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Archive for the ‘Desktop’ Category

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On wlan and browser authenticated internet

July 7th, 2009 by

Nowadays more and more organisations will use an intercepting proxy to give you access to internet. Last week I had the pleasure to use again such a system. To use is an exaggeration as my opensuse 11.1 box with kde4.3 rc1 connected to the wireless network (network manager) but refused to give me access to the authentication page in the browser.

I did all the decent tests that my brain and time allowed me. Checked the ip, checked gateway and checked dns. They seemed ok.

To make frustration even bigger I was able to connect to th very same network with a kde4.3 beta1.

Posted in Base System, Desktop, KDE, Network | Comments Off on On wlan and browser authenticated internet

OpenOffice_org 3.1.1 alpha2 available for openSUSE

July 2nd, 2009 by

I’m happy to announce OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 alpha2 packages for openSUSE. They are available in the Build Service OpenOffice:org:UNSTABLE project and include many upstream and Go-oo fixes. Please, look for more details about the openSUSE OOo build on the wiki page.

The packages are alpha 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, …

We kindly ask any interested beta testers to try the package and report bugs.

Other information and plans:

The next build will be 3.1.1-beta1 and should be available 3-4 weeks from now. The final OOo-3.1.1 packages should be available at the beginning of September.

I have vacation the following two weeks and will not have access to the internet. I hope that the current alpha2 build is usable. If not, please report bugs and switch back to the stable build.

Posted in Desktop, OpenOffice.org | 2 Comments »

On kontact

June 26th, 2009 by

I will go on holiday next week, so today is my last day in the office. I have decided that the things I have to do today are too many and I should work in the train in my way to the office.

All good, start the computer, of course no internet, so I had to shutdown kontact to stop him crying about not being able to connect.

Being able to easy go to an offline mode  would be a very nice and useful feature to have in kontact, and kde applications in general. Checking that before you want to communicate with some third party that you actually have the phone instead complaining that he is not answer, would be a very good design decision, too.

Now being the holiday season I hope at least one of the kde/kontact developers would get hit by this missing feature and soon we will have it.

Tags: ,
Posted in Desktop, KDE | Comments Off on On kontact

On KDE4.3

June 24th, 2009 by

We are almost one month far away from the kde4.3 release. Yesterday the 4.3 rc1 was tagged and due to excellent work of our colleagues in OBS we have it already.

Personally, I would have liked it to go a little bit further away in terms of usability, we will speak about that later.  This release will mark the break with 3.5. I see no real reason for not using kde 4.3. All the functionality that people were crying after from 3.5 is finally up and running (a lot of time better) in KDE 4.3.

What more would you like then, people may ask.

I would like to be able to give a kde4 desktop to a secretary to use and to a teenager who is into Web2.0.

  • a features consistent kontact, a kalendar that actually can be used in a real life environment, avoiding silly design inconsistencies like you can spell check your popup notes but you cannot do it for your notebooks entries.
  • a kopete that actually supports video/audio features of protocols.
  • a rock solid kblogger may help.
  • a way to synchronize mobile devices.

and the last

  • adding more work on making existing features working perfect rather than adding new ones.

Alin

Posted in Desktop, KDE | Comments Off on On KDE4.3

OpenOffice_org 3.1.1 alpha1 available for openSUSE

June 18th, 2009 by

I’m happy to announce OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 alpha1 packages for openSUSE. They are available in the Build Service OpenOffice:org:UNSTABLE project and include many upstream and Go-oo fixes. Please, look for more details about the openSUSE OOo build on the wiki page.

The packages are alpha 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, …

We kindly ask any interested beta testers to try the package and report bugs.

Other information and plans:

The build for openSUSE Factory will provide also OpenOffice_org-kde4 package with an initial KDE4 integration. It is done by Roman Shtylman, an external contributor, and it is still a work in progress. I can’t build it for openSUSE-11.1 because it requires the newer Qt >= 4.5. Please be patient, Roman wants to stabilize it at first. It is a good idea because we really want to have it ready for openSUSE-11.2. Then he will look if it would be possible to port it for the older Qt and openSUSE-11.1. There are missing some useful features, so he would need to create workarounds.

Unfortunately, the packages for openSUSE Factory are still not ready in the  OpenOffice:org:UNSTABLE project because the build is blocked by rebuild of another low level packages. I have submitted the package sources also into the official openSUSE Factory. I hope that it will be available there soon.

Note that I would like to provide 3.1.1-alpha2 build within next three weeks. The final OOo-3.1.1 packages should be available at the beginning of September.

Posted in Desktop, OpenOffice.org | 1 Comment »

open source xml editor in sight

June 18th, 2009 by

Six years ago I was involved with an early predecessor of the openfate feature tracker. I had  extended docbook sgml with a few feature tracking tags and it rendered nicely.  We stored it in cvs and jointly hacked on the document.  It never really got off the ground though, because there was no open source xml editor for Linux beyond emacs.

xml is great:  It’s a simple, human- and machine readable serialization.  And xml sucks because of all these ankle brackets.  You need a tool to edit it.

Now yesterday I’m getting this mail:

Subject: ANN: Serna Free XML Editor Goes Open Source Soon! Help Us Build the Community!
From:  Syntext Customer Service <XXXXX@syntext.com>
To: Susanne.Oberhauser@XXXXX
Date: 2009-06-17 17:11:26

Dear Susanne Oberhauser,

We are happy to tell you that our Serna Free XML Editor is going to be open-source software soon! Serna is a powerful and easy-to-use WYSIWYG XML editor based on open standards, which works on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and Sun Solaris/SPARC.

We love Serna and wish to share our passion with anyone who wants to make it better. Our mission is to make XML accessible to everyone, and we believe that open-source Serna could enable much more users and companies to adopt XML technology.

It goes on about spreading the news and supporting the transition from just cost free to open source.

I got this mail because I’ve tried Serna five years ago, on the quest for a decent  Linux xml editor.  Back then it just rendered xml to xsl-fo with xslt, and then you edit the document in that rendered view, as if it was a word document.  Serna came with docbook and a few toy examples like a simple time tracking sheet.  Meanwhile they’ve added python scripting, dita support, an “xsl bricks” library to quickly creaty your own xslt transforms for your own document schemes, and the tool gathers the data from different sources with xinclude or dita conref and stores the data back to them and on the screen you just happily edit your one single unified document view.

I just hesitated to build an infrastructure around it because it was prorietary.  I hate vendor lock-in.  And now they want to open source serna!!

If this comes true, serna rocks the boat.  It’s as simple as that.  With the python scripting Serna is more than an xml editor:  it actually is a very rich xml gui application platform, with one definition for print and editing, with wysiwyg editing in the print ‘pre’view.  I dare to anticipate this is no less than one of the coolest things that ever happened to the Linux desktop… Once Serna is open source it will be so much simpler to create xml based applications.  I guess I’m dead excited 🙂

Serna, I whish you happy trails on your open source endeavour!!

S.

Posted in Desktop, Documentation | 2 Comments »

Kraft 0.32 Live CD

June 5th, 2009 by

You might have heard about Kraft, a KDE application aimed to people who operate small enterprises and have to write an offer or invoice sometimes. Kraft version 0.32 was released recently, the last KDE 3 based version, the KDE4 port has finally started.

Kraft is one of the candidates for the KDE group for financial apps which is a consolidating idea and was encouraged in Alvaros article A group to bind them all recently.

Unfortunately it is still a bit tricky to set up. To make it easier to check it out Live Images were created featureing Kraft on an openSUSE distribution with all tools and  interesting demo data. That is perfect to try it out and give it to friends and colleagues and talk about.

Please check the download page of the Kraft Homepage for details.

Tags: , ,
Posted in KDE | 1 Comment »

Universal Go-oo 3.1 build available

June 3rd, 2009 by

I am happy to announce that the universal Go-oo 3.1 build is available for Windows, Linux (i586, x86_64), and MAC OSX Intel. 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 fixed them in the future releases. Also you could send feedback to the dev@lists.go-oo.org mailing list or contact us on irc.freenode.net, channel #go-oo.

