Carlos Gonçalves: 2008

openSUSE 11.1 has been released!

openSUSE 11.1 just got released a few seconds ago!

The openSUSE Project is proud to announce the release of openSUSE 11.1. The openSUSE 11.1 release includes more than 230 new features, improvements to YaST, major updates to GNOME, KDE, OpenOffice.org, and more freedom with a brand new license, Liberation fonts, and openJDK. This is also the first release built entirely in the openSUSE Build Service.

Get a copy of it by downloading via http://software.opensuse.org, or if you want an original copy order the openSUSE 11.1 Retail Box for only 59.95 EUR/USD. With the supported version of openSUSE you not only get a complete end-user documentation, installable media for x86 and x86 64-bit systems, plus 90 days of end-user installation support, but you also will be contributing by giving some money to the openSUSE project itself!

Read the full announcement: openSUSE 11.1 Released!

Digg it: http://digg.com/linux_unix/openSUSE_11_1_Released

openSUSE KDE Bug Squashing Days (20-21 September)

The openSUSE KDE team wants to dedicate some time on KDE bugs before openSUSE 11.1 gets released, focusing on reported KDE bugs on bugzilla.novell.com inviting the community to take part of it.

Let's stamp out bugs in KDE for openSUSE 11.1! The openSUSE KDE team is holding a Bug Squashing event to work the KDE bugs reported in bugzilla.novell.com. You can be a part of a bug-free KDE!

The openSUSE KDE Bug Squashing event is scheduled September 20 through September 21 (right after openSUSE 11.1 Beta1 release), and the main goal is to have zero bugs!

In order of priority, we have the following list:

Find duplicated bugs, and obviously close then as DUPLICATE;

Non openSUSE KDE bugs (KDE upstream bugs) should be:

Reported on bugs.kde.org (if not yet);
Added the upstream bug URL to the URL field on bugzilla.novell.com;
Closed as UPSTREAM (resolution field).

Filter KDE 4.0 bug reports and try to reproduce them on KDE 4.1:

If you can't reproduce close them as WORKSFORME and leave a comment as it was most probably fixed on KDE 4.1;
If you still can reproduce them, try to investigate why/how that happens (eg: step-by-step on how to reproduce) and state it's still reproducible;

Same as above but for KDE 4.1 - taking in consideration the quicklydevelopment of KDE4 it's really easy that those bugs reported have beenfixed meanwhile.

Help providing info for bugs marked as NEEDINFO

Set priority for bugs with Priority = P5(None).

Explore KDE3 and KDE 4.1 looking for bugs. See if KDE3 ones are fixed for KDE4. Bug report them.

Note: Bug squashers should start from higher severity/priority bug reports to lower ones.

To successfully achieve all these tasks, the openSUSE KDE team needs as many people as possible. All you need to help is one (or more) of the following to help us with debugging:

An updated openSUSE 11.0 or openSUSE 11.1 system
KDE 3.5.10 installed from KDE:KDE3 OBS repository
KDE 4.1 installed from KDE:KDE4:Factory:Desktop OBS repository

During the event the community will be in the #opensuse-kde channel on irc.freenode.org to help you out in whatever you might need. The openSUSE KDE mailing list is also a great way to communicate with the KDE community.

See the openSUSE KDE Bug Squashing Days page for more and updated information at http://en.opensuse.org/KDE/Bug_Slashing/20080920

Have a lot of... openSUSE KDE Bug Squashing Days! ;-)

ENOS 2008: a quick review

As announced on openSUSE News, ENOS 2008 took place this Saturday, September 6th at ISEP, Porto, Portugal. The event started at 10:00 am (local time) and during 1h:30m people had the opportunity to meet each other in a non formal environment, and at the same time I gave away openSUSE t-shirts, caps, lots of stickers and PromoDVDs (thanks Novell, specially to Martin Lasarsch!) to them. At 11:30 we started the two scheduled morning presentations:

"The openSUSE 11.0 News" (Carlos Gonçalves, PDF) - as the name says, I presented the news of openSUSE 11.0, but also took the opportunity to do an overview of the openSUSE project since many of the attendance wasn't openSUSE users, and at the end random slides including information on how to get involved, how to communicate, openSUSE 11.1 roadmap, etc.

