openSUSE Linux

Been a busy week, last week. There was Plasma Active One, OwnCloud 2.0, openQA 1.0 and KDE's 15th birthday. Each of them deserves a lot of attention, which they got. I'll just add my thoughts!Plasma Active OneLet's start with Plasma Active One. Now ... [More] that is one heck of an exciting technology. Where the Linux Desktop will probably follow the general 'desktop computing world' into a (far less relevant) niche, tablets are hot. There is quite a bit of competition: iPad of course, and Android. Soon Microsoft will come out with something that might be viable on tablets. But the competition also means the market is dynamic and people are used to choice.Plasma Active is an unique product in many ways. The UI itself is quite different from competitors, yet easy to use and intuitive. There are innovations like the heavy use of Activities and Nepomuk, stuff like Share-Like-Connect. And the way it is developed by a dedicated team, using 'agile' techniques and working with a number of companies is really interesting. I have a tablet with it and despite the horrible hardware in there (essentially GPU acceleration doesn't work) it's easy to see the potential.Obviously I'm excited to see the team using the openSUSE infrastructure and technology. And it's working for them. OBS allows the team to have the new code packaged and available for the interaction designers overnight, resulting in a fast design-implement-discuss cylce which is surely part of the success of Acive One.I think the Plasma Active team is on to something and congratulate them with their first release!OwnCloud 2.0OwnCloud 2.0 made a stunning release as well. Their new platform is easier to use, introduces a huge number of new features and... we're working on integrating it in openSUSE. You can already download an SUSE Studio image (Virtual Machine, USB, CD or Hard drive images available) to get it up and running in minutes. If you enter your Amazon Cloud credentials you can deploy it to EC2 without even downloading anything! Other stuff I am not allowed to speak about or I'll be jumped by a couple of big, German openSUSE dudes who can crush my back by looking at me.As Frank said, the biggest thing he's proud off with OwnCloud is the community, and right he is. I met some of them at the Desktop Summit in Berlin but there's a whole bunch more and they are like busy bees. Just following their mailing list a little, I can't wait for the next release! So, OwnCloud team - congrats on your release!openQA 1.0On the same day as OwnCloud 2.0 came available, openSUSE released openQA 1.0. openQA is basically a tool which boots up an ISO file into a VM, giving (where needed) input via virtual keyboard or mouse events and takings screen shots of the process. It then compares the screen shots to reference screenshots and BAM, you know if the ISO did what you expected! It is stunningly easy to use on your own computer: clone the git repo and start the tests by running os-autoinst/tools/isotovideo [isodisc]. You'll get a log file as well as screen shots and a video of the whole boot - installation - run process in a directory.The tests are written in Perl, something not everyone loves, but the whole thing is quite flexible and can be used to test ANY operating system. There's some support for Fedora, Debian and openIndiana but if Microsoft is interested in getting some QA to their OS they can get support in quite easy ;-)I think, while there's work to do, for an 1.0 openQA is pretty cool and there's plenty of application for it. Let's hope other distro's will look at it, see if they can use it to improve the state of Linux quality all over the place.So, openQA team, congrats on the successful release!KDE is 15 years old!15 years ago KDE was started. In that time it has evolved into the largest and most vibrant Linux Desktop project. I'm proud of this 15th birthday milestone! The cool thing about such an anniversary is that you tend to look back at what has been. But KDE has always been a community which looks forward. New technologies and innovations continuously flow from the community and while I would love it if the Free Desktop world would be a bit less 'NIH', much of this is adopted in other places at some point. Everyone knows about WebKit for sure but it is also cool to see KWin lead in the efforts towards Wayland and openGL-es, Nepomuk innovate on the semantic desktop and Plasma Active shows the world what a 'device spectrum' UI should really look like!So instead of dwelling on the past (and yes, I've done and seen plenty in my ten "KDE years") I'll look forward to the future too. And I bet the next 15 years will see KDE continue to grow like Paul Adams' graphs show us. I'm proud to be part of two communities which are so close - openSUSE and KDE. And I congratulate my KDE friend with their 15 year birthday and celebrations!I hope this week will stay a bit more quiet as I have some time off ;-) [Less]

Here: http://www.iki.fi/tml/libocon2011-xcompiling.pdf

Making the blank slate useful During the Desktop Summit, Garrett and I had a very fruitful discussion on the daily workflow around files and documents. To me it was heartwarming to see that ... [More] , after careful explanation, we mostly agreed with the vision for Document-Centric Gnome — and that it could be improved gradually. One of the ideas we played with is about making document-creation applications more useful when they have just started up. Most such programs, when started, give you a blank slate that has some default configuration, as in the page size for print-oriented media. When you start a program, though, you generally want to do one of these: create a new document from scratch, create a new document based on something that you can use as a template or a starting point, or open a document on which you've worked before. Right now those actions are rather scattered in the UIs of applications. File/New may give you a blank page, but you then have to configure the page with Document Properties, or Page Setup, or Format/Page, or some other idiosyncratic command. Templates are left up to the user ("open something you had and Save As to another name"), or they get put in a