openSUSE Weekly News, Issue 196 is out with: 12.1 Beta,Board Election,ARM

9. Oct 2011 | Sascha Manns | No License

We are pleased to announce our new openSUSE Weekly News Issue 196.

Cover

openSUSE Weekly News

### openSUSE Weekly News Team

196 Edition

Legal Notice

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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: 2011-10-09

Table of Contents

Announcements Board Election 2011 Hackweek VII Status Updates

Team Reports In the Community

Postings from the Community Welcome new openSUSE Members Events & Meetings openSUSE for your Ears Communication Contributors Games Corner 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

Reports LOL Feedback Credits Acknowledgements Copyrights

List of our Licenses Trademarks Translations

We are pleased to announce our 196 issue of the openSUSE Weekly News.

You can also read this issue in other formats here.

Enjoy reading :-)

Announcements▼

“

  [openSUSE 12.1
    Beta Arrives!](//news.opensuse.org/2011/10/01/opensuse-12-1-beta-arrives/)

The much-awaited Beta release of openSUSE 12.1 is here! And just in time for your weekend Beta Pizza Party. So fire up that oven and warm up that download manager because its time to get ready for the latest awesome openSUSE on your computer. (…)

”

“

Hackweek results for openSUSE ARM

Last Friday Dirk Müller send an email to openSUSE-Factory about the status of the openSUSE ARM port. SUSE employees Adrian, Alexander, Dirk and Reinhard had spend their Hackweek revitalizing the initial work by Jan-Simon and Martin by getting openSUSE Factory on ARM to build and work. The current build status on OBS shows that almost 2500 packages are working successfully and the team invites anyone interested to come and help increase that number!

”

Board Election 2011▲▼

“

openSUSE Board Election Committee Formed

The 2011 openSUSE Board term is soon coming to an end. In the last few project meetings as well as at the conference, the board has called for people to step up for the Election Committee. Five openSUSE contributors have offered their help and we’d like to introduce them to you.

The Team

The openSUSE Board is proud to welcome the following members of our openSUSE Community as this year’s Election Committee:

Izabel Valverde
Kai-Uwe Behrmann
James Mason
Kostas Koudaras
Thomas Schmidt

The Job

In the coming days and weeks, this committee will act independently to implement a formal plan for the oversight and election of a new Board for the 2012 term. Currently, three board seats will be up for election. These seats are currently held by Rupert Horstkotter, Pavol Rusnak, and Bryen Yunashko (whose seat is vacated due to term limits.)

The Election Committee will announce the nomination process and election period as part of the election plan. Please stay tuned for further news from the Committee itself.

We are sure this team will perform its duties to the best benefit of the openSUSE Project and we look forward to an exciting election term and seeing many openSUSE Community members stepping up as candidates in the upcoming election.

”

Hackweek VII▲▼

“

Sankar P: Telepathic Flirt With Chromium

Hackweek is an event in SUSE where developers can work on any pet project for a week (like Google’s 20%) This year’s edition happened last week in SUSE. Since I am part of the openSUSE community, I too participated in the spirit of this event in my night time. The project is codenamed Arattai.

I tried to bring a prototype to provide IM/Chat support built-in to the Chromium browser. Watch the screencast below. Please click here in case you do not see the embedded video. Please see the video in full screen HD.

”

“

  [Tor Lillqvist:
    Hack Week, Autumn 2011](//tml-blog.blogspot.com/2011/10/hack-week-autumn-2011.html)

During this hack week I worked on making LibreOffice build also against the MacOSX 10.5, 10.6 and 10.7 SDKs. We had some support for that in the configure.in already, but it had apparently never been tested what then happens if one actually tries something other than the 10.4 SDK.

Mostly, with some changes here and there, and except for 10.7, I got it to work, and also the resulting LibreOffice built against the 10.6 SDK seemed to work.

Building against the 10.7 SDK fails because some APIs that were deprecated already in 10.4, but the Mac code in LibreOffice still uses, have now then finally been removed in the 10.7 SDK. This shows the sad state of our Mac code.

I also experimented with building against the 10.6 SDK but with MacOSX 10.4 as the target OS API level. I didn’t get such a build to finish yet, but I am continuing on it in the background. The idea here is that if it would be possible to build LO to run fine on 10.4 even if you build it using the 10.6 SDK, we could get rid of one requirement for our (at least Intel) Mac build that is getting more and more silly: That you need to install the old Xcode 3 (with 10.4 and 10.5 SDKs) in addition to, or instead of, the current Xcode 4 (with 10.6 and 10.7 SDKs).

