openSUSE Linux

Tweet I’ve been a bit away from openSUSE in the last months (mainly this summer) and this is related to several things that are happening in my personal life. During this time I’ve kept a look in several packages I maintain for GNOME, but haven’t ... [More] been doing anything related to openSUSE. As many people know, the international pressures in Portugal are placing much demanding things on every citizen, mainly on the working force. I still don’t see the shackles around my hands, but it’s pretty much obvious they exist and they are around my wrists. It’s time to rethink the strategy for the life I wanted to live and move out to living it. No changes to be announced except that some weight I shouldered is going to be dropped, this is the case of GNOME:Ayatana, which I will discuss with Vincent once he’s around, but from my side the proposal is simple, salvage all the packages that are requirements to other packages and might have some utility in the distro, all the others, just a plain and simple nuke them. It served it’s purposes, but I no longer have the time or will to continue maintaining stuff, some that worked, others that never worked. In a way I was wrong, openSUSE users are far better with the traditional choices, ex: GNOME, than with other alternative choices. [Less]

Of late, I have been reading a lot of code via browser. Sometimes, when evaluating a patch or when reading through open source project sources, I find it very hard to track how variables move across functions/loops.If I am using VIM, I can happily ... [More] use CTAGS for this. Chrome highlights all the occurrences of the text that you searched for in yellow color. However when you search for another string, the old highlights disappear. It would have been nicer if any new string search starts highlighting in a different color. I could not find any plugin for achieving this, So, I wrote my own Chrome extension for this.Please visit the extension page: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/phabnclfbnmhmoipebjdfhkiacojlcnc While I was trying to upload this extension, Google wanted me to make a screencast also. The video of the extension in action is available here (please watch in fullscreen - HD)Screenshots Search token input box Highlights in action  This extension though created to satisfy a developer's need, will be very helpful for any common  browser user who wants to search and highlight multiple strings in any webpage (say while searching a page with phone list for multiple people etc.)The extension is open-source - MIT Licensed and is hosted in github. Your comments, patches, feedback, Likes, +1s, Shares, etc. are welcome. Since it is open sourced, you can feel safe about installing the extension :-) [Less]

More mail digging, nearly cleared the backlog, reviewed patches, read Federico's nice slides on design patterns. Found a systemic problem affecting linked incremental builds, and fixed it. Re-worked some legacy UNO wrappers (removing lots ... [More] of cut & paste), added more friendly exception printing for fatal startup / loading errors. Lunch. Chat with Thorsten, plugged away at palette loading issues, not the most elegant split between xmloff/ and sd/ but functional for now. Discovered another couple of big rats nest of cut/paste coding of bulky code - set too dunging them out. LibreOffice -really- needs someone to test / explode the mind of their trendy/new cut/paste coding detector; I wonder what the state of the art is there. [Less]

You may have already wondered why you can't use the full disc space on an ext2/3/4 partition? You already seen something like this, where the used and available blocks don't fit the number of blocks on the device/partition:Filesystem 1K-blocks   ... [More] Used    Available Use%  Mounted on/dev/sdc1   15391664  38184   14571608      1%  /mntThe reason is: if you create an ext filesystem (no matter if with mkfs or YaST), 5 % of the filesystem get reserved for the super-user to allow e.g. root daemons to continue to write to the partition after unprivileged processes stopped because the partition is full.While this perfectly make sense on system partitions as '/', it makes no sense on data partitions or external media (in the most cases). By this you get e.g. on an external 2TB/1.8TiB drive 100GByte/~92GiB, which you can't use as normal user. But you can get this space back. Either you set the number of reserved blocks to zero when you create the file system:mkfs -t ext4 -m 0 /dev/sdc1or you do it later:# make sure partition is unmountedumount /mnttune2fs -m 0 /dev/sdc1On a LUKS encrypted  you have to do this:# on a LUKS deviceumount /media/disktune2fs -m 0 /dev/mapper/udisks-luks-uuid-X You should see this output:tune2fs 1.41.14 (22-Dec-2010)Setting reserved blocks percentage to 0% (0 blocks) And if you mount the device again, you can see with df that you have the full space available: Filesystem 1K-blocks   Used    Available Use%  Mounted on /dev/sdc1   15391664  38184   15353480      1%  /mnt [Less]

