Have you ever wanted to join Build Service development, but you had no idea what to implement? Would you like a real opportunity to learn Ruby on Rails? This is a great time to start!

The OBS developers have collected smaller projects on this wiki page. These projects are ideal for anyone new to OBS development. All you need is a local copy of the Web Client, which can easily be deployed on your development system.

Most of the jobs will enable functionality which is already implemented, but not available in the web client. The web client is great for browsing the content and the status of the projects. These improvements will help developers to get a better overview about their builds and sources.

(more…)

    Issue #54 of openSUSE Weekly News is now out!
In this week’s issue:

• Bugzilla Update to 3.2
• Contributor Gifts
• Miguel de Icaza: Mono goes Accessible!
• lowobu: Since when do you use (open)SuSE?
• Nikesh Jauhari: Read-Write Support for NTFS partition on OpenSUSE 11.x

The openSUSE Weekly News is available in:
German,
Indonesian,
Japanese,
Polish,
Portuguese,
Russian and
Spanish.

New: Short version in Hungarian .

Meeting page

Want classic KDE on openSUSE, without the full DVD download? Carlos Goncalves has you covered. openSUSE 11.1 Live CDs and USB images featuring KDE 3.5 are now available for download.

Created by openSUSE community member Carlos Goncalves, the KDE 3.5 Live CD and USB images contain openSUSE 11.1 plus several key updates.

In addition to KDE 3.5, the Live CD offers OpenOffice.org 3.0, Smolt, Amarok 1.4.10, KDEPIM3, Firefox 3.0.4, K3b, and many other useful applications. You can see the entire package list here: package-lists-openSUSE

And, of course, openSUSE has the current KDE releases covered as well. You can download the official openSUSE 11.1 KDE4 Live CDs based on KDE 4.1.3, or if you want to follow KDE development, Stephan Binner has created a KDE Four Live CD featuring KDE 4.2 Beta 2.

Note that the KDE 3.5 live CD is an “unofficial” release. Even though it’s not a formal release, we’re excited by the work Carlos has put into supporting KDE 3.5 and showing what can be done with the build service. Want to create your own Live CD featuring openSUSE? See Carlos Build Service Live CD project on creating a Live CD here: home:cgoncalves:LiveCD, and Masim’s “How to Make openSUSE 11.1 KDE 3.5 LiveCD or LiveDVD” article.

Download

openSUSE 11.1 KDE3 Live CD and USB are available for i686 and x86_64 architectures:

• openSUSE 11.1 KDE3 Live CD: i686 (md5, sha1), x86_64 (md5, sha1)
• openSUSE 11.1 KDE3 Live USB: i686 (md5, sha1), x86_64 (md5, sha1) (instructions)

If you want to report any bug found use Novell’s Bugzilla for better tracking. Feedback can be sent via email, IRC and comment in here.

A huge thanks to Stephan ‘Beineri’ Binner, Stephan ‘coolo’ Kulow, and Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier for their assistance and effort!

We hope that the openSUSE community will find it useful and have a lot of fun with KDE 3.5!

Meeting page

Andreas Schneider has unleashed the first public release candidate of csync 0.42, which is now available as source from the csync Web site, or via one-click for openSUSE 11.0 and 11.1.

As mobile computing becomes more and more important, file synchronization is more important than ever. Our jobs often require working not only on multiple computers, but in multiple locations, and disconnected from our networks. To help solve this problem, we need effective strategies for replication of user data and files.

csync is a bidirectional file synchronizer for Linux and allows to keep two copies of files and directories in sync. It uses uses widely adopted protocols like smb or sftp so that there is no need for a server component of csync. It is a user-level program which means there is no need to be a superuser. With pam_csync it is possible to create roaming home directories.

For more on using csync, see the user guide. Please report bugs using the bugtracker. For more information on csync, or to get involved with development, see the csync Web site and join the devel lists or find help in IRC.

To make bug reporting easier, we will be updating Novell’s Bugzilla to the latest stable release (Bugzilla 3.2) with some additional features added by Novell. This update will take place on Saturday, January 10th, and Bugzilla will be unavailable from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. MST (that’s 17:00 UTC to 21:00 UTC).

One significant change is that we will have a new guided mode for reporting of bugs that is default for non-Novell accounts.

The guided report mode is a feature of bugzilla itself that we just enable.  It gives smart hints for reporting bugs including bad and good examples, makes the report more structured, suggests “hot” duplicate bugs and asks for reproducibility, expected and actual result.  This should help to create better bug reports and thus help with better resolving of bugs.

For those that use the unguided mode and want to use the guided mode (or the other way round), you can bookmark a template of the “New Bugreport” (see below for details) . Once you’ve done this, manually edit the URL of the bookmark and append “&format=guided” (if you want guided mode) or remove it if you do not want it. You can then use this bookmark for easy access, I have created that way a bookmark for openSUSE 11.1 bug reports that has already some stuff filled in, e.g. set “Found By” to “Community User”. Note that the guided mode will only be available after the update of bugzilla!

The changes for 3.2 in the upstream bugzilla are documented at the bugzilla site. In addition, a couple of bugs and enhancements in our bugzilla have been fixed.

Btw. if you want to report a bug, please check also our guidelines.

Task: How to create a template for new bug reports

• Select “New” to create a new bug report. Enter values for the attributes you want to predefine.
• Click
• A new page appears:



• Right click on the hyperlink and and choose “Bookmark link” (Firefox) to add it to your bookmarks
• Select the bookmark to create a new defect with your predefined attributes

Update: I rewrote the first paragraph and added a paragraph explaining guided report mode.

Update: Correction: you have to append “&format=guided”, an example URL for openSUSE 11.1 bug reports is therefore https://bugzilla.novell.com/enter_bug.cgi?product=openSUSE+11.1&format=guided

Today we had two posts that contributors received the Box and a very special gift. Again Salid was one of the first who got it. If you are not from Germany, you have to wait a little bit longer, but the packages should arrive soon.

Thanks again to all contributors!

btw: we made the T-Shirt exclusively for contributors. It is not available somewhere else!

    Issue #53 of openSUSE Weekly News is now out!
In this week’s issue:

• Masim Sugianto: First Hackfest for Indonesian openSUSE Community
• How to Make openSUSE 11.1 LiveUSB
• Joe Brockmeier: openSUSE – One of the 10 coolest of 2008
• Marek Stopka: Fatrat – Nice download manager in OBS…
• Howto-How to compile the new Kernel 2.6.28?

The openSUSE Weekly News is available in:
German (delay),
Indonesian,
Japanese,
Polish,
Portuguese,
Russian (delay) and
Spanish.

New: Short version in Hungarian .

Happy New Year !

    Issue #52 of openSUSE Weekly News is now out!
In this week’s issue:

• openSUSE Education available SLE10 and 11.1
• Zimbra Mail Server Training in Indonesia
• Q&A with Joe Brockmeier
• Forums: Getting VMware to run on openSUSE 11.1
• Best of Newsletter 2008

The openSUSE Weekly News is available in:
German,
Indonesian,
Japanese,
Polish,
Portuguese,
Russian and
Spanish.