openSUSE Weekly News, Issue 173 is out!

We are pleased to announce our new openSUSE Weekly News 173.

openSUSE Weekly News

### openSUSE Weekly News Team

173 Edition

Legal Notice

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Published: 2011-04-30

Table of Contents

Announcements Google Summer of Code Status Updates

Distribution Team Reports In the Community

Postings from the Community Events & Meetings openSUSE for your Ears From Ambassadors Communication Contributors 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 Call for participation Reports Reviews and Essays Feedback Credits Acknowledgements Copyrights

List of our Licenses Trademarks Translations

We are pleased to announce our 173rd issue of the openSUSE Weekly News.

You can also read this issue in other formats here.

Enjoy reading :-)

Announcements▼

“

openSUSE happy to welcome 16 GSOC students!

We’ve got excellent news! We’ve received many excellent submissions for our Google Summer of Code application and Google has given us 16 slots. This means that 16 eager students have been selected and will start working with their mentors on an awesome openSUSE project!

According to the GSOC timeline the students will now start with the Community Bonding period in which they have time to set up their development stuff, get acquainted with their mentors and get to know the openSUSE community. This means we’ll see those students on our communication channels, be it IRC, forums or mailing lists! Give them a warm welcome!

In a little over three weeks, the coding will start. I’m sure you’re all excited to find out what projects these students will be working on! Well, we were too, so we’ve compiled a nice list of the accepted proposals and asked a few students a quick quote on IRC! (…)

License: GFDL 1.2

”

“

openSUSE 11.4 DVDs for Events

Following the huge success for filling requests of openSUSE 11.3 media in February, we have produced openSUSE 11.4 DVDs to distribute at events, Linux user groups, universities etc.

The PromoDVDs

These “PromoDVDs” are meant to promote openSUSE and help users get a quick taste of what we have to offer. A PromoDVD is different from the usual openSUSE DVD’s you can download from our download portal. They contain a reduced set of packages for installation to make room for a Live GNOME and Live KDE image. And the DVD’s are double-sided with both 32 and 64 bit on one disc!

In some countries, where network connections are an issue, users can bring these DVD’s from an event home for installation. In other places, the Live images and added convenience giving people a chance to test drive and see right away why openSUSE is a great distro for them!

License: GFDL 1.2

”

“

Upcomming power outage Saturday, 2011-04-30

We will have a service outage this Saturday (30 April) due to work on power supply in one of our server rooms. As result, the infrastructure in front of the following services will not be reachable on that day:

• build.opensuse.org

• api.opensuse.org

• software.opensuse.org

• stage.opensuse.org

• features.opensuse.org

• connect.opensuse.org

• hermes.opensuse.org

• users.opensuse.org

• board.opensuse.org

• conference.opensuse.org

The content on download.opensuse.org will come from a fall back system and will not get updated during Saturday evening.

License: GFDL 1.2

”

“

openSUSE Coming to LFNW

Following in the growing list of appearances we’re making worldwide, openSUSE will land in Bellingham, Washington for the LinuxFest Northwest conference ( LFNW ) on Saturday, April 30 and Sunday, May 1 at the Bellingham Technical College. We’re excited to be joining in the festivities there, along with an exxpected attendance of over 1,000 visitors, running a booth and 3 presentations, doing our best to help make the event interesting and successful for everyone. Doing what we do best, you’ll find the same great booth you’ve come to expect at other events. There, you’ll be able to pick up a DVD of openSUSE 11.4, just released last month amid great reviews. You’ll also be able to show your support for openSUSE and LFNW at the same time by buying an openSUSE T-shirt for just $5. Every dollar we make will go directly to supporting the great work of the LFNW crew. These FOSS events are very important to the community and openSUSE wants to do its part to promote that. For those of you that prefer a game of chance, be sure to sign up for the “World-Famous” LFNW raffle; we’ve donated a few bigger-ticket items there as well, and again, all funds support LFNW.

”

Google Summer of Code▲▼

“

Kai-Uwe Behrmann: Google Summer of Code 2011 Students

Several students proposed this year to specific colour management themes. Unfortunately not all could be accepted for the stipends, even though the quality of the proposals where generally high for the themes and response was very lifely. The mentors made their decision and picked the following three proposals and students.

