openSUSE Linux

There's been a "small" upgrade to my desktop machine at work, and as a part of that I got my hands on a 1920x1080 Dell monitor and couldn't help placing it as a secondary monitor, rotated. And I couldn't help noticing various problems with this ... [More] setup. A screen rotated to become 1080x1920 should be quite useful for a developer - let's face it, 1920x1080 is often good just few displaying a narrow text column between two huge margins anyway (hello dot.kde.org and other sites), so why not rather use the extra size for the direction that matters. But in practice, it didn't quite work, not really. Getting (some) driver to work somewhat decently in this setup wasn't exactly trivial and even then, there were various problems and the extra monitor seemed more like added weight than useful addition. There were bugs of course, the unusual geometry can lead to strange results pretty easily, with the center of the right monitor being at the same height like the bottom edge of the left monitor. But, more importantly, it didn't seem to work right as a whole. I use virtual desktops a lot, and each virtual desktop spans the whole area of all monitors combined. Which makes the monitors very dependent, linked together, and so trying to take advantage of them for viewing something results in a struggle to arranging windows properly. So, this Hackweek came about in the right time to allow me to do something about it as my project. I have fixed a number of multi-monitor bugs that bothered me, and I have a usable implementation of a desktop-per-screen feature for KWin. My changes for it are in the KDE git repo in clones/{kdelibs|kde-workspace}/lunakl/desktopperscreen, and let's see how it works in practice. The picture above is from my testing (the black is the dead area). After selecting either of screens as the active switching desktops switches just what that screen shows. That means that with this setup its much simpler to have e.g. 4 virtual desktops on the left screen for development and 2 virtual desktops on the right screen for documentation, and using keyboard shortcuts one can get rapidly to anything wanted quite easily. Of course, there is still room for improvements, or perhaps better said fixes for this mode. It can quickly get confusing about which virtual desktop is shown on which screen, so the picture shows an applets I quickly hacked up for this (I needed it quick&easy, so this one is for Kor). The pager now also shows incorrect information, since now each virtual desktop spans just one screen, e.g. desktop 4 should be shown in pager as having the KWrite window in its bottom-right corner, like it is in reality. But well, it works, or so it seems so. I'll add the patches to my 11.4 KDE packages in the home:llunak:my OBS repo, time to try it out for real. [Less]

Last Friday Dirk Müller send an email to openSUSE-Factory about the status of the openSUSE ARM port. SUSE employees Adrian, Alexander, Dirk and Reinhard had spend their Hackweek revitalizing the initial work by Jan-Simon and Martin by getting ... [More] openSUSE Factory on ARM to build and work. The current build status on OBS shows that almost 2500 packages are working successfully and the team invites anyone interested to come and help increase that number! Hackweek and ARM The openSUSE ARM efforts were announced by Andrew Wafaa after the openSUSE Conference in Nuremberg. The openSUSE ARM mailing list as well as the #openSUSE-arm IRC channel are buzzing with activity. The Hackweek bootstrapped openSUSE on ARM. Hackweek is a SUSE tradition where there is one week per year during which any engineer can work on whatever Free Software project he or she wishes. This week, called Hackweek is in it’s 7th incarnation now and over the years has resulted in many exciting contributions to new or existing Free Software projects. This year, a team of four SUSE employees worked with the openSUSE community to get openSUSE ARM in the air. Status Currently, openSUSE Factory for ARM is build for armv5tel (soft floating point with thumbs) and for armv7l (hard floating point with aapcs-linux ABI). These are widely used architectures and seem to be becoming a cross-distribution standard as well. Right now, almost 2500 packages are building successfully and tests on real hardware have shown these to work. As low-level dependencies are being fixed many more packages are expected to come in over the next couple of days. There are some issues under investigation, including a miscompile problem with GCC 4.6 and armv5tel which results in RPM database corruption but a workaround (building with GCC 4.4) is in place. There are also some threading issues because the builds are being done in usermode QEMU wich does not have great thread emulation. System QEMU however is quite slow so the team is looking at possibilities to acquire real hardware. Both suggestions and hardware donations are very welcome! Help out! Help is more than welcome. The team is especially looking for people to help out finding and fixing build errors, with merge requests containing fixes preferably submitted directly to openSUSE Factory. Building packages locally to test is not difficult thanks to QEMU but the team recommends to use the openSUSE:Tools:Unstable repository for QEMU as some recent fixes are required for proper building. The current status, as well as information on how to get involved and what needs doing can be found on the openSUSE Wiki. If you want to get involved or are just curious about the status, check out openSUSE’s new ARMs! [Less]

