Small, big, bright green, yellow green

Even avatars…

To fix that, Bruno Friedmann (tigerfoot) & Françoise Wybrecht (Morgane Marquis) invite you to come at Geekos Place on SecondLife and grab your own plush for free.

A long dream has become true last week, with the effort of several people contributing together to make Tigerfoot’s dream a reality.

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At the openSUSE conference last week, Lydia Pintscher from the KDE Community Working Group led a BoF on “women in openSUSE”. This is what we (Stella, Bruno, Lydia, Pascal, Susanne, Greg) worked out:

There are very few women in openSUSE for a variety of reasons. In our perceiption, despite the good efforts of moderators on IRC, forums and mailing-lists, some attitudes there still persist, and we believe these are a key issue that keeps women away. To further address this as a small group, we decided to start at just one place, opensuse-project@. Here’s why and how:

There is quite some research on why there is so few “women in FLOSS” in general. One of the recurring topics there, and one that we also quickly came to in the BoF, was the ‘flaming’, or more generally, the negative possibilities of the direct, unfiltered yet anonymous communication on IRC, forums and mail.

We all value the speed and positive directness of those forms of communication — however it’s cutting off facial expression and physical reaction. So it’s very easy to miss the tone, without even noticing. To more sensitive souls, this is creating a barrier of entry that especially women do not want to cross, or if it hits you unprepared, will reject you, often with no return. Nota bene: this effect is not limited to women! It just happens to reject women more than men.

What’s going on there? On one side there is newcomers wanting to learn, and with a great potential to contribute, however with a “thin skin”, an expectation of being treated with respect and politeness, whatever that means. On the other side, there are knowledgeable people, often young, sometimes unpatient, maybe tired, frustrated themselves. Now the former ask naive questions while the latter “shoot out” a quick response without any visual feedback on what happens right after they hit the “send” button. Kazoom! And the frustration results into discussions that quickly are far beyond the original topic, frustrating, unproductive and the opposite of what we want: respect and getting things done.

openSUSE, like many other open source projects, has set the direction for mutual respect by working out Guiding Principles, and making members accept these. The openSUSE project Board is forming a body of volunteers who “enforce” these rules, something like the Community Working Group in the KDE project. The objective is to focus the speed and directness of the communication on productivity: turn the flaming energy of frustrations into creative energy that makes openSUSE a place to enjoy and to contribute to!

We, the BoF participants, want to simply support that effort, by working on just one list (opensuse-project@), and by providing additional material that complements the very high level goals set forth in the guiding principles.

Stay tuned 🙂

My first computer was a Timex 2068, which would be replaced by the latest ZX Spectrum 128K +2A (already produced by Amstrad and not Sinclair). This lasted until it was replaced by a Commodore Amiga 1200 and later with a Amstrad PCMM 512K!

To celebrate the 30 years, there is a new speccie comming out! I know I will grab one from the shelves once it hits! Something to remember.

My ID Card was supposed to expire in the end of the year, and I’ve decided to replace it now by new ‘Cartão do Cidadão’ (Citizen’s Card). The Citizens Card is the primary document for any Portuguese citizen and replaces or holds the data from several cards:

* Old fashioned ID Card;
* SNS Card (National Health Care System); (yes in Portugal this services are free, though 40% of the Health Care industry is already private)
* NIF Card (tax number cards);
* Drivers Licence;
* Social Security Card/Number.

Also some biometric data is being now collected into digital files and some organizations can access it. This card holds 3 PIN Codes for several purposes, and can enable a lot of features and services for the citizens and the Authorities. It’s possible now to sign digital documents with the unique key per citizen on the card and it’s going to be widely used on governmental infra-structures. For example, I can now fill my tax forms on the internet and use the card plugged to my PC through a USB card reader to digitally sign my tax forms and enter them through the internet. The data will be crossed with Social Security and Tax departments from the state, and within minutes tax forms are complete, signed and submitted.

The Police branches, either militarized or civilian also have been receiving new toys to read this cards and have full access to people’s criminal sheets, driving sanctions, etc.

When I went to pick up the card, I bought a card reader (Card costed 15€’s, and the card reader costed 16€’s) to use the card with my PC. Though I have an account man and someone to handle my tax forms from me, I do have some itches and want to explore this option. The fun thing…

* There are drivers for Linux for the Card Reader and it’s supported;
* The application to handle the card is available for Windows, Mac and Linux (including openSUSE 11 binaries);

So what openSUSE Portuguese users need to do to work with this card? Install the dependencies (on my system only required libopenssl for libcrypto) and run the bloody application. I don’t understand why this wasn’t provided as an RPM, instead a dumb tar.gz file with a very naive installer, but it works.

It’s nice that I can use openSUSE now also to fill my taxes, do my legal citizen stuff, sign digital documents with a governmental verified key and use all the mind crushing stuff they have prepared for us. It is nice that the Government hasn’t really forgotten openSUSE, as they did on other distributions (the minor ones).

Linux (and others) software and manual (in Portuguese only) download page is here.

#10 – Artwork – openSUSE 11.4 ships with ‘Stripes’ artwork. I love specially the console terminal which offers very good contrast. The boot splash images are visually attractive and provide a pleasant boot experience.

