openSUSE Weekly News 193 is out with Conference, Libre Office 3.4 and next Nepomuk

17. Sep 2011 | Sascha Manns | No License

We are pleased to announce our new openSUSE Weekly News 193.

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openSUSE Weekly News

### openSUSE Weekly News Team

193 Edition

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We are thanking the whole openSUSE Weekly News Team and the open-slx gmbh for spending time and power into the openSUSE Weekly News.

Published: 2011-09-17

Table of Contents

openSUSE Conference 2011 Status Updates

Team Reports In the Community

Events & Meetings openSUSE for your Ears Communication Contributors New/Updated Applications @ openSUSE Security Updates Kernel Review Tips and Tricks

For Desktop Users For Developers and Programmers Planet SUSE openSUSE Forums On the Web

Announcements Reports Feedback Credits Acknowledgements Copyrights

List of our Licenses Trademarks Translations

We are pleased to announce our 193 issue of the openSUSE Weekly News.

You can also read this issue in other formats here.

Enjoy reading :-)

openSUSE Conference 2011▼

“

Jos Poortvlieet: openSUSE Conference Fun!

At the openSUSE conference in Nýrnberg almost 400 visitors have shown up for the four tracks of sessions about technical and community matters and the many other events and parties. While a longer article is coming, we’d like to give a taste of the conference here! (…)

”

“

Greek openSUSE Ambassadors: openSUSE Conference: First Day

In Friday morning, at 4:50 Kostas “Warlordfff” Koudaras , George “Etern4L” Bratsos, Eustathios “efagra” Agrapidis and Stella “differentreality” Rouzi met in Thessaloniki’s airport. We were about to travel to Nuremberg, Germany to go at the openSUSE Conference at Zentrifuge.

After we met up at the airport we checked in and we entered the airplane. It is the first journey of the Greek community to a Conference like that. After two and a half hours we arrived at Zurich airport where we stayed for two hours waiting for the next flight to Nuremberg. The flight between Zurich and Nuremberg lasted half an hour an finally after 4 hour traveling we arrived at Nuremberg. (…)

”

“

Greek openSUSE Ambassadors: openSUSE Conference: Day 2, The Conference Begins

Awesome! The sun goes up in Nuremberg… The Greek team woke up early in the morning in order to get ready for the first day of the conference… We had a good breakfast and we started heading for the Zentrifuge in order to meet the other guyz and attend the Conference. On our road to the openSUSE Conference we met the Chinese community and we both head to the conference together. When we arrived people were awesome. Everyone was there…

The day’s program was printed so we took a copy in order to see and decide which awesome presentations we will attend! (…)

”

“

Greek openSUSE Ambassadors: openSUSE Conference: Day 3, The conference continues, the Greeks attack!

Greek team woke up in the cloudy morning in Nuremberg. We ate our breakfast at hotel and we started heading to the openSUSE Conference.

We arrived a bit late but luckily they haven’t started yet! There were again many interesting presentations among about community, distribution and about technology. Presentations that stood out where “openSUSE Tumbleweed” Mr. KH, Greg, “Ambassador Program: Current status,potential changes and improvements” by Mr. KOUDARAS, Kostas (openSUSE), Mr. GUPTA, Manu (openSUSE), “Our experience in organizing a local community: The Greek example” by by Mr. KOUDARAS, Kostas (openSUSE) and “How to get more Women into openSUSE” by PINTSCHER, Lydia (KDE). Do not forget the LPI exams we had at the conference. (…)

”

“

Kai-Uwe Behrmann: Taxi @ rwx³

Sebastian Oliva presented today at the openSUSE conference the results of his ICC Device Profile Repository project to his mentoring organisation as participant of the Google Summer of Code 2011 program. As profile creation is expensive to most users, he emphasised the importance to easily share ICC profiles among these users. During the summer project, which is called now taxi, he developed a generic API to store and obtain ICC profiles through JSON requests.

”

“

Kai-Uwe Behrmann: dispcalGUI 0.7 @ rwx³

My yesterday held workshop for calibrating and profiling monitors using dispcalGUI+ArgyllCMS in Nuremberg was a nice experience. Around ten people from the openSUSE Conference gathered, all being eager to do something for their health of colour vision. We wanted to create ICC device profiles and collect them for later publishing. Following is a small report and review from the workshop.

