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update from the openSUSE Boosters

October 21st, 2009 by

While openSUSE 11.2 gets closer and closer, all of the Boosters are mostly busy making sure RC1 and the final release are good.  But we’re finding some time to work on our Boosting projects.  On the umbrella site for all opensuse.org sites front, a design and user profiles are being developed .  The factory.opensuse.org status site concept is being developed in collaboration with the Maintenance team, so that it will be used for seeing the state of maintenance work (ie online updates) for released openSUSE versions.  We’re analysing the Build Service web client code for how to hook in there, and several team members are brushing up their Ruby skills.  The reorganize contributor documentation squad are discussing a new structure on the opensuse-wiki mailing list.

If you have any feedback on these ideas you can find us on the opensuse-project mailing list or on -wiki as above.  If you want to help out, we’ll be using opensuse-boosters@opensuse.org in future.

Busily,

The Propaganda Minister

Posted in Build Service, Documentation, Wiki | Comments Off on update from the openSUSE Boosters

Making technology Previews succeed – OSC 09 Unconference session notes

October 9th, 2009 by

I did an Unconference at openSUSE Conference 2009 titled: Roads Less Travelled – Making Technology Previews succeed“.  More number of people than I had expected participated in the unconference session. I wanted to make the discussion notes (rough) available to a wider audience so that we could act on some of those:

Often Technology Previews are not solving their purpose. The objective of this session was to discuss, find out how we could get better feedback on Technology Previews and make them better.

The discussion is focused primarily on these areas:

  • Advertise the feature through proper channels, places
  • Make it easy enough for users to try out and provide feedback
  • Make it less risk-prone
  • What stops users from trying out?
  • Provide better documentation?

Key discussion points, suggestions:

  • Announcement in opensuse.org main page/wiki could grab the attention of community members who could help test Technology Previews.
  • Reduce hassles in providing feedback. For e.g Perhaps facility without authentication/Single-signon?
  • Easy ways/methods to provide feedback/input
  • Bug/Issue reporting made easy, command line tools?
  • Text area to provide feedback (as opposed a authentication based system).
  • Create a dedicated page for preview for e.g. previews.opensuse.org
  • irc channel for previews? (Discussion on all TPs, User testing one TP might get interested in another)
  • Announcement in openSUSE Weekly news could help
  • More Blogs, Articles, Whitepapers etc.. (blog entries should have provision for giving comments)
  • Perhaps, try to get some help from documentation team?
  • Provide instructions, mechanisms to safely try out without breaking things.
  • Additional information about new technology while the community tries to use the old technology For e.g. while a user tries to do nfsv3 mount providing an informational message that NFSv4 is available and can be used
  • Suggest using a VM
  • Caution about what might break and what might not (Make community feel less riskier to try out).

Please feel free to comment on what might work and if you have any more suggestion.

The short presentation I used to introduce the topic can be found here: http://files.opensuse.org/opensuse/en/d/de/Roads_Less_Travelled.pdf

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Posted in Distribution, Documentation, Quality Assurance | Comments Off on Making technology Previews succeed – OSC 09 Unconference session notes

DocBook-XML die Zweite!

September 21st, 2009 by

(Disclaimer: This post is mainly intended for a German audience and describes my book about DocBook XML. For this reason, as an exception, the following text is written in German only.)

Nach ca. 1½ Jahren und unzähligen Stunden, dem Verschleiß von hunderten von Korrekturseiten und Stiften, einer überstandenen Druckerei-Pleite, viel verbrauchtem Gehirnschmalz, einem unwilligem PC und über 1000 Revisionen im SVN-Repository, ist jetzt die 2. Auflage meines Buches  “DocBook-XML — Medienneutrales und plattformunabhängiges Publizieren” beim Millin-Verlag erschienen. 5 Jahre nach der ersten Auflage.

(more…)

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Posted in Documentation | Comments Off on DocBook-XML die Zweite!

New Layout in Town

September 17th, 2009 by

Creating a new (book) layout is both challenging and fun. On the one side you have to observe different parameters like legibility, simplicity, and aesthetic. On the other side, you can play with fonts, margins, styles and all the other great things in typography and design! 🙂

It’s the first time for the Start-Up Guide to get a new layout after some years. The result is the new, so called, pocket layout.

(more…)

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Posted in Artwork, Documentation | Comments Off on New Layout in Town

Call for Participation: openSUSE Weekly News

August 16th, 2009 by

Hello Mates,

since 2 Month our Call for Participation is running. We would like to hear more feedback. Please tell us your likes and unlikes, your Wishes and so on. Please share your Ideas with us. You can drop your ideas here:

http://forums.opensuse.org/surveys-polls/416228-how-opensuse-news.html

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Posted in Documentation, Marketing | Comments Off on Call for Participation: openSUSE Weekly News

Twitter Statusupdate via CLI (Shell)

August 13th, 2009 by

This was an interesting Idea, and i have found it on Tips4Linux. Based on: http://tips4linux.com/update-your-twitter-status-from-the-linux-command-line/

T4L: You can easily update your Twitter status from the CLI by using this one simple command:
curl -u user:password -d status=”Your status message” http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml
where user is your username and password is your Twitter password entered in plaintext. Replace the text Your status message with anything you wish.

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Posted in Documentation, Miscellaneous, Usability | 1 Comment »

HowTo: Regular cleanup the Tempfolders

July 19th, 2009 by

If you would like to cleanup regularly your System, we presenting the following Steps!

(more…)

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Posted in Documentation, lizards.openSUSE.org | 2 Comments »

Howto: How to create an Userpage

July 2nd, 2009 by

Novell account
==============
First of all, in order to access the forums, build service, features, and bugzilla information a Novell user account must be created.  To create an account visit: https://secure-www.novell.com/selfreg/jsp/createOpenSuseAccount.jsp?target=http://www.opensuse.org and fill out the Form.

Login
=====
After creating a Novell account, you should automatically be logged in and directed to: http://en.opensuse.org/Welcome_to_openSUSE.org.  If you are not automatically logged in, navigate to en.opensuse.org, select “Login” at the top right, and enter your user name and password.

User page
=========
Once you have completed logging in, your user name will be displayed at the top right of the page.
Clicking on your user name will display your user page.  Since you have not edited your page yet, it should be relatively empty.

To edit your user page click on “edit”.  A “Wiki” text entry box will be displayed, allowing you to enter information you would like to share about yourself, such as, your Name, email address, or instant messenger information.

Picture uploading
=================
If you would like to add a picture of yourself, navigate to http://en.opensuse.org/Special:Upload and select a file you wish to upload.  Take note of the statement:

“To include the image in a page, use a link in the form [[Image:file.jpg]], [[Image:file.png|alt text]] or [[Media:file.ogg]] for directly linking to the file.”

This statement describes how to link/bind the freshly uploaded picture to your user page.

Bind your picture to your page by navigating back to your user page and clicking edit.  Click the “Embedded Image” icon.  If you are not sure which icon is the “Embedded Image” icon, hover your mouse over the various icons to display a description of each.

Once you have clicked the correct icon, the text: [[Image:file.jpg]] will be displayed in the “Wiki” text box.  change the file name to the name of the picture you just uploaded.

Click Show preview to see a preview of your changes or Save page to commit the changes to your user page.

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Posted in Documentation, lizards.openSUSE.org, Marketing | 2 Comments »

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 »

South East Linux Fest

June 15th, 2009 by

This week I attended SELF (South East Linux Fest) at Clemson University here in South Carolina. It was a great day! I met and worked the openSUSE booth with Joe Brockmeier aka “Zonker”.  There were lots of enthusiastic attendees both from the Linux and Education communities.  All of the Educators that came to visit the booth where extremely pleased with the work the EDU team has completed and If I had been able to supply them, many would have taken copies of the EDU Li-F-E disk and Sugar disk that I had running on my laptop.  Cyberog and the team really have hit a home run! I had with me a thin client setup and did several demonstrations  on the ease of installation and setup.  Kiwi-LTSP is one of the most exciting products for Education I have seen in a long time.  Easy-LTSP, the openSUSE configuration utility for LTSP, is by far the easiest configuration utility available to LTSP users. Combine Easy-LTSP and Italc (a computerlab monitoring suite) and in 5 minutes a teacher can setup a computer lab and either display the lesson on each\all screen or capture a students screen for display to others or simple monitoring of all screens.

I sat through a couple of presenters and I was most excited to hear Chad Wollenburg from VA. Chad is a kindred spirit , he has been slowly moving his district to open source for a few years now and he started much the same way most of us have, his school district could not afford to relicense Microsoft office.  He too, had to show that Open Office was compatible and comparable to MSOffice and explain the over 200,000.o0$ savings to his district using small steps and insider advocates as his method of operation. I am glad to meet so many people dedicated to reducing the “criminal” costs of licensing.

Our project itself past another milestone this week, I am proud to present the OBS-Education forum. http://forums.opensuse.org/obs-projects/obs-education/      Please feel free to post questions specific to openSUSE Education development, bugs, enhancements, etc.

Posted in Documentation, Education, Events, lizards.openSUSE.org | Comments Off on South East Linux Fest

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