stick's corner

This article is about openSUSE 11.3 & KDE SC 4.5 Launch Party in Prague, Czech Republic and is probably not very interesting for people living abroad.

Tak ako minulý rok, sme si aj tento rok pri príležitosti vydania openSUSE 11.3 (sťahujte odtiaľto) a KDE SC 4.5 pre vás pripravili Launch Party v Prahe.

Nové vydanie oslávime priamo v centre diania – našej pobočke SUSE Linux, s.r.o na Lihovarskej 12, Praha 9 (konkrétne 4. poschodie). Tu budeme k dispozícii v piatok 6.8.2010 od 14:00 do 19:00. Naša budova sa nachádza v trojuholníku medzi zastávkami tramvají “Balabenka”, “Ocelářská” a “Divadlo Gong” (mapa).

K dispozícii budú CD či DVD openSUSE 11.3, formou prednášok vám predstavíme novinky v openSUSE, KDE a GNOME, pomôžeme s inštaláciou na notebooky a v neposlednom rade budete mať možnosť porozprávať sa s openSUSE vývojármi.

Fotoreportáž z minulej Launch Party od Petra

Udalosť na Facebook-u.

Tešíme sa na vašu účasť v hojnom počte!

PS: Thanks gnokii for the great poster!

Last week Michal and I went boosting to an event called OSSConf which took place in Žilina, Slovakia. We didn’t know what to expect, because it was only second year of this conference, but it turned out to be a really great one!

We left our Prague SUSE offices early in the morning, so we could reach Žilina shortly after noon and not miss a lot from the conference. During our journey we stopped in Brno to pick up our rivals^Wfriends Marek and Mifo from Red Hat. The trip was rather long, but it was quite funny and soon we were able to admire the great architecture of Žilinská Univerzita.

The first two talks we saw were about Graphics software in schools from Petra Talandová and about Generating font books by Pavel Stříž.

After these, the winners of Best student’s opensource projects awards were announced. First and second place projects were led by Red Hat employees, so hats off to them (pun intended). Novell should definitively try to engage more at universities. The rest of attendees didn’t walk away with empty hands neither, because they could win a nice openSUSE T-shirt or mugs and pens from Red Hat in a raffle shortly after.

Second day started with a talk from Michal about openSUSE 11.3, followed by lots of interesting talks including Mifo‘s about Deltacloud, mine about openSUSE Build Service and Michal‘s about SUSE Studio, …

…Juraj‘s about Processing.org+related projects and Pavol‘s about (Lack of) Security in publicly used technologies.

Third day was full of talks about concrete usage of open-source tools in university environment and ended with a SOIT (Society for Open Source Information Technologies) meeting. We became a members of this non-profit organization and discussed various topics how to make Slovakia more aware about open-source technologies. I was also very surprised to find a book where author describes how to create your own Linux distribution and also mentions both openSUSE Build Service and SUSE Studio. Way to go, SUSE!

We concluded this great conference with a nice trip to close Lietava Castle and the best Slovak beer Šariš – more particularly its so called “cut beer” version – half dark, half light.

I’m already looking for next year edition, see you there!

Related posts:

• OSSConf 2010 in Zilina, Slovakia by Radek Vokal
• Krátka reportáž z konferencie OSSConf 2010 v Žiline by Róbert Dúbravský

Photos shamelessly stolen from Marek and Michal.

Today I stumbled upon this image:

I thought this is exactly the motto openSUSE needs right now so I created this one:

(Feel free to enhance, XCF file for Gimp is here.)

I just returned from LinuxTag 2010 in Berlin and it was a blast!

Our car crew (Michal, Luboš, Martin and me) got up very early and we were on our way from the Prague office shortly after seven. Fortunately it took us only 40 minutes to realize that our GPS was set to ignore highways, so we could make it to Berlin before noon.

At the time we arrived our booth was already full of other SUSE colleagues and of course visitors. Besides 13 official talks we also held four hack sessions every day (making it 29 sessions in total, absolutely crazy! – the complete list is in the wiki). The booth was rather small (when compared to 3 times larger and almost always empty Ubuntu one, hope that organizers noticed that) but it was fun as always and the atmosphere was great!

Nearly all SUSE folks were also interviewed by RadioTux, thanks Gnokii for driving that.

