openSUSE Linux

My submission to the 4th German OWASP Security Day was accepted. Now let's see if we can accept their OWASP license that needs to be signed...kostenloser Counter -

Last Friday Stephan Kulow, our openSUSE Release Manager, started a discussion on Factory mailing list about show-stoppers for the 12.1-Beta release scheduled for 2011-09-22. It became clear that Factory still needs some polishing to become a useful ... [More] Beta for large numbers of testers to try out.. Particularly, one of the reasons is the challenges relating to the switch to use systemd by default, which means that it is also used during install and first boot (which has the special configuration stuff).  And between the timing of last week’s openSUSE Conference and next week’s planned Hackweek, the Factory team agreed it is better to take the time to ensure a release that meets the level of quality that our openSUSE Distro is known for. You can read more on this thread via our mailing list archive here. This means, the Beta will be up to two weeks later than planned, and we’ll be sure to let you know as soon as it is ready for download.  On the bright side, this also means you have more time to prepare for the Beta Pizza Party in your home area.  And our final release date for openSUSE 12.1 is still targeted for November 11th. [Less]

After 12 years I am leaving the SUSE Security-Team... just to support them! :-)Like a satellite I was spun-off from mother earth. Flying around the SUSE Security Team as project-manager to take care of our products before they get released working ... [More] hand-in-hand with Marcus and his team that (mostly but not exclusively) takes care of the security of already released products.kostenloser Counter - [Less]

Randall Munroe is a hero of mine. Inspired by him, I tried my hands at drawing a cartoon and made one on Google Plus. However, it turned out to be a bad experiment. Yet in a mood to celebrate failures, I decided to share it. The images are hand-drawn ... [More] by me and powered by Gimp and LibreOffice. Please click on the image(s) to see them in high resolution.  [Less]

Respecting users is a priority to the openSUSE Project so when something does not work the way it should be, taking a step back is more preferable than delivering something that is not ready yet. For that reason yesterday afternoon Greg K.H. ... [More] announced to the openSUSE-factory mailing list that systemd is being removed from Tumbleweed so that users won’t have a problem with it. That way it will allow developers to spend more time on working on it in order to have systemd ready for the upcoming 12.1 instead of chasing problems that are specific to Tumbleweed. Here is the e-mail from Greg K.H. announcing the removal of systemd from Tumbleweed: Due to a number of inter dependencies on packages that are not ready for Tumbleweed, and other interactions with the system that are causing problems for some users, I’m going to remove systemd from Tumbleweed today to allow the developers to spend more time on getting it stable for Factory and 12.1 instead of having to chase down problems that are specific to Tumbleweed only. So if you have installed systemd in Tumbleweed, I suggest you now remove it with a simple: zypper rm systemd thanks, greg k-h [Less]

