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Integration of YaST Server Modules to YaST System Services

January 8th, 2009 by

Today, I’ve played a bit with an idea to allow starting of YaST Server module from the YaST System Services module.

YaST System Services (Runlevel) Editor

The only visible difference is the additional “Configure…’ button at the bottom of the dialog. This button would be active only if there is a YaST module associated with the entry. After clicking it, the respective YaST module would be started:

YaST Firewall module invoked from YaST System Services module

With this simple principle, the YaST control center ‘Network Services’ section would be reduced to:

YaST Control Center, Network Services section

And all those YaST modules would be available from ‘System’ section:

YaST Control Center, System section

This approach could be used even further. You can see that the ‘Network Services’ section contents do not really match the section name anymore. In fact, most of the items could be moved to other modules as well. E.g. introducing a module for authentication/authorization, which would cover Kerberos client, LDAP client, etc. The NFS client is in fact a part of the new Disk Partitioning module already. So, the section could vaporize completely.

However, there are drawbacks. The biggest one I see is a ‘starting point’ problem. Just imagine you want to have a Apache2 running in your system. Until now, the YaST HTTP module is installed and can be used to bootstrap your configuration – it will install the packages and help to set up the basics. But with the new approach, the apache2 package is not installed, therefore System Services module would not see the apache2 service (init script) and does not show it at all! I’m not sure how to address this. Maybe the best would be to attach the YaST  module to apache2 package or HTTP server pattern and the Software Management module would become such starting point. Would it be better? I don’t know.

Then, there is an issue of a quick access – if you are moderately experienced user, you know what you are looking for and you start a proper module right away. But to figure out what is the configuration starting point if it’s hidden in another module, that might be a blocker.

I’m sure there are more problems. Anyway, I find the idea quite useful for reducing the number of YaST modules. What do you think?

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Posted in YaST | 3 Comments »

Vote good posts

January 7th, 2009 by

Hello Folks,

today i haved an idea. If we Bloggers on lizard post an Article, and you like it, then make an vote in the head of the Article (vote with stars).

This had two effects:

1.) The Author see, that the Readers like his post.

2.) The Author can see, what are interesting for the readers. Than he can write articles, what you are interesting for.

Happy votig 🙂

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Posted in Documentation, lizards.openSUSE.org | Comments Off on Vote good posts

New Releases for 11.1 in home:saigkill

January 7th, 2009 by

Hello Folks,

in the last week i’ve build my repository (home:saigkill) for 11,1. This are the Packages:

– BOINC 6.4.5
– Mount Manager 0.2.5
– libatlas 3 – 3.8.1
– libnecpp0-1.2.6
– libqt4-4.4.3
– necpp 1.2.6
– Lynis 1.2.1
– necpp 1.2.6
– python-iCalendar 1.2
– qantenna 0.2.1
– kde4-skrooge 0.1.0 (i586 only)

Have a lot of fun 🙂

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Posted in Build Service, lizards.openSUSE.org, Packaging | 2 Comments »

OSF Status Report #1

January 6th, 2009 by

7 months have been passing by since the launch of the official openSUSE forums back in June. Since then a lot has been done by both the membership and the forums team to make this a big gain for the whole openSUSE community. From now on we are going to provide status reports on a monthly basis to represent the progress we make. As this is the first issue of status reports, we’d like to provide some long-term openSUSE forums statistics along the statistics for December 2008.

Up to the 31st of December 2008, we achieved a membership of 18.772 members, 18.144 threads and 105.203 posts, which is quite a lot considering that we started with an empty database due to some technical issues we had during the merge of the three independent parties that initially joined forces. Most users ever online was 7.771 – including guests – on the 2nd of December 2008.

The following diagram shows the monthly development of new user registrations, user activity, new threads and new posts since the launch in June. The user activity measures the number of individual visits to the openSUSE forums. We started strong with the release of openSUSE 11.0, then the traffic has been slowly declining followed by another peak with the release of openSUSE 11.1.

The next diagram outlines the daily statistics of the same measurements for December 2008. As you can see, the release date of openSUSE 11.1 – the 18th of December – had a significant impact on all presented measurements.