The following OOo-3.1.1 release should be available on the beginning of September.

—

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.

I wonder if the two separate announces are confusing. Should I separate the blogs even more? Any ideas?

Hmm, the best solution would be to do the universal build in the Build Service as well. Then all builds would be done at exactly the same time, they would be in the “same” repository, … It is my long term task but it will need some loving. The universal build must be done on a quite old hacky distro to work everywhere. The Windows build would require cross-compilation, …

Posted in Desktop, OpenOffice.org | 10 Comments »

OpenOffice_org 3.1 final available

June 3rd, 2009 by

I’m happy to announce OpenOffice.org 3.1 final packages. They are available in the Build Service OpenOffice:org:STABLE project and include many upstream and Go-oo fixes. Please, look for more details about the openSUSE OOo build on the wiki page.

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 are already working on the 3.1.1 release. I would like to put the first alpha build into the OpenOffice:org:UNSTABLE project within next two weeks. The final release is planned for the beginning of September.

Posted in Desktop, OpenOffice.org | 7 Comments »

openSUSE-Edu: looks pretty too

May 30th, 2009 by

What has openSUSE-Edu project been up to these days?

More Live Images:

openSUSE-Edu team has been working hard to polish the various image “flavours”. The latest addition to the images is openSUSE-Edu-Desktop. This image contains the latest GNOME with many useful educational applications.

Samyak Bhuta, our designer came up with a new theme for this image, called “Classroom”. Click on the image below to see whole album and theme brief:

Sugared up openSUSE

David “Nubae” Van Assche, has been busy as a bee 😉 bringing most comprehensive Sugar suite to openSUSE, you can find Sugar, Fructose, Sucrose, Honey and all other sweet tooth  satisfying goodies in our repository. Try “Tam Tam Jam”, even grown ups will be whiling away hours having fun. Sugar can be installed on standard openSUSE 11.1 giving another session at login just as KDE/GNOME. Live CD is also under development, if you want to check out things to come get openSUSE-Sugar-live-unstable iso from here(mind the -unstable).

Here are the activities to look forward to enjoy with your children:

Thanks Nubae, Alsroot and all the Sugar developers for the great work.

KIWI-LTSP

We have KIWI-LTSP, easiest to run Linux Terminal Server based onthe latest LTSP5 and openSUSE’s KIWI imaging technology on openSUSE-Edu-Live-Li-f-e DVD. Just click on the icon on the desktop to get fully working LTSP server with tons of Education application, things can’t get simpler than that to set up a classroom running openSUSE in minutes 🙂

Future plans for openSUSE 11.2:

  • Integrate stgraber’s ltsp-cluster work, simple load balancing cluster is already supported, but is limited to small cluster of upto 5 servers
  • Jan weber is currently rewriting Easy-LTSP GUI for LTSP management in python, the idea is that now more distributions may feel comfortable including it getting all the benefits we have been enjoying for some time now. Watch out for the Easy-LTSP-ng, get the source if you would like to work on it.  Feedback, suggestions always welcome
  • Use new clicfs images for the NBD and AOE root

openSUSE-Edu Testing Team

We are forming a testing team to keep very high standards for all the applications shipped on openSUSE-Edu medias. Here is what you  need to join the party:

  • Fast net connection to download and test new images
  • Good bug reporting(fixing would be big advantage) skills
  • Lurk on IRC Freenode #opensuse-edu to squash bugs that can be fixed quickly

If you are interested add yourself to the list here:

http://en.opensuse.org/Education/Team

Events

The project will be represented at LinuxTag 2009, spotting the booth should be easy, there will be “Geeko” and people wearing cool openSUSE-Edu t-shirts 😉

Ciao

Let’s make openSUSE-Edu the best Li-f-e experience.

Posted in Artwork, Education, GNOME | 1 Comment »

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