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Hermes Twittering about openSUSE Factory

February 1st, 2010 by

I'm going to FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting

Last week we updated Hermes on our production servers, they’re running a version now which will become a first Hermes release. I hope to get it packaged and released this week to present it on FOSDEM where I’ll give a talk about Hermes. Don’t miss it if you’re interested in this useful technology.

There went in a lot of technical improvement and bugfixes which one gets aware of if a system like Hermes runs in production for quite some time, such as missing indexes here and there which slow down the database and stuff like that. But that is another story.

What I actually wanted to talk about is the the fact that Hermes now is twittering now for you. You can follow it under the OBSHermes Twitter account. Hermes currently twitters about version updates of all packages in the openSUSE Factory project, so this is your tweet if you want to be at the bleading edge of Factory.

It is configurable for the administrator what actually is twittered. Is there other useful information around the openSUSE project which you would like to see twittered about? If so, please let me know.

What a Cool App: screenie

January 14th, 2010 by

Sometimes you stumble over an application that is really cool and makes your day. Of course when you tell your colleagues everyone knows it – except you, well…

Today I had this nice experience with a little tool called screenie. It helps to arrange screenshots or images in general nicely such as this example where I made boring Hermes screenshots look nice: Hermes Screenshot Composition

It does it with a perfect simple interface on which you drop three images out of a file manager. A handful of options allow you to adjust the image to your needs and there you are – your little screenshot composition simply looks amazing, after a few moments of work. Great software.

Btw, iit’s only around 500 lines of code and a couple of resource files. Amazing, must be based on a quite powerful toolkit utilized by a real smart guy…

If you also want to look nice, no idea how, but for screenshots and stuff quickly install screenie from the KDE::Community repository.

Ah yes, I know, you know it already, of course 😉

Kraft Project Status

January 12th, 2010 by

I thought it might be nice after the holidays to tell about the status of the Kraft project, the KDE software for people operating a small business. Some nice things happened around it.
Kraft Logo

The best thing is that an additional developer works on Kraft: After my last status post Thomas Richard (account trichard) contacted me that he is interested, next days I had the first patch in my mailbox and from that point of time on he constantly contributed high quality changes into the Kraft repository.

His high energy, dedication and fresh ideas gave me a new motivation push after having worked on Kraft basically alone for more than four years. That’s great!

The last months we worked on porting Kraft to the KDE4 platform which is in a quite good shape in SVN already: Kraft compiles without warnings and without Q3 and K3 support classes and works stable again.

We couldn’t resist to make use of the new capabilities of KDE4 here and there and as a result we have a few small feature updates as well. The most interesting might be that the first KDE4 Kraft version will additionally support a sqlite database backend which eases setup and configuration for users tremendously.

Following our friends from the KMyMoney project we will come up with a first Kraft-on-KDE4 beta soon. Please stay tuned.

openSUSE Wiki Changes

December 19th, 2009 by

There was a lot of dicussion in the openSUSE project about the project wiki which was suffering from something all successful projects in some point of time experience: There is a huge amount of documentation in the Wiki, however it seems a bit unstructured, sometimes outdated or not really maintained.

The brave openSUSE wiki team stepped up to change that. The decision is to set up a new wiki with a well selected set of extensions and now the content of the old wiki is going to be transfered to the new wiki. Of course there will be a rigorous quality check of the articles, as well as a new thought through structure. The goal of this huge amount of work is to provide a outstanding good and well consumable source of information for all people in and interested in the openSUSE project. That is a high goal and I admire the energy and dedication of the wiki team.

The new wiki is now in place. So if you also want to help, either with the motivation of a developer telling how things work, or from the upstream perspective using the openSUSE vehicle to push the project or simply because you want to help openSUSE to become even better, first read the Transition Guidelines and subscribe on the wiki mailinglist, since most of the coordination happens there.
There is also a Forum Thread going on around that.

Please help to make this a success – thanks 🙂

Usability Symposium

November 27th, 2009 by

On wednesday Will and me visited the Usability Symposium 2009 of the Network for User Oriented Software Design, a group which consists mainly of people from the Georg Simon Ohm University of Applied Sciences here in Nuernberg and people from local companies such as Astrum. It was the first symposium of this group and they gave three presentations about software usability.

One of the presentations were given by Evamaria Fuchs and Dr. Sigi Olschner, both former SUSE employees who worked in the usability lab. They presented about the development of the KDE KickOff menu that we shipped in version 10-something for KDE 3. Its successor became the KDE 4 default menu. Eva and Sigi presented how consequent usability work which goes along with the development effort can improve the quality measurable. They also gave a very good insight on free software and open source development in general, taking into account that most people from the audience did not have any experience with it. It was a very nice talk.

While Will was presenting KDE 4 to some interested people Sigi gave me some lessons on how to set up and use the eye tracking device that we have in the Boosters team now. We certainly need another lesson and much more knowledge about usability in general but that was a good start – thank you Sigi 🙂

Usability experts out there – our Eye Tracker is ready to be used by you for the good of free software! I am wondering when we will have the first session where we try to examine user experience of our software with that device.

openSUSE 11.2 is out

November 12th, 2009 by

The openSUSE Project is pleased to announce the release of openSUSE 11.2. After a couple of month good work towards the 11.2 we’re enjoying a very nice distribution which I already like very much. It is running on most of my machines for a few weeks now. I have already seen some SUSE Linux distros going gold over the time I spent with SUSE and my personal gut feeling tells me this is one of the more remarkable versions.