deeply-hidden place. During the Zeitgeist hackfest a few months ago, Seif and Michal showed a "dashboard" plug-in for Gedit which makes Gedit's startup window look like this: Gedit's documents don't really have a physical media size, so the option at the top of that window is simply to edit a new, empty text file. The other options let you select recently/frequently used files. Garrett and I talked about having a similar kind of "dashboard" for when other applications have just started up. The dashboard, or "blank slate that helps you get started", would give you the option of creating a new document with meaningful options for the page size, or to create something from templates, or to open something that you have already worked on. Here is my first cut at a mockup for the GIMP. The part that is cut&pasted from a screenshot needs a little work to fit better within the sketched part; I just grabbed the screenshot to avoid doing all the work in Pencil. The four big buttons in the "Create" section are the various ways in which the GIMP lets you create new images: from an empty image, from a scanner, from a screenshot, etc. When you click on those buttons, the section under them would change to present the appropriate options. One question is whether this should be a rather abstract, but standardized mega-widget in GTK+, or if we should just publish some guidelines for how applications can implement this. Let's see if we can turn this into a real UI pattern: Blank slate helps you get started. Please add any comments/discussion there (the discussion section is at the bottom of that wiki page). [Less]

Up lateish, caught up with mail slowly. Chased what turned out to be a kernel problem plaguing openSUSE 12.1 and making yast2 un-responsive. Re-synched feature/gtk3 to master. Is it only me that experiences a total-irony-failure when ... [More] those who repeatedly fail to meet their commitments to open their code then can't find other people's that are in plain sight ? Still, I should straighten out & publish my slides, written in the minutes before giving them to help out (no doubt). Wrote Linux Format column, forwarded deluge of conference slides to David Nelson (who is helping out up-loading and organising them nicely). Drove to Presdales School in Ware to see if it is worth moving house, county etc. to avoid Newmarket College & get a good state school education; seemingly an excellent school, but probably not worth moving so far for. Back late. [Less]

As I promised a week ago, I’m publishing results of my little MySQL survey. Question that people (including me) are probably the most interested in is what variant(s) of MySQL are people using. No big surprise is that the most used variant (89%) is ... [More] MySQL Community Server from Oracle. It’s well known default, people know what to expect and administrators golden rule is don’t touch it if it works. And other variants build on top of it anyway. Second place (20%) belong to MariaDB. That is answer I also kind of expected. MariaDB guys are verbose and visible. At least I saw much more people talking about MariaDB then about Percona. Part of it might be that they position themselves as kind of MySQL competitor. Oracle is big controversial company. Sometimes we hate them (they killed OpenOffice!), sometimes we love them (btrfs is great!). So I can imagine regular users getting angry with Oracle and switching to the competitor. And there was a period of time in history when we all were unsure about what Oracle will do to the MySQL and MariaDB was there for us. Some people can also have some valid reasons. Like the need for one of the included storage engines. What surprised me was how little people use MySQL Cluster included in the distribution. 4 people responded that they use MySQL Cluster and only two of them use it from main repository. Cluster uses same amount of people as people using Percona which we don’t have in our repositories at all! The outcome from this is that I’ll probably drop MySQL Cluster from main distribution and keep it only in obs for now. This change will help me concentrate more on variants that people use. But MySQL Cluster will be still available in obs in it’s latest version. I’m not planning inclusion of Percona, but if anybody is interested, it should be pretty easy to put it to obs using templates I have for MySQL. From the rest of the results, it’s apparent that unstable repository is not known and that plenty of responders have some suggestions for default MySQL configuration and they are keeping them to themselves! So if you are one of them, let me know you suggestions. Ideally by sending me configuration snippet everybody can benefit from In the end I would like to thank all participants for their responses, it will help me concentrate on things you are interested the most and improve overall presence of MySQL in openSUSE Build Service. And of course, any comments are welcome and whole results can be seen on separate web page mentioned bellow Survey results [Less]

In openSUSE we’ve got currently MySQL Community Server, MariaDB and MySQL Cluster. From all of these we have even multiple versions. Although these packages are different, they are quilte similar. So I’m handling them in a little bit special way. ... [More] When I was adding MariaDB I knew that packaging will be quite similar to the MySQL Community Server. So I took some parts of .spec file away into separate files so I can sync them easily and left only package dependent parts in .spec files. Later on, I created special git repository and few scripts to handle patches and patch sharing among these variants. And lately I automatized tre rest of the manual syncing I was diong. So today I want to present how do I do MySQL packaging today. And that is also some tutorial on how you can modify these packages easily or even create packages for other variants like Percona Everything starts with one of my repositories on github. Let’s take a look at what it contains. Some scripts and few directories. Let’s start with directories. First directory is named common and it contains several files. As you can guess, it contains code common to all MySQL variants. So you can find here build scripts, install scripts, rc script, few readmes and template for the spec file. Templates ends up with .in. All non-template files are later committed to the openSUSE Build Service as they are in the repository. Templates needs to be filled in first. For that I decided to use mustache. You can install it by running gem install mustache. But back to the packaging. We need some variant specific files, something to fill templates with and some patches, right? For these reasons there are directories named after particular MySQL variant (for example mysql-community-server-56 or mariadb-53). Inside these directories are at least config.yaml file and series fil. But probably there is some more. config.yaml file is used by mustache to fill in the templates. So you can find here package names, descriptions, versions and such. Things that has to differ among all variants. Apart from these, you can also find some .cnf files in variant specific directories. These are configuration files to be included. This way even if you modify your /etc/my.cnf, these snippets can get updated (if you don’t modify them as well). Here is also place for some contribution – you can send me just few snippets from my.cnf, that will improve default configuration Or create packages with new plugins and them register automatically here. Last file in the variant directory I spoke about – series file and the last directory I havn’t spoke about yet – patches have something in common – they are used for patching. series file contains a list of patches to apply. And patches directory contains these patches. How it works is described in my other github repository. Basically the point is to use few scripts so I have to maintain just series file outside of .spec file. Then there are scripts that will fetch patches, pack them up and during build apply them. No need for me to take some extra care. Example So how it works in practice. Let’s imagine we want to update MariaDB 5.3.x to newer version. I will go to the local checkout of mariadb-53 package (how to get one was described in the first article of this series) and replace old tarball with new one. Then I will modify mariadb-53/config.yaml file in packaging repository (change the version). After that I will call the only thing I haven’t spoke about yet – update-package.sh script in my packaging repository. This will check current path and according to the directory I’m in it will pick correct variant and replace all files with updated variants from the repository – new rc script, updated .spec file and everything. After that I need to check whether all patches still apply or fix them (now quilt comes handy) and try building the package. It may happen that I’ll find something that needs to be fixed. In that case, I’ll fix stuff in the git repository and let the script recreate everything. When I’m finished, I’ll commit everything to obs and git and move to another package. The key is that this way although I’m maintaining a lot of MySQL variants, I maintain them all as one. An if I fix something in one variant, fixes will eventually get to all of them [Less]

Team de-brief in the morning, pizza with the team; only just made the Eurostar home; poked at mail on the train and slept. Home in the evening, good to hug the babies and read some bedtime stories; deadly pleased to see that Tollef has upgraded the freedesktop bugzilla to 4.0, great chap. Bed early - exhausted.

Ophir Mine Air Compressor, originally uploaded by Mecworks. While visiting the Ophir mine in Utah, I was able to have access to the old mining buildings including the air compressor and electricity generation building. No related posts. No related posts.

Hello everyone!I am very pleased to announce the new issue (196) of openSUSE Weekly News in Greek.In this issue you will read about:* openSUSE 12.1 Beta Arrives!* Hackweek results for openSUSE ARM* openSUSE Board Election Committee Formed* Hackweek ... [More] VII* Tux Arena/Craciun Dan: Xonotic – Free Shooter Based Off NexuizAs well as many interesting news about openSUSE and useful advice, which can make our lives easier.Enough said though... Read more at: http://own.opensuse.gr, http://el.opensuse.org/Weekly_news or www.os-el.grWe are always looking forward to receiving your comments as well as suggestions regarding things you would like to read about in our next issue.The openSUSE Weekly News is being translated in the Greek language from issue #150. You can read older translated issues here: http://el.opensuse.org/Κατηγορία:Weekly_news_issuesEnjoy it!Efstathios Agrapidis (efagra) [Less]

We are pleased to announce Issue 197 from openSUSE Weekly News. openSUSE Weekly News openSUSE Weekly News Team 197 Edition Legal Notice This work (compilation) is licenced under Creative Commons ... [More] attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. The rights for the compilation itself are copyright by Sascha Manns. Opt-Out: If you are an Author and don’t want to be included in the openSUSE Weekly News, just send a Mail to: <[email protected]>. Copyrights of the referenced articles are owned by original authors or copyright owners. If you want to reuse those articles, ask each original copyright owner which license should be applied. We don’t reprint any Article without a free license, we just introduce it then under the Agreement of the German Copyright Law. If you are an author and want to set your blog under a free License just visit: http://goo.gl/Tw3td We are thanking the whole openSUSE Weekly News Team and the open-slx gmbh for spending time and power into the openSUSE Weekly News. Published: 2011-10-16 Table of Contents Announcements Status Updates Team Reports In the Community Events & Meetings openSUSE for your Ears Communication Contributors Games Corner Security Updates Kernel Review Tips and Tricks For Commandline/Script Newbies For Developers and Programmers For System Administrators Planet SUSE On the Web Announcements Call for participation Reports Reviews and Essays LOL Feedback Credits Acknowledgements Copyrights List of our Licenses Trademarks Translations We are pleased to announce our 197 issue of the openSUSE Weekly News. You can also read this issue in