stick's corner

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.

Yesterday Andrea aka anubisg1 announced the Live CDs for LXDE, which he built in Build Service with the help of Dmitry Serpokryl. It was a very easy task for me to replace LXDE packages with Xfce ones in kiwi definition, so I can present you the Xfce Live CDs!

I’ve created an entry in our Derivates page and you can download the images from this location. The default user is linux with no password, user root uses the same empty password.

I’ve tested the 32-bit image in VirtualBox and hit some issues (see below), the 64-bit image is untested at the moment. There’s where I would like you to ask for testing both images. Some points first:

• currently the Qt YaST is used (I had some issues with GTK one)
• after the login a warning message is shown (about putting “linux” into /etc/hosts)
• you can install the system to hard drive using the Live Installer icon on the desktop
  • unfortunately this blocks us from enabling autologin (installed system expects “linux” user which is present only on Live CD and login ends in loop, the bug in YaST is being worked on)
  • also some message dialogs about locked storage subsystem are shown during the installation steps

If you hit a new issue, please report it to me. Also if you know how to fix any existing ones, please don’t hesitate as well! Thank you!

Thanks to Tom we now have avatars in openSUSE Build Service, so e.g. Involved Users list looks like this:

If you have a shady man instead of your nice photo, go to gravatar.com and setup your own one. Don’t forget to add the email address you are using in the Build Service!

We had a listing of pending requests in the Build Service for a while. Unfortunately, it was mashed together with “My Projects” view and one couldn’t do anything with them. Few days ago, Jan Loeser added support for handling these requests directly in the web client. I liked the idea, so I decided to spend some time on it, too. I moved the request listing to a separate page and added some nifty Tango icons for the actions, so they wouldn’t take too much of the precious space. Also, the design doesn’t use tables-in-table anymore. You can view the result on the following image or directly in the Build Service.

PS: The page still looks like it was designed by programmers, but as usual you are welcome to help us!

From time to time I use Mac OS X and I really like the application management with its dock. I came across several different implementations for KDE 4, but they were usually too immature and not very pretty. I was very surprised when I finally found a decent implementation called Daisy. I immediately dropped the default KDE taskbar and started to use Daisy in conjunction with desktop effects “Box Switch” and “Present Windows” a.k.a Exposé. You can look at my setup here (only bottom 64 pixels are shown, the rest is usually occupied with maximized application):

Daisy detects running instances of applications by Window Class, so it doesn’t try to start another instance, it rather activates the already running one. The experience is very similar to the Mac OS X one, but still, there are three problems:

• I still have to use the panel for Battery Monitor and Device Notifier widgets
  • Daisy could act as a host for other widgets and show them as icons
• Applications started manually (e.g. with KRunner) do not appear in the dock
  • Daisy could act as a taskbar and show icons of all running windows
• Applications like instant messengers or IRC clients use tray for notifications
  • Daisy could act as a tray and replace the launcher icon with the one added to tray by application after its start (so it will flash in the dock)

Once these three points are met, Daisy will become a complete counterpart of Mac OS X dock. I’ve already written these suggestions to Lechio (upstream developer), but I’m not sure if this is the direction he wants to go and whether it is possible to do without any extra hacks at the KDE/Plasma side. (I’m sure that Lechio will accept any help ) Anyway, have a look at the project page, KDE-Look page or try the plasmoid from the Build Service. The package is called plasmoid-daisy and is present in KDE:KDE4:Community project.

This week we had Hack Week event when everyone was welcome to use Innovation time on FOSS projects or even start the new one! I spent most of the time on hacking the Game Store, which I introduced in my previous blogpost. The package is now ready for you in the Build Service.

Simply use the following One Click Install files (openSUSE 11.0, openSUSE 11.1 and openSUSE Factory) or add the games repository and install the gamestore package manually. Game Store uses this repository to download the games, so you should stay subscribed to it after the installation too.

As a bonus I created a very simple One Click Install files catalog which imitates the Game Store look. It is available at gamestore.gk2.sk.

The screenshots for both versions (left Qt, right web) are here so you get the idea how it looks, but the best thing is to try it on your own!

Big thanks go to randy-sk who helped me with harvesting of icons and screenshots of the games. I am already looking for your feedback!

I was adding some new packages to our games repository in openSUSE Build Service, when I realized that we have over 150 games at this one centralized place! Wouldn’t it be great if there was an application which would allow users to browse through games, filter them by genres or names, view the screenshots and read the information about the games? Players usings Windows can already use “Games for Windows” or “Steam” from Valve, but they also have to pay for the majority of the games. All games in our repository are free and just one click away! I started to hack an application with pretty concrete idea in my mind. You can look at the result of my efforts below (left Games for Windows, right Game Store):

As you can see, Game Store is at the moment quite immature Qt application (actually it is my first Qt app, so my Qt skills suck pretty much right now ), but it is already able to load locally stored XML together with game icons, screenshots and descriptions. User can install new games (using our great One Click Install feature) and launch the installed ones. Later I want to add the ability to synchronize your games settings (configuration + saved games) with Game Store server, so you can have these on any computer and the server could create a hi-score charts for every supported game. There is a long way ahead to go, but I wanted to approach you very early, so you could be involved too. Even if you don’t speak C++ or Qt, you can help us with filling the missing descriptions, gathering game icons and screenshots. Just read the GameStore wiki page to get the idea what needs to be done or clone the git repo and start hacking right away!