We had available a i1display, a DTP94 and a i1pro as measurement devices, which no of the attendees owned privately. Installation on openSUSE-11.4 went pretty smooth. ArgyllCMS is in the multimedia:photo repository and dispcalGUI is in multimedia:color_management. Both are easily searchable through the //software.opensuse.org URL. One hacker had all packages installed in advance and could start instantly with the i1display. With the default settings in dispcalGUI appeared a small terminal and required to adjust native monitor settings or continue with calibration. We pressed number 7 and continued with the calibration part. This lasted relatively long. dispcalGUI and in the background ArgyllCMS took quite some work to iterate over the calibration for four times with lots of “regression getting worse” style messages. This indicated to us, that it reached an end for improvement or the application where not satisfied according to each persons like. The profiling and installation finished after quite some time and the new calibration and profile could be used in colour managed applications. In Gimp the monitor profile was not used by default. The Colour Management tab in Gimp’s preferences needs to manually enable the system profile, which is a troublesome exercise to figure out. Instead colour managed applications should look first at the system profile. Overriding the system profile by default is dangerous for a good user experience.

”

“

Greek openSUSE Ambassadors: openSUSE Conference: Day 4

The Greeks woke up early today. The cloudy weather of Nuremberg didn’t stopped us from taking the road to openSUSE Conference. We also had Lydia Pintschert of KDE keep us company for the way to Zentrifuge.

Today there are many interesting presentations about community tools and about new technologies in Linux. We started from Lydia’s awesome presentation about “Social skills for geeks”. After that we attended the presentation of Mr. Vogelsang, Hendrik about “How to contribute to the openSUSE Wiki” which was very interesting and we all were there get informed on our next community target ;). Also, we attended at the main hall the presentation of an important member of SUSE and openSUSE Mr. Milller Michael who told us about his experience with SUSE and openSUSE. After we ate, talked with people and rest ourselves we attended the conversation about “Playing with Geeko: Contribution can be fun” by Koudaras, Kostas and Gupta, Manu where they presented to the community why and how we can contribute at the project.

”

“

Andreas Jaeger: openSUSE Conference 2011 is over - Photos uploaded

The openSUSE conference is now over. It was a really great event and I loved to meet many friends in person that I have only met online before like Manu and Kostas. As one of the co-organizers of the event, it was a lot of work and the reward was great! I’m happy to have been part of such a great team organizing osc11. Yesterday and today a couple of us spend cleaning everything up and I’m now exhausted, so I only write this short article to point out the photos I’ve taken. More next week…

I’ve taken many photos - like the group photo - and uploaded them to my gallery, and I hope you enjoy them. Also, an article by The H is online based on a conversation I had with Andrea Mýller from The H.

”

“

Greek openSUSE Ambassadors: openSUSE Conference 2011, Day 5 “Τhe Last Day”

Greeks woke up earlier in order to be in time at Zentrifuge. We ate breakfast and we prepared ourselves for taking the road to the conference. We were a bit tired but we wanted to live again and again the experience of participating at the openSUSE Conference. So we took the metro and went at Zentrifuge.

There were many community based presentations and many technical presentations about Google summer of code projects and in general technologies that openSUSE uses and updates. Our day started by attending the conversation about “Do we need an ambassador mentoring program?” by Koudaras, Kostas where we talked about ambassadors and how we can improve the program in all ways. Many people from Novel attended the presentation and integrate with ideas in order to help improve the program. After that, we attended “Connect - a social networking platform for the openSUSE Community” by Mr. Vogelsang, Hendrik and Rusnak, Pavol who presented us this new awesome community tool, how it works and how we can improve it.

”

Status Updates▲▼

Team Reports

Build Service Team

Build Service Statistics. Statistics can found at Buildservice

GNOME Team

“

      [Nelson Marques: GNOME:Ayatana – Looking for contributor…](//www.marques.so/2011/09/gnomeayatana-looking-for-contributor/)

I’m looking for a volunteer contributor to maintain the compiz 0.9.x stack on GNOME:Ayatana. Anyone interested please contact me, my contacts are public on my openSUSE Connect profile or on my wiki page.

The main reason behind this is quite simple, enable Unity. Feel free to contact me with any questions.

”

openFATE Team

Top voted Features

“

        [decouple download and installation (Score: 365)](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: 192)](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?

