Archive:weekly news 107
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Welcome to issue # 107 of openSUSE Weekly News
In this Week:
- Wiki Cleanup – Geeko wants you!
- Masim Sugianto: Recover Deleted Files on Linux with Extundelete
- Updated GNOME for openSUSE 11.2, and why it's good
- Carlos Gonçalves: PySide packages for openSUSE, Mandriva and Fedora
- Skype 2.1 beta 2 aka Talking Screens for Linux
Announcements
- openSUSE News: openSUSE @ FOSDEM 2010
- "FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting, will take place at the first weekend in February (6th/7th) in Brussels and we’re going to attend. There is a buttload of tracks, devrooms and lightning talks to visit. Including, but not limited to: Security, Scalability, Monitoring, Distributions, KDE, GNOME, Ruby on Rails, X.org, LiMux, csync, GeeXboX and so on and so on. You should check the Schedule. Of course also the famous exhibition exhaust pipe hallway will be back once more with project booths ranging from CAcert to Zarafa Community."
- Spyhawk: Wiki Cleanup – Geeko wants you!
- "Online since August 2005, the openSUSE wiki has proved to be an invaluable resource for users, contributors and developers. However, we had no Quality Assurance step in the publishing procedure for wiki articles. This made it very hard to assure a consistent quality across all articles. Several attempts were made to scan the wiki in order to clean up, sort and merge duplicate articles, raise overall quality, introduce meaningful categories, etc. However, after all attempts we were still not where we wanted to be."
In the Community
- Masim Sugianto: Unikom Linux Week 2010 : openSUSE Workshop @ Bandung-Indonesia
- "A friend of mine, Indonesian openSUSE Ambassador and also Indonesian openSUSE Community leader for Bandung West Java, Andi Sugandi has initiated Unikom Linux Week, an agenda for Linux promo but mostly covering openSUSE workshop :-) on February 2010 . Beside openSUSE, ULW will also host an Ubuntu and Blankon (Indonesian Local distro) workshop."
Status Updates
Distribution
- Stephan Kulow: Status distribution
- "I'm in the process of testing the first DVD builds, so far it looks okayish for the first milestone. The list of known bugs will be longish, but we have to start somewhere."
- Nagappan Alagappan: Announce: Linux Desktop Testing Project (LDTP) 2.0.1 released
- "LDTPv2 a complete rewrite of LDTPv1 in Python. This release is dedicated to Eitan Isaacson[1]. Eitan wrote the LDTPv2 framework and important API's in LDTPv2 !
- My co-workers in VMware Ranjith Murugan, Gaurav Sharma and Anupa Kamath, did a wonderful job in verifying the compatibility of LDTPv1 and v2. Special thanks to them and my manager Greg McShea on supporting this effort."
Boosters Team
- status of factory.o.o sprint
- "I hope http://retro.opensu.se/milestones/1/sprints/2/stories is a link that works for everyone - I had to click around quite a bit to get to the stories."
- Retrospectiva
- "I've been 'boosted' by one our community member and I started a little cleanup of our Retrospectiva."
- Egbert Eich: Egbert's Weeks 50,51 2009 and 2,3 2010
- Klaas Freitag: Work report KW 2 2010
- Petr Utzel: Work report puzel kw 1,2
- Pavol Rusnak: work report kw2 prusnak
- Michal Hruseky: work report kw2 mhrusecky
- Henne Vogelsang: Work Report hvogel
- Thomas Schmidt: work report #2
- Lubos Lunak: work report kw2 llunak
Build Service
- Richard Bos: A stable repository for kolab
- "During the X-mas holidays Kolab, the groupware server got a stable repository for 11.1 and 11.2 on the openSUSE build service (OBS). All packages that are not provided by the openSUSE base distribution have been copied (using osc copypac) to the STABLE repository. Another possiblity to achieve the same result could be by making a fixed link to the unstable package using osc linkpac -r <rev>. Once the unstable package works again the link could be updated with osc setlinkrev -r <newrev> to point to the working revision or updated revision."
- openSUSE News: openSUSE releases the openSUSE Build Service(OBS) Beta 2 today
- "This release is now feature complete and also the API should be final by now.
- Biggest changes since beta 1 are:
- * Switch to Ruby on Rails 2.3.5
- * The branch call is doing full copies of packages now, not just _link files anymore
- * Repository status + dirty flag is calculated and displayed in the web interface (and with osc 0.125)
- * many bugfixes esp. in api and webui
- * Workers can get auto configured via SLP."
