Fire up your virtual machines, get your test machines motoring, and start tweaking your fingers. It’s testing time!

openSUSE 12.1′s next milestone 5 is now ready for download. Thanks to the men and women of openSUSE Factory who kept their eye on the ball with all the wonderful flurry of activities going on in our Project these days, they never lost sight and we’ll be sure to have an awesome final release in November.

There’s a lot of interesting updates to the 12.1 release and some cool new technologies including GNOME 3 and SystemD. You’ll definitely want to take this milestone for a spin and see what you can expect in 12.1. And if you’ve never tested before, its easy if you follow these instructions. Being a tester is one of the great ways of contributing to the free software movement, and there’s plenty of room for testers in openSUSE Project. (...)

Big mistake, big mistake. At the call for papers deadline, we ended up with not having any sessions about packaging at all except one by Jan Engelhardt.

Now, that would have been quite a ludicrous situation, as our core activity is precisely to build packages, without which it wouldn't be a distribution in the first place.

So I picked up an early email from Lars Vogdt who proposed a few sessions on the topic of packaging. Unfortunately, it was really early in the call for papers phase and we weren't quite organized yet, which caused his proposal to remain unanswered for a few weeks. I tried to contact him by email a few times, but he didn't reply (until now, that is), and I nevertheless took it up on myself to do a few packaging related sessions at the conference. (...)

Disclaimer: the next paragraphs may sound presumptuous, but they're not. I swear.

It has occurred to me, time and time again, that some people consider others as semi-gods. People who are highly active e.g. in open source projects, and are sometimes even regarded for their work. Well, it sucks.

I know that this has happened to me a few times (being seen as a semi-god, that is), and I hate it. Not only does it not have any ground for being, we're just folks like everyone else, and while hard and good work should be appreciated, and while a simple "thank you" is way too rare and rewarding, taking it to that level is a very-bad-thing (tm) (...)

It's been quite a while since I wrote a decent blog and it might be a while longer until I really get to it. I do have a lot to write about, however. First about the Community Leadership Summit - the notes of which I'd like to turn into a few blogs. Second, the Desktop Summit, which was awesome. And third my trip to Taiwan. Finally the upcoming openSUSE conference which is going to be awesome. But let me get the most important stuff out of the way first. (...)

Among other things, the openSUSE project is about “having a lot of fun”. In that spirit we would like to add a bit of diversion and an extra incentive for everyone to register and attend the openSUSE conference.

Join the Drone On! contest and have a lot of fun.

We’ve purchased an AR Drone, small flying aircraft which can be controlled by a computer or mobile phone over wifi, to be given away at the openSUSE Conference. There is an open sourced SDK for Linux. The SDK site provides the software and shows how to guide the drone from a Linux workstation; with a console to show the drone operating parameters. Let’s get it up and running on openSUSE for the fun of it! (...)

I was asked the other day "What do you expect from the openSUSE Conference?" The simple answer is I only expect to have fun. Seriously, I expect nothing more, nothing less. I hope for a whole lot more, but I certainly don't expect it.

This may sound somewhat silly, but in all honesty that's how I feel. This conference (as are most others) is a great way to meet the people you interact with online, there's something satisfying to be able to replace the digital person with a real flesh and blood person. You can thank someone in a real sincere way with a gift (could be a pint or something else) or slap them and let your anger out. Digital is pretty good, but having the physical is always better once in a while :-D

As announced in my previous post there will again be a keysigning party at the openSUSEconference 2011. As time flies by and I have yet only received very few keys, I thought it might be a good idea to talk a little bit about what this whole thing is about and why you should participate. (...)

The changes I have made in SaX3 in the following week

Last week was very busy for me and also very exciting. The end of Google Summer of Code period overlapped the beginning of a new period of my life. During these days, i moved from Salamis(Greece) to Amsterdam(Netherlands) where i am going to study towards a master degree in Artificial Intelligence. As you may understand there were and still are many things for me to arrange, as a person in a total new place/city/country.

So enough about me, what is up with the project? Well, i am very glad to say that the project “ended” and reached a very satisfactory level, the merging functions are now working and i can say that the application is now in an alpha testing phase. There are of course things that always can be improved and a lot of testing to be done in order for this project to take its place and be useful and ready for use in openSUSE. This is the last GSoC report for this project. (...)

Rares gives his weekly Kernel Review with openSUSE Flavor.

During our work in our preload department at SuSE we have to install our current image on several machines for each image version for smoke testing, which meant burning several DVDs per iteration (and there is typically one iteration per week!).In order to ease this work flow I created a kiwi image for a CD or an USB stick for installing the latest image via network - the Network Image Installer. It's also capable of installing arbitrary openSUSE / Fedora / Ubuntu versions, so you never have to burn another DVD if you have a reasonably fast internet connection. Network detection is automatic, wireless requires the SSID etc. changed in a config file beforehand.

