openSUSE Weekly News, Issue 158 is out!

16. Jan 2011 | Sascha Manns | No License

We are pleased to announce our new openSUSE Weekly News.

openSUSE Weekly News

openSUSE Weekly News Team

158 Edition

Published: 2011-01-16

Table of Contents

Announcements Status Updates

Distribution Team Report In the Community

Postings from the Community Welcome new openSUSE Members Events & Meetings openSUSE for your Ears Communication Contributors New/Updated Applications @ openSUSE Security Updates Kernel Review Tips and Tricks

For Desktop Users For Commandline/Script Newbies For Developers and Programmers For System Administrators Planet SUSE openSUSE Forums On the Web

Announcements Reports Reviews and Essays Credits External Copyrights Feedback Translations

Abstract

We are pleased to announce our 158 issue of the openSUSE Weekly News.

You can also read this issue in other formats. Just click here.

Enjoy the reading :-)

Announcements

** Reviewing the Trademark Guidelines **

In 2009, a set of trademark guidelines were created to help define how the community and beyond could use the openSUSE logo and related trademarks in their own products and services. Along with this, Novell granted powers to the openSUSE Board to be the guardians of the openSUSE trademarks. This included ensuring that proper usage followed the guidelines as well as giving the Board the ability to review special use cases.

It also helped those who wanted written permission from the Board authorizing the use of trademarks on their products and services. Formal requests for such permissions were sent to <[permission@novell.com](mailto:permission@novell.com)>, and Novell would forward the request to the Board for review.

As you know, trademark protection is important because it represents the identity of an organization. Trademark usage also provides an important tool for the community that wishes to promote openSUSE. The use of the trademarks makes it easier to share and spread openSUSE works. Of course, regulating the appropriate usage of the trademarks is also a necessary evil to prevent abuse.

As with anything in life, time gives perspective. There has been sufficient time since the implementation of the first guidelines to observe real use cases where the guidelines were either effective or ineffective. And for the Board, this includes identifying a more responsive workflow to addressing requests for authorization of usage, as we, and others, recognize the current process as being perfectible.

The Board, along with others in the community, would like to begin a review of the current state of our trademark guidelines and identify where it can be strengthened and be more effective. To this end, our first step is to open an openFATE Feature request for comments. We invite the community and beyond to review the current guidelines and offer their input on language and past use case experiences.

While we would like comments submitted on openFATE, if you prefer, you can post your comments here or send your thoughts directly to <[board@opensuse.org](mailto:board@opensuse.org)>. A specific timeline for completion of this process has not been determined yet, but it is the intention of the Board to move forward on this topic in order to help the community at large move forward on their own projects.

The openSUSE Board election 2010

The openSUSE Board Election process, started in December 2010, is heading full-speed for the planned announcement of the results on January 26, 2011. Today the voting begins and it’s time to take a closer look at the candidates and make up our minds!

![](/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/vote.jpeg)

In this election we will have 2 seats to be voted upon as the board periods of Pascal Bleser and Henne Vogelsang expire. With the existing company affiliations in the board (Pavol Prusnak- Novell, Bryen Yunashko – none, Rupert Horstkötter – openSLX) the restraint is that at most one of the to be elected members can be affiliated with Novell and at most one with openSLX. According to the election rules, no single organization or company can control more than 40 percent of the electable Board seats. That means, in this election, that if two candidates from either Novell or openSLX score a first and second place, only the one with most votes will have a seat. The other seat will to go to the third candidate in line (provided of course that person is not also affiliated with the same company). This time we have seven candidates, all contributors with different experiences and backgrounds.

You can check their user pages, blogs and the platform page explaining their vision and plans for openSUSE:

Chuck “PUP” Payne, ambassador from the US (blog) Platform
sebas, open-slx user experience expert (blog) Platform
Kostas Koudaras, ambassador from greece (blog) Platform
Peter Linnell aka mrdocs, OSS It consultant Platform
Henne Vogelsang, Booster, currently Board Member, Novell (blog) Platform
Sankar P, Programmer, Hacker, FOSS Enthusiast, Novell (blog) Platform
Nelson Marques, Contributor (blog) Platform

The openSUSE board was set up to lead the overall project. The main tasks for members of the board are:

Act as a central point of contact
Help resolve conflicts
Communicate community interests to Novell
Facilitate communication with all areas of the community
Facilitate decision making processes where needed

The board should provide guidance to and support for existing governance structures, but shouldn’t direct or control development, since community mechanisms exist to accomplish the goals of the project. The board does however document decisions and policies, as well as mediate when issues arise. The board decides on usage of the trademarks of openSUSE, deals with conflicts, works with the Novell openSUSE community manager on funding decisions, works with the community on the organization of events and in general does a lot of ‘small things’ often only visible when they are not handled. The board members are elected according to Board Election rules by the members of the community who’ve been accepted as official ‘openSUSE Members’ and the chair person is appointed by Novell. Current chair is Alan Clark.

Our current Board has had a busy time in the last year, setting up the foundations for a great 2011 for openSUSE. And the new Board members will need to put in some hard work to bring openSUSE to this new level. This includes the work on setting up the Foundation and the new responsibilities waiting for the board once that work has completed. Moreover challenges that might come up related to the Attachmate takeover of Novell have to be handled but also the usual day to day work in the community must continue.

Ballots have just been opened and all openSUSE members whose membership is in good standing are eligible to vote. Please verify if your email address is valid and that you are able to read emails sent to your openSUSE address! The ballots are being done via the web on connect.opensuse.org and have been announced on opensuse-project IRC channel and Mailing Lists. Once a vote has been submitted it may not be changed afterwards. Finally, voting will end on January 26th, 2011 when the ballots close. Shortly thereafter, you can expect the announcement of our two new board members!

More detailed information can be found on the generic Board Election and board election 2010 wiki pages. Have a good vote!

Status Updates

Distribution

** Schedules for the next week (Thu, 20 Jan 2011 14:00:00 GMT) **

openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 6 release

Milestone: First localized build
Milestone: Localization testing starts
Milestone: Only major/critical/blocker bugfixes allowed.

Important Links

Team Report

Art Team

** Nelson Marques: Wallpaper Community Pack #1 **

I’ve received some emails and some positive feedback about one wallpaper I used for a couple of screenshot’s I’ve used in the past, including also information requests about where that very same wallpaper could be found. I’m happy people liked my choice.

The wallpaper is question is the following, which can be found at gnome-look [dot] org: Green Snake HD - by Kmurat @ gnome-art.org

![](//gnome-look.org/CONTENT/content-pre1/70282-1.jpg)

It is clear to me at this stage that Artwork has good demand and it’s a ‘value +’ recognized by many users. Understanding this, I’ve decided two things:

GNOME:Ayatana will have a small Artwork Package by the Community, I’m currently contacting Kmurat to check if he can change the licence on this artwork piece (with over 20.000 downloads on gnome-art) so I can use it for distribution. Currently it’s licensed as CC BY-NC-ND, in which the NC can be probably a problem. Let’s wait a couple of days and see… Either way for those who asked for the source of this wallpaper, click on the image above.
I will create a small package with wallpapers from the community and make it available (for GNOME, KDE, etc) users.

My intentions are to include a set of wallpapers (4/3, 16/9 and 16/10) of around 5/7 wallpapers from several artists and community contributors. The first person I’ve contacted regarding this was Javier Llorente, a openSUSE Artwork Team and KDE contributor, which donated and pointed some artwork. I’ve also sent a small email to María ‘Tatica’ Leandro, a contributor of Fedora Design Team from South America asking if she had something that she could share with us for this community package (I did loved some of her submissions into Fedora Art). Additionally, I’m also going to nag Sirko Kemter (gnokii) for a contribution…

Once this is assembled (already have 5 wallpapers) I’m going to package it, run a sanity check and prepare it for distribution…

UPDATE: María ‘Tatica’ Leandro has answered positive to my email requesting for a donation, Sirko Kemter also answered positive.

Build Service Team

Build Service Statistics. Statistics can found at Buildservice

openFATE Team

Top voted Features

**Features with highest vote, but no one has been assigned to yet. We are looking for volunteers to implement. **

** Run download and install in parallel (Score: 331) **

“Network installation could be improved by running package download and package installation in parallel.”