- Adrian Schröter: Build Team Meeting
- Minutes from the Meeting
Wiki / Communication / Events
- Wiki transition: Status
- "There is 667 articles in the list. Checked is 167, or 25% . The bug that is blocking new wiki infrastructure setup (templates, namespaces, help files) is still preset. "
Tips and Tricks
For Desktop Users
- Tech Source From Bohol/jun auza: 20 (More) Awesome GIMP Brush Sets
- "Since the collection of awesome GIMP brushes that I showcased a few months ago was quite popular, I decided to put together another wonderful list of brush sets that I'm going to share once again to all of you."
For Commandline/Script Newbies
- Joe Brockmeier: Bash 201 - Intermediate Guide to Bash
- "Last week we took a look at some of the basics of using the GNU Bash shell. Of course, that's not all there is to getting to know your way around the shell.
- Here we'll take a look at configuring bash, setting aliases, and a few other tips and tricks for getting to know your shell. Learning the way around the shell is a marathon, not a sprint, so we'll try to take it in small manageable chunks."
- The Geek Stuff/Sasikala: Awk Tutorial: Understand Awk Variables with 3 Practical Examples
- "This article is part of the on-going Awk Tutorial and Examples series. Like any other programming languages, Awk also has user defined variables and built-in variables.
- In this article let us review how to define and use awk variables."
For System Administrators
- Masim Sugianto: Recover Deleted Files on Linux with Extundelete
- "Extundelete is a utility tools for recovering deleted file. What make it usable is that the utility has a capability to recover data from an ext3 and ext4 partition. The ext3 file system is the most common file system on Linux distro (openSUSE 11.1 and former version provided it by default) while ext4 is the successor.
- Beware that Extundelete has no guarantee to successfully recovering your files but it still better to have a choice to rescue your data than simply cries and leave your file gone away :-P . Actually, I’ve also trying another tool from RIP Linux (Recovery is Possible Linux) beside Extundelete and will be discuss it later on next article."
- Masim Sugianto: Ext4 File System Support on openSUSE 11.1 or Older Version
- "openSUSE 11.2 has ext4 file system support by default but how if we want to make openSUSE 11.1 or an older version (11.0, 10.3) have an ext4 support? I found this problem : unknown filesystem type ‘ext4‘ while trying to mounting openSUSE 11.2 disk on new installation of openSUSE 11.1."
- Linux Magazine/Ken Hess: VirtualBox’s Little Secret: The Command Line
- "... It may surprise you to know that sneaking around under that cute VirtuaBox GUI, with its colorful graphics, explicit Settings page and numerous dropdown lists, is the occult world of the command line. The true power of this dark realm reveals itself to those who dare enter its musty catacombs. After you discover the VirtualBox CLI, you might decide that the GUI is little more than lame window dressing (pun intended) created for those passersby who would otherwise ignore the uninspiring black rectangle of the real application."
New/Updated Applications @ openSUSE
- Petr Mladek: OpenOffice_org 3.2 rc2 available for openSUSE
- "I’m happy to announce OpenOffice.org 3.2 rc2 packages for openSUSE. They are available in the Build Service OpenOffice:org:UNSTABLE project and include many upstream and Go-oo fixes. See also overview of integrated features and enhancements. Please, look for more details about the openSUSE OOo build on the wiki page."
- Packman: lmms 0.4.6-0.pm.1.3
- "LMMS aims to be a free alternative to popular (but commercial and closed-source) programs like FruityLoops, Cubase and Logic giving you the ability of producing music with your computer by creating/synthesizing sounds,arranging samples, playing live with keyboard and much more... LMMS combines the features of a tracker-/sequencer-program (pattern-/channel-/ sample-/song-/effect-management) and those of powerful synthesizers and samplers in a modern, user-friendly and easy to use graphical user-interface."
- Packman: FreeCAD 0.9.2646-1
- "FreeCAD will be a general purpose 3D CAD modeler. The development will be completely Open Source. As with many modern 3D CAD modelers it will have a 2D component in order to extract design detail from the 3D model to create 2D production drawings, although 2D (e.g. AutoCAD LT) is not the focus, neither are animation and organic shapes (e.g. Maya, 3D StudioMAX and Cinema 4D)."
- Wolfgang Rosenauer: Firefox 3.6 released
- "Spread Firefox Affiliate ButtonFirefox 3.6 has been released and obviously it’s already available for download from the openSUSE Mozilla repository for all openSUSE versions back to 11.0. (As it is really fresh, some Addons might not be updated yet and as always the latest previous version 3.5.x is still available in the mozilla:legacy repo.)