Find the sources on gitorious, I will eventually try to understand the functionality in the openSUSE build service to create images automatically, but for now you'll have to build the image yourself. I'll post when there is a downloadable image available.

Now I'm off to Fantasy Film Fest again.

As you might know, the horde project does not only release a set of production quality software (and an interesting bunch more which are not yet release quality) but also provides over 80 well-designed loosely coupled libraries which help you build websites, business applications or even commandline tools. To stress that point, the Horde Project now put a link to the list of components right on their frontpage. Use Horde_Rdo, a lightweight ORM layer or use the RFC-compliant Imap_Client library which performs equally or even better compared to PHP’s interpreter extension written in c. Horde_Auth, a versatile and pluggable authentication layer, has recently been featured in a series of blog posts by lead developer Jan Schneider. Like in Symfony or Zend Framework, Components are released along with a PHPUnit based test suite adapted in the Horde_Test class and can be obtained individually through the Horde Pear Channel.

Today, openSUSE Program Manager Andreas Jaeger announced that openSUSE will stop shipping Sun Java in the upcoming 12.1 release.

Distribution users will now only be offered the GPLed openJDK. In a recent announcement, Oracle declared openJDK to be the new official reference implementation for Java SE7. Along with that move, Oracle dropped the “Distributor’s License for Java (DLJ)” which was required for redistributing Sun Java. Users depending on Sun/Oracle Java are now required to download it directly from the oracle website. Since the acquisition of sun by oracle, the companny has been known for questionable moves which alienate parts of the opensource community. Among these was the OpenOffice dispute which led to the departure of many developers to form LibreOffice. The former sun-owned mysql database has also seen a fork called MariaDB. According to Jaeger, openSUSE will continue to provide the existing packages in the Java:sun:Factory project but will not update them anymore and won’t ship them with the new distribution. Users are urged to switch to either openJDK or the versions available directly from Oracle.

Yesterday was my last working day at SuSE Linux Products. After exactly 7 years of working for this awesome Linux distribution there was an opportunity I couldn't refuse. I made innumerable friends in this company (and it's the people that define a company!), and there were many great moments that will stick in my memory forever

.Now I'm moving (back) to academia, and will start teaching and researching at the Georg-Simon-Ohm University of Applied Science, as "Professor for Applied Computer Science" (which is the official job title).Currently, it's the free period of the summer semester, and the University is almost deserted. I'm currently only starting to get used to the new environment, prepare courses, meet with other professors, etc.I'm pretty excited about the new opportunities in this position, and will keep you posted how everything turns out!Now back to Fantasy Film Fest again ;-)

Disk Usage

YaST installer estimates used disk space in the final installed system. This is possible thanks to the disk usage metadata in installation repository (located in file suse/setup/descr/packages.DU.gz).

This file contains disk usage statistics for every package, so YaST needs just to sum them for all selected packages. (Actually it's slightly more complicated, the disk usage is stored per directory, so YaST/libzypp has to sum it up according to the proposed disk partitioning. Imagine you have separate /usr or /boot partition...) (...)

This is a simple but quite powerful feature of installation. By using a modified installation repository you can add several other repositories automatically (or let user decide which repositories to add). The only thing you need to do is to create an add_on_products.xml file describing all the additional repositories and add it either to root of the installation repository or root of the installation system.

Installation repository can be easily modified just by adding the file there, installation system (inst-sys) can be easily extended by Linuxrc DriverUpdate. (...)

Here's what happened: user accepts a kernel update, afterwards needs to reinstall the driver for his NVIDIA graphics card, and to recompile the kernel module for VMware, a virtualization program. No way the system lets him do that. The compiler "gcc" segfaults in all attempts. Nasty, since the user depends on the machine for his work. Read how, in the end, the user himself finds the solution.

Today the official release of Milestone 5 on the road to openSUSE 12.1 was announced. Installation images are available for downloading. Like always we have a thread, still quite empty now, to share user experiences. Interested? Check the thread.

This subject is one of the issues we see in the forums on a regular basis: when trying to install/update software, Yast's Software Management prompts the user to insert the install CD/DVD, or gives an error on not being able to read the contents of a repo. Cause: during install the CD/DVD entry in the repolist was not removed (as far as I know it should). Solution: start Yast - Software - Software repositories and remove the CD/DVD entry from the list. After doing so, Software Management will not try to refresh or check the contents of this "repo", and thus the errors will be gone.

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)