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Easy use of WebYaST for OpenSuSE 11.3

December 21st, 2010 by

Have you ever tried WebYaST ? No ? Then it is time for. 🙂

We have noticed that WebYaST is not really known in the OpenSuSE community. One reason for is that WebYaST is not really user friendly regarding the installation.

So we have investigate here some effort. Lets  see….

Installation

The simplest way is the one-click installation which is already installed on your OpenSuSE 11.3.

Just use a web browser (like firefox) with the url:

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/YaST:/Web/openSUSE_11.3/webyast.ymp

The browser will ask you to start the installation via the one-click installation. Start the installation and go through the installation workflow.

Starting and managing WebYaST

WebYaST is a web application which runs on two http servers on your system. For starting and managing these servers Thomas Goettlicher has written a nice Qt-applet which can be started e.g. in KDE:

After starting the WebYaST applet the WebYaST icon appears on the right edge of the frame :

WebYaST is disabled

WebYaST enabled

With the right mouse click you can manage WebYaST:

With this applet you can start WebYaST in your browser too. After accepting the GPG-key please login with your “root” account.

And that’s WebYaST:

That’s all.

(Yes, I know that sentence is written almost in every post here. Even in posts where problems just starting after the sentence has been read. :-))

But I think that should be really all. If not, please use bugzilla and blame us !

Have fun !

(Yes, I know that’s the second sentence which should be in every blog :-))

Posted in Desktop, KDE, Systems Management, YaST | 8 Comments »

Unity on openSUSE ? Maybe…

December 17th, 2010 by

I’ve packaged a bunch of indicators and some of the dependencies for Ubuntu’s Unity Desktop. The saga goes on with 3 more accomplishments today…

1. dee –  http://launchpad.net/dee (packaged and submitted)
2. bamf – http://launchpad.net/bamf (packaged and submitted)
3. nux – on the forge… currently breaks due to being built with libpng14 (Ubuntu using libpng12) and some deprecated syntax.

A lot of support libraries like dbusmenu had already been packaged before for the Indicators. One step closer…

Posted in Desktop, GNOME | 7 Comments »

Adobe Flash 64 bits under openSUSE 64bits (11.2,11.3,11.4,factory)

December 17th, 2010 by

Non Free

Dear readers, we sometimes have to use non-free software. This post will learn you how to get the latest flash player supporting natively your favorite openSUSE Linux 64 bits distribution.

Keep in mind that it is preview software, actually pre-release code quality, and with it you will not receive any security updates. Keep an eyes on it, and refresh it manually if newer version are published

So why to try that software ? My answer is simple : it’s a native 64bits plug-in. So it’s interaction with your native 64bits browser, should give you a better stability. My experience using it in the last 4 months is pretty good, no Firefox crash due to flash. (Several pro week or day with the 32bits 10.0 version)

Get ready

Remove any installed 32bits packages

First things to do, remove all actual 32bits flash installed.

zypper rm flash-player pullin-flash-player

Get the lastest Flash square preview

Go the main project page Square
Read the informations, and the Adobe License you implicitly accept by using this software.
Then Download the tar.gz

cd /tmp
wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/flashplayer10_2_p3_64bit_linux_111710.tar.gz

Uncompress & Install

tar -xvzf flashplayer10_2_p3_64bit_linux_111710.tar.gz
sudo chown root:root libflashplayer.so
sudo cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib64/browser-plugins/libflashplayer.so

Test

Close any firefox or konqueror running, and restart them
under firefox, launch the about:plugins uri

and you should see

Shockwave Flash
File: libflashplayer.so
Version:
Shockwave Flash 10.3 d162

Have a nice surfing session, if you like flash website .

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Base System, KDE, Mozilla | 7 Comments »

Last Indicator builds!

December 13th, 2010 by

Finally… the last of the indicators builds and works properly… fun thing… works out of the box with Banshee!

Two pics… one from the indicator-sound and another from the messaging indicator with empathy and evolution support.

Posted in Desktop, GNOME | Comments Off on Last Indicator builds!

New day… new indicator…

December 11th, 2010 by

Ayatana’s battery indicator is known as ‘battery-status’… it’s also currently packaged and semi-tested. This indicator required a tiny patch to use cpufreq-set. It does appear working to me, but I need some more debugging for it.

There’s also a small testing repository for the indicators on my home project on OBS for Factory only, which can be found here. So if you are a openSUSE Factory user… feel free to check it out and if you find any issues, please report them to me.

Currently I’ve only uploaded the Session Menu, ME Menu and Battery Indicators. I need to check a couple of things with the messages indicator before uploading it. As said before, feedback is welcomed.

