Next on program was a talk from Kendy about LibreOffice. He explained the reasons for forking, some new features available in version 3.3, but also ways how one can contribute to the project. For example, there is a list of easy hacks which includes things like translating German source comments into English or removing unused code. More advanced programmers can participate in Google Summer of Code by solving one of the ideas (btw, this also applies for openSUSE: ideas to grab are here).

The official part continued with my talk about changes in openSUSE. I talked about our desktop environments shipping with the latest 11.4 release (KDE, GNOME, Xfce and LXDE), about applications like Firefox and other browsers or LibreOffice. I also mentioned changes under the hood like Linux kernel, Xorg + Mesa or systemd. At the end I mentioned other changes in the project like Tumbleweed initiative, split of Packman repositories, SUSE Studio and virtualization in general and our web infrastructure: more precisely Build Service and Connect.

The last talk was given by Miro. He is an editor-in-chief of the Czech Linux magazine called LinuxExpres. While doing interviews in our offices a week ago, we asked him if he’d be willing to do a talk at our release party about Xfce 4.8 which is available in 11.4. To our delight he agreed, although he uses Xfce in Debian, but he wanted to see how 4.8 looks like. In fact, openSUSE is the first major distro to have Xfce 4.8 in its stable release!

All photos taken by Michal Kubecek, thanks!

This article is about openSUSE 11.2 Release Party in Prague, Czech Republic and is probably not very interesting for people living abroad.

Ako mnohí z vás vedia, dnes oficiálne vyšlo openSUSE 11.2 (sťahujte odtiaľto) a po celom svete sa nasledujúci tyždeň budú konať Release Party. My sme si túto príležitosť nemohli nechať újsť a pripravili sme pre vás tiež jednu takúto akciu v Prahe.

Kedy a kde sa to celé odohrá? Podarilo sa nám zarezervovať lukratívne priestory v budove Matematicko-fyzikálnej fakulty UK, konkrétne poslucháreň S3 (3. poschodie). Tu budeme k dispozícii v piatok 20.11.2009 od 14:00 do 19:00. Budova sa nachádza pri zastávke “Malostranské náměstí”, potom stačí iba prejsť cez parkovisko (mapa).

A aká bude náplň akcie?

• prezentácia openSUSE 11.2 (čo nové sme pre vás do nového vydania ukuchtili)
• rozdávanie inštalačných médií openSUSE 11.2
• pomoc pri inštalovaní openSUSE 11.2 na notebooky a iné mašinky, ktoré si prinesiete
• riešenie problémov s už nainštalovanými openSUSE (buď 11.2 alebo staršími)
• možnosť porozprávať sa s openSUSE vývojármi
• k dispozícii budú aj reklamné predmety openSUSE

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Tešíme sa na vašu účasť v hojnom počte!

Update: Petr pripravil z akcie fotoreportáž …

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!

The Xfce development team announced today the release of the long-awaited 4.6.0 version of their Xfce Desktop Environment. There is also a very nice Visual Tour prepared by Jérôme Guelfucci and Jannis Pohlmann, which highlights some of the new and exciting Xfce features. For me, the most vivid change is the complete rewrite of the Settings Manager together with its configuration backend, but I’m sure that everybody will find his/hers own favorite .

It took me longer to prepare the updated packages than I expected, because of the busy BuildService, but they are finally ready in our X11:xfce BuildService project and I would like to encourage you to try them. If you encounter any problems, either upgrade issues from distribution 4.4.x series, issues with clean installation from repository or any other defects, please do not hesitate and contact me. Thank you very much and I’m looking for your comments and responses!

Instructions (command-line):

1. add X11:xfce repository if it is not already added:

   zypper addrepo http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/X11:/xfce/openSUSE_11.1/ xfce

   (replace 11.1 with your openSUSE version)

2. refresh this repository:

   zypper refresh xfce

3. get new packages
   • if you have Xfce 4.4.x installed – upgrade the packages from xfce repo:
     zypper dist-upgrade --repo xfce
   • or install the Xfce packages directly:

     zypper install Terminal mousepad orage ristretto thunar thunar-volman xfce4-appfinder xfce4-desktop xfce4-mixer xfce4-notifyd xfce4-settings xfce4-taskmanager xfce4-volstatus xfconf xfwm4

Instructions (one-click install):

just click on the link with your distribution:

• openSUSE 10.3
• openSUSE 11.0
• openSUSE 11.1

1. add the following repositories:

   zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/prusnak:/scout/openSUSE_11.0 scout
   zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/prusnak:/scout/data scout-data

   (change openSUSE_11.0 to your distribution if necessary)

2. install scout:

   zypper in scout

3. add any of the index data you find attractive (only example – see scout wiki page for the whole list)

   zypper in scout-bin-suse110
   zypper in scout-java-suse110

   Data package names are in format scout-module-repo. Indexes for autoconf macros are in autoconf packages, bin are indexed binaries and java are indexed java classes. Repository names are either distributions (sle10, suse101, suse102, suse103, suse110) or BuildService projects (jpackage17 for Java:jpackage1.7). Simple, isn’t it?

   (Warning: Java indexes are pretty large – 5MB RPMs and around 30MB when installed.)

When you are ready, run scout without parameters to see the help. I think that the usage is pretty straightforward (nevertheless, I will try to create demonstration video soon). You can also try running scoutcsv or scoutxml – they are only symlinks, but they produce CSV or XML output, instead of table output.

I hope you will like it!

The next thing to do is to add support for ZYPP repositories (sat-solver files) in module for binaries, so user could query packages (even in the BuildService repositories) without installing any external index data. When this is done, it would be a piece of cake to replace the earlier implementation of command-not-found with the new one using scout as its backend. Unfortunately, this is not going to happen before the ZYPP bindings for Python (python-zypp) are fixed. (API has changed and it seems that only Ruby bindings are maintained.) I tried to fiddle with it (bugzilla), but I’m not a SWIG expert.

Background: Debian and Ubuntu use patched bash, that allows to write handler, which is executed before “command not found” is written. That provides us a way we can help user in solving the problem. You can look at the picture to get the idea:

In first example, user types “epihpany” instead of “epiphany” and handler suggests correct spelling. After this user tries running epiphany, but it is not installed, so handler shows list of packages that provide this program. In the third example, user runs program that is not found, but package providing it is installed (meaning that program is not in user’s path – probably intended to be run only by root).

Package command-not-found and patched bash are available in BuildService or you can download packages directly from repository. Please test the packages and let me know if you have any ideas or in case you have found a bug.

Ah, I almost forgot You have to add these 3 lines to /etc/bash.bashrc.local or ~/.bashrc:

if [ -f /etc/bash_command_not_found ]; then
  . /etc/bash_command_not_found
fi

Handler for zsh can be installed in similar fashion. Read README in command-not-found package.