Hardware needed for openSUSE on ARM As I mentioned before, we have an initial target platform identified for testing the work of all those involved in the openSUSE ARM port. The problem is we need to obtain the hardware.   I am in ... [More] discussions trying to get some corporate sponsorship of hardware, but we can not rely soley on those kind companies that would like to see us succeed. We as a community need to help ourselves succeed, as such I've set up a campaign on Pledgie to enable us the community to contribute to the effort for obtaining hardware.   With these funds, we the community will be able to purchase 5 (maybe more) PandaBoards which will help developers fix packages and also test the port to ensure everything works. Until the new ARM based chipsets are released, which could be the middle of next year, we will also need a substantial number of boards to provide a decent enough amount of compute power for OBS to build natively.  OBS is great, but there are limitations with emulating the environment in Qemu. Having physical hardware will remove these limitations and enable us to prove that openSUSE is a world class ARM distirbution.   So please help us to help you, donate what you can so that we can reach our goal of €1,000.   [Less]

openSUSE Users! The VideoLAN Repository will get through some minor changes. Mainly affected are current users of the vlc-beta packages, BUT there is important news for all of you: The VideoLAN Project moved the VLC Player sources into the future. ... [More] For this reason, vlc-beta packages as of now will only be built with full capabilities for openSUSE 11.4 and Factory (and future releases). Currently, on 11.3 I had to drop v4l2 features, as the kernel is considered too old to be supported by the latest VLC snapshots (See this mail thread) the existing 1.1.x packages are of course not affected, but there are plans to have 1.2 tree to become the ‘main’ tree for VLC! This would be some big news and changes coming down our way! Yay! [Less]

Hackweek is an event in SUSE where developers can work on any pet project for a week (like Google's 20%) This year's edition happened last week in SUSE. Since I am part of the openSUSE community, I too participated in the spirit of this event in my ... [More] night time. The project is codenamed Arattai.I tried to bring a prototype to provide IM/Chat support built-in to the Chromium browser. Watch the screencast below. Please click here in case you do not see the embedded video. Please see the video in full screen HD.Under the HoodI have used Telepathy  as the underlying library for implementing the basic chat support. The source code is mostly a prototype which will have to go through a rigorous design review and improved upon if you need to use it in a production machine. This is mostly to satisfy a personal itch and not of good quality yet.The patches are attached in the Chromium bug http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=98990I chose Telepathy because it seem to provide the best implementation for XMPP 0174 protocol, Serverless Messaging, which was my primary aim. Also it is agreed upon by both GNOME and KDE. Isn't it something rare ;-) ?The heart of the code is only about 5 days old and is not of good quality yet. telepathy-glib has a C interface. Chromium is written using C++ . So, I wrote a TelepathyBridge class with static members to marshal the requests from Chromium to Telepathy and vice-versa. I wrote a TelepathyBean class to move across these layers. Also, there were ArattaiUI and ArattaiHandler classes to take care of the Chromium side of things (like registering a protocol, webui etc.) The user-interface you have seen is provided by the arattai.html and arattai.js files.I believe having IM support may be important for Chromium as IM is one of the important activities that could not be performed yet on the browser.There are things like webRTC which will form the future of communication. However, we still have dozens of protocols that work with existing clients which the browser should support (like support for Novell Groupwise, MSN, Office Communicator etc.)ObservationsMy personal opinion that, C++ is a needlessly complex language, strengthened. There are a dozen ways to do casting, smart pointers, const functions etc. but no native async/event support. I love C# as a programming language. Sadly C# does not seem to have an appealing future on Linux anymore.The guy who invented Javascript should have been a C++ programmer.Javascript typing can get on a C programmer's nervesTelepathy hackers in #telepathy are extremely helpful. Thanks a lot folks.Open source libraries in general have very poor documentation, if not backed by a company like Google.If Telepathy support has to be included into Chromium, it should be available in Windows too.Automatic memory management is bliss.Please share your opinions/thoughts about this feature either in the comments or by mail. Thanks. [Less]

The openSUSE conference is over. Nirenberg was full of geekos attending the conference. Almost 400 visitors have shown up for attending the sessions about technical and community matters and have fun at the parties and other events organized. Talks ... [More] & Workshops! Everything was interesting. People couldn't decide which session to attend! There were many technical sessions from low-level development to kernel tools. There were marketing and social sessions, focused on how openSUSE can be spread all over the world! Packaging sessions weren't missing and they were detailed teaching the attenders how to create a package from scratch! There were interesting conversations like Robert Schwelkert’s talk, about “Where do we improve?” where we talked about the improvements that must be done at documentation, wiki, translations, Bugzilla and other stuff. From the openSUSE Conference couldn't be missing the openSUSE project meeting where we discussed about the upcoming elections and the status of openSUSE Foundation and a number of interesting development ideas about the distribution. The one presentation to remember was by Gregory Zysk about “Introduction to Cross-Cultural Communication, Conflict and Collaboration. After presenting his model of cross-cultural communication model and his ambitions, he made an awesome test... He made everyone in the room pick a mate that he hadn't worked with him at all or get to know and after he gave us two papers of different scenarios he made us conflict and find a common solution to solve the scenario! Furthermore, from the openSUSE conference couldn't be missing the incredible openSUSE women! There was a conversation about “How to get more Women into openSUSE” by Lydia Pintscher of KDE who talked about the difficulties that women face in a community and how can a community attract and get more women. Moreover, there were interesting presentations based on openSUSE sub-projects like Education, and Tumbleweed. Also, there was a topic about openSUSE in commercial, and especially for enterprise and other services which gives us the impression that openSUSE is spreading and deployed everywhere!Last but not lease, there were “Lighting Talks” from people of openSUSE and other communities, introducing themselves, talk about their jobs, their hobbies, their interests and in general talk about their everyday life. Have a lot of fun! Every day was different! The beautiful decorated location and the German beergarden was perfect for geekos to have fun. There were different happenings everyday after the sessions were over. “Pizza Party” with many pizzas and beers, “Barbeque Party” with sausages and other meet, “Rodeo Texas Party” with poker tables and bull riding, different live concerts with interesting music like the “8bit Music concert” where the music came from tweaked GAME BOYS. Last, it was awesome that we went at a city nearby to see the man that made us the “Old Toad” openSUSE beer! We were guided in the factory rooms and saw how beer is made. After that, we ate local food and drunk local beer at the local restaurant where we stayed there till late at night discussing, drinking beer and having fun! Summary We are happy that we participated at the openSUSE Conference successfully. People from all over the worlds were there in order to meet the geekos and attend the sessions. Thanks to our sponsors, we had a great internet connection and many parties and happenings for geekos to attend. You can also read the daily reports from Greeks.1st day2nd day3rd day4rth day5th day [Less]

You get an invitation! Geeko place on SecondLife Ladies & Gentlemen, months after the first virtual party [1][2][3] organized for 11.4 launch, Françoise (aka Morgane Marquis) and myself (tigerfoot) organize 3 new parties on SecondLife [4] to ... [More] welcome and fest our next release openSUSE 12.1, coming around the 11.11.11. Three virtual great Saturday: October 22th, November 12th and December 10th. From 6 to 8am Australian DJ Ariella is back again. From 9 to 11am (SL time : utc-9) we will have the pleasure to listen American DJ Esquivel. You should take this opportunity to try Second Life, creating an avatar, coming to dance and drinking some beers with us at Geekos Place.   Geeko in Linux tribe place What’s new ? From January to march 2011, we did rent a land, which cost much less than in real life, but had a cost. Yes it’s money and time to organize party, to find good DJ, invite people and for the main point : to get people come to your place. So after 10 great evenings with around 30-40 people, we decided to slow down. In April, we discovered the linux tribe sim. The place has been created to promote opensource, and even started recently a learning place (blender, gimp …). Finally our Geekos Place is much smaller, but has found a place in the middle of the penguins tribe. Thanks to them. Second Life (SL) in a few words Second Life represent millions of avatars (names and password), but let’s say about 40 to 60’000 people are connected at the same time (from USA to Europe, Australia, Africa …). As most of these visitors have a programmer or design profile, they can’t stand themselves from buying a land, creating a place, testing new concepts or scripts. So in fact, SL is a huge great creative space … and seems sometimes like a desert (as less people stand together on a same place). Why Second Life ? In January, we start looking for open groups on SL … and we were surprised to see a list of hundred of those. Then we discovered that if some were listing the different Linux distributions, most of them forgot openSUSE. Worst when we arrived on the penguin tribe sim, it seems we fall inside an Ubuntu fan club. We heard that openSUSE was too difficult to install! Beg your pardon ? lol. Ok, we won’t go to SL for a competition (in term of fight), but just to be where users and contributors can be! Even if SL is not that easy to use, as it need a powerful openGL 3D stack, and specialized client software [5], it’s a surprising place to visit Real and virtual life We could start a big talk on "what is real or not?" But who cares? We just invite you to come, try it, Have a lot of fun, and represent openSUSE on a virtual place. We found 2 great DJ, Ariella from Australia, and Esquievel from the USA. Both are mixing great rock and pleasant music. And we have to remember that they are not paid, except with the tips they receive during the party from you and us. If you are not an addict of SL perhaps you don’t know that pretty cheap to give generous tips on SL. And each buck earn is really appreciate by the DJ. Think about it!   Act Now! Can we count on your energy and joy? Don’t wait the last minute! Create today your avatar, and come as soon as possible, get and wear your free Geeko t-shirt! If you need help to move or to find the place, just IM Morgane Marquis or Tigerfoot. See or hear you soon. Related links Previous Article: Party RC1 Gallery March 10th Gallery March 11th secondlife.com Software Phoenix Viewer SecondLife Viewer [Less]

