I’ve had some problems in the past with openSUSE Factory and ATI support… even the normal radeon driver wasn’t worked properly. After the last updates, the radeon driver started working properly and I’ve decided to install the ATI FireGL driver which is actually something I need to continue testing and debug Unity implementation on openSUSE.

IT WORKS!

Here’s what you need (64 bit users):

* Install the required dependencies to compile the kernel module (currently on 2.6.37-rc5-12-desktop). 64bit users will require the following:
[code] zypper in kernel-source compat-32bit qt3-32bit libstdc++ libgcc xorg-x11-libs-32bit xorg-x11-devel-32bit Mesa-devel-32bit fontconfig-32bit expat-32bit freetype2-32bit zlib-32bit gcc make[/code].

* Download ATI FireGL driver (version 10.12) from ATI website (http://ati.amd.com).

* Extract the files using the command:
[code]sh ati-driver-installer-10-12-x86.x86_64.run –extract[/code]
This will create a small folder which starts with fglrx*. Change directory into that folder…

* Download the following patches:
– sema_init.patch
–  fglrx-2.6.36.patch
–  makefile_compat.patch

* Apply the patches (patch -p1 < file.patch).

* Run the following command:
[code]sh ati-installer.sh  8.801 –install[/code]

* Follow the installer instructions. Finally check /usr/share/ati/fglrx-install.log to check if everything is cool…

* Restart using your favorite method… mine is ‘shutdown now -frn’.

Enjoy FireGL on openSUSE Factory!

José Morinho - Best Coach of the World, FIFA 2011, a warrior of Portugal!

I’ve been away for a couple of days due to a small increase work load from the University and the exams are somehow nearby.

Regarding openSUSE, I’ve builded already Compiz with the ‘glib main loop patch’, fixing some other minor issues on plugins packages, and still waiting on development on other stuff that might be interesting.

It’s time now to prepare the last packages for a mass upload into GNOME:Ayatana which should happen soon. I’ve also going to book some time in the next GNOME Team meeting to gather some information about the best way to do this.

I’m also happy that a couple of people jumped in and helped in the TODO tasks, this is the case of openSUSE contributor Malcolm Lewis.

This is just a small update on whats happening on Nelson’s land, as my private battalion of ‘twisted monkeys’ knows no rest. Now it’s time to scribe a couple of emails….

PS: I couldn’t forget to leave a public statement regarding the ‘Mister’ José Morinho, which wrote another glorious page for every Portuguese! More than a coach, not just a man, a warrior of Portugal!.

Dear all,

I’ve decided to submit an application to the openSUSE Board. As a part of the procedures, there is the need of also complying with having a user page and provide some interesting information (openSUSE Elections Platform Template). This post should fulfill those requirements and provide a bit more of information about this sudden move.

Introduction and Biography

My name is Nelson, and hopefully I’m just another face in the crowd. I am a Linux enthusiast and once a believer that Linux could effectively replace other systems, even on the Desktop. I see myself as a end-user, as I don’t have too much demanding computing needs, for the most I use my computer just like any of the traditional end users out there. I don’t have a featured list of accolades or victory knots on my belt, instead I have a random casual action on a distant past on the national scene…

I’ve started my Linux experience with SuSE Linux 5.2 and kept going till SuSE Linux 7.1. I ended up by swapping to Red Hat and later to Fedora. I’ve return to openSUSE as it became more attractive due to FireGL support. It was a friendly transition and openSUSE tools helped a lot.

Major Concerns (previously ‘issues’)

* Secure a stronger position amongst the Desktop. Linux Desktop isn’t dead, neither emerging consumer electronics markets are a risk to the Linux Desktop. Nothing will change in the next 5 years. Take my word for it.

* Secure stronger distribution channels, expand the media partners network and optimize current channels for massive deployment of contents.

* More updates on people’s work through the planet. The press is keeping an eye on it. People should have the motivation to post more often, thus providing the media partners and our news team with more contents. Our userbase will see a non-stopping community, always working for the ultimate goal of satisfying their needs.

* Start implementing a structure that allows openSUSE as a Community to be managed as a service. Deploy extensive marketing to our established community and educate them on the basics of service marketing and customer loyalty builds. Our future depends greatly on this.

* Extend and improve the cooperation between openSUSE and other projects (ex: GNOME Project, KDE, others). There exist countless ways of doing this.

* Build and promote a openSUSE Desktop experience! This means deployment of more optional software, deployment of artwork by the community and of features voted by users.

* MOST IMPORTANT OF ALL: we need to DARE for more. We need to take risks and battle for our choices. Being conservative or follower doesn’t help. We need a strong vertical strategy.