Thank you and I hope that GameStore will be a great addition to other openSUSE applications and tools we already have!

Update: See the next blogpost for more information.

Few months ago I tried to use OSC – our command-line client to BuildService under Windows. I failed because of the hard-coded dependency on python-rpm module, which is (of course) not present in Python package for Windows.

Today I saw Feature #306354, so I decided to give it a try again. Fortunately, the recent code changes made this task a lot easier! I still had to create some fixes and hacks, but they are now commited to OSC subversion and shouldn’t cause problems anymore.

There are two ways how to use OSC in Windows:

• download this archive (or click on the openSUSE/Windows icon above),
  unpack it and use osc.exe binary without installing the whole python distribution
  (this does not need administrator rights) (Obsolete! see Update #3 below)
• install python and use osc directly from its sources
  (this needs administrator rights if the python is not installed)

Most of the features like checkouts, checkins, editing metadata should work, but there are some osc features that are unusuable (yet) under Windows:

• osc build – local building of the packages
• osc vc – automated editing of changes file – you have to change the changelogs manually

If you plan to use the binary package (option 1) you don’t need to read further. However, if you are interested in how I created the package or you want to use osc directly from its sources, keep reading!

Follow these steps if you want to build your own Windows build of osc:

1. install the latest python (I used python-2.6.2.msi installer and kept the default path
   C:\Python26)
2. install the latest py2exe (I used py2exe-0.6.9.win32-py2.6.exe, it should find your python distribution installed in previous step)
3. install the latest subversion client (I used the build from sliksvn.com: Slik-Subversion-1.6.2-win32.msi)
4. change into your working directory and checkout the latest osc from subversion:

   svn co https://forgesvn1.novell.com/svn/opensuse/trunk/buildservice/src/clientlib/python/osc

5. change into osc directory
6. run py2exe:

   C:\Python26\python.exe setup.py py2exe

7. compress all files in directory dist into osc.zip and you are done! enjoy!

If you want to use osc directly from its sources, just follow the steps 1, 3, 4, 5 and run:

C:\Python26\python.exe osc-wrapper.py

(You can save typing if you add path C:\Python26 into your %PATH% variable.

That’s it!

Update #1: I found out that something very similar could be acheived on Mac OS X using py2app and by calling python setup.py py2app. However, this is usually not needed, because Mac OS X already ships with python (2.4.2 in Tiger and 2.5.1 in Leopard if I recall correctly – these are older, but running osc with them should be just fine).

Update #2: Michael E. Brown and Shalonda Matthews from Dell reported two bugs in my build. They were caused by different behaviour of mmap.mmap function under Unix and Windows and the fact that function os.path.sametime isn’t available under Windows at all. Both problems are fixed in SVN now and I have also rebuild the osc.zip archive.

Update #3: The zip archive is not maintained. Build Service requires quite new build of osc, therefore I recommend creating your own executable by following the steps described above.

Update #4: The code has moved from Subversion to Gitorious. You need to install Git and run git clone git://gitorious.org/opensuse/osc.git instead of points #3 and #4.

A few years ago, me and four of my friends were doing an university project, which was basically a web portal. While designing our application we needed a tool for creating mock-ups and screen prototypes. There are a lot of options like Wireframe Sketcher, Cleverlance Petra, but finally we ended up with Axure RP. Now I’m not sure why, but at least we had the motivation to finish the prototype early (trial period was only 30 days ).

Today, I was again looking for the alternatives and found – Pencil. No, I don’t mean the office aid, but the Pencil Project. It lacks some important features like creating hyper-links between the components and thus exporting to HTML pages, but these are planned and I can say that I really like this tool. And not to forget – it is open source! You can install it as a Firefox extension or download it as a standalone application. Unfortunately upstream tarball contains the whole XULRunner, so I decided to create a package for openSUSE. It is available from our Contrib repository and is only 330kB large! (Big thanks goes to Wolfgang Rosenauer for helping me to tame XULRunner.)

Pencil right now supports common shapes like rectangles or bitmaps, annotations, GTK widgets and Windows XP widgets. The widgets (or rather stencils) are simple SVG files, so if we help Duong Thanh An, the author, we might see Qt, iPhone or Yahoo stencils as a part of the Pencil in the future! Wouldn’t that be sweet?

Update: I just found Graffletopia – with hundreds of stencils (or so-called graffles) for Mac OS X tool OmniGraffle and some of them are really great. How about a converter ?

I’m happy to announce that this year I’ll be mentoring GSoC project which will attempt to create an alternative source backend using git. Student implementing the idea is Peter Libič. I have created an openSUSE wiki page with the copy of the proposal and some useful links. Some of my colleagues (like Andreas Gruenbacher and Brandon Philips) are also interested in topic and already provided a valuable feedback. If you’d like to get involved, feel free to contact me, edit the project wiki page or join us on IRC channel #obs-git@irc.freenode.net.