other formats here. Enjoy reading :-) Announcements▼ “ openSUSE Announces First Public Release of openQA The openSUSE Project announces the 1.0 release of the unique cross-distribution-capable, fully automated testing framework openQA. openQA is the only comprehensive testing tool which can run tests on every level of the OS, from core functionality like the bootloader and booting the kernel up to testing applications like Firefox and LibreOffice. It shows the results in a convenient web interface and allows testers to see screenshots and even videos of the issues found. openQA is used to run nightly tests of the ‘Factory’ development repository for the upcoming openSUSE 12.1 release. openQA is available under the GPL version 2 or later. (…) ” “ Interview about openQA Last week, openQA 1.0 was released. We did an interview with Bernhard Wiedeman, the main developer of openQA. First of all, whatýs your job regarding the openQA project? My role in the project was to wish for, envision, design, organize and implement most of openQA and OS-autoinst (the test-engine powering the openQA service). I made it do what was needed most and added things others wanted as well. Actually, my job at SUSE (doing cloud stuff) is completely unrelated to openQA, which is still my hobby project. (…) ” Status Updates▲▼ Team Reports Build Service Team Build Service Statistics. Statistics can found at Buildservice openFATE Team Top voted Features “ decouple download and installation (Score: 369) Network installation could be improved by running package download and package installation in parallel. ” “ Look at plymouth for splash during boot (Score: 196) I wanted to open a fate feature about this when I first heard of plymouth, but reading http://fedoramagazine.wordpress.com/2008/10/21/interview-fedora-10s-better-startup/ really makes me think we should go this way. Ray’s comment starting with “Every flicker and mode change in the boot process takes away from the whole experience.” is especially interesting. Is it okay to track the “don’t show grub by default” here? ” “ 1-click uninstall (Score: 168) An easy way to remove Software! For example: you installed an application with “1-click install” (which will install all the packages that you need), there should be an easy way (also with 1 click) to remove what you have installed with that 1-click operation… in another words: an “1-click Uninstall” to remove installed software (dependencies and packages included). ” “ Update to GRUB v2 (Score: 156) Every single bug or feature that anyone has developed for GRUB 0.97 has been rejected by the upstream project in favor of using GRUB 2. There has been resisitence in the distribution community to switching boot loaders, but this stalemate isn’t going to go away. The code itself isn’t well written or well maintained. Adding a new feature involves jumping through a lot of hoops that may or may not work even if you manage to work around all the runtime limitations. For example, a fs implementation has a static buffer it can use for memory management. It’s only 32k. For complex file systems, or even a simple journaled file system, we run into problems (like the reiserfs taking forever to load bug) because we don’t have enough memory to do block mapping for the journal so it needs to scan it for every metadata read. (Yeah, really.) (…) ” “ Popularity contest (Score: 113) We need a feedback about packages that are preferred by users and actively used. Debian already has a tool named Popularity contest (popcon) * reusing popcon will give us results that are directly comparable with Debian and Ubuntu * packagers team can take care of the package * we need a configuration dialog in YaST that is visible enough * we need a server infrastructure on opensuse.org. (There are certain privacy issues, see Debian FAQ for details) ” Recently requested features Features newly requested last week. Please vote and/or comment if you get interested. “ Login screen after lock screen Why does not require a password to unlock the screen with the same login screen of KDM or GDM, instead of a dialog box? Such as Windows XP. ” “ Need libcue This is a dependency for tracker (and possibly gstreamer). Libcue is intended to parse a so called cue sheet from a char string or a file pointer. For handling of the parsed data a convenient API is available. This project is meant as a fork of cuetools by Svend Sorensen which saw it last release in 02/2006. http://sourceforge.net/projects/libcue/ ” “ Deny individual users’ access to screen-saver settings This is an extension of Feature #312871, but because it’s a little more involved than changing a simple default, I thought it would be better to have a separate feature request. The screen-saver settings for time-out and “require password” are security settings that really should not be freely available to the individual user. I propose that we 1) set a reasonable default (60sec, 15sec, always require passwd) (see Feature #312871) and 2) only let these settings be modified by someone with root-access. To a regular user, the timeout and “require password” settings should appear “greyed out”, clearly indicating “not available”. ” “ change QCAD to LibreCAD Remove the very old unmantained QCAD (it requires QT3!!!) and add LibreCAD a mantained port to QT4 http://librecad.org ” “ 64-bit Flash 11 in OpenSuse 12.1 Adobe just released Flash 11 which has a native 64-bit version for Linux, OS X and Windows. It should be included with OpenSuse 12.1 in the same way that Flash 10.x is included in 11.4. I know it’s very new but I think the removal of the nsplugginwrapper requirement on 64-bit makes it worthwhile. Flash is also know to have many security bugs, so keeping 12.1 at 10.3 for it’s entire lifecycle would be more dangerous than including 11.0. ” “ Kernel updates removes user choices from /boot/grub/menu.lst When doing a kernel patch or update (as in eg zypper dup), the upgrade process re-writes the menu.lst entries for the kernel parameters with the default string from /etc/sysconfig/boot-something.conf Not a lot of end-users are aware of that file (in my case it took 5 years to realise what was happening), and are instead constantly having