Universidad de Panamá, Facultad de Informática, Electrónica y Comunicación. Conmemoración del X aniversario de la Facultad. On May 3, 2010 the openSUSE Ambassador was invited to talk about “Introducción a las características y ventajas de openSUSE, su relación con NOVELL y la comunidad de usuarios” (“An Introduction to New Features and Advantages on openSUSE 11.2, the openSUSE Project Community and the relationship with NOVELL”). When I did talk about openSUSE. People came from a few persons in the room to suddenly filling the whole space available for that room. Surprisingly, I had the opportunity to watch several girls between the audience so I thought there is a chance to organize a chix open source community or users group. Click on the link to watch photos
Archive for the ‘Desktop’ Category
FLISoL 2010 in Panama City
May 7th, 2010 by Ricardo ChungFLISoL 2010 at Ciudad del Saber looked good with several Linux Distributions and different open source applications. It was a small building with a lot people in transit. With three people and only two months to organize this event it was a successful achievement because our goal was accomplished: be on the eyes of governmental organizations, ONG, business, academics, students, users, professionals. Some media communications groups give some interviews. After this event we are receiving more invitations to give a talks for education and participate on some projects than ever before. Click on link below to watch the photos
A Blog on Sourceforge
May 6th, 2010 by Klaas FreitagA little more than two weeks ago we released Kraft version 0.40, the first version of Kraft based on KDE 4 software platform. The release went fine as far as I can tell, no terrible bugs were reported yet. Some work went into the new website since then, but in general I need a few weeks break from Kraft and spend my evenings outside enjoying spring time.
Today, Sourceforge posted a blog about Kraft after they kind of mail-interviewed me. It’s nice, it really focuses on the things also important to me. This might be another step towards a broader user base for Kraft. I say that because one could have the impression that the number of people actually really using Kraft could be larger. A high number of users is one of the fundamental criteria for a successful free software project and thus I am constantly trying to understand whats the reason for the impression or the fact.
The first idea is that the Kraft project simply does something wrong in the way a project should be driven. But there are releases, there is a so far ok website, there are communication channels with information on it and people answering questions. Of course, it always could be done better, but I hope and believe we are not doing too bad. Marketing could be more, that’s granted.
The next thing could be that nobody needs this kind of software. But there are quite some companies doing this kind of software in the commercial space. So there must be a market. Actually I think the market is huge. People are writing invoices all over the world and I bet many of them are not really satisfied with the way they do it usually which makes Kraft at least an option to try for them.
And this might lead to better path: Probably these people do not know that the option exists. They simply haven’t heard about Kraft yet and if they would there is a good chance that they would not believe that it is free etc pp. And this is probably not specific to Kraft but also applies, of course much more weaker, to larger projects like openSUSE or KDE: A lot of people from the ‘real world’ don’t know about free software communities, the ideas behind and the benefits for users of the software. That sounds strange to us, as this is our daily reality, but start with asking your parents or non computer related friends if they really understand what it is about. Imagine what people know who have no computer job nor -hobby nor know you!
What consequences can that have for us? Well, we could decide to skip this group of people. That would mean, beside some other effects, that Kraft would not make sense any more and I don’t like that. It probably should influence the way we see the ‘product management’ aspect of our projects. For me, ‘product management’ is often equivalent to “take care that the result is especially useful to non computer scientists” (which is probably not what PM really is about) and the focus on that is very important and the precondition for the next point.
We might have to take our projects even more out of the geek niche and go to places where the ‘real world’ happens. That is difficult for various reasons. First, it means that we have to start to explain again from start, and maybe also get questions where the answer is not obvious. Furthermore it might have practical issues, because for example fairs for handcrafter utilities charge seriously for software boothes which is not the case if we present projects on FOSS events.
On the other hand its easy because we all just have to spread the word even more and tell everybody about free software, our projects and free culture. And try to think as if we weren’t free software people. I know, most of us do already what they can and that’s great 🙂
OpenOffice_org 3.2.1 beta3 available for openSUSE
April 27th, 2010 by Petr MladekI’m happy to announce OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 beta3 packages for openSUSE. They are available in the Build Service OpenOffice:org:UNSTABLE project, are based on the upstream 3.2.1-beta sources and include many Go-oo fixes and improvements. Please, look for more details about the openSUSE OOo 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. See also the list of known bugs.
Other information and plans:
We are sorry for the delay but this beta was quite problematic. We would like to prepare another build two weeks from now. We hope that it will be rc1 but it depends on upstream. The final release should happen by the end of April or in the beginning of June.
KDE Finance Apps Group Spring Sprint
April 24th, 2010 by Klaas FreitagYesterday started the first ever sprint of the KDE Finance Apps Group. We meet for three days and where could that better happen than in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, which is one of the larger places on the world where financial industry resides. As a matter of fact, the place where we meet is in the direct neighborhood of a quite impressive buildings of Deutsche Bank and german stock exchange 😉
The KDE Finance Apps Group is a group of people who have two commons: First, all of us are working on a KDE application and second the application has something to do with money. Like KMyMoney, which is a personal finance manager and Skrooge, a comparable new star on the KDE finance management sky, Assuma, a membership management software for associations and LemonPOS, a free point of sales system.
Quickly the idea came up to do a sprint to get each other to know and discuss the first concrete steps for the group. Thanks to KDE e.V. and Thomas Baumgart and his company SyroCon hosting us perfectly, that takes place now 🙂
Yesterday we had a great warm up with introductions, get to know each other and an impressive Skrooge introduction, and today we will start dive into more technical details. Great 🙂
Novell Client on openSUSE 11.2
April 20th, 2010 by Christopher HobbsThis has been covered on a couple of forums out there, but I’ve yet to find a decent comprehensive post. This is for 32bit systems, it’s easily modified for 64bit setups.
