• Rotate tool
• Polygon/Polyline Editing
• Linear Gradient Picking
• View and Edit Source
• Clone tool
• Align tool
• Firefox extension
• Opera widget

Jeff Schiller also prepared two screencasts. The older one is an introduction to SVG-edit, where he uses 2.2 version. And the newer one, which presents some of the new features included in 2.3 release.

Head here if you’d like to try SVG-edit yourself!

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!

• Wireshark now contains a nice new start page (Picture 1)
• Display filters now do auto-completion (Picture 2)
• Wireshark can lookup in GeoIP databases and also use OpenStreetMap (Picture 3)

The release contains also a lot of bugfixes, support for the new protocols and the new capture files. You can find more info in the release notes.

If you want to test GeoIP/OpenStreetMap integration in Wireshark, just follow these steps:

1. install the latest wireshark and GeoIP packages from Factory:

   root@host:~> zypper install wireshark GeoIP libGeoIP1

2. run the utility which was recently added to GeoIP package by Ludwig Nussel:

   root@host:~> geoip-fetch -a

   This will fetch the latest GeoIP data files including the GeoIPCity, which is 44MB large, so we don’t keep it in the package, but is necessary for this feature of wireshark.

3. run wireshark and enable GeoIP: Edit -> Preferences -> Protocols -> IP -> check Enable GeoIP lookups
4. trace some network traffic (probably the best is to access various websites in your browser)
5. pick some packet and expand Internet Protocol from dissector, you will see a line similar to this one:

   [Destination GeoIP: Mountain View, CA, AS15169, 37.419201, -122.057404]

6. go to Statistics -> Endpoints -> select IPv4 tab
7. you’ll see IPv4 endpoints with Countries, Cities, Providers and Latitude/Longitude
8. press Map button at the bottom of the dialog window
9. browser with OpenStreetMap and embedded Endpoints will open (see Picture 3)
10. you can also use new packet filters starting with the ip.geoip prefix (see Picture 2)

• tooltips for all UI elements
• editing of fill, stroke and group opacity
• selecting and moving elements
• saving SVG file
• adding end editing of text elements
• context panel for tools
• change rectangle radius
• controlling of the editor with keyboard shortcuts

You can try the 2.1 branch here:

Unfortunately the editor still has some problems when embedded into Google Wave, but now that Vidar received his invitation, I hope we’ll be able to fix it sooner. We are also already cooking new features for 2.2 so stay tuned!

Then I stumbled upon svg-edit by Narendra Sisodiya. It was rather raw and lots of features were missing, but then I sat down, started hacking and after few hours I created quite a long list of changes. When I sent them to Narendra, he was so kind that he made me an administrator of the project, so I was able to push all my changes into SVN trunk and to continue the work there.

Today I finished all changes I wanted to fix before the relase, so I can present you the 2.0 release of SVG-edit! You can try for yourself by clicking on the next picture (this is pointer to trunk development version, so it might get messy in time ):

During the development I was testing it in Firefox and Opera and I’m sure there will be some problems in other browsers. If you hit any, do not hesitate and write me an e-mail or even better use the issue tracker on the project site.

Also there are some features that are still missing, but they are planned (like adding text, more complicated shapes or selecting, moving, scaling, rotating objects) and I hope they will be added in the near future.

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 ?

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

This years Google Sumer of Code, student Peter Libič tried to implement an idea of Migrating Assistant. MacOSX contains utility which can import users, application settings and various files from old Macintosh to new one. Idea to port this functionality to Linux is not new. Something similar was created during GSoC two years ago by Ubuntu, but we tried to use different approach (object oriented C++) so the code is better extendable and maintainable.

Application support is not as wide as it probably should be, but because of the clean design, we hope that the number of supported applications will rise in the future. You can try Mango for yourself – packages are ready in BuildService and we are looking forward to feedback from you. See http://en.opensuse.org/Mango for more info and installation instructions …