On Thursday, May 9th, 2008 the Utah Python User Group decided to settle the debate that has plagued us developers since the beginning of time: If you were a programming language, what editor would you use?

I was tasked with showing Eclipse with the PyDev plugin in all its glory–but we all know–real men / developers don’t use IDE’s, so we are going to talk about using Python and Vim together, reaching a state of Zen that the Dalai LLama would be jealous of and establishing more Feng Shui than Martha Stewart’s Kitchen.

Freely jump between your code and python class libraries

There are 2 ways to add your ability to jump between python class libraries, the first is to setup vim to know where the Python libs are so you can use ‘gf’ to get to them (gf is goto file). You can do this by adding this snippet to your .vimrc:

python << EOF
import os
import sys
import vim
for p in sys.path:
    if os.path.isdir(p):
        vim.command(r"set path+=%s" % (p.replace(" ", r"\ ")))
EOF

With that snippet you will be able to go to your import statements and hit ‘gf’ on one of them and it’ll jump you to that file.

Continuing accessibility of the Python class libraries we are going to want to use ctags to generate an index of all the code for vim to reference:

$ ctags -R -f ~/.vim/tags/python.ctags /usr/lib/python2.5/

and then in your .vimrc

set tags+=/.vim/tags/python.ctags

This will give you the ability to use CTRL+] to jump to the method/property under your cursor in the system libraries and CTRL+T to jump back to your source code.

I also have 2 tweaks in my .vimrc so you can use CTRL+LeftArrow and CTRL+RightArrow to move between the files with more natural key bindings.

map <silent><C-Left> <C-T>
map <silent><C-Right> <C-]>

You can also see all the tags you’ve been to with “:tags”

Code Completion

To enable code completion support for Python in Vim you should be able to add the following line to your .vimrc:

autocmd FileType python set omnifunc=pythoncomplete#Complete

but this relies on the fact that your distro compiled python support into vim (which they should!).

Then all you have to do to use your code completion is hit the unnatural, wrist breaking, keystrokes CTRL+X, CTRL+O. I’ve re-bound the code completion to CTRL+Space since we are making vim an IDE! Add this command to your .vimrc to get the better keybinding:

inoremap <Nul> <C-x><C-o>

Along with code completion, you will also have call tip support. Here is a screenshot:

Documentation

No IDE is complete without the ability to access the class libraries documentation! You’ll need to grab this vim plugin. This gives you the ability to type :Pydoc os.path or use the keystrokes <Leader>pw and <Leader>pW to search for the item under the cursor. (Vim’s default <Leader> is “\”). Here is a screenshot:

Syntax Checking

Vim already has built in syntax highlighting for python but I have a small tweak to vim to give you notifications of small syntax errors like forgetting a colon after a for loop. Create a file called ~/.vim/syntax/python.vim and add the following into it:

syn match pythonError "^\s*def\s\+\w\+(.*)\s*$" display
syn match pythonError "^\s*class\s\+\w\+(.*)\s*$" display
syn match pythonError "^\s*for\s.*[^:]$” display
syn match pythonError “^\s*except\s*$” display
syn match pythonError “^\s*finally\s*$” display
syn match pythonError “^\s*try\s*$” display
syn match pythonError “^\s*else\s*$” display
syn match pythonError “^\s*else\s*[^:].*” display
syn match pythonError “^\s*if\s.*[^\:]$” display
syn match pythonError “^\s*except\s.*[^\:]$” display
syn match pythonError “[;]$” display
syn keyword pythonError         do

Now that you have the basics covered, lets get more complicated checking added. Add these 2 lines to your .vimrc so you can type :make and get a list of syntax errors:

autocmd BufRead *.py set makeprg=python\ -c\ \"import\ py_compile,sys;\ sys.stderr=sys.stdout;\ py_compile.compile(r'%')\"
autocmd BufRead *.py set efm=%C\ %.%#,%A\ \ File\ \"%f\"\,\ line\ %l%.%#,%Z%[%^\ ]%\@=%m


You will have the ability to to type :cn and :cp to move around the error list. You can also type :clist to see all the errors, and finally, sometimes you will want to check the syntax of small chunks of code, so we’ll add the ability to execute visually selected lines of code, add this snippet to your .vimrc:

python << EOL
import vim
def EvaluateCurrentRange():
eval(compile(' '.join(vim.current.range),'','exec'),globals())
EOL
map <C-h> :py EvaluateCurrentRange()


Now you will be able to visually select a method/class and execute it by hitting “Ctrl+h”.