First off, search your favorite RPM repo for binutils-2.19-9.3. I like to use http://rpm.pbone.net, but at the time of writing, they happen to be down.
Get a copy of the Novell Client ISO from http://download.novell.com and mount it:
sudo mount -o loop novell-client-2.0-sp2-sle11-i586.iso /mnt
Extract the files from the RPM:
rpm2cpio binutils-2.19-9.3.i586.rpm | cpio -idv
This should create a “usr” directory in your present working directory. Go ahead and copy it’s contents to your filesystem:
sudo cp -R usr/* /usr/
Change directories to wherever you mounted your ISO (in this case “/mnt”) and run the installer:
cd /mnt && sudo ./ncl_install
As the packages attempt to install, you’ll be given options and warnings concerning libbfd and several other packages. Choose option “2” for everything (“Break dependencies”). Don’t worry about actually breaking anything, just roll with option 2.
Lastly, issue ldconfig as root and reboot:
sudo /sbin/ldconfig
sudo /sbin/reboot
That should get you up and running. You can run “ncl_tray” directly from the command line, or create a shortcut to the client. If you’re having connection issues, make sure that openSLP is configured.
The only issues I’ve had so far is the inability to browse trees, which turned out to be a DNS problem on my end. Occasionally I get warnings on login about novfs kernel modules not being properly loaded, but this appears to be benign.
Call for testing: unzip feature
April 7th, 2010 by Dinar ValeevHello Planet!
Have you ever faced a bug like this bnc#540598 ?
When you create zip archive with non-English filenames and try to unpack it on openSUSE, filenames within archive become unreadable. It can irritate, isn’t it?
It seems as if we found a solution for Russian language. We tested it and it works for us.
It would be helpful if some of you could test your local language. And check whether core functionality still works 😉
Here is a list of languages that are potentially affected by this bug: Ukrainian,Belorussian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Estonian, French, German,Hungarian, Italian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Polish, Slovak, Spanish,Slovenian, Swedish.
So it is worth to test them in the first place.
The reproducer is pretty simple:
- create zip archive on windows with file named in you local language
- transfer archive to openSUSE system
- unpack it
- see if filenames are readable
What needs to be tested:
- if this bug applicable to you language
- if core functionality of unzip still works
Please share your experience by commenting on bug.
Package to test located in Lazy_Kent home project
Thanks in advance
OpenOffice_org 3.2.1 beta2 available for openSUSE
March 29th, 2010 by Petr MladekI’m happy to announce OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 beta2 packages for openSUSE. They are available in the Build Service OpenOffice:org:UNSTABLE project, are based on the upstream 3.2 sources and include many Go-oo fixes and improvements. Please, look for more details about the openSUSE OOo 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. See also the list of known bugs.
Other information and plans:
The package finally builds also in openSUSE:Factory with gcc-4.5. We sugegst to update because it solves some Calc crashes and maybe more.
The beta3 build should be available two weeks from now. The first release candidate should be by the end of April. The final release should happen in May.
Li-f-e updated
March 24th, 2010 by Jigish GohilopenSUSE Education team is happy to announce the availability of the updated openSUSE Education Li-f-e DVD iso. The Linux for Education (Li-f-e) contains the wide selection of education, development, office, as well as multimedia packs to meet all possible computing needs of students, teachers and parents.
Some of the highlights of this update:
Desktop Environments:
Additions:
- Stellarium, planetarium software
- Cinelerra, movie editor
- vsftpd, a very secure ftp server
- FreeNX for secure and low bandwidth remote access
Updates:
- All official updates to openSUSE 11.2 since its release
- LTSP 0.5.1.99, includes fat-client support
- Banshee 1.6 RC1
- Code::Blocks SVN 6182
- and of course most of the education packages like gcompris and tux4kids suite got updated.
Download:
Direct Download | metalink | torrent | md5sum
More mirrors on sourceforge
More information here: http://en.opensuse.org/Education/Live
Have a lot of fun
Your openSUSE Education team
The KDE Plasma Reference
March 17th, 2010 by Klaas FreitagTwo days ago the KDE Plasma community announced that they are providing a live image of the Plasma Netbook Reference Platform. They provide this image to make it easy for all interested developers, users, journalists and geeks to check it out, work with, talk about and and improve it. The reference image is the result of an KDE effort utilizing the openSUSE Buildservice and it’s based on the openSUSE distribution.
What does that mean for us the openSUSE community? First of all it makes us very happy and proud. And we think it proves once again that the openSUSE projects’ distribution and its tools have the level where they stand the production pressure which comes with this kind of use cases. The Plasma Netbook Reference Edition is a lot of code to build and has many potential contributors, testers and users. Enabling people to fullfil these jobs can not be done with some script found lying around on the internet. It requires a high level of experience, professionality and stability in development and operation of the toolchain. We always have these factors in mind and many hands and brains produce high quality products reproduceably. We have the build engine, the collaboration tools, notification systems, download infrastructure and the distribution on this level. For the KDE Plasma Netbook Reference Edition we can provide the tools to build the packages and the distribution image plus the linux distribution neccessary to test the interactions between the UI and the rest of the hardware on a netbook system. That way people can experience a whole system, which is way more useful than testing the UI in isolation.
But what is most important, many people in the community are around who wholeheartedly work on achieving these great results while having fun. Again, we are proud that the team selected our distribution as a base and our tools to work with. Thank you guys for your trust. It is a great move for all, the users, KDE and openSUSE.