openSUSE Linux

GNOME3 and the GNOME Shell are no doubt, major improvements. They bring in usability and quite a bit of eye candy (in a different way compared to compiz) while at the same time, a few features went missing in 3.0 release – like Emblems, for instance. ... [More] Nevertheless, GNOME3 is a great release and has been extremely stable so far (Yes, i have been using it since it’s release in April.). One major complaint that I hear from people is that GNOME3 is not as easy to customize as 2.x. A lot of people seem to think that they are “stuck” with the blue-black theme that comes by default. Ofcourse this is not the case. In this post, I ll explain a few ways in which we can customize GNOME3 and the GNOME Shell. But before proceeding any further, we have to make a clear distinction which was not necessary before. In GNOME3, with the advent of the shell, there are two sets of themes – one for the shell and the other for the windows (The GTK Theme). To get a smooth and complete makeover, one has to change both the themes. By default, we have the GNOME3 shell theme and the Adwaita Metacity theme for the windows. 1. GNOME Shell Themes This must be one of the biggest issues I have with he way GNOME3 looks. I cant bear the big, black stripe on the top. It just does not look good. I am sure there are many of you out there who would agree with me on that. But luckily, there are quite a few good options out there that can replace it for us. Also, just to make it easier for us, let’s install the gnome-shell-theme-selector plugin so that we can swtich between themes faster. This plugin adds a Theme button on the top along with windows and application buttons in the Activities mode so that you can change you theme on the fly! So, let’s get started. Open up a terminal, and type in the following commands to install GNOME Shell Extensions. git clone http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-shell-extensions cd gnome-shell-extensions ./autogen.sh –prefix=/usr –enable-extensions=user-theme make && sudo make install Now, let’s install the Themeselector extension. Fire up another terminal and follow me. wget http://www.fpmurphy.com/gnome-shell-extensions/themeselector-0.9.tar.gz tar xvf themeselector-0.9.tar.gz mv themeselector-0.9/extension.js ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/[email protected]/ mv themeselector-0.9/metadata.json ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/[email protected]/ mv themeselector-0.9/* ~/.themes/ Now, restart GNOME-Shell by pressing Alt+F2 and typing ‘r’ (Without quotes followed by enter). Now, in the activities window, you should have a themes tab with 6 themes to choose from! To add any new themes you may come across later on, simply extract and add the folders to ~/.themes/ directory. Simple right? 2. GTK Themes Now, to complete the new look for your desktop, grab a suitable GTK theme to match with your Shell theme from GNOME-Looks.org or from any other website. To install, simply extract the theme to /usr/share/themes. Great, Not the last thing is to actually tweak the GNOME settings and make it use the GTK theme we just installed. Let’s see how to do that next. 3. GNOME-Tweak-Tool The GNOME-Tweak-Tool is an aplication that is used to tweak a few values that changes the way your desktop looks and feels which, otherwise, is hard to change. The UI is clean and intuitive, which is a key aspect of a configuration tool. To obtain the tweak tool, open another terminal and : git clone http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-tweak-tool cd gnome-tweak-tool ./gnome-tweak-tool NOTE: Compiled binary is available in the git repository. Hence no need to recompile. Works as it is. That should fire up a window as shown above. On the left, choose interface from the list and on the right, select the GTK theme you just installed using the drop down menu. And that’s it! You can mess around and change a few other things like the font, font size and quite a few other settings. So be sure to check out all the options… Here is how I have set up my GNOME3. I am not artistically inclined and I am sure a lot of you out there can do much better. So let me know what you guys end up with. [Less]

Here are two more versions that I created upon request. I created the light versions for openSUSE.

The much-awaited Beta release of openSUSE 12.1 is here!  And just in time for your weekend Beta Pizza Party.  So fire up that oven and warm up that download manager because its time to get ready for the latest awesome openSUSE on your computer. If ... [More] you’ve been following us, you know this release was originally called Milestone 6.  However, the release team and its testers agreed this round of testing showed Milestone 6 to be so stable and ready for general testing, they decided to call it Beta.  And that means that if you’ve been thinking about taking a pre-release of 12.1 for a spin before our final release in November, there’s no time like the present. Testing is even easier nowadays with the ease of setting up a virtual machine so you won’t have to worry about affecting your actual production machine.  Naturally, with any pre-release, you’ll want to check out the list of known bugs to make sure there’s nothing that catches you by surprise. And as with any release, we welcome your reports of any bugs not already found so we can make the final release of openSUSE 12.1 even more awesome. So what are you waiting for?  Call up your friends and get together for an awesome night of pizza, beer (or root beer), and start downloading here.  We’re sure you’ll be just as excited as we are once you see 12.1 on your machine. [Less]

Klaas wrote a nice summary of our hackweek’s work on ownCloud: http://kfreitag.tumblr.com/post/10848737554/where-do-you-put-your-data

