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Archive for the ‘Distribution’ Category

FLISoL 2010 in Panama City

May 7th, 2010 by

FLISoL 2010 at Ciudad del Saber looked good with several Linux Distributions and different open source applications. It was a small building with a lot people in transit. With three people and only two months to organize this event it was a successful achievement because our goal was accomplished: be on the eyes of governmental organizations, ONG, business, academics, students, users, professionals. Some media communications groups give some interviews. After this event we are receiving more invitations to give a talks for education and participate on some projects than ever before.  Click on link below to watch the photos

http://picasaweb.google.com/RICARDO.A.CHUNG/FLISoL_2010#

Promoting Open Source Communities in Panama

May 7th, 2010 by

Universidad Interamericana de Panamá on March 25, 2010 was the scenario for an opensource and Linux party. Several Linux Distros like Ubuntu, CAELinux, Fedora, Gentoo, Debian, openSUSE and organizations like CIDETYS and business like ELCONIX did make presence and their users and members gave a Talk for students, academics, users and professionals. Those Talks were transmited simultaneously by video streaming to the Laureate Universities Network to promote opensource software contributions, trainings, certifications and community participation, job opportunities. Click on to watch photos
http://picasaweb.google.com/RICARDO.A.CHUNG/UIP_250310#

Ambassador, Panama, openSUSE

This event did open a collaboration between communities , enterprises and Universidad Interamericana de Panama to promote open source  and Linux certifications and Linux diplomados.

All open source communities ambassadors will organize their groups looking to keep their members up to date with knowledge.

Some CAPATEC (Cámara Panameña de Tecnología) members, like ELCONIX, has showed higher intention to support  some Open Source communities sponsoring education, certification, and some events like FLISoL and Freedom Software Day.

Mirtha Rodriguez, UIP,  Systems Engineering Faculty Dean, did give us a great liaison and invited us to keep working with their students at UIP for future events.

A Blog on Sourceforge

May 6th, 2010 by

A little more than two weeks ago we released Kraft version 0.40, the first version of Kraft based on KDE 4 software platform. The release went fine as far as I can tell, no terrible bugs were reported yet. Some work went into the new website since then, but in general I need a few weeks break from Kraft and spend my evenings outside enjoying spring time.

Today, Sourceforge posted a blog about Kraft after they kind of mail-interviewed me. It’s nice, it really focuses on the things also important to me. This might be another step towards a broader user base for Kraft. I say that because one could have the impression that the number of people actually really using Kraft could be larger. A high number of users is one of the fundamental criteria for a successful free software project and thus I am constantly trying to understand whats the reason for the impression or the fact.

The first idea is that the Kraft project simply does something wrong in the way a project should be driven. But there are releases, there is a so far ok website, there are communication channels with information on it and people answering questions. Of course, it always could be done better, but I hope and believe we are not doing too bad. Marketing could be more, that’s granted.

The next thing could be that nobody needs this kind of software. But there are quite some companies doing this kind of software in the commercial space. So there must be a market. Actually I think the market is huge. People are writing invoices all over the world and I bet many of them are not really satisfied with the way they do it usually which makes Kraft at least an option to try for them.

And this might lead to better path: Probably these people do not know that the option exists. They simply haven’t heard about Kraft yet and if they would there is a good chance that they would not believe that it is free etc pp. And this is probably not specific to Kraft but also applies, of course much more weaker, to larger projects like openSUSE or KDE: A lot of people from the ‘real world’ don’t know about free software communities, the ideas behind and the benefits for users of the software. That sounds strange to us, as this is our daily reality, but start with asking your parents or non computer related friends if they really understand what it is about. Imagine what people know who have no computer job nor -hobby nor know you!

What consequences can that have for us? Well, we could decide to skip this group of people. That would mean, beside some other effects, that Kraft would not make sense any more and I don’t like that. It probably should influence the way we see the ‘product management’ aspect of our projects. For me, ‘product management’ is often equivalent to “take care that the result is especially useful to non computer scientists” (which is probably not what PM really is about) and the focus on that is very important and the precondition for the next point.

We might have to take our projects even more out of the geek niche and go to places where the ‘real world’ happens. That is difficult for various reasons. First, it means that we have to start to explain again from start, and maybe also get questions where the answer is not obvious. Furthermore it might have practical issues, because for example fairs for handcrafter utilities charge seriously for software boothes which is not the case if we present projects on FOSS events.
On the other hand its easy because we all just have to spread the word even more and tell everybody about free software, our projects and free culture. And try to think as if we weren’t free software people. I know, most of us do already what they can and that’s great 🙂

Preparation for Mounting /var/run as tmpfs

May 3rd, 2010 by

Feature #303793 proposes to mount /var/run as tmpfs.

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Guest Blog: Weekly Minutes from the Testing Team (Larry Finger)

May 1st, 2010 by

Guest Blog from Larry Finger

For general news about the openSUSE Testing Core Team, please see http://tinyurl.com/24n8ufe and the links within it.

This has been a quiet week for the team, at least as a group. Individually, we have been testing 11.3 M6 since its release on April 29. In addition, we are preparing for our next team meeting to be held May 3 at 17:00 UTC. If you interested in our group, please join us on the #opensuse-testing channel on the Freenode IRC Network -irc://irc.freenode.net/opensuse-testing.

In the testing front, 11.3 M6 now installs on x86_64 systems, which is an improvement over M5. There are two bugs on the “Most Annoying Bugs” list at http://en.opensuse.or /Bugs:Most_Annoying_Bugs_11.3_dev, both have been repaired. That web page also lists workarounds.