Browsing the source

Moving around the source code is an important feature in most IDE’s with their project explorers, so to get that type of functionality in vim we grab the Tag List plugin. This will give you the ability to view all opened buffers easily and jump to certain method calls in those buffers. Here is a screenshot of it in action:

The other must-have feature of an IDE when browsing code is being able to open up multiple files in tabs. To do this you type :tabnew to open up a file in a new tab and than :tabn and :tabp to move around the tabs. Add these to lines to your .vimrc to be able to move between the tabs with ALT+LeftArrow and ALT+RightArrow:


map <silent><A-Right> :tabnext<CR>
map <silent>&ltA-Left> :tabprevious<CR>


Debugging

To add debugging support into vim, we use the pdb module. Add this to your ~/.vim/ftplugin/python.vim to have the ability to quickly add break points and clear them out when you are done debugging:

python << EOF
def SetBreakpoint():
import re
nLine = int( vim.eval( 'line(".")'))

strLine = vim.current.line
strWhite = re.search( ‘^(\s*)’, strLine).group(1)

vim.current.buffer.append(
“%(space)spdb.set_trace() %(mark)s Breakpoint %(mark)s” %
{’space’:strWhite, ‘mark’: ‘#’ * 30}, nLine - 1)

for strLine in vim.current.buffer:
if strLine == “import pdb”:
break
else:
vim.current.buffer.append( ‘import pdb’, 0)
vim.command( ‘normal j1′)

vim.command( ‘map <f7> :py SetBreakpoint()<cr>’)

def RemoveBreakpoints():
import re

nCurrentLine = int( vim.eval( ‘line(”.”)’))

nLines = []
nLine = 1
for strLine in vim.current.buffer:
if strLine == ‘import pdb’ or strLine.lstrip()[:15] == ‘pdb.set_trace()’:
nLines.append( nLine)
nLine += 1

nLines.reverse()

for nLine in nLines:
vim.command( ‘normal %dG’ % nLine)
vim.command( ‘normal dd’)
if nLine < nCurrentLine:
nCurrentLine -= 1

vim.command( ‘normal %dG’ % nCurrentLine)

vim.command( ‘map <s-f7> :py RemoveBreakpoints()<cr>’)
EOF

With that code you can now hit F7 and Shift-F7 to add/remove breakpoints. Then you just launch your application with !python % (percent being the current file, you can declare your main file here if its different).

Another tweak I use is to have my vim inside screen with a horizontal split, that way I can see the python interpreter and debug while still having vim there so I can easily fix my code. Here is a screenshot of that in action:

Snippets

A great time saver with stanard IDE’s is code snippets, so you can type a few key strokes and get a lot of code out of it. An example of this would be a django model, instead of typing out the complete declaration you could type ‘mmo<tab><tab>’ and have a skeleton of your model done for you. To do this in vim we grab the Snippets EMU plugin.

Check out a great screencast of snippetsEmu in action here

You can get my full setup here

Emacs

Here is a great post on how to do the same with Emacs.

In two and half weeks the likely biggest Linux Event kicks off: LinuxTag 2008 in Berlin. Four days of exhibition and more talks (the organizers say 240, German/English mixed) than ever before. I plan to be around all the time.

On Wednesday everyone's darling, the multi-headed president of KDE e.V. and the galaxy, Aaron Seigo will give a keynote about KDE4. On Friday is a day-long track with KDE talks, on Saturday is openSUSE day and there are separate talks about Amarok and Kontact planned. Additionally there will be of course KDE and openSUSE booths all the time.

Special tip: one can travel for 59 Euro from everywhere in Germany with ICE to LinuxTag/IT Profits and back.

