openSUSE Weekly News 187 is out!

6. Aug 2011 | Sascha Manns | No License

We are pleased to announce our Issue 187 from openSUSE Weekly News.

Cover

openSUSE Weekly News

### openSUSE Weekly News Team

187 Edition

Legal Notice

This work (compilation) is licenced under Creative Commons attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. The rights for the compilation itself are copyright by Sascha Manns.

Opt-Out: If you are an Author and don’t want to be included in the openSUSE Weekly News, just send a Mail to: <[news@opensuse.org](mailto:news@opensuse.org)>.

Copyrights of the referenced articles are owned by original authors or copyright owners. If you want to reuse those articles, ask each original copyright owner which license should be applied. We don’t reprint any Article without a free license, we just introduce it then under the Agreement of the German Copyright Law.

If you are an author and want to set your blog under a free License just visit: //goo.gl/Tw3td

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: 2011-08-06

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 New/Updated Applications @ openSUSE Security Updates Kernel Review Tips and Tricks

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

Reports Feedback Credits Acknowledgements Copyrights

List of our Licenses Trademarks Translations

We are pleased to announce our 187th issue of the openSUSE Weekly News.

You can also read this issue in other formats here.

Enjoy reading :-)

Announcements▼

Important

The Articles inside this Section are in full. If you are already knowing the stuff in news.opensuse.org, then you can skip this section through using the TOC.

“

  [Volunteers
    needed for the conference](//news.opensuse.org/2011/08/01/volunteers-needed-conference/)

As you know, the third international openSUSE Conference is happening in a couple of weeks from now, you already should be registered! For the organization team this means that we are really picking up pace now and start to feel dizzy. One of the reasons for that is that we are short on helping hands. We especially miss “boots on the ground“, we need your help!

Being a boot on the ground means we need people to help us at the conference in September. There is no special knowledge about the location or other details needed. So far we have 5 tasks where we desperately need people to help out. Venue setup, Registration Desk, Session Chairs and the Snack Bar. Read on to learn how you can contribute to the success of the conference.

Venue Setup

The Zentrifuge is not an event location in the classical sense so we have to do a lot of setup tasks the days before the conference starts. For instance we need to make sure that the seminar rooms have enough chairs, multisockets and a working projector. We also need to setup the lounge with sofas, equip the Beergarden with tables, distribute waste bins and so on and so on. Most of this we will need to do on Friday/Saturday before the conference and it’s a lot of physical labor. If you can help with this please lets us know on the volunteers page or let us know at opensuse-conference@opensuse.org.

The Registration Desk

At the conference, every morning from 9:00 to 10:30, we will have a registration desk. It will handle the registration of new visitors, distribution of info materials and answering of general questions and such. We need two people per day to man this desk during the conference. On Sunday, as it’s the first day, it better be three! If you can help with this please lets us know on the volunteers page or let us know at opensuse-conference@opensuse.org.

Session Chair

We have two floors in the Zentrifuge and both have a main room and some smaller rooms for workshops and birds of a feather sessions. For both floors we need two people per day to be a chair for the sessions that will take place. Being a chair means that you introduce the next presenter, make sure the sessions stick to the schedule and answer all questions speakers might have. This task takes a bit of experience as speaker/moderator to make the introductions, a wristwatch and, ideally, some technical knowledge with projectors/laptops. If you can help with this please lets us know on the volunteers page or drop us a mail at opensuse-conference@opensuse.org.

The Snack Bar

This year we will run our own snack bar at the venue. The organization team has already seen to that foods and drinks are available and that we have a fully equipped snack bar ready. Now we need people that help us to man the snack bar to sell, sell, sell. You would need to sell snacks and drinks, make sure that we don’t run out and count the moneys! If you can help with this please lets us know on the volunteers page or drop us a mail atopensuse-conference@opensuse.org.

Evening Manager and Lock Service

One nice side effect of the Zentrifuge not being a classical event location is that we will have very long opening hours. People can continue to collaborate and don’t have to leave the place until 23:00. But this also means that we have to have at least one person per day that makes sure it doesn’t get to wild and that closes everything in the night. If you can help with this please lets us know on the volunteers page or drop us a mail at opensuse-conference@opensuse.org.

Other tasks

The team held couple of meetings which resulted in a nice list of stuff to do, like organizing hardware for the venue, ordering internet, food and drinks and so on. If you rather want to help with this, you’re more than welcome to contribute to the conferences success! A good start is to subscribe to our mailing list and participate in our meetings.

Thanks a lot in advance!

”

“

Are you ready for RWX³ ?

Less than 50 days left before the 3rd openSUSE conference starts. A lot of people are working hard for this to be another successful gathering. Are you registered yet? If you are still undecided, and looking for a reason why you should come, let me tell you this:

You will miss many interesting talks, you’ve heard the little birds sing that kernel star Greg KH will keynote at oSC…
More awesome keynote speakers and sessions are going to be announced in the next week or so, STAY TUNED!
You will miss one of the greatest FOSS events in the world.
You will miss a chance to meet other fellow Lizards from all over the world in person.
You will miss the chance to meet people from other projects like KDE, GNOME and LibreOffice.
Imagine the interesting talks you will have in the halls of the conference, if you won’t come you will miss those too.
You will miss to visit Nuremberg, one of the most beautiful and historical cities on Europe.
You will miss tons of group-hugs.
You will lose the chance to kick people that annoy you on IRC and on Mailing lists.
You will miss the chance of drinking lots of openSUSE-branded beers and eating tons of Wurst having a good excuse, you will be in Germany after all so it’s your ‘duty’ to do that.

If you want to come, but money is a problem then you can apply for assistance through the Conference travel sponsorship program. People of openSUSE ‘are willing to help you, as much as possible.

The conference will take place in Zentrifuge which is a very interesting place to be. Zentrifuge has an exhibition and event hall on the former grounds of a company called AEG. The hall is used to host art exhibitions of local and international artists and workshops. It is managed by a foundation that helps network the art world. The people there are very excited about the idea of hosting our conference so you can count on having a great time there during the conference.

Oliver Fecher visited Zentrifuge Venue and took a few shoots of the place that will host the Conference. Take a closer look at the photos and imagine you and your favorite FOSS people having endless talks there.

”

Google Summer of Code▲▼

![](//michal.hrusecky.net/wp-content/uploads/GSoC2011_300x200.png)

“

  [Ratan Sebastian: GSOC 2011:
    ssc Week 10](//rxvl.in/post/8339259286/gsoc-2011-ssc-week-10)

Tasks completed this week:

Implemented checkout of an existing appliance from Studio. ssc checkout –appliance-id=APPLIANCE_ID now works.
Integration tests for the appliance, package and repository handlers. (Currently at about 50% test coverage).
Completed the refactoring and migration to the New DirectoryManager module.
Added the build and build_status commands

The tasks for next week are:

Improving test coverage and removing all the deprecated and unused methods.
Writing unit tests for the helper modules.
Writing usage examples for the app to help new users.

If you have any suggestions for features. Please do write in on the studio-users mailing list.

”

“

  [Justine Leng: Implement sorting functions for Requests](//obsforandroid.wordpress.com/2011/08/01/implement-sorting-functions-for-requests/)

One of the goals for this OBS Mobile Project to make the list of requests sortable, by date/time, requester, target project/package, and request state.(…)

”

“

  [Justine Leng: New Features Added to Requests](//obsforandroid.wordpress.com/2011/08/05/new-features-added-to-requests/)

I would like to share some exciting progress on the OBS Mobile Project:

Request state has been added to each request;
Sorting functions have been implemented for Requests;
A search filter has been added to the Request page.

Now, when the user logs into the list of requests, the user will not only be able to see the state of each request, but also sort requests based on 4 criteria:

request date
requester’s name
target project/package
request state

”

“

David Williams: Entomologist UI Changes – Weekly report #11

This week has involved trying to get the UI in place for ToDo List exporting/configuration. The work should now be finished and I’ve begun trying to implement Remember the Milk exporting which is made a bit complicated by how they accept API requests but I hope to have this finished as soon as possible. I don’t really have that much to talk about this week as nothing huge has changed but I will keep working on integrating the services.

What I hope to achieve is Google Calendar, Remember The Milk and WebDAV server integration by the Soft Pencils Down Date, which I believe is the 19th of August. I think it’s perfectly achievable to get these features to a finished state by then and I’ll continue working on having them integrated. As I’ve previously mentioned I would like to use the final week as a time to merge and test everything to try and uncover any bugs I’ve missed whilst adding these features.

”

Status Updates▲▼

Distribution

“

    [Michal Marek: Mounting /usr in the initrd](//lizards.opensuse.org/2011/08/03/mounting-usr-in-the-initrd/)

I changed the openSUSE mkinitrd to mount the /usr filesystem in the initrd, if /usr is a separate partition. I hope this will calm down some heated discussions about systemd, udev, etc. It’s not 100% ready yet, some setups like root or /usr on nfs or md might not work as expected (*), but the common usecases should be covered. Try updating mkinitrd from the Base:System project and let me know if it works for you. Before testing it, you should do a backup of your initrd:

cp /boot/initrd-`uname -r`{,.orig}

and create a section in /boot/grub/menu.lst pointing to the /boot/initrd-*.orig file.

”

“

    [Andreas Jaeger: Factory Progress 2011-08-05](//lizards.opensuse.org/2011/08/05/factory-progress-2011-08-05/)

The last few weeks have seen some a lot of package updates thus keeping our review and checkin team busy. I’d like to mention Sascha Peilicke who reviewed alone this week lots of packages. Have a look at just two numbers: In all of July we had 1001 check-ins and just from August 1st to 4th we had already 276 checkins.

The legal team has also gone through the long list of new packages and package updates during the legal reviews and reduced this week the list from over 100 packages to 12 packages now. Thanks Ciaran and Christoper for your legal review!

Policy

Detailed changes

Coolo explained the current policy on how detailed the changes entry in packages should be:

“

I repeat what I said before so everyone is on the same page:

Version numbers are per se no information and we want to offer users an easy, standarized way to find out what changed. But it’s not the packager’s job to collect upstream NEWS. So if the upstream project does not offer a summary, then say so in the .changes file, so also the user knows. If the upstream project does not provide a summary but a detailed web page, then a link is fine too.

”

Major Package checkins

Desktops

GNOME saw another step to the stable GNOME 3.2.0 with the GNOME 3.1.4 testing release getting pushed into Factory. KDE’s new release 4.7 is now also in Factory.

So far, the new kontact 2.0 version has not been submitted for Factory and you can get it from the KDE repositories. Btw. the openSUSE KDE developers have made the sqlite backend the default for akonadi since the upstream default of mysql caused too many problems. If you’re running already kmail2 and like to switch followIsmail’s advice to change in ~/.config/akonadi/akonadiserverrc the line Driver=QMYSQL to Driver=QSQLITE.

New packages

New packages include quassel (an irc client) clementine (an amarok competitor) shorewall (new firewall). Also amarok was updated to 2.4.3 and thunderbird got updated together with enigmail.

Mounting /usr in the initrd

Michal Marek updated mkinitrd to mount /usr in the initrd. In the past, we had to move quite a lot libraries and binaries from /usr to the rootpartition to allow having /usr as separate partition that can be mounted in all supported scenarios, like via nfs. This led to changes in many places and testing that everything worked as well. With mounting from the initrd, we do not need to move binaries and libraries anymore around.

Michal calls for testers on his blog and is also going to enhance the initrd to support all cases. Right now the simple cases work but support for booting from nfs is not supported yet.

Other interesting bits

openSUSE Conference

Please register now for the conference!

”

Important Links

Team Reports

Build Service Team

Build Service Statistics. Statistics can found at Buildservice

openFATE Team

Top voted Features

“

        [decouple download and installation (Score: 361)](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: 188)](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: 162)](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: 143)](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: 107)](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.

“

        [SUSE Distribution for embedded devices](https://features.opensuse.org/312689)

A SUSE Distribution for embedded devices, size less or equal 128 MB (text-only installation), requiring less than 256 MB of RAM (operating with for example routing functions).

Should perhaps contain a pattern, installing all features needed for use as a router operation system like m0n0wall, fli4l, styx or pfsense.

”

“

        [YaST Software Management -- Install from cache](https://features.opensuse.org/312690)

Since Software Management allows users the option to save downloaded packages, it would be nice to also give the option of installing a saved RPM.

”

“

        [Package dbus-c++](https://features.opensuse.org/312691)

//sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/dbus-cplusplus/

This provides C++ bindings for dbus.

This is an optional dependency for gnote.

”

“

        [Font Rendering esp. KDE](https://features.opensuse.org/312694)

Improve the font rendering on opensuse especially on KDE. Bring it upto the standards of ubuntu at least.

”

“

        [openSUSE Linux 12.1: Create a new firewall](https://features.opensuse.org/312708)

My suggestion is to join all the features of SuSEfirewall2 , with Dynamic Firewall , FirewallD and system-config-firewall of Fedora Linux, Interactive Firewall of Mandriva Linux, dynfw of Gentoo Linux, ufw of Ubuntu Linux, the Shorewall , the Firestarter , the Kmyfirewall , the PF (firewall) , the Vuurmuur , the Firewall Builder , the Astaro Security Gateway Software Appliance , the Firewall Analyzer , the Smoothwall , the ClearOS , the Endian Firewall , the Cisco IOS , the IPCop and IPFire , after this union of features, it would create a new Firewall, more stable, secure, efficient, current, complete, modern, flexible, integrated, manageable, easy and fast to use, dynamic and interactive: SUSEfirewall3. (…)

”

“

        [openSUSE Linux 12.1: Create a new AppArmor](https://features.opensuse.org/312714)

My suggestion is to join all the features of AppArmor 2.3 ,with SELinux , the MSEC , the TOMOYO Linux and grsecurity , after this union of features, it would create a new AppArmor 3, more everything that was spoken in the feature: 312708.

”

“

        [openSUSE Linux 12.1: Create a new YaST](https://features.opensuse.org/312715)

My suggestion is to join all the features of YaST2 ,with Webmin , the Horde , the ISPConfig , Froxlor , the SysCP , the MCC , the RouterOS , the FreeRADIUS , the SAGU-PRO , the OpenNMS , the Cacti , the CiscoWorks , the Collectd , the Nagios , the Zentyal , the SME Server , the N2RRD , the Observium , the Munin , the MRTG , the RRDtool , the TclMon , the Zabbix , the ispCP , the NetXMS , the Isyvmon , the Zarafa and MDS , after this union of features, it would create a new YaST3, more everything that was spoken in the feature: 312708.

”

Feature Statistics

Statistics for openSUSE distribution in openFATE

Testing Team

“

      [Larry Finger: Weekly News for August 06](//lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-testing/2011-08/msg00002.html)

In last week’s discussion of our upcoming Open Bugs Day to be held on August 21, 2011 from 0:00 to 23:59 UTC, I failed to supply the URL for the web page describing the event, which is//en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Open-Bugs-Day.

Our next IRC meeting will be at 17:00 UTC, August 15 on Channel #opensuse-testing on the Freenode IRC Network. irc://irc.freenode.net/opensuse-testing. We will discuss our experiences with MS4 and finish the planning for Open Bugs Day.

”

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

“

    [Jos Poortvliet: KDE release on Radio Antwerp](//blog.jospoortvliet.com/2011/07/kde-release-on-radio-antwerp.html)

As usual lots going on. I haven’t mentioned it anywhere yet, so: congrats to all KDE peeps for therelease of SC 4.7 ;-)

I presented the release on Radio Antwerp Centraal a few days ago. I had helped out a bit with the release announcement but hadn’t had a recent look so I had to catch up to the major highlights quickly. Worked out great, though. Also discussed Tumbleweed and GNOME with the radio dude. Not sure what the initial plan was but I found myself talk for a full program in the end… Surprise, huh?

On the other side of the world I went to CLS last week. Still have to turn my notes into something readable - struggling with crappy sleep, family visits and other time-eating things. And the DS is upcoming… But I’ll blog about this later, promise!

”

“

Jos Poortvlieet: And they keep rocking…

Over the last few months the openSUSE ambassadors have continued to visit conferences around the world. Since our previous report beginning of May, several big events have happened and we’ll treat you on a report on some of those.

Already covered in blogs

Let’s start with a few quick links to reports which are already online and probably read by some of you. There is for example the huge splash Greece ambassadors made at Fosscomm 2011 which took place on May 7 and 8 in Greece. With 8 presentations as well as a similar number of lightning talks and a workshop on OBS openSUSE ruled the conference. The team co-hosted the GNOME community in their booth as well as the Enlightenment project and a few others, showing the open and collaborative spirit of openSUSE! Last but not least, they organized a late 11.4 release party which ended up having Red Hat, Ubuntu, Slackware, FreeBSD and many other visitors joining the party!

The Greek team also organized a summer camp from which you can see pictures in their facebook group. Rest assured we’ll make them work harder after they so clearly spend a lot of time drinking and hanging in the sun…

Most interestingly, the Greek team went to the Xariseto.gr bazaar. In Thanasis’ words: Xariseto is a festival where people meet and donate their personal belongings which they don’t use any more. So as a Linux and openSUSE community we thought that participating in these kind of festivals is really interesting.

The result was people from 7 to 70 years old learning about openSUSE… The team also went to the EL/LAK conference in Thessaloniki.

And as was quite visible on planet openSUSE, we had a presence at LinuxTag in Berlin.

More reports

While not all openSUSE ambassadors have the time to send in event reports, we are always happy to read the ones we get. Below a few of them.

Chile, FLISoL

At the end of April, Ricardo Varas Santana attended the FLISoL event in Chile, which has about 1000 visitors. He gave a talk titled “openSUSE, Linux in Green and for all”, talking about what openSUSE is, how to get involved as well as what technologies we have. About 400 DVD’s were handed out as well!

USA

Orv Beach participated in the Southwest Computer Conference where he presented openSUSE to an eager crowd. He gave out Tuxes and Geeko’s as well as 160 DVD’s and flyers to the visitors, mostly members from Computer Clubs around the USA.

Taiwan

Max “Sakana” from Taiwan wrote us three reports in one. First of all, he as well as several other openSUSE ambassadors was at GNOME.Asia 2011, where the GNOME 3 LiveDVD’s (based on openSUSE) were handed out. Pictures can be found in theopenSUSE flickr pool. But Max and the Taiwan team did more. Max teaches students openSUSE at the Ming Chi University of Technology, where openSUSE is quite popular. Moreover, there were two seminars at two different colleges, the Ling Tung University and the National Formosa University about SUSE Studio and Nagios with openSUSE. openSUSE DVD’s were handed out and according to Max, openSUSE did very well!

Great Britain

Stuart Tanner went to the RedRat Computer Market in Sheffield. He was the only linux person in the room and brought a large 42″ FullHD TV to demo it. He tried to lure amateur-photographers into Free Software, aweing them with ShowFoto, DigiKam and similar tools

Netherlands

Your humble writer has also done his small share the last months, showing up at a computer event in the Netherlands. A team of 4 manned a booth, held 2 presentations, handed out a few hundred DVD’s as well as posters and in general showed openSUSE rocks also in NL!

more work

First of all, the above are just a few of the events we know about. For example, in Brazil, openSUSE was present on FISL, the Porto Alegre event with over 8000 visitors. We’re eagerly awaiting the event report! More events happened, more will come. But this is not the only thing openSUSE ambassadors do!

Take the incredible Baltasar Ortega who has been covering openSUSE and KDE technology in his blog for years! If you can read Spanish, be sure to bookmark his blog. He will point you togems like the Studio Imagewriter or share wonderful tutorials like these. Max wrote an article about “openSUSE and Hadoop” the May edition of the Hongkong Chinese/Taiwanese Linux Pilot Magazine.

And did you notice our Greek team translates the awesome Weekly News in Greece?

Value

The work these ambassadors do for openSUSE is incredibly valuable and should not be under estimated. Christos Bountalis, working on fillup-ng in openSUSE, joined after meeting the Greek openSUSE ambassadors at an event, remarking in his interview, when asked why he joined openSUSE: I have found many nice and interesting peopleAnd indeed. People are what makes the difference between a good and a great Free Software project. And our Ambassadors are often the first people outsiders see!

Thanks!

So we’d like to thank our ambassadors for their awesome work, and invite anyone to join their ranks!

You can also help in other ways. For example, if you are an openSUSE developer or follow development closely, add a glimpse of what is coming to the wiki. Or if you know a bit about openSUSE, add and improve our talking points! We also can always use artwork, help with writing and many other things. Feel free to contact the openSUSE marketing team on opensuse-marketing@opensuse.org and offer to help out!

”

Events & Meetings

Upcoming

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.

From Ambassadors

“

    [1st Greek openSUSE Collaboration Summer weekend Camp: The Report](//news.opensuse.org/2011/08/03/1st-greek-opensuse-collaboration-camp-the-report/)

From Friday the 15th to Sunday the 17th of July Lizards and other FOSS enthusiasts were gathered at Katerini for the 1st Greek openSUSE Collaboration Summer weekend Camp.

The whole event started at the Hotel pool where all met before the actual beginning of the event . After everybody that was expected came, the talks started.

Fridays talks were more related to the openSUSE local community. Efstathios Iosifidis and Kostas Koudaraspresented Lokalize and gtranslator and show people how useful tool those are. Efstathios Agrapidis along withStella Rouzi presented how you can help the community by translating the openSUSE weekly news.

After a dinner break from 19:30 to 20:30 there was a Translation contest. The original plans were on letting people translating some wiki articles in a certain time but since people were enthusiast about Lokalize andgtranslator the program Committee decided to change it and give people .po files to translate. The contest should normally last one and a half hour total but everybody asked for more time to do more work, so Diomidis Anadiotis talk ‘I am new to the community’ was postponed and the contest lasted until midnight. During the contest 20 applications were translated from English to Greece.

The program was made lose so that people had the opportunity to physically collaborate, it was considered more important for the people to have fun working as a community than actually have a tight schedule and this actually worked perfect through the weekend. After all the hard work of the first day, people wore their bathing-suits and went to the Hotel’s pool party where they had tons of fun. People there had beers, conversations about FOSS, late night pool games. The last of them actually left the party after 4:00. Once again it was proven that FOSS is tightly connected with fun.

At Saturday there was an early wake around 8:30 for breakfast and around 10:15 the program started with the announcement of the previous night’s contest where Diomidis Anadiotis won the Geeko plush reward. The First presentation of the day was ‘Using Yast – System management: easy, fast and with many options’ where Efstatios Agrapidis and Kostas Koudaras presented how and why to use YaST more. The day continued with Theo Chatzimichosfrom the Gentoo community presenting Django and making a tutorial of how and why to use it. After thatStavros Kalapothas and Efstathios Hatzikiriakidis fromThe-Hackerspace presented ‘Security and arduino: Multifactor authentication system (voice recognition and RFID technologies)’ which was a four hour workshop with a short break.

After the workshop, at around 15:00 there was long break where once again there were great FOSS conversations among cold beer, water-gun fights, pool volley and other water sports… Some people though preferred to take a nap since last nights sleep was not enough for them.

At around 17:30 the program started again with ‘Qt Signals And Slots’ from Antonis Tsapaliokas fromKDE and continued with another workshop from the people of The-Hackerspace titled ‘Security and arduino: Wireless devices remote control (client – server control center)’. There was a dinner break and then continued with a ‘Vim introduction’ by Yannis Chatzimichos which was really interesting and showed people why Vim is better than other editors. After that there was the previous days scheduled talk from Diomidis Anidiotis titled ‘I’m new in the community’ where he talked about how new people to a FOSS community feel entering a community. It was a great feedback for all and this lead to the next and last planned conversation for the day which was ‘Collaborating inside a FOSS community’, where all people expressed their opinion about how people should do that. Many valuable conclusions were made there. Of course once again people went to the pool-bar afterward and continued the conversation there.

Sunday was the last day and it started around 10:00 after breakfast with the Gnome community andEfstathios Iosifidis presenting ‘Surviving with Gnome 3 in a KDE-world’. Efstathios Agrapidis took up the baton presenting ‘I’m OBS-ing, are you OBS-ing too?’. Unfortunately there were some internet issues so instead of the OBS workshop, after the OBS presentation we had Theo Chatzimichos (due to popular demand) continuing the workshop on Django. After that came George Tsapaliokas presenting ‘KDE Frameworks’ and how to work with them. The day finished with a talk from Athanasios-Ilias Rousinopoulos titled ‘openSUSE Medical project’ where as the new project leader he talked to us about it and why we should all help this project.

As you can see from the photos, the event was a success as it reached its goal providing education through presentations, workshops and discussions, all that through summer entertainment.

Most important, all participants are impatiently looking forward to the next event! Soon the videos of the workshops and talks will be available at YouTube, stay tuned…

Special Thanks to Giorgos Tsapaliokas and Stella Rouzi for helping more from all on organizing the whole event. Also the Greek openSUSE community really wants to thank the people from Gentoo, KDE, The-Hackerspace andYannis Chatzimichos for participating at the event with their valuable and really interesting presentations and workshops.

”

Communication

Contributors

openSUSE Connect

New/Updated Applications @ openSUSE▲▼

“

        [Bruno Friedmann: ATI/AMD fglrx 8.872 Catalyst 11.7 available for openSUSE 11.3,
            11.4, 12.1 (Factory)](//lizards.opensuse.org/2011/08/01/atiamd-fglrx-8-872-catalyst-11-7-available-for-opensuse-11-3-11-4-12-1-factory/)

I’ve rebuild and published the new rpms last wednesday, but didnt find the time to give some news here.

Please refer to my previous article where all the installation procedure is explained.

Quick résumé :
There’s no full changelog about them, but Catalyst 11.7 installer (pdf)
Get the cheat-sheet 11.6 version
Kernel supported up to 3.0x version
Removed support of openSUSE 11.2, if you are still using it with Evergreen project, the repository still exist with older version
Wrong (to my point of view) create an xorg.conf file which is unneeded if you work with /etc/xorg.conf.d/50-device.conf and have driver “fglrx&quot inside

(…)

”

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▲▼

“

  [lwn.net/Greg Kroah-Hartmann: The 3.0.1 Stable Update is Out](//lwn.net/Articles/454216/)

I’m announcing the release of the 3.0.1 kernel. All users of the 3.0 kernel series must upgrade. The updated 3.0.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-3.0.y.git and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: //git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-3.0.y.git;a=summary

”

“

  [Rares Aioanei: kernel weekly news – 06.08.2011](//schaiba.wordpress.com/2011/08/06/kernel-weekly-news-06-08-2011/)

Rares gives his weekly Kernel Review with openSUSE Flavor.

”

Tips and Tricks▲▼

For Desktop Users

“

    [Dominik Zajac: Use SSH for more secure browsing in public networks](//www.banym.de/security/use-ssh-for-more-secure-browsing-in-public-networks)

In the time of free wifi and free internet connections in every hotel, bar or cafe you should be sure your connections are secure. In some cases you can’t trust the connection but you need to go online and read some mails or share some documents. In this case some basic tools like SSH and Firefox can help you to build an secure connection to an known computer in the internet you can trust (for example your own root server).

To make more clear what I am talking about i created this small diagram to make it more easy for me to explain what I am doing with this SSH connection and how I can benefit from it. (…)

”

“

    [Wazi/Dmitry Kaglik: How To Create an Ebook with OpenOffice.org](//olex.openlogic.com/wazi/2011/how-to-create-an-ebook-with-openoffice-org/)

Do you want to see your name on the front page of a book? It’s easier than you might think. First, write the book. Next, follow these simple steps to prepare an ebook using the free OpenOffice.org desktop publishing application.

Publishing ebooks today can be a DIY business. If you write for a specific audience, you can create a successful book without the help of big companies, and get your work into the hands of readers who can download ebooks from popular sites such as Amazon CreateSpace, Lulu, or Lightning Source.

Let’s assume you’ve already written the book you want to publish. Your work might be in plain text format or written using a word processing application. No matter where it starts out, import it into OOo Writer and use that program’s rich set of tools to create a file for publication. (…)

”

“

    [Linux.com/Jack Wallen: Advanced Layering Techniques on Linux with GIMP](//www.linux.com/learn/tutorials/477968-advanced-layering-techniques-on-linux-with-gimp)

The GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) is one of the most powerful image editing tools available. It is, effectively, the Photoshop of the open source world; and with that kind of title comes a level of power most never take advantage of. One feature that should be a must-use for all digital artists is the layer. Using layers not only makes work easier, it gives digital art more depth and more flexibility.

What I want to do is to illustrate some of the more advanced methods for using layering in GIMP. Once these techniques have been mastered, creating and editing digital masterpieces will be so much easier. I will assume the basics of layers is understood (such as how to add, copy, and delete layers), so the 101-level layer steps will not be discussed.(…)

”

For Commandline/Script Newbies

“

    [BashShell.net/Mike: Line Addressing in sed](//bashshell.net/utilities/line-addressing-in-sed/)

Line Addressing

Line addressing allows you to select the lines that you want to work with. Addressing can use regular expressions to determine the lines or list numbers for the lines in the format of a number. If two numbers are used separated by a comma then it becomes a range.(…)

”

“

    [Linuxaria: Be nice with your process on Linux](//linuxaria.com/pills/be-nice-with-your-process-on-linux?lang=en)

On Linux there is a way to set/change the priority of processes, the user can act to give greater or lesser priority to its own processes.

For example you are running a backup with rsync or doing a tar, but you do not want these processes use all your CPU, in these cases you can make use of the nice command. (…)

”

“

    [Ankur Aggarwal: How Bash Shell interprets a command ??](//flossstuff.wordpress.com/2011/07/09/how-bash-shell-interprets-a-command/)

In this previous part of this article we learned about types of shells . In most of the Linux distributions , bash shell is the default shell. So we are going to discuss the working of bash shell in this article . Fasten your seat belts and get ready for the bash ride :D (…)

”

For System Administrators

“

    [ServerWatch/Joe Brockmeier: Try collectl for System Monitoring](//www.serverwatch.com/tutorials/article.php/3937996/Try-collectlfor-System-Monitoring.htm)

Most Linux system administrators are familiar with sar for collecting system status data. However, there’s a few ways that sar shows its age and doesn’t quite live up to expectations. If you’re looking for a newer utility that also handles NFS, Slab data and sub-second intervals, collectl may better fit the bill.

The collectl utility was written by Mark Seger, and it is dual-licensed under the Artistic License and GNU General Public License (GPL). It’s written in Perl and does a bit more than just read from /proc and copy data to the terminal. (…)

”

Planet SUSE▲▼

“

Jos Poortvliet: Harmony horrors

Besides the positive things, there’s some less nice stuff to talk about.

On the other side of the web, I kept discussing Harmony with Allison (Canonical) until I asked something and got no response anymore.

Bringing up arguments like ”it provides more clarity to contributors, a ‘check point’ to look at the legal situation and reassurance of legal status to users” or the already-debunked ”but it is helps protect the copyrights and handling of disappearing contributors” doesn’t convince me that contributors should sign away their code while running the risk TO GET SUED BY THE COMPANY THEY JUST GAVE THEIR CODE TO FOR WRITING IT IN THE FIRST PLACE. Seriously, that’s a risk, read Michael’s post. (…)

”

openSUSE Forums▲▼

“

  [openSUSE 12.1 Milestone 3 available for download](//forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/pre-release-beta/463068-opensuse-12-1-milestone-3-available-download.html)

  It was brought to my attention that there was no mentioning this event in the previous openSUSE Weekly News. Well, here it is. Like with the Milestones for the previous releases, we see growing activity in the forums with each new milestone release. Members test, try, use them, they report bugs, all to make openSUSE 12.1 better than any openSUSE before. Read the thread, read about issues, features, follow what's going on on the road to openSUSE 12.1, to be released in November 2011.

”

“

[KDE 4.7 is out](//forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/pre-release-beta/463408-kde-4-7-out.html)

  A big hand to the KDE developpers for delivering KDE 4.7. Not just some small maintenance update, but lots of new features, furhter integration of applications in the desktop, better interaction between applications. As usual a quite a lot of KDE users want to see what it would mean for them, so they look for updates. The thread provides links to a new KDE:Release:47 repo. At the moment KDE 4.7 has not yet landed in the Tumbleweed repos, the advice to Tumbleweed users is to wait a bit.

”

“

[upgraded from 32-bit to 64-bit openSUSE 11.4--missing KDE desktop](//forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/install-boot-login/463525-upgraded-32-bit-64-bit-opensuse-11-4-missing-kde-desktop.html)

  At first glance I would say, that it's normal to run into trouble when doing what this member did: perform a 32bit install from DVD first, then perform a 64bit install on the same root partition afterwards, where, as far as I understood, the 32bit install was not erased, but overwritten. Well, the story has a happy ending, though not easily reached. Like always, attempts to repair have one major requirement: backup anything you want to keep, before even starting to attempt.

”

“

  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

“

    [Peter Penz: Introducing Dolphin 2.0](//ppenz.blogspot.com/2011/08/introducing-dolphin-20.html)

During the last months I’ve been working on Dolphin 2.0 which is planned to get released with the 4.8 release of KDE Applications. Dolphin 2.0 will get a new “view-engine” that will have several improvements in comparison to the current version.

Well, what means “view-engine” in the scope of Dolphin? The view-engine is responsible for showing the directory content as icons and text. In a very simplified form it can be seen as the sum of Dolphin’s “icons mode”, “details mode” and “columns mode”. (…)

”

“

    [Linux.com/Nathan Willis: A Look at the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard 3.0](//www.linux.com/learn/tutorials/476610-a-look-at-the-filesystem-hierarchy-standard-30)

It was big news when the 3.0 kernel was released at the end of July, but as luck would have it, another fundamental piece of your average distribution is about to bump its own version number up to 3.0 as well: the filesystem hierarchy standard (FHS). If you’re not sure exactly what that means or why you should care, don’t worry. It’s the distros that implement the FHS — when it goes well, all you know is that your system runs smoothly. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing important hidden away in this new release. (…)

”

“

    [Network World/Joe Brockmeier: Say what? GNU Emacs violates the GPL](//www.networkworld.com/community/blog/say-what-gnu-emacs-violates-gpl)

GPL violations are a dime a dozen. Some are intentional, some are not — but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one quite as surprising as this one. Yes, Richard Stallman has sent out a note letting everybody know that the 23.2 and 23.3 releases of GNU Emacs are in violation of the GPL. Says Stallman, “We have made a very bad mistake. Anyone redistributing those versions is violating the GPL, through no fault of his own.” (…)

”

“

    [h-online.com/Dj Walker-Morgan: Netatalk returns to open source](//www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Netatalk-returns-to-open-source-1315667.html)

NetAFP, the Netatalk developers, have announced that they are to resume open development of Netatalk and have updated the project’s git repository with the latest source. In early July, NetAFP, the Netatalk developers, announced they were only making the source code for Netatalk 2.2.0 available to paying customers. The timing of the move was well chosen as, within weeks of that, Apple released its latest version of Mac OS X, Lion, which uses AFP (Apple Filing Protocol) 3.3. The latest version of AFP mandates support for Replay Cache functionality and this feature is also required by Lion’s Time Machine. (…)

”

“

    [Linux Journal/Susan Linton: LibreOffice Developer Glimpse Proves Balance](//www.linuxjournal.com/content/libreoffice-developer-glimpse-proves-balance)

Florian Effenberger recently posted statistics of the number of developers contributing to the LibreOffice project. Several months ago, Cedric Bosdonnat offered data on the number of contribution and contributors from the various sources. While Effenberger’s post provides much less detail, it still provides a glimpse into the composition of the growing community.

According to commit counts it seems 54 developers from Oracle, everybody’s favorite bad guy these days, has the highest employee count. This was a full 18% of all commits. As Italo Vignoli explained, “Oracle contributions are related to the OOo code that has been merged with LibreOffice, and in fact the number of commits has decreased dramatically during the last few months. There are, though, some former Oracle developers contributing on a volunteer basis to LibreOffice.” (…)

”

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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▲▼