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Archive for the ‘Base System’ Category

small Qt based mail biff

September 8th, 2008 by

Some days ago I was asked what this little button bar on my desktop is and I explained that it’s only a small program I wrote to keep track on my mail folders. I know there are many many programs out there which already does the same but for some reason he liked it and encouraged me to blog about it 🙂

qbiff runs as a server client application and is able to manage mails stored in the maildir format. The server should run on the machine which locally stores the data and the client or multiple of them can run on the desktop you have an eye on. The connection(s) between the server and the client(s) are SSL connections, even though there is no mailcontent which is transfered the information how many mails, how many new ones and what mail folders exists might be an information not everybody needs to know about… so I chose a secure connection 😉

If the file .qbiffrc exists the user can control which mail folders should be checked, if the file doesn’t exist all folders the server finds at start up will be used. Each folder is represented by a button. Whenever a new mail arrives the button changes its color and notifies the user with a tip window about the current mail situation of this folder. A click on the button runs a user defined program whereas the first parameter is the path and name of the folder. In my setup I call mutt respectively to read the mail in the folder

So it looks basically like this…

Packages can be found in my home Project at:

  • http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/sax2
  1. Install the package qbiffd on your server
  2. Install the package qbiff on your client, server and client could be the same machine
  3. Edit the file /etc/sysconfig/qbiff on the server and setup at least the  QBIFF_USER which should be the same user the mails belong to and the QBIFF_FOLDER which is the base directory of your mails
  4. Run the server by calling rcqbiffd start
  5. Run the client by calling qbiff-client. The default password for the SSL certificates is “linux
  6. click on a folder button and read the note about how to setup a personal mail reader script

If you want to create your own certificates you need to check out the code at

  • svn co https://svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/qbiff/qbiff-head .

and run the following commands:

  1. cd cert-server && make distclean && make
  2. cd ../cert-client && make distclean && make
  3. cd ..
  4. ./.certinstall on the server and the client

Hackweek Day 3: cross-build with OBS Part 2

September 1st, 2008 by

This is the second part of my article series about the Hackweek Project “cross-build in the OBS”. The first part can be found here.

Before I come back to our Hackweek project, some information about the qemu emulator. As a preparation to Hackweek, I talked with Uli Hecht and Jan Kiszka. Uli Hecht is the Novell/SUSE Maintainer of the qemu packages in openSUSE:Factory/qemu and maintainer of the OBS project Emulators, where every emulator you can imagine is maintained for a couple of linux distributions. Also I consulted Jan Kiszka, one of the reviewers and maintainers of the qemu upstream project about the status of the qemu in general, “User Mode” and status of important architectures specifily.

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Hackweek Day 2: cross-build with OBS Part 1

August 31st, 2008 by

I took the chance to meet with the openSUSE Buildservice Developers on tuesday and discuss with them the progress made so far. Although the OBS was not a theme at Hackweek that much, I found two people participating.

Dirk Müller, Marcus Hüwe and me decided to meet at Hackweek to accelerate the development by adding a way to build for architectures, where the buildhost is different from the architecture you are working at. Dirk was inspired by the call of some KDE akademy participants to get the Maemo Project used in the Nokia N810 building and running in OBS. We were all motivated by all the embedded systems out there and a secenario of running embedded openSUSE on them. Also, Adrian told me very often that cross-build is one of the most wanted features requested when openSUSE and OBS is beeing presented at an event.

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Build for Another System

August 26th, 2008 by

This is about what I did yesterday in the first day of hackweek:

hello world

It is a hello world program. No, the interesting thing about that is not that I am finally able to write a hello-world (which I copied from the internet anyway) but the system on which it is running is unusual for me. It is another system than Linux, it is Windows.

Still somehow boring to let run a hello world on Windows? Yes, but I did not build it on Windows. I build it on Linux on a free software stack. I yesterday set up a mingw compiler ready for cross compiling Windows binaries on Linux. Maybe this can be the first little step towards a Windows build target in the Buildservice.

What do you think?

openSUSE 11.0 and Vista Users (Poor souls): How’s Dual-booting?

June 4th, 2008 by

Stephan Kulow asked on the Factory mailinglist if anyone was dual-booting Windows Vista and openSUSE 11.0:

Both me and the reporter of bug 396444 have a broken vista
boot after RC1 instalation (I ignored the problem as I did
not boot vista since quite some time, so it could just as well
be broken with alpha0).

So I wonder if other's vista is still functional? Unless I
know what's causing this, this bug is one of those that will
delay 11.0, so please help me.

Since there weren’t many people on the mailinglist who were, if you do boot Vista and SUSE 11.0, with success or otherwise, please let us know on the opensuse-factory@opensuse.org mailinglist 😉

Talking bootloader – heard in Beta2

May 7th, 2008 by

Steffen announced today that as of openSUSE 11.0 beta2, the graphical bootloader (the one on the installation media) supports speech output via the pc-speaker – reading out all menu items, he says:

This feature is mainly there to aid visual impaired people.

It’s still experimental and I’d like to get your feedback whether it works or not on your machine.

To try it, simply press F9. (In the worst case, your machine will freeze at this point.)

I gave it a try and it worked fine. I just missed the German translations! 🙂

Great work, Steffen!