Just want to point out four improvements of the YaST Qt package selector in the upcoming openSUSE 11.0 that were missing too long, much requested (at least by me) and now added :

The first screenshot shows the new special package groups "Suggested packages" and "Recommended packages" to list packages which enhance your installed packages. Also the strange "zzz All" package group of previous releases is renamed to "All packages" and visible without endless scrolling.

On the second screenshot you can see the new "@System" meta repository to list all installed packages only. And note the new secondary filter "Unmaintained packages" to detect which packages are not contained in your activated repositories (also a nice way to detect which old packages were wrongly not obsoleted by a distro upgrade).

Over the past week, I've been spending some time hacking on Evolution again because of my frustration with the current IMAP backend. This got me to wondering... why hasn't anyone stepped up to the plate and rewritten Evolution's IMAP code yet?

I think the reason can be summed up with the following 2 problems:

1. IMAP is hard
2. Coding something complicated like a multithreaded multiplexed IMAP client library in C is harder.

That got me and Michael Hutchinson wondering... wouldn't it be nice if we could write Camel provider plugins in C# or in any other managed language that we might prefer?

I think Camel, like Evolution itself, should allow developers to implement plugins in C# as well. I really think this might help lessen the burden of implementing new mail protocol backends for Camel/Evolution.

On that note, I've created a new svn module called camel-imap4 which can be built against your installed evolution-data-server devel packages.

Currently, however, it'll probably only work with e-d-s >= 2.23.x because some things (and assumptions) in Camel have changed recently.

One problem I'm having is that the symbol camel_folder_info_new() used to not exist in older versions of e-d-s, but recently that symbol was added and makes use of g_slice_alloc0(). The problem is that the way providers used to allocate CamelFolderInfo structures before was using g_new0() themselves. Why does this pose a problem? There's no guarantee that I'm aware of that you can mix and match g_malloc/g_slice_free or g_slice_alloc/g_free.

This makes it difficult for me to implement a plugin that builds and works with my installed version of Evolution (2.12) and also work with Evolution svn (2.23). This is quite unfortunate :(

While I'm at it, allow me to also propose some changes to the GChecksum API. Please, please, please make it so that we ned not allocate/free a GChecksum variable each time we need to checksum something?

I propose the ability to do the following:

GChecksum checksum;

g_checksum_init (&checksum, G_CHECKSUM_MD5);
g_checksum_update (&checksum, data, len);
g_checksum_get_digest (&checksum, digest, &len);

Then I'd like to be able to either call g_checksum_init() on checksum again or maybe have another function to clear state, maybe g_checksum_clear() which would allow me to once again use the same checksum variable for calculating the md5 of some other chunk of data.

Camel generates md5sums for a lot of data, sometimes in loops. Having to alloc/free every iteration is inefficient and tedious.

Apologies to maintainers of Planet type sites that aggregate my blog (including to myself for Planet SUSE) as those sites will be picking up some of the non-blog bits of my site at the moment. As part of sorting out the site, I've moved those pages into the blog tree rather than having to maintain two versions of the look of the site (one for the blog script the other for the PHP pages) and, having also edited some, they now have a datestamp of today.

I've also changed the look of my site slightly, tweaking the style I launched at the start of the year. There's less dead-space now and larger fonts make it easier to read. It also defaults to the Free DejaVu fonts when they're available.

Despite being a openSUSE member and a platinum member of the PackMan team packaging several widely-used applications he also helps the Build Service team with osc code contributions.

With no more talk, today we nominate Marcus Hüwe as part of ‘People of openSUSE’!

(more…)

Given that you're here, and apparently reading this tripe, I assume you want to know something about me. Well, I'm in my early 30s and I currently live near Southampton on the south coast of England. I've been married to Amanda since March 1998 and we have a son, Callum, who was born in January 2007.

I used to be a UNIX Systems Administrator for an insurance company. Before that I was Network Manager at SUSE Linux UK. I am probably best known for my work on the openSUSE GNOME repositories and for running Planet SUSE, where you can read the latest blogs from the openSUSE community.