#9 – Wine – openSUSE 11.4 ships with Wine 1.3.10 which works very good for me. I’ve tried Lord of the Rings Online (flawlessly out of the box) and World of Warcraft. From the tested products, I feel that openSUSE promotion needs a bit more of effort on highlighting Wine. Marcus must be proud, and I’m for sure thankful for his great work!

#8 – Repository Management – One of the main reason why I love openSUSE is because it works like “Lego”. You can keep adding/removing software repositories and have a hell of a kick ass experience. Success on this tasks require some brains, but an expert tinker can perform great things with openSUSE repositories!

#7 – “Out of the Box” Factor – It just works… even with my problematic ATI. This is one important point for me. I don’t really like to install a Linux distribution and spend hours tinkering it for my needs. With openSUSE it’s done fast and clean.

#6 – Default Software Patterns – The default software patterns on openSUSE are awesome and they fulfill all the needs for my daily computing tasks.

#5 – Security and Stability – Without doubt the calling card from openSUSE. There’s isn’t really much to say, except it inspires trust!

#4 – YaST Installer – Not being a technical person, I have to remove my hat before openSUSE installer. It ‘speaks’ normal user language, it provides outstanding features for advanced and starters. It inspires total supremacy of man over machine!

#3 – Featured upstream Projects – The most known upstream projects are present! GNOME, KDE, LXDE and friends, even IceWM made his way into 11.4. Banshee, VLC, you name it… Everything can run on openSUSE, even community repos such as GNOME:Ayatana! Whatever software you are looking for, it’s for sure in a openSUSE repository!

#2 GNOME – Does it need an introduction? NO! It’s mature, stable, rock solid and will provide a powerful Desktop experience for any user! OpenSUSE 11.4 is a must for people who want to hang around with GNOME2 for a bit more, and for all the GNOME3 fans through an additional repository. GNOME3 is something you can’t miss! openSUSE 11.4 will enable you that feature later on!

#1 Community – A strong and helpful community in which our users can rely. Swift on bug fixing, helpful when one is in trouble and commited to bring our users the best Linux experience possible. It’s all about faces and human interaction, it’s all about being human in charge of the machine! And most of us will  speak your language!

DISCLAIMER: Based on personal preferences, and deeply personal. Other people might have different views, this is mine.

Packaging Unity wasn’t much of a problem, but implementing is being translated into frustration… this cases and the lack of satisfactory results eventually lead to pre-burnout situations, and I’m not walking that road.

My apologies for those who had expectations on this, but I sense this task requires much more than what I can offer at the current time. The packages are still available from my home repo if someone wants to pick it up. All the components build so far, the dependencies are all in that repository as well, as I see only integration is required. I’ve runned across some problems, mainly Compiz behavior on several different git snapshots, I’ve run against problems with the default gconf settings required by Unity and the backup/restore operations from openSUSE defaults amongst other things. It’s maybe wiser to wait for a bit more of development from upstream before looking into this. openSUSE is supposed to be stable and reliable, and I don’t see this branch of Compiz match those two qualities yet.

If anyone wants to scavenge those packages, feel free to do it. If no one takes this up, I will look into it later once there’s an official Compiz release from the branch that is required for Unity, meanwhile I’ll keep openSUSE time available for learning a bit more on cmake and maintain the stuff that really works, the indicators, which involve already over 30 packages between dependencies and indicators.

NM

I would like to leave a very fond ‘Thank You’ to everyone who has placed their trust in me on the recent elections. The number of votes on me was a true surprise.

This election was probably one of the most important in openSUSE history, mainly to the fact that it’s the Board that is going to push the Foundation forward. I find the results very pleasing and I’m happy to see Henne and Peter moving up to help on those efforts.

Thank you all for an inspiring source of motivation.

Nelson

I’ve finally added the Compiz packages to my development repository and unity itself alongside with some tools.

There are several bug reports on launchpad concerning ATI users, involving RADEON DRM driver and FireGL (fglrx) drivers. Unfortunately for me, I’m also a very happy ATI customer.

I’ve struggled yesterday with some ABI problems on compiz, this was mainly because I had git snapshots from different days, and updating and rebuilding it, really solved the issue.

Today I’ll be implementing the required patches for compiz by Ubuntu,, and hopefully this will enable me to test Unity, this time on a spare laptop with Intel Graphics chipset. I was hoping to pop some screenshots today, unfortunately, I’m having a couple of problems with Compiz that hopefully a couple of missing patches will solve.

I’ve left behind the ‘clutk’ package, as it’s currently broken and I need to take closer look into ‘glew’ and work it out. Something for monday/tuesday spare time.

For the time being, the only screenshot I have to show is the one of CCSM (compizconfig-settings-manager) with the Unity plugin.

Today I’ve decided to send a couple of questions for Board candidates. To me it is important the answer to this questions, as through such answer it will be possible for me to sharp my opinion about some of the people behind the applications.

The questions aren’t all direct and involve a critical analysis of quotations provided. The thread can be visited on the openSUSE Project mailing list.

I’ve used quotations from 5 different people that should be familiar to most people.

* F. Nietzsche – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche
* Adam Smith – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Smith
* Daniel J. Bernstein – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_J._Bernstein
* Richard M. Stallman – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman
* Mahatma Gandhi – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohandas_Karamchand_Gandhi