Home Home
Sign up | Login

Deprecation notice: openSUSE Lizards user blog platform is deprecated, and will remain read only for the time being. Learn more...

My switch from Windows to Linux

September 15th, 2008 by

In March 2006 I lost my patience with Microsoft Windows XP Prof. which I’d bought together with a hardware upgrade on my older computer. I had allready been using StarOffice 5.2/OpenOffice for letters and spreadsheets for 6 years and Firefox had been my preferred webbrowser for some years after 5 to 6 months using Netscape Navigator.

At that time I had only heard a little about Linux, and when I googled I only found sites advertising installation CD’s. Not really what i needed.

One day though I saw an article from an experience from a company, who had switched over to SuSE Linux 10.0. The result was, that the majority of emploiees in that particular company hardly noticed any difference from what they were used to. And some even thought it to be easier. Encouraging article that woke up my curiousity – I wanted to learn more.

Several searches later I had learned about the danish Linux forums and I discovered the danish guide written and maintained by Martin Schlander (cb400f). The guide described how to download and burn .iso images etc. Five (5) CD’s was it, which made me wonder, whatever that were all about. Never the less I downloaded, burned, and backed up my files on my computer. Through my 12 years Windows experience I had learned to allways partition my harddisk and keep important files on the D:-drive.

I were ready to jump into it.

What a surprise. I were used to spend an entire day installing first the OS with a couple of reboots. Then install drivers – reboots – programmes – reboots same-old-story-etc. etc. It were all don in only 40 minutes including upgrades through my wireless router. All my hardware (except from my webcam) worked out-of-the-box. Installing files needed for mp3-files and to be able to watch DVD’s etc. was described in the guide.

Deeply impressed I were ready to learn more. Not only about Linux but also about the community. I subscribed to some forums and newsletters and started my voyage into a totally different world.

To be continued…

Posted in Miscellaneous | Comments Off on My switch from Windows to Linux

Developing with libyui/libzypp & python – part1

September 14th, 2008 by

In a small series of posts I’ll describe some tips and tricks for developing with libyui and libzypp in python.
Thanks to the YaST developers and Klaus Kaempf, there are bindings to libyui the Yast User Interface library for python.
For libzypp there are also python-bindings done by Duncan Mac-Vicar Prett and Arvin Schnell.
Both are generated with the swig code generator and are not perfect yet, but as we’ll see they’re pretty usable.

One big problem we need to solve is: libyui and libzypp are part of your base-system/YaST. If we would update them in the main system,
we would probably screw up zypper and YaST – which is bad.
Therefore I compiled libyui and libzypp and all other needed packages with an custom –prefix (/opt/yuitest) inside the openSUSE Buildservice.
Thus we can easily install the latest version without breaking our system.

In this first part we’ll install and test libyui.
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Build Service, Documentation, Miscellaneous, YaST | 2 Comments »

YDialogSpy Can Now Show Widget Properties

September 12th, 2008 by

Yesterday I wrote about YDialogSpy, the new interactive YaST dialog debugger. The plans for its future included showing the properties of the currently selected widget. Well, that future came much quicker than expected; it arrived late this afternoon:
(click for large versions)

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: ,
Posted in Systems Management, Usability, YaST | 1 Comment »

Installation over serial line

September 12th, 2008 by

It’s now possible to install openSUSE if you only have a serial line (without additional tricks). Our graphical bootloader frontend used to ignore serial input. That’s now (starting with 11.1 beta1) changed.

In the default setting it monitors com1/com2 (the first two bios configured serial ports) for input. Baud rate is autodetected (you have to press a few keys until it catches on). Output is sent to all lines it receives input from.

When it works, the first screen looks like:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Base System, Systems Management | Comments Off on Installation over serial line

OpenOffice_org 3.0rc1 available (ask for testing)

September 12th, 2008 by

I’m happy to announce that OpenOffice.org 3.0.0.3.1 packages are available in the Build Service OpenOffice:org:UNSTABLE project. They are the fitst release candidate of the OpenOffice.org 3.0 version.

We kindly ask for testing. Please, try and report bugs.

Note: They might still include bugs and are not intended for data-critical usage. A good practice is to archive any important data before an use, …

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Desktop, OpenOffice.org | 1 Comment »

Conditional features aka “use flags”

September 12th, 2008 by

In a coordinated effort with Manfred Tremmel, the xine maintainer at Packman, we’ve reworked the xine spec file. Most of it can now be shared between Packman and openSUSE Factory so packaging work doesn’t need to be duplicated. The spec file now makes heavy use of conditional build macros to enable or disable certain features. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Build Service | 2 Comments »

Learning YaST (YCP language)

September 12th, 2008 by

My name is Alexander i`m a trainee at SUSE.

In my blog i will write about my experience with learning YCP (YaST Control Language)

First of all, most important part of learning is to have a good manual.

Here you have some links to start:

YCP book ->must read! (up to date)

YCP Reference book

YCP User interface referece book

YaST Development in General

Later i add additional info …..

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Systems Management, YaST | 1 Comment »

YDialogSpy: An Interactive YaST Dialog Debugger

September 11th, 2008 by

Programming a GUI version of “Hello, World” is easy in the YaST programming environment, no matter if it’s YCP (the YaST-specific scripting language), plain C++, Perl, Python, or Ruby.

But if dialogs become more complex, it can get demanding to make them look good and – equally important – to behave well as the user resizes dialogs:

The YaST UI (user interface) engine now features a new debugging tool to make life easier for developers: YDialogSpy. In the Qt version, hit the magic key combination

Ctrl-Shift-Alt-Y

and you will get a YDialogSpy window like this:

This shows the widget hierarchy of the original dialog as a tree. Clicking around in that tree, you can highlight the corresponding widget (and its child widgets) in the original dialog (move the YDialogSpy window to the side first):

This can also make widgets visible you normally can’t see such as H/VSpacing, H/VStretch etc., and it shows the extent of alignment widgets (left, right, top, bottom) as well as layout boxes (H/VBox):

Availability

yast2-libyui-2.17-9 or later
yast2-qt-2.17.8 or later

The Future

This is just a first version, of course. Future versions will get a “Properties” table that can show certain values of the current widget. Maybe there will also be some (very limited) editing capabilities.

Stay tuned.

Further Reading

http://en.opensuse.org/YaST/Development/Misc/YDialogSpy
(With original-size screen shots)

Posted in Systems Management, Usability, YaST | Comments Off on YDialogSpy: An Interactive YaST Dialog Debugger

openSUSE Buildservice: cross-build with OBS Part 3

September 10th, 2008 by

This is the third part of my article series about the Hackweek Project “cross-build in the OBS” and the current OBS development. The first part can be found here, the second here.

What happened in the meantime?

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Build Service, Hackweek, Packaging, Toolchain, Virtualization | 1 Comment »

KDE3 and KDE4 for openSUSE

September 10th, 2008 by

As Zonker announced yesterday (and I copy some lines from his message), the KDE team has decided to take the following course of action after receiving a great deal of feedback on the issue of KDE 3.5 inclusion in openSUSE 11.1 – and state of KDE 4.1:

  • KDE 3.5 will be part of the DVD media for openSUSE 11.1, though space constraints may require to slim the package selection for 3.5 slightly.
  • KDE 3.5 will be included in the main selection page under “Other Desktop Environments” (during installation).
    This way new users will learn KDE4 directly and those users updating from a previous openSUSE release will not see this dialog at all.  Those that want KDE3 to install anyhow will still be able to easy install it.
  • We encourage and support contributors who are interested in maintaining KDE 3.5 for future releases of openSUSE, however the Novell employed part of the KDE team will shift focus to maintaining the KDE 4 packages for the openSUSE releases after the next one.
  • While KDE 3.5 will be on the openSUSE 11.1 media again, KDE 3.5 will not be included on any 11.2 “official” media or repositories, but the community certainly has the option of creating live CDs with KDE 3.5 packages for 11.2.
  • The Novell KDE team will only be addressing high priority bugs for KDE 3.5.x from this point forward. Again, this does not preclude community contributors from supporting KDE 3.5.x, and we encourage them to do so.
  • We will work on an easy migration from KDE3 to KDE4 desktops so that settings and data will persist.  This has already been started for openSUSE 11.0 and will continue to get improved.

We’d like to thank all the people who helped provide constructive feedback while we evaluated the best course for the next release of openSUSE. While we know that no solution is guaranteed to make every user happy, we think that we’ve reached the best compromise for openSUSE 11.1 and beyond, to ensure a smooth transition. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Desktop, Distribution, KDE | 1 Comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »