We are pleased to announce the new openSUSE Weekly News.
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Archive for January, 2011
openSUSE Announces Development Milestone Six of Six
January 28th, 2011 by Will StephensonopenSUSE project manager Stephan Kulow has announced that openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 6 (M6) is ready for testing. With M6, the pace of development is starting to slow down as the focus switches towards QA and bug fixing.
The project has been evaluating systemd vs SysV init to manage system and service startup, and has decided to stay with SysV init for 11.4 due to issues in getting the last 10% of the integration perfect.
M6 sees the completed removal of the HAL hardware abstraction layer, to be replaced with the more up-to-date and actively maintained udev, udisks and upower suite. HAL was already scheduled for removal in 11.3, but it was retained while the last few software packages which depend on it were ported to udev and company.
Branding and artwork has had a lot of attention, with the addition of the final wallpapers, splash screens and branding for 11.4. The default wallpaper is called Celadon Stripes, taking its inspiration from the color codename for this release.
New software added in Milestone 6 includes the WebYaST stack. WebYaST is the web-based admin tool developed for SLES, now available for openSUSE. Professional sysadmins and those who just like to comfortably administer their openSUSE servers will appreciate WebYaST. Also on the server side, the latest versions of the Horde groupware suite are now in openSUSE.
Software updates this milestone include the update of XOrg to 7.6, VirtualBox 4.0.2, GnuCash 2.4, and Scribus 1.3.9. A lively discussion on the opensuse-factory list about whether to include the stable Firefox 3.6.13 or a Firefox 4 beta centered around the limited availability of popular extensions for version 4 versus the short upstream maintenance period of Firefox 3 releases. As this article was published, the discussion was leaning towards taking a Firefox 4 beta and online-updating it to the final release when it becomes available.
Updates are flowing thick and fast to the KDE workspace and applications. KDE 4.6RC2 is on M6, and will be updated to 4.6.0 final for the first Release Candidate. The accompanying flurry of application releases include Amarok 2.4.0, Digikam 1.8.0, KOffice 2.3.1, k3b 2.0.2, KDevelop 4.2, KMyMoney 4.5, Rekonq 0.6 and BlueDevil 1.0.1. Fans of the Oxygen style will also see it in GTK applications, thanks to the native port of Oxygen to a GTK style in the form of the oxygen-gtk package .
As the GNOME project prepares for GNOME 3, the focus at openSUSE is on stabilisation and polish to GNOME 2.32. Bugfixes to PulseAudio, GDM and gnome-main-menu will ensure that 11.4 brings incremental refinement to GNOME users. Clutter 1.5 is included to support the latest available preview of gnome-shell, and the gramps genealogy tool is added in version 3.2.5. The GNOME team is preparing an 11.4-based Live CD that will include GNOME 3 when it is released in March.
The XFCE desktop is updated thanks to the hard work of the community to version 4.8, bringing with it network transparent file management, a rewritten panel, menus editable with Alacarte, and improved packaging and installation selections for openSUSE.
A list of most annoying bugs is being compiled; please check it before installing. We look forward to your bug reports and test experiences too. Automated testing and the openSUSE Factory team have been active to ensure that your download of M6 will be at least minimally functional.
Release Candidate 1 is scheduled for February 10 and brings with it a hard freeze. openSUSE 11.4 is planned to be released in March 2011.
openSUSE Board Election 2010: Vogelsang and Linnell elected
January 28th, 2011 by Sascha Manns
The last few weeks in the openSUSE project have been very interesting. Two seats on the openSUSE Project board were up for election. The Election Committee closed the polls on Wednesday, and we are pleased to announce the results:
- Henne Vogelsang (125 Votes)
- Peter Linnell (72 Votes)
- Sankar P. (71 votes)
- Sebastian Kügler (64 votes)
- Chuck Payne (39 votes)
- Nelson Marques (23 votes)
- Kostas Kodouras (20 votas)
220 of the 469 openSUSE members voted.
We at the News Team wish the new board members all the best and Have A Lot Of Fun!
Poll: Which outputformat of Weekly News you prefer?
January 27th, 2011 by Sascha Manns
The openSUSE Weekly News team just created a Poll with the topic: Which outputformat of Weekly News you prefer? Please drop your vote there: https://connect.opensuse.org/pg/polls/read/saigkill/11553/which-outputformat-of-the-weekly-news-you-prefer.
First Bretzn Sprint: openSUSE App Store on the Horizon
January 27th, 2011 by James Mason
Novell hosted the first Bretzn Sprint in the SUSE office in Nürnberg between 21th and the 23st of January. The objective of the sprint was to create an proof of concept application store for openSUSE.
This meeting is a direct follow up of the Cross-distribution meeting on application installer which took place in the 3 days leading up to the Bretzn sprint. During this meeting developers from Debian, Fedora, Mageia, openSUSE, and Ubuntu Linux distributions decided to work together on common APIs and code for application stores on Linux.
The Bretzn Sprint was dedicated to the development of a proof of concept of this idea, using existing components like the MeeGo Garage client and libattica as starting points.
Attendees of this meeting where Will Stephenson, Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Frederik Gladhorn, Mateu Batle Sastre, Eugene Trounev, Vincent Untz, Pavol Rusnak and Frank Karlitschek. This team brought together a wide range of skills, as can be seen in the results of this highly productive sprint.
In just two and a half days, they managed to create a working application store client for openSUSE and KDE. The server part was based on OCS (Open Collaboration Services), which already did everything needed for the server side and just needed some data inserted to be shown in the client. The client in turn was created by using the MeeGo Garage client, and adapting it to be a more KDE-like application, by using the various KDE widgets and other tools, removing the duplication of functionality which was covered by the KDE libraries.
Finally, a new application view was created, to replace the existing which was never as pleasing as the original authors wanted it to be. This was done by using Qt Quick, which has allowed for the rapid construction of a much more pleasant look. The new interface is the result of a brainstorming session involving all members of the sprint, based on the results from thecross-distribution meeting. While this work is still in progress, it already represents an improvement over the old interface.
Article contributed by Frank Karlitschek
App Installer Meeting or More Collaboration Across Borders
January 26th, 2011 by Izabel ValverdeBack in October, at the openSUSE Conference, several meetings and hallway discussions occurred on the topic of “Installation ofApplications” on openSUSE. As of today, we still have a very package-centric approach, while users usually do not think in terms of packages but in terms of applications: people want to use Firefox, LibreOffice or Frozen Bubble.
We investigated the best way to approach this issue and come to a fast resolution. With several people from various distributions already working on some technologies that are related to this, we realized this could be a prime example of Collaboration Accross Borders. This lead Vincent Untz to contact several people from different distributions, to see if he could spark an interest in a cross-distribution meeting on this topic. It turned out that everyone replied enthusiastically! That’s how the App Installer Meeting saw the light.
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Testing IRC Meeting
January 20th, 2011 by Will Stephenson| January 31, 2011 | ||
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The openSUSE Testing Core Team will meet in the channel #opensuse-testing on the freenode IRC network.
You can find and edit the agenda and read the meeting minutes on past meetings on our meeting page in the openSUSE wiki.
Small server maintenance Thursday, 2011-01-20
January 19th, 2011 by News TeamWe will have a service outage (expected are 30 minutes) this Thursday morning between 09:00 and 10:00 CET.
This means the following services will not be reachable during that time:
* software.opensuse.org
* build.opensuse.org
* api.opensuse.org
Hackweek VI
January 19th, 2011 by James Mason
Hackweek VI will take place January 24th – 28th, 2011.
Hackweek is one of Novell’s biggest ways of giving back to the openSUSE community – by providing developers the opportunity to spend their paid work week contributing to free and open source software instead of their assigned projects. Hackweek V produced an amazing variety of projects, including froxlor (server management panel), a donor management app for Shelterbox, a GUI client for SUSE Studio, and hundreds more. Prior Hackweeks have spawned projects that are now desktop Linux mainstays, like Tasque and Giver.
Hackweek VI features the theme “Engineering Cloud” and allows developers to get their hands on related projects. In order to support that approach, we are providing access to a few select cloud providers and a setup where you can deploy cloud infrastructure software (e.g. Eucalyptus). Your favorite hack-project may or may not relate to that theme, it may well be experimental, as long as it is Linux- or SUSE-related.
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