"Migrating from Windows to Linux" (Lívio Cipriano, PDF) - a great talk by Lívio on how to migrate from Windows to Linux with good points of view and tips to easily migrate even in enterprises environments, eg: start using cross-platform software such as OpenOffice.org, Firefox, and Thunderbird and later migrate to Linux - users won't notice much difference indeed.

At 13:00 we headed to a shopping nearby to lunch and continue the informal conversation we were having before. Hot topics: openSUSE, Ubuntu, KDE, GNOME, Novell, community. Back from lunch, we had scheduled interesting and full afternoon talks:

"YaST - a programming platform. PackgeKit and PolicyKit" (Ricardo Cruz) - it was mainly a technical talk about YaST. Ricardo showed us how simply is to create a "Hello World!" windows, buttons and some widgets. He also introduced PackageKit and PolicyKit.

"Oxygen, a pillar of KDE4" (Nuno Pinheiro, PDF) - Pinheiro's main goal with this presentation was to demonstrate that Oxygen is not a KDE icons theme, but rather much more stuff than that.

(Coffee Break, free cookies!)

"Qtractor, an Audio/MIDI multi-track sequencer" (Rui Capela, PDF) - Linux Audio hacker on his spare time Rui spoke about his audio/MIDI multi-track sequencer Qtractor application, gave audio demos using it, and highlighted some Linux Kernel Real Time 2.6.{26,27} issues as for example the time lag problem kernel-rt is facing at the moment.

"Mono - introducing Mono and its features" (Andreia Gaita) - what can I say... awesome talk! Andreia presented Mono and MonoLight, what made them, developers, develop such technology, what we can do with it, etc. This talk was indeed one of the reasons to people have attended ENOS 2008.

After these talks we went into several discussions while some participants were doing the LPI exams and raffled (no money involved obviously) the biggest Tux I had ever seen sent kindly by Novell. Later around 19:15 many said goodbye and drove back home and a few others stayed for a bit longer where we moved to a restaurant to have dinner.

Gallery

See the rest of the photo gallery

ENOS 2009:

ENOS 2009 already has place, Castelo Branco, and it will be organized by Associação de Informática de Castelo Branco. Anyone interested in helping us is highly welcome. I hope see you next year! ;-)

The Community:

Mailing list: opensuse-pt@opensuse.org (subscribe)
IRC: #opensuse-pt on irc.freenode.net
Web: http://opensusept.org/

Big thanks to Porto Linux, ISEP, and Novell for the support!

Thanks to all attendees for participating!

P.S.: there are two presentation PDFs missing. I will add them as soon as possible.

ENOS 2008: news and changes

NEWS and ChangeLog:

Oxygen chief artist Nuno Pinheiro will attend ENOS 2008 and give a talk entitled - "Oxygen, um pilar do KDE 4"
Agenda has been rescheduled
Meeting point is auditorium H2, ISEP, Porto.
Maps added
openSUSE Install Party

See you there!

Encontro Nacional de openSUSE 2008

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.

ENOS 2008 is the second yearly edition (read about ENOS 2007 here) of the event and will be held in Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto (ISEP), Porto, Portugal on September 6th.

This year we will have special guests giving some talks:

Ricardo Cruz (YaST-GTK maintainer) will introduce us YaST and how easily is to create a module for it. PackageKit and libzypp will be be introduced.

Andreia Gaita (Mono developer) presenting Mono open source project, sponsored by Novell.

Rui Capela (Linux Audio hacker) will talk about his audio applications, focusing on Qtractor, an Audio/MIDI multi-track sequencer application.

(click to enlarge)
As in last year, attendees will have the opportunity to do the LPI Certification Exams at the event with a 50% discount off by LPI Master Affiliate DRI. Email eventos@opensusept.org to sign in.

Anyone interested in attend should sign in or email eventos@opensusept.org so we can have a better idea of how many people we should expect (tip: you will not leave the event without some openSUSE goodies!).