Minor Issues

World Domination.

Role of the board

The role of the Board from my perspective is to be the Guardian and Sake keeper of the openSUSE values! The Board should also be the keeper of strategical guidance and the big pusher of the Community. From my perspective the board should enforce all necessary policies to ensure that the Community expands in numbers and contributions, but also keeping the orientation that allows us as a community to reach the strategical objectives defined previously.

The Board should also play a ‘self assessment’ role on the community and take swift and hasty action whenever required. All users should face the openSUSE board as a ‘beacon of light’ showing the way to the commity!

Why you should vote for me?

For all the subjects I’ve pointed as important to the future, you will notice that most of them can’t be enforced by the Board or by a group of persons. They need to be a free initiative from everyone around openSUSE. Not because we demand it, but because you understand the benefits that the community as a whole can take from such actions.

Aims/Goals

* Extend the list of official media partners and create a stronger and wider diffusion network for our contents, thus promoting existing sub-projects like News.

* Promote actively the participation of openSUSE contributors on the Planet. We need to update more often what we’re doing. The press is around, feel free to provide them the contents they need, thus you are promoting also openSUSE.

* Promote a stronger marketing commitment towards the established community! We need this!

* Survey often and a lot our community. Be always aware of our users needs and requirements so we can be ready to answer them.

* Make better usage of current materials and deployment capabilities. A quick example, YaST’s installer has some slideshows… We can improve those as a promotion method for upstream strategical projects, openSUSE and Community.

* Self assessment of all the resources currently available. We need to have a goal and methodology to allows to take quick action when required and provide accurate data that can influence our future.

* Promote more community efforts in the Desktop area. For example, community artwork packages, artwork repositories… etc.

* Ambassadors program requires methodology for self assessment and diagnose of ‘investment vs returns’. We can’t just ‘give’, we need to take something in return as well. What do we want in return ?

Seasonal greetings of a happy and pleasant Winter Solstice for everyone.

Nelson

Image by: / Clue on http://openclipart.org

Fellow openSUSE Contributor,

I am not as gifted as Mizmo, so I can’t really present some cool metaphore in the form of a cartoon… Nevertheless I will try my best.

During the OSC2010 in Nürnberg I tried without much success to pass on the word that Marketing isn’t about a Team, but comes also down to us. This in an awesome time to demonstrate that on practice… Right now with an important release on the horizon, your Marketing team is starting a process to gather information to promote the features of the next release. Speaking for myself, I don’t feel confortable in taking an assingment of gathering features for example about the Kernel. As I won’t feel confortable producing contents about KDE which I barelly know… Nevertheless if those contents aren’t provided to us…. we have to dig for them… sometimes not even having a clue of the extention of their importance.

Many times I’ve heard the ultimate excuse ‘Marketing is for Ubuntu, because they are just Marketing and nothing else’… and things on that line… Well… think again… who’s fault is this that only them care about Marketing ? I see a good opportunity for you all to achieve some things in the next days… with only 10 minutes of your time… and why could be nice it happened this way:

* You run a project that is on Factory… cool… Please take 10 minutes, make a small list of 10 features that are really cool on the next release… make a 7/15 lines text on how your project changed and the benefit of the improvements for our users (if you don’t know your users, then write it as if you were talking about yourself)… This way you save your Marketing Team ‘wild goose chase’ on a stack of Changelogs we might not understand… even worst, we might even pass on the wrong stuff….

* By doing this… you are doing Marketing… you are promoting your own project within openSUSE, giving it more visibility and with 10 mins of your time… you will pass on the right word to the Marketing Team and help them. Instead of spending 50 hours searching for stuff and taking some hard decisions that might not work out in the best way for YOUR project, we have 50 mins more to work your information and make sure it is better used for the interests of YOUR project.

* If Marketing takes 3 features to write an article or make Marketing materials… and just lists the other 7… If like at least we get contributions in this form from: Kernel, GNOME, KDE and Ambassadors (yes, people should also be on the release)… thats 3×4 = 12 featured articles for the release and a feature list of 40 new exciting features….

Now… does this seem so surreal to ask 10 minutes of your time to help out your Marketing Team and make the best release ever! Oh! And have a lot of fun!

Someone said that I was crazy… and that projects and developers would never comply and would most likely laugh on my face after proposing such thing… I might be crazy… or I might very well on the wrong track. I’ve decided not to back down from facing the ‘mob’, and still risking to be laughed upon, I brought this to your attention.

Become a openSUSE Pirate ?

You are a Pirate…

I’ve decided to remain a spectator during this Board elections to understand the process and I like the applies for the board. I can say I’m happy to see ‘mrdocs’ applying for the board, as he was one of the persons which helped me a lot with openSUSE Build Service in my early days. He always had a cool advice or a couple of minutes to make my life easier.