I've been a curate at an Anglican church here since July 2007 and before that I was training at St John's College, Nottingham. Before starting my training, we lived in Watford, which is in Hertfordshire, just north-west of London.

Oeste Digital Network (ODN), a tech group part of a Portuguese association which I am involved in, some days ago was invited by ANAE (Education and Animation National Association) to join a *particularly* mini LAN party for children between 4 and 7 years old. This LAN party will take three days (Friday to Sunday, and afternoons only obviously) in June, and the goal is to ODN take care of the games. Therefore computer games will be needed!

Since ODN is trying more and more to put proprietary software out of the way we are looking for open source game solutions to run on the 15 laptops that will be available. Digging a while for this "requirement" it seemed to be more difficult than we thought it would be - most of the games aren't suitable for kids and others are not really playable or appealable judging by their point of view. Currently we are looking for three to five games, which at least one should be multiplayer.

So, please if you are aware of good open source games for this range of ages let me know!

P.S.: If you are still wondering why this event is so *particularly* then what would you think if I tell you that it will be hosted in a bus hã!? ;-) Yeah, that's right, in a BUS!!

... than FOSDEM *MUST* come to me!

Dear FOSDEM 2008 attendees,

Unfortunately I couldn't go to FOSDEM 2008. I can't either find much photos available on the Internet nor videos at all. So... I'm begging you to upload some photos and videos from FOSDEM 2008, specially from the openSUSE booth and talks.


Best regards,
Carlos Gonçalves

To be continued...

There has been a discussion on the HAL development list regarding DeviceKit, a corresponding power management subsystem daemon, and a possible CPU frequency scaling interface.

During the discussion, it turned out, and I realised this quite late, that KPowersave still exports the possibility to set either the powersave or performance governor. That is basically a bad idea, and still there because of former times. See this journal for a good rationale. However, the author quite unfriendly rants towards the developers. Unfortunately, I’ve not seen a bugreport in sourceforge’s bugtracker for that, nor anywhere else. Maybe he could have pointed this out in a more elegant way, instead of immediately telling people they are dangerous. How emotional. And funny after all. I filed it here, just to be sure it is not missed for upcoming openSUSE 11.0.

So that is the one issue of the discussion, a completely other one is about if we need a D-Bus interface for tuning CPU frequency scaling (related to the ondemand governor) knobs. As an example, the ondemand governor provides an up_threshold setting you can tune through sysfs. Basically it defines how long a CPU burst has to be so that the frequency is increased. Quoting the kernel documentation:

up_threshold: defines what the average CPU usaged between the samplings
of 'sampling_rate' needs to be for the kernel to make a decision on
whether it should increase the frequency.  For example when it is set
to its default value of '80' it means that between the checking
intervals the CPU needs to be on average more than 80% in use to then
decide that the CPU frequency needs to be increased.

When having only short CPU bursts, it is better to stay at a low frequency for a short period of time when it comes down to power consumption. And the typical desktop use consists of those short CPU bursts. Browsing a web page, opening a mail folder, etc.

The kernel sets a sane default for this setting. It is nearly self-evident for a default to be sane, someone should have thought carefully about it. However, that does not mean it is ideal. It just cannot be for all different kind of use cases. Servers, desktops, what applications are running, “on battery”, “on AC”, namely, depending on the current power source.

So I am an advocator of having a D-Bus interface somewhere at the system level (we already have in HAL, but this will most likely vanish sooner or later due to its successor called DeviceKit) for tuning such knobs by someone who cares about policy. And policy is more and more put to Desktop applications these days.

If you have a few minutes to spare this weekend, and haven’t done this yet, contribute just a few minutes to the open source census. What’s the aim of the Census? Pretty ambitious:

The Open Source Census is the first collaborative, global project to count the number of installations for each open source software package. We realize that’s pretty ambitious, but we figure you have to think big. Of course, we know we can’t count every single installation of open source software in the world, but we believe it’s possible to obtain a sample large enough to be representative.

Since open source is not subject to a single point of control, it’s really hard to gather accurate data. So it’s vitally important for open source advocates to participate in efforts like this to help gather more accurate data.

