelius’ work is in there 🙂 ), but I think it is cool that after the Definition we now have the CERNOHL License.  Now, let the BSD vs GPL vs Apache vs MIT-with-crumpets discussion begin 🙂

Posted in Miscellaneous | Comments Off on Open Hardware License released by CERN!

[gsoc] osc code cleanup – summary of week 6

July 4th, 2011 by

Hi,

here’s a small summary of the 6th (coding) week. Unfortunately I had
to spent more time with university stuff than I expected – that’s why
I didn’t finish the complete todo for this week.
I did some code restructuring and started to work on the class for the
source route.
TODO:
– rewrite the project and package working copy classes:

  • the new working copy format will be incompatible with the current
    format.
  • the basic layout will look like this:
    prj
    |
    —> .osc/ (stores prj _and_ pkg metadata)
    |
    —> pkg1
    #       |
    #        —> <files>
    …
    |
    —> pkgN
    #       |
    #        —> <files>
    So all metadata is stored in the prj/.osc dir instead of prj/pkg/.osc
    The advantage is that we can support a complete package
    “restore” (without the need to download the package again):
    cd prj; rm -r pkg; osc revert/restore pkg;
    (that’s possible because the metadata is stored in the prj/.osc
    dir).
  • to convert old project/package working copies to the new format
    the “osc repairwc” command can be used (at least that’s the plan)

Feedback is always welcome.

Marcus

Posted in Build Service, GSOC | Comments Off on [gsoc] osc code cleanup – summary of week 6

Factory Progress 2011-07-01

July 1st, 2011 by

Here’s with some delay the next incarnation of Factory Progress. I’ve noticed the following changes that might interest people using and developing openSUSE Factory:

Package changes

Linux 3.0

Linux kernel 3.0 rc5 is currently on its way to factory and the header files (in package linux-glibc-devel) have already been updated for it. If your software reads the Linux kernel version, please check that it can cope with the two digits instead of the three of the new version. Best would be to not read the version at all.

Systemd

Frederic has proposed a “Road to systemd for openSUSE 12.1″. Systemd is a replacement of the SysVinit scripts that we have been using and improving in the past with many new – including some controversial – ideas. Check his blog post for additional references about systemd. The majority of the distributions are moving to systemd as well and standarizing on it, will allow to share some more code and development in this area.

We’re now in phase 1 – which means: Get systemd running as an option. Once this is working satisfactory, we can switch the default (phase 2) and decide what to do with SysVinit support.

(more…)

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Posted in Build Service, Factory, Packaging, Security | 2 Comments »

Facebook bans KDE’s photo uploader; all uploaded content inaccessible.

June 27th, 2011 by

So in my head there’s a little Walter Sobchak beating on my conscience and shouting “This is what you get when you trust Facebook with your data, Will”.
The reason is that I upload photos to Facebook using KDE’s shared uploader and this has fallen victim to the whims of FB’s purge of its app biosphere. Unless the original developer can convince them that the app is not spammy, offering a bad experience or having the wrong attitude, the app, my photos (all archived elsewhere of course), but most importantly, all the kind comments from my friends and contacts that represent FB’s only value, get sent to the farm.
This is what you get when you trust one company with stuff you care about. Will.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in KDE, Miscellaneous | 14 Comments »

[gsoc] osc code cleanup – summary of week 5

June 26th, 2011 by

Hi,

here’s a small summary of the 5th (coding) week. I’ve spent most
of the time with the url-like argument parser (more information can be
found here and here). Additionally I cleaned up/reworked the
remote file classes (now we have: RORemoteFile and RWRemoteFile).
I also added an AbstractHTTPResponse and HTTPError class to the httprequest
module (the main purpose of the AbstractHTTPResponse is to encapsulate a
“concrete” http response (for instance it can be used as a wrapper around
urllib(2)’s addinfourl class)).
TODO for this week:

  • write a search module in order to find packages, projects, requests etc.
  • maybe we also need something like a source module (mainly to access the
    /source route)
  • think about working copy code cleanup/internal restructuring

Marcus

Posted in GSOC, Miscellaneous | 1 Comment »

LibreOffice 3.3.3 bugfix release available for openSUSE

June 21st, 2011 by

I’m happy to announce LibreOffice 3.3.3 bugfix release for openSUSE. The packages are available in the Build Service LibreOffice:Stable project. They fix various crashers, usability and translation problems, see the libreoffice-3.3.3.1 release news for more details. See also some notes about openSUSE LibreOffice build.

The openSUSE LO team hopes that you will be happy with this release. Though, any software contains bugs and we kindly ask you to report bugs. It will help us to fix them in the future releases.

Other information and plans:

The bugfix release 3.3.4 is planed two months from now. Though, I would rather provide LO-3.4.2 packages instead.

I am already working on the LO-3.4 packages. They are more complicated because there were significant changes in the build stuff. You might expect something within the next few weeks in the LibreOffice:Unstable project.

Posted in Desktop, OpenOffice.org | 3 Comments »

1-2-3 Cloud

June 20th, 2011 by

Towards the end of last year there was an article in openSUSE news “announcing” the cloud efforts in the openSUSE project and on OBS. Well, cloud is still all the rage (see Jos’ contribution to openSUSE News issue 180) and people just cannot stop talking about cloud computing.

Using openSUSE as a host for your cloud infrastructure is also making great progress. We have 3 cloud projects in OBS and hopefully these cover your favorite cloud infrastructure code, Virtualization:Cloud:Eucalyptus, Virtualization:Cloud:OpenNebula, and Virtualization:Cloud:OpenStack. The projects provide repositories for Eucalyptus, OpenNebula, and OpenStack, respectively.

We attempt to make it relatively easy to get a cloud up and running. In this process OpenNebula and OpenStack have progressed the most. Eucalyptus is working, but due to an issue with Eucalyptus and openSSL 1.0 and later (the version in openSUSE) automation has to wait until these issues are resolved.

For OpenNebula we now have a KIWI example that shows how one can get a cloud setup from scratch in less than 2 hours, including the image build. The example contains a firstboot workflow for the head node, and self configuration of cloud nodes.

For OpenStack SUSE Gallery images are in the works and will be published in the near future.

All repositories provide packages you can install on running openSUSE systems. If you are interested in using openSUSE as the underlying OS for your cloud or if you want to contribute to the cloud projects, subscribe to the cloud mailing list opensuse-cloud@opensuse.org

Posted in Build Service, Infrastructure, Packaging, Programming, Virtualization | Comments Off on 1-2-3 Cloud

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