** Look at plymouth for splash during boot (Score: 163) **

“I wanted to open a fate feature about this when I first heard of plymouth, but reading //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: 130) **

“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).”

** Replacement for Sax2 (Score: 99) **

“We need a replacement for sax2 in 11.3, as a safety measure for when auto configuration fails to detect certain monitors/keyboards/mice. (…)”

** Popularity contest (Score: 81) **

“We need a feedback about packages that are preferred by users and actively used. Debian already has a tool named Popularity contest (popcon) (…)”

** Off-Line one click install (MSI for Linux) (Score: 65) **

“Idea from community member Raúl García. Same concept as MSI packages for Windows but exploiting the One Click Install concept of openSUSE (and therefore inheriting the simplicity, code and security. (…)”

** YaST-Qt: More informative “Installation Summary” (Score: 61) **

“The YaST Qt package manager should provide as much information in the “Installation Summary” view as zypper, esp the overall download size to expect and how much disk space will be freed/used after performing the operation.”

Recently requested features

Features newly requested last week. Please vote and/or comment if you get interested.

** Ensure opensuse displays properly on a 1024x576 netbook screen **

I currently run opensuse 11.2 on a lenovo S10e netbook with a kde desktop.

As it not uncommon in the netbook world the screen resolution is 1024x576 (16:9) rather the the 1024x600 (16:10) which may be more familiar.

The problem is that menus for critical functionality such as NetworkManager are too tall for the display even if resized, so it is physically impossible to “apply” settings as this button is always at the bottom of the dialogue box.

Can effort be made to ensure that opensuse 11.4 does not have menus for critical system components such as NetworkManager which will not display at typical netbook screen resolutions?

** OpenDocument Thumbnail plugin for KDE **

Include open document thumbnail plugin for default package list.

//kenai.com/projects/kde-odf.ail/sources/sources/show

//kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=110864

** Kernel: Update README.SUSE **

README.SUSE lacks documentation for stuff like patches.addon and mkspec as also hinted at

//lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-kernel/2010-07/msg00014.html

** Better support for Garmin GPS **

Garmin peripherals seem not to be automatically recognised under openSuse.

At least for my e-trex, I need to do some manual configuration in order for it to be recognised. For this I follow the procedure indicated on the GPSbabel website.

Can the situation be improved at the distribution level?

** Installer like Fedora **

Maybe you know the Fedora installer. You’ve got four options:

Use all Disk space
Update the existent Linux system
Use free disk place
Do your own partition table

This would be a nice and easy to use feature for openSUSE too. Maybe as a additional installation-option, that you can choose. By the way, Fedora-users have it easy to change to openSUSE.

What do you think?

** Scanner buttons configuration **

Please, add the ability to configure the scanner buttons via Yast. Configure=assign an action, like one-button scan. Currently, this can be done with scanbuttond daemon, but its configuration is far from straightforward, let alone convenient.

Ref: //en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Scanner_buttons_and_one-touch_scanning

** A radio button “stay login in” **

A radio button “stay login in” in authorization form (like this //img.flashtux.org/img132db222350dx1203e659.png ) in openSUSE sites.

** UPEK support in Yast Fingerprint **

Some Lenovo laptops use the UPEK driver for fingerprint. Using the latest version of fingerprint-gui (which also ships the UPEK drivers) gives me a perfect functionality of my device. However, Yast does still not recognize my device. Could it be easily implemented?

Maybe provide packages for fingerprint-gui, too, and Fedora’s system-config-authentication:

//diegobz.net/2009/08/29/fingerprint-authentication-using-kde-on-fedora-11/

Feature Statistics

Statistics for openSUSE 11.4 in openFATE

Translation Team

Daily updated translation statistics are available on the openSUSE Localization Portal.
Trunk Top-List – Localization Guide

In the Community

Postings from the Community

**Greek openSUSE Ambassadors: Greek openSUSE community report for 2010 **

![](//2.bp.blogspot.com/_EX6cn8rqip4/TN-Wm8DijDI/AAAAAAAAAbw/vfdjWxS-_Qo/s320/opensuse_hellas.png)

This is the annual report of the Greek openSUSE community. As you all might know this is the first report since we were formed as a community this year.