Mail triage, reviewed / pushed misc. patches. Downloaded & installed openSUSE 11.2 Beta 1 - looking pretty. Dug out some code pointers for a new volunteer, nice. Sync. with Kendy, plugged away at re-factoring vcl much of the afternoon - lots to improve there.

openSUSE Hackweek: implementing GtkPlacesSidebar As part of ongoing work, I used last week to continue the implementation of GtkPlacesSidebar. Both Nautilus windows and GtkFileChooser ... [More] dialogs have a sidebar that shows you bookmarks, volumes, and some special locations like your home directory. For historical reasons, these are separate code bases. Nautilus calls this the "places sidebar"; GTK+ doesn't really call it anything, as it is just a chunk of ad-hoc code inside the file chooser's implementation. It's time to separate out the code that deals with the places sidebar and make it usable for applications. Of course, the first two clients will be GTK+'s file chooser itself, and Nautilus windows. With some luck, even other file managers like XFCE's will be able to use it. I am taking NautilusPlacesSidebar and turning it into a GtkPlacesSidebar, based on Jon McCann's original patch - this removes the Nautilus-isms and turns the places sidebar into a standalone thing. I'm doing this in the places-sidebar branch in GTK+, if you want to follow the development. [Less]

Today I found myself with Picasa for Linux (3.0 beta) not allowing me to login to web albums, even if I could login without problems from the web browser. After googling a bit, it seems that Picasa 3.0 does not work anymore due to some Google+ ... [More] related changes. On the other hand it looks like Picasa on Linux is abandoned  ie: 3.0 vs 3.8 on Windows. Picasa 3.8 has some interesting new features. Why not a Linux version? Picasa for Linux is no more than Picasa for Windows bundled with wine plus some minor changes. Ok, lets do one ourselves. I started by unpacking the original rpm and replacing the “Picasa3″ folder in “Program Files” with the tarred content of the “Program Files/Picasa3″ resulting from installing Picasa 3.8 with wine. That worked, but it requires you to create this tarball. Then I went one step further: why not trying installing the newer Picasa 3.8 inside the build section of the .spec file? Thanks to the wpkg project I figured how to run the installer in unattended mode. The Build Service Tips & Tricks page explains how to run something that requires an X server using XVfb. So the spec file first unpacks the original Linux rpm in the builroot. Then runs the Windows-based installer in unattended mode using a temporary wine prefix, and then copies the new installed Picasa over to the buildroot, replacing the files in the original rpm. We use the official rpm as a base because it contains a custom wine and some other Linux integrations, however it would be worth to see if it behaves better with newer wine versions. You can find the resulting .spec file in my home project. I can’t redistribute the original rpm and the windows installer, so I include a fetch.sh (just like the spec file for the nvidia driver does) that will fetch those binary files. To build it: osc co home:dmacvicar picasa # get the files I can't redistribute ./fetch osc build openSUSE_Factory Now install it and you should have Picasa 3.8 on Linux, which also solves the issue of login into Picasaweb: [Less]