This week is openSUSE hackweek, as you might know, and we do fun stuff. A couple of people, I was one of them, were investigating in the very promising project called ownCloud. We were working on a better integration in the openSUSE desktop in ... [More] upcoming releases.Why do we like ownCloud so much? Well, thats easy: ownCloud is a solution that is under the full control of the user and as a result very transparent. The server, were you push your data to is owned by you. You start, stop, erase or open it how ever you want. Surely, other solutions were you push your private data to a server not owned and controlled by you are cool too, but, well, at least I do not want that. I did not came along a long way with free software to finally leave my data unfree. I want full control about the software and the data I work with.openSUSE always strives to be a very free Linux without compromises and so I hope you will agree that our solution should leave the control about the cloud with the user working with the cloud. No trust us, we’re always will do good attitude. That is our way to go, and we will make that simple and appealing. Specifically that means a couple of things: we use a feature rich and extensible cloud supported by a large community which is ownCloud a very easy installation of ownCloud for the openSUSE distribution user. one syncronised folder on the desktopb by default without trouble setting it up good integration in dolphin What did we achieve so far in this hackweek? On my computer here, I see a little cloud in my tray. If I click it, I am told that I am not yet connected to an ownCloud. A wizard now guides me through one of the three options: connect to a ownCloud I set up earlier install a new ownCloud locally to check it out install a new ownCloud on my webspace via ftp. The wizard collects the data needed, downloads the ownCloud source from the upstream official download location and installs it at the target location. After that the local integration is created. A folder called ownCloud in user’s home is created which is automatically synced up to the cloud. After fife clicks, I have ownCloud installed on my private domain and connected ~/ownCloud as a sync up folder :-)It surely needs some more fixes here and there and some fixes, but I am still confident that will have some of that in 12.1. Speak up if you want to help, of course all code is public. Thanks to Frank for visiting us and helping to get it going, Duncan, who started the mirall tool, which we extended, last Hackweek, to Cornelius for Ruby magic, Ismail for desktop integration and Tom for php hackery on ownCloud. It was a cool company this time, one of the best Hackweeks ever :)Hope you’ll like the cloud coming into openSUSE :) [Less]

I almost made it a year without a blog post. I recently started using Vagrant to test our auto-provisioning of servers with Puppet. Having a simple-yet-configurable system for starting up and accessing headless virtual machines really makes this a ... [More] much simpler solution than VMware Fusion. (Although I wish Vagrant had a way to take and rollback VM snapshots.) Unfortunately, as soon as I tried to really do anything in the VM my Mac would completely bog down. Eventually the entire UI would stop updating. In Activity Monitor, the dreaded kernel_task was taking 100% of one CPU, and VBoxHeadless taking most of another. Things would eventually free up whenever the task in the VM (usually apt-get install or puppet apply) would crash with a segmentation fault. Digging into this, I found an ominous message in the VirtualBox logs: AIOMgr: Host limits number of active IO requests to 16. Expect a performance impact. Yeah, no kidding. I tracked this message down to the "Use host I/O cache" setting being off on the SATA Controller in the box. (This is a per-VM setting, and I am using the stock Vagrant "lucid64" box, so the exact setting may be somewhere else for you. It's probably a good idea to turn this setting on for all storage controllers.) When it comes to Vagrant VMs, this setting in the VirtualBox UI is not very helpful, though, because Vagrant brings up new VMs automatically and without any UI. To get this to work with the Vagrant workflow, you have to do the following hacky steps: Turn off any IO-heavy provisioning in your Vagrantfile vagrant up a new VM vagrant halt the VM Open the VM in the VirtualBox UI and change the setting Re-enable the provisioning in your Vagrantfile vagrant up again This is not going to work if you have to bring up new VMs often. Fortunately this setting is easy to tweak in the base box. Open up ~/.vagrant.d/boxes/base/box.ovf and find the StorageController node. You'll see an attribute HostIOCache="false". Change that value to true. Lastly, you'll have to update the SHA1 hash of the .ovf file in ~/.vagrant.d/boxes/base/box.mf. Get the new hash by running openssl ~/.vagrant.d/boxes/base/box.ovf and replace the old value in box.mf with it. That's it. All subsequent VMs you create with vagrant up will now have the right setting. [Less]

Up early, pleased to see the fantastic cross-compilation work from Tor, Kendy, Fridrich & others. What with it being SUSE hack-week Kendy's been working on getting the resulting binaries to run; which they now do (under WINE etc.). So ... [More] we finally have a live Linux -> Windows cross compiled version, built entirely with Free Software tooling, inside a repeatable Linux environment. If you have Kendy's hardware, that means you can build from scratch in under 15mins cf. tsc minutes. Hopefully this'll mean more frequent Win32 developer snapshots and more reliable. Played with the build - finally the chance to test some Windows specific improvements that I've wanted to hack on for a while. With Lanedo to work on MSI packaging, hopefully we'll have a complete cross-compilation story for Windows for LibreOffice 3.6 / 4.0. Chewed & spewed more mail. Slogged away at a silly with calc unit tests and locale setting. Finally got around to writing and sending my candidacy for the TDF board elections. [Less]

Hackweek 7 - Learning JavaScript - Viewer For Chess Games

Hackweek 7 - WebSMBTA

Hackweek 7 - IRC Bot with Nod.js