Instructions are here - it’s really simple and only takes a little while. I think it took about 15 minutes on my ThinkPad T61 for the scanner to run, but it’s something you can kick off and then go do something else. So, download the client, register with the project, and then run the client before you go out to lunch or start your normal weekend activities — it’ll be done long before you come back.

So, take a few minutes to be counted, and have a lot of fun this weekend.

jslezacek shares a tip on how to save Kernel boot messages after a server crash/hang when access to a serial console is not available.

read more

Updated: Collects important system information for troubleshooting.

read more

Thanks to Rodrigo’s work, simple-ccsm now has a switch to easily enable/disable Compiz.

On openSUSE 11.0 users will not have to fiddle with any commandline, hack scripts or xorg.conf to enable Compiz. AIGLX is enabled by default on all the supported hardwares, and as soon as ATI/NVIDIA drivers are installed via 1-click, so all that is required is launch simple-ccsm (Desktop Effects) application and enable compiz.

In case you are wondering what theme I am using, it is just the default openSUSE gilouch theme, greened just the way I like it. Download and drag and drop the tarball on “Appearence” caplet if you want it too.

Monsoon

The voting went as follows:

*Monsoon = 8
*Transmission = 5
*No Preference = 5

This takes into account both the openSUSE GNOME meeting on irc and the web vote.

People, you had your chance to voice your opinion, hopefully now we can put this issue to bed. Don't forget if you don't like Monsoon for whatever reason you can deselect it and choose Transmission instead from the install media or from the GNOME:Community repo. This is also where the latest and greatest of many GNOME apps reside

Thank you to all those that took part.

• Up, prepped babes for (pre-)school; recovered my x86_64 RAID setup; good; poked at and filed Noel's gcc buglet with test case. Managed (by swapping disks variously) to get 11.0 Beta2 installed on the system whose only chance of boot media is a floppy disk: looking good there too.
• Lunch, Bruce & Anne around - lovely to see them, back from Paris. Nailed three nasty yast2-gtk bugs.

Just a gentle reminder that the GNOME BitTorrent Client Poll closes in just under 2.5 hours. Just to clarify, there will be one client installed by default and the other one will be available on the installation media should users prefer the alternative.

There has been some good feedback already, so thanks in advance.

Checks specified binary and it's shared library dependency rpms.

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Participants in the Google Summer of Code will now be recognised on Planet SUSE by having GSoC in front of their names at the top of their posts.

If you're a student on the GSoC and you don't see this with your posts, please drop me a line and let me know.

I’ve just finished designing a new dialog for Calc’s sheet protection functionality to allow optional sheet protection options. This was actually my first time designing a dialog from scratch instead of modifying an existing one, so I had to dig around and figure out how to add a dialog. It turns out that it is actually very simple once you know what to do. After several hours of creative designing process, I’ve come up with something I can show to people. So here it is:

One thing to note: obviously this dialog is inspired by the similar functionality offered by Excel, and Excel provides many more options for sheet protection than just the two I’m showing here. The reason I only have two at the moment is because I’ve only implemented support for those two options in Calc core. When we support more options in the core, we can easily add them to the dialog.

This work is on-going in scsheetprotection02 CWS. Aside from the new dialog and sheet protection options, this CWS contains my other work on the binary Excel export encryption as well as sheet and document password interoperability between Excel and Calc. I’m trying to wrap this up, so hopefully I can come up with something that people can try out soon.

PT_BR - Sorry english speakers.

Estava pensando uma revista mais “consistente” com os fatos, que mostrasse mais coisas além de propaganda e achismos diversos, advinhações tolas…

Dai comecei… Newsweek, Times, Der Spiegel, Europe News….só olhando os sites das revistas, procurando um clipping ou form para assinar… dai olhando a Der Spiegel, eu encontro esse tipo de coisa:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/ - der Spiegel
http://www.honestreporting.co.uk/articles/critiques/Bowens_World.asp - Europe News.

Porque esse tipo de informação certeira não existe por aqui? Será que essa informação é tão superior para entendermos?

If Oracle had its way, there’d be one Linux distro — but who would do the development? According to this post by Paula Rooney, Oracle’s Edward Screven says that Linux distro vendors should compete “purely on the support side of the business.”