As usual it comes with tons of new up to date software and also the installation runs smoothly, please read the announcement for all the details, but what for me the most remarkable with 11.2 is that it is a real community openSUSE distro.

There is so much effort visible in 11.2 which was achieved through our growing community rather than just the SUSE people. We had a lots of requests in openFATE suggesting features, we discussed some of them quite heated, others were no-brainer. We again had lots of testers who hammered the alphas and betas and reported big and small bugs. On the openSUSE Conference many discussions about the upcoming distribution took place which were inspiring. We were able to utilize the powerful openSUSE Buildservice to build the distro together with all packagers very effectively. That improved the quality of our packages again. Another very visible thing for me personally is the desktop artwork which was done in best cooperation with upstream – and it looks so great that I hesitate to start applications which cover the desktop all day 😉

It is really exciting to see how things come together on the way to community distribution, and how far we got with openSUSE 11.2. I am happy about that and I am proud to be part of this and like to say thank you for every little bit you might have contributed. I believe that the message that openSUSE is your community distribution has arrived.

Of course openSUSE continues to be open for your ideas, the distribution can be the vehicle to power up ideas from a little application to huge software projects. The openSUSE project is the powerful community behind which helps to make ideas reality. And all that based on the principles of free software! I am really happy today and very excited about what future will bring 🙂

I hope to see you on the release event here in Nürnberg soon 🙂

Booster Sprint Results

November 6th, 2009 by

The boosters team promised to talk about what happens in our sprints – the two week time boxes in which we work on our projects. The last sprint ended on october 27th and we still owe you what happened.

Please understand this little report as usual as an invitation to ask, comment, suggest things and of course fire up your editor and contribute if you like.
You find us on IRC in channel #opensuse-boosters or on the opensuse-boosters mailinglist.

Discoverable centralised documentation driven by Lubos, Egbert, Henne, Petr and Federico.
This squad is working to provide a better discoverable developer documentation around openSUSE.

In the last sprint a lot of discovering “how things are usally done with wediawiki” has happened, such as how wiki content
is sorted or how portals are used. That went in parallel to the discussion Rupert started on the wiki mailinglist, good enough that both efforts go combined now – everybody is asked to join the discussion on the wiki list.

We also discovered that the media wiki update has not yet gone through, the problem was that our iChain plugin was broken with the new version of the Wiki. The squad will fix that.

Integrate all infrastructure under one Umbrella driven by Klaas, Robert, Darix, Michal, Pavol.

We were still very much individually sitting around and fiddle with the Ruby on Rails framework to get on speed with it. For example the way how to integrate several Rails projects under one umbrella project was investigated.

The plan for the next sprint is to come to a first draft on how the new web structure should look like. We’re very much bound to our artists work, so if you are a screen designer, please get in touch with Robert to support him to direct the poor developer souls.

factory.opensuse.org – website visualising Factory status driven by Tom, Vincent, Will, Coolo

this squad was a bit understrength because of vacation and the upcomming 11.2.

Nevertheless they discovered a lot of dependencies in the OBS which are needed to set up the factory.o.o page. Some not so nice corners in the OBS were cleaned a bit which came to light when tom and Will were working to set up a test instance of the OBS.

Made my day…

September 7th, 2009 by

This morning when I started to work I found a bug report about Hermes. Nothing amazing so far, but hey – there is a patch attached to fix the problem!
We all know that this is the way it works in communities, but still, everytime it is a very good experience to get a patch that fixes something that was overseen, not thought through or forgotten for whatever reason. It means basically that somebody has found the problem and has not gone away but found it worth to take a closer look and help to fix it. For me, that is a great acceptance of my work and I bet that most developers feel that way.
So, if you want to motivate a developer, simply send a patch 🙂
Thanks, Christian, for bnc #537106 coming with a fix, you made my day.

Hermes Improvements

September 3rd, 2009 by

I did some interesting changes to the Hermes instance of openSUSE.

There have been complaints that it is not possible to follow requests that have been originated by oneself, which can result in the weird situation that one does not get information what happened to a request. I fixed that by adding a new subscription called OBS Request Author to the Hermes start page that informs you about all changes to a request originated by you. All people who already had a subscription on the request change notifications have been automatically subscribed. The subscription can of course be removed on the Hermes page if it is not wanted.

Another problem was that people who are subscribed on Build Failure with the _mypackages special filter were flooded by mails. That happens because the _mypackages filter thinks a package belongs to you if you’re either maintainer of the project or package. Since this is not what maintainers of big projects want I created a _mypackagesstrict filter that only fires if one is really the maintainer of the package. To enable this fix, please go to the Hermes Expert page to edit your subscription to BIULD_FAILURE. Edit the filter to set it to special value _mypackagesstrict.

I hope that makes Hermes again a bit more useful for you. Please let me know what you think!

Hackweek: Application Directory Interface for OBS

July 20th, 2009 by

Frank Karlitschek is joining us here in Nürnberg to work with us through the Hackweek. First project is to build and integrate an interface where webapps like www.kde-apps.org can get information from about binary packages that exist on the openSUSE Buildservice. That will make it very easy for upstream developers who build their package for several distros in OBS to get a list of available binaries in the application directory application. In kde-apps.org which will use this first you just need to enter the name of OBS project and package and the download links for rpms or deps will appear automagically. That takes away the pain to maintain lenghty lists of links to rmps 🙂

The specification is in the Wiki – Buildservice Concepts. Comments are welcome.