![](//3.bp.blogspot.com/_gVkPBOXagGg/TQjgvRgbs5I/AAAAAAAACCI/vbVpPv5Sg0M/s320/69343_1658265182347_1408656662_1777955_1854916_n.jpg)

Our first event of the year was the appearance at 3rd FOSSCOMM at 24th and 25th of April. Greek Ambassador, George Koutsikos, participated with a booth. He with a team of people, were informing participants about openSUSE Project. He was giving away 11.2 DVD stickers and brochures. (…)

Welcome new openSUSE Members

** Frederic Crozat (fcrozat) **

Very active in the openSUSE GNOME Team and Bugzilla.

Helen South (helen-au)

Helen works inside Marketing and the Editor Team of news.opensuse.org.

Matt Hayes (dominian)

Active in Bugzilla, Wiki and Mailinglists.

Angelos Tzotsos (tsotsos)

Active inside the Greek Community and Marketing.

Kai-Uwe Behrmann (bekun)

Kai-Uwe serves as Speaker, Boothman and Developer for the openSUSE Project.

Events & Meetings

Past

Upcoming

You can find more informations on other events at: openSUSE News/Events. - Local Events

openSUSE for your Ears

The openSUSE Weekly News are available as livestream or podcast in German. You can hear it or download it on Radiotux.

Communication

Contributors

The User Directory

New/Updated Applications @ openSUSE

Packman: vlc 1.1.5-5.pm

“VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.”

Packman: flexdock 0.5.1-0.pm

FlexDock is a Java docking framework for use in cross-platform Swing applications. It offers features you’d expect in any desktop docking framework such as: (…)

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 11.1 has reached end of Novell support - 11.1 Evergreen goes on

With the release of an opensc security fix on Thursday 13th January Novell has released the last update for openSUSE 11.1.

openSUSE 11.1 is now officially discontinued and out of support by Novell.

However, a community effort has been started to continue 11.1 maintenance under the codename of “Evergreen”.

The overview page of this project, how to activate and use it, and other details, is on: //en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Evergreen

The Evergreen project is lead by openSUSE community member Wolfgang Rosenauer.

Here are some statistics:

openSUSE 11.1 was released on December 18th 2008, making it 2 years and 1 month of security and bugfix support.

Some statistics on the released patches (compared to 11.0) can shown there.

Kernel Review

** h-online/Thorsten Leemhuis: Kernel Log - Wonder patch merged, improved AMD and Intel graphic support **

**For Linux 2.6.38, the kernel developers have integrated the much-discussed patch which considerably improves the response time of Linux desktops in certain situations. The AMD developers have extended their open source graphics drivers to support various Radeon HD 6000 graphics chips. A discussion was sparked by the tricky situation surrounding the graphics drivers for Intel’s new processors. **

After the release of Linux 2.6.37 on Wednesday morning, the first patches for kernel version 2.6.38 appeared in the Linux main development branch late on Thursday night. Among Torvalds’ first 2,769 commits were the almost 600 patches for the network subsystem that had been submitted by its maintainer, David Miller. As expected, these patches have added the rtl8192ce driver for Realtek’s RTL8192CE and RTL8188CE 802.11n Wi-Fi chips to the kernel.

The first changes made for Linux 2.6.38 also include the patch that considerably improves the interactivity of desktop applications in situations where the CPU is fully utilised. This patch became known through such articles as “The ~200 Line Linux Kernel Patch That Does Wonders” on the Phoronix web site; details of the patch’s functionality as well as a description of an alternative, more flexible, approach can be found in a previous Kernel Log. The maintainer of the process scheduler, Ingo Molnar, explicitly pointed out this function in his Git-Pull request, calling it “one of the biggest and most visible interactivity improvements achieved by the Linux scheduler”. (…) License: 4