to re-write missing kernel paraemters into the menu.lst file. For instance, most sane folks would use splash=verbose as opposed to splash=silent, and for anyone using console=, brokendriver=, etc this is quite disasterous in the case of remote systems that suddenly become unreponsive / unreachable as a result of the kernel upgrade changing very important parameters. Instead of taking the default from an obscure config file that no other distro even uses, I’d suggest that the kernel param line is taken as-is from the menu.lst / elilo.conf files, not set to some static value. ” Feature Statistics Statistics for openSUSE distribution in openFATE Translation Team Daily updated translation statistics are available on the openSUSE Localization Portal. Trunk Top-List – Localization Guide In the Community▲▼ Events & Meetings Past October 05, 2011 : Project Meeting October 13, 2011 : GNOME Team Meeting Upcoming October 19, 2011 : Project Meeting October 19-21, 2011 : Latinoware (Iguassu Falls, Brazil) October 24-26, 2011 : Linux Kernel Summit (Praque, Czchech Republic) You can find more information on other events at: openSUSE News/Events. – Local Events openSUSE for your Ears The openSUSE Weekly News are available as podcast in German. You can hear it or download it on http://saigkill.homelinux.net/podcast. Communication The Mailinglists The openSUSE Forums Contributors openSUSE Connect Games Corner▲▼ The Section provides the Game of the Week, and Updates in the Game Repository “ Nelson Marques: Unknown Horizons 2011.3 RC3 ready for testing on openSUSE! While the Unknown Horizons developers are working hard fixing bugs and preparing the new release, 2011.3, I’ve went ahead and started to update all the dependencies to bring this wonderful game to openSUSE users. Here’s a few things that were changed to support this release: FIFE – Unknown Horizons now requires FIFE 0.3.3 (released a few days ago). This was a bit of a pain-in-butt package, that started to build properly after a SCons update (also forwarded to the openSUSE devel project in devel:tools:builders). Updated guichan to the latest release (0.8.2) and backported a commit that enables UTF-8; Updated SCons to 2.1.0; ENet was updated to latest version (1.3.3). Regarding Unknown Horizons packaging, I’ve also fixed some pending issues: Added python-enet package: we now provide this so we can drop the binary blob bundled with Unknown Horizons (depends on libenet >= 1.3.3); UH now requires FIFE >= 0.3.3, which is no longer backward compatible; Updated %post and %postun scriptlets. Sources are a bit fatter now, using .xz now. To install Unknown Horizons 2011.3rc3 please use one of the available 1-Click installers for openSUSE: Install for openSUSE 11.4 Install for openSUSE Tumbleweed Install for openSUSE Factory ” 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. “ openSUSE-SU-2011:1076-3: important: seamonkey: Update to Mozilla Seamonkey 2.4.1 Table 1. SUSE Security Announcement Package: Update to Mozilla Seamonkey 2.4.1 Announcement ID: openSUSE-SU-2011:1076-3 Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2011 15:08:20 0200 (CEST) Affected Products: openSUSE 11.4 openSUSE 11.3 Description: fixing various bugs and security issues. ” Kernel Review▲▼ “ h-online/Thorsten Leemhuis: Kernel Log: Linux 3.1 approaches Kernel version 3.1 will probably be released in the next few days. After a break of more than four weeks, Greg Kroah-Hartman has released new stable kernels. The X.org developers are thinking about merging the most important graphics drivers into the X-Server. Late last Tuesday night, Linus Torvalds issued the ninth release candidate of Linux 3.1. Since then, some further corrections have been integrated into the main development branch; however, in the past few days there have not been any new hints on when Linux 3.1 might get released – but it is likely to be released some time this week, or next week at the latest, as indicated by Torvalds when releasing RC7. Linus Torvalds explained in his release email that in RC9, a new GPG key for signing Git tags has been used for the first time. The new key is said to be stronger than the old one and has already been signed by more developers who are known to Torvalds; however, the tag has also been signed with the old key. ” “ Linux User & Developer/Jon Masters: The kernel column with Jon Masters #106 As is the case every month, Jon Masters looks at the latest developments in the Linux kernel community, including work on new architecture and ABI support, not to mention Kernel.org disruptions… In spite of the recent security attacks on kernel.org and other Linux community infrastructure, the show must go on and kernel development continued – albeit heavily disrupted at first by the various outages. That didn’t stop patches being posted adding support for two brand new architectures to the Linux kernel. One of these architecture patch postings targets a new DSP (Digital Signal Processor) design from Qualcomm called Hexagon that is commonly found in combination with a more powerful ARM processor within Qualcomm system-on-chip (SoC) processors – that’s two cores, both running different Linux kernels on the same chip. ” “ Rares Aioanei: kernel weekly news – 15.10.2011 Rares gives his weekly Kernel Review with openSUSE Flavor. ” Tips and Tricks▲▼ For Commandline/Script Newbies “ Linux Journal/Jayson Broughton: Getting Help From Linux – Part 2 Info Well here we are again, at part two of the ‘Getting Help from Linux’ series. In this blog post I’ll be talking about using Info to get help from Linux. In my previous post I spoke about how Info came about, but just in case you missed it I’ll give you another quick lesson. Gnu Info was created by the Free Software Foundation and in my experience is used by all of Gnu’s software for their version of ‘man’ pages. Info may contain much more information than what you can find in Man pages, and sometimes contains much more than you ever really need. The good thing about Info is that it is a hypertext markup utility. This makes it much easier to navigate through via hyperlinks embedded in emacs, than simply using arrow keys to navigate through information. While Man uses the Less utility to control the display, the info utility itself is designed to display Info pages. For those of you familiar with emacs, it appears the layout may be the same, along with some of the basic navigation. But that’s where the two applications can differ. If you’re using the Info application then your commands will be different than if you’re viewing info files in Emacs. This article is about reading Info pages inside of info. (…) ” For Developers and Programmers “ Michal Hrušecký: openSUSE @ ASUS Transformer This is going to be just a brief blog post with one important image. You probably all already know that there is bunch of people in openSUSE community who are working on getting ARM supported by distribution. And you probably already seen many blog posts about how great it is working. Well this is one of them. I’m happy owner of ASUS Transformer machine. As a geek I have root on my android machine. And since not long time ago, I also had a Debian chroot there to be able to run my favorite applications. But not any more. I replaced my Debian chroot with openSUSE one and now I can use zypper happily and forget everything about apt-get. How did I did that? I started with a simple package in obs, changed BuildRequires to the set of packages I wanted to have, run osc build armv7l standard and after osc created chroot for me, I just took it away. And fixed few things after switching to it on my Transformer. I’m still missing some packages, but hopefully they will be available soon ” For System Administrators “ Wazi/Juliet Kemp: Monitoring and Dealing With Snort Alerts Snort, the open source intrusion detection and prevention system, is immensely powerful, but to get the most out of it, you need to configure it correctly for your own setup. My previous Snort article looked at Snort’s own performance monitoring provision and how to use it to tune Snort to get the best throughput at the detection end. Here are some performance tips for dealing well with alerts, looking at alert monitoring, streamlining false positives and genuine but frequent real positives, and logical rule optimization. The last article looked at monitoring rule performance – that is, how well the Snort detection engine deals with the traffic it sees. The next stage concerns what to do with traffic that Snort flags as suspicious: alerts of various sorts. I won’t go into detail about how to deal with specific alerts, but talk instead about some good Snort management practices. (…) ” “ Wazi/Anatoliy A. Dimitrov: Use MySQL Replication Like an Expert to Improve Performance and Enhance Availability By using MySQL replication, you can distribute MySQL queries over multiple servers to improve application performance, provide high availability (HA), and distribute data across diverse physical locations. The process involves one or more master servers, which send databases or tables asynchronously to slave servers. For all of its potential benefits, MySQL replication can cause serious trouble, especially in complex environments. Follow the advice here to get off to a healthy start. In MySQL replication each participating server may be a master, a slave, or both. Master servers handle database transactions and write them to a binary log (binlog). Slaves connect to masters and request copies of their binary logs. Servers can act both as master and slave thanks to features such as different auto increment, which sets the interval between successive column values. (…) ” “ Linuxaria: How to convert from .deb to .rpm and viceversa As many of you know the most used packages on GNU/Linux are deb and rpm. deb is the extension of the Debian software package format and the most often used name for such binary packages. Debian packages are standard Unix ar archives that include two gzipped, bzipped or lzmaed tar archives: one that holds the control information and another that contains the data. The accepted program for handling these packages is dpkg, commonly used via other programs such as apt/aptitude or Gdebi. RPM Package Manager (RPM) is a package management system. The name RPM variously refers to the .rpm file format, files in this format, software packaged in such files, and the package manager itself. RPM was intended primarily for GNU/Linux distributions; the file format is the baseline package format of the Linux Standard Base. (…) ” “ IBM developerWorks/Sean A. Walberg: Learn Linux, 302 (Mixed environments): Authentication and authorization In preparation for taking the Linux Professional Institute Certification exam LPI-302 for systems administrators, learn how to set up and store passwords, integrate Samba with LDAP, and use ACLs to protect your Linux installation. (…) ” “ Fred Blaise: Linux fstab: mount a path containing spaces Let’s say you want to CIFS mount a windows share — say “//server01/it stuff$”, but your Windows admin put spaces in the path. Replace the spaces with \040. So, in your /etc/fstab, the line would give: //server01/it\040stuff$ /home/fblaise/mnt/MyITDrive cifs \\ username=fblaise,password=yoursinhere,uid=1000,gid=100,_netdev 0 0 It will then work, and your linux apps which cannot see beyond your local filesystems will have a new life. ” Planet SUSE▲▼ “ Andrew Wafaa: ARMing openSUSE – 111011 So HackWeek VII has been and gone, but work has not stopped in getting our beloved Geeko some ARMs. Now I’ll be the first to admit, things have been a wee bit scrappy in places. This isn’t anyone’s fault, it’s just that we want to get things rolling ASAP. Thing is, we need more haste less speed; we need to be somewhat more concerted with our efforts. So instead of trying to get everything to build in one hit (would be great if that was possible), we are going to target patterns of packages. (…) ” “ Ladislav Slezak: OpenSUSE Hackweek VII – Hacking USB Joysticks in YaST This hackweek I spent playing with joysticks in YaST and hwinfo (libhd). YaST already has a module for configuring joysticks, but I only supported Gameport joysticks which are quite obsoleted these days. AFAIK all recent mainboards do not have gamport connectors (just a pin header) or the gameport is completely missing. And if you want to buy a joystick you will