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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 »

BugDay

November 22nd, 2010 by

At the last openSUSE project meeting and after the discussion about “zombie” bugs on the opensuse-project mailing list, a small team of volunteers agreed to organize a Bug Day on Saturday, November 27th. What is a Bug Day? This is a day when many people from the community help to triage bugs in Bugzilla. It is a good and easy way to get involved in the openSUSE project!

Here is what you need to participate:
– a recent version of openSUSE (11.3 or a milestone of 11.4). It’s okay to run openSUSE in a virtual machine.
– an IRC client to interact with the other participants
– good mood 🙂

A small team will organize the event by providing lists of bugs, and will be available to guide new contributors if needed. So it will be easy to help!

For this specific Bug Day, we will focus on the “zombie” bug reports: those are reports against old versions of openSUSE (openSUSE 10.x and 11.0). As some reports might still be valid, we don’t want to close all of them automatically. We will therefore check all those reports to see if they are still valid in the latest version of openSUSE (11.3 or a milestone of 11.4). The goal is to close those bug reports if possible, or, if they are still valid, to move them to a current version of openSUSE so that they’re not lost in limbo. So during a full day, people come on irc and help each other triage bugs.

Please note that this is only for openSUSE bugs (living in bugzilla.novell.com), but a solution for some bugs might be to forward them upstream.

Come on #opensuse-bug (freenode) on a Saturday 27.11.2010, we’ll be glad to have you join the fun! 😉

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Posted in Contrib, Distribution, Quality Assurance, Usability | Comments Off on BugDay

Handling of Features in openFATE

November 12th, 2010 by

The boosters have been working on enhancing feature handling in openFATE so that features can be evaluated and implemented by everybody. The current state of the development is visible in the openFATE preview. Now we can start evaluating features so that they get implemented.

openFATE Preview

The openFATE screening team needs further members, if you’re interested, please add yourself to the list and start getting familiar with openFATE. To get familiar with it, it’s best starting with openSUSE 11.3 clean up.

We had a first meeting about openFATE on IRC yesterday and will have another one in two weeks time.

Right now the major tasks for the screening team are:

  • Evaluate features for openSUSE 11.4
  • Push features forward
  • Define a proper process on how to evaluate features
  • Cleanup features from openSUSE 11.3

I have written a proposal for the feature process and would like feedback on that one on the opensuse-project mailing list.

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Posted in Distribution | 2 Comments »

openSUSE medical team releases stable version 0.0.6

November 11th, 2010 by

Some month our team was busy, and so you hasn’t heard about us. But we are alive. We are pleased to announce our new openSUSE Distribution who still medical needs.

Whats happened? In the beginning of the project we tried to package some stuff just as beginning. Then we published 2 pre versions, but there we found some things to fix. We have worked hard for you, and now we are pleased to announce openSUSE medical version 0.0.6 with fresh packaged packages.

What’s new?

FreeMedForms (FMF) is a multi-platform software (available on MacOS, Linux, FreeBSD, Windows), multilingual, free and open source, released under the new BSD license.
FreeMedForms is developed by medical doctors and is mainly intended for health professionals. Currently, the suite is under development. It is available only for testing purposes. The main objective of FreeMedForms is to manage the electronic medical records based on your medical practice or the practice of clinical research groups. Your records will be fully customizable through the use of plugins. Some parts of the suite are already operational and usable in practice as the prescriber FreeDiams (formerly DrugsInteractions). If you like to use FreeMedForms, you have to login yourself in the application as user “admin” with password “admin”.

FreeDiams prescriber is the result of FreeMedForms prescriber plugins built into a standalone application.
FreeDiams is a multi-platform (MacOS, Linux, FreeBSD, Windows), free and open source released under the GPLv3 license. It is developed by medical doctors and is intended for use by these same professionals. It can be used alone to prescribe and / or test drug interactions within a prescription. It can be linked to any application thanks to its command line parameters. FreeDiams can use several drugs database. Are currently available: Drugs database FDA_USA, the french AFSSAPS drugs database, the Canadian drugs databases (HCDPD), and the South African (SAEPI) are available. Drugs interactions calculation is available for all these drugs databases beginning with the upcoming v0.5.0.

The GNUmed project builds free, liberated open source Electronic Medical Record software in multiple languages to assist and improve longitudinal care (specifically in ambulatory settings, i.e. multi-professional practices and clinics). It is made available at no charge and is capable of running on GNU/Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. It is developed by a handful of medical doctors and programmers from all over the world. It can be useful to anyone documenting the health of patients including, but not limited to, doctors, physical therapists, occupational therapists, acupuncturists, nurses, psychologists …

TEMPO is open source software for 3D visualization of brain electrical activity. TEMPO accepts EEG file in standard EDF format and creates animated sequence of topographic maps. Topographic maps are generated over 3D head model and user is able to navigate around head and examine maps from different viewpoints. Most mapping parameters are adjustable through appropriate graphical user interface controls. Also, individual topographic maps could be saved in PNG format for future examination or publishing.

But the openSUSE medical Distribution has more inside the DVD. The openSUSE medical team has hand-selected which package to add into the Distribution.

So we can say, that we have a good solution for Doctors, Students, Clinics and other people who trying to spread the word about Open Source.

We also have added a complete openOffice.org package, multimedia-codecs and multimediaplayer.  So you can play with different inputformats.  And the last addition was the KMyMoney Package, so you can know how to make money 🙂

Thanks a lot on this time for the Upstream Coder: Eric Maeker from France,  Sebastian Siebert from Germany and the TEMPO Team.

Technically: From this version on we have fixed the *.desktop files. Now all medical desktop applications can found under Menu/Education/Science/. So it is easier for our users to find the needed software. Tomorrow i’ll starting to create a list of “Must have” applications for our project. So every Packager can choose the the product he like to package. But we need more Packagers in our team.  So if you know the BuildService and don’t know what should you do, just join the team.

But, where you can get this nice stuff?

You can get it there: http://susegallery.com/a/NETBqB/opensuse-medicalos11332bitkde4

How can you see our good Team?

You can visit our teampage: http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Medical_team The site explains how you can be a part of our Mailinglist or Project.

All the other things you can find in our Portalpage: http://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Medical There you can find all important Links, and how to file a Bug or how to drop a openFATE Entry.

The Horizon: We can see good clouds on the horizon. ATM our team plans a collaboration between openSUSE and Fedora and Debian. The goal is that we can create new packages and share the package and all needed Informations and Experiences with other medical teams on the screen. We hope to arrange a shared Guideline for packaging medical Software and find new Ideas and Enhencements for the medical Community. Thats our Part for “Collaboration across Borders”.

Now enjoy your openSUSE medical.

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Posted in Derivative | Comments Off on openSUSE medical team releases stable version 0.0.6

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 »

openFATE Screening Meeting

November 8th, 2010 by

With the progress the boosters made on the openFATE preview instance, we can now edit features and handle them. A screening team has been formed some time ago and now it’s possible to really start working on features.

I’d like to invite everybody that’s interested to join the openFATE team and discuss how to handle features on Thursday, 11th of November, 16:00 UTC on IRC freenode, channel #openSUSE-project.

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Posted in Distribution, Factory | Comments Off on openFATE Screening Meeting

A new Flavor: openSUSE Invis Server

October 28th, 2010 by

Invis Server Beside many other amazing things which happened at the openSUSE Conference 2010, Stefan Schäfer gave a talk about his project called Invis Server. It is a very specific server solution for the small and medium business, based on the openSUSE distribution. The Invis Server is perfect software for all production installations in small business use cases, also to be maintained by consultants in that space.

All needed services such as printing, mail, web and file server, database and groupware are there and get preconfigured at installation. For daily operation in the users network, there is a simple yet powerful web interface.

In the discussion after the presentation it turned out that Stefan would be fine with moving the Invis Server Project nearer to the openSUSE project and get a larger community find together to power up the project on openSUSE distributions.

As a result we decided to found the openSUSE Invis Project. The idea is to create an openSUSE Distribution flavor with solid packages coming from openSUSE Factory together with some specifically packaged sources ready to power the Invis Server. The openSUSE Buildservice will be used to build the needed packages and create the product images. The first tasks will be to clean up the package list and do some packaging to be able to create a convenient openSUSE-Invis CD.

The openSUSE-Invis Mailinglist was set up and is waiting for your subscription. Please show up there soon to help us to move this idea forward.

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Posted in Boosters, Derivative, Distribution, Factory | 7 Comments »

Read The Fabulous Manual

October 26th, 2010 by

We have a new place where we collect static documentation like manuals, user guides, quick start pages, developer documentation … and so on.
This new place is: rtfm.opensuse.org doc.opensuse.org.
Our “fabulous manuals” are also accessible at: doc.opensuse.org (in case you don’t like the word “fabulous”).

A few days ago Thomas Schraitle already wrote about this site before it was in a state that we wanted to announce – so sorry for any confusion this might have created.

This site is not meant to be a competitor to the documentation in the wiki. It was rather born from the need to have a central place to publish generated static documentation. Content on rtfm is not meant to be edited. If you want to contribute documentation we very welcome this in the wiki and encourage  you to link back to rtfm where applicable. The pages on rtfm are static but however they will be updated automatically upon changes (new releases of a project or product).

Currently we have published some great user guides and quick start pages for openSUSE (KDE, Gnome, Security, …) and SLES (AppArmor, Admin Guide, kvm, Xen, Security, …) as well as a user and vendor guide for WebYaST. There is also developer documentation available for YaST and Zypp (libzypp, satsolver) development.
In the next days or weeks we will add more documentation as soon as it is ready to be published.

Update:
We changed the domain name of that site. To read the fabulous manuals please use and link only to doc.opensuse.org. The domain docs.opensuse.org will be alias for it – please only link to doc and do not use rtfm anymore. Thanks for your appreciation.

Posted in Distribution, Documentation | 3 Comments »

OBS 2.1: Status of SuperH (sh4) support with QEMU

October 24th, 2010 by

With established ARM support in OBS the as well as emulated MIPS and PowerPC is getting more mature, the last big embedded architecture not working in OBS with QEMU user mode was SH4. QEMU developers community had done a lot of work in improving QEMU user mode during the last months, so I can proudly present with currently only a few patches to QEMU git master OBS builds working with the SH4 port of Debian Sid. The new QEMU 0.13 released recently is a big milestone for this.

Another news is that I had fixed the bugs in Virtual Machine builds (build script) when using them with some architectures like PowerPC 32bit and SH4. So now also the combination of using for example KVM (XEN should also work) in a worker together with ARM, MIPS, PowerPC and SH4 is working. The appropriate fixes are in one of the next build script releases (if not even released already now with OBS 2.1, I have to check that). You can select architecture “sh4” with OBS 2.1 and also start a scheduler with “sh4”.

With the use of the QEMU User Mode, you can build also accelerated native cross toolchains for your host architecture so time critical parts like the compiler can run without the emulator. This works with .deb as well as with .rpm based backages. The MeeGo Project as well as the openSUSE Port to ARM uses this technique to provide an optimum between compatibility and performance. It means you can mix natively build packages and use cross toolchains on it. The “CBinstall:” feature helps you to use native or cross builds automatically depending on if your build host is a native machine or a x86 machine with cross build. In summary, we have the current classics of linux embedded archs together now in OBS: ARM, x86, MIPS 32, PowerPC 32 and SH4.

I have uploaded the fixed QEMU package to the OBS project openSUSE:Tools:Unstable inside the package “qemu-devel” after some more testing. I have of course also a OBS meta prjconf file working with Debian Sid. The SH4 port of Debian Sid you can find at Debian Ports Site.

And last but not least I would like to thank Riku Voipio of the Debian Project, QEMU project and MeeGo project and other major contributors during the QEMU 0.13 development cycle for the restless work on QEMU user mode improvements. In case of KVM, QEMU is used even twice, with QEMU-KVM as well as QEMU User Mode. I am sure I had forgotten other important people, so thanks to them also.

Posted in Build Service, Distribution, Packaging, Toolchain, Virtualization | 3 Comments »

Documentation

October 13th, 2010 by

Hi folks,

this post is just request for all obs-packagers. Please, don’t forget write some documentation about your projects (which you maintain or develop). I mean, documentation for developers. This make more easy to understand logic of program, connection between some modules inside or interfaces between widget/applet and “system/hardware part”. For sure, comments in source code (or in changelog) help, but some times they give not so much clarity.

This is not so complicated to write one-two pages about project, which you hack. This also can save time of new developers. They will not ask you about architecture of project, and that will save your time too 😉

I don’t know how will be better to do it: use wiki (create a new page) or add just text-file in source project. Anyway it’s not so important where will be this documentation, main things that this documentation will be exist 🙂

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Posted in Build Service, Contrib, Documentation, Packaging, Usability | 1 Comment »

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