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Archive for the ‘Usability’ Category

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BugDay

November 22nd, 2010 by

At the last openSUSE project meeting and after the discussion about “zombie” bugs on the opensuse-project mailing list, a small team of volunteers agreed to organize a Bug Day on Saturday, November 27th. What is a Bug Day? This is a day when many people from the community help to triage bugs in Bugzilla. It is a good and easy way to get involved in the openSUSE project!

Here is what you need to participate:
– a recent version of openSUSE (11.3 or a milestone of 11.4). It’s okay to run openSUSE in a virtual machine.
– an IRC client to interact with the other participants
– good mood 🙂

A small team will organize the event by providing lists of bugs, and will be available to guide new contributors if needed. So it will be easy to help!

For this specific Bug Day, we will focus on the “zombie” bug reports: those are reports against old versions of openSUSE (openSUSE 10.x and 11.0). As some reports might still be valid, we don’t want to close all of them automatically. We will therefore check all those reports to see if they are still valid in the latest version of openSUSE (11.3 or a milestone of 11.4). The goal is to close those bug reports if possible, or, if they are still valid, to move them to a current version of openSUSE so that they’re not lost in limbo. So during a full day, people come on irc and help each other triage bugs.

Please note that this is only for openSUSE bugs (living in bugzilla.novell.com), but a solution for some bugs might be to forward them upstream.

Come on #opensuse-bug (freenode) on a Saturday 27.11.2010, we’ll be glad to have you join the fun! 😉

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Posted in Contrib, Distribution, Quality Assurance, Usability | Comments Off on BugDay

RTFM!

October 23rd, 2010 by

Before and during the openSUSE conference, some nice people (Jens-Daniel, Jürgen, Darix) created the following site for you:

http://rtfm.opensuse.org http://doc.opensuse.org

Thank you guys! I like the thrilling name. 😉

It’s a static page (at the moment?) and collects the current documentation from several products and projects. Probably you will see more to come in the next weeks.

Have fun!

Update (AJ since Thomas is ill) 2010-10-27: Based on the feedback received, we’re going to  change now rtfm.opensuse.org to docs.opensuse.org. So, you can reach the fine side under http://docs.opensuse.org and http://doc.opensuse.org.

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Posted in Documentation, Marketing, Usability | 11 Comments »

Documentation

October 13th, 2010 by

Hi folks,

this post is just request for all obs-packagers. Please, don’t forget write some documentation about your projects (which you maintain or develop). I mean, documentation for developers. This make more easy to understand logic of program, connection between some modules inside or interfaces between widget/applet and “system/hardware part”. For sure, comments in source code (or in changelog) help, but some times they give not so much clarity.

This is not so complicated to write one-two pages about project, which you hack. This also can save time of new developers. They will not ask you about architecture of project, and that will save your time too 😉

I don’t know how will be better to do it: use wiki (create a new page) or add just text-file in source project. Anyway it’s not so important where will be this documentation, main things that this documentation will be exist 🙂

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Posted in Build Service, Contrib, Documentation, Packaging, Usability | 1 Comment »

Adventures with Intel Atom D510 board

October 8th, 2010 by

For long I had been using my old laptop for everything; building images with KIWI, writing documents using LaTeX and Docbook XML, sorting my photos with Digikam. I have been upgrading since version 9.0 and at the moment opensuse 11.1 was the release ( OK with lots of new software thanks to the Build server. However, for some odd reason I wanted to have something new. Dangerous word, new is.

I have 2 Intel Atom’s running for my mail and web servers and I was quite happy with their performances, (by the way I am still happy). Hence I decided to ride the change train and bought the Intel D510 board

opensuse 11.3 Kde LiveCd worked fine and using Susestudio I designed my image. So far was really good. Booting the usb brought my feet back to earth. A frozen screen. So I tried the failsafe option and I had a 800X600 display. Reboot and this time trying “nomodeset” option same thing. Nevertheless I decided to give it a go ( I can always use it at run level 3).

Last night I have decided to include the Kernel:HEAD repo so I am using kernel-default-2.6.36-rc6.25.1.x86_64 along with the X11:XOrg repos using X.Org 1.9.0.901 (1.9.1 RC 1) so now I have “1366×768 (the max my monitor can give) and I do not need to set “nomodeset” in the boot options anymore.

I have not tweaked everything yet, like my Logitech keyboard’s multimedia keys are useless in KDE at the moment.  At the end they will work one way or the other, I am sure.

Lesson Learned: do your homework well before jumping the change train or enjoy the adventures

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Posted in Usability, X.org | Comments Off on Adventures with Intel Atom D510 board

Free BEER for free people

September 17th, 2010 by

When we call beer “free”, we mean that it respects the users’ essential freedoms: the freedom to drink it, to study and change it, and to return empties with or without some changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech”… but in this case also “free beer” too.

Why man have to choose a free beer? Because it’s open and free to use. Everybody can give some feedback on the freebeer’s twitter page.

The project was started by Wädi Bräu in Switzerland like “open source beer” project. On the home page you can get more information about this project, for example, news and last updates.