A member of the Testing Team, Bernhard M. Wiedemann,  has been preparing videos showing the steps for installation from various media. Links to these demonstrations are available at http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2010-04/msg00447.html

making of the openSUSE install video

April 29th, 2010 by

Videos of software can have many good uses. You can have tutorials or a quick-start how-to illustrated by a video that shows the steps you need to go.

However, creating such videos takes some effort. Especially hard to make is a video of an operating-system installation, which includes a bootloader and other low-level software where you can not run capture-software on the OS.

Being a member of the Testing Core Team, I wanted to automate the typical openSUSE installation workflow up to the point where the installed system first started, because if installation media would not get to that point, it could prevent testers to try the remaining software.

To do this automation, I employed KVM (the much fancied Kernel Virtual Machine). As it is a variant of QEMU, it also has all those many useful options to adjust its behaviour to ones liking. One of those options allows KVM to be remote-controlled via the management-console. You can (among others) send key-presses, move/click the mouse and capture screenshots.

Putting all this together, I got a series of many images. So the next logical step was to run ffmpeg2theora on those images to create with free tools and free codecs a .ogv video file that has an even smaller size and better quality than mpeg[124]. Plus it can be easily viewed in firefox&co at high speed.

The results can be seen on http://www3.zq1.de/bernhard/mirror/opensuse/video/

This is still work in progress. KVM might have issues. e.g today I found, that I could speed up the network from 290kB/s to over 30MB/s by changing the emulated network device model from e1000 to virtio. With this, a network install from a fresh proxy cache took only 34 minutes instead of 95.

There is some more info in  http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2010-04/msg00439.html

(note that my initial test-runs were flawed because they used old MS5 packages and thus hit well known bugs in those)

What do you think: What can I improve? Can this technique be put to other good uses?

Trophy from IBM Develothon 2010

April 27th, 2010 by

Went to IBM Develothon here in Baroda(Vadodara) today, did a small presentation on openSUSE Edu Li-f-e during the “unconference”. This is what I brought home 🙂

Click to zoom

Guest Blog: Testing Team Minutes (Week 16)

April 23rd, 2010 by

Guest Blog from Larry Finger:

The openSUSE Testing Core Team (TCT) has been asked to contribute to the Weekly News on a regular basis. We are grateful for the opportunity.

The TCT is a group of 25 volunteers that are charged with helping the openSUSE developers test each new release. Our objectives and membership are given on our wiki site:

http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Testing_Core_Team

The TCT was organized in the middle of the 11.2 development cycle, thus we are still learning our role; however, it is clear that we need the involvement of the openSUSE community at large to conduct proper
testing. That is why we appreciate the invitation to participate here.

In particular, the community can help in the following ways:

* Publish Bug Reports in the Bugzilla (http://bugzilla.novell.com/).

* Inform us of testing that worked. With this, we have an idea of the
test coverage.

* Participate in our regular IRC meetings. See http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Testing_Core_Team/Meetings. During the  development phase of a new release, our meetings are held at 17:00 UTC on the Monday following the release of a new Milestone or Release Candidate. Accordingly, our next meeting will be on May 3, assuming that M6 is released during the week of April 26. The transcripts of previous meetings are posted on the site. If there is a topic you would like to see covered in an upcoming meeting, please send a private mail to user lwfinger on the openSUSE site. Our meetings are held on the
#opensuse-testing channel on the Freenode IRC Network -irc://irc.freenode.net/opensuse-testing. All are welcome.

oSC09 videos

April 16th, 2010 by

Well it’s been almost seven months since our inaugural conference, and there were a load of videos taken. The problem was that our usual VT gurus have been unavailable to do any of the editing etc. So the raw video has languished on the servers waiting for some kind soul to help edit them.

After multiple calls for help and nudges from the marketing team, I decided to see if I could slot it in anywhere (yay me, I’m such a hero :-P) Thankfully I had some brilliant help from SankarP who refreshed my memory on how to edit video, thanks chief!

Currently only Day 1 of the conference is available, you can view online (flash) or download (ogg) the talks from the openSUSE TV channel on BlipTV. I am working on getting a channel on YouTube to enable a wider reach, as some people have bandwidth issues with Blip. You can also subscribe to the feeds in multiple formats – rss, miro, itunes.

If anyone has any openSUSE related video that they would like put on the channel, then please let me know 🙂

Call for testing: unzip feature

April 7th, 2010 by

Hello Planet!

Have you ever faced a bug like this bnc#540598 ?

When you create  zip archive with non-English filenames and try to unpack it on openSUSE, filenames within archive become unreadable. It can irritate, isn’t it?

It seems as if we found a solution for Russian language. We tested it and it works for us.

It would be helpful if some of you could test your local language. And check whether core functionality still works 😉

Here is a list of  languages that are potentially affected by this bug: Ukrainian,Belorussian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Estonian, French, German,Hungarian, Italian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Polish, Slovak, Spanish,Slovenian, Swedish.

So it is worth to test them in the first place.

The reproducer is pretty simple:

  • create zip archive on windows with file named in you local language
  • transfer archive to openSUSE system
  • unpack it
  • see if filenames are readable

What needs to be tested:

  • if this bug applicable to you language
  • if core functionality of unzip still works

Please share your experience by commenting on bug.

Package to test located in Lazy_Kent home project

Thanks in advance