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 bugfix release available for openSUSE

February 26th, 2010 by

I’m happy to announce updated OpenOffice.org 3.2 packages for openSUSE. They are available in the Build Service OpenOffice:org:STABLE project and provide some useful fixes, the most critical one was the broken date editing in some locales.  Please, check also the older announce for more details about OpenOffice.org 3.2 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.

Other information and plans:

I am going to submit 3.2.1-alpha1 packages  into the OpenOffice:org:UNSTABLE project. They  should appear there in the beginning of the followin week.

Posted in Desktop, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice_org 3.2 bugfix release available for openSUSE

Tokamak4

February 26th, 2010 by

For the last seven days we were hosting the KDE Plasma Team doing their developer meeting called Tokamak4 here in at the Nuremberg offices of Novell. It was great for SUSE to see the twentyfife KDE enthusiasts hacking on one of the most important parts of the KDE software compilation.

On monday we had the pleasure of a public event with four highly interesting talks given by the Plasmas in our allhands area in Maxtorhof. Will Stephenson was sheding some light on the old days where SuSE already was hosting a sprint for KDE. I guess in that days we still called it “developer meeting”, but it was basically the same concept. It happened in an office building called Schanz which was still SuSEs but not in use these days. Will had some cool photos of well known KDE developers, partly with more hair and less bally than nowadays, hacking on KDE3. I think the meeting was in 2003, so it is great to see how many people are still around in the community.For me that was the first KDE meeting I participated, working on my scan application called Kooka. Fun.

After that Aaron Seigo was talking about Plasma as a cross device and cross form factor concept, Marco Martin was presenting very interesting stuff about KDEs Netbook shell and finally Sebastian Kügler was introducing Silk, the project to free the web from the browser. It was a very inspiring evening which closed with good discussion over some drinks. I like to thank the KDE guys for giving the presentations and our guests for showing up.

The rest of the week was full of concentrated work for the Plasmas, watch out on planetkde for various posts.

From the openSUSE perspective it was a pleasure to host the meeting, it was very nice to meet you all again. Thank you all for being our guests. It was fun and as a result we really want to continue the idea.

openSUSE is upstreams friend and we are convinced that personal meetings are the most effective way to make progress. So if your community is watching out for a place to meet, innovate and hack, let us know, I am sure we can arrange something.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Desktop, Events, KDE | 1 Comment »

Kraft Document Templating System

February 21st, 2010 by

One of the most important objectives for Kraft is to create business documents of perfect quality. The docs are an important face to the customer and represent the business, so best is just good enough. The old times where invoices got printed on a 24 needle printer in ascii mode should finally be gone 😉

Documents should represent the ‘coorperate identity’, which in small size firms probably comes down to printed stationary with a company logo and some other information on it. Kraft has to print  nicely on it. For that it is important that the layout can be configured at all and without compiling Kraft if the customer address should be printed fife millimeters higher for example.

Currently Kraft uses a document template written in RML for the layout. RML is a XML format which can be converted to PDF utilizing a python based command line tool which is called by Kraft. RML is a open source toolkit, quite powerful and mature. However, it does not solve all problems with flexible document creation and sometimes comes a bit unhandy. As a result our eyes are always open for alternatives.

Here are some requirements a template system must provide:

  • There is a document template in the file system. It can be changed by the user without recompiling Kraft. Kraft picks it up, fills the document values in and processes it to PDF. Other output formats are optional.
  • Layout: Areas where parts of the document are printed can be freely specified, ie. where the address, the date etc. is printed.
  • Graphical elements like lines, fixed text, boxes, colors and images can be placed everywhere.
  • The system knows at least different layouts for the first page, middle pages and the last page.
  • All pages have page header and footer.
  • Loops: Since an invoice for example has an unknown amount of items the system must be able to handle that, including clever space management with  pagebreaks. Nested loops are possible.
  • Maintain areas which must not be split, i.e. an invoice item should be printed completely on one page and not be split by a pagebreak.
  • Text faces, paragraph alignment, width, spacing and these kind of things must be configurable in the template.
  • Some variables are available such as a page counter.
  • Really great would be if the system provides carryover of calculations, like  on the top and bottom of each page the so far accumulated sum is printed.

Which free layouting and PDF generating system is able to provide that, preferably Qt/KDE based? Kugar was striving to solve it but when I tested it it did not work out.

Another idea is to use the ability of KWord to work with templates. If Kraft could read KWord templates, fill them and automatically generate a KWord doc from it, that would be a great solution, because in addition to automatic PDF generation documents could easily be exported as KWord docs and changed manually if needed. A great ‘template editor’ also would be available. This would in the direction of office suit integration that commercial Kraft competitors nowadays have.

I am not sure how far we are away from that. Something to investigate.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Boosters, Desktop, KDE | 6 Comments »

KDE icons for Apache

February 15th, 2010 by

apache-kde

I have been working on making Apache’s directory listings a bit more beautiful by creating a collection of KDE icons (Oxygen and Crystal). Apache’s default icons are a bit old and not that vivid. In fact, they were originally made for Mosaic. So, what I’ve done is handpicking some Crystal and Oxygen icons, making a few by combining two icons, modifying some Apache’s config files, writing the instructions and, finally, putting everything together. So, now we have apache2-icons-oxygen and apache2-icons-crystal.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank Adrian Schröter and Peter Pöml for the help and feedback.

The rpm packages are available on my OBS home project:
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/javierllorente/

Comments and suggestions are welcome!

Posted in Apache, Artwork, KDE | 10 Comments »

supertuxkart does not start due to pulse audio

February 15th, 2010 by

I tried to start supertuxkart, the marvelous race game, in openSUSE_11.2 (x86_64 if that matters) but it failed with the following error:

$ supertuxkart
Data files will be fetched from: '/usr/share/games/supertuxkart/'
AL lib: pulseaudio.c:382: Context did not get ready: Connection refused

The problem is a configuration setting in /etc/openal/alsoft.conf. Just uncomment the drivers line and remove pulse from the drivers line in that file and supertuxkart starts to work again.

It can be easily tested with the command openal-info. Before the change one get the error message shown above, and after one gets useful information.

I got this problem solved, due to a discussion on the ubuntu forums. Thank you guys.

Hopefully this short note is useful for someone.

Update (16 Feb 2010): just today openal was updated from version 1.10 to 1.11 and with the new version supertuxkart started without problems 🙂

Posted in Desktop, Sound | 2 Comments »

Universal Go-oo 3.2 build available

February 12th, 2010 by

I am happy to announce that the universal Go-oo 3.1.1 build is available for Linux (i586, x86_64), MAC OSX Intel, and Windows[*]. See also download and installation instructions. The builds include many upstream and Go-oo fixes.

Go-oo team hopes that you will be happy with this release. Though, any software contains bugs and we kindly ask you to report them, so that we could fix them in the future releases. Also you could send feedback to the ooo-build@lists.freedesktop.org mailing list or contact us on irc.freenode.net, channel #go-oo.

[*] We are sorry but the bundled extension with dictionaries is broken in the GoOo-3.2-10.exe Windows build. Please remove it in Tools/Extension Manager… and install the fixed one. Only this single fix will be included in the upcomming GoOo-3.2-11.exe build. We are going to upload it the following week. You need not update to the 3.2-11 build if you re-install the extension manually or if you do not use the spell checker. Only Windows users are affected by this bug. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

—

PS: I feel a bit schizophrenic. I want to blog about the openSUSE builds at planetsuse and about the universal build at planet.go-oo. Both builds are based on the same sources, so the schedule is almost the same. We only do more alpha and beta builds for openSUSE because it is so easy with the Build Service.

Posted in Desktop, OpenOffice.org | 7 Comments »

OpenOffice_org 3.2 final available for openSUSE

February 12th, 2010 by

I’m happy to announce OpenOffice.org 3.2 final packages for openSUSE. They are available in the Build Service OpenOffice:org:STABLE project and include many upstream and Go-oo improvements and fixes. Please, check the wiki page for more details about the openSUSE OOo build.

The openSUSE OOo team hopes that you will be happy with this release. Though, any software contains bugs and we kindly ask you to report them, so that we could fixed them in the future releases.

Other information and plans:

We have also updated the OpenOffice_org-LanguageTool extension to the version 1.0.

We are already working on the 3.2.1 release. I would like to put the first alpha build into the OpenOffice:org:UNSTABLE project within next few weeks.

Posted in Desktop, OpenOffice.org | 2 Comments »

AstroGarrobo Beta

February 10th, 2010 by

Space, the Final Frontier! This is the tale of one Amateur Astronomer that have found in openSUSE a terrific tool for public outreach, self-learning and teaching platform.

Ok, that was a bit exagerated.

But the truth is that I am enjoying the new SUSE Studio suite. And that’s because it is facilitating my job as an educator. I work with the Nicaraguan Amateur Astronomers Society (ANASA) in teaching basic astronomy to the public. Obviously, my workhorse is an openSUSE laptop, loaded with Stellarium, Celestia, KStars and Xephem (and many other tools for my personal job as an astronomer).

(more…)

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Build Service, Education, GNOME, openSUSE 11.2 | Comments Off on AstroGarrobo Beta

OpenOffice_org 3.2 rc5 available for openSUSE

February 8th, 2010 by

I’m happy to announce OpenOffice.org 3.2 rc5 packages for openSUSE. They are available in the Build Service OpenOffice:org:UNSTABLE project and include many upstream and Go-oo fixes. See also overview of integrated features and enhancements. Please, look for more details about the openSUSE OOo build on the wiki page.

The packages are release candidates. Though, they have not passed the full QA test and might still 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:

There were more blocker bugs in the rc4, so we needed to release rc5 in the end. The good news is that no new blocker bug has been reported last few days. If nothing bad happen with the next few days, rc5 will be final and I will put it to the OpenOffice:org:STABLE project by the end of this week. Please, keep your fingers crossed 😉

Posted in Desktop, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice_org 3.2 rc5 available for openSUSE

OpenOffice_org 3.2 rc4 available for openSUSE

January 29th, 2010 by

I’m happy to announce OpenOffice.org 3.2 rc4 packages for openSUSE. They are available in the Build Service OpenOffice:org:UNSTABLE project and include many upstream and Go-oo fixes. See also overview of integrated features and enhancements. Please, look for more details about the openSUSE OOo build on the wiki page.

The packages are release candidates. Though, they have not passed the full QA test and might still 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:

I am sorry for the huge delay. We spent a lot of time with debugging some java related problems. Upstream released rc4 in the meantime, so I decided to skip the rc3 packages for  openSUSE.

This is evidently one of the more problematic releases.  I wish I said that rc4 was the final release but we still do not know. Upstream thinks about to release rc5 because of the following bugs:

  • Crash of presentation mode at the start of animation (i#108748)
  • Problem to finish en-US-only build (i#107957)
  • Create style via API is broken (i#108426)

Though, the first bug happens only with Cairo canvas disabled and it is enabled in our build by default. The other issues are already fixed in the openSUSE rc4 build. So, these are not real blockers for us but…

Posted in Desktop, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice_org 3.2 rc4 available for openSUSE

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »