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Archive for the ‘Factory’ Category

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ATI Amd flgrx 8.812 catalyst 11.1 available also for 11.4/factory

February 13th, 2011 by

A quick note for the week-end, I’ve build and uploaded the new fglrx drivers.
The good news, they are also available for 11.4/factory,

Unofficial-but-working repository

For openSUSE 11.4 (factory) NEW !

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

I would like to have feedback about how that works for you, please comment !

Factory specifics troubles

on a fresh auto-configuration factory install : libomp43 

Problem: fglrx64_7_6_0_SUSE114-8.812-1.x86_64 requires gcc, but this requirement cannot be provided
  uninstallable providers: gcc-4.5-16.1.i586[openSUSE-11.4-11.4-1.35]
                   gcc-4.5-16.1.x86_64[openSUSE-11.4-11.4-1.35]
 Solution 1: deinstallation of libgomp43-4.3.4_20091019-5.23.x86_64
 Solution 2: do not install fglrx64_7_6_0_SUSE114-8.812-1.x86_64
 Solution 3: break fglrx64_7_6_0_SUSE114 by ignoring some of its dependencies

Choose from above solutions by number or cancel [1/2/3/c] (c): 1
Resolving dependencies...
Resolving package dependencies...

The following NEW packages are going to be installed:
  binutils-gold fglrx64_7_6_0_SUSE114 gcc gcc45 glibc-devel 
  kernel-default-devel kernel-desktop-devel kernel-devel kernel-source 
  kernel-syms kernel-xen-devel libgomp45 linux-glibc-devel make patch 

The following package is going to be REMOVED:
  libgomp43 

15 new packages to install, 1 to remove.
Overall download size: 127.9 MiB. After the operation, additional 600.9 MiB 
will be used.

Normally this bug (in M5/M6) should has been resolved in RC1.

See full details on my previous dedicated post
//lizards.opensuse.org/?p=4673

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Posted in Base System, Distribution, Factory, Kernel | Comments Off on ATI Amd flgrx 8.812 catalyst 11.1 available also for 11.4/factory

Join us for the first virtual launch party openSUSE 11.4

February 3rd, 2011 by

Annoncing the first virtual launch party

Dear folk, we are organizing a special event for the openSUSE 11.4 launch, and you’re invited. Virtually all of you can participate, and increase the success of it. And spend a good time.

Too soon? Not really, we are in the process to organize also pre-release party, certainly for the RC1 and RC2 launch. So you can practice before the real event. Prepare your environment, and dress your avatars with decent clothes, and gadgets.

We will do our best to welcome you in english, french & greek.
If you want you can also anwser our short pool we are looking about help.

Where?

Geekos place bar in SL

On secondlife.com, go to area macedonia. at 183,213,21 coordinates
Or fire the search engine, and look after Geekos group, then join that group

When?

During 3 days March 9 10 & 11 2011
Party start at 16:00 UTC ( 8am SL time)

What?

Join our special place build for that event and let’s get

  • Dance party
  • Free drink
  • Goodies
  • Wall of pictures
  • 11.4 installations movies
  • open minded discussions
  • Experience exchange

Who?

tigerfoot on secondlife
Morgane Marquis on secondlife

Your guests would be myself (tigerfoot) & Morgane Marquis.
A team of excellent dj’s as Lillith from Australia, Esquievel from USA, Stefanos from France,
or our great Greeks neighbors

 

Why?

Hey not so long ago I was kicked by H!
Because it’s a place where people have also fun, and we want to talk with them about the freedom & openSUSE.
Did you never attempt to realize something that has not been made yet?
Just to have a lot of fun! The full explanation Here

How?

To access that 3D virtual world, you need a recent computer 1.5Ghz or +, and good internet access >3500/300bps, and a 3D enabled graphics cards like radeon HD4xxx or more, Nvidia Geforce >9600, Intel > i945 & Intel Extreme.

To be continued

In the next weeks, I will publish an more technical article about how to get 3D world viewer installed on your openSUSE. And we are just finishing the picture gallery about that project which should be online next week (due to FOSDEM) this week-end.

Stay tuned !

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Posted in Distribution, Events, Factory, Marketing | 5 Comments »

Unity on openSUSE: UPDATE

January 30th, 2011 by

Unity works as a plugin for Compiz using the glib mainloop. Currently the development version of Compiz available in OBS X11:Compiz already provides this requirement (glib mainloop) as a plugin. This version and two git snapshots I’ve builded were crashing heavilly, so I’ve decided to take  a closer look into Ubuntu’s packages and build from their sources on my devel project. This has proven wise as their snapshots (2010-11-25) with their patches removed the crashes on compiz.

The patches applied include the new unity-window-decorator which works fine. Here’s a small screenshot of GNOME’s System Monitor using Unity’s window decorator (which relies on a patch on metacity to enable UX Shadows).

The theme for this screenshot is Ambiance (also from Ubuntu) with a changed color scheme. This shot was taken on M6 with the newest FireGL drivers from ATI. I’ve noticed some changes on the blur effects on this driver, but I really can’t develop much.

I haven’t seen crashes on individual components when I test them (ex: unity-panel-service and unity-window-decorator), which seems to be a good pointer.

Currently I’m working out in porting the Unity wrapper and some scripts from Ubuntu to the reality on openSUSE as many files seem to be distributed on the filesystem in very different places. Just to name an example… compiz on openSUSE currently stores it’s profiles and stuff on $HOME/.config/compiz-1, and Unity is searching those files on $HOME/.compiz-1, and as such, fails to find them. This is where I’m currently placing my efforts. This should fix soon the ‘unity’ wrapper.

To make this short… Compiz isn’t crashing anymore or seg faulting, and Unity is picking up the information required from different file locations on the file system. Once fixed, we should have a running Unity for BETA soon.

My very special thanks to Malcolm Lewis for making the integration of Unity with Compiz possible in a very nice way and for fixing many bugs that allowed us to successfully build this packages.

As soon as we have more developments, those will be posted.

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Posted in Desktop, Distribution, Factory, GNOME, Packaging, X.org | Comments Off on Unity on openSUSE: UPDATE

openSUSE KDE Team activity, Jan 2011

January 27th, 2011 by

What’s been going on in the openSUSE KDE team this week?  The news on everybody’s lips is that the KDE project released 4.6.0 yesterday.  Naturally, we’ve got it available for download for all current openSUSE releases as we prepare 4.6 for openSUSE 11.4.  4.6 brings better performance and improved power management control to the Plasma workspaces.  The KDE 4.6 application releases include features such as navigation capabilities in the Marble map app, more ways to search your files in Dolphin, and photo sharing via social networks.  KDE 4.6.0 is currently available in the KDE:Distro:Factory repositories.  A KDE:Release:46 repository will shortly be made available, providing the point releases in the KDE 4.6 series.

But that’s not all that we’ve been up to. Amarok 2.4.0 continues to help you rediscover your music, with better automatic playlists and removable device support.  We’ve packaged KOffice 2.3.1 including the realistic natural medium paint app, Krita.  KDevelop 4.2, also released today, is already on our mirrors.  C++ and PHP coders should check it out for its powerful code completion and refactoring support, augmented with better search and replace, improved Kate text editor, and QtHelp documentation support.  digiKam 1.8.0 leads the way in professional Free Software photo management.

The team continues to work to prepare openSUSE 11.4.  The openSUSE updater applet is being replaced by the more polished KPackageKit from KDE.  Our beta testers have already resolved several critical bugs before 4.6.0 was released, and is assessing PulseAudio and the range of Phonon sound system options for the best audio experience when 11.4 is released.  All dependencies on the old HAL system for hardware in KDE have now been replaced with udev, and have received a lot of testing.  KSynaptiks has been configured by default to allow touchpad taps, but disable the touchpad when typing.  And the team has been assiduously packaging new dependencies in KDE’s 4.6 releases so they are fully featured, including the Okteta hex editor plugin for KDevelop, the R backend for the Cantor math app, and the new speaker setup config module.

Artwork and branding for 11.4 is nearly complete, featuring the Celadon Stripes wallpaper by KDE’s Ivan Čukić .  The mysterious-looking upstream default wallpaper ‘Horos’ is also available – just install the package kdebase4-workspace-branding-upstream.  KDE’s Oxygen look and feel becomes possible in GTK apps by installing the new Oxygen GTK theme.  And a number of minor tweaks to the default KDE in a new installation of 11.4 add up to improved performance, for example by deferring starting services until they are needed.

If you want to join the fun or just need a helping hand, the expert and fanatical openSUSE KDE team can be found in #opensuse-kde on IRC, at opensuse-kde@opensuse.org or at http://en.opensuse.org/Portal:KDE.

Posted in Boosters, Distribution, Factory, KDE | 8 Comments »

openQA is testing for you

January 20th, 2011 by

You might have read the announcement of the factory-tested repo (or not, because it did not go on planet.o.o). There have been many additions to the testing during the last eight weeks.

openQA.o.o is a machine running automated software tests all the time to decide if factory-tested can be updated. If you think, this was boring, you might find out that it is not, since every testrun generates a video of approx 4 minutes that can be conveniently viewed in firefox.

You can view those test results on the openQA page.

And those are the updates:

  • I have added testing of development repos, so that it is now possible to detect bugs before they even get into Factory (most of those tests have “devel” at the end of their name). In fact, this has already found two such bugs.
  • The test system’s hardware was upgraded with a sponsored SSD and the software adapted to allow running multiple tests in parallel (using make -j3)
  • I have updated the web-interface to use the nice Bento theme
  • And I found yet another cool use-case for automated testing: it allows to bisect bugs. I did a binary search in old results for a live-installer bug which made it really easy to find the causing commit. However, seeing how long such a bug went unnoticed, made me think, that it would be nice if more people would check the results for anomalies, since not all of those can easily be auto-detected. As this just needs a firefox and little time, this is pretty easy to do. Much easier than to actually setup a test-system in any case.
  • An IRC notification bot was added, keeping #opensuse-openqa updated with new test results
  • Then, I am looking for additional automatic test-scripts, that also work standalone on an openSUSE install. It is especially important to test high-impact things. Things that break often or block many users if they break. And it would be nice to have a small result range such as OK|fail|unknown or it should at least be mappable to such.
  • Jürgen Weigert has packaged sikuli, so it is easy to create GUI tests with it, that could then be included in the test-suite.

Then there are still some things on the ToDo list…

  • Hermes integration to get email alerts and RDF feeds for newsreaders
  • Have more test variants auto-scheduled (-live and -dup)
  • Find a way to have Add-On-Repos with custom priority (otherwise Factory packages might be used, as happened for kernel-default-2.6.37-rc7) – using linuxrc’s driverupdate feature could be one way.

your input is highly appreciated

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Posted in Factory, Quality Assurance | Comments Off on openQA is testing for you

Kick off for GNOME:Ayatana Project…

December 29th, 2010 by

“Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.” // Peter F. Drucker

This has been one of the guidelines in my life for quite some time… It started as a curiosity a long time ago with Notify OSD and evolved to full project in openSUSE. It is important to acknowledge at this point the motivation provided by the openSUSE GNOME Team from which I’ve been getting plenty of guidance and help, namely from Vincent Untz (vuntz) and Dominique Leuenberger (Dimstar). Thanks to them, we have now a GNOME:Ayatana Project on OBS (openSUSE Build Service), currently being populated with the support libraries for Ayatana’s Unity and Indicators.