LinuxTag was not always about hacking and computers. Our booth was often visited by clown who created a very nice geekos from balloons (thanks Eva!):

And our sessions included craft workshops led by Henne and Annika:

On Wednesday some of us were invited to Qt dinner (thanks Alex and Jos!) and on Thursday we all went to LinuxNacht. It is a great informal event where you can chat with all speakers and project contributors over beer and good food.

I visited a couple of very interesting and inspiring talks:

• What Is Special About the QML Declarative Language? by Matthias Ettrich
• Real-time Communications with PHP by Scott Mattocks (can be applied to any platform, not just PHP)
• MeeGo – Linux for Mobile Devices by Dirk Hohndel
• The Move Towards Open Source and Open Clouds by Larry Augustin
• Google and Open Source by Chris DiBona
• Beyond init: Systemd by Lennart Poettering
• Kernel Mode Setting – a Change in Paradigms for the Graphics Driver Stack by Egbert Eich
• On Being Free by Jos Poortvliet

Last but not least, Google had a stand where you could fill in the general and software engineering quiz. Michal and I were supposedly the only people who had the latter one correct so we were two of the four that won Nexus One phones, thanks Google!

I’m already looking forward for next year edition of LinuxTag. It is a event you can’t miss and a great opportunity to meet FOSS infected people!

(Photos taken by Adrian Schroeter, Michal Hrušecký and Sirko Kemter)

Gnokii pointed me to Ubuntu countdown banner for Facebook and asked me if I could rework it to show openSUSE Counter instead. Unfortunately I was not able to reuse the code because it was written in Python as a plugin for Google AppEngine and I wanted something lightier. After some time I was able to come up with my own simple solution in PHP.

Here are the steps for you:

1. login to Facebook
2. go to http://apps.facebook.com/opensuse-counter
3. application will ask for permission to access your profile, to accept click Allow
   
4. click Add to Profile on the following page
   
5. click Add to confirm your choice
   
6. you’ll be taken to your profile page where you click Keep
   
7. enjoy openSUSE counter on your Facebook profile!

Update: When the counter seems to be stuck on 43 days, just remove and re-add the profile box.

Dobrý den!

Na základe tiskové zprávy zveřejněné na stránkách MFČR dne 24. května 2010 si vás tímto dovolujeme upozornit na zavádějící vyjádření BSA a MFČR ve věci “Postihování softwarového pirátství”.

Daňová správa se při své kontrolní činnosti už léta zabývá rozeznáváním potenciálních úniků daní a v průběhu této činnosti se stále více zabývá i otázkou využívání software při podnikatelských aktivitách. Protože vyjádření daňové správy jsou ve velké míře korektní, dovolíme si upozornit jen na část tiskové zprávy, která jednoznačně znevýhodňuje odběratele hardware. Odběratelé hardware jsou ve smyslu vyjádření MFČR povinní při koupi hardware zabezpečit i software a mít k němu odpovídající daňový doklad. Podle našeho názoru je software možné nabýt třemi způsoby: koupí práv či licence, vlastní tvorbou, nebo získáním z volně šiřitelných zdrojů, např. Open Source.

Naše námitka se týká opomenutí svobodného a otevřeného software (FOSS, volně šiřitelný software), který není dostatečně specifikovaný ve vyjádření MFČR. Tento software je celosvětově uznávaný jako legální, a přitom na něj není potřebné mít daňový doklad. Pojednává o něm například licence GPL (a jí podobné), která umožňuje volné využití software bez nároku na odměnu. Protože tento software je často tvořen nadšenci, kteří za svou práci odměnu nepožadují, je velice těžké specifikovat, jak takový software zdanit, protože jeho nabývací cena je de facto nulová.

O konkrétním využití Open Source lze mluvit například u francouzské policie, která ve své správě využívá operační systém Linux, který patří mezi Open Source, a tím ušetřila miliony eur, které by jinak byly potřebné pro zakoupení komerčních operačních systémů. Francouzská policie přitom nedostala za tento software žádný daňový doklad, zaplatila jen za služby spojené s instalací tohoto software, případně využila vlastní lidské zdroje a jejich potenciál.

Na základe výše uvedeného je možné jednoznačně konstatovat, že vyjádření MFČR a BSA je matoucí, neboť vyvolává nesprávný dojem, že na hardwaru pořízeném bez operačního systému bude provozována nelegální kopie software.