Another concern that poped out is the Summary’s and information on the spec’s which doesn’t seem consistent… I’m the one to blame, so that’s also for the next days in my TODO list… to provide this packages with a uniform way so that during updates they somehow seem related. Indicators need to be searchable by the term ‘Indicator’ or ‘Ayatana’.

Posted in Desktop, GNOME | Comments Off on New day… new indicator…

New Indicators… the saga continues…

December 10th, 2010 by

As the indicator saga continues… some new indicators were built… Indicator-messages is a small indicator that pics up messages and stuff from applications to display them on a nice all-around indicator. It works fine with evolution (plugin also built and doesn’t require patching for what I’ve seen).

This indicator support more applications, though they require some patching. As being discussed on the opensuse-GNOME mailing list as as proposed by Vincent Untz, this indicators are moving to GNOME:Apps and there _might_ an effort to support some features in applications like empathy. Keep in mind this is not a priority, but if it’s possible to support some more feature, it might happen.

Additionally, I’ve also tried some other indicators… indicator-application for what I can tell is an indicator that removes the menu’s from the GTK applications and places them on the panel (MAC style). I’ve built this indicator, but I have no means to test yet because further patching is required at least in GTK and eventually on glib. I don’t think there’s actually any need to have this indicator, specially when it will bring additional efforts on GTK maintenance, and this feature is somehow supported by software like gnome-globalmenu (which I’ve also packaged for myself and works dearly with supported apps).

I’ve done some hammering on indicator-sound as well… Ubuntu’s sound widget… I’m stuck with some error and I have 2 possibilities… downgrade to the last version of the previous branch which should built, or work the current branch (more dependency demanding). I’m working on it… it will happen one way or another during the next days. I guess this one is actually one of the most wanted 🙂

There are few other indicators… for time and date, calendar and so on… Those will be last ones. After indicator-sound is done, I’m starting to clean up the packaging and make sure it’s compliant to the GNOME team methodology and submit them to GNOME:Apps and the support libraries that are required as dependencies forwarded to projects where they might be useful (need to check out with the people which ones those will be).

A special thanks to Ken Vandine from Canonical for some guidance with libindicate. I’ve seen around some ‘hate’ waves towards Canonical, and I would like to say that so far in the few times I’ve interacted with them, either on bug submission or asking help, they have been awesome and caring. It’s really something I would like to point… they are pretty cool, and their devs are very helpful (but hey… so are our devs 😉 ).

Also a very special thanks to Vincent Untz, Dimstar and mrdocs which have been a great help and from whom I’ve learned already a lot.

So picking up the useful stuff… and placing it up together in a single Indicator:

Posted in Desktop, GNOME | Comments Off on New Indicators… the saga continues…

Happy Birthday Scribus

December 9th, 2010 by

I rarely blog and even this one is merely  a link to another one, but: http://rants.scribus.net/2010/12/08/happy-birthday-scribus/ is worth a look. So, where is the connection to openSUSE ? Well, way back when, SuSE 9.0 was the first distro to really promote Scribus. 🙂

You can have the latest Scribus rpms for many distros, thanks to the awesome Build Service.

Enjoy!

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Build Service, Desktop, Miscellaneous | Comments Off on Happy Birthday Scribus

LibreOffice 3.3 rc1 available for openSUSE

December 3rd, 2010 by

I’m happy to announce LibreOffice 3.3 rc1 packages for openSUSE. They are available in the Build Service LibreOffice:Unstable project. They are based on the libreoffice-3.3.0.1 release. Please, look for more details about the openSUSE LibreOffice build on the wiki page.

The packages are based on release candidate sources but they have not passed full QA round yet and might include even serious bugs. Therefore they are not intended for data-critical usage. A good practice is to archive any important data before an use, …

As usual, we kindly ask any interested beta testers to try the package and report bugs against the product LibreOffice .

Known bugs

  • unopkg crashes (bug #655912)
  • shell wrappers are still ooffice, oowriter, …; we need to discuss the new wrapper names with other distros first
  • some packages were not renamed, .e.g. OpenOffice_org-thesaurus, …; they are not built from the main LibO sources; we will do it later
  • user configuration is stored into ~/.libreoffice/3-suse; we might try to share the directory ~/.libreoffice/3 after we fix the incompatible BerkleyDB; Well, we are not sure if it is enough and it is a good idea, so it will need some more testing
  • GNOME quickstarter is started by default; you might disable it in Tools/Options/OpenOffice.org/Memory/Enable systray Quickstarter
  • SLED10 build is not available; need more love

More known bugs

Other information and plans:

The package are based on LibreOffice-3.3-rc1 sources. There are still some openSUSE-specific bugs that needed to be fixed. I hope that they do not break the base function, though.