”

“

        [1-click uninstall (Score: 164)](https://features.opensuse.org/305305)

An easy way to remove Software! For example: you installed an application with “1-click install” (which will install all the packages that you need), there should be an easy way (also with 1 click) to remove what you have installed with that 1-click operation… in another words: an “1-click Uninstall” to remove installed software (dependencies and packages included).

”

“

        [Update to GRUB v2 (Score: 150)](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: 111)](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.

“

        [Volume Control](https://features.opensuse.org/312792)

Volume Control:

if possible, please make volume go up my 1’s instead of in a random order. Music, sound, and sound effects are either to loud or to soft.

”

“

        [Update libjingle to 0.5.9](https://features.opensuse.org/312794)

latest version in head is 0.3.12. 0.3.x was released in 2006. latest version on the project page is 0.5.9

//code.google.com/p/libjingle/

”

“

        [opensuse 12.1 - integrate libKGoogle into opensuse to share google calendars etc](https://features.opensuse.org/312796)

A project that ought to be integrated into opensuse 21.1 so that kontact can use it:

//progdan.cz/2011/08/akonadi-google-resource-complete-rewrite/

”

“

        [Safer distribution updates](https://features.opensuse.org/312799)

Currently the documentation says that to do a distribution upgrade you should first update your software stack to the target distribution, then do a zypper dup. The software stack update can already kill your system.

zypper could allow an option that makes it first install a miniroot containing the update stack itself, then automatically switch over to the miniroot to do the “zypper dup”.

”

Feature Statistics

Statistics for openSUSE distribution in openFATE

Testing Team

“

      [Larry
        Finger: Weekly News for September 17](//lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-testing/2011-09/msg00026.html)

The Testing Core Team met at 17:00 UTC, September 12. Our meeting was not too long as most of the participants were at openSUSE Conference 2011.

We first discussed our experiences with 12.1 MS5. I reported that I was having problems with the KDE plasmoid NetworkManager applet, and with systemd. As it turned out, I was downloading a 1751-package upgrade during the meeting, and those upgrades fixed most of the problems with NetworkManager. In addition, a subsequent upgrade has fixed my systemd problems.

Our next topic of discussion was oSC 2011. There were back-to-back BoF sessions on testing, one conducted by Bernhard Wiedermann of the TCT, and the second organized by Jiri Slaby of SuSE. Bernhard also had a talk on “One Year of openqa.opensuse.org”. The conference also included a talk on kernel testing, more indication of the need for automated testing of systems that get more and more complicated.

We next discussed Open Bugs Day No. 3. The possible explanations for the low participation ranges from “looking at old bugs is not very exciting” to “it was a nice summer day in Germany”. Whatever the cause, I hope we get a better turnout when we have an OBD for the bugs in 12.1.

We then discussed the areas in 12.1 that have the greatest likelihood of causing problems for openSUSE users. As systemd will be the default in 12.1, it needs to be tested on as many of our platforms as possible. We also expect further problems with the KMS video drivers, particularly nouveau for the nVidia adapters. To help users, we proposed that “nomodeset” be a standard feature of the installation media on the Factory ML. There was some reluctance, but it is likely that a failsafe option will be added to the GRUB menus on the media.

The next meeting of the Testing Core Team will be September 25, 2011 at 17:00 UTC on Channel #opensuse-testing on the Freenode IRC Network (irc://irc.freenode.net/opensuse-testing). Our preliminary agenda includes our experiences with 12.1 Beta, and a discussion of the Beta Pizza Party.

”

Translation Team

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

In the Community▲▼

Events & Meetings

Past

Upcoming

September 21, 2011 : Project Meeting

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

openSUSE for your Ears

The openSUSE Weekly News are available as podcast in German. You can hear it or download it on //saigkill.homelinux.net/podcast.

Communication

Contributors

openSUSE Connect

New/Updated Applications @ openSUSE▲▼

“

        [Petr Mladek: LibreOffice 3.4 available for openSUSE](//lizards.opensuse.org/2011/09/15/libreoffice-3-4-available-for-opensuse/)

I’m happy to announce LibreOffice 3.4 packages for openSUSE. They are available in the Build Service LibreOffice:Stable project.

LibreOffice 3.4 provides many interesting features and fixes. The openSUSE packages are based on the LibreOffice 3.4.2 release but they include all fixes from the last 3.4.3 bugfix release. Please, look for more details about the openSUSE LibreOffice build on the wiki page.

The openSUSE LO team hopes that you will be happy with this release. Though, any software contains bugs and we kindly ask you to report bugs. It will help us to fix them in the future releases. (…)

”

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.