Kudos to our Top5 posters during the last 7 months…

  • oldcpu – 4.558
  • caf4926 – 3.643
  • kgroneman – 2.536
  • ken_yap – 2.375
  • swerdna – 2.355

…and to our Top5 posters during December 2008.

  • caf4926 – 795
  • oldcpu – 658
  • mingus725 – 449
  • ken_yap – 441
  • BenderBendingRodriguez – 284

Thanks a million for making the openSUSE forums useful.

We’d like to take the opportunity to thank the whole openSUSE community for their participation – without your great support during the last 7 months the success of the openSUSE forums would never be possible. The openSUSE forums are accessible through the website and the NNTP gateway. If you’re interested in the latter possibility, be sure to read my former article about NNTP access to the openSUSE forums.

As of the issue #49 of the openSUSE Weekly Newsletter, we present hot topics and asserted threads at a dedicated openSUSE forums section to the openSUSE community. If you are a frequent forums visitor and you’d like to contribute to this openSUSE forums section, you are very welcome to join the Newsletter Team. If you’re interested, please contact me – rhorstkoetter/at/opensuse.org – for further information.

Happy New Year from the whole openSUSE forums team!

Posted in Marketing | Comments Off on OSF Status Report #1

Howto – Adobe Flashplayer for X86_64

January 3rd, 2009 by

Unfortunaltely no Flashplayer for x86_64 exists. So far. Now the Adobe Labs released the libflashplayer for x86_64. It is very easy to run it on openSUSE.

First of all, you must download it.  Go to http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html.

Then go to the bottom of the page, and klick on “Download 64-Bit Plugin for Linux”. Now you will see an Dialogbox. At this place you can download the tar.gz File to an Place, you wish.

After them, you go to your shell, and go into the Directory, that you have specified in the Dialogbox. Now you type: “tar xvfz libflashplayer-{insert your Version].tar.gz”. After unpacking you will see an file called “libflashplayer.so”.

Now you have two alternatives:

1.)  If you are the only one on your Computer, you can move the file to: ~/.mozilla/plugins.

2.) If you have more Persons at the computer, you move the file to: /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/

After an Restart from Firefox you can use this new plugin.

From the Developers Side the Plugin is in unstable Status. But it works for me very fine. If you would like, try it out. …

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Posted in Desktop, Documentation, lizards.openSUSE.org, Miscellaneous, Mozilla | 5 Comments »

Saschas Backtrace: Gobby (collaborative editor)

December 28th, 2008 by

By working in the Weekly News Team, one Problem was bad. Only one Person can edit in the Wiki at the same time. Now yesterday Jan (dl9pf) has an great Idea. We test an pice of Software called “Gobby”.

The Projectpage from Gobby is: http://gobby.0x539.de/trac/

You can install the Program with: zypper in gobby.

After running the Program you can go to “Existing Session” (I don’t know who is called in English),

After Login you see the following:

Working Place

Every User has an own Color. The first Section is the Place who you can edit an open Document. Every change what you are make. is in your own color. I have written “Dies ist eine Testnachricht”. And my color is orange. In the bottom of the Program is an Chat-Window. Here can all Editors communicate.

Menue

In the List of Documents you can see, what Documents are open. All in this List you can edit, or add an own Document.

In the Lust of Users you can see all Users with the own color.  And you can see, what Program is owned by other Users.

All in all i must say: This is an very nice Program. 🙂 I think we’re using this Program every time. I’ve heared that the new Version is delivered without the Chat Function.

In the next Time i try it out and write an Report.

By the Way, we would like to say: “Thank you” to the Gobby-Development-Team.

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Posted in Documentation, GNOME, KDE | Comments Off on Saschas Backtrace: Gobby (collaborative editor)

Menage Skype and Facebook with Pidgin

December 27th, 2008 by

Hi folks, Merry xmas to everybody…

i have a greate news for all pidgin lovers…

yes! you red well… i packaged two pidgin plugins that allow to to use pidgin fro skype and facebook chat!

don’t beleive me? here some pictures:

Skype

Facebook

really nice eh? and it’s really easy to install and use! all packages you need are on my repository home:anubisg1 lots of you know it because of pidgin upstream version without the need to add GNOME repositories.

