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Linux Distribution Popularity Across the Globe

August 22nd, 2008 by

openSUSE popularity around the world

Royal Pingdom has issued an article about “Linux Distribution Popularity Across the Globe”. They have included eight common Linux distributions in their survey: Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Fedora, Debian, Red Hat, Mandriva, Slackware and Gentoo and used Google Insights for Search, for determining the results.

Below is the summary from their results :

  • Ubuntu is most popular in Italy and Cuba.
  • OpenSUSE is most popular in Russia and the Czech Republic.
  • Red Hat is most popular in Bangladesh and Nepal.
  • Debian is most popular in Cuba.
  • Cuba is in the top five (interest-wise) of three of the eight distributions in this survey.
  • Indonesia is in the top five of four of the distributions.
  • Russia and the Czech Republic are in the top five of five of the distributions.
  • The United States is not in the top five of any of the distributions.

There is an interesting result, Rusia, Czech and Moldova beating Germany about openSUSE popularity 😉 . Oh, of course this is not complete survey, and it is not the weakness of openSUSE itself. In the other side, the survey show us that openSUSE gained much popularity in outside Germany.

Another interesting result, congratulation for Indonesian openSUSE Community, Indonesia is in top five (number #5 of 5) of openSUSE popularity in the world and Indonesian openSUSE Community contributed in the survey results to make Indonesia as top five of four of the distributions.

Please navigate to the survey results for another interesting results and detail statictics.

Posted in Miscellaneous | Comments Off on Linux Distribution Popularity Across the Globe

Hamradio packages ready !

June 19th, 2008 by

Tim and I updated the Amateur radio (hamradio) packages and made them ready for 11.0 .

Amateur radio (also Hamradio) is both a hobby and a service in which participants, called “hams”, use various types of radio communications equipment (also homebrew) to communicate with other radio amateurs for public service, recreation and self-training.

The repository is available at http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/hamradio/ .

You can also install single packages via the 1-click-Installer of the software-search-portal at http://software.opensuse.org/search or add the repository to YaST2/zypper.

YaST2:

Open the repository editor and add http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/hamradio/<your distribution version>

Example: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/hamradio/openSUSE_11.0/

zypper:

10.1: zypper ar -r http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/hamradio/SUSE_Linux_10.1/hamradio.repo

10.2: zypper ar -r http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/hamradio/openSUSE_10.2/hamradio.repo

10.3: zypper ar -r http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/hamradio/openSUSE_10.3/hamradio.repo

11.0 zypper ar -r http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/hamradio/openSUSE_11.0/hamradio.repo

Here’s a list of available packages:

7plus
acfax
aldo
aprsd
as296-tty
ax25-apps
ax25-doc
ax25spyd
ax25-tools
axssh
axw3
baken
baycomepp
conlogv
cwdaemon
digi_ned
dpbox
dxc
fbbdoc
fbbsrv
fldigi
fltk
fpac
glfer
gmfsk
gnuradio
gpredict
gpsk31
gpsman
gpsmanshp
grig
HamFax
hamlib
hamlog
hf
ibp
kamplus
klog
kpsk
kptc
ktrack
libax25
libgdal
libgeos
libgeotiff
libhdf4
libproj4
linkt
linrad
minimuf
mtrack
multimon
node
qgrid
qrq
qsstv
rspfd
sdcc
shapelib
soundmodem
spandsp
splat
svxlink
tfkiss
tkconv
tlf
tnt
twpsk
unixcw
wxapt
xastir
xcall
xcircuit
xconvers
xdemorse
xdx
xfhell
xlog
xoscope
xsmc-calc
xwxapt
yfklog
z8530drv-utils

Thats > 80 packages in our repository.

I you find a bug you can report it HERE .

vy 73 es 55 de

DG7GT es DL9PF

Posted in Build Service, Desktop, Miscellaneous, Packaging | 1 Comment »

Converting Babylon Dictionaries to Stardict Format in OpenSuse

June 14th, 2008 by

This blog does not add any information to the documentation you can find around. Anyway, it is not too long since someone was able to make Babylon dictionaries usable by software other than the proprietary Babylon application. And they have been trying for years… so it has not been a trivial step 🙂

If you do not know Stardict, you can get it from Yast. This is the official site.

A few dictionaries are also linked – ready and free to use – at Stardict website. However, I used Babylon when I was a Windows user and i have to admit that their dictionaries remain unbeaten. Matters not what language you want, mono-language or bi-language, technical, general purpose etc etc… they just rock!

