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!

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