All you need to use it are skype4pidgin and pidgin-facebookchat packages. Once you install them you have to set-up your account… let me show you how.

On “add account” windows you’ll see 3 other protocols: facebook, skype, skype (D-BUS), choose the one you want as i did here:

now, if you choose facebook plugin, you simpy have to accept login.facebook.com SSL certificate and then you are ready to go. like here:

if you want to use skype plugin instead, right now you still need skype to installed and run…

On you first skype login using pidgin, you have to allow pidgin to connect skype like here:

that’s all.. you can now do anything you do with skype/facebook with pidgin too, you may want to know, that right now, the skype plugin directly use skype to start audio/video calls, because it is not able to do it..

Have fun with it.

Andrea

oh i forgot.. here links to the plugins home pages:

http://code.google.com/p/skype4pidgin/

http://code.google.com/p/pidgin-facebookchat/

Posted in Desktop, GNOME | 6 Comments »

Enlightenment LiveCD

December 24th, 2008 by

Ladies and Gents!

Glad to announce the third release of unofficial Enlightenment LiveCD based on our brand new OpenSUSE-11.1.

Download page
‘Welcome’ notes (PDF)

Please visit the download page to see the details and try the mirror provided by Yandex.ru. Read the Welcome.pdf before you pop the disk into the PC/Qemu/etc.

Along with this “release” we made another ‘iso’ which has less software but carry the proprietary ATI/NVIDIA drivers and all components to build and install them for your PC. Instruction is here:
‘Development’ release
Disk has a kernel sources, gcc, make and other ‘user unfriendly’ packages – thet’s why it’s a ‘development’ one.

The brief changelog comparing to the old ‘release’:

  • all EFL applications now use the default themes. This allowed to save some valuable spase and provide additional software (like the latest ‘linuxdcpp’ with multithreading download capability)
  • ‘SCIM‘ is included and ready to support the wide spectrum of international locales (added upon request from our Japanese colleagues)
  • operations with any external and internal volumes/storages under ‘User’ via hal+dbus+udev. You’re welcome to explore the amazing E17’s module ‘places‘ which allow an ordinary user to control and monitor all volumes on-the-fly
  • EFL/Enlightenment is build in OBS from svn revision 38164 (dated 20081215)
  • ~/bin folder has some nice scripts inside and we hope to provide much more useful tiny utilities next time
  • ‘Wicd‘ is set as a default network configuration utility (instead of ‘Exalt‘ which is now in a heavy development). If you’re not happy with it – just use the default ‘NetworkManager’.
  • ‘jwm‘ is added as an example of a WM which could be configured in and out (man jwm). It’s very good for an old PC’s (along with ‘E16‘). We tested the disk with a 128 RAM – works…
  • and the most interesting feature – is a ‘0install‘ technology, which allow you to build your own ROX-Desktop from scratch (internet connection is required). The result is very close to ‘GoboLinux’ – just click on ‘ROX-Filer‘ menu entry (Applications -> System -> File Manager -> ROX-Filer)

Some new applications added like ‘Tracker‘, ‘Edje_viewer‘, etc., init routine adjusted and several other tricks performed to prepare yet another general-purpose Linux LiveCD. Below is a link to the small gallery of a screenshots:

screenshots

Exactly what you get by default. Unfortunately they can’t express the feel of E, which is “…like people say, amazing.” Mirror is updating right now and the new version soon will be there (hope so).

As usual we’re glad to receive your feedback.

Acknowledgments:

Enlightenment Development Team and Enlightenment Community
OpenSUSE Build Service Team
OpenSUSE KIWI Team (schaefi, cyberorg, pzb, cgoncalves – THANKS!)
Stalwart, thanks for the hosting!
Packman Team
Novell
Jan Engelhardt
and all the others, who helped to make it (Engineers, Developers, Users, Maintainers…)

Thanks!