Kernel Review▲▼

“

  [Linus Torvalds: Linux 3.1-rc6](https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/9/14/33)

[ Heh. Somewhat delayed, but I literally didn’t notice that all my outgoing email bounced for the last couple of days, so here it is again. Originally meant to be sent on Monday, just apparently never got anywhere. So when it says “I should have done this yesterday”, it actually means Sunday ;^]

So I should have done this yesterday, but I was distracted. So here it is, a day late:

git://github.com/torvalds/linux.git

with just over a hundred commits. It’s been fairly quiet.

Some arm and openrisc updates, various small driver fixes (the drm nvidia fixes might be the ones most noticeable to people), and some fuse, 9p and btrfs updates for filesystems.

Nothing really stands out. Have at it, and let us know of any outstanding regressions. (…)

”

“

  [Rares
    Aioanei: kernel weekly news – 17.09.2011](//schaiba.wordpress.com/2011/09/17/kernel-weekly-news-17-09-2011/)

Rares gives his weekly Kernel Review with openSUSE Flavor.

”

Tips and Tricks▲▼

For Desktop Users

“

    [Dedoimedo: How to install the Nvidia proprietary driver in openSUSE](//www.dedoimedo.com/computers/opensuse-nvidia.html)

This is not a new topic. We talked about it at least two or three times before, in my original openSUSE 11 review and tutorial, then again in the openSUSE 11.X articles. Still, it was more sort of a reference rather than a proper step-by-step guide. Indeed, the graphics driver installation,ýeven though it’s fairly simple, is not trivial. To remove all and any doubt, I decided to write this tutorial.

We will dabble in Yast, learn how to handle repositories, add the Nvidia source, install the correct driver and test the installation. We’ll also recall how the installation used to be done in the past and what some other distributions offer. Follow me. (…)

Editors Note: This Howto doesn’t work with the Tumbleweed Kernel. In this case you must install the *.run File from the NVIDIA Page.

”

For Developers and Programmers

“

    [Wazi/Juliet Kemp: Create Your Own Syntax Highlighting in Vim](//olex.openlogic.com/wazi/2011/create-your-own-syntax-highlighting-in-vim/)

In text editors like Vim, syntax highlighting is the feature that shows defined components in different colors depending on their functions in the file. Vim has code syntax highlighting already available for a huge array of programming languages, including PHP, Python, HTML, Ruby, JavaScript, and more, and most of them are installed by default in the $VIM/syntax/ directory, so in most cases you can just open up your source code files and see different parts appropriately color-coded. But what if you’re using a little-known language that doesn’t have a preinstalled syntax file? Or if you’re working with a different type of file altogether and want to create syntax highlighting from scratch? This tutorial shows how easy and even fun it is to write your own syntax highlighting rules for Vim. (…)

”

“

    [BashShell.net/Mike: String Matches in Regular Expressions](//bashshell.net/regular-expressions/string-matches-in-regular-expressions/)

The parentheses allows you to use regular expressions to perform string matches, or matches to actual words. Thus you may write a search that is looking for “virtual” or “main” with (virtual

mail). Note they are separated by a pipe. These are string searches so you are looking for “virtual” not “v” or “i” or “r” etc. (…)

”

“

    [Linux Journal/Joey Bernard: Parallel Programming Crash Course](//www.linuxjournal.com/content/parallel-programming-crash-course)

I’ve been covering various scientific programs the past few months, but sometimes it’s hard to find a package that does what you need. In those cases, you need to go ahead and write your own code. When you are involved with heavy-duty scientific computing, you usually need to go to parallel computing in order to get the runtimes down to something reasonable. This month, I give a crash course in parallel programming so you can get a feel for what is involved. (…)

”

Planet SUSE▲▼

“

Matthias Hopf: XDC: How to bring in more contributors

In my talk (or rather: structured discussion) “Methods of Attraction: How to bring in new contributors” on this year’s X.org Developer’s Conference I brought up reasons why open source projects often fail to attract new contributors, and some changes to help this.

During the discussion it turns out that for X.org the changes are either very non-trivial, or (better) somewhat implemented already (like the list of low hanging fruits, which basically boils down to our ToDo list and the Janitor subproject).

I didn’t really expect any direct outcome from this discussion (as it’s more like a meta discussion because we need to understand the real issues first), but I think it was fruitful especially in keeping everybody aware of the situation. (…)

”

openSUSE Forums▲▼

“

  [How to prevent system-(over)writes to customized /etc/sysconfig/* files?](//forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/applications/464824-how-prevent-system-over-writes-customized-etc-sysconfig-files.html)

  The title is clear, this thread means to find a solution for overwriting of modified system config files during an update. Of course there are the dirty tricks, like making the files concerned read-only etc., but that's not the way it should be done; forget one, and you may find yourself in a mess. IMHO the best suggestion is not to change these files at all, but add new ones that already are called from the existing ones, Still a very interesting thread for those of us that use modified default configurations for system services like, for example, a webserver.

”

“

[openSUSE as a corporate server](//forums.opensuse.org/english/other-forums/looking-something-other-than-support/465296-re-opensuse-corporate-server.html)

  Question in this thread is whether this can be done: using openSUSE as a corporate server. Of course there's the suggestion to use SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, but personally I have no hesitations to reply with a full "yes' and add that openSUSE can be used for the desktops connecting to the server as well. Read on, if you're interested in moving to an openSUSE based network for your company or organization.

”

“

[openSUSE 11.4 and njytouch touch screen - Problems](//forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/hardware/465251-opensuse-11-4-njytouch-touch-screen-problems.html)

  Today's world of computing is changing. Not only do we interact with social networks from our desktops, the way we control our actions changes as well. A good example is the touch screen for desktops/laptops as an input method. Not new -they've been out there for a couple of years already-, but these screens used to be quite expensive. With that changing, touch screens will become more common. Do they work on linux? They should, but here's a thread where original poster has difficulties in getting it to work properly.

”

“

  openSUSE Language specific subforums:

We now host the following language specific subforums under the umbrella of the openSUSE Forums: Main forums, english 中文(Chinese) Nederlands (Dutch) Français (French) Deutsch (German) Ελληνικό (Greek) Magyar (Hungarian) 日本語 (Japanese) Portuguese Pусский (Russian)

”

On the Web▲▼

Announcements

“

    [The Document Foundation Blog/Florian Effenberger: LibreOffice launches extension and templates repository for public beta test](//blog.documentfoundation.org/2011/09/12/libreoffice-launches-extension-and-templates-repository-for-public-beta-test/)

Developers invited to contribute their add-ons

Community-based review process ensures quality and reliability

LibreOffice, the free office productivity suite, can be enhanced with hundreds of extensions and templates. Users can download these smart extras to improve the suite’s functionality to fit their job or hobby, and developers can easily write their own add-ons and share it with millions of users worldwide.

Since, at the moment, there is no reliable and stable source for downloading these handy add-ons, the LibreOffice community has put great efforts into launching a public repository. It does not only provide extensions and templates for LibreOffice, but also for OpenOffice.org and other compatible office suites. Users of these can benefit from the work and the commitment of our community, and are invited to have a look at recent versions of our product, which already has included has the most popular extensions, and comes with many new features.

The new site is now in public beta testing at

//extensions-test.libreoffice.org

and

//templates-test.libreoffice.org

and has been created in cooperation with the Plone community, on whose technology it is based. To ensure the quality and reliability of the offered extensions, a community-based review process is currently set in place: Community volunteers test and review available extensions, and those meeting criteria of quality will be tagged accordingly. (…)

”

Reports

“

    [Sebastian Trueg:
      Nepomuk – What Comes Next](//trueg.wordpress.com/2011/09/16/nepomuk-what-comes-next/)

After a very generous start to my fundraiser (thank you so much for your support) it is time I get into more detail about what you are actually supporting. Originally I wanted to do that by updating nepomuk.kde.org. I will still do that but it will take a little more time than anticipated. Thus, I will simply start with another blog post.

Well then, apart from cleaning out the bug database at bugs.kde.org (this will be a hard one), continuing to support app developers with Nepomuk integration, maintaining the whole Nepomuk stack, Soprano, the Shared-desktop-ontologies, and some smaller Nepomuk-based applications there are some very specific tasks I want to work on in the near future (In this case the near-future roughly spans the next half year).(…)

”

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Credits▲▼

We thank for this Issue:

Sascha Manns, Editor in Chief
Satoru Matsumoto, Editorial Office
Gertjan Lettink, Forums Section
Thomas Hofstätter, Eventeditor
Thomas Schraitle, DocBook-Consultant

Acknowledgements▲▼