With our conference, osc11, fast approaching (Have you registered yet? If not, what are you waiting for?!), the excitement is building all over the project. Its quite some work to get to create a reasonable schedule for a conference. For osc we want ... [More] to have a program with talks that interest all our visitors. And as visitors have a wide rage of skill levels we also want to balance the depth of the talks. Another thing we wanted to create are “gravitation centers” for our key topics within the program. Oh and we also seek out for new contributors with our conference. And all that needs to be sorted between rooms with different sizes, within the tracks you think are useful, with breaks, time to change rooms and so on and son on. Quite some parameters to take into account. That said, we are very happy that we can announce the schedule for the openSUSE Conference 2011 today! http://conference.opensuse.org/timetable We have scheduled more than 100 contributions in the four days of the conference. More than 50% of those are interactive like birds of a feather sessions (BoFs) and workshops, that is along with our motto RWX³ which basically means that people should not only just listen, but also do things. So as the schedule is done, speakers are working on their presentations and evening events are being planned in full swing. And to top it all off, each day we have an awesome keynote speaker to get us psyched up for the rest of the conference. Let’s introduce you to some of our speakers. Jos Poortvliet Topic: Opening Session Date: Sunday, 11-September-2011 — 10:00 a.m. Job: openSUSE Community Manager Quote: You should go to openSUSE Conference because you can make a difference and have fun doing it Vojtech Pavlik Topic: Opening Session Date: Sunday, 11-September-2011 — 10:00 a.m. Job: Director SUSE Labs Quote: You should go to openSUSE Conference because we can meet there. Jos Poortvliet and Vojtech Pavlik will welcome you with a kick off to the openSUSE Conference Sunday morning at 10:30 a.m. This is your chance to get up to speed about all the great things that have happened in the openSUSE Project for the past year and really get ready for the Conference itself. After all, this conference is about you and team building and productivity through our RWX3 theme. Jos is a Dutch Organization Psychologist, long-time Free Software evangelist and openSUSE community manager for SUSE. He coordinates the marketing around the project, is visiting and organizing conferences, and maintaining contacts with the press. Vojtech studied biophysics and informatics, developed autonomous robots, wrote most of the Linux kernel input device handling, and bits of a bunch of other code in there, now, after 12 years with SUSE, serves as the Director of SUSE Labs. Greg Kroah-Hartman Topic: The Current State of openSUSE Tumbleweed Time: Monday 12-September-2011 — 11:45 a.m. Job: Linux Kernel Developer Quote: You should go to the openSUSE Conference because it’s the largest gathering of openSUSE users and developers in the world, why would you ever want to miss that? Join us as Greg introduces us to what Tumbleweed is, it’s goals and ambitions. It’s one of our most exciting and popular initiatives within the openSUSE Project. With an overview of how well it is currently working, what types of packages are being added, and how to use it, you’ll be sure to want to get in on the Tumbleweed Bandwagon. Greg will then wrap up with future plans for Tumbleweed and how developers and users can get involved in moving Tumbleweed forward. Greg Kroah-Hartman is a fellow at SUSE and a Linux kernel developer. He is responsible for the Linux kernel stable releases, and is the maintainer of the USB, driver core, tty, and staging portions of the kernel. In openSUSE, Greg is driving the Tumbleweed rolling-release which aims to provide a rolling updates version of the distribution containing the latest stable versions instead of relying on rigid periodic release cycles. Greg’s keynote will evolve around Linux 3.0 and other, more serious, adventures in his life. Michael Miller Topic: SUSE and openSUSE Time: Tuesday, 13-September-2011 — 11:45 a.m. Job: Vice President Quote: You should go to the openSUSE Conference because you’ll meet up with friends, have lots of fun and also learn about and contribute to your favorite parts of the openSUSE project. It’s been nearly a year since the announcement of the acquisition of our main sponsor by Attachmate. Since that time, we’ve seen organizational changes to our sponsor’s various business units. Join us as we hear Michael’s vision for a stronger relationship between SUSE and the openSUSE Project and what this means for us. As Vice President of Global Alliances & Marketing for SUSE, Michael Miller is responsible for growing the SUSE Linux business globally through key alliances and innovative technology initiatives. Michael will deliver a keynote on the future of the symbiosis of the new SUSE company and the openSUSE Project. The openSUSE Project Title: Wrapup Session Time: Wednesday 14-September-2011 — 4:15 p.m Quote:Have a lot of fun… Join us for the closing session as we all gather together to reflect on the conference and the state of the openSUSE Project. This meeting will be led by the openSUSE Board and provides an open dialogue opportunity with the board as well as proposing new initiatives you may have on a variety of topics. This is your opportunity to help further shape the direction of our community for the coming year. We hope you will enjoy the program and the keynotes at osc11. See you in September! [Less]

… and I’ll be there again as well! I guess there’s no need to tell I am really looking forward to it. I’m pretty excited when I look closer at the just published Conference Timetable. What I really like about the openSUSE Conference is that it has ... [More] also sessions that are not directly related to SUSE or Linux in general. You can “geek out” about topics like Digital processing of early color photography, Open Street Map, 8-bit Music, Wooden kayaks or Open Hardware and Hackerspaces. The last one will be held by me and I’ll try to bring a functional Rep Rap 3d printer from our Prague hackerspace brmlab so you can see it in action and print your own 3d models. All in the spirit of our motto: Have a lot of fun! Together with Henne and Tom we’ll hold a workshop about our social networking platform called Connect and we hope we’ll get more contributors to it. Among the talks I mentioned I also plan to visit sessions about GNOME 3, tmux, 5Ws of Contributions, Static Code Checking and Lightning Talks. And of course don’t miss the keynotes and social event The Geek in Wild West theme! See you all there! [Less]

As recently announced here, the LXDE team is looking for graphics contributors. Trying to involve as much people as possible i created a graphic contest! Is time for you, cool graphics, to create a logo for the openSUSE-LXDE team! The contest will ... [More] start tomorrow, everyone is welcome to join! All the rules are in our wiki! So? what are you waiting for??? Is just the right time to Have a lot of fun… [Less]

Dear flgrx’s users of rpm or ati-installer.run, this time I’m asking your help. Sebastian Siebert (freespacer) give his time to maintain the SuSE part inside the installer. Unfortunately he didn’t have high-end graphics card, nor double screen, and ... [More] thus is not able to test nor report results to AMD. He’s also spending time on irc and forum to help users when things goes wrong. So how can we help him? Simply giving back a little amount of money, if you can afford it. I’ve opened a pledgie for that : see the full explanation at pledgie.com/campaigns/15879. I really count on you. Spread the word. ps : Catalyst 11.8 is out, stay tuned, I’ll be back this week-end. [Less]

Image by planetc1 via Flickr Last weekend at WordCamp San Francisco, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg announced a most sensible plan to prune the existing plugin and theme directories. When you’re building a software ecosystem, numbers count, and ... [More] WordPress successfully built its plugin ecosystem to the point where more than 12,500 applications were accepted into the directory. At least, that was what we reported in the newly released 2nd edition of WordPress in Depth (at better bookstores everywhere, and online, of course). Today, that number is nearly 16,000! The theme directory isn’t quite as prolific, but still has close to 1500 themes. So WordPress has demonstrated that it can attract designers and developers to build on its core functionality, but now the user has to wade through all those apps to find the right tools and look for their site. The directory offers some help with descriptions, compatibility information and other statistics. We of the community can also contribute ratings and other real-world compatibility information, but not enough of us do that. If you need evidence for that, consider that only 23 people have reported on whether the highly popular All-in-One SEO plugin works with WordPress v3.2! And that, of 8.5 million downloads of the same plugin, only 1070 users have bothered to rate it. Soon all these numbers will be going down, as themes and plugins that have not been updated since 2009 will disappear from search results. This is only fair, really. There have been a lot of changes to WordPress since v2.8 (the active version two years ago). If a developer hasn’t even checked to see whether that plugin even works with newer versions, chances are good the user won’t get the benefit of support if something goes wrong. Over at the WP Dev Updates blog, someone asked “Might there be plugins out there that are so good and really basic that their utility spans greater than 2 years?” Mark Jaquith gave the right answer: We looked at the old plugins with the highest download counts and saw nothing that caught our eye. Ultimately, if a plugin author can’t update just the “Tested up to” version, then it’s pretty safe to consider it abandoned. The “Tested up to” values for such plugins are no higher than 3.0, and most are far worse. It may be a cliché, but pruning old dead wood is great for a forest ecosystem. Good for a software ecosystem, too. See the complete State of the Word 2011 address at WordPress.TV [Less]

Prodded mail variously; reviewed a patch or two, set to work on embedded palettes for an internal issue. Called up by clueless BT guy - kept repeating that he worked for BT - and was trying to save me money: couldn't tell me anything ... [More] about my call history, or what the best plan was for me - but insisted on trying to explain several complicated package options to me: why?. If the company were 1/2 clueful they could tell me which the cheapest plan for me for the last year would have been, and I'd pick it - it is highly unclear that that is in their interest though. Why would they genuinely want me to pay them less ? Lunch, team meeting, TSC call. Back to palettes. As normal the vast majority of time is wasted at the UNO interface - picking some new and innovative way to mangle what is necessary through a hole that is the wrong size and shape. Dinner, back to work, worked late. [Less]