Regards,
SOAD team

Posted in Build Service, Desktop, Distribution | 13 Comments »

Saschas Backtrace: Interview with Petko D. Petkov on Netsecurify

December 24th, 2008 by

Petko D. Petkov is one of the founding-members of the Gnucitizen-hacker-network. They work inbetween internet, computers and security and always have very interesting projects going on, for example the “House of Hackers” a social-network for hackers and security experts. The Gnucitizen define themself as “a leading information security think tank, delivering solutions to local, national and international clients“.

Thier latest project is Netsecurify, an automated, webbased, remote testing tool, that enables security-testings of applications. One of the primary goal of the projects is not only to have a pioneering sort-of feeling, but foremost to support low-profit or non-profit organisations to have a robust and stable security-testing tools for free. They think of organisations, that otherwise would not be able to affort security experts and testing. We had a short interview with Petko D. Petkov on Netsecurify, their motivation, software design and overall goals.

What does the tool Netsecurify exactly do?

Netsecurify is a remote, automated, vulnerability assessment tool. The tool follows the SaaS (Software as a Service) model, i.e. it is a service which runs from Amazon’s scalable computing infrastructure. In it’s core, the tool performs several assessments, all based on open source technologies, and also provides recommendations through a flexible recommendation engine. The tool also allows 3rd-party organizations to enhance the reports.

Netsecurify is very simple to use. All the user has to do is to login and schedule a test for a particular network range. Once we approach the specified scheduled data, we run the test. When the test is done, the user is notified via email or by other means which we are working on at the moment. The user then logs in and downloads a copy of the report. For security reasons, the report is destroyed 30 days after it has been completed.

What was your motivation for starting the project?

The primarily motivation for starting this project is to provide free, quality, flexible, automated information security testing tool which can be employed by charity organizations, 3rd world countries, and in general, organizations and companies who cannot afford to spend money on security. Also, a huge motivational factor is the fact that no one has done a project like this. We are the first to do it. 🙂 This is pretty cool.

Who are the people behind the project and how is the project organized (agency, virtual, decentralized)?

Technically speaking, the people behind Netsecurify are GNUCITIZEN. However, we welcome anyone who is interested to join us and help us improve it. Because the testing engine is based on open source technologies which we have glued together and we are continually enhancing, we are planning to contribute back to the community everything that we do and as such close the circle of energy. In theory, this makes the entire security community part of the Netsecurify project.

What is the basic design concept and how do you think will the project develop and evolve?

We have a scalable backend and very easy to use and flexible frontend. In between we have several APIs which allow us to expand the service as we go. The tool hasn’t been just built from scratch. There was a lot of thought and design considerations put into this project before the actual code. We follow the KISS (Keep it Simple Stupid) principle. We find that this approach works quite well for us. In the future we are planning to continue simplifying and enhancing the product.

Do you have other projects planned, that will be coming at us in the future?

We always have. Expect to see more from the GNUCITIZEN team soon.

Thanks to Martin Wisniowsky (mw@node300.com)

Original Link to this Interview: http://digitaltools.node3000.com/5minutes/interview_with_petko_d_petkov_on_netsecurify_testing_tool.php

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Posted in lizards.openSUSE.org, Marketing, Network, Security | Comments Off on Saschas Backtrace: Interview with Petko D. Petkov on Netsecurify

YaST Qt4 Stylesheet Editor

December 23rd, 2008 by

YaST uses style.qss located in /usr/share/YaST2/theme/current/wizard by
default. If you want YaST to use a different style sheet (e.g. the style shown
while installation) you can set the $Y2STYLE environment variable:

Y2STYLE=installation.qss /sbin/yast2 disk

I’ve added a new hotkey to YaST which allows to modify the style sheet on
runtime. Pressing [Ctrl] + [Shift] + [Alt] + [S] in a YaST module opens the Stylesheet Editor. Now you can load a style sheet and modify its style rules.

Screenshot YaST Stylesheet Editor

The Stylesheet Editor can be very usefull when you want to design your own style for the YaST Qt4 UI.

This feature will be available in openSUSE 11.2. If you want to use it now all you need is yast2-qt version 2.18.2. You can find the latest version here:
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/tgoettlicher/openSUSE_Factory/

Posted in Artwork, YaST | Comments Off on YaST Qt4 Stylesheet Editor

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