We expect that rc2 will be needed within next two weeks. We will try to fix more openSUSE-specific bugs in the meantime…

Posted in Desktop, OpenOffice.org | 1 Comment »

GoogleEarth 6.0 running in opensuse 11.4 factory 64Bits

December 1st, 2010 by

Sometimes we need some of those applications running under our favorite OS. If you can stick with marble.

So the new googleearth 6.0 version hit the street. And if like me you want to give it a try, there’s some tricks to make it installing under your 64bits opensuse factory.

My first attempt just result in a nice crash … 

h GoogleEarthLinux6.0.bin 
Verifying archive integrity... All good.
Uncompressing Google Earth for GNU/Linux 6.0.0.1735..............................................................
I/O error : No such file or directory
setup.data/setup.xml:1: parser error : Document is empty

^
setup.data/setup.xml:1: parser error : Start tag expected, '<' not found

^
*** glibc detected *** setup.data/bin/Linux/amd64/setup.gtk2: free(): invalid pointer: 0xbabababa ***
======= Backtrace: =========
/lib/libc.so.6(+0x6df6b)[0xf6c64f6b]
/lib/libc.so.6(cfree+0xd9)[0xf6c69ab9]
setup.data/bin/Linux/amd64/setup.gtk2[0x8074214]
/usr/lib/libxml2.so.2(+0x5131b)[0xf768531b]
======= Memory map: ========
08048000-08091000 r-xp 00000000 fd:01 1752187                            /tmp/selfgz99614152/setup.data/bin/Linux/x86/setup.gtk2
...

Google Eartch 6 In action
So I found that can be helpful, during the transition phase to have a package for openSUSE.

Here’s the recipe.

1: get the binary

wget http://dl.google.com/earth/client/current/GoogleEarthLinux.bin

2: extract it to a temp directory

sh GoogleEarthLinux.bin --target GoogleEarthFixed

3: replace the defective gtk2 setup thing

mv ./GoogleEarthFixed/setup.data/bin/Linux/x86/setup.gtk ./GoogleEarthFixed/setup.data/bin/Linux/x86/setup.gtk2

4: Launch the installer
4a : as root for system wide install

su -l
./GoogleEarthFixed/setup.sh

4b : as normal user to have it installed inside your own home

./GoogleEarthFixed/setup.sh

5: Cleaning !
If you don’t need anymore.

rm -Rf ./GoogleEarthFixed
rm ./GoogleEarthLinux.bin

I would thanks people posting this comment

The method should also work for the older 5.2 version

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Factory, KDE, Miscellaneous | 3 Comments »

LibreOffice 3.3 beta3 available for openSUSE

November 22nd, 2010 by

I’m happy to announce LibreOffice 3.3 beta3 packages for openSUSE. They are available in the Build Service LibreOffice:Unstable project. They are based on the libreoffice-3.2.99.3 release. Please, look for more details about the openSUSE LibreOffice build on the wiki page.

The packages are beta versions and might include even serious bugs. Therefore they are not intended for data-critical usage. A good practice is to archive any important data before an use, …

As usual, we kindly ask any interested beta testers to try the package and report bugs. The product LibreOffice should appear in the Novell bugzilla soon. In the meantime, please, use the OpenOffice.org product.

Known bugs

  • shell wrappers are still ooffice, oowriter, …; we need to discuss the new wrapper names with other distros first
  • extensions are not registered after the update from OpenOffice_org-* packages; a workaround is to reinstall the packages once again; We plan to remove the registration during installation; it will allow users to disable the extensions by themselves
  • some packages were not renamed, .e.g. OpenOffice_org-thesaurus, …; they are not built from the main LO sources; we will do it later
  • user configuration is stored into ~/.libreoffice/3-suse; we might try to share the directory ~/.libreoffice/3 after we fix the incompatible BerkleyDB; Well, we are not sure if it is enough and it is a good idea, so it will need some more testing
  • GNOME quickstarter is started by default; you might disable it in Tools/Options/OpenOffice.org/Memory/Enable systray Quickstarter
  • SLED10 build is not available; need more love

More known bugs

Other information and plans:

I am sorry if you had troubles with the LibreOffice:Unstable repository last week. It was sometimes inconsistent because I forgot to disable publishing before I fixed build of all packages. Everything should be fine now.

I have done another rebuild over the weekend that finally enabled non-English localizations.

The next build should be available within two weeks. It is still a bit unclear whether it would be another beta or the first release candidate.

Posted in Desktop, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on LibreOffice 3.3 beta3 available for openSUSE

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