Yiannis Belias will continue the last years project: “API stabilization for Oyranos Colour Management System II” for OpenICC We have seen good progress and quite usable code during the last year period. Still there is lots to do to integrate and finish the code transformation. (…)

”

“

Jos Poortvliet: GSoC - DOs and DON’Ts

Soon we’ll all hear the news on the students accepted to Google Summer of Code. I’m excited and I’m sure so are a lot of students!

Once the news is in, it is time to start getting to know your mentor, getting your development environment up and starting to code. To help students, mentors and admins, let me echo a post by Lydia Pintscher to Planet openSUSE pointing to three blogs about DOs and DON’Ts she wrote with two other experienced GSoC mentors: (…)

”

Status Updates▲▼

Distribution

Important Links

• Detailed Bugzilla Report

• Submitting Bug Reports

• Bug Reporting FAQ

Team Reports

Build Service Team

Build Service Statistics. Statistics can found at Buildservice

KDE Team

“

      [Aaron Seigo: First KDE Plasma Active app: Calligra office suite](//vizzzion.org/blog/2011/04/plasma-active-a-desirable-user-experience-encompassing-the-device-spectrum/)

(Note: This post is about Plasma Active, a community collaboration to bring KDE software to consumer devices. To learn more about Plasma Active, read this blog post.)

Today, Plasma Active is proud to announce our first Active App, or rather our first Active App suite. While interacting with what are generally referred to as “office documents” isn’t what we may think of as “sexy” it’s a very important set of functionality.

For Plasma Active, we’ve joined forces with Calligra which is a suite of office applications which uses the KDE Platform and has an active mobile and consumer electronics effort.

Calligra Active is currently in alpha, but this refers primarily to the touch interface. The file format compatibility with Open Document Format and Microsoft’s Office Open XML is some of the best to be found in a mobile form factor. The Calligra team is currently working on a transition of the interface to QtQuick, but Plasma Active is already including the current mobile-targeted interface in the operating system images. (…)

”

openFATE Team

Top voted Features

“

        [decouple download and installation (Score: 347)](https://features.opensuse.org/120340)

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

”

“

        [Look at plymouth for splash during boot (Score: 182)](https://features.opensuse.org/305493)

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?

”

“

        [Replacement for Sax2 (Score: 127)](https://features.opensuse.org/308357)

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

”

“

        [Update to GRUB v2 (Score: 116)](https://features.opensuse.org/308497)

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: 95)](https://features.opensuse.org/305877)

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.

“

        [automated bugreporting - whole system](https://features.opensuse.org/312275)

It is a nasty jop to report bugs to the openSUSE bugzilla by hand.

A automated bugreporting for the whole openSUSE OS like in KDE (drkonqi) would be great. It would save time for the user, improve the frequency of bugreports for the project(I guess many bugs don´t find the way to bugzilla), and a coupling to a stacktrace or logfiles would improve the quality of the bugreports in the openSUSE bugzilla.

Good for the user, good for the quality of openSUSE, not so good for a developer(->many work:)

”

“

        [Add a 'Skip all' option to YaST's install error dialog....](https://features.opensuse.org/312276)

As someone whom regularly uses the KDE OBS’ for latest builds, I normally run into the issue that packages are updated faster than when I apply the changes. This causes YaST to constantly pop-up that a given package could not be applied, and then a second pop-up for the action to take.

First, can we please cut this down to ONE pop-up, not two? Second, for the actions, can we please have an option to ‘skip all missing packages’ or the like? Obviously, this would have to warn the user that their system may be left in an inconsistent state, but I’d rather that than chasing pop-ups.

”

“

        [Include GNOME Tweak Tool](https://features.opensuse.org/312277)

Recently I have tried GNOME 3. There are several settings that you once could customize in GNOME 2 that you can’t do in GNOME 3. There is a package called gnome-tweak-tool, that lets you customize things like the Theme again. This should be included on the distribution DVD (and perhaps Live CD too) for openSUSE 12.1.

”

“

        [Add gnome-achievements](https://features.opensuse.org/312280)

Hamster can use trophies from https://github.com/tbaugis/gnome-achievements so we probably want to take a look at packaging this.

”

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▲▼

Postings from the Community

“

Bryen Yunashko: What’s in a name? (Or… What should we call the openSUSE Conference?)