That, of course, is complete nonsense.

The tension between Linux vendors to bring in customers through added features and continual development is what helps the Linux community move forward. Without that tension, Linux wouldn’t have matured as quickly as it did, and it wouldn’t continue to improve at such a rapid pace.

I’d also like to know which company is supposed to pick up the burden of development? Oracle isn’t doing it — they’re contributing to Kernel development upstream, but not doing much in the way of advancing Linux beyond that. While the multi-billion dollar company hitches a ride on Red Hat’s development infrastructure, Red Hat, Novell and other Linux vendors are investing in the future as well as supporting the here and now. Very nice for Oracle, not so nice for the rest of the community.

Even though Red Hat might be thrilled at the prospect of being the only Linux, I doubt they’d be thrilled about carrying the sole burden of developing everything to allow companies like Oracle to ride on their coattails.

If Novell adopted the Oracle model, we’d be able to save tons of money on development. We’d also be failing to hold up our responsibility as a Linux vendor to contribute to the foundation of our success. We’d also give Red Hat less incentive to innovate and work on new features. And we’d definitely be less interesting to our customers.

I also don’t fancy the idea of a single vendor in control of the operating system. Even when it’s open source — having multiple distributions is, while admittedly more challenging from the ISV standpoint — better for the market, and better for each vendor because they are not solely responsible for the entire development ecosystem.

Linux needs more contributors, not fewer contributors, and I don’t think all OS development or decision-making should rest in the hands of a single vendor. It’s too important to leave with one vendor or project. This is why I chastized Sun the other day for continuing to tilt at the Solaris windmill.

The Linux vendors do need to find ways to make it easier for ISVs like Oracle to target multiple Linux distros — and that’s why we support the Linux Standard Base — to find a standard that allows companies like Oracle to more easily support multiple distros, without doing away with actual development and advancement that Linux vendors provide.

Earlier this week, SAP announced additional Business All-in-One solutions, this time partnering with HP and IBM. Details on specific configurations with each partner are listed in those announcements, but a common thread is the SAP Business All-in-One solutions are based on SUSE Linux Enterprise from Novell. The integrated solutions are targeted at small to midsize enterprises to simplify deployment and lower costs.

• Awoke in the morning, to discover a crushed mouse in the "better mousetrap", the part-time vegan (have to one-up Miguel) in me not inconsiderably upset by this; binned it.
• To work, phone call with Noel - who has isolated a most interesting 64bit compiler bug afflicting the OO.o test-tool: nice. Dug at mail. Filed bugs, played with Soeren's display properties capplet, and was unfeasibly pleased to see it working so nicely.
• Amused by Philip's extraordinary analysis of BS 1363 as Wikipedia says This plug is often described as the safest in the world. What is meant by this concern for static electricity is quite unclear to me; by design (as is common), the earth pin is connected before the live & neutral pins are so the device casing is earthed: ie. it should not be possible to have a device (even with a live -> earth fault) whose casing is live & un-earthed. Consequently - you can touch the earth pin as much as you like (or drop tin foil on it or whatever) and if you get a static shock - this is because you have a nylon carpet you were just shuffling about on: you would get the same effect from the tap, a lamp-post, or well anything good earth.
• Call with Florian, lunch with Lydia. Booted the Gnome Live-CD on x86_64 - looks beautiful, configured my awkward monitor correctly too: nice. Did the install with yast-ncurses to avoid the now fixed yast2-gtk live installer bug.
• Chased nasty nautilus bug a bit; played with the babes; conference call with Greg & crew on the OSRB - interesting. Installed all the good stuff onto the x86_64 live CD install system: the joy of zypper etc.

I am working on CRAN packages in openSUSE buildservice for some time. I have more then 1300 CRAN packages there. This packages were created by my automatic creation script in BASH. But my script was not perfect. It is because DESCRIPTION file in this packages was not perfect as well. ...

Mike Faris explains how to configure your Apache Web Server to allow for multiple languages.