License: creative commons.
Alcogol vol: 4.8 %
Size: 0.33 L

Be free… drink free beer 😉

p.s. Who know, maybe Novell will be sponsored this great open source project (?) 😉

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Posted in Events, Miscellaneous, Usability | 4 Comments »

AcetoneISO2 and LXDE

June 3rd, 2010 by

I am sure that most of you know and like acetoneiso2, a nice tool to menage isos and lots of other things. Latest release, 2.2.1 support only kde, gnome and xfce as DE and allow to open their file managers to browse files and mounted stuffs…

So, you know, FLOSS is our world.. i took the code, and improved it, just a trivial change, but really nice. I added LXDE/PcmanFM support, as you can see from the picture:

Now you can have acetoneiso2 run pcmanfm too.

The patched package is already into Packman repository and a submit-request (#41069) has been submitted to KDE:KDE4:Community repository, so hopefully, it would be available even there quite soon.

So people.. enjoy it 😀

Andrea

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Posted in Accessibility, Build Service, Desktop, Distribution, Factory, openSUSE 11.2, Usability | 2 Comments »

openSUSE at Universidad de Panama, FIEC

May 7th, 2010 by

Universidad de Panamá, Facultad de Informática, Electrónica y Comunicación. Conmemoración del X aniversario de la Facultad. On May 3, 2010 the openSUSE Ambassador was invited to talk about “Introducción a las características y ventajas de openSUSE, su relación con NOVELL y la comunidad de usuarios” (“An Introduction to New Features and Advantages on openSUSE 11.2, the openSUSE Project Community and the relationship with NOVELL”). When I did talk about openSUSE. People came from a few persons in the room to suddenly filling the whole space available for that room. Surprisingly, I had the opportunity to watch several girls between the audience so I thought there is a chance to organize a chix open source community or users group. Click on the link to watch photos

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

openSUSE Ambassador Panama at FIEC, UP

openSUSE, Ambassador, Panama, FIEC, UP

openSUSE Ambassador Panama Talk at FIEC, UP

openSUSE, Ambassador, Univ. Panama, FIEC

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Posted in Accessibility, Education, Events, GNOME, KDE, Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, openSUSE 11.2, Usability | Comments Off on openSUSE at Universidad de Panama, FIEC

Novell Client on openSUSE 11.2

April 20th, 2010 by

This has been covered on a couple of forums out there, but I’ve yet to find a decent comprehensive post. This is for 32bit systems, it’s easily modified for 64bit setups.

First off, search your favorite RPM repo for binutils-2.19-9.3. I like to use http://rpm.pbone.net, but at the time of writing, they happen to be down.

Get a copy of the Novell Client ISO from http://download.novell.com and mount it:

sudo mount -o loop novell-client-2.0-sp2-sle11-i586.iso /mnt

Extract the files from the RPM:

rpm2cpio binutils-2.19-9.3.i586.rpm | cpio -idv

This should create a “usr” directory in your present working directory. Go ahead and copy it’s contents to your filesystem:

sudo cp -R usr/* /usr/

Change directories to wherever you mounted your ISO (in this case “/mnt”) and run the installer:

cd /mnt && sudo ./ncl_install

As the packages attempt to install, you’ll be given options and warnings concerning libbfd and several other packages. Choose option “2” for everything (“Break dependencies”). Don’t worry about actually breaking anything, just roll with option 2.

Lastly, issue ldconfig as root and reboot:

sudo /sbin/ldconfig
sudo /sbin/reboot

That should get you up and running. You can run “ncl_tray” directly from the command line, or create a shortcut to the client. If you’re having connection issues, make sure that openSLP is configured.

The only issues I’ve had so far is the inability to browse trees, which turned out to be a DNS problem on my end. Occasionally I get warnings on login about novfs kernel modules not being properly loaded, but this appears to be benign.

Posted in Desktop, Documentation, GNOME, KDE, Network, Usability | 5 Comments »

Installing Ruby 1.9 on openSUSE 11.2

April 6th, 2010 by

It’s been a while since I’ve posted or been active in the community, so I thought I’d toss an update out there.  I’ll cross post this on my personal blog and on Cool Solutions (modified for SLEx 10).  This is a pretty rudimentary post as installation from source is pretty straightforward, but perhaps it’ll be useful to someone.

The only requirements for this build that I’m aware of at this time are make, gcc, and the openssl/openssl-devel packages.

The default Ruby distribution in 11.2 is 1.8.7, contrasting the current stable release of 1.9.1.  If you already have Ruby installed via zypper, you’ll need to uninstall it (‘sudo zypper rm ruby’), otherwise the first step is to grab the latest release from http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/.

Next, unpack your release (replacing 1.9.1-p376 with the build you downloaded):

tar xfvz ruby-1.9.1-p376.tar.gz

Change to the extracted directory and run the config script:

cd ruby-1.9.1-p376 && ./configure

Build the release:  Note that you can allow jobs to run simultaneously with the -j switch, see make (1) for further details.

make

Install the release as root:

sudo make install

To verify that 1.9 is indeed installed, issue:

ruby --version

Posted in Documentation, Miscellaneous, Usability | 1 Comment »

FLISOL 2010 in Nicaragua

March 10th, 2010 by

The folks of the openSUSE Community in Nicaragua, are preparing a great event in the city of Granada, Nicaragua, in Central America.

After some considerations and discussion within the Nicaraguan LUGs Community, SUSE-Ni was appointed to carry on with the FLISOL event on April 24th.

(more…)

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Posted in Education, GNOME, KDE, Miscellaneous, Usability | 3 Comments »

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