Over the past few weeks there’s been actually two threadson the openSUSE Project mailing list discussing what we should call the upcoming openSUSE Conference. One proposal was to continue with last year’s theme calling it “Collaboration Across Borders II” and another calling it “rwxrwxrwx”. The other day, the program planning committee (including myself) took on the task of attempting to decide which one works best. Unfortunately, even then, we still didn’t come to an easy agreement on which name to choose.

Both have their unique pros and cons. And ultimately whichever one we choose will impact how we market the conference to the world. In my opinion, both are more similar in intent than different, but I should probably put in a disclaimer now by mentioning that personally, I’m a fan of the rwxrwxrwx (or rwx3 as it’s possible variation.) And yet, both will appeal to different sensibilities and goals of the conference as a whole. (…)

”

“

Kostas Koudaras: Why you should not be afraid to mingle with the openSUSE Project

I see many people coming to the openSUSE project but only a few of them (the new people) actually participate in the mailing list talks and on IRC channels talks. I kept asking myself why? Why is this happening? Is there something wrong or what? Recently I spotted a new openSUSE ambassador that was too ‘tight’ when we were talking about community matters and I took the opportunity to open a conversation with him about all of the above and what I got from that is that people are often don’t say their opinion because they fear of saying something wrong, also they fear on saying their different opinion when they disagree with an older community member and other similar situations. (…)

”

Events & Meetings

Upcoming

• May 5, 2011 : FOSS User (Sri Lanka)

• May 5-8, 2011 : Linuxwochen Vienna (Austria)

• May 7-8, 2011 : FOSSCOMM 2011 Patras (Greece)

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 podcast in German. You can hear it or download it on //saigkill.homelinux.net/podcasts.

From Ambassadors

“

Bruno Friedmann: Fosscomm 2011 in Patras – Greece

The event will take place in Patras this year. For those of you who don’t know, fosscomm is one of the major foss event in Greece. I’ll go there and will make a presentation : Amazing openSUSE : we, you, together a promizing future! I hope to see all of you there! Come and meet the growing openSUSE Greek community, and most of the Greek ambassadors. Follow them on Twitter. The official hashtag of FOSSCOMM 2011 is: #fosscomm2011 Official Patras city website PS: The websites is also available in english :-) (…)

”

Communication

• The Mailinglists

• The openSUSE Forums

Contributors

• The User Directory

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.

“

SUSE Security Announcement: Linux kernel (SUSE-SA:2011:019)

”

“

SUSE Security Announcement: Linux kernel (SUSE-SA:2011:020)

”

“

SUSE Security Announcement: Linux kernel (SUSE-SA:2011:021)

”

Kernel Review▲▼

“

  [h-online/Thorsten Leemhuis: Kernel Log: Coming in 2.6.39 (Part 2) – Storage and file
    systems](//www.h-online.com/open/features/Kernel-Log-Coming-in-2-6-39-Part-2-Storage-and-file-systems-1232317.html)

Various internal changes to the block layer that were specifically mentioned by Linus Torvalds are designed to enhance performance and scalability. The Ext4 file system is also said to offer improvements in this respect. Still classified as experimental, Btrfs now offers Batched Discard functionality, and LIO (Linux-Iscsi.org) includes a loop-back function.

At the end of last week, Andi Kleen published a series of patches that fixes a performance problem between the Virtual File System (VFS) and the security infrastructure; this was an unwanted side effect from the optimisation to the VFS that was merged in Linux 2.6.38. Torvalds showed great interest in them and merged one into the main development tree; a second fix that is based on the three patches from Kleen followed on Monday and fixes the problem in the SELinux codebase. It’s still undecided if these or similar patches will make it into a stable kernel 2.6.38, as Torvalds mentioned at one point that he was considering.

Torvalds did not yet produce a fifth release candidate for Linux 2.6.39 – but it should emerge in the next few days, as the RC4 is already more than one week old. (…)

”

“

  [Linus Torvalds: Linux 2.6.39-rc5](https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/4/27/8)

Another week, another keyboard destroyed by spilling coffee on it.. C’est la vie.

We have slightly fewer commits than in -rc4, which is good. At the same time, I have to berate some people for merging some dubious regression fixes. Sadly, the “people” I have to berate is me, because -rc5 contains what technically is a regression, but it’s a performance thing, and it’s a bit scary. It’s the patches from Andi (with some editing by Eric) to make it possible to do the whole RCU pathname walk even if you have SElinux enabled.