Susan Linton has made a small article for Linux Journal about this project in the past. Though some people pointed to me that it was advertising and excelling Ubuntu… I would like to leave a statement… We’re not taking a hike on Ubuntu visibility, and it isn’t bad at all, on the contrary… In fact it will help Ubuntu, us and many others… specially if some Ubuntu patches are accepted faster by upstream. I hope other RPM distributions will follow the way we, openSUSE, proudly seem to pioneering! From my personal point of view… a distribution ‘distributes’… and despite this software isn’t attractive for some openSUSE users, I’m happy it is available (totally or partially) for all those who want to test it… Wait… you don’t even need to install Ubuntu or changing the platform you run!

Due to several reasons, being the most important of them versioning, this repository will start on the next release of openSUSE in March 16th (World day of Conscience, interesting point). This is also interesting as if YOU are willing to improve a package or submit a package you can now do it to this repository.

This goes with a very huge cookie for Dimstar and Vuntz for taking care of this repository and making sure that everything will comply with the openSUSE Guidelines. You are my personal heroes.

It has been quite an interesting experience to be with openSUSE GNOME team which is full of knowledge and helpful in many ways. I can’t also forget to mention that last week Luis Medinas has taken tutorship of a Portuguese contributor to openSUSE GNOME, João Matias and will provide him the necessary help to integrate him on the workflow of the GNOME Team. My personal thanks to Luis for stepping into this task, which from my personal point of view is very important.

Regarding to Ayatana it is worth to mention that Dimstar provided some valuable help in fixing the dbusmenu package and taking care of the necessary patch submission in GTK and gdk-pixbuf to allow dbusmenu to build with introspection support and generate properly the Vala files required for other packages. This handicap beaten… we’re on the good road for better functionality. This patches also allowed to correct some behavior in some indicators, one fine example of this the ‘Me Menu’ which now displays correctly a  ‘dot’ on the selected status as the screenshot bellow shows:

In the last days, despite it’s Christmas season and soon new year…. I’ve been also working on providing additional extensions to enable some functionality on some indicators. This was the case of indicator-sound, which provides an alternative sound gadget that offers extended functionality with multimedia players. A fine example of this is Novell’s Banshee player which has astonishing out of the box implementation with the sound indicator from Ayatana by a small extension that can be enabled. I’m still wondering why so many people toss heavy critics at this indicator calling it ‘mac styled’… while to be honest I doubt such people have even seen OSX sound applet, which is more or less a direct copy of the one present in GNOME, the vertical switch. Interesting view nevertheless.

Indicator-sound has also been fixed and no longer requires the nasty hack in the previous package. Since I’m not an Ubuntu user, neither I have extensive experience on their Desktop, I’m not sure if the functionality present so far in the indicators is the one offered by Ubuntu. I plan to run a Open Beta on the Ayatana software repository during the last Milestone of Factory to all Factory users to collect more data and improve the packages, at least the indicators, as in the present since I have ATI hardware I don’t have FireGL enabled on Factory, so I can’t really push much on Unity and test it for the time being.

Another subject of plugins was Xchat which is GNOME’s premier IRC client. Novell’s Evolution also got it’s plugin which is found to be partially working. I haven’t tracked yet if there are patch submissions to Evolution from Ubuntu to enable indicator functionality. That’s for sure one of the next steps, and since Evolution is a bit of ‘in-house’, would be nice to have them approved upstream if submitted already, as it would serve openSUSE as well.

Most of this applications, evolution, xchat, gwibber, empathy, pidgin are supported by indicator messages which collects information from several messaging services and places them on a single indicator in a cascade style experience for the user. I personally find it weird as I’m not used to this, but seems nice. Unfortunalty some applications seem rely on patches to be fully supported, like empathy. I hope upstream accepts the patches from Ubuntu (if submitted) and we can also benefit from such changes in our side.

