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Archive for March, 2015

How to organize-start an open source community

March 26th, 2015 by

This is an attempt to make a list of things that someone-group of people can follow to develop a healthy community or team. This post is an overview of what I did with Kostas for the Greek openSUSE community.
A small detail is that we were only 2. So we took decisions fast. We didn’t have to vote or something.
We had an “advantage” because we have an awesome global community and we asked for something we weren’t sure how to proceed.

Let’s start:

0. Have a clear goal. What you want to do. Have a big goal that some parts aren’t “visible” when you start.
1. Web page: This is the web page-blog that will show information about community, the distro or the project. Make it visible on planets. BE CAREFUL. Don’t focus on how to make a great site-blog using personal wordpress, drupal etc. Set it up on blogger and start post articles. You want CONTENT (write an article every other day). Don’t spend time to maintain or secure your web page.
2. Mailing list: Ask the project if they can setup for you. If not, then try to find alternatives such as google groups.
3. IRC Channel
4. Forum: Prefer to ask from the project to setup a section for your language. If your project doesn’t have forum, then ask a LUG or tech forum to use their’s. Do not have your forum setup in your host for the same reasons as before. Don’t spend time to maintain or secure the forum.
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Posted in Ambassadors, Marketing | Comments Off on How to organize-start an open source community

How to organize your trip, your project’s presence to a conference

March 26th, 2015 by

We saw some ideas about how to organize a release party for your project (we like to party!!!). Another part of marketing is to join conferences to promote your project. I write some thought from my experience. Please, if you have any idea you want to share, be my guest.

1. Read the tech news
Read the news (RSS, social networks, mailing lists). There are many conferences that you can join (some conferences are annual). Unfortunately, the organizers might skip to sent you invitation because you’re either too small project without any marketing section or they forgot you for their reasons. You should contact them and ask them to join as community-project. Most conferences have call for papers period, where you can apply for a presentation.

2. Community Meetings
Now that you made the first contact, you should sent an e-mail to your project mailing list, informing them about the conference and asking for an IRC meeting. At the kick off meeting, someone MUST be the coordinator of everything (the tasks are following). Another thing that should be clear is how many members of the community will join. You have to decide early because you can book your trip and accommodation (if the conference is quite big, there won’t be any rooms available for you). Travel as a team. If you decide early, you can ask for sponsorship, like openSUSE Travel_Support_Program or GNOME Travel sponsorship (GNOME for smaller events).

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Posted in Ambassadors, Marketing | Comments Off on How to organize your trip, your project’s presence to a conference

How to organize a release party for a project

March 26th, 2015 by

Part of marketing and organizing a community is the party of the local community to celebrate the new release. From my experience so far, people who join a release party want to have fun. They don’t want to see a presentation of new features of the release etc. We will see the steps to organize a success release party. Please add your opinion, since there are ways to improve.

Procedure:

1. Find a date.
The date of your party should be during a weekend (because it’s easier for people to join, since most people work during the week). Prefer to have your party during the morning. People from outside your city want to join the party and they have to travel to your city and back home. If you discuss with the members of your community about the date, you have to find 2 alternative dates for the party since you have to find the place for the party (see below), so if the owners of the place do not allow you your first date, then use the alternative. A good tool to find common dates is http://www.doodle.com/.

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Install VAMOX Icons and change your Desktop Environment

March 26th, 2015 by

I was searching to add some awesome icons to GNOME. After a long search, I found out that VAMOX icons rock!!! I liked the 3D nature of them. They come to 3 different versions. Take a look:

1. Vamox MATE
2. Vamox Ceibo
3. Vamox Celeste

I thought why not try to put them to obs? Is it the right tool? I made a research and found some other cool icons there. So I started reading and testing. A lot of errors. Since I’m end user, I thought I’m not going to make it. I better quit. So I deleted everything. The next day, I tried 2-3 times and it worked (the actual error was the name of the unzipped file). I tried it on my computer and it worked fine. Then I added Fedora as another repository and with the help of my friend Tom Tryfonidis, I added Arch Linux. Let’s see the result.

VAMOX MATE

If you like this result, go to vamox mate repository and choose your distro.