Big thanks to Porto Linux, ISEP, and Novell for the support!

openSUSE 11.0 KDE3 Live CDst

I have been reading since openSUSE 11.0 GM release a lot of comments posted in many forums and blogs about the "lake" of KDE3 CDs. This big noise around got my attention specially because I was one of the KDE users that shared people's preferences of using a very stable KDE version - KDE 3.5 - for daily use instead of the bleeding edge KDE 4.0.

The process of installing KDE3 on openSUSE no matter what desktop environment users were using was quite simple to follow:

# zypper install -t pattern kde3

or if you just want a clean KDE 3 base:

# zypper install --no-recommends -t pattern kde3

or even by selecting "KDE3 Base System" pattern on YaST. Easy, isn't it?

Well, for those lazy people who don't want to install openSUSE with KDE4, GNOME, XFCE or any other and then install KDE3 I have a gorgeous news: openSUSE 11.0 KDE3 Live CDs are now available!

openSUSE 11.0 KDE3 LiveCD (i686)

openSUSE 11.0 KDE3 LiveCD (x86_64)

MD5SUM and SHA1UM

Kiwi config (32bit) and Kiwi config (64bit)

These Live CDs are also installable CDs and were creating using the openSUSE KIWI Image System. They contain the latest official updates as also the latest packages from KDE:KDE3, KDE:Backports, KDE:KDE4:Factory:Desktop, and KDE:KDE4:Factory:Extra-Apps repositories as of this time of writing.

Big thanks to the KDE Team and Kiwi Team that supported me since the beginning encouraging and helping me in this adventure ;-)

Note: these ISOs are not officially supported by openSUSE nor Novell. If you want to report any bug found use Novell's Bugzilla for better tracking. Feedback or for any other purpose please contact me via email (cgoncalves [at] opensuse [dot] org).

Re: openSUSE adopts Canonical's strategy to promote the project

Replying to "OpenSuse adopta estratégia da Canonical para promover o projecto" (aka "openSUSE adopts Canonical's strategy to promote the project") posted by Bruno Miguel:

The openSUSE project does this for quite long, even maybe before Ubuntu exists.
The news here is that now we have a specific page to users request them easily instead of emailing.

Just to clarify to avoid wrong conclusions about openSUSE/Novell... :-)

LAN party for children

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!!

Linux 2008

Caixa Mágica and Sysbase for the 6th consecutive year are preparing Linux 2008, a National Open Technology Meeting event at the Auditório da Lispólis, Pólo Tecnológio de Lisboa, Telheiras, Portugal, coming up in 15 April.

Among many talks, "Linux in the low cost PC market" by Mandriva CEO François Bancilhnon, and "Debate: Definition of Open Standards and of Interoperability" by many known Portuguese and international people, including Manager Novell Portugal João Batista, would be personally the top moments of the day.

Also, there will be a short presentation about the recent decision that PSA Peugeot Citroën made for have choose SUSE Linux Enterprise for its desktop and server machines - 20,000 desktops plus 2,500 servers.

Unfortunately I will have to miss Linux 2008 due to an exam that I have to do (damn Maths!) ...

If I can't go to FOSDEM... [2nd part]

If I can't go to FOSDEM...

... 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...

Now that's what I'm talking about!

Reading the latest Aaron Seigo's blog post I completely froze, for good!
To quote him:

(...)
i've got OpenSuse 10.3 on the new machine and i have to say that i'm more than pleased with it. i was afraid i'd miss apt-get ... but zypper rocks.
(...)
the rpm search through community contributions is yet another really great thing that has happened during my hiatus from suseland; really nice to see and something i'm sure to use again in the future...
(...)
after seeing 10.3 i was impressed enough to try it out again; i'm a little tired of the *buntu world these days and unhappy with some of their decisions. didn't help that on my last upgrade of my laptop, it rendered my system unusable due to a screw up in their evms packaging; this was doubly "humorous" as the system wasn't using evms at all. it was just installed and that was enough. this isn't the first time such a catastrophic update has come down those apt-get pipes so it's just in time for me that OpenSuse starts to look like its back on the rails again. there were even kde4 packages available as an option in the installer =)
(...)

I must say: welcome back aseigo!

Carlos Gonçalves

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