A pretty cool session at the Community Leadership Summit was the Death Star Usergroup session, led by Simon Phillips. My notes on this one are below...The Deathstar User GroupImagine you're part of an User Group. The UG of an Deathstar, no less. ... [More] Despite the obviously evil intentions of your organization, you are not evil. Still, you and your fellow UG members stay there. Either because Darth Vader gets you if you refuse. Or because you want to 'change the system from the inside'. Or you simply like big explosions and blowing up planets. In any case, you have to deal with things. How do you explain to your family what you do every day? To your friends? "Yeah, I work on a Deathstar. We blow up rebel planets, killing anyone we see!" And how do you deal with the choices you have to make? Do you tell your friends that the planet you just destroyed was really only inhabited by evil wrong-doers who attack law and order? Or do you admit the planet was full of innocent woman and children and was only destroyed because Darth Vader had a bad day? When do you refuse an order? Can you face the consequences?Hard choices. Simon Phillips, ex-community manager at Sun, organized a session about this subject. The question: how do you handle the suggestion (or reality!) that your employer is not 100% well intended?Companies are reptilesSimon shared an interesting story. He once visited an alligator farm. A trainer there fed the alligator, entertaining the public. At some point he was standing close to an alligator who was just lying in the sun. Somebody asked: "does the alligator know you so he doesn't attack?" The trainer explained that he wasn't afraid, but not because the animal knew him or respected him. He said: "A reptile acts on instinct, and instinct alone. They fights when they are afraid, attack when hungry. If they're neither, they will just lay in the sun. Right now, for example, he's been fed and is not afraid of me. So I am safe. But I should never expect him to delay even one second to attack me, just because I happen to be the guy who feeds him every day." According to Simon, companies are like reptiles. They don't have moral standards. They are not evil, nor good. They just need to make money. If something threatens that, they attack. If they are safe and not hungry, they just lie there - and let their employees do whatever doesn't threaten their income.Of course, we should also realize that IN those companies, persons of flesh, blood and emotions run the show. They have obligations to their company but they also have their own goals. Even on a Deathstar, many people want to do the right thing... With a few other people from companies like Adobe, Microsoft and Oracle there, it was interesting to hear stories about what was going on at these companies.Evil actions or just accidentsA funny observation is that often, people perceive evil intentions behind actions which are entirely or almost entirely random. Big companies do weird stuff. One part of the company wants to go left, the other part wants to go right. Sometimes timing is strange. This leads to all kinds of conspiracy theories. I always think: "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity". It's as true about companies as it is about people, if not more. The big, evil plans people see are often just a random coincidence combined with (good or bad) luck and a healthy dose of incompetence.Of course, these things can be just as damaging. Oracle has been miss-handling their Free Software projects to the point where they simply killed them off entirely. Is that evil? Does Oracle hate Free Software? It's far more likely that they just don't understand it. They lost incredible business value and probably still don't realize it... Obviously, we (as in Free Software contributors) should be careful in dealing with them. Giving them a hard time doesn't help them learn but might convince them how hard it is to work with Free Software. But we shouldn't trust them too much either until they've shown that they (finally) get it. Which will take a while...Self-fulfilling propheciesThe bad thing about having people focus so much on "this and this company is evil" is that it results in less positive relationships with companies than we could have. Take Microsoft. Sure, their business relies on proprietary software. And parts of what they do is threatened by Free Software so not the whole company is a big fan of 'us'. But not so much that they try to kill any FLOSS they can. There are plenty of people in Microsoft who believe in the model of Free Software and in collaboration with the community. Microsoft is churning out Free Software, contributing to FOSS projects and doing all kinds of interoperability stuff. In part because their customers simply demand it from them. In part because some people in the company simply believe there are opportunities there and nobody stops them. But we shouldn't expect the company to trow away their current cash cows like Windows and Office - they're a company and make money on proprietary software. Realize that companies are even legally obliged to act like that: if CEO would do something 'because it is the right thing', and not pursue income, the shareholders can sue him!A company can only ever do good as long as it makes business sense. That's why it is so awesome to work for a company which does indeed make money on doing the right thing. Developing and distributing Free Software, a FOSS consultancy company, a hardware company sharing it's source code with others... Even then, you might occasionally bump into 'Deathstar issues'. But usually you can convince management to do the right thing. And if not, contain the damage as much as you can.Take a stand, or?That's not to say there are no people who just close their eyes and keep happily hacking (operating the Deathstar) while their work actually is damaging. Just looking at the interesting technology and the work you do is no excuse if the end result means you're collaborating on something bad.Yes, in some cases - you might have to take a stand. I know people who quit because they couldn't reconcile their role in what their company was doing. And I respect that greatly. But I don't look down on people who keep trying to change things for the good. It's a hard and often not exactly thankful job which deserves equally much respect! It is a though call and I think we all have to realize that we don't know the full picture. We can't see what happens internally in a company, we can't judge how much chance there is to turn things around.It was an interesting session ;-) [Less]

The first release of Banshee 2.2 series has just been announced and includes 108 notable bug fixes (since version 2.0.0) and delivers some long waited new features: Support default internet radio stations; New extension: Album Art Writer ... [More] (banshee-extension-album-art); New extension: Duplicate Song Detector (banshee-extension-dsd); New custom support for the Barnes & Noble Nook – transfer music between your library and your Nook device, it just works; eMusic Store – Browse, search, preview, buy and download music straight into your Banshee library from the eMusic online store; Banshee 2.2.0 on openSUSE 11.4 – screenshot by Andrew Wafaa “Official release date is only tomorrow ! Damn openSUSE packagers, they’re too fast ! ;)” - Bertrand Lorentz (Banshee developer) The release of Banshee 2.2.0 also was responsible for a few changes in the Banshee repositories (which have over 3 million downloads, being one of the most popular repositories in openSUSE Build Service). Here’s a few things that changed in the Banshee repositories: Packaging: Development repository changed from Banshee:Unstable to GNOME:Apps (under the GNOME Team supervision). Banshee:Unstable now auto-updates from GNOME:Apps project; Package rename from ‘banshee-1′ to ‘banshee’ (which many people requested and makes all sense to have it this way); Sub-packages were optimized (great effort from Vincent Untz) and the spec file was re-written; NDesk and friends dependencies were dropped in favor of dbus-sharp and dbus-sharp-glib. Dependency ‘notify-sharp’ was worked to drop NDesk and use the new dbus-sharp and dbus-sharp-glib. Package ‘banshee-1′ was supressed in all repositories. Repositories: Banshee project repository major cleanup, now down to 15 packages (including the 1-Click installer pattern). About 5/6 more packages are going away also once the life cycle of openSUSE 11.3 is over. This will allow Banshee to build against the dependencies provided by the distribution, thus avoiding unwanted Mono updates which might break other applications (a known case was F-Spot because of mono-addins). Banshee:Unstable auto-updates from the development project GNOME:Apps and is synchronized with openSUSE Factory; 1-Click installers updated. SLE11 and SLE11SP1 repositories were removed, as newer versions of Banshee don’t build in those platforms due to dependencies (eg: gstreamer); Platforms: Banshee and Banshee:Unstable projects provide clean packages for all supported openSUSE platforms (11.3, 11.4, Tumbleweed and Factory); Banshee 2.2.0 made it’s way into openSUSE Factory and openSUSE 12.1; Tumbleweed users will get Banshee 2.2.0 update for free; openSUSE 11.3 and openSUSE 11.4 users can get Banshee 2.2.0 through Banshee repository subscription (now using all the dependencies provided by the distribution); openSUSE Factory users will get free update. Potential New Repository (SLE11/SLE11_SP1): This wasn’t on my original plans, but it would be a crime not to contemplate the SLE11(SP1) users from whom I’ve just nuked the repositories. Though Banshee 2.2.0 series will not build for those platforms, I will make a special repository for those users with the latest version that builds. I’m looking forward to explore the best solution possible for those two specific platforms. Directly or indirectly many people were involved on this changes at several levels. I would like to leave a huge ‘Thank You!’ for their awesome contributions: Vincent Untz, for spec work on the new spec; Stephen Shaw, for working out the Mono repositories and quick action when needed; Andrew Wafaa for testing (banshee and repository install methods); openSUSE Factory reviewers and maintainers for helping with fast transition on several processes; Banshee developers which provided us one hell of a release to make the delights of everyone; I hope that all this changes will help our users achieving a better Multimedia experience with openSUSE and developers to have very accurate and resourceful repositories for their work around Banshee. I’m proud to continue Gabriel Burt’s work on the Banshee repositories for which he deserves all the credit for making this repositories one of the most successful in openSUSE Build Service! Enjoy Banshee with openSUSE, we don’t take prisoners! [Less]