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This post by Melissa Shapiro of Mozilla illustrates (one of the reasons) why Firefox and the Mozilla Foundation is doing so well at getting the word out about Firefox and other news from the foundation — because they’re not relying on the press release as a sole means of getting the word out.

It’s also because Mozilla views marketing as a conversation rather than as a one-way street that begins with a press release and ends with a “did you get our press release” call to a reporter in the hopes that they’ll do all the work in spreading Mozilla’s story.

How does this related to openSUSE? (Aside from the fact that most of us run Firefox and include it in the distro, of course…) I’m talking about the news that we’ve launched lizards.opensuse.org.

The lizards site is a multi-author WordPress blog to help encourage openSUSE members to blog about what they’re doing. Many members have stepped up already and are aggregated on Planet openSUSE, and our blogging Lizards will be as well, but we also recognized that we needed to give some of our community a little extra nudge to get blogging.

Note that lizards is a platform for openSUSE-related discussions only — let’s leave the lolcats to personal blogs and whatnot — but we should look forward to a lot more discussion of the great work that’s going into openSUSE.

(I couldn’t help whipping up a lolcat to go with the discussion…)

Getting back to the press release… as a project, we still need to put out announcements and the occasional press release — as a non-practicing journalist, I can attest to the importance of a press release for reference purposes when writing stories, but I’ve rarely been moved to write a story because of one.

However,  in conjunction with announcements and releases, we need to supplement that kind of communication heavily with discussion on our blogs and using other means to reach the openSUSE community and beyond with news and information that will help build our community and add to it.

So, I look forward to watching the lizard grow fat and happy with posts about what’s going on in openSUSE. Thanks much to the openSUSE contributors who have already started posting on the site!

First, a quick note to people using the Ubuntu Banshee 1.0 PPA packages. Unfortunately, the packager messed up and at first released packages without iPod or MTP support. And now it has come to my attention (via comments and bugs from disappointed users) that the packages include the podcast extension, when it is pre-alpha and should not have been included. Hopefully the Ubuntu guys will get fixed packages out soon, and be more careful with packaging in the future. Jorge is working to make things right.

We do expect to have the podcast extension ready by Beta 2. And Beta 2 will have auto-rip support which I just committed last night. After enabling it in your Preferences, whenever you insert a CD it will automatically begin importing it, if it's not already in your library and if MusicBrainz information can be found for it. Very useful if you are ripping many CDs.

So this isn't the primaries in the US, but the openSUSE GNOME team need your input.

As per my previous post(s) - sorry about the double posting - we need a final decision on what will be the default BitTorrent app. In the meeting today we had a vote but we need more votes to be cast, especially from all you users both novice and pro and anything inbetween. Please oh please try and be objective and not belligerent, try and forget about the programming language etc and focus on the functions

The only problem with this is that I need to close the voting by tomorrow Friday 09 May 2008 @ 1600UTC/GMT/ZULU - or for those not quite with the whole "foreign" time thing try this. To do so please leave a comment here with your choice of:

1) Monsoon

2) Transmission

I will announce the results shortly after then. You have a voice and a vote, use them or loose them. Don't forget this is one way of contributing to the distro, and without your input evil maniacal dictators like myself will rule the world - help make it a happier place

Well, on last two days I installed the openSUSE 11 Beta2 using a liveCD with KDE 4. Amazing. Congratulations openSUSE Team.  Its really a great job! Is so easy to use the installer, with good interactivity.

But, nothing is perfect.

On the first reboot after liveCD Install, I received a shell prompt to login. WTF? Probably, the correct way on first restart after complete install is a runlevel 5 startup. But the openSUSE restarted on runlevel 3! I fixed this error on /etc/inittab, but to dummie user is so hard!

After, I start the “kdm”, and I received a KDE “already logged”. I started kdm! I need a login interface to choice my normal user login!

And finally, xorg.conf are using fbdev. I have a worst video card called Via Chrome 9 HC IGP, which I can´t turn on for now a correct drivers(yes, I found a correct repository for 10.3, but I don´t had success after install). I will try after install the correct driver, but I want the vesa driver on xorg.conf. Honestly, vesa works better.