Důkazem jsou firmy, které běžně ke své práci využívají počítače, na kterých jsou provozovány operační systémy založené na bázi Linuxu, případně BSD. Software, který popisujeme, tedy patří jednoznačně do sekce legálních, volně použitelných a dostupných programů. Je proto nutné podotknut, že nejednoznačné směrnice a pokyny MFČR mohou být zavádějící a zastrašovat uživatele Open Source a tím pádem může docházet k poškozování společností, které poskytují služby spojené s tvorbou a správou Open Source software. Tyto společnosti jsou často místní a zaměstnávají místní obyvatelstvo, zatímco komerční společnosti nabízející své placené operační systémy většinou pocházejí ze zemí mimo EU.

Z výše uvedených důvodů vás žádáme o změnu oficiálního postoje MFČR k tématu získávání hardware bez operačního systému.

S pozdravem,

Jan Adámek (sten AT stensoft.com)
Miro Baník (miro.banik AT gmail.com)
Václav Baran (vexar AT seznam.cz)
David Bařina (dabler AT gmail.com)
Anna Bernáthová (anicka AT suse.cz)
Lukáš Bezdička (255993 AT mail.muni.cz)
Peter Bistrický (xbistric AT node.mendelu.cz)
Vladimír Bobek (vladimir.bobek AT seznam.cz)
Michal Bořek (mibo AT xpa.cz)
Matej Buday (xbuday AT fi.muni.cz)
Zoltán Čaplovič (caplovic AT gmail.com)
Tomáš Čech (tcech AT suse.cz)
Lubomír Čevela (lcevela AT gmail.com)
Michal Čihař (mcihar AT suse.cz)
Tomáš Crhák (tcrhak AT think-forth.com)
Martin Děcký (martin AT decky.cz)
Jaroslav Dolejší (ganimoth AT gmail.com)
Petr Dvořák (atribut AT centrum.cz)
Radek Dvořák (radek.dvorak AT gmail.com)
Michal Fabík (michal.fabik AT gmail.com)
Michal Fabry (michal AT fabry.sk)
Miroslav Filip (mirfilg1 AT gmail.com)
Michal Fojtik (mfojtik AT redhat.com)
Alena Ganobčíková (alena.ganob AT gmail.com)
Michal Hocko (mhocko AT novell.com)
Ondřej Holeček (aaannz AT gmail.com)
Adriana Homolová (ada AT vov.sk)
Aleš Hrabě (ales.hrabe AT honeynet.cz)
Michal Hrušecký (michal AT hrusecky.net)
Martin Hubáček (hubacek AT 4wifi.cz)
Šárka Huďová (sarka.hudova AT gmail.com)
Aleš Janda (ales.janda AT kyblsoft.cz)
Petra Kadlecová (fionastar AT seznam.cz)
Darek Kaláb (dkalab AT gmail.com)
Gabriel Karády (bansh3er AT gmail.com)
Jan Kára (jack AT ucw.cz)
Jiri Kastner (jkastner AT redhat.com)
Michal Kaukič (misolietavec AT gmail.com)
Josef Klanica (d3mon AT centrum.cz)
Matus Kocka (kocir AT physics.muni.cz)
Luboš Kocman (lkocman AT redhat.com)
Ivor Kollár (kollar AT dcit.cz)
Daniel Kopeček (dkopecek AT redhat.com)
Jan Kratochvíl (jan AT jankratochvil.net)
Jan Kriho (erbureth AT galaxyhosting.cz)
Pavel Kropitz (univerz AT fu-solution.com)
Filip Krška (fill_io AT centrum.cz)
Martin Kudlvasr (mkudlvasr AT suse.cz)
Lukas Kumpera (lukas.kumpera AT seznam.cz)
David Kutálek (dkutalek AT redhat.com)
Ján Labant ( labant1 AT post.cz )
Dana Lennerová (lennerka AT gmail.com)
Peter Libic (peter.libic AT seznam.cz)
Lukáš Lipavský (llipavsky AT suse.cz)
Lukáš Lommer (drom AT kdyne.net)
Luboš Luňák (l.lunak AT kde.org)
Pavol Lupták (pavol.luptak AT nethemba.com)
Katarína Machálková (bubli AT bubli.org)
Marek Mahut (mmahut AT redhat.com)
Stanislav Marek (stmr AT seznam.cz)
Richard Marko (rissko AT gmail.com)
Jakub Matas (jakubmatas AT gmail.com)
Tomas Medek (tomas.medek AT centrum.cz)
Juraj Mikus (juraj.mikus AT skosi.org)
Petr Mladek (pmladek AT centrum.cz)
Tomáš Mudruňka (tomas AT mudrunka.cz)
Radek Nováček (rnovacek AT redhat.com)
Michal Novák (mixnov AT gmail.com)
Petr Ošťádal (postadal AT novell.com)
Marek Osvald (marek.osvald AT seznam.cz)
Libor Pecháček (lpechacek AT novell.com)
Vít Pelčák (vit AT pelcak.org)
Jan Petr (jan.petr AT irisa.fr)
Zuzana Petrová (zpetrova AT suse.cz)
Roman Plášil (roman.plasil AT gmail.com)
Tomas Plch (tomas.plch AT gmail.com)
Bohdan Pomsahar (bpomsahar AT nocomment.sk)
Jan Raszyk (jan.raszyk AT gmail.com)
Jaroslav Řezník (jreznik AT redhat.com)
Lukáš Richter (lukass.richter AT gmail.com)
Lubomir Rintel (lkundrak AT fedoraproject.org)
František Rochovanský (rochovaf AT gmail.com)
Radim Roska (radim.roska AT gmail.com)
Pavol Rusnák (prusnak AT suse.cz)
Jiří Šamánek (jiri.samanekr AT krystalka.com)
Michel Samia (m.samia AT seznam.cz)
Václav Seidler (seidler.vaclav AT seznam.cz)
Jan Siblik (hondza AT centrum.cz)
Michal Smrž (michal.smrz AT opensuse.cz)
Miloš Šrámek (sramek.milos AT gmail.com)
Jakub Steiner (jimmac AT gmail.com)
Jan Stodola (jstodola AT redhat.com)
Daniel Suchy (danysek AT gmail.com)
Martin Šuška (martin.suska AT gmail.com)
Petr Svestka (ps AT odbornici.cz)
Martin Swiech (martin.swiech AT gmail.com)
Norbert Szetei (norbert.szetei AT nethemba.com)
David Tardon (dtardon AT redhat.com)
Tomáš Tieftrunk (tie_tom AT seznam.cz)
Lukas Tinkl (ltinkl AT redhat.com)
Pavel Tišnovský (ptisnovs AT redhat.com)
David Toman (david AT vseborice.net)
Pavel Troller (patrolr AT sinus.cz)
Petr Uzel (petr.uzel AT suse.cz)
Petr Varkoček (chytrex_fsude AT centrum.cz)
Marek Vasut (marex AT openbsd.org)
Lea Vojteková (stoparka AT email.cz)
Lenka Vondráčková (lenka.vondrackova AT nejde.net)
Michal Vyskočil (mvyskocil AT suse.cz)
Maroš Zaťko (hacxman AT gmail.com)
Štěpán Zelman (s.zelman AT tiscali.cz)
Ondřej Žižka (ozizka AT redhat.cz)
Lukáš Krejčí (lkrejci AT redhat.com)
Jiri Skala (jiri.js.skala AT email.cz)

