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Archive for the ‘Usability’ Category

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Tabbed Browsing for Packages

January 23rd, 2009 by

There are many approaches to managing software packages. Some users like to use command line tools like zypper. Others prefer a GUI tool like the YaST2 package selector. And even within such a GUI tool, there are many ways to deal with the packages you’d like to install, update or remove: Install a bunch of packages that make up a functionality like “KDE desktop” or “web development”, find one specific package with a known name, or just look through packages that are available. That’s why there are different filter views for those different approaches.

How do you select any of those filter views? In previous versions of the (Qt) package selector, we used to have a combo box to do that:

That’s somewhat unusual, and there have always been critics who claimed that we should use tabs instead. Our standard reply was always that this would not really be helpful because there are so many of them; you’d run out of screen space quickly, and with the number of filter views we have, this would look overwhelming and confusing:

Ugh… not good. Not even at this screen resolution. Now think about 800×480 netbooks and more verbose languages like German, French or Hungarian. No way to make this fit on the screen. And left/right scroll buttons are the last thing you want for tabs.

So, what else could we do?
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Posted in Software Management, Systems Management, Usability, YaST | 22 Comments »

Controlling your minions with Ruby and Capistrano

January 21st, 2009 by

Welcome to yet another installment of our Ruby mini-series.  Capistrano (http://capify.org/) is a DSL written in Ruby for automating common tasks.  While Capistrano is more often used for Rails deployment, it can easily be used for system automation as well.

A while back, I put together a presentation for the local Ruby user’s group.  The presentation covers a very brief intro to Capistrano for simple system automation.  You can download it here.  I’m aware of at least one typo (a missing single quote) in the slides, there may be others.

Rather than repeat myself here, I’ll let the PDF do the talking.  For the official documentation, see http://capify.org/getting-started

Posted in Documentation, Systems Management, Usability | Comments Off on Controlling your minions with Ruby and Capistrano

Graph of Storage Devices

January 19th, 2009 by

With openSUSE 11.1 on the road we developers can use some time for new ideas. One idea on my mind for month was to show the dependencies of storage devices in a graph. Using graphviz and QGraphicsScene a first version was running within few days.

It’s far from finished. Some items still missing are:

  • Use different shapes and colors for different devices types.
  • Some basic user-interaction.

Will be available in Factory within the next weeks. Further improvements are welcome.

Posted in Systems Management, Usability, YaST | 8 Comments »

Using Ruby for system scripts

January 14th, 2009 by

So here we are, the second installment of my openSUSE+Ruby mini-series.  See this link for the first article covering installation and configuration.  In this post, I’ll give you a fast introduction to Ruby and a sample system script on openSUSE.

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Posted in Documentation, Miscellaneous, Software Management, Usability | 2 Comments »

What’s green, red, and awesome all over?

January 10th, 2009 by

openSUSE/SLES and Ruby!

Considering that my blog no-longer exists and I’ve got a couple of topics floating around in my head, I thought I’d make use of my Lizards account and contribute something useful for once.

openSUSE has quickly become my favorite development platform and Ruby is my language of choice these days.  The two together make an excellent combination and it couldn’t be easier to get started.  In the next few posts, I’ll cover how I use the Ruby scripting language with SUSE on a daily basis.

That being said, lets start with installation…

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Posted in Documentation, Miscellaneous, Systems Management, Usability | Comments Off on What’s green, red, and awesome all over?

Blog Themes

November 30th, 2008 by

Hello Folks,

now i changed all. In my old Blog i haved a themed Blog- The Themes was: “Saschas Insights”, a Theme with my personal thoughts about the world, the economy, the health and many more.

The second Theme was “Saschas Backtrace”, in this Blog i write about an newly or interesting Software, and how to work with it.

The last Theme was “Sascha and SuSI”. In Germany the Name SuSI is a Shortform for Susanne. But this part of my Blog not written to a new girlfriend. This Theme is for my experience with openSUSE.

And so i’m pleased to announce, that the Themes “Saschas Backtrace” and “Sascha & SuSI” moved to this Blog.

Have a lot of fun 🙂
cu Sascha

Posted in Documentation, lizards.openSUSE.org, Miscellaneous, Usability | Comments Off on Blog Themes

Bootloader gets chattier

November 6th, 2008 by

Since openSUSE 11.0. we have some basic speech support in our bootloader. This enables visually impaired people to use the bootloader as there is usually no other output device available at that time (BIOS doesn’t really support braille displays).

It uses the PC-speaker for output (which has the benefit that you don’t need specialized sound drivers for every hardware).

If you didn’t try it yet: press F9 at the boot screen.

I’ve reworked that a good deal in openSUSE 11.1 RC1 (2MB sound samples) and now it reads all menus and dialogs to you and spells all chars you enter in input dialogs (actually it speaks the char left from cursor).

The sound samples are pre-generated with espeak. But you are of course free to replace them with your own voice if you like that more. 😉

Posted in Accessibility, Usability | 2 Comments »

Remastering openSUSE : How to Build your Own openSUSE Based Distro

October 16th, 2008 by

kiwi imaging system

I’m writing an article series about : “Remastering openSUSE : How to Build your own openSUSE Based Distro” as part of my presentation at Indonesian openSUSE Community monthly meeting [0] last week. The article based on my experience while making openSUSE 11.0 KDE 3.5+Multimedia Support LiveDVD (beware with it’s restricted media if you want to rebuild this. I make it as part of my presentation tutorial).

I’ve posted 2 article for now, “Kiwi as imaging system and how to install it on openSUSE”[1] and “How to build openSUSE Minimal System LiveCD” [2] and currently writing the third article “How to make openSUSE 11.0 KDE 3.5 LiveCD”

[0] : http://vavai.net/2008/10/09/indonesian-opensuse-community-monthly-meeting-10/
[1] : http://vavai.net/2008/10/15/remastering-opensuse-how-to-build-your-own-opensuse-based-distro/
[2] : http://vavai.net/2008/10/15/how-to-build-opensuse-minimal-system-livecd/

It was not a completed tutorial but I hope it could helped you for making openSUSE with your own specification. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Note : The term “Remastering” would not correct either, because I simply described how to make openSUSE with our specified configuration and application without change any openSUSE branding, splash screen or another openSUSE trademark.

Posted in Distribution, Documentation, Miscellaneous, Usability | 5 Comments »

Parralel processing in zypper

October 6th, 2008 by

I have been on leave for a couple of days and today when I booted my laptop the openSUSE updater notified me of 4 security updates. While I was watching zypper updating the system (I prefer the command line client) I wondered if it would be possible for zypper to download and install patches/programs/etc asynchronously.  To explain better: instead of downloading a patch and then installing it, why can’t zypper download the patch and then start a process/tread to install it while it immediately starts to download the next file ? I have no knowledge of the internals of zypper or yast, so I don’t know it it even feasible, but it would decrease the time needed to patch the system.

Posted in Software Management, Usability, YaST | 3 Comments »

What should happen happen if I transplant a brain?

September 23rd, 2008 by

I’m currently involved in a discussion on factory about what should happen if I replace the graphics card, or when I move the hard disk from one machine to another one, with different hardware.

I wished SUSE did handle such transplants gracefully, maybe for the same reason I do not wish my 2CV back:

My first car was a Citroën 2CV.

On some summer day I did a very long autobahn trip with it and the engine got real hot as it was air cooled.  When I finally had arrived in my home town late at night, I rolled down a long hill using the engine brake and at the end of hill at a red light I stopped the car — and oops: so did the engine…

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Posted in Base System, Usability, X.org | 5 Comments »

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