find only USB models anyway. There was a note in the YaST module that it only supports Gameport joysticks but some users find it confusing. So I decided to change the situation and do something interesting during my Hackweek project – to add USB joystick support to YaST. (…) ” “ Thomas Thym: 2 days to go and KDE turns 15! Whoooo. Just 2 more days until KDE can celebrate the 15th birthday. Have you prepered your presents ;-) And even more important: Are you ready to party? Find more information on the dot. http://dot.kde.org/2011/10/05/freedom-15-years-party ” “ Cornelius Schumacher: The demise of the Windows platform I bought a Windows game last week. What I got was a scenic tour through the demise of the Windows platform. I knew that Windows as gaming platform was troublesome, but it never was as clear that it’s actually moving towards irrelevance. If you ever have seriously played games on Windows you know this cocktail of driver updates, googling error messages, entering illegiible cryptic codes from stickers hidden in game boxes, waiting for online activation, going through update popups of various origins, and what not. It took me something like two hours before I was even able to start the game. I love games, and I have played quite some games on Windows, but I might be done with this now. ” “ Sebastian Kügler: Plasma Active Perspective: The User Story Plasma Active brings a flexible, elegant, activity-driven user experience to a spectrum of devices. This article is part of a series of articles about different perspectives on Plasma Active. This installment looks at the user story, and aims at answering the questions “what does Plasma Active bring me as a user?”, what are the underlying concepts and how do we plan to achieve these goals. For the user who wants to enjoy the Internet, multimedia and data away from his laptop or desktop, right now choices are rather slim. This means, for example, that you will choose a platform with some sort of critical mass, meaning that your favourite 3rd party apps are available, enough services supported, etc.. A Free software platform has to bring a lot to the table for users: There’s a lot of cool software available, systems such as Plasma Active offer a system without lock-in to a single vendor, but rather being able to take apps across vendors and devices. Plasma Active already comes with a good amount of interesting widgets, new ones are being developed all the time, the development platform is proven to be stable and working in real world use, and it’s easy for 3rd parties to develop and bring support for (even “4th” party) services. Plasma Active extends the Free software ecosystem into user experiences for devices, bringing a critical mass with it. I personally use Plasma Active almost every day, I prefer the tablet form factor for “light reading”, checking on news, social networks, the blogosphere. For me it’s an ideal “on the couch in the living room” device, although I tend to use it in trains for reading and watching movies as well. With its powerful email client Kontact Touch it allows me quite conveniently read longer email threads. The virtual keyboard works well enough for entering short texts. For longer texts, I usually either plug in a keyboard and put the tablet into a stand, so it feels more like a ‘stationary laptop’. (…) ” “ Michal Hrušecký: How to contribute in openSUSE Build Service I promised that I’ll write a post about how you can contribute. There are several ways how to contribute to MySQL, but most of it means modifying packages. And as everything in openSUSE is built using openSUSE Build service, first post will be actually pretty general obs and osc howto. In the next posts, I’ll go deeper into specific details of MySQL packaging. (…) ” “ Michal Hrušecký: How to create patches using quilt Last time I described how to contribute quite to any package in openSUSE Build Service. But I left out the most important part. I haven’t shown how to change anything. This time I want to show you, how to create patches, if you need them, easily. Let’s start start with package we checked out from obs. Creating patch for anything is different only in first few steps. First we got to the directory where do we have the package checked out. We run quilt setup This command will parse the .spec file, unpack tarball and prepare all quilt stuff. Now is time for patching, so let’s enter the newly created directory and try following command quilt push ” “ Cornelius Schumacher: Fifteen years of KDE Fifteen years ago Matthias Ettrich started the KDE community. On 14th October 1996 he wrote his famous email to the de.comp.os.linux.misc group on Usenet. He called for other programmers to join him to create a free desktop environment for Linux targeted at end users. Many, many people joined. Thousands of developers wrote millions lines of code. We did 90 stable releases of our core set of applications alone, not counting all additional stuff and the thousands of 3rd party applications. (…) ” On the Web▲▼ Announcements “ Plasma Active One Arrives! On the 9th of October, 2011 (9.10.11), the first release of the Plasma Active tablet user experience was made publicly available. Plasma Active One’s touchscreen interface is more than just an application launcher. As soon as the device is turned on, rather than the traditional grid of applications, you see the Activities view showing your current project, task or idea. With Activities, you can collect all of the documents, people, web sites, media and widgets related to a topic in one place, building personalized and interactive views of your life. With Plasma Active, the possibilities are unlimited. You can add as many things to an Activity as you wish with its “infinite scroll” feature. You can create as many Activities as you like and move between them using the touch-friendly Activity Switcher. (…) ” Call for participation “ Design a logo for SCALE 10X, win a trip to LA! Want a free trip to SCALE 10X in Los Angeles this January? In marking 10 years of the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) and 20 years of Linux, the SCALE team wants to incorporate an open-source approach to this year’s expo logo