chci podepsat -> zanechám komentář ve tvaru: Jméno Příjmení (emailova AT adresa.cz)

Update #1: Situaci mapuje Liberix.
Update #2: Dopis byl také odeslán klasickou poštou …

Today morning I was working on some packages in openSUSE Build Service when suddenly OSC started to throw 403/503 error messages. I went to http://build.opensuse.org/ site to see this:

Then it occurred to me – it would be much better if we had some funny image on this page to cheer user up, something like twitter failwhale or the one Jimmac made for SUSE Studio. I started Inkscape and after a couple of minutes I created this one:

I know it is far from perfect (I’m no artist), but feel free to grab the original SVG and create a better one! We’ll include it in the 2.0 release of Build Service which will be using Bento theme by Robert.

From Thursday to Saturday there was an event in Vienna held as a part of longer Austrian tour called LinuxWochen. This opportunity could not have been missed by openSUSE, so we formed a team consisting of me, Michal and Sirko.

All three days were packed with more than 70 talks and workshops. We had a stand directly next to Fedora’s one, handled by Fabian and Zoltan, so we also had an opportunity to talk about our distros and also to make fun about each other. Sirko lead a very crowded workshops about Inkscape and Gimp on Friday, where people were able to create a very nice drawing of Tux and great space wallpaper with Earth and Moon. In the meantime we were dealing with very curious questions from visitors at the stand. One man was so satisfied with Michal’s patience and expertise, that he joined us for Friday’s Linuxwochen After Hour Party at Museum Quartier and bought us a dinner! The party was organized by quintessenz, which is an organization to “restore civil rights that have been abolished by technical means during the first stage of the information revolution”.