Tips and Tricks

For Desktop Users

** FreeSoftwareMagazine/Terry Hancock: Creating a moving story-reel shot with Inkscape and Blender **

There’s a reason they’re called “movies.” They’re supposed to move. Your eyes are keyed to follow motion, and the constant revelation of new information in a moving shot holds your interest longer. Thus, while four seconds might be about the maximum comfortable length for a static shot, shots in which the camera or subject are moving extensively can often last more than a minute without feeling slow at all. Storyboards made entirely from static images make it hard to judge active shots. It’s useful, therefore, to be able to insert some movement at the storyboard phase by panning and zooming a drawing. Here I’m going to demonstrate such an animated storyboard using Inkscape and Blender. (…)

Sankar P: Download all youtube videos of a user

Recently I got addicted to watching Nigella Lawson Cooking videos on youtube. As much as I like youtube, I prefer to watch videos offline as well. One user has uploaded a lot of those videos and I wanted to download all the videos by that user.

I tried a few firefox plugins, youtube-dl python script, etc. for doing this but none seemed to be fit for the job. Good old Shell-script came for rescue. I saved the user’s youtube homepage in .html, grepped through the file for links, ran uniq and then fed them all to youtube-dl and bulk-downloaded all the videos. If you want parallel downloads, you can easily do that also by tweaking the script.

The commands are:

grep -E '//www.youtube.com/watch\?v=[[:alnum:]-]{11}' dump.html -o | uniq > vdos
for i in `cat vdos`; do youtube-dl -t $i; done; rm vdos;

HTH someone.

If you know of a better solution (some firefox/chrome addon, Greasmonkey, etc.) which will work in Linux, please let me know.

For Commandline/Script Newbies

** BashShell.net: Using Pipes in the Bash Shell **

The usage of pipes with the shell is easy and powerful. This lab will help you understand the use of pipes. (…)

For Developers and Programmers

** nixCraft/Vivek Gite: Linux Commands For Shared Library Management & Debugging Problem **

If you are a developer, you will re-use code provided by others. Usually /lib, /lib64, /usr/local/lib, and other directories stores various shared libraries. You can write your own program using these shared libraries. As a sys admin you need to manage and install these shared libraries. Use the following commands for shared libraries management, security, and debugging problems. (…)

For System Administrators

** Linux.com/Joe Brockmeier: Linux Kernel Module Management 101 **

The Linux kernel allows drivers and features to be compiled as modules rather than as part of the kernel itself. This means that users can often change features in the kernel or add drivers without recompiling, and that the Linux kernel doesn’t have to carry a lot of unnecessary baggage. Want to learn how to manage your modules? It’s easy to do, just keep reading.

In this tutorial, we’ll walk through the steps of seeing what’s already loaded in the running kernel, and adding and removing modules from the kernel. (…) License: 1

** Chuck Payne: System Administrator 101 — A Basic Bash Loop — Part 1 “for” **

Being a System Administrator you will find that you need to do a lot of repetitive tasks. Moving files, grepping files, and creating users. You could spend all your time type the same commands over and over, but why?

You can save a lot of time by looping commands. There are three ways you can do that, by using one of the following; for, while or until. We will first focus on for, it my favorite of the three.

The thing to remember with a ‘for loop’ is the following syntax:

for variable in x y z ; do command $variable ; done

Variable is what ever you want to call it. Most people use i as a variable, but again it can be anything you want. The x y x is the information that you want to pass to the command. The last thing to remember with a loop is when it passed everything to the command that if finish, that is why you need the done.

Here is an example of a simple count down that you can do with for a ‘for loop’.

for i in 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ; do echo $i ; done

As you can see, we have set our variable to be i, in that variable we are going to pass 10 to 1 to the command echo. By the way, you can do this another way if you are using Bash 4.0, by changing the number to {10…1} , this because of inbuilt support for setting up a step value use {START..END..INCREMENT} .

Here is another example, we are going fun and make the computer count out load to 100 by 5′s…

for x in {5..100..5} ; do echo  | festival --tts ; done

In this loop we set our variable to x, and we told it to start with 5 go to 100 by increments of 5. We then passed that on to echo that is piped into festival to read it out load, once it had reach 100, it stops.