VAMOX Ceibo

If you like this result, go to vamox ceibo repository and choose your distro.

VAMOX Celeste

If you like this result, go to vamox celeste repository and choose your distro.

NOTE: It’s tested on openSUSE (GNOME, XFCE and MATE) and on Arch (GNOME)

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Posted in Artwork, Desktop | 1 Comment »

Compile ZNC (IRC Bouncer) on Raspberry Pi

March 26th, 2015 by

There are many IRC Bouncers . My favourite one is ZNC. ZNC installation on server is a simple thing (zypper in znc). But what if you don’t have a server (avoid all the costs)? The best solution is a Raspberry Pi (it doesn’t matter if it’s B, B+, 2). It’s small, no power consumption, can easily setup as home small server. The only thing that it might disturb you, is the lights.

First of all, check out how you can install openSUSE on Raspberry Pi.

Now, you have to compile ZNC. There’s no package in the repositories. If developers read this, please please make an ARM package. Please!!!

First of all, you have to install the following packages (that’s what I did):

zypper in gcc-c++ gcc git libopenssl-devel make

Now, let’s download the last release (you can find the whole procedure at official page)

wget http://znc.in/releases/znc-latest.tar.gz

Then untar the file:

tar -xzvf znc*.*gz

Then you have to do some steps that usually do when you compile:

cd znc*

and run the command

./configure

Next command will take a lot of time to finish

make

When it’s over, run the final command:

make install

You’re ready to use it. Now login as user and run the command:

znc –makeconf

If you have an older configuration, you can use it (run only the command znc).

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Posted in Documentation, Server | Comments Off on Compile ZNC (IRC Bouncer) on Raspberry Pi

Linux audio library smackdown part4: LibAO

March 2nd, 2015 by

Last time I’ve took look at Simple Direct Layer and how to get audio out of it. If SDL still feels little bit too hard to cope with I think I have solutions for you: libAO. Besides being no brainier with API libAO provides huge list of supported operating systems.
There is so much audio systems supported that you won’t be dissapointed but as much as I like everyone use Roaraudio. I don’t see it’s happening really soon (sorry roar you had your time in fame) but supporting Roaraudio  doesn’t mean that libAO is obsolete. It’s far from being obsolete. Libao supports OSS, ALSA and Pulseaudio out of the box and only problem is license is GPL 2.0+ so it’s no-go for proprietary development.

History

LibAO is developed under Xiph umbrella. Xiph is the organization who brought you Ogg/Vorbis, FLAC, Theora and currently they are hammering together next generation video codec Daala. Opus-audio codec standard is also Xiph project. LibAO rised from Xiph’s need multi-platform audio output library for Vorbis-audio codec. In this point if you don’t have any glue what I just said in last sentences I think you should take your spoon and start shovelling about Open Source audio codecs.
Becaus of the history libAO only has output mode and doesn’t use any callbacks. It doesn’t have fancy Float32 mode (as much as I understood) but that doesn’t say it’s bad thing. It works as expected you just feed bytes and after while you hear them from your speakers.

What about API

Supported outputs: Alsa, Oss, Jack, Mac OS X, Windows
License: GNU General Public license 2.0+

As said libAO API is difficult to describe since there almost ain’t NAN of it. You initialize, ask output device, put in your mode settings and start feeding data. Pulseaudio simple is almost easy as this but it’s still more difficult if you compare it to libAO. LibAO doesn’t support recording so only output and there must be a way to use another device than default but it’s not very easy to find or I was too lazy to dig it out.

So who wants to use libAO? People in hurry and don’t mind GPL-license, someone with very very tiny need of just getting audio out and people how hate bloat.

Summary: So if you hate bloat and again license doesn’t make you unhappy please use this library. Still libAO has kind of same problem that ALSA has. It’s mature, usable and ready for hardcore torturing but is it sexy? No! Is fresh? No, No! Is something that will change it API every week or hour?

After this I have to choose what to bring next. I have FFmpeg, Gstreamer and VLC in row. If you have opinion about next framework let me know.

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Posted in Education, lizards.openSUSE.org, Miscellaneous, Programming | Comments Off on Linux audio library smackdown part4: LibAO