On Saturday I gave a talk about Game Store and Michal told a few words about upcoming openSUSE 11.3 release. After mine talk Horst Jens, one of the pygame.org maintainers, told me that he really likes the concept of GameStore and Build Service games repository and he would love to have all games from pygame.org available from games repo. I will try to create a generic SPEC template for games written in pygame or even create an automated generator for this.

In the afternoon we held a Build Service workshop and although we had problems with network connection (which was really slow), we managed to create a package in OBS together with the people that came. We also covered the basics of OSC usage including the creation of submit requests.

Here are some photos that Michal took with his camera and some that were taken using webcam in our presentation computer. (Sirko has also some of them in a blogpost and on flickr).

For creating my GameStore talk at LinuxWochen Wien I decided to use new and hip tool called Prezi. I’m not going to write about its features, you have to try and see for yourself. What I can say is that I really like the tool, but it has one big disadvantage – it’s written in Flash.

During the event we had a wireless connection available, but it was rather unreliable, so it was no option for me to present the talk online. I started to investigate the offline options. Either you can download the full blown Prezi Desktop, which is available if you subscribe the service, or you just download the Prezi “Player”. But wait, the page claims it is compatible only with Windows and Mac OS X. Let’s see. I downloaded the ZIP archive and indeed – it contains data folder with your presentation, Windows application (prezi.exe) and Mac OS X application (prezi.app).

Let’s get hacking! Mac OS X application is in fact just a directory structure. I copied the file prezi.app/Contents/Resources/movie.swf to the same location as my data directory and tried to run flashplayer movie.swf. Wow! The presentation started to load, but unfortunately it stopped after few seconds and I ended with this:

I tried straceing the process, but found nothing unusual (like failed open calls). Then I downloaded the debug version of Flash Player, run the command again and got this exception:

An ActionScript error has occurred:
Error #2044: Unhandled SecurityErrorEvent:. text=Error #2140: Security sandbox violation:
file:///.../movie.swf/[[DYNAMIC]]/1 cannot load file:///.../data/fonts/LiberationSerif-Regular.swf.
Local-with-filesystem and local-with-networking SWF files cannot load each other.

Aha! Locally stored SWF files cannot load other SWF files, neither local ones, nor remote ones. That’s the problem. Ok, let’s change the standalone player settings. But how?! I tried various command line switch with no success. After couple minutes of searching I found that standalone Flash Player settings could be changed via Flash plugin that loads Settings manager from the Internet? WTF?!

I will make it easier for you: let’s google for “flash global security settings content creators”. The first result at the time of writing this article was this one. Go to this URL, wait until the Settings manager is loaded and then click on the “Edit locations …” button.

After that select “Add directory” and choose local directory where you store your presentations. From now on you enabled standalone Flash player to run your Prezis. Congratulations!

Even though I like Prezi, I would be ecstatic if they dropped Flash and used SVG instead as its presentation and interchange format, probably using the uber-cool SVG-edit as the core. It would also enable iPad users to use the tool. And yes, I know about JessyInk, but that’s not exactly what I have on mind …

I was playing with the idea to write an application inspired by xkcd comics 715 since it was released, but today I finally found time to whip it up! The whole source code is a single webpage (HTML+Javascript/jQuery) around 100 lines long. It basically forms the query by replacing hash sign “#” with the particular number from loop and then asks Google via its Search API. Resulting data are shown via Google Visualization API. It doesn’t have much eye-candy yet, but it works and that’s what counts. I put the presets Randall came up with and also added some of my own. I will now describe the first three in detail:

The first one was "xkcd #", which easily showed that the most popular issues were: 10, 12, 244, 385, 427, 449, 452, 505, 701, 705 and 714.

I continued with "# czechoslovakia", which of course spotted the most important years of the 20th century for this country (1918, 1938, 1945, 1948, 1968, 1989 and 1993).

The last one, "favorite number is #", shows the distribution of favorite numbers. Three, seven, eight and thirteen were expected, but I was surprised to see peak also at 42. I guess you know why.

Bear in mind that there are still some outstanding issues and also if you have any ideas for interesting presets to add, I’d be more than happy to include them!

Ah, I almost forgot the link, so here it is: http://gk2.sk/xkcd715.html. Enjoy!