openSUSE Linux

Up earlyish, off to la Cantine, somehow just in time for the start of our talk (with Italo & Florian), annoyingly lost a number of images from my slides (good to work with the latest bleeding edge development version). Frantic day ... [More] of meeting & talking to interesting people, lunch with Simon & Norbert, gave a GSOC summary talk for Matus after that. Met up with Mike from Mozilla to talk performance, tried to compare the Lightning talks session at the end. Talk slides are available: achievements, Matus' Google Summer of Code and new developers. Off to the party kindly hosted by the Paris Region, fine food wine, and great news. Good to see LibreOffice On-Line launched in style. Talked to lots of interesting people including Mathias, Camilo & Glynn. Out with the lads for a late drink. [Less]

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 ... [More] 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’. User experience central Plasma Active has been designed, from the ground up for the user. Our goal is to create an elegant experience for the user, with as little friction in the UI as possible. The device(s) support the user’s workflow, are ergonomic to use on a given formfactor. The device should get the work done, be fun to use and flexible enough to easily adapt to the user’s wishes and needs. In our development process, this is strongly reflected by the integral role designers play. Usability and interaction engineering is not an afterthought, but the driving force behind the work we do. Mind-mapped UX Contour, Plasma Active’s primary workspace uses semantic technologies to represent to the user. On a low level, this means that the user deals with photos, persons rather than .jpg files and email addresses. The semantic layer provides the data abstraction, including files, online resources, but also more abstract things such as locations. The Contour shell uses this information, and melds it with smart algorithms into a mapping for the user. The building blocks of this mindmap of the user’s digital life are activities. Activities are easily created, customized and removed, and you can use them go group similar items, bookmarks, widgets, apps, images, music tracks or videos. Activities allow you to organize all the interesting things you encounter while using your device. The Share Like Connect feature allows you to interact with these activities, so instead of generally bookmarking a website, you can also directly connect it to one of your activities and have it neatly organized among the rest of your digital artifacts. Where are we going? Plasma Active devices are interconnected and work together well, as they offer similar functionality across a range of devices. In Plasma Active One we’ve delivered the first bits that will lead to this goal: The Contour shell which gives a stronger connection between the user, his data and network and the device. In future releases, we will enhance Contour to provide more handles and “background support” to the user. Share-Like-Connect’s like and share features provides stronger connections to the (social) network, a perfect feature for the Free Culture community, and one of the strong selling points of Free Software (even if for many people outside the “geek crowd” perhaps not consciously). It will also be used to easily share anything across devices, imagine watching photos in a group, moving an interesting article from your desktop onto your tablet to read it on the couch or on the go, showing your friends on Facebook, Google+ and other social networks your preferences. [Less]

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 ... [More] 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 [Less]

Just ran across that, so here it is. Let’s say you want to CIFS mount a windows share — say “//server01/it stuff$”, but your Windows admin put spaces in the path. Replace the spaces with \040. So, in your /etc/fstab, the line would give: ... [More] //server01/it\040stuff$ /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 [Less]

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 ... [More] 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.Of course Windows as a platform won't go away anytime soon. There are hundreds of millions of people running it. But the interesting part is that there are less and less reasons to do so. One of the arguments why people don't use Linux on their desktops always was "I need Windows to run my games". I heard this a thousand times. But as this argument becomes irrelevant, the only argument left is "I have always run Windows".The free Linux desktop is mature. It's not only on par with proprietary desktops on other operating systems, it actually is innovating and moving beyond what other systems do. It covers all the needs of the vast majority of use cases. It has a variety of office suites, it runs several fine web browsers (another area where Windows has lost relevance up to the point of being made fun of), it has excellent tools and applications in almost any area you can think of, it's a primary choice for software developers, it even moves beyond classical desktops to netbooks, tablets, and more.In addition the free desktop has some inherent attributes where Windows just can't compete, first of all the software freedom, but also the development model, and the distribution ecosystem. When you install a Linux desktop you have a fully functional system, you can browse the web, you can send email, you can edit your spreadsheet, even printing works out of the box these days. When you have Windows installed you are at the beginning of an odyssey to add all the bits and pieces you need to have make your system functional and secure.Some might argue, that the desktop itself is becoming irrelevant. For some areas that might be true. People will use their phones or tablets or game consoles for things they have done on a desktop before. But there are so many people using their computers for work and other serious things, where you do want to have a solid desktop, probably not exclusively, but it won't go away for a very long time.You might also argue, that people are using web applications instead of desktop applications. This also might be true in some areas. But the interesting part is that web applications have developed into another kind of desktop applications. The platform is different, it's Javascript and the web client environment, and the apps are heavily connected to web services. But you absolutely need a solid platform on your local system to be able to run the web apps. This platform is more than ever based on Linux (think Android), and there is no reason why this shift shouldn't continue to happen very quickly.KDE is in an interesting position here. We are one of the key players on the free desktop, we have a mature classical desktop, we are expanding to other form factors and into the web, we have a strong community, which can make things happen, nobody would have expected to be possible (or who thought that Matthias announcement from 15 years ago would result in something like we have today).We even have a story on Windows, where we have central applications like Kontact or Okular, which are more than a replacement for the apps, which are only running on Windows. This is more important than ever as a migration strategy. It's very easy to arrive at a point, where all the applications you run on Windows, are actually running natively on Linux as well. Running LibreOffice, Firefox, and Kontact on Windows? Fine, move over to Linux, it will run as well and better, and you will enjoy the freedoms of free software.We have a chance to change the world, let's do it. [Less]

Breakfast with the team, and off to La Cantine - nice venue, quick team / brainstorming meeting while people arrived. Lots of meeting up with people. SC meeting and lunch, SC Q&A, drinks - did a few demos of fun / new pieces. Out ... [More] for dinner with the Lanedo guys. Worked on slides for introductory talk, while Andras slept, then GSOC bits in stead of Matus, and a lightning talk. [Less]

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-partyOctober 14th—a global celebration of freedom and achievement!

Looking at still progressing survey(currently more than 50 responses), I still see, that nobody uses server:database:UNSTABLE repository in openSUSE Build Service. So I have an idea to drop it completely – whole repository – and move packages that ... [More] are only there (like MariaDB 5.3 or MySQL Community Server 5.6) to the server:database repository. This might make it easier for people to find these packages. But it has some downsides as well. Original purpose of UNSTABLE repository was to have it in name that this contains alpha/beta versions and that it may not work or worse. Once I will move it to the server:database repository, only distinction would be summary and package name. And who read the summary… I guess I will go for it and we will see. But if you have some strong arguments against, speak now, otherwise I will proceed in next few days [Less]

Up early, restless wife - hopefully recovered enough to cope with the babes by now. Train to Cambridge, started reading the Innovator's Dillema - nothing like being late to the party: presumably by now it paints a useful anti-pattern. ... [More] St Pancras, Eurostar, random bug fix. Got to Paris, to La Defence, caught up with the lads; eventually on to the Hotel to wait for more of them etc. [Less]

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 ... [More] 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 [Less]