I’ve been alternately kicking myself for merging it, and just being so pleased with the rcu pathname walk now extending outside of the no-security confines … I dunno. The patches are all pretty simple (there’s also a few dentry cleanup patches that were the result of me looking at profiles and generated code), and it really is a rather important performance thing, but at the same time I would shout at others for trying to merge it to me this late. So I’ll consider myself properly chastised.

Other than that? We should have all the fallout from the block layer plugging changes fixed now, and Tejun fixed the infinite CD-ROM disk-change notification thing. So that’s hopefully all good and done.

And then there are all the usual driver noise (including some hwmon documentation), some ecryptfs and gfs2 updates and just various small random fixups. The diffstat actually looks pretty good, most of it is just one-liners and stuff like a few new device ID’s etc.

Go forth and test,

Linus

”

“

Rares Aioanei: kernel weekly news – 30.04.2011

This weeks Issue of Rares Aoianei’s Kernel Weekly News.

”

Tips and Tricks▲▼

For Desktop Users

“

    [Scribbles and Snaps: Generate HTML Photo Galleries with digiKam](//scribblesandsnaps.wordpress.com/2011/04/26/generate-html-photo-galleries-with-digikam/)

There are so many clever ways to share photos on the Web that the idea of creating a static HTML photo gallery may sound positively obsolete. But in certain situations, the ability to turn a bunch of photos into an HTML gallery can come in rather handy. For starters, serving a bunch of static HTML pages is less complicated than setting up a dedicated photo sharing solution, which can be useful if you want to host a photo gallery on your own server. An HTML gallery usually requires less resources, too, so you can host it on modest hardware. Also, you can store an HTML gallery on a USB stick and use it as your photo portfolio you can display even when offline. (…)

”

“

    [LinuxJournal/Bruce Byfield: Using Styles in Scribus](//www.linuxjournal.com/content/using-styles-scribus)

If you don’t include master pages (which are really styles under another name), then Scribus supports three types of hierarchial styles: lines, character, and paragraph. As in any other self-respecting word processor or layout application, these styles allow you to apply detailed sets of formatting options quickly, without having to change each instance of a formatting option individually. However, styles are implemented idiosyncratically in Scribus, so they can take time to learn, even if you are familiar with the basic concept from other applications.

One of the conceptual problems you may have is that styles are defined and applied in different places in the editing window. To define and manage styles, you open the Style Manager, by selecting Edit -> Styles or pressing the F3 key. However, to apply styles, you either select Properties from the right-click menu of a selected object or press the F2 key. For paragraph styles, you also have the option of selecting Edit Text from the right-click menu of a selected text frame, or selecting Ctrl+T to open the Story Editor.

”

“

    [Unixmen/ayesha ahmed: 31 Great Tutorials for Inkscape! ](//www.unixmen.com/linux-tutorials/1659-31-best-tutorials-of-inkscape)

Inkscape is an open source vector graphics editor. Inkscape is cross-platform and runs on Unix based OS, Windows and Mac (typically under X11). In this post we have inkscape_logoattempted to gather some best tutorials around the web, categorizing them into various groups, organized from novice users to advance level. If you have not installed inkscape then you can follow the following tutorial. (…)

”

For Commandline/Script Newbies

“

    [Linuxaria: Check your disk usage with df and du](//www.linuxaria.com/howto/check-your-disk-usage-with-df-and-du?lang=en)

As system administrator , but also as common user on my PC, one of the more common problem is the fill up at 100% of a filesystem. So, in this article we’ll see 2 commands that can help us in keeping under control or check the space used in every filesystem and in his directory.

df : report file system disk space usage

du: estimate file space usage (…)

”

For Developers and Programmers

“

    [net tuts+/Joseph Pecoraro: An In Depth Guide to mod_rewrite for Apache](//net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/other/a-deeper-look-at-mod_rewrite-for-apache/)

When people think of .htaccess configuration, the first thing that might pop into their minds is URL manipulation with mod_rewrite. But they’re often frustrated by mod_rewrite’s complexity. This tutorial will walk you through everything you need to know for the most common mod_rewrite tasks. (…)

”

For System Administrators

“

    [Novell Cool Solutions/jmeldrum: ssh-keygen: password-less SSH login script](//www.novell.com/communities/node/12811/ssh-keygen-password-less-ssh-login-script)

license: GPLv2

This utility uses ssh-keygen and ssh_copy_id to create RSA private/public key pairs for use by SSH protocol version 1 and RSA or DSA keys for use by SSH protocol version 2. The public key is then copied onto a remote system. You can now SSH to the remote system without the use of a password from the specified machine.

If the file /etc/root/.ssh/authorized_keys exists on the destination system, you probably already have it setup.

For more information see the man pages for ssh-keygen and ssh_copy_id. (…)

”

Planet SUSE▲▼

“

Will Stephenson: Tokamak 5: The Pancake Sprint

Flat things are good. I’m at Tokamak 5 in Nijmegen, the KDE sprint where we plough a deep furrow into the future of the Free Desktop and sow KDE seeds that will grow into exciting, novel interfaces and make the stuff we already have even faster and more reliable.

So what about the flat things I mentioned? We’ve just guzzled our way through a stack of pancakes of geological proportions, produced for us by pancake-flipper and KDE allrounder par excellenceAdriaan de Groot. Other good flat things are tablets (I won’t call them ‘tablet computers’ in case I sound old fashioned), which are in evidence here in a variety of makes and models. We’re working on several things that will make KDE on tablets as easy and fun to consume as Adriaan’s pancakes.

I’m here for a few days to make KConfigXT, KDE’s proven automatic configuration persistence layer, work with user interfaces programmed in Qt Quick, and to support the Plasma Active work going on in the openSUSE Build Service with my geeko skills.

”

openSUSE Forums▲▼

“

Windows and openSuse 11.4 dual boot problem

  Dual booting is still very popular. It allows you to use different operating systems for different tasks. Most of the times this works out of the box. However, there are situations, where users cannot access both operating systems, or can access only one of them. In the thread from the title a user cannot manage to get a working situation for his Win7 and openSUSE 11.4, read ahead to see what possible solutions are available.

”

“

Opensuse 11.4 install from Hard Drive Like usb

  The last couple of years we've seen an increase of devices that do not have a CD/DVD drive, so installing from traditional media is not possible. This issue was met by using technology that allows copying the install media images to USB devices, which can be used to install on CD/DVD driveless machines. Here we have a user that wants to use an extra internal hard disk to install from. Is this possible? The answer is yes, read the thread to find out how it's done.

”

“

Gnome 3 and 11.4 Known Issues and Workarounds

  Now that GNOME 3 is here, and packages for openSUSE 11.4 have been officially released and approved, we see that some users have issues / problems after upgrading. One of our members started a thread to gather these issues / problems and collect workarounds / solutions for those. Although it's far from complete, the thread is giving a good impression of what one can expect when upgrading to GNOME 3. The time does not seem to be ready yet for KDE users that have GNOME installed as well to perform an upgrade yet. We'll follow the developments and let you know.

”

“

Upgrade SUSE Linux 9.2 to OpenSUSE 11.4?

  This title describes a returning question: Can I upgrade version X to version Y. In general, one could say, that this is possible, if versions are not too far apart. In this case: No. Development in linux has made giant leaps forward in such a way, that doing what's suggested in the title would and will only lead to massive trouble. Read the thread to see why.

”

On the Web▲▼

Announcements

“

    [The Attachmate Group Completes Acquisition of Novell](//www.attachmate.com/Press/PressReleases/attachmate-group-completes-aquisition-of-novell.htm)

HOUSTON – April 27, 2011 – The Attachmate Group today announced the completion of the acquisition of Novell, Inc., a leader in intelligent workload management, under the terms of the definitive agreement disclosed on November 22, 2010. Novell will now operate as two separate business units under the Novell® and SUSE® brand names and join Attachmate® and NetIQ® as holdings of The Attachmate Group.

The addition of Novell furthers the mission of The Attachmate Group and its ability to support customers’ strategic and tactical business requirements through innovative solutions, quality products, and exceptional service. The Attachmate Group product families now include complementary solutions that range across IT operations management; open source; end user computing and collaboration; host connectivity and legacy modernization; security, identity and compliance management; virtualization and cloud computing; and more. (…)

”

Call for participation

“

    [5th Annual North Bridge Future of Open Source Survey 2011](//futureofopensource.drupalgardens.com/2011-future-open-source-survey)

Who are the top 3 up-and-coming commercial open source software companies?

Take 5 minutes to take the survey, make your vote count, answer question 15.

Complete the survey & you can register for OSBC with a 20% discount! (…)

”

Reports

“

    [ZDNet/Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: Attachmate reveals Novell, SUSE, & Linux Plans](//www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/attachmate-reveals-novell-suse-linux-plans/8771)

Now that Attachmate owns Novell, what does the formerly obscure company plan to do with its $2.2-billion operating system and networking prize? I interviewed Attachmate via e-mail CEO Jeff Hawn and this is what he told me.

Before launching into the interview, I’ll note that most of Novell’s senior executive staff won’t be hanging around. Ron Hovsepian; President and CEO; Dana Russell, CFO; John Dragoon, CMO; and Markus Rex, SVP and General Manager of open platforms and long time SUSE leader have all left. So it is that Attachmate is starting with a clean management slate.

(…)

SJVN: What plans does Attachmate for Novell/SUSE’s open-source offerings? E.g. openSUSE and Mono.

JH: SUSE sponsorship and participation in key open-source projects is a fundamental element of the business. This commitment is driven by a desire to contribute to and collaborate with the community in a way that fosters the success of open source technologies overall and creates the greatest value for our customers. The openSUSE project is a great example of vibrant and healthy collaboration. SUSE sponsorship and participation in projects like openSUSE creates great value for the community and also for SUSE customers who benefit from the innovations and advancements we create together. (…)

”

“

    [h-online/Richard Hillesley: Open source gaming – or things I do when I should be working](//www.h-online.com/open/features/Open-source-gaming-or-things-I-do-when-I-should-be-working-1230013.html)

“What I was proud of was that I used very few parts to build a computer that could actually speak words on a screen and type words on a keyboard and run a programming language that could play games. And I did all this myself”–Steve Wozniak

For some users computer games are little more than “the things I do when I should be working”, a soothing distraction or a waste of time and space. For others games are a matter of life and death, the bane of partners, the be all and end all of computing, and the reason why we bother. So the addicts are pleased to go out and buy an XBox, a Nintendo or a PlayStation 3 rather than a full-blown computer, and are happy to play the night away.

The best games are a learning experience, an exercise in strategic thinking, memory retention, what-if scenarios and problem solving – not unlike programming itself. Each piece in a game like chess has a limited number of moves, yet the game itself is a world of possibilities, and like a chess player, a programmer has to think ahead, so it isn’t really surprising that many coders approach programming as if it was a game of chess, and are also gamers. (…)

”

Reviews and Essays

“

    [Unixmen/Anuradha Shukla: When will Linux games become more mainstream?](//www.dedoimedo.com/computers/trinity-kde.html)

Developers are quite often gamers at heart. Until they get to core structure, there is no respite. Delving deep into popular games and rebuilding them are quite often the reason developers go on to develop the next generation of games. Linux has had quite a challenging history of games and their development. These are notably due to technical and practical reasons. While sometimes the philosophy of Open source have been the hurdle for successful games development.

Linux and lack of technical framework

Technically the lack of GPU drivers for Linux-based graphic cards, like in high-performing as proprietary software and the never resolving patents do put a large hurdle-infested road map for Linux games. Experts believe the continued failure to include S3TC for open source OpenGL drivers as most are patent pending is creating a pseudo-scenario where distros are being released on the assumption that the drivers are already available. Distros without supporting graphic card drivers are as improper to have as a web browser without .jpg.

Linux and lack of revenue generation from games

The main belief for laxity in Linux games is that open source gaming sponsors find there is a lack of revenue generation as most is free software and most believe in doing-it-yourself philosophy. The limitation in specialized proprietary game-ware available currently, is that they become so niche in their genre that gamers are finding it difficult to port games across platforms.

Linux overworked by licenses?

Linux Gamers have a choice between choosing limited digitally licensed games that allow games to be installed on several systems and open source fee games. But again, the buck stops why are they not as powerful or as overwhelming as MMORG games and their ilk, given that Linux offers such fantastic scope for similar gaming ecosystems. Grapple is one of the free software projects, which is bundled with the Linux Game Publishing. It offers multiplayer opportunities and applications development.

**Trend towards Linux game change **

Analysts are now pinning down on new trends of platform confining proprietary games. Purist gamers believe cross-platform gaming and Linux with its high degree of cross platform compatibility are beginning to look towards Linux for better gaming solutions.

The dichotomy in Linux games seems to have been bridged somewhat by the availability of Humble Indie Bundles a non-dependent video gaming line by Wolfire Games, which are multi-platform, non-DRM and compatible with Windows, OS X as well as Linux. The first bundle released in the second quarter of May 2010, saw the likes of World of Goo, Lugaru, Penumbra, Gish and Samorost 2 as an afterthought. As the developers committed to offer these under open source if sales went beyond $1 million, the 1.25 million sales led to these games being available under the GPL license. Revenge of the Titans was released post better sales in Dec 2010.

Despite World of Goo’s success, open source yet remains a high-risk option for games owners. Humble Indie Bundle has proved a successful model and will hopefully be the harbinger of greater, more enjoyable games on the open source platform.

License: CC-BY-NC-ND

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“

    [Linuxaria: 10 Easter Eggs in Linux](//www.linuxaria.com/article/10-easter-eggs-in-linux?lang=en)

Happy easter to all, what’s better than celebrate this holiday taking a look at what have hidden the programmers in our software ? A virtual Easter egg is an intentional hidden message, in-joke or feature in a work such as a computer program, web page, video game, movie, book or crossword. The term was coined—according to Warren Robinett—by Atari after they were pointed to the secret message left by Robinett in the game Adventure. (…)

Editors Note: If you are an openSUSE user, try ‘zypper moo’ on your console. ;-)

”

“

    [Linux Library/thinkinhurtz: OpenSUSE 11.4 Gnome Review](//linuxlibrary.org/index.php/distributions/opensuse-11-4-gnome-review/)

Here is another great all purpose Linux distribution with lots of the newest software only a few clicks away. Although things don’t appear to have changed much in recent years there are still some great improvements under the hood. OpenSUSE is known as a reliable distribution with a diverse selection of options making it another great choice for desktops and servers alike. Lighter desktop editions of OpenSUSE might be a better for choice for laptops however. I have already covered OpenSUSE 11.4 KDE for those who are interested, here I will focus on the OpenSUSE Gnome desktop. (…)

”

“

Linux.com/Glyn Moody: The naming of parts: Time for “Linux Inside”?

**Names matter in free software. Just think of the number of electrons that have been spilt arguing over whether it’s “Linux” or “GNU/Linux”. **

The naming of parts came up when I interviewed Linus back in 1996. I had asked him about his relations with Richard Stallman, and this is what Linus said:

I’ve had some, not very much. At first he wasn’t too interested, because Linux was so PC-centric – just two years ago, it didn’t run on anything else. And I suspect Richard really dislikes PCs. So he wasn’t really interested in that sense. Lately, when it’s become obvious how portable it is and how well it works on other architectures too, I think Richard in that sense looks at Linux in a different light.

One problem we’ve had, well, problem, kind of clash of personalities, is that Linux has gotten so much press and GNU has gotten so little. So for Richard, he’s not pragmatic, he really has this idealistic world-view, he’d really like the system to be called GNU/Linux or something like this. Personally I don’t think GNU Linux flies as a name, it should be catchy.

But is “Linux” catchy? The fact that few people have heard of it outside the rather specialised world of free software suggests not. Indeed, far more people have probably come across “Ubuntu”, which has taken on the role of the public face of GNU/Linux to a certain extent. That’s good, in the sense that it has done valuable work promoting free software to the general public; but it’s also unfortunate in that it has pushed the “Linux” name even further into the background. (…)

”

“

    [Techrepublic/Vincent Danen: Introduction to SELinux: Don't let complexity scare you off](//www.techrepublic.com/blog/opensource/introduction-to-selinux-dont-let-complexity-scare-you-off/2447)

akeaway: Vincent Danen acknowledges that some of the complexity of SELinux is intimidating, but if you spend some time with it, the payoff is heightened security and better control of your system.

Most people who know Linux have at least heard about SELinux. SELinux, or Security-Enhanced Linux, was originally developed primarily by the NSA (U.S. National Security Agency), as an implementation of the Flask operating system security architecture. Flask implements MAC (Mandatory Access Control), a means of designating what processes have access to what resources (be they network ports, files, and so on). A lot of work has been done to make SELinux as easy to use as possible, although at first glance it does look hideously complex.

Since 2003, SELinux has been integrated into the mainline Linux kernel, and is fully supported in distributions such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, CentOS, Debian (disabled by default), Ubuntu, openSUSE, Hardened Gentoo, and others. On Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora, SELinux is enabled at installation.

”

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First published on: //saigkill.homelinux.net