Here are some real world examples of how System Administrator use a ‘for loop’. Let say you have a text file that you keep a list of Linux servers that you take care and you need to push a rpm or a file to them.

 linux01 192.168.1.1
 linux05 192.168.1.5
 linux10 192.168.1.10
 linux20 192.168.1.20

With a ‘for loop’ it is very simple and fast. We are going to cat the file so that we know what server to access. We are also going to use awk so that we get the ip from the second coloumn. To get the information we will need to pipe ‘ | “ the loop into the awk command to get it, because we are run commands to get the information for the loop we will need to use ` ` in order to run the statement.

for f in `cat linux_server | awk '{ print $2}'` ; do scp somefile user@$f:/dir ; done

This loop tell that our variable f is going to pass the four ip so that we can scp the file to those boxes.

Note

If you are not sure about what the output going to look like, it always best to use the following to see what the output going to be….

echo $f

Now lets say that file you pushed to the server is rpm that you need to update your server. You can do ‘for loop’, using ssh and pass the command to the boxes to update that rpm

for r in `cat linux_server | awk '{ print $2 }` ; do ssh user@$r rpm -Uvh /dir/myfile ; 

done

To ensure that the file was updated, you can do another ‘for loop’ check the rpm database to see if there by doing rpm -qa and pipe into a grep with the file name.

for r in `cat linux_server | awk '{ print $2 }` ; do ssh user@$r rpm -qa | grep myfile ; 

done

By the way you can use all of these commands together in one script to save even more time.

#!/bin/bash
 servers=”linux_server”
 files=”files_to_push”
 
# Here we are going push files 
for f in `cat $servers | awk '{ print $2}'` ; do scp $files user@$f:/dir ; done
# Here we are going to install the files 
for r in `cat $servers | awk '{ print $2 }` ; do ssh user@$r rpm -Uvh /dir/$files ; done
# Here we are going to check if it got installed 
for x in `cat $servers | awk '{ print $2 }` ; do ssh user@ rpm-qa | grep $files ; done
exit 0

As great System Administrator, finding the simplest ways to do recurring tasks frees up your time for tackling more complex problems . A ‘for loop’ is a great way to help. Next time I will go over while. License: 3

** Nelson Marques: openSUSE Factory: ATI FireGL 10.12 **

I’ve had some problems in the past with openSUSE Factory and ATI support… even the normal radeon driver wasn’t worked properly. After the last updates, the radeon driver started working properly and I’ve decided to install the ATI FireGL driver which is actually something I need to continue testing and debug Unity implementation on openSUSE.

IT WORKS!

Here’s what you need (64 bit users):

Install the required dependencies to compile the kernel module (currently on 2.6.37-rc5-12-desktop). 64bit users will require the following:

zypper in kernel-source compat-32bit qt3-32bit libstdc++ libgcc xorg-x11-libs-32bit \

xorg-x11-devel-32bit Mesa-devel-32bit \

fontconfig-32bit expat-32bit freetype2-32bit zlib-32bit gcc make
Download ATI FireGL driver (version 10.12) from ATI website (//ati.amd.com).
Extract the files using the command:

sh ati-driver-installer-10-12-x86.x86_64.run –extract

This will create a small folder which starts with fglrx. Change directory into that folder…

Download the following patches:
Apply the patches (patch -p1 < file.patch).
Run the following command:

sh ati-installer.sh 8.801 –install
Follow the installer instructions. Finally check /usr/share/ati/fglrx-install.log to check if everything is cool…
Restart using your favorite method… mine is ‘shutdown now -frn’.

Enjoy FireGL on openSUSE Factory!

** HowtoForge/Falko Timme: Installing Cherokee With PHP5 And MySQL Support On OpenSUSE 11.3 **

Cherokee is a very fast, flexible and easy to configure Web Server. It supports the widespread technologies nowadays: FastCGI, SCGI, PHP, CGI, TLS and SSL encrypted connections, virtual hosts, authentication, on the fly encoding, load balancing, Apache compatible log files, and much more. This tutorial shows how you can install Cherokee on an OpenSUSE 11.3 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support. (…)

Planet SUSE

** OMG! SUSE!-Team: Zombie Lizards! Evergreen brings 11.1 back from the dead **

![](//cdn.omgsuse.com/omg/images/evergreen.jpg)

In mid-October we wrote about openSUSE 11.1 being put out to pasture and the openSUSE team’s decision to rapidly end-of-life the release. In the world of open source, what does “end of life” actually mean for users? As resident security expert Marcus Meissner stated in the original announcement:

“SUSE Security announces that the SUSE Security Team will stop releasing updates for openSUSE 11.1 soon. Having provided security-relevant fixes for the last two years, we will stop releasing updates after December 31st 2010.”

Before the deadline of December 31st came, there was already talk about extending support for openSUSE 11.1 by the openSUSE community. Shortly after the new year, openSUSE project Evergreen was born, a community-powered attempt at extending long-term support for 11.1.

Currently Evergreen is still very much an experiment but community member Wolfgang Rosenauer, who originally proposed the project, is actively working with a few other contributors to get all the infrastructural and technical issues worked out so the Evergreen project can start pushing out updates. If you’re interested in joining the project, Wolfgang has created a mailing list you can subscribe to in order to get started.

(…)

Tejas Guruswamy: Winter updates

Phew. long time no news! It’s been a busy start of winter … on that topic a happy new year to everyone! Welcome if you’re reading this for the first time on PlanetSUSE, have a look at my intro if you’re curious who I am. A few updates on what I’ve been working on this month at least.

libopensync-plugin-akonadi 0.22.1 released Released an update to try and make it work better with the Google Akonadi resource (thanks ares).

Package updates on the OBS:

Packaged krazy2, the KDE code quality checker, straight from git in KDE:Unstable:Playground
Updated get_iplayer, the BBC iPlayer download tool, in home:MasterPatricko. It now works!
Packaged powertop2 beta, the power consumption monitor, in home:MasterPatricko; interesting improvements compared to powertop. Needs kernel 2.6.37 (i.e. Factory or Kernel:HEAD) to show off its full power, but still works in 11.3.
Update liquidwar6, the particle simulation game, to 0.0.9beta in games
Update maxima, the Computer Algebra system, in science to 5.23.0
Update unshield, the .CAB file extractor from the SynCE project, in Archiving (and eventually Factory) to 0.6
Fix build of denyhosts, the SSH brute-force protection tool, on x86_64
Update redshift, the auto screen-brightness adjuster in Factory:Contrib to 0.6
Created a package vncserver-autostart in home:MasterPatricko which adds an init script to start a tightvnc vncserver on bootup. Complete with sysconfig-style configuration. Completely insecure of course but perfect for a local network.

Started using my hard-earned openSUSE member benefits; tejas.guruswamy AT and masterpatricko AT opensuse.org are operational; got the blog syndicated on planet.opensuse.org.

Plus, as always, I have a couple of new project ideas I’d like to get started on … more on that soon. Comments welcome as always.

Sascha Manns: openSUSE Weekly News available for EBook Reader

Some years, the openSUSE Weekly News, only was edited and published in the Wiki.

Now, after some time the team is looking forward to break new ground. The new ground are new formats. editing for . Also, translations are well done. The disadvantage, however, that an interested reader must surf again and again to a particular website, and these must be read online.

To extend our offer, we have already started in the middle of last year to convert the wikicode in HTML code, and published it in full on openSUSE’s News platform news.opensuse.org. This is now offered readers the opportunity to subscribe to the RSS feed, and thus any time if the reader wishes it to be available. (…)

openSUSE Forums

New Forum Home Page layout

  This has kept the Forums Team busy for a bit. With the new forums template effective, we've looked for further improvement of the accessibility of the forums. We hope help, info and the community have come a couple of clicks closer for our members and guests. Another aspect is the improved visibility of the non-english forums. This thread gets a lot of reponse. Don't forget to check the new home page layout.

Proper way to obtain source code packages

  We use an open source OS, open source programs, now what if we actually want to take a look at the source of a program to see, like in this thread, where it takes it's icons from. The replies point to the ins and outs of this.

Permissions: make files from CD writable when copying to hard disk

  When files, like photos get copied from a CD they keep their read-only permissions. This member supports his parents in using linux, he knows how to change the permissions himself, but he does not want his parents to have to do that. Yet they would need write permissions to their photos to do some basic photo editing, like rotation and removing red eyes. Read how it can be done.