You can get tons of dictionaries for free from Babylon website:

Now, go to Yast Software Manager and search for dictconv. Alternatively, you can install from source (which is what I personally did).

Installing is very easy: ./configure and then make all install

Now you’re all set. To use it to convert:

cd to the directory where you have the .BGL dictionaries and type: dictconv INPUT_FILENAME.BGL -o OUTPUT_FILENAME.ifo

Pay attention to the extension: must be .ifo. This will generate 3 files for each BGL dictionary: .ifo, .idx, .dict

Place all these 3 files in /usr/share/stardict/dic/ creating a separate folder for each dictionary. Then rebook Stardict and go to Manage Dictionary (bottom right): there you can select what comes first, activate or deactivate etc etc

Nothing difficult but def worth, and not only for non native speakers.. there are lots of technical terminology Babylon dictionaries that may well come handy.

Notice that with Stardict you can also implement Pronunciations of the typed words: see Stardict site: “WyabdcRealPeopleTTS package make StarDict pronounce English words. It is just many .wav files. Extract(tar -xjvf) the tarball at /usr/share/”.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sooo well… Have fun ~ Buon divertimento ~ Viel Spaß ~ I que te diviertas ~ Maak plezier ~ ha så roligt [hmm i’m just hoping the dictionaries mentioned just above are not making me do some poor figure for these few transations of “Have Fun”.. cuz i have no idea for any language except Italian :D]

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Posted in Miscellaneous | 8 Comments »

Welcome to the Official openSUSE Forums !

June 10th, 2008 by

After announced on March 11, 2008, official openSUSE forums has been established and starting work for providing better support for openSUSE community on June 09, 2008. Forums merges 3 existing openSUSE forums, suseforums.net, suselinuxsupport.de and the openSUSE support forums at forums.novell.com.

openSUSE forums

You could use single sign-on login with your Novell/openSUSE account. It’s also should be work with your existing account at existing forums but I didn’t try it ;-), so, please try to login before create another new account.

Thanks for all of Novell staff and openSUSE community members who make the dream come true. Quoting what Michael said last 3 month : “a big gain for the whole openSUSE Community !”

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Posted in Miscellaneous | 4 Comments »

Query your XML with xpathgrep.py

June 9th, 2008 by

Maybe you know this problem: You have a couple of XML files and you need a specific information. Probably everybody would think of grep or similar tools first. But maybe your query is a bit more complicated than just a simple piece of text. What do do?

Recently I’ve found a very useful command line utility, which is probably not very known. It’s named xpathgrep.py and you can get it from the lxml repository (you need lxml too). Let’s assume we have the following DocBook file:

File db.xml
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<book>
  <title>My Cooking Book</title>
  <chapter>
    <title>Ingredients</title>
    <para>...</para>
  </chapter>
  <chapter id="howtocook">
    <title>How to cook</title>
    <para>...</para>
  </chapter>
</book>

Now, if I want to get all the titles I have to use a XPath (which is a path description language for XML, similar to Unix/Linux paths, but more powerful). To get all title elements all I have to do is to write //title, regardless of the level:

$ xpathgrep.py //title db.xml

and I get this:

<title>My Cooking Book</title>

<title>Ingredients</title>

<title>How to cook</title>

Nice, isn’t it? Probably you say: “But, hey, I can get this with grep too!” Yes, but if you want just all chapter titles, you have a problem with grep. With XPath and xpathgrep.py I only modify my XPath expression a bit:

$ xpathgrep.py //chapter/title db.xml

Now this reduces the above output just to the wanted chapter titles. And I can extent my query just for all chapters that doesn’t have an id attribute:

$ xpathgrep.py '//chapter[not(@id)]/title' db.xml

(You need the apostroph because of the shell.) The tool outputs this:

<title>Ingredients</title>

That’s nice, isn’t it? There are a lot of more to discover. A few hours ago I send a small patch to the lxml-devel mailinglist to support namespaces. Hopefully, it will be accepted. 🙂

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Toms´ Musings about…

June 7th, 2008 by

Some time ago, I saw this posting about the new blogging platform. Well, I played with this a idea a bit and thought, this would be a good opportunity. 🙂

So who am I? Well, I’m with SUSE (or SuSE, S.u.S.E.?) since 2000 and mainly in charge with documentation. Apart from that, I’m known to attack heavily XML and XSLT stylesheets, to some degree I work also with Python. As you have suspected, yes, I’m also a long time DocBook user (should I say advocate?) and helped migrated our old LaTeX sources to DocBook years ago. And I love to play with typography and the like.

Yes, you guessed it: It’s very likely that I will write about DocBook, XML, XSLT, Python, typography and anything in between. Of course, anything what I think it interesting too.

Stay tuned! 😉

Posted in Miscellaneous | 2 Comments »

Indonesian openSUSE Monthly Meeting-May 2008

May 27th, 2008 by

Last week, Indonesian openSUSE community (openSUSE-ID) had a regular monthly meeting on Saturday, May 24, 2008. for promotional and marketing benefit, we choose Detik.com-currently biggest online newspaper in Indonesia) office at Aldevco Octagon Building Jakarta as our location for meeting. This is our sixth regular meeting since November 2007.

As scheduled on my previous post, this meeting covering up some agenda, ie : openSUSE 11.0 features preview, knowledge share about zypper package manager, our preparation for booth on IGOS Summit 2 event, openSUSE 11.0 release party and openSUSE on Live USB demo. (more…)

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Today Agenda : openSUSE-ID Monthly Meeting

May 23rd, 2008 by

Today (Saturday, May 24, 2008), Indonesian openSUSE Community (openSUSE-ID) have a regular monthly meeting. Meeting for this month will be held on detik.com office, Jakarta.

We got about 30-40 registered members will be attending the meeting. It would reach more than 30 members because some of our regular meeting members didn’t submit their registration. The registration process itself only counted how much the attendees for better meeting room preparation.

This month, the agenda of meeting will cover up some discussion topics : openSUSE 11.0 features and highlight preview, presentation about zypper package manager, openSUSE on USB Live Stick demo, preparation for IGOS Summit 2 event (The event looks similar with FOSDEM in Europe. We have openSUSE booth at the event) and openSUSE 11.0 release party.

I’ll be update with some picts of our monthly meeting.

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Posted in Events, Miscellaneous | Comments Off on Today Agenda : openSUSE-ID Monthly Meeting

Help With Bug Hunting

May 20th, 2008 by

So far from what I’ve heard and seen, people really like the upcoming 11.0 release – yes it is now only a month away 🙂

To try and make sure it is even better come release date the guys and gals need good bugreports, and preferably not duplicate bugs. One handy tool for searching for your bug is Martin Vidner’s Bugzilla search tool. This has been formed into an OpenSearch plugin by the maestro that is Benji.

Basically all you need to do is head over to here and then select your search engine drop down menu and choose “Add openSUSE 11.0 Bug Search”. I have tried it in FireFox 2 and 3, but Konqueror should be pretty much the same.

Thanks to Martin and Benji for this lovely facility, and now there is no excuse for not filing correct bug reports 😉 Happy bug hunting.

UPDATE
Thanks again to Benji, he has corrected my mistake for adding the search option in Konqueror. Just do the following:
settings -> configure konqueror -> web shortcuts -> new
bnc search settings in konqueror

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Posted in Miscellaneous, Quality Assurance | Comments Off on Help With Bug Hunting

Indonesian openSUSE Community Monthly Meeting on Detik.com

May 15th, 2008 by

This is my first post in lizards.opensuse.org :-). Thanks to Beineri for activating this account.

Indonesian openSUSE Community (openSUSE-ID) monthly meeting will be held on Saturday, May 24, 2008, 09.00-13.00 am (GMT+7) at Detik.com head office Jakarta. Detik.com currently is the biggest online newspaper in Indonesia.

The monthly meeting called “Kopdar”, means “Kopi Darat” or offline/physical/face to face meeting.

This monthly meeting will be discuss some issue regarding openSUSE 11.0 release party on June 2008, preview about openSUSE 11.0 features, openSUSE remastering and share knowledge about zypper package manager.

Another topic is about our agenda on IGOS Summit 2 event. IGOS stand for Indonesia goes Open Source and IGOS Summit 2 is an event prepared by Ministry of Communication and Information Technology of Indonesia to encourage open source application usability in Indonesia. OpenSUSE-ID have a booth at the event. Well, it’s a small booth (2.75 m x 2.5 m with 1300 watt of electricity) but this booth is free of charge 😉 and we have a nice opportunity to promoting openSUSE.

We choose Detik.com as our place for monthly meeting to reached more user and (maybe) to get a nice publication about our activity. a friend of mine worked for Detik.com and he helped me to arrange this event. Thanks Andry.

So, if you are an Indonesian openSUSE lover, why don’t you join with us on Detik.com. Let share together !

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Posted in Events, Miscellaneous | Comments Off on Indonesian openSUSE Community Monthly Meeting on Detik.com

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