- HowTo for installing: here"
- Wolfgang Rosenauer: Prism 1.0b3
- "As mentioned in blogs hereand here Prism 1.0b3 got somehow released. I have updated the version I had in mozilla:beta and moved it to the openSUSE mozilla repository (even if it’s officially beta but then there is no previous version so it makes sense).As the previous version it’s based on XulRunner and does not contain a full Gecko release which also means if you run Prism it will find a matching XulRunner automatically (not necessarily the latest one though what I consider bad behaviour and intend to fix)."
Projects Corner
The corner for introducing activities of sub project *inside* openSUSE.
KDE Project
- Ostatic/Joe Brockmeier: Crowdsourcing the KDE Web Site
- "The KDE Project is taking a smart approach to reworking the KDE Website. Lydia Pintscher put out the call Sunday for contributors to pitch in with content and screenshots for one or more KDE programs by January 23rd.
- KDE apps are broken down into three batches on the wiki. Contributors are asked to pick one (or more) apps and submit a screenshot, and basic information about a project such as its homepage, features, IRC channels, and so forth."
GNOME Project
- Updated GNOME for openSUSE 11.2, and why it's good
- "Luis already unleashed the word: GNOME 2.28.2 will be released as an online update for openSUSE 11.2 (for reference, openSUSE 11.2 was initially released with 2.28.1). You can currently help testing that everything is fine with the packages by adding the 11.2-test repository and upgrading. Please go ahead and test it, and tell us if it breaks anything. Hopefully, it should work quite fine."
Planet SUSE
- Masim Sugianto: 7 Lightweight Linux Browsers You may want to Consider for Fast Browsing Experience
- "Mozilla Firefox may becoming the most popular browser in Linux world but these are also some competitors such as Opera, Konqueror, Google Chrome, Epiphany and others. The above browser has similar function and quite nice to be used on a standard PC. Unfortunately, as a modern and complex application, all listed browser need a fast, modern computer with standard modern hardware, such as minimum 256 MB of RAM. If you trying to run one of these on the older hardware, the result may vary but most of them will running slow, even on 256 MB of RAM. Google Chrome may run faster than Mozilla Firefox but overall working with modern browser on an older PC is very inconvenient."
- Jigish Gohil: Eclipse on Stellarium
- "Stellarium is a free software available for Windows, Linux/Unix and MacOSX. It renders 3D photo-realistic skies in real time.. With stellarium, you really see what you can see with your eyes, binoculars or a small telescope. Packages for openSUSE are available from Education repository on openSUSE Build Service via 1-click install.
- India and many parts of Asia witnessed the longest annular solar eclipse of the millennium, next such event will take place after 1000 years. Stellarium helps to re-live the moments of this eclipse and explain what exactly was going on during the eclipse."
- Carlos Gonçalves: PySide packages for openSUSE, Mandriva and Fedora
- "As some are already aware of, I've been packaging PySide (including apiextractor, generatorrunner, and boostpythongenerator) for openSUSE since the project has been publicly announced.
- Not only stable/released versions have been packaged, but also snapshots taken from mainline git repository with both built and hosted on the openSUSE Build Service in my home dir there (home:cgoncalves:pyside and home:cgoncalves:pyside:devel)."
- Katarina Machalkova: On testing
- "What is the most important part of software project? Experienced developers? Creative user interface designers? Good managers? Meticulous testers? Decision making in the right hands? Hmmm ... if you ask me, it's balanced combination of all of these, but this is not what I'm going to write about. Testing - that's (maybe along with l10n work) one of the most underestimated and largely invisible part of any software project, be it a small appliance or something as large-scale as Linux distribution."
openSUSE Forums
- Dolphin, Konqueror Freezes.
- "This looks like the stock version as shipped in the 11.2 release so somewhat surprising to find this, though I suspect there might be more to than meets the eye. The OP here is consistent in his troubles and it is beginning to appear like a general incompatibility."
- Blackberry and openSUSE
- "If you are interested in Gadgets and perhaps just learning a thing or two about compatibility, then read on. It's sure difficult anyway to find gadgets that actually work, so add this to your list of OK's."
- Can't find Kiwi
- "The only association to fruit is in the icon and it has nothing whatsoever to do with NZ residents. You might find it interesting though."
- Not quite so Super User Mode
- "If titles can be deceiving then this is one of them. Ultimately it's a sound troubleshooter but covers some interesting ground in the process."
On the Web
Announcements
- Skype 2.1 beta 2 aka Talking Screens for Linux
- "Welcome the Talking Screens, our newest Skype for Linux release.
- Start downloading it now and keep reading.
- This release brings to you many features what you have asked from us especially screen sharing, instant message quoting and support for user interface styling. In addition to these we now also support abuse reporting on Linux and we have implemented support for localized time formats. This is not all there are many other smaller improvements inside to be found."
