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Archive for the ‘Desktop’ Category

openSUSE-LXDE 11.3 live CD

July 23rd, 2010 by

Hi people,

I know lots of you was waiting for that, and i am really sorry if it took some time, but i can finally announce the first beta release for our 11.3 live cd.

It is still a beta and such as it have some flaws, like for example it doesn’t fit into a CD yet. The good news is that this is an hybrid and permanent iso, so you can use dd to copy the iso into your usb pendrive.

Please help us testing and reporting bugs and issues you find.

To download the isos, as usual browse here!

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/X11:/lxde/images/iso/

i believe i should be able to release new isos soon, i need to at least provide you isos able to fit into a cd!

Andrea

ATI HD57xxx fglrx drivers under 11.3 & 11.4

July 15th, 2010 by

Unofficial-but-working repository

Adding the repository

For openSUSE 11.4

zypper ar -c -f -n "ATI/AMD fglrx non-official" http://linux.ioda.net/mirror/ati/openSUSE_11.4/ "ATI/AMD FGLRX"

For openSUSE 11.3

zypper ar -c -f -n "ATI/AMD fglrx non-official" http://linux.ioda.net/mirror/ati/openSUSE_11.3/ "ATI/AMD FGLRX"

For openSUSE 11.2

zypper ar -c -f -n "ATI/AMD fglrx non-official" http://linux.ioda.net/mirror/ati/openSUSE_11.2/ "ATI/AMD FGLRX"

Searching the version you need

zypper se -s fglrx
+-----------------------+--------+---------+--------------+---------------------------
| fglrx64_7_5_0_SUSE113 | pakiet | 8.812-1 | x86_64       | ATI/AMD fglrx non-official
| fglrx64_7_5_0_SUSE113 | pakiet | 8.801-1 | x86_64       | ATI/AMD fglrx non-official
| fglrx64_7_5_0_SUSE113 | pakiet | 8.783-1 | x86_64       | ATI/AMD fglrx non-official
| fglrx64_7_5_0_SUSE113 | pakiet | 8.771-1 | x86_64       | ATI/AMD fglrx non-official
| fglrx64_7_5_0_SUSE113 | pakiet | 8.762-1 | x86_64       | ATI/AMD fglrx non-official
| fglrx_7_5_0_SUSE113   | pakiet | 8.812-1 | i586         | ATI/AMD fglrx non-official
| fglrx_7_5_0_SUSE113   | pakiet | 8.801-1 | i386         | ATI/AMD fglrx non-official
| fglrx_7_5_0_SUSE113   | pakiet | 8.783-1 | i386         | ATI/AMD fglrx non-official
| fglrx_7_5_0_SUSE113   | pakiet | 8.771-1 | i386         | ATI/AMD fglrx non-official
| fglrx_7_5_0_SUSE113   | pakiet | 8.762-1 | i386         | ATI/AMD fglrx non-official

There’s several version, as I would offer a way to use an older if new break everything 🙂

Launch the installation (always as root under a console, and better to be in init 3 mode)
For 11.3 64bits

zypper in fglrx64_7_5_0_SUSE113

For 11.3 32bits

zypper in fglrx7_5_0_SUSE113

etc .. I believe you pick the trick !
At the end of the installation, you can just reboot, or init 3 && init 5 .

Actual version Catalyst 11.1 / 8.812 Published January 26 by ATI/AMD

Previous version Catalyst 10.12 / 8.801 Published December 13 by ATI/AMD (Not available for factory/11.4)

If you already have a fglrx rpm installed, remove the previous version, otherwise catalyst center will give you wrong version information in info panel.

Update news January 26th

Catalyst Release 11.11

Sebastian Siebert blog about his script work nicely well
Script and
German Article

Work in progress : fglrx under factory ( 11.4 ) done for 11.1 catalyst version

At least but not at last, my unofficial-but-working repository packages has been updated yesterday. Another tricks for those who are tired of activating their desktop effects at each kde startup : (picked from the opensuse-kde)

Check out the kwin settings in: /home/user/.kde4/share/config/kwinrc
I have solved that problem changing the DisableChecks parameter from 'false' to 'true'. Although seems that this would be a cover instead of a real solution.
-- Hernán Thiers García

Update news October 2th

How to build the 10.9 driver ? Patch needed

I’ve posted here a version how to patch the drivers to get fglrx.ko builded with latest kernel on openSUSE 11.3 http://www.susepaste.org/80021629

Don’t forget to have a look at Siebert blog his script work nicely well here

Non Official repo and build

For those of us who feel adventurous, and trust me you could install my package (no flgrx.ko inside)

Update news August 7

Seems there’s now an ati repo
you can grab it at http://www2.ati.com/suse/11.3

check the wiki page about that SDB:ATI

zypper ar -fc http://www2.ati.com/suse/11.3 ATI

Check and choose the appropriate package according to your kernel.

but you know what : they just segfault !. My rpm 10.7 (8.753) doesn’t.

Update news July 27

ATI/AMD just release their 10.7 version with native support for openSUSE 11.3

So I rewrite this article with the use of them, and remove any ref to the 10.6 version

Hardware & check

After installing my opensuse 11.3 on a computer with ATI radeon HD57xxx, there’s no desktop effects available, no 3D, no acceleration that can be provided with the free opensource radeon. Too bad, but it’s only a question of months to see support for this graphic card.
My advise would be if radeon works (even with some glitches in it) keep it. And help dev’s with bugs reporting.
To check if 3D is there (would return a YES)

glxinfo | grep -i render

Second point : ATI doesn’t provide anymore repository for their binary drivers, so we have to build them on each needed system. When the 11.3 hits the street, the procedure was complex and not so easy, now with their 10.7 ( 8.753 ) version, it’s doable.

Note All of those manipulation are done under console. So try to leave X, do a ctrl+alt+F1. Go to console, and as root run and init 3 to stop running X

Get ready to build

Downloads

Firstly : read the release note, check if your card is supported or not (HD 3870 X2 is not !)
Secondly : read the release note again, you missed something important before. 🙂

Building env

Prepare your openSUSE with a minimal building environment :
zypper in kernel-source kernel-syms module-init-tools make gcc libstdc++ libgcc glibc-32bit glibc-devel-32bit fontconfig freetype zlib*

Now we have to add the correct headers (Thx to those who reveal that )
So most of you running the -desktop flavour

zypper in kernel-desktop-devel

or

zypper in kernel-default-devel

or on 32 bits

zypper in kernel-pae-devel

Install / Build rpm

Quick Install

sh ati-driver-installer-10-7-x86.x86_64.run

Or build your own package to manage them with YaST/zypper/rpm
For 32 bits (can also be build if you have a 64 bits install)

sh ati-driver-installer-10-7-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg SuSE/SUSE113-IA32

For 64 bits

sh ati-driver-installer-10-7-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg SuSE/SUSE113-AMD64

(more…)

Workshop at Party Quijote

July 13th, 2010 by

Last weekend I went to Party Quijote, which is probably the biggest LAN party of Castile (Spain). It was organized by the regional government (Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La Mancha), local universities (Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Universidad de Alcalá de Henares) and other institutions (Centro de excelencia de software libre de Castilla-La Mancha, Fundación Insula Barataria, Ayuntamiento de Azuqueca de Henares). Some of its sponsors were Cisco, Telefónica, Iberdrola and Caja Castilla-La Mancha. This year Party Quijote took place in the city of Azuqueca de Henares, which is very close to Guadalajara and Madrid. For more information, take a look at Party Quijote’s website

Anyways, I thought it was a great opportunity to promote openSUSE and KDE  in my region, so I organized a workshop: Crea tu propio Live CD (build your own Live CD). Yes, it was a LAN party but there were also Linux-related talks and workshops.

(more…)

openSUSE Edu Li-f-e 11.3 RC1

July 7th, 2010 by

Hello Community

openSUSE 11.3 is almost Gold, with that openSUSE Education team is also ready with the “Release Candidate” of Li-f-e based on 11.3.

Some of the highlights of this upcoming release:

  • Tons of Education softwares
  • KDE, GNOME, Sugar desktops
  • Full multimedia support
  • Latest LTSP including iTALC support out of the box
  • Much much more for you to discover…

The DVD iso image doubles as live USB image too, just “dd” the iso to 4GB+ USB stick to get fully functional desktop/server on a stick. Check out this development release to report any bugs or missing feature before we go gold.

We are looking for volunteers to do a detailed preview for the launch, drop us a line if you are interested.

Have a lot of fun!

openSUSE 11.2 and OBS at Universidad Latina

July 5th, 2010 by

Universidad Latina, Facultad de Ingeniería. “LibreSoft”. July 1st., 2010 from 6:00 p.m. To 10:30 p.m. (- 5 EST) several FOSS individual representatives held a meeting on 3rd floor of the main building, gave some talks about FOSS, software developments, open source, licensing, sharing code, community contributions, and applications to the general public, Telecommunications and Industrial Engineering students, professors, dean and lawyers. OpenSUSE Ambassador, Ricardo Chung, shared the space with Diego Tejera (Ubuntu LoCo Team), Alejandro Perez ( Fedora Ambassador ), Abdel Martinez ( Fedora Campus Ambassador), Adrien Scott ( www.fosdev.com) and others. Ricardo gave a talk about openSUSE 11.2 features and some sneak preview features on openSUSE 11.3 ( http://en.opensuse.org/Product_highlights_11.3), the openSUSE Build Service 2.0 ( http://en.opensuse.org/Build_Service) as software development and colaboration platform useful for any Linux distribution, SUSE Studio to customize our distribution on different enviroments, and KIWI to make an operating system image available on physical media ( http://en.opensuse.org/Kiwi ). Ricardo also, answer some questions about openSUSE community and local users group, installation, as well as some questions about Novell and Microsoft alliances were clarified. After the talk an openSUSE and Novell trivia was given and the winners got some openSUSE 11.2 CDs with Gnome Desktop by default.