Basically to sum up everything in a short review…

* Indicators are working fully or partially depending on patch level on some applications. If upstream starts accepting Ubuntu patches (some shouldn’t be much of a problem), it will work out for Ayatana software in openSUSE as well.
* Unity – Though it builds already with some compiz packaged from git sources (to include glib mainloop patching), I have no way of testing it, neither I have done integration on it. Unfortunately both my systems have ATI hardware and I have no way of testing it on Factory which seems to be too much bleeding edge for ATI to keep up. It’s stalled a bit, but in the worst scenario will be available a few weeks after the next official release of openSUSE.
* During this wait time… we might see a new release of compiz with the patches upstreamed by Canonical, which will for sure help us also a lot. No need for hurry in Unity at this time.

My personal experience with this project has given me lots of knowledge about OBS, hacking Makefiles and configure scripts… debug skills… and specially I ended up loving the way openSUSE is built and how it works. I would take also this opportunity to make a small statement… all the development so far has been deployed over GNOME 2.32. Much of the software packaged already supports GTK3 and should be easy to migrate it to GNOME3. At the moment, since the next openSUSE release is still based on GNOME 2.32, I’m not testing all this software on GNOME3. It might take a few days/weeks to have it available for GNOME3 after it’s release, though from a personal perspective, what I’ve seen on GNOME3 seems to be overkill! It’s damn nice and I have no doubt GNOME3 will succeed as the ultimate Free Desktop.

I would also like to mention that I’m not testing this indicators with KDE. In case someone wants to do this, please feel free to nag me on IRC (#opensuse-gnome @ Freenode) and leave feedback. I’m focused only on GNOME2 and GNOME3 deployment of this software packages, though I will help in whatever way I can if someone wants to work them out for KDE.

I’m using a patched version of Metacity (patches were submitted upstream) which improves the display of buttons by improving overlaying of images (I think). Look at the sharp corners of the theme in the pic bellow. As always, Faenza Icon theme with Canonical’s light theme Radiance (not hacked). This is another change I hope that goes upstreamed soon.

My sincere congratulations to everyone working on the awesome GNOME3, I’m sure it will be a success and make the delights of many! My faith points that GNOME3 will change Desktop user experience forever!

Have a lot of fun…!

Nelson Marques

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Posted in Build Service, Desktop, Distribution, Factory, GNOME | 16 Comments »

GoogleEarth 6.0 running in opensuse 11.4 factory 64Bits

December 1st, 2010 by

Sometimes we need some of those applications running under our favorite OS. If you can stick with marble.

So the new googleearth 6.0 version hit the street. And if like me you want to give it a try, there’s some tricks to make it installing under your 64bits opensuse factory.

My first attempt just result in a nice crash … 

h GoogleEarthLinux6.0.bin 
Verifying archive integrity... All good.
Uncompressing Google Earth for GNU/Linux 6.0.0.1735..............................................................
I/O error : No such file or directory
setup.data/setup.xml:1: parser error : Document is empty

^
setup.data/setup.xml:1: parser error : Start tag expected, '<' not found

^
*** glibc detected *** setup.data/bin/Linux/amd64/setup.gtk2: free(): invalid pointer: 0xbabababa ***
======= Backtrace: =========
/lib/libc.so.6(+0x6df6b)[0xf6c64f6b]
/lib/libc.so.6(cfree+0xd9)[0xf6c69ab9]
setup.data/bin/Linux/amd64/setup.gtk2[0x8074214]
/usr/lib/libxml2.so.2(+0x5131b)[0xf768531b]
======= Memory map: ========
08048000-08091000 r-xp 00000000 fd:01 1752187                            /tmp/selfgz99614152/setup.data/bin/Linux/x86/setup.gtk2
...

Google Eartch 6 In action
So I found that can be helpful, during the transition phase to have a package for openSUSE.

Here’s the recipe.

1: get the binary

wget http://dl.google.com/earth/client/current/GoogleEarthLinux.bin

2: extract it to a temp directory

sh GoogleEarthLinux.bin --target GoogleEarthFixed

3: replace the defective gtk2 setup thing

mv ./GoogleEarthFixed/setup.data/bin/Linux/x86/setup.gtk ./GoogleEarthFixed/setup.data/bin/Linux/x86/setup.gtk2

4: Launch the installer
4a : as root for system wide install

su -l
./GoogleEarthFixed/setup.sh

4b : as normal user to have it installed inside your own home

./GoogleEarthFixed/setup.sh

5: Cleaning !
If you don’t need anymore.

rm -Rf ./GoogleEarthFixed
rm ./GoogleEarthLinux.bin

I would thanks people posting this comment

The method should also work for the older 5.2 version

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Posted in Factory, KDE, Miscellaneous | 3 Comments »

Announcing factory-tested

November 29th, 2010 by

Good news everyone! There is something new that is better than Factory and Milestones.

You might have heard users complaining about openSUSE Milestones being alpha quality and RCs/GMs being beta quality only.

You might also have heard developers complaining that people only start testing RCs, which is too late to fix most bugs (some users don’t know that).

You might also have heard geeks calling for rolling releases to always have bleeding edge software.

Luckily, all of the above can be helped.

I have been thinking about this situation and how to improve it.
The main problem is, that Factory is sometimes broken. So how can we make testing new software safer, even between milestone-releases (which are manual factory-snaphots)?

There is now a factory-tested repository that only gets updated when tests show that factory meets the following minimum requirements:

  • The system can be installed,
  • Zypper can install software,
  • And X11 can be started – at least on KVM

While this can not save users from all major bugs, it is already a big improvement to current Factory which gets released whenever it builds. So, why don’t you give it a try?

For more info on test-results (including videos), you can also have a look at the openQA page.

Posted in Factory, Quality Assurance | 4 Comments »

updated permissions handling in 11.4

November 24th, 2010 by

In addition to supporting file system capabilities (fate#307254) I’ve also updated the permissions handling in 11.4 slightly.

There have been complaints that every SuSEconfig run also calls SuSEconfig.permissions which leads to changed file permissions at unexpected times. Therefore I’ve modified SuSEconfig.permissions to only actually set permissions when called explicitly (ie SuSEconfig –module permissions). When called by a generic SuSEconfig run SuSEconfig.permissions now only shows files with wrong permissions but doesn’t actually fix them anymore.

Since packages that have files with special permission handling do call SuSEconfig.permissions explicitly via %run_permissions in %post the change above alone isn’t sufficient to avoid surprises. Therefore I’ve introduced the new macro %set_permissions. This macro expects file names as arguments. Only permissions of those files are adjusted then. To notify packagers of that new method an rpmlint check now issues an informal message if %run_permissions is used.

Posted in Base System, Distribution, Factory, Security | 2 Comments »

10 obscure Linux office applications

November 9th, 2010 by

Last night I was trying to beauty up my Kraft Homepage a bit and while doing that I realised that half of the allowed transfer volume that is coming with the cheap hosting contract is already eaten up for November. Investigating how that could have happened I found out that Kraft was mentioned in a very nice blog called 10 obscure Linux office applications you need to try. It introduces some interesting apps out of the whole mass of all FOSS apps in that specific area. Kraft is mentioned there, which is of course nice, the author seems to like Kraft. I am, however, not really sure why the word obscure is in the headline of the blog, do you know 😉 ?

But the other nine applications are also really interesting, such as goldendict, which combines multiple dictionaries on the desktop or TOra which is a cool database GUI. We do not have them in Factory nor
Contrib.

The next openSUSE release 11.4 is slowly but surely coming up and I think it makes sense to add cool software now. Maybe the listed apps in the blog are ideas to spice up our distro a bit with good software? I volunteer to take care of Kraft 😉

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Posted in Boosters, Factory, KDE | 2 Comments »

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