For now, I´m really waiting the final release of openSUSE 11. Is the best designed and developed SuSe for me. On next year I will celebrate my first “10 years” using SuSE. And I will use more and more years.

Please don’t forget the biggest Linux event in Germany, just a few weeks away! For the second time it will be in Berlin, from 28-31.05.2008. The location is slightly different, still at Messehalle Funkturm, but this time it’s hall 7 (south instead of east like last year).

Again we try to have an interesting program for you, let me be little bit more verbose …

- booth: meet the openSUSE community, talk with developers and see the latest openSUSE 11.0 beta/RC running. We will have decent hardware and big screens to show openSUSE in all it’s glory. We are happy that we have again a community project at our booth, this time it’s Linux-Club.de, a big German Linux forum. If you are interested in the Novell Enterprise products, we will have also a counter with SLE. You can also meet Zonker for the first time in Germany!

- openSUSE day: one day, packed with talks, this time on Saturday! Look at the schedule for more information, we think that there is something for everybody in it.

There are of course a lot of other interesting open-source projects at the LinuxTag, so if you are in Germany/Berlin, don’t miss it!

Some links:
Program schedule: http://www.linuxtag.org/2008/en/conf/events/vp-samstag.html
openSUSE page: http://en.opensuse.org/LinuxTag

I just stumbled upon the Guiding Principles of the openSUSE project, located here:  http://en.opensuse.org/Guiding_Principles

I like the fact that they’ve taken the initiative to lay out their direction and drive.  I also don’t think that it’s a lot of feel-good fluff like missions statements sometimes tend to be.  I really feel like the community is making a good attempt at following the list.

I’ve signed the guiding principles in support of the project and I’d like to encourage others to at least give them a read.  If you support it, sign it with your Novell user account.

In the summer time
When the pollen count is high
I wish plants would die.

“The Register” reports NASA is working with SGI on acquiring a massive SGI Altix ICE supercomputer to assist with jobs for future manned missions and other aeronautical research.

Read on.

The approach towards the setup of an LTSP server changed today. LTSP GUI will be split in some modules. You will have an module for setting up the server, if your distro comes with the needed scripts. The other module will be there to edit the ltsp.conf file and help you to manage the configuration. And thanks to ogra i will implement the whole stuff flexible, so that in a future version it should be possible to manage more then one server.

Interesting things coming up on my radar, looking forward to more interesting stuff happening. The SoC adventure has just begun…

For those who either have to use Windows occasionally or (poor, poor people) all the time, there are kick-ass OpenOffice.org 2.4.0 builds now available at Go-OO.org.

Why does this make my life easier? The presentation PC at church runs Windows and this means I can now upgrade the OOo install on it.

With openSUSE 11.0 GNOME gained a new default BitTorrent client - monsoon. This choice has been met with some criticism, which is fine.

Well the GNOME Team are holding their regular meeting today Thursday 08 May 2008 @ 1600UTC/GMT/ZULU - or for those not quite with the whole "foreign" time thing try this. One of the themes is the BitTorrent client, why am I saying this? Well for all those that have an opinion about it, please come along and let everyone know what that is, yes there may be a chance to get on your soap box and denounce the world and it's dog, and we can have a real-time discussion about it. If you don't tell someone (preferably someone that makes decisions) then no one knows and nothing happens, filing bugs also helps

A bit of background reading on why the choice of monsoon was made can be found here - yes I did indeed do the initial review of clients and made the recommendation, and I'm sticking to it! I did however get others to test it to confirm I'm not 100% insane. As with all applications your mileage may vary, but we are intent in trying to make your mileage be the same great journey as one would expect from openSUSE. So if you care, join in and you never know you may bring something to the table that no one thought of

NASA is getting its next supercomputer from SGI, specifically a 20,480-core SGI Altix ICE system, for those of you thinking of maybe getting one for the family. As you might have guessed, it will run SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell.

NASA’s new supercomputer will be one of the largest SGI Altix ICE systems ever deployed, joining the State of New Mexico’s Encanto, a 14,336-core SGI Altix ICE system which is currently ranked as the third most powerful supercomputer in the world. And yes, it also runs SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.