designs for publications and for swag. With this in mind, the SCALE team announces a contest to select the artwork for use on this year’s t-shirts, attendee bags, and other conference materials. The designer of the winning submission will win a free pass to SCALE 10x, including airfare within the continental United States, as well as a three-night stay at the Hilton Los Angeles Airport. (…) ” Reports “ What’s next for MeeGo? “Join openSUSE”, says Jos Poortvliet openSUSE community manager, Jos Poortvliet, shares his thoughts on the recent creation of Tizen and offers a new home for the MeeGo project… A while ago Intel and Samsung announced a new initiative under the Linux Foundation umbrella: Tizen. Tizen is a Linux OS for embedded use building on HTML5 and CSS. Cool? Well, maybe. If you’ve been involved with MeeGo, the Linux Foundation’s previous embedded Linux OS, you’re probably not too happy right now. Yes, MeeGo will have to go. For them, as Richard Dale wrote, it’s ‘Tizen or Tizen’t’. The MeeGo community had no say in the merger of Moblin and Maemo to MeeGo, nor did they in the birth of Tizen. Surprised? (…) ” “ h-online: Anti-virus software fails to deal with government trojan Since last Monday at the latest, all virus scanners will issue an alert when an attempt is made to load the trojan that was exposed by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) onto a computer. However, to think that one is therefore protected from the government-procured spyware would be a serious mistake. Anti-virus software hardly stands a chance against such malware; some of the alerts have even turned out to be proper dummies. ” “ h-online: openQA emerges from openSUSE – Update An open source automated testing framework, openQA 1.0, has been released by openSUSE to make it easier to test Linux distributions and other operating systems. The GPLv2 licensed framework is already running within the openSUSE process to test openSUSE Factory distributions, including the upcoming openSUSE 12.1, due mid-November. ” “ h-online: ownCloud web-based storage app hits version 2.0 The KDE project has announced the release of version 2.0 of ownCloud, an open, web-based storage application which is designed to be run on a user’s personal server. The major stable update includes a new user interface and several new features, such as support for calendar and address book syncing. ” “ Desktop Summit Survey Report Thanks to the people who completed the survey for the Desktop Summit 2011! To improve Desktop Summits in the future, the Desktop Summit organizing team collected feedback from attendees through this survey, which 192 people answered. The survey asked for brief background information, a general evaluation of the Desktop Summit and various elements of it, and feedback on the social events. The overall feedback was positive. People enjoyed Desktop Summit 2011 Berlin and the forum it provided for exchanging technology and ideas among different free software communities. In addition, there were suggestions for improvements to upcoming Desktop Summits. Details can be read in the report if you’re interested. We appreciate you taking time to give us feedback and look forward to seeing you again at the next Desktop Summit! ” Reviews and Essays “ ZDNet/Ken Hess: The greatest security vulnerability: You Believe it or not, the greatest threat to your personal or corporate computing environment is you. You put your personal and collective corporate security at risk every day by just being you. It’s not a particular personality flaw with you as an individual but rather it is your innate human response to other humans. You want to be open, helpful and kind but those attributes are also your security Achilles’ heel. The quote, “A little kindness goes a long way,” is no less true when speaking of computer security. That wee bit of kindness that you show a stranger could put your personal and corporate security at significant risk and could result in very high remedial costs. (…) ” LOL “ like-a-boss.org: hacking the imperial death march One of the great things about the original Star Wars trilogy, was the “lived in”, junky, hacked together aesthetic of the Star Wars universe. Everything was a bit trashed, as if real people actually lived there. Thankfully, that’s one of the things that George Lucas hasn’t tinkered with in his endless quest to ruin the childhood memories of a generation. So it’s heartening to see this tradition carried on with the playing of the imperial death march on miscellaneous hacked together hardware. Enjoy … (…) ” Feedback▲▼ Do you have comments on any of the things mentioned in this article? Then head right over to the comment section and let us know! Or if you would like to be part of the openSUSE:Weekly news team then check out our team page and join! If you don’t know, how to contribute, just check out the Contribution Page. We have a Etherpad, which you can also use to sumbit news. Talk with us: Or Communicate with or get help from the wider openSUSE community via IRC, forums, or mailing lists see Communicate. Visit our connect.opensuse.org Page: and give your Feedback. Visit our Facebook Fanpage: Fanpage You also can submit via Bugtracking and Featurerequests for give your Feedback. Keep updated: You can subscribe to the openSUSE Weekly News RSS feed at news.opensuse.org. DOCS: Visit the official openSUSE docs page: docs.opensuse.org. Credits▲▼ We thank for this Issue: Sascha Manns, Editor in Chief Satoru Matsumoto, Editorial Office Gertjan Lettink, Forums Section Thomas Hofstätter, Eventeditor Thomas Schraitle, DocBook-Consultant Acknowledgements▲▼ We thank for this Issue: RenderX XEP, PDF Creation and Rendering SyncRO Soft Ltd., Oxygen XML Editing iJoomla, Surveys open-slx GmbH, Sponsoring Copyrights▲▼ List of our Licenses Permission Information for own Trademarks SUSE ®, openSUSE ®, the openSUSE ® Logo and Novell ® are registered Trademarks of Novell, Inc. Linux ® is a registered Trademark of Linus Torvalds Translations▲ openSUSE Weekly News is translated into many languages. Issue 197 is available in: English Coming soon: Japanese Greek German Russian First published on: http://saigkill.homelinux.net ")); [Less]