Next week is a Hack Week. Do you know, what Hack Week is? It’s week during which we at SUSE come to work and work on anything we want. Anything? Well anything open source related. So if you normally work as a designer, you can sit down and spend a ... [More] whole week hacking Linux kernel. Or on the other hand, as kernel developer, you can try to improve design of our web. What are my plans for next week? I’m not sure yet. I still have some requests regarding openSUSE Paste. But as week is a long time, I would like to try something else, requiring more time. libguestfs libguestfs is a set of tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images. And I would like to have it available somehow in openSUSE as I use virtualization quite a lot. That can be interesting and useful project for the next week and I think it may be useful not just for me. Karma in Connect Yes, here I go again. I already wrote about it several times and it is still not implemented and although I think full implementation would take quite some time, I could try to take a look at some simple way how to provide something to start with. So these are my two ideas what I may try to do next week. Not decided yet, so maybe I will end up with something completely different. But in the meantime, this can serve as an inspiration for others and if somebody would like to join me on either of these, don’t hesitate to leave a comment [Less]

Tweet (Banshee 2.2.0 was released a few minutes ago…) The Banshee 2.2.0 sources were made available a few minutes ago. This is the perfect time to perform some maintenance tasks on the openSUSE Banshee repositories. Since many of the packages on ... [More] this repositories are used in other projects (ex. Meego), I’m contacting the maintainers and see how will approach the ‘nuking’ part. Some of the task to be performed: Package name change from banshee-1 to banshee, deprecating banshee-1; Banshee for openSUSE is now maintained on GNOME:Apps project. Banshee:Unstable will be served by a branch of the packages in the GNOME:Apps project (only banshee and banshee-community-extensions); Move from ndesk-* to dbus-sharp and dbus-sharp-glib (thus nuking ndesk packages); Nuke unwanted Mono packages so that the build links against the distribution mono packages. This will clear a few problems that might happen, thus making this repositories perfect to openSUSE users. Anything I might have forgotten… Banshee 2.2.0 will arrive within 24/48 hours to openSUSE users… [Less]

Tweet A few more updates landed today and yesterday on GNOME:Ayatana, including a couple of new packages, amongst them: unity – not yet ready for users to test, but it’s a first submission which aims mainly to provide unity-core-4.0 dependency ... [More] for other packages. It needs a bit of work still, for example we’re missing the KDM and GDM session files to load the Unity Desktop and there’s really no testing done at this stage. unity-lens-applications unity-lens-files etc… During the next days I’m uploading hopefully a fully working version of Unity 2D, I’m just trying to fix some build errors on one of it’s dependencies, the Qt bindings for dconf. Once this is done, I have strong reasons to believe that I’ll have a fully working Unity 2D package. I’ve also submitted gtk3-engines-unico (and submitted to GNOME:Apps) which provides the GTK3 engine for Canonical’s Light Themes, this one is properly tested and works very nice with GNOME3. Hopefully more cool developments during the next days… And I’m still looking for a volunteer contributor for Compiz… [Less]