”

“

Noel Power: hackweek #7 oletool.py

Last year for some reason that I can’t recall I only managed to take 1 day of hackweek, back then I started oletool.py. oletool.py is intended to be like a cheap & nasty (zip/unzip)-like command-line tool for OLE compound documents. I started this for 2 reasons

I often play with Libreoffice filters, many times I want to either extract some stream or other from a document to examine it or maybe quickly modify a stream re-inject it into the document to test some code or theory
Libreoffice has support for Python, I know nothing about Python and I wanted to learn a new scripting language ( I know I could have used libgsf for this tool - maybe something for some spare cycles )

So, has to be said I wasn’t starting completely from scratch, Kohei already created mso-dumper for dumping the content of Excel documents in python. Last year I was happy with my one day’s work, I managed using Kohei’s mso-dumper code to quickly cobble together a tool that allowed the contents of the document to be displayed ( ala gsf list type format ) and also extract one or more streams. (…)

”

Status Updates▲▼

Team Reports

Build Service Team

Build Service Statistics. Statistics can found at Buildservice

GNOME Team

“

Nelson Marques: openSUSE 12.1 delivers GTK+ 3.2 with Broadway backend!

On the 25th of September 2001, Mathias Clasen announces the release of GTK+ 3.2.0. This release includes delivers:

Many improvements to the CSS theming support;
Width-for-height support in many more widgets (ex: GtkPanel, GtkMenuBar, GtkNotebook, etc);
New experimental Wayland and HTML5 ‘Broadway’ backeds;
GtkFileChooser and GtkAssistant received face-lifts;
New widgets (ex: GtkLockButton and GtkOverlay, etc);

”

openFATE Team

Top voted Features

“

        [decouple download and installation (Score: 368)](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: 195)](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: 167)](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: 157)](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: 113)](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.

“

        [Auto-lock with password when screen saver kicks in](https://features.opensuse.org/312871)

Enable automatic screen-lock with password required. E.g. after 5mins and 10seconds respectively
add a default “lock” button to the GUI taskbar

”

Feature Statistics

Statistics for openSUSE distribution in openFATE

Testing Team

“

      [Larry
        Finger: Weekly News for October 08](//lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-testing/2011-10/msg00000.html)

The next meeting of the Testing Core Team will be October 10, 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.

The Beta 1 release of 12.1 was released approximately one week ago and has been getting quite a bit of testing. On my systems, I have been doing updates from the Factory repos nearly every day. Most things are working without problems.

”

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

“

Bruno Friedmann: 3 new virtual party on SecondLife for upcoming openSUSE 12.1

Ladies & Gentlemen, months after the first virtual party organized for 11.4 launch,

Francoise (aka Morgane Marquis) and myself (tigerfoot) organize 3 new parties on SecondLife [4] to welcome and fest our next release openSUSE 12.1, coming around the 11.11.11.

Three virtual great Saturday: October 22th, November 12th and December 10th.
From 6 to 8am Australian DJ Ariella is back again.
From 9 to 11am (SL time : utc-9) we will have the pleasure to listen American DJ Esquivel.

You should take this opportunity to try Second Life, creating an avatar, coming to dance and drinking some beers with us at Geekos Place. (…)

”

Welcome new openSUSE Members

“

We are happy to announce the new openSUSE Members!

abittner (abittner)

”

Events & Meetings

Upcoming

No News!

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

Games Corner▲▼

The Section provides the Game of the Week, and Updates in the Game Repository

“

  [Tux
    Arena/Craciun Dan: Xonotic - Free Shooter Based Off Nexuiz](//www.tuxarena.com/2011/09/xonotic-0-5-free-shooter-based-off-nexuiz/)

Xonotic is a free first-person shooter game for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. The Xonotic project started as a fork of Nexuiz, a game which was popular for many years on Linux. The fork was created because Nexuiz was licensed to IllFonic game studios, and it is to be used as a platform for developing a commercial game for Steam, Xbox and PlayStation.

Xonotic uses the Darkplaces game engine, an engine which started as a Quake modification, but it was under heavy development and new improvements were made. Currently the developers of Xonotic state that the game is “on the par with most commercial games from 2006-2007″. Which, for the Linux platform is pretty important. (…)

”

“

Nelson Marques: Trine 2 coming for Linux?

I’ve just noticed that Frozenbyte is already doing the beta for Trine 2, a fun platform game. The fun thing is that according to several sources on their forums they are planing to launch Trine 2 for Linux alongside with the Windows version or “shortly after”. I never heard of this game before and the video makes me remember of a very old DOS game called Goblins III. Either way the video is awesome and I’m pretty sure this is a potential purchase for my game collection.

”

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-SU-2011:1076-2: important: MozillaThunderbird: Update to Mozilla Thunderbird 3.1.14

Table 1. SUSE Security Announcement

Package:	Update to Mozilla Thunderbird 3.1.14
Announcement ID:	openSUSE-SU-2011:1076-2
Date:	Tue, 4 Oct 2011 15:08:20 +0200 (CEST)
Affected Products:	openSUSE 11.4 openSUSE 11.3
Description:	fixing various bugs and security issues.

”

Kernel Review▲▼

“

  [Rares
    Aioanei: kernel weekly news – 08.10.2011](//schaiba.wordpress.com/2011/10/08/kernel-weekly-news-08-10-2011/)

Rares gives his weekly Kernel Review with openSUSE Flavor.

”

Tips and Tricks▲▼

For Desktop Users

“

    [N.B.Prashanth:
      Customizing GNOME3](//nbprashanth.wordpress.com/2011/10/01/customizing-gnome3/)

GNOME3 and the GNOME Shell are no doubt, major improvements. They bring in usability and quite a bit of eye candy (in a different way compared to compiz) while at the same time, a few features went missing in 3.0 release – like Emblems, for instance. Nevertheless, GNOME3 is a great release and has been extremely stable so far (Yes, i have been using it since it’s release in April.).

One major complaint that I hear from people is that GNOME3 is not as easy to customize as 2.x. A lot of people seem to think that they are “stuck” with the blue-black theme that comes by default. Ofcourse this is not the case. In this post, I ll explain a few ways in which we can customize GNOME3 and the GNOME Shell. (…)

”

“

    [Linuxaria: 4 programs to update your Blog from Linux](//linuxaria.com/recensioni/4-programs-to-update-your-blog-from-linux?lang=en)

Sometimes it’s useful to work offline, and once the article it’s finished publish it on your Blog. yes you can do it with an html editor, or also with a simple text editor like Vi or Emacs, but there are specialized programs that can ease your work of publishing and management of your online Blog.

So we’ll take a look at Scribefire, BloGTK, Blogilo and Qumana. (…)

”

For Commandline/Script Newbies

“

    [Wazi/Carla Schroder: How to Find Anything Under Linux](//olex.openlogic.com/wazi/2011/how-to-find-anything-under-linux/)

The Linux find, grep, and awk commands are amazing power tools for fine-grained file searches, and for finding things inside files. With them you can find the largest and newest files on a system, fine-tune search parameters, search for text inside files, and perform some slick user management tricks. (…)

”

For Developers and Programmers

“

    [The Geek Stuff/Himanshu Arora: Journey of a C Program to Linux Executable in 4 Stages](//www.thegeekstuff.com/2011/10/c-program-to-an-executable/)

You write a C program, use gcc to compile it, and you get an executable. It is pretty simple. Right?

Have you ever wondered what happens during the compilation process and how the C program gets converted to an executable?

There are four main stages through which a source code passes in order to finally become an executable. (…)

”

For System Administrators

“

    [IBM
      Developer Works/Tracy Bost: Learn Linux, 302 (Mixed environments):
      Internationalization](//www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-lpic3-312-6/index.html)

If you work in a mixed environment in which non-English characters are used, you need to understand character codes and code pages as they relate to your locale. You also need to understand Linux and Windows environments differ when interpreting name spaces. Although Samba supports internationalization, if you work with older Windows clients , Samba 2.x versions, or otherwise need to use a specific character set other than Unicode, you’ll need to do a bit of configuration tuning. Depending upon the environment’s locale in use, building and patching conversion libraries may also be necessary. In this article, learn how to handle internationalization in your Linux environment. (…)

”

“

    [ZDNET/Steven
      J. Vaughan-Nichols: How to lock down Linux](//www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/how-to-lock-down-linux/9665)

Linux is, by design, a very secure operating system, but so what? You can have the best security system in the world on your house, but if you leave your front-door open anyone can still walk in. Even people who know better, like Linux kernel developers, blow it sometimes. That’s what happened to the Linux Foundation’s constellation of sites. Multiple important Linux sites were down for weeks and as of October 3rd, kernel.org is still down. This doesn’t have to happen to you. Here are a few simple suggestions from me, and some more advanced ones from Greg Kroah-Hartman, one of Linux’s lead developers. (…)

”

Planet SUSE▲▼

“

Andrew Wafaa: Hardware needed for openSUSE on ARM

As I mentioned before, we have an initial target platform identified for testing the work of all those involved in the openSUSE ARM port. The problem is we need to obtain the hardware.

I am in discussions trying to get some corporate sponsorship of hardware, but we can not rely soley on those kind companies that would like to see us succeed. We as a community need to help ourselves succeed, as such I’ve set up a campaign on Pledgie to enable us the community to contribute to the effort for obtaining hardware. (…)

”

“

Gregory M. Zysk: Looking back at the openSUSE Conference 2011 (oSC)

Well, once again, I had a chance to meet a community, one of which, I have never met before ;-)

I arrived at Zentrifuge on the 10th of September for the warmup to the oSC. Immediately after arrival, I was greeted with warm smiles, open discussions, and cold beer ;-) No one knew who I was, but they all welcomed me. As the evening continued, I was witness to how the community also made sure that they welcomed everyone, once they arrived. This is pure class and I would like to say is very important to a newbie who is entering the community. This is one aspect where openSUSE makes the difference, since it is not practiced to this extent in many other communities.

”

“

Gregory M. Zysk: openSUSE Marketing Hackfest 2011

On the 15th and 16 of September 2011, following the oSC, the marketing team held a Marketing Hackfest at the SUSE headquarters in Nuremberg, Germany.

I was asked to attend this event for several reasons aside from the normal Marketing related things, two of which were the most important to me being new to this event. One, was to observe how the marketing team functions as a unit. And second, to hold meetings with different people to discuss certain issues with an outlook of solving them for the benefit of the openSUSE community. Moreover, many of us had a chance to further discuss (in person) initiatives started at the oSC, since we had a chance to digest them and come with some valuable input that was used to move things forward ;-)

”

“

Sascha Manns: Balsam Professional 12.1 Boxdesign (based on openSUSE)

Now it is out, our new Boxdesign:

”

openSUSE Forums▲▼

“

  [openSUSE 12.1 Beta comments](//forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/pre-release-beta/465917-re-12-1-beta-comments.html)

  The development of openSUSE 12.1 has gone past the Milestones stage, and has now achieved Beta status. As usual there's a lot of activity around this in the forums. If you're interested in the comments. reports etc by forums members testing the release, this is the thread to watch. Some solutions for current issues can be found here as well.

”

“

[KDE 4.7 in Tumbleweed ?](//forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/tumbleweed/465269-kde-4-7-tumbleweed.html)

  It's already a while ago, that we were presented with openSUSE Tumbleweed, the rolling release version of openSUSE. Also a while ago, that KDE 4.7 was released. Yet, there's still no KDE 4.7 in Tumbleweed, using the KDE:/Release: repos is not the way to go. Greg Kroah Hartman, maintainer of Tumbleweed, stated in one of the forums threads that there are some issues in KDE 4.7 that keep it from being in Tumbleweed. So, patience seems to be the best for now. Greg will probably let us know, when things get cleared.

”

“

[Adobe Flash 11 64-bit has finally been released to the public for download](//forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/64-bit/466013-adobe-flash-11-64-bit-has-finally-been-released-public-download.html)

  The title says it all. Adobe released a 64bit version of their Flash player 11. Some members report erronious behaviour, others, like me, have no issues. Read the thread to find out about the details

”

“

  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▲▼

Reports

“

    [TDF Blog: The Document Foundation publishes details of LibreOffice 3.4.3 security
      fixes](//blog.documentfoundation.org/2011/10/05/the-document-foundation-publishes-details-of-libreoffice-3-4-3-security-fixes/)

The Internet, October 4, 2011 – The Document Foundation (TDF) publishes some details of the security fixes included with the recently released LibreOffice 3.4.3, and included in the older 3.3.4 version. Following industry best practice, details of security fixes are withheld until users have been given time to migrate to the new version.

RedHat security researcher Huzaifa Sidhpurwala identified a memory corruption vulnerability in the code responsible for loading Microsoft Word documents in LibreOffice. This flaw could have been used for nefarious purposes, such as installing viruses, through a specially-crafted file. The corresponding vulnerability description is CVE-2011-2713,”Out-of-bounds property read in binary .doc filter”. (…)

”

“

    [The Register/Dan Goodin: Check your machines for malware, Linux developers told](//www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/04/linux_repository_res/)

Following a series of embarrassing intrusions that hit the servers used to maintain and distribute the Linux operating system, project elders have advised all developers to check their Linux machines for signs of compromise.

Emails sent Friday by Linux kernel lead developers Greg Kroah-Hartman and H Peter Anvin arrived as volunteers with the open-source project worked to bring LinuxFoundation.org, Linux.com, and Kernel.org back online following attacks that gained root access to the multiple servers that host the sites.

Among other things, project leaders are requiring all developers to regenerate the cryptographic keys used to upload source code to the site, and to ensure their systems are free of rootkits and other types of malware. (…)

”

LOL

“

    [like-a-boss.org: hacking the imperial death march](//like-a-boss.org/2011/09/30/hacking-the-imperial-death-march/)

One of the great things about the original Star Wars trilogy, was the “lived in”, junky, hacked together aesthetic of the Star Wars universe. Everything was a bit trashed, as if real people actually lived there. Thankfully, that’s one of the things that George Lucas hasn’t tinkered with in his endless quest to ruin the childhood memories of a generation. So it’s heartening to see this tradition carried on with the playing of the imperial death march on miscellaneous hacked together hardware. Enjoy … (…)

”

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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▲▼