Quickie: fglrx corrupting lower right corner

Yesterday I kinda was forced to install the proprietary ATI drivers (ATI Mobility Radeon X600 on my laptop ) for 3D support reasons.
Installed the drivers smoothly, but after restarting X and after a few seconds using the laptop some "glitches" appeared on the lower right corner of my display. Even taking a screenshot it doesn't appear in it.

In the release notes ATI/AMD says: "Corruption may be noticed in the lower right corner of the display after the system is running for a long period of time". This might be true in some situations although my laptop wasn't running for that long...
Digging a bit with Google's help I found an useful tip - adding Option "XaaNoOffscreenPixmaps" "true" (Section Device) in xorg.conf fixes the fglrx bug.

As expected this bug not only affects openSUSE as it affects all Linux distributions, and can be found in the current version (8.443) and version 8.404, at least. I hope this bug gets fixed as fast as possible pushing a new ATI drivers release version out.

People of openSUSE voting system

Hi Planet SUSE!
My name is Carlos Gonçalves and I've just been added to the planet, and would like to kick off requesting your attention for a moment, if possible :-)

The 'People of openSUSE' is a project which aims to let the people behind openSUSE become more visible to each other. Therefore we publish every week an interview at openSUSE News of someone from the openSUSE community or Novell working on the distribution, alternating between them.

Getting all this work done every single week isn't as simple as it might seems to be - we need to choose who will we interview, mail the person requesting him/her interview, parse the answers checking if everything is fine, and finally import it to openSUSE News making it readable, if nothing goes wrong...

To let all the community/openSUSE News readers happier with these interviews, we would like to know who should be in your opinion the next person being interviewed by us. Taking that in consideration, Stephan 'Beineri' Binner created an election page on the openSUSE wiki for that propose - voting on who should be the lucky one.
Thus, please vote and in case the person isn't listed yet, add him/her to the election list and here providing some info about him/herself.

Thanks in advance for your collaboration!

A new openSUSE policy?

openSUSE 10.3 have been released on 4 October with tremendously lots of new and improved features, and since then many offers have been given for free to the people who helped the openSUSE team creating a better distribution.

To name a few:
  • Translators have got an openSUSE 10.3 retail box and an openSUSE t-shirt;
  • Packagers, those who joint the Packaging Day, got openSUSE t-shirts, baseball-hats, and even tuxs.

In my opinion this is an awesome openSUSE/Novell initiative to raise up some (healthy) competition between the people already involved on the project and people who never thought that contributing to an open source project could have had any returns for helping the project itself.

Even though if you don't know how to package or translate openSUSE into your language, or even if you don't want to do these things you can do something you like/want to help the project - eg: promoting openSUSE (events, blogging, LPIs), bug reporting, helping people on web forums, and IRC, writing articles on the openSUSE wiki, etc...

As always, Novell and the openSUSE team will give you full support, providing you anything you need to execute your volunteering task - at least, they did it for me ;-)

UA: I'm in!

Saturday night I blogged about the counting down to end of the impatient waiting of the latest months to know if I would gather University and if so to where would I. University of Aveiro (UA) was my first option and I made it!
I'm happy, but not fully happy though... My mate didn't gather UA so he gathered University of Coimbra (UC) which is about 60km from Aveiro. Not bad at all.

Yesterday I went to Aveiro to search for a room to rent but no rooms near to UA and/or without the needed conditions to live in. Today, I went back again to UA to make me as an official student, explored the campus and looked again for a room to rent. I had much luck because I met also two new students who were looking for a room to live in too. We all joint together and walked through the city. At the end of the day we discovered a nice flat near UA (north entrance) and liked it. Therefore we accepted the terms of the flat owner and agreed to stay there for, at least, this upcoming university year. Also, we met there a person who will be my colleague (same course) and lives next door from ours - yeah!

As I said, I can't say I'm entirely happy due to the non gathering of my (best) friend at the same university as mine, but at least I hopefully met student people and they seems to be good people so that's a nice step forward.


This week I will be preparing and packaging stuff to carry on into my new home where I will live for the next 5 years.

Tic Tac Tic Tac... less than 2h left!

Within less than 2 hours I will know to where will live for the next 5 years! Of course I'm talking about university life...

My first option was Computers and Telematics Engineering at University of Aveiro (UA), and the second was Computers Engineering at University of Coimbra (UC).
I really hope I have the chance to gather University of Aveiro. It has an awesome Linux group - Grupo Linux da Universidade de Aveiro (GLUA), a large campus, well know professors. Although, it is a bit far from my home, so I will have to rent a house/room and get used to it completely in a few days with no dads around to make my meal, clean my own stuff, etc :-P

Nevertheless, it's probably I gather the same university and the same course with a friend of mine so things become easier than gather without know anyone.



UA campus



Tic tac, tic tac...!!!!

Another opensuse-i18n-pt calling!

Don't worry, I won't bother you again with a calling for help with the openSUSE distribution translations...

I said in a blog post some time ago I had no time to help on it but I realized that António really needed a hand with the translations so I joined him (again). In just one/two weeks we have translated all untranslated strings and the fuzzy ones, so we are *almost* done! Even with 100% translated I'm saying *almost* because we have the last step to do - we now need people willing to test our translations in a proofreading way. How to do that? Well, for your lucky you only have to install the latest openSUSE 10.3 version and go to YaST -> System -> Language and setup the system to Portuguese (Portugal, of course), in case you don't have it already (YaST will automatically download some Portuguese localization packages).
After that, just do some clicks here, some clicks over there, reading every text looking for some translation mistakes - orthography, grammatic, out-of-context text, etc, etc.. To report the mistakes or simply for suggesting something to add/delete/modify you can contact me/António directly or evenvia opensuse-pt mailing list, IRC or forum. We are totally open to listen you! Bug us as much as you want ;-)


Keep in mind: 100% translated doesn't mean good quality translations! Move your ass and help us :-P

ENOS - 1 September, 2007

The acronym ENOS stands for 'Encontro Nacional de openSUSE', a Portuguese expression which can be translated to 'National openSUSE Meeting', an event meant to unite the Portuguese openSUSE users.

The purpose of ENOS is to give an opportunity to the Portuguese openSUSE users to be together, as well as provide the participants an insight view on the latest developments on the openSUSE project and stimulate them to take an active part on the community itself.

// Note: The following info is obsolete. Please visit Events/ENOS page to make sure you are reading the newest news about ENOS.



Places and Dates

  • Date: 1 September, 11:00 am - 00:00 am
  • Places: Caldas da Rainha, Centro da Juventude and Parque D. Carlos I
  • Discussion Topics: Innovation, openSUSE Status, related projects, Open Source projects
  • Map: ENOS Map

Schedule

The current schedule, subject to changes, defines the following (all the times refer to Portugal Local Time):

  • 11:00 am - Gathering at Parque D. Carlos I (wireless is available)
  • 01:00 pm - Lunch at 'O Canas' restaurant
  • 03:00 pm - Community Space at 'Centro da Juventude' (wireless is available)
    • Talks
    • Ideas & Discussion
  • +06:00 pm - Caldas da Rainha at night :-)



Routes

Photos Gallery



Organization and Participants

Hosted and promoted by Carlos Gonçalves and by the openSUSE-pt community, with the support of the Caldas Rainha Network.

Be Involved

If you don't know how to help us, see the suggestions below:

  • Plan a session, workshop or a demo
  • Tell a friend so he/she can invite another person



Speakers and Discussion

Calling for Portuguese translators

In an email discussion I had with António Cardoso Martins, the openSUSE i18n-pt coordinator, he told me he is now alone with the openSUSE distribution translations which is truly sad (don't know the reasons why the other 2 translators gave up...)!
Since I can't help with the translations due to the required time that the pt.opensuse.org wiki needs I'm calling everybody who would like to join António to quickly conquer the 1st position in the ranking, which now we are at the 5th position (not bad!), in order to have completely translated the next stable openSUSE release.

The translation process is quite simple - you only need to have a translation tool like KBabel (kdesdk3-translate RPM) and the .po files (the files to translate).
So if you want to begin, first fetch the .po files:
  • $ svn checkout https://forgesvn1.novell.com/svn/suse-i18n/trunk/yast/pt
  • $ svn checkout https://forgesvn1.novell.com/svn/suse-i18n/trunk/lcn/pt
(subversion RPM package is also required for this step).


Open the files that needed to be translated with KBabel and you're now ready to start!
Please, drop an email at the opensuse-pt mailing list (to this address email) saying you have started it. Later the translated files should be sent to me or to António therefore commit them to the svn server.



I would like to thanks António Martins for didn't quit. We really need!! :-)
Also, António confirmed as he will attended the openSUSE-pt meeting.
I have decided to organize the first openSUSE-pt meeting with the rest of the openSUSE-pt board members.

The meeting is an opportunity to all of us to meet each other in a non-formal event. For that day [1] we chose Caldas da Rainha, Leiria city to be the spot because it's located in the middle of our small country.
To mark the meeting as an informal meeting we will lunch in a restaurant (to be decided which is) and then get a walk at Parque D. Carlos I (hey... it has free wireless connection as far as I know!).

Some topics that I would like to be discussed during this day:
  • openSUSE 10.3 - the news (improvements, openSUSE Education, etc)
  • The openSUSE i18n-pt status
  • The wiki status (we need people willing to help us!)
  • How to promote this great Linux/GNU distribution (at least in Portugal)
  • More mirrors (kind of promo related)
  • ...

We also thought that would be great if we could be in live with the Brazilian people that obviously can't attend the meeting but are part of the community too using a webcam and microphone - to be planned.

So that's it! Anyone whether he or she is an openSUSE/Linux user can join us (don't be shy and come up!)


[1] We haven't schedule a date yet but we think the best date is in the end of August/begin of September because until then people like to take their holidays with their own family, so the end of the Summer could be the best date to schedule it.
And finally this is my first blog post in my entirely miserable life...

My goals with this blog is to provide some information about what I'm doing (or what I'm not doing!), share my experiences and set you up-to-date with the newest OSS news (openSUSE and KDE mainly, guess why?!).
Ok, for those who didn't got what I said above I will try to specify a little more. Well, I'm an openSUSE & KDE fan using them since some years ago. As so, I became a member of the Portuguese openSUSE community and also became the pt.opensuse.org coordinator.


More informations about me can be found at my personal website (under *slow* construction, yet).


P.S.: Btw, I decided to post all my blog posts in English (even know it isn't pretty good) because I believe this way everybody can understand what I'm trying to spread out. Please, any corrections to my English skills are extremely welcome!
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