Except for ‘mrdocs’ I really don’t know much about the other candidates, so I’ve decided to take a small note and expose my frustration for not seeing Sirko Kemter running for the Board. I would support Sirko on running to the board for several reasons:

1. He’s the face of openSUSE Artwork team. He’s been doing awesome screencasts and tutorials… I guess in a way, related to Artwork, which I find to be an area which is underdeveloped in openSUSE, he can bring lots of new synergies… and a new visual identity to openSUSE.

2. His degree of commitment to the local German Community. I’ve seen some posts of him and some of the initiatives he does. I loved the openMovie night at KommKino in Nürnberg during openSUSE Conference for which he was the mastermind behind it. So he’s really a community guy.

3. His a vertical and direct person, which speaks his mind. This is something I love on people. I don’t know Sirko from talking on the back of people, I know him from being straight to point and direct. This is a very positive thing…

4.  Gnokii plays well the role of ‘bad cop’. That’s always good to have around. Sometimes people need to ear more harsh things to get back into reality. Gnokii does this role good.

5. He’s one of the most objective people I’ve seen around… many times bringing people to reality, thus speeding up people on taking actions and drop the philosophical issues.

I really see him as a community guy, always around, helping whenever he cans… He’s doing a great job and he should be empowered to run to the Board.

For all the other candidates, which many I don’t know… good luck… with so much cool people running for the Board, I can only see a smiling future ahead. I won’t vote for the Board elections for some reasons, being the major… I won’t to split votes amongst so many cool people, therefore, I’m remaining on neutral grounds wishing all the best of luck. Whatever is the outcome, I’m sure openSUSE will win!

Have a lot of fun!

PS: I hope to see a public debate with all candidates on IRC opened to questions and doubts from the openSUSE community members and users! Please make it happen!

I’ve manage to hammer in 2 more indicators.

Indicator-session provides a quick and easy method to manage your GNOME session. The options are pretty intuitive and it works ok so far. A simple screenshot.

Then we have also indicator-network which was a bit more problematic to build and required a couple of very ugly quick fixes. Though I’ve built a package for it and it’s dependencies (including The Connection Manager). My concerns about it:

* It’s a piece of software under heavy development;
* The user configuration interface is very fuzzy and provides cool clear text passwords for LAN;
* nm-applet is far superior;
* Requires ‘connection manager’ – Connection Manager is a pretty cool application, and it’s compat mode with Network Manager makes it’s integration pretty easy… Though ‘connection manager’ seemed to be an outstanding piece of software, I’m not going through all the trouble to package and integrate it in openSUSE (integration should be pretty fast, just a init script, since it allows compat mode with Network Manager).

I personally don’t like this network indicator… Though I’ve packaged it,  I’ve decided not to share it because of 4 points above. I really don’t see anything positive about having it for openSUSE users, it would most likely turn their GNOME experience into something a bit fuzzy.

Either way… that’s how it looks…

According to this post by Adam Williamson (Fedora QA), Unity might actually land on Fedora.

Some time ago, I’ve dropped into openSUSE-GNOME mailing list an email regarding this topic, and the need that we openSUSE have regarding to protect a possible risk of having our users migrating to Ubuntu to check out Unity. The downside of openSUSE is the fact that we might be limited by manpower.

To me, this sounds the most sane strategy to promote a vertical defense of our community. Adam Williamson and Fedora seem to have acknowledged that it is important to provide users with software so that they do not feel the rush or need to change vendor to check out a new piece of software, specially when it’s something already strong in name as Unity.

From my side… I’ve started to work on building a test repository for Ubuntu stuff… currently I’ve got most dependencies already ready for Factory, including a gtk+ version with the patches to enable some functionality required for the Ubuntu Indicators.

If ‘openSUSE IBERIA’ happens to happen… it’s GNOME version will be very close to Ubuntu (and in some cases even featuring extended functionality, like GDM Configuration tool, Notify-OSD skinning, amongst other small goodies). Why to build something close to Ubuntu? EASY ANSWER! PORTUGAL AND SPAIN are dominated by Ubuntu… by providing something very close to the Ubuntu experience we might become more attractive to those users and establish positive synergies to attack their user base! YES, we, proud Portuguese and Spanish are packing out stuff to take the fight to the streets! Which reminds me of an old English saying:

“Españoles en la mar quiero. Y si es en tierra, San Jorge nos proteja…” (The spanish we want on the sea. If in land we find them, Saint George protect us…”

—
s/Williams/Williamson
Many apologies for the mistake.