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

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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.

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 …

Yesterday, we needed with darix to obtain a dependency graph of the package you are about to install. I knew that something similar was planned in zypper, so I went to Jano Kupec to check the status of it. Unfortunately, I learned that this feature is not implemented yet. I think it should not be very hard to enhance the zypper package list with some eye-candy, but I haven’t looked into it yet. I would love to have these outputs similar to Gentoo ones (colors and simple ASCII art dependency trees). Btw, zypper already has color support, so if you want to start hacking, there is source code in gitorious.

Jano also showed me a neat trick how to obtain the results we wanted anyway. If you are in similar situation, just follow these steps (they are of course not suitable for everyday use, but still better than nothing):

1. install package libzypp-testsuite-tools
2. run zypper install --debug-solver pkg
3. cd into /var/log/zypper.solverTestCase
4. open solver-test.xml in your favorite editor
5. add <graphic/> tag just above the </trial> closing tag
6. run /usr/lib/zypp/testsuite/bin/deptestomatic.multi solver-test.xml (as normal user, you won’t get any graph when running as root)
7. you can pan the graph, rotate it with the right click or even save it to disk!

The resulting image can be seen here:

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!