Make a click on http://picasaweb.google.com/RICARDO.A.CHUNG/OpenSUSEAtLibreSoft# to watch some photos

OpenOffice_org 3.2.1 bugfix release available for openSUSE

June 18th, 2010 by

I’m happy to announce updated OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 packages for openSUSE. They are available in the Build Service OpenOffice:org:STABLE project and provide some useful fixes. The most critical one is the crash in non-Oxygen KDE4 themes that affects openSUSE-11.3 and Factory KDE4 users. Please, check also the older announce for more details about OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 release.

The openSUSE OOo team hopes that you will appreciate this update. We kindly ask you to report any other bugs so that we could fixed them in the future releases.

openSUSE Edu: Li-f-e theme for 11.3

June 14th, 2010 by

For openSUSE Edu: Linux for Education based on openSUSE 11.3 we will be going with great new default openSUSE 11.3 theme by Jakub “Jimmac”  Steiner with small addition of our own, here is how it looks.

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Zippl – a Lightweigth Presentation Tool

June 11th, 2010 by

Recently people played around a lot with a new kind of presentations. The pages in the classical presentation tool sense seem to lie around on a large canvas and while the presentation running, the focus moves over the canvas and stops by interesting points. Zooming allows to go more in detail and other cool graphics effects make it fun to watch these presentations.

This week was the fifth Hackweek at Novell where we can pick an interesting topic and work on it. I am always interested in cool applications and I wanted to investigate a bit on Qts GraphicsView anyway so I decided to go for a proof of concept implementation of a lightweight but cool presentation tool following these concepts.

The tool is called Zippl (for no specific reason). It is implemented in C++ with Qt 4.6. Via a XML file the user can specify so called spots on the Zippl-canvas. During a presentation one after the other canvas is displayed with an animated move from one to the other.

Spots can consist of text in various fonts and sizes, geometric forms and images. Colors and line widths and stuff can be specified for each item. It is amazing what can already be done with these few elements.

But decide yourself by checking the following out, its the first little presentation done with Zippl:

With Qt its again fun to work on this kind of applications and the GraphicsView framework is awesome. If you want to see code, it is in the KDE svn, module playground/office.

What do you think? Is that something to investigate more on? You can give me feedback in openFATE about it if you want and rate it.

Hackweek 5 – LXDE

June 8th, 2010 by

Hi,

as hackweek continue I want to present my contribution for this year event. My plan is to support our the youngest supported desktop environment LXDE. So I contact our LXDE guy Andrea Florio and he ask lxde developers. Then we communicate directly and I found as the most intersting idea to replace gnome gvfs which is needed to have usable gio interface in glib ( geek-deserialization: allow easy access remote systems, zip archives in file manager like it is part of filesystem). Motivation for replacement is quite big gvfs dependency and system resource requirements. It choose it because I can learn something new, can return to programming in C from Ruby on Rails which is used for webyast and last not least I think it is usable also for another lightweight environment xfce4.

Code can be located in pcman git repository. Idea of implementation is quite simple. Don’t use daemons and special code to handle different backends. Instead use fuse and its already written fs based on fuse. As first I start with ftps and its sshfs implementation. Code for single fs is simple and short. Today I finish first working proof of concept of gvfs extension and its gfile extension. It can query and copy file on gvfs as you can see in file gfusevfs.c where is testing program. Main problem which I still see is that fs is not umounted so it takes some sources, but umount it after file operation can lead to annoying behavior like passing password on each file operation.

I welcome any comments and ideas about this project.

Hacking for Freedom

June 7th, 2010 by

Hi developers!

These are first hours of hackweek. A lot of people in Novell and in the community are starting to work on different projects. What can I give for free software in this week? Sure, my favorite project is NetworkManagement.

As you can see, NetworkManagement don’t work well. For example, it can’t see WiFi connection and don’t show wired connetcion. Yes, right now we have one bug with module “networkmanagement”.

This module must be loaded after start NetworkManagement, but this is not happening 🙁

If you check it, you will see:

anaumov@pizza:~/plasma/networkmanagement> qdbus --system org.freedesktop.NetworkManagerUserSettings
Service 'org.freedesktop.NetworkManagerUserSettings' does not exist.

Why it’s happening? Problem is in connection between plasmoid and deamon NM (via DBus).

anaumov@pizza:~/plasma/networkmanagement> qdbus org.kde.kded /kded loadModule networkmanagement
true
anaumov@pizza:~/plasma/networkmanagement> qdbus --system org.freedesktop.NetworkManagerUserSettings
/
/org
/org/freedesktop
/org/freedesktop/NetworkManagerSettings
/org/freedesktop/NetworkManagerSettings/0
/org/freedesktop/NetworkManagerSettings/1
/org/freedesktop/NetworkManagerSettings/2
/org/freedesktop/NetworkManagerSettings/3
/org/freedesktop/NetworkManagerSettings/4
/org/freedesktop/NetworkManagerSettings/5
/org/freedesktop/NetworkManagerSettings/6
/org/freedesktop/NetworkManagerSettings/7
/org/freedesktop/NetworkManagerSettings/8
anaumov@pizza:~/plasma/networkmanagement>

So, now we can see WiFi interface:

And WiFi interface can see WiFi connections:

Good, but this works not automaticly. It’s first what I want to hack on this week.

And what do you want to do on this week? 😉