This week’s subforum: Forums Feedback

  This is our place where members give feed back on the forums themselves, i.e. the layout, accessibility, translation issues, suggested features and improvements. There are no stats available on this, but a lot of the things we see today were born in these regions.

On the Web

Announcements

** HTML Video Codec Support in Chrome **

The web’s open and community-driven development model is a key factor in its rapid evolution and ubiquitous adoption. The WebM Project was launched last year to bring an open, world-class video codec to the web. Since the launch, we’ve seen first-hand the benefits of an open development model: (…)

Reports

** OSTatic/Lisa Hoover: Black Duck Software Buys Olliance Consulting Group **

In its continued march across the open source industry landscape, Black Duck Software, a Boston-based company which services managed and secure implementations of open source software, announced today the purchase of Olliance Group, an open source enterprise consulting firm. After acquiring open source search engine Koders in 2008, Black Duck got quiet for a while then slurped up three more companies in the last three months – Oholoh, SpikeSource, and now Olliance. We caught up wtih Peter Vescuso, Executive Vice President of Black Duck Software to find out more about this acquisition and what the future holds for the company.

According to Vescuso, the decision to purchase Olliance was a natural evolution in response to the changing needs of Black Ducks’ customer base. “Over the last few years as our business has grown we’ve encountered more and more customers that not only needed a software platform to manage their use of open source components, but wanted help with business strategy around their use of open source, policy development, etc. Last year we formalized a partnership with Olliance to address this need which has been successful beyond our expectations. So much so that we realized for Black Duck to achieve its vision of being the company that organizations trust for all their FOSS-enablement needs, we needed to acquire Olliance, the leading consultancy in this area”, says Vescuso.

Although Black Duck already offers some consulting services to clients, they are mainly focused on pre- and post-deployment support. Olliance’s consulting services, on the other hand, help businesses map out how open source fits into a their overall business strategy “Black Duck’s services have been mostly focused on process integration and implementation, roll out, with some services for policy development”, says Vescuso. “Olliance’s strength and deep knowledge developed over hundreds of customer engagements is in business strategy, policy and process, which is highly complementary to what we were offering, hence the motivation to acquire Olliance”. (…) License: 5

** LinuxDevices.com/Jonathan Angel: All-in-one POS device runs SUSE Linux **

NCR announced two all-in-one POS (point of sale) systems that run Novell’s SUSE Linux for Point of Service. The RealPOS 25 and RealPOS 50 include integral touchscreen displays and can be placed on a counter, pole, bracket, or wall. (…)

Reviews and Essays

** Youtube– “Be Free with KDE” advertisement **

Youtube: “Created as part of the Google Code In program”

** InfoWorld’s Linux IQ test: Round 2 **

So you live and breathe Linux, eh? You’ve aced Linux IQ Test: Round 1 and our Open Source IQ Test to boot. The free OS runs on your phone, your netbook, your desktop, and even your alarm clock. You named your dog Linus and you have Tux wallpaper. You take such great pride in your uptimes that you brag about them at the lunch table. Andrew Morton signed your underwear. You’re in the game. But how much do you really know about the most pervasive open source project on the planet? Take Round 2 of our Linux IQ test and find out. License: 6

** EweekEurope/Tom Jowitt: Novell: Community Wants OpenSUSE Foundation **

Open source commentators were suspicious when news emerged that openSUSE will move to an independent foundation, during the acquisition of Novell, which currently supports openSUSE development.

But the move is in line with the wishes of the openSUSE community, will be properly funded, and does not represent any fading of Novell’s interest in the Linux version – or any lack of involvement by Novell’s prospective owner, Attachmate.

That is the view of Jos Poortvliet, Jos Poortvliet, openSUSE Community Manager at Novell, who contacted us to give some background to the move, which he says dates back well before the Attachmate deal was announced. (…) License: 2

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

External Copyrights

This are the Licenses from our Sources:

Trademarks:

SUSE ®, openSUSE ®, the openSUSE ® Logo and Novell ® are registered Trademarks of Novell, Inc.

Linux ® is a registered Trademark of Linus Torvalds

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Translations

openSUSE Weekly News is translated into many languages. Issue 158 is available in: