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Linux Distribution Popularity Across the Globe

August 22nd, 2008 by

openSUSE popularity around the world

Royal Pingdom has issued an article about “Linux Distribution Popularity Across the Globe”. They have included eight common Linux distributions in their survey: Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Fedora, Debian, Red Hat, Mandriva, Slackware and Gentoo and used Google Insights for Search, for determining the results.

Below is the summary from their results :

  • Ubuntu is most popular in Italy and Cuba.
  • OpenSUSE is most popular in Russia and the Czech Republic.
  • Red Hat is most popular in Bangladesh and Nepal.
  • Debian is most popular in Cuba.
  • Cuba is in the top five (interest-wise) of three of the eight distributions in this survey.
  • Indonesia is in the top five of four of the distributions.
  • Russia and the Czech Republic are in the top five of five of the distributions.
  • The United States is not in the top five of any of the distributions.

There is an interesting result, Rusia, Czech and Moldova beating Germany about openSUSE popularity 😉 . Oh, of course this is not complete survey, and it is not the weakness of openSUSE itself. In the other side, the survey show us that openSUSE gained much popularity in outside Germany.

Another interesting result, congratulation for Indonesian openSUSE Community, Indonesia is in top five (number #5 of 5) of openSUSE popularity in the world and Indonesian openSUSE Community contributed in the survey results to make Indonesia as top five of four of the distributions.

Please navigate to the survey results for another interesting results and detail statictics.

Posted in Miscellaneous | Comments Off on Linux Distribution Popularity Across the Globe

Get Read/Write support to external NTFS Hard Drives

August 21st, 2008 by

Hi Lizards, that’s my first post here! 🙂 so… Thanks for reading!

Well let’s start.

I Red lots of times that users have problems with NTFS usb hard drives. Of course i’m talking about read/write support and ntfs-3g.

Touch and works with /etc/fstab is not a nice idea, also because device name could change and a static mount point will be unusefull.

The solution is to write an hal rule. In this case, all we need is the following:

With you favourite editor create like root that file:

/usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/20-ntfs-config-write-policy.fdi

and past in it that lines:

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!-- -*- SGML -*- -->
<!--
   Allow read/write mounting of external NTFS devices with ntfs-3g.
    /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/
-->
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
  <device>
    <match key="volume.fstype" string="ntfs">
      <match key="@block.storage_device:storage.hotpluggable" bool="true">
          <merge key="volume.fstype" type="string">ntfs-3g</merge>
          <merge key="volume.policy.mount_filesystem" type="string">ntfs-3g</merge>
          <append key="volume.mount.valid_options" type="strlist">locale=</append>
      </match>
    </match>
  </device>
</deviceinfo>

than restart, as root, hal daemon with

hald restart

to make changes working.

If you want you could use my ntfs-3g package on my home repository

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/anubisg1/openSUSE_10.2/
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/anubisg1/openSUSE_10.3/
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/anubisg1/openSUSE_11.0/

it is always the last stable ntfs-3g released (right now is 1.2812) and include also the hal rule wrote before.

I hopes that to be usefull for lots.

Andrea 🙂

Tags:
Posted in Usability | 4 Comments »

openSUSE TV update

August 21st, 2008 by

Ok now that my tubes to the net are back with gusto, I have been able to get all of tube.o.o onto openSUSE TV.  Actually oTV has some videos that aren’t on tube.o.o 🙂

With HackWeek 3 coming up this week, I’m hoping to get more videos up there.  So calling all Geecko Stations, if your make some videos of you escapades, please let me know and we’ll get them uploaded.  As it isn’t an official corporate sponsored site rules are a touch looser, e.g: video format doesn’t have to be in OGG, yes it would be preferable but not final.  I have a HackWeek project relating to the openSUSE Broadcasting Corporation, so the weeks after HackWeek should hopefully be good.  I’m hoping to be able to do some updates during the week too, but they may have to wait.

Remember if you have any suggestions or (preferably) any content to share with folk about openSUSE and it’s ecosystem please let me know.  You can get hold of me by leaving a comment here or mail me (you may need to edit the address 😉 ).

Tags:
Posted in Marketing | Comments Off on openSUSE TV update

Accessing the Build Service from Eclipse

August 13th, 2008 by

One of this year’s Google Summer of Code projects is a an Eclipse plugin to access the Build Service, developed by Long Hong from Beijing. If you are interested, read on.

open Build Service perspective

While there are still issues to be solved, I think it’s in a state that everybody can try it out. Grab a package from my home project, launch eclipse and open the Build Service perspective. Please note that the package itself is a bit experimental and was only tested to work on openSUSE 11.0. Enjoy! 😉

screenshot of the properties view

screenshot of the remote view

screenshot of the build result view

Posted in Build Service | 2 Comments »

Akademy 2008

August 12th, 2008 by

In Sint-Katelijne-Waver, Belgium currently Akademy, the annual conference of the KDE project takes place. More than 300 people had a nice weekend listening to a whole bunch of very interesting talks of various topics around KDE. Over the week there will be special topics and BOFs and Hacking 🙂

While most of the topics were technically or very much related to KDE such as talks in the community track, on sunday there was a keynote from Cliff Schmidt from literacybridge.org with the title Digital Audio to Reduce Illiteracy, Poverty and Disease. Danny has already blogged about it. It was a real mind opener that a lot of our efforts are useless to people who simply can not read. Cliff and the literacybridge project has a deep insight of how that can be improved. It was a real impressing talk and hope that the success for that project continues. Please check the project out.

On monday we had the general assembly of the KDE e.V. where Cornelius and Aaron Seigo were reelected into the board of the KDE e.V. Furthermore it was decided about a Community Code of Conduct for KDE that gives some hints how to behave in our community which seems to be needed these days and some other interesting and important stuff.

Today there is the “Embedded and Mobile Day” on Akademy which started with a talk around the Maemo platform where now Qt4 is available and everybody is invited to port interesting (KDE)  applications to it. Nokia was nice enough to give lots of N810 devices to KDE developers. Very motivating 🙂

openSUSE is also very present on Akademy, not only as a sponsor. Coincidentially most of the conference speakers were standing very near to the openSUSE poster and as a result it was very prominent, but more important is that openSUSE is running on many desktops I saw…  Some people approached me and mentioned things like openSUSE 11.0 is really cool, KDE 4.1 is most easily installable with one-click-install, zypper rocks and other cool things. Nice.

Akademy is great and I enjoy some hacking on Kraft now 🙂

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Posted in Desktop, Events, KDE | Comments Off on Akademy 2008

GUI with python and libyui

August 7th, 2008 by

For some days now I’m working on a GUI written in python. I needed X and konsole, so I gave python-yui (python-binding of libyui) a try.
Libyui is the YaST2 User Interface library and python-yui is part of openSUSE 11.0.
If you want to have a quick look you can try my (demo-) widgets.py. It shows some, but not all widgets available. Klaus Kaempf uploaded it to the svn (tnx!).
Dependency:
zypper in python-yui
wget -nd "http://svn.opensuse.org/svn/yast/trunk/libyui-bindings/swig/python/examples/widgets.py"

a) with GTK/QT GUI:
python widget.py

b) with ncurses/konsole GUI:
export DISPLAY2 = $DISPLAY; unset DISPLAY; python widget.py ; export DISPLAY=$DISPLAY2 ; unset DISPLAY2

Have Phun!
Edit:
Here’s a screenshot,
Screenshot

Posted in Systems Management | 2 Comments »

openSUSE TV

August 5th, 2008 by

Some may know about the Geeko’s Tube, I’m not so sure that many do though.  There has been for a while now tube.opensuse.org, this is the official repository of videos by openSUSE people.  All the video is in .ogg format, and as such will play straight out of the box regardless of whether users are purists/pragmatists/whatever.

There are several services out on the web that offer video streaming in flash, one that caught my attention is blip.tv.  So why is blip different to YouTube et al?  Well for starters they openly use Open Source (they’re not ashamed of it), they support multiple formats for uploading and playback, and they provide multiple mechanisms to get your shows out there.

After some consultation on the mailing lists and IRC, I have created an openSUSE channel on blip.tv – http://opensuse.blip.tv The aim is for videos by the openSUSE Community for the openSUSE Community can get uploaded there and reach a much wider audience.  There are only a few videos on there at the moment but the content will grow (I’m just having a few ISP issues over here :-/ ).  So what content is able to go on there?  The short answer is any, yes there are only a couple of catches: they must preferably be clean (remember the audience is varied from young to old), have an openSUSE twist (the whole reason for the channel).  At present there are a few screencasts and some presentations by community members at events (granted they’re all employees, but that doesn’t make them any less a member of our community).

Just to show some of the ways you can watch the channel:

Banshee (out of the box openSUSE 11.0 install)

Browser (again out of the box openSUSE 11.0 install)

Miro which you can download, just look here.

As the channel is syndicated via RSS you can subscribe to it using Banshee/Miro and it will automatically download the latest episode for you (sorry I haven’t tried in KDE, but I believe it should work).  You can also add the RSS feed into your preferred reader and pull the attachments from there.

I would be really keen on getting people’s feedback and also if people have content they would like to get on there.

Tags:
Posted in Distribution, Marketing, Usability | Comments Off on openSUSE TV

LRL UK 08 – Not The Last

July 21st, 2008 by

So LUG Radio Live UK is over for another year, yes the event will be back next year but not the podcast.  openSUSE were represented by yours truly and Roger Whittaker (also representing the Big N), and to be honest I didn’t have to get my baseball bat out once to get people to come by – I was slightly disappointed with that as knocking some sense into some of those Ubuntu zombies would have been fun 😛  Part of the reason may have been the fact that the Furry Geekos were out in force

March of the Geekos

Roger also did a sterling job of getting the new openSUSE 11.0 Live/Installable DVD into almost all the “NutSacks” (The bags attendees received when entering the event).  Those that didn’t get one in there pretty quickly came over to ensure they did get one.  Everyone agreed that we had the best mascot and the best swag, talking of which can anyone guess what this is?

Mystery Swag

Only a few folk were lucky enough to get one, and to be honest it is a much better one than what RedHat/Fedora were dishing out.  It is of course a USB stick

Mystery Swag Revealed

Another piece of openSUSE swag that was being dished out but not by us was the Linux Magazine openSUSE 11.0 Special.  This is actually quite a good issue and is a great companion for anyone new to the distro.  I have a couple that I can send to people (UK/Europe preferably due to cost) if requested.  The issue was created aimed predominantly at the US market where Linux Magazine is trying to get a foot hold:

Linux Magazine openSUSE 11.0 Special Edition

Wandering around, I spoke to quite a lot of people about Linux in general and openSUSE and the feedback from people was tremendous.  Those that have actually tried 11.0 really really like it, and those that haven’t were adamant that they would.  So much so that one rather intimidating chap mentioned that “A friend of mine needed to re-install her machine and she was very scared of the process, I gave her a DVD of 10.3 and told her to ring me if she was stuck.  She rang me a short while later and exclaimed at how easy and straight forward it was.  She hasn’t looked back since!” The praise also came from a fair few die hards of other distros, which was pleasant to see and hear.  There was a friendly swag exchange with RedHat and Fedora, although their offering was pretty poor in comparison but still better than Ubuntu who had nothing but a type of crummy sticker and a million and one CDs of assorted variants of the same crud 🙂  The Fedora guys took it upon themselves to try and sully the image and spirit of our beloved Geeko by hanging it by one of their lanyards

Hung Geeko

Thankfully the kind chaps from Debian rescued it, although I’m pretty sure it was for their own gains.  The atmosphere was light hearted and pleasent with no trolls in sight or in earshot.  This even extended to my lightning talk which was pretty well attended, around 30 people almost none of which were involved with openSUSE in any way.  You can get my slides here, and there will be a video of it shortly.

All in all it was a fairly good weekend, and from an openSUSE perspective a very productive one 😉  I would like to thank Roger for his hard work in doing the stand, helping out and support as well as for the photos (some of which I used here).  I would also like to thank Zonker and Novell for arranging for the brilliant swag and DVDs, without which we could have looked like dull dorks.  Till next year!

Tags: ,
Posted in Distribution, Events, Marketing | 5 Comments »

Trick of the Day: Reboot as User

July 18th, 2008 by 
$ reboot
-bash: reboot: command not found
$ /sbin/reboot
reboot: must be superuser.

In KDE / GNOME, you can just click reboot in the menu and your session sends a message to display manager, which runs as root and does the dirty job of rebooting or shutting down your machine. Unfortunately, things are not that easy if you are using a simpler window manager or want to shutdown from a script. Sure, there is sudo, but that has to be configured first to work without password. Luckily, after a couple of hours of googling (only to find helpful advice as “this can be done easily with ConsoleKit or hal”), reading documentation of dbus, {Console,Policy}Kit and hal and clicking in qdbusviewer, I finally found a way with hal+dbus:

$ dbus-send --system --dest=org.freedesktop.Hal \
  --type=method_call --print-reply \
  /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/computer \
  org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.SystemPowerManagement.Reboot

To shutdown, just replace Reboot with Shutdown. I’m going to add this to the default icewm configuration, so that the logout menu finally works.

Posted in Desktop | 3 Comments »

openSUSE Gets the JeOS

July 16th, 2008 by

openSUSE is great for the desktop, great for the server, and now it’s ready to take on appliances — and we don’t mean toasters and blenders. No, we’re talking about software appliances — virtual machine images that come pre-configured with the application you want to use, without any of the hassle normally associated with installing an application.

If you’re interested in building a virtual appliance, or have another use for a minimal operating system, read on to learn about openSUSE LimeJeOS.

What is LimeJeOS?

LimeJeOS is the openSUSE version of JeOS. The term JeOS (“Just enough Operating System”) refers to a customized operating system that precisely fits the needs of a particular application. LimeJeOS includes only the pieces of an operating system required to support a particular application and any other third-party components contained in the appliance. This makes the appliance smaller, more efficient, more secure, and offers better performance than an application running under a full, general-purpose operating system.

As the name suggests, “LimeJeOS” itself is not an appliance or an operating system; it is just the base for various possible appliances. LimeJeOS contains just the very basic parts of an operating system. The major goal is to make the system as small as possible while providing the possibility to install additional software. A LimeJeOS system itself is not very useful without additional packages. Besides an editor (a stripped version of vi) it just contains a package manager that allows the actual applications to be installed. Of course all the usual repositories can be used for that purpose; just with a regular, full-size Linux distribution.

What is the difference between SLE JeOS and LimeJeOS?

SUSE Linux Enterprise JeOS relates to LimeJeOS just like openSUSE relates to SLES. In fact, SLE JeOS is built from the latest version of SLES while LimeJeOS is built from the latest version of openSUSE. While LimeJeOS provides the latest state of the openSUSE distribution, SLE JeOS will offer all the services and support that is also available for SLES.

Which one should you use? If you’re working on a virtual appliance for a project that won’t require commercial support, and you want to track the latest in open source, openSUSE is the version for you.

If you’re working on a project that’s likely to need support, then you probably want to go with SUSE Linux Enterprise JeOS.

Where can I get LimeJeOS?

LimeJeOS is built using kiwi. The configuration files are managed via Subversion and are available at: https://forgesvn1.novell.com/svn/opensuse/trunk/distribution/images/LimeJeOS/

In the future we plan to create a regular package (RPM) and add it to the openSUSE build service, so that the latest version is always created automatically with the latest software versions in openSuSE.

How to build LimeJeOS?

Check out the current version of LimeJeOS using the following commands:

svn co https://forgesvn1.novell.com/svn/opensuse/trunk/distribution/images/LimeJeOS

Make sure you have the needed kiwi packages installed. You will need at least: kiwi, kiwi-tools and kiwi-desc-vmxboot and/or kiwi-desc-xenboot from http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/openSUSE:/Tools/. When those conditions are met, building the openJeOS images is accomplished by just running the “./build.sh” script from the LimeJeOS repository.

./build.sh

Please note that the build process will need at least twice as much diskspace as the final images, so you’ll need around 2 GB of free disk space at this time to build Lime JeOS.

After you have booted the virtual system, log in as user “root” with password “linux”.

Posted in Distribution, Server, Virtualization | 5 Comments »

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