Reports
- Greg Kroah-Hartman: Stable kernel tree status, January 18, 2010
- "Here's the state of the -stable kernel trees, as of January 18, 2010."
- Luc Verhaegen: FOSDEM: Coreboot and X.org Schedules
- "This year, at FOSDEM, there is a coreboot DevRoom, and for the hardware-lover, there are some really interesting talks there. When putting together the final schedule, I actually had to spend some time on containing people's enthusiasm and limiting their ideas to something feasible for FOSDEM. A rather good sign, and i am sure that many people will enjoy the truly interesting and juicily in-depth talks there."
- Kohei Yoshida: Distributed text justification
- "Here is something I’ve been working on for the past few weeks. Since I just checked in the first version of this feature into ooo-build master, it’s probably a good time for me to talk about this. This feature introduces a new justification option for cell text known as the “distributed justification”, where the left and right edges of the text are aligned with the left and right edges of the bounding box by adjusting space between characters (inter-character spacing), rather than space between words (inter-word spacing), across the entire width of the bounding box. This type of distributed text justification makes little sense for Latin-based languages such as English, French and German, but makes a big difference for Asian languages such as Japanese. The reason the normal justification doesn’t work for Asian languages is because, in those languages, you don’t put spaces between individual word boundaries, and the normal justification relies on presence of spaces at word boundaries. This is where the distributed justification comes into play."
- MakeTechEasier/Tavis J. Hampton: A Preview of KDE 4.4
- "A highly anticipated release, KDE 4.4 has taken necessary steps to solidify the underlying Plasma technology of KDE 4 and add polish to the already shiny surface. This week, MakeTechEasier will take you on a preview of the upcoming KDE 4.4 release, scheduled for February 9. I recently installed Release Candidate 1 on my desktop computer and took it for a spin. I was not disappointed."
- Martin Gräßlin: New Decoration control module
- "There are a few things in KDE’s desktop shell which have not changed for a very long time. For example I remember that the first KDE version I used (that was a 3.x with x << 5) had the same control module for window decorations as the one we will have in KDE SC 4.4. The interface displays a dropdown list with the names of the available decorations, a configuration panel for the selected decoration and a preview. This results in wonderful tabs inside tabs user interfaces – just look at the Oxygen configuration in 4.4."
- kamstrup: Zeitgeist Storage Awareness
- "Leading up to our last Zeitgeist release (0.3.1) I hacked up our new Blacklisting- and Monitoring APIs, both things quite fun work and very useful API if I might say so my self :-) But I regret not blogging about it as I wrote it – we gotta keep them olde hype-wheels a’turnin’. So here we go about the next feature on my plate…"
- Srinivasa Ragavan: anjal-settings capplet & smarter tabs
- "Thomas posted an awesome blog on GNOME/Moblin control center. Last week or so, I wrote a capplet to fit into the single-window control center. Screenshots below… Screen1: Single window control center shell with Email setttings capplet in it."
Reviews and Essays
- Datamation/Bruce Byfield: KDE vs. GNOME: Email Readers
- "Aside from perhaps the web browser, an email reader is likely to be the first application configured on a new computer installation. And, if you are using a desktop, the default choice is likely to be KMail if you are using KDE, or Evolution if you are using GNOME."
- Network World/Alan Shimel: Are You Ready For An Open Source Car?
- "Admit it, when many of you think of open source you assume software. But new concepts of open source in hardware and design promise to transform many industries. Open Source's allure of faster, more agile development, quicker innovation and accelerating evolution of technology doesn't apply to software alone."
- DaniWeb/Ken Hess: Jobs.Linux.Com: When Job Boards Go Bad
- "Last week, The Linux Foundation launched it's new Linux Jobs board and normally, I applaud anything that The Linux Foundation (TLF) does but not this time. And I think it's great that TLF has a job board on Linux.com, however, the execution lacks the luster I've come to expect from these guys. So, what's my beef with something so positive as a job board? What would make anyone, much less me, irritable at a Linux job board's implementation and launch? It's simple, really. To call something a Linux Jobs Board, what would you expect to see there? Linux jobs, perhaps? Yes, they have those. So, what, you ask, do I have a problem with?
- The "Linux" Jobs Board also has truck driving jobs, nursing jobs, AIX jobs, Solaris jobs and more jobs that have nothing to do with Linux."
- Linux Magazine/Christopher Smart: Proprietary Software and Linux: Good, Bad or Somewhere in Between?
- "Canonical is looking into selling proprietary software like Adobe’s Photoshop and Apple’s iTunes within its distribution, Ubuntu. This would undoubtedly be helpful for certain end users wanting to switch to Linux, but is it good for free software in the long run?"
Past Events & Meetings
Upcoming Events & Meetings
Security Updates
To view the security announcements in full, or to receive them as soon as they're released, refer to the openSUSE Security Announce mailing list.
SUSE Security Announcement: Linux kernel (SUSE-SA:2010:005)
- Package: kernel
- Announcement ID: SUSE-SA:2010:005
- Date: Fri, 15 Jan 2010 14:00:00 +0000
- Affected Products: openSUSE 11.1
- SLE 11 High Availability Extension
- SLE 11 SERVER Unsupported Extras
- SLES 11 DEBUGINFO
- SLED 11
SUSE Security Announcement: krb5 (SUSE-SA:2010:006)
- Package: krb5
- Announcement ID: SUSE-SA:2010:006
- Date: Tue, 19 Jan 2010 17:00:00 +0000
- Affected Products: openSUSE 11.0
- openSUSE 11.1
- openSUSE 11.2
- SLE SDK 10 SP2
- SLE SDK 10 SP3
SUSE Security Summary Report: SUSE-SR:2010:001
- Announcement ID: SUSE-SR:2010:001
- Date: Tue, 19 Jan 2010 17:00:00 +0000
- Cross-References: CVE-2008-7251, CVE-2008-7252, CVE-2009-3560
- CVE-2009-3897, CVE-2009-3942, CVE-2009-4034
- CVE-2009-4136, CVE-2009-4605, CVE-2010-0230
SUSE Security Announcement: Linux kernel (SUSE-SA:2010:007)
- Package: kernel
- Announcement ID: SUSE-SA:2010:007
- Date: Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:00:00 +0000
- Affected Products: SLE SDK 10 SP3
- SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 SP3
- SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 SP3 DEBUGINFO
- SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP3
- Vulnerability Type: remote denial of service
Statistics
Numbers in brackets show the changes compared to the previous week.
opensuse.org
Communication
lists.opensuse.org has 37364 (-22) non-unique subscribers to all mailing lists.
The openSUSE Forums have 40930 (+302) registered users - Most users ever online was 30559, 08-Jan-2010 at 14:06.
Contributors
4180 (+18) of 10858 (+59) registered contributors in the User Directory have signed the Guiding Principles. The board has acknowledged 395 (+0) members.
Build Service
The Build Service now hosts 10202 (+172) projects, 89178 (+484) packages, 18623 (+435) repositories by 20547 (+133) confirmed users.
openFATE
Feature statistics for openSUSE 11.3:
- total: 459 (+12)
- unconfirmed: 291 (+2)
- new: 44 (-1)
- evaluation: 75 (+6)
- candidate: 1 (+0)
- done: 15 (+1)
- rejected: 19 (+3)
- duplicate: 14 (+1)
Bugzilla
The numbers for all openSUSE project products are this week:
- All Open Reports: 5081 (-97)
- Blocker: 3 (-1)
- Critical: 259 (-9)
- Major: 861 (-17)
- Normal: 2907 (-74)
- Minor: 454 (+16)
- Enhancements: 597 (-12)
- Detailed Bugzilla Report – Submitting Bug Reports – Bug Reporting FAQ
Localization
- Daily updated translation statistics are available on the openSUSE Localization Portal.
- Trunk Top-List – Localization Guide
openSUSE for your ears
- The openSUSE Weekly News are available as Livestream or Podcast in the German Language. You can hear it or download it on http://blog.radiotux.de/podcast .
Feedback / Communicate / Get Involved
Do you have comments on any of the things mentioned in this article? Then head right over to the news.opensuse.org story comment section and let us know! Communicate with or get help from the wider openSUSE community -- via IRC, forums, or mailing lists -- see Communicate.
If you would like to be a part of the openSUSE Weekly news, then please send an email over to opensuse-marketing@opensuse.org (you need to subscribe first). Or you can go to the channel #opensuse-newsletter on irc.freenode.net.
Credits
- Dl9pf Talk - Contributions Jan-Simon Möller (Chief-Editor)
- saigkill Talk - Contributions Sascha Manns (Second Chief-Editor, Main-Newsletter)
- STS301 Talk - Contributions Sebastian Schöbinger (Tips/Tricks)
- HeliosReds Talk - Contributions Satoru Matsumoto (Editorial Office)
- Caf4926 Talk - Contributions Carl Fletcher (Main-Newsletter, Forums Sec.)
- Okuro Talk - Contributions Thomas Hofstätter (Events & Meetings)
- add translators
