Home Home > Desktop
Sign up | Login

Deprecation notice: openSUSE Lizards user blog platform is deprecated, and will remain read only for the time being. Learn more...

Archive for the ‘Desktop’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

OpenOffice_org 3.2.1 beta1 available for openSUSE

March 15th, 2010 by

I’m happy to announce OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 beta1 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 beta1 packages are not available for openSUSE Factory. We are working on fixing the build there.

The beta2 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.

Posted in Desktop, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice_org 3.2.1 beta1 available for openSUSE

openSUSE-LXDE Live CDs

March 13th, 2010 by

We have them!

http://en.opensuse.org/Derivatives#Unofficial_updated_LXDE_live_CDs

Thanks to Dmitry serpokryl (The author of SOAD), to make it possible!

i586 and x86_64 isos are both available! But most of all, they provides the latest LXDE packages like pcmanfm 0.9.2

Now it’s your turn, download them, test them, report issues so i can fix them! Oh btw, you can also install them 😉

And finally

Have lot’s of fun

Andrea

Posted in Desktop, openSUSE 11.2, X.org | 9 Comments »

FLISOL 2010 in Nicaragua

March 10th, 2010 by

The folks of the openSUSE Community in Nicaragua, are preparing a great event in the city of Granada, Nicaragua, in Central America.

After some considerations and discussion within the Nicaraguan LUGs Community, SUSE-Ni was appointed to carry on with the FLISOL event on April 24th.

(more…)

Tags: , ,
Posted in Education, GNOME, KDE, Miscellaneous, Usability | 3 Comments »

Setting up a slide show screen saver in GNOME

March 10th, 2010 by

There are multiple options to set up a slide show screen saver that shows the pictures of your choosing when the screen saver kicks in. The following shows the various options and works with the gnome-screensaver.

Easy does it

The most direct way to get a slide show screen saver going is to place your pictures in the $HOME/Pictures directory, then start the GNOME screen saver settings dialog by using gnome-screensaver-preferences from the command line or by selecting the Screensaver icon in the Control Center (gnome-control-center). In the screen saver settings dialog select “Pictures folder” and click “Close”.

One step of customization (not the preferred option)

If you do not want to use the Pictures directory as the location for the pictures to be shown you can customize the location by making a few simple edits. As the root user edit the file /usr/share/applications/screensavers/personal-slideshow.desktop. At the end of the line that starts with “Exec” add “–location=PATH_TO_PICTURE_DIRECTORY”, without the quotes and with PATH_TO_PICTURE_DIRECTORY being a real path. For example if my pictures were in /opt/slideshow the modified line would look as follows:

Exec=/usr/lib/gnome-screensaver/gnome-screensaver/slideshow –location=/opt/slideshow

Save the file and select the “Pictures folder” in the screen saver preferences dialog to select the slide show as your screen saver.

While this is a straight forward modification this is not really a good solution. The reason being that this modifies a file that is part of a package and when the package gets updated you will loose your changes.

A second step of customization

The better solution to accomplish the task of customizing the picture location is to create a new .desktop file in /usr/share/applications/screensavers. You should use the personal-slideshow.desktop file as your starting point.

As root copy the personal-slideshow.desktop file to a file with a name of your choice, then edit the file. Change the value of “Name”, “Comment”, and add the “–location” option at the end of the “Exec” value as previously. Save the file and start the GNOME screen saver preferences dialog. In the list to the left search for the value you assigned to the “Name” variable when you edited the new .desktop file. Select it and your all set.

Getting fancy

If the animation of the pictures in the previous slide show setup is not sufficiently fancy for you, the GLSlideshow screen saver maybe the ticket for you. Unfortunately you cannot just simply configure the location of the images you would like to use in the GNOME screen saver preferences dialog or via command line arguments to the glslideshow screen saver. In order to configure the location of the images to be used it is necessary to run the xscreensaver settings dialog (don’t worry, in the end gnome-screensaver will be running again).

Just starting xscreensaver will fail as only one screen saver daemon per display is allowed. Therefore, it is necessary to first kill the gnome-screensaver; use the following commands:

-> ps -A | grep gnome-screens

At the beginning of the line this produces you will find a number, this is the process ID (PID). Use this number in the next command

-> kill -9 PID

Now fire up xscreensaver and select “Settings”. In the settings dialog select “GLSlideshow” and then switch to the “Advanced” tab. In the “Image Manipulation” frame select “Choose Random Image” and then enter the path of the directory containing your image files in the text box below the check button text. If you click the “Settings” button on the “Display Modes” tab you can set various parameters for the slide show.

With the slide show configured you can switch back to the GNOME screen saver if you so desire. In the settings dialog select File->Kill Daemon, then File->Quit. Now in a terminal window restart the GNOME screen saver by using the “gnome-screensaver” command. The process is a daemon and it will background itself. That’s it, now if you select the GLSlideshow in the GNOME screen saver preferences dialog you will see your images being selected.

With this you can have a slide show as your screen saver in no time.

Happy Hacking.

Posted in GNOME | 1 Comment »

Build your own Google Earth rpm

March 9th, 2010 by

The last days I’ve spent some time to investigate how to package Google Earth into an rpm. There was already a script called make-google-package available on the internet, but this one creates a debian package only. However, it was a good start to get me going to create a Google Earth (GE) rpm. Although I met quite some obstacles, which is not to uncommon in package building, I was still able to come up with a procedure a get GE packaged. The biggest problem I encountered were incorrect library dependencies, for which I opened issue 702 in the Google Earth issue tracker. Anyway to make a long story short: the rpm installs Google Earth system wide, corrects file permissions, for openSUSE_11.2 it takes care that the font is rendered correctly, the rpm takes care that Google Earth integrates nicely with the rest of the openSUSE system.

The procedure to build the rpm can be found in the openSUSE wiki. One word of caution about the procedure, you need to be an experienced linux user and you need to have access to the openSUSE Build Service (OBS) to be able to build the rpm. This is due to library dependency problem, which prevents it to build without modification to the base system.

If you like and you have the knowledge how to build an rpm with the tool ‘build’, it would be great if you can extend the howto with steps how to do this (build a GE rpm with ‘build’) to the before mentioned page. The same is valid for a procedure that uses VirtualBox to build the rpm.

Last but not last; a procedure or even a script, that uses ”’rpmbuild -ba”’ to build the rpm, would be very welcom as well.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Build Service, Desktop, Packaging | 1 Comment »

OpenOffice_org 3.2.1 alpha1 available for openSUSE

March 2nd, 2010 by

I’m happy to announce OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 alpha1 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. Especially, we are interested into feedback for the following features:

  • toolbar popups refactoring
  • media embedding (i#83753)
  • support for dotted and dashed border
  • improved writer document comparing
  • “insert new sheet” tab in Calc (fate#308396)
  • distributed text alignment support (fate#308334)
  • insert current date/time via Ctrl-/Shift-Ctrl- (fate#307762)
  • English function names instead of localized ones (fate#308029)

Other information and plans:

The alpha1 packages are not available for openSUSE Factory because  I need to fix the build with the newer gcc first. I will look at it within next few days.

I expect that beta1 build will be available two weeks from now and the final release will in April. Though, it depends on the upstream release and the upstream schedule is still somehow unclear.

Posted in Desktop, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice_org 3.2.1 alpha1 available for openSUSE

openSUSE-LXDE development status

March 1st, 2010 by

Ok people… openSUSE 11.3 Milestone2 has been released and quite soon we will have the Milestone3.

So now, after lot’s of promises, what is the status now?

IT’S DONE!

yes… it’s done… openSUSE 11.3 allow now to install LXDE directly from installation DVD or Net install. I’m sure all of you reading this post wants to try it, but for lazy people (and i know there are a lot of them outside), just click here and watch some pictures.

Can that be all? No of course not!

Just today i announced to opensuse-lxde and opensuse-factory mailing lists that we switched finally to pcmanfm2.

Even if that one is not yet stable, and even if it’s still on alpha release stage, it’s already feature rich and stable enoguht for daily usage. Of course bugs exist and you report is welcome, so we can fix them.

But it’s not enough, thanks to sidux lxde community we have a couple of nice tools: lxdm-conf and lxcc.

lxdm-conf as name suggest, it is a simple and powerful tool that helps you to edit lxdm settings without take care to manually edit /etc/lxdm/lxdm.conf file. This tool is already into repos.

lxcc instead is a small control center, written using python-gtk. It’s based on an idea of PCLinuxOS Community that wrote lxdecc using gtkdialog. Instead to port original lxdecc to openSUSE we choose to cooperate with Sidux on lxcc simply because gtkdialog looks to be a dead project. Lxcc is not yet into repos, so here a screenshot:

Schermata

And to finish a very good news. We are working on live cds. Yes, it’s taking looong time, but now we should be able to provide you better ISOs in shorter time since we moved from suse-studio to OBS kiwi system. Preliminary images can be downloaded from here:  X11:lxde (login required).

Most probably, a preliminary image will be published soon for a testing (based on openSUSE 11.2), in the same way, a Factory based live CD should be ready soon. Of course, i can’t forget, all that work on ISOs couldn’t be possible without the Dmitry serpokryl help (The author of SOAD).

I hope you’ll enjoy openSUSE-LXDE experience. So please, test test test and test it again. We have to provide the best LXDE ever!

Posted in Accessibility, Desktop, Distribution, Factory, lizards.openSUSE.org, openSUSE 11.2, Packaging, X.org | 2 Comments »

Kraft 0.40 Beta 1 for KDE 4 available

February 27th, 2010 by

The Kraft team is happy to announce the first beta version of Kraft version 0.40. This is the first version of Kraft based on the KDE 4 platform. It is the result of a very long porting effort but has now reached a state where we can, after a short beta cycle, release a stable version of Kraft for KDE 4. It will be nearly feature equal to version 0.32 for KDE 3.

One of the new features of Kraft 0.40 makes the setup of Kraft easier. The file based sqlite database was added in addition to the mysql backend, so for evaluation no database server setup work is required any more. Furthermore a setup wizard that guides new users through the setup process aims to make it easier for new and unexperienced users.

Please help us by testing the beta version and report bugs back to the Kraft user mailinglist. The sources can be downloaded from the Sourceforge project page. Binary packages for openSUSE 11.1, openSUSE 11.2 and (K)Ubuntu 9.10 are available from the Kraft Beta repository from the openSUSE Buildservice, see here how to add and use it.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Desktop, KDE | 3 Comments »

Tokamak4

February 27th, 2010 by

On this week the leading KDE developers met together again. This time it was held in Nürnberg, in the openSUSE premises and was kindly made possible by Novell and KDE e.V.
26 hackers, who make KDE better.

For me it was first time, where I met hackers not for drinking a cup of beer, but for working, for hacking, for learning… and I think in this time I got much more fun.

We started at 9-10 am and finished it at 1-2 am. Yes, these two days we hacked like crazy. I’m not so good in KDE, I mean – I’m just trainee in SUSE/Novell, but in these two days I took a lot of information about KDE (arhitecture), Solid, Plasma, methods of project’s buildings (cmake), etc.

I have uploaded photos. You can find these here.

I have worked before on KNetworkManager. It was just a couple of patches (Qt/KDE3 based), and KNM has another aspects of integration with hardware as we have now in KDE4. In KDE4 we have SOLID, and this makes more easy to asking for such things like, for example, wired connection or to find hidden SSID wi-fi…

Yes, my current project is Network Management plasma applet.

With Sebastian Kügler and Will Stephenson, we worked together on functionality to easily connect to wired, wireless and mobile broadband networks and also to VPNs. As I said, I don’t did so much, but I started working on support for connection. Maybe next month I will be able to show that I did.

I would like to thank everyone with whom I spent those 2 days. Especially Will, who always supports and helps me to become a KDE developer.

Tags: ,
Posted in Events, KDE, Network | Comments Off on Tokamak4

cd tokamak4; make uninstall && make clean

February 26th, 2010 by

It’s Friday again already and the longest week of my life is over. It’s certainly been one of the most inspiring. Seeing nearly thirty expert KDE developers hammering out reams of code, artwork and design all over the workspace and further down the stack at all hours has been thrilling and has kept me serving their needs better than any amount of caffeine.

Now Tokamak 4 is over.  The last few visitors are leaving and I’ve been calling taxis, tidying out the offices and dismantling networks.  I’m looking forward to seeing the results in improvements to KDE SC 4.5.  Yesterday we made a series of short videos explaining what we’ve been working on that will be published over the course of next week.

Observant readers of this blog’s title will notice that I haven’t deleted the build system.   I’ve learned a lot about organising a large developer sprint and as part of our openSUSE Boosters’ strategy we expect to be hosting more such developer meetings for upstream projects in order to make improvements directly to the software we distribute.  We strongly believe that using our facilities to allow upstream to do the great things they want to do creates benefits both for openSUSE, and in a snowball effect for the wider Free Software universe.  So I’m documenting what works and what doesn’t on the openSUSE wiki in order to make next sprint we host here come off even more successfully and smoothly.

As for me, I’m looking out the window at a Bavarian lake and taking it easy this weekend.  As always, Have A Lot Of Fun…

Posted in Desktop, Events, KDE | Comments Off on cd tokamak4; make uninstall && make clean

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »