1 – What is ATK and AT-SPI in simple words?

AT-SPI is the acronym for Assistive Technology Service Provider Interface. Its main purpose is to provide a means for an assistive technology to interact with an application. For instance, the Orca screen reader wants to present newly-inserted text, such as a new instant message, to the user. Therefore Orca asks AT-SPI to inform it whenever text gets inserted. When Orca is told what text has just been inserted, it can present that new text to the user in speech and in braille. Similarly, Orca presents each newly-focused object to the user as the user navigates via the keyboard. Orca can do this because AT-SPI tells it each time a new object gains focus.

Orca, of course, is not the only assistive technology out there. Speech recognition tools can make it possible for users to speak the name of something they wish to click on, like the ‘Close’ button in a dialog box, and then do the clicking for them through AT-SPI. A screen magnifier can make sure the user’s location is always visible on the screen by paying attention to changes in the location of the caret, in the selected item, and in the focused item — each of which gets reported to assistive technologies by AT-SPI.

AT-SPI in turn needs a way to get this information from the applications being used. This is typically accomplished through the application’s toolkit.  For instance, Gtk+, Clutter, Gecko, and other toolkits implement an accessibility abstraction layer called ATK.  If a toolkit implements ATK, then AT-SPI will automatically receive the information from that toolkit thanks to the atk-bridge. It turns out that, in the case of Qt, there is no ATK implementation. Instead Qt implements its own direct bridge to AT-SPI. But that is a special case. What is important is that in all cases, accessible free desktop toolkits expose information to assistive technologies, and assistive technologies get that information via AT-SPI.

2 – How easy is for someone with disabilities to run a computer? How far is Linux from other similar proprietary software?

In short: it is not especially easy. And in some cases the problems start early on in the user experience because not all distros have accessible installers yet. Having said that, we are seeing more and more awareness of accessibility on the part of developers as well as distros. Thus we are getting closer and closer to the point of Linux accessibility which “just works.”

With respect to how far away Linux is from other similar proprietary software, we’ve admittedly got a ways to go. But it is also worth mentioning that in the case of Linux GUIs, accessibility is comparatively new, having been created just 10 years ago.

3 – Do you believe the financial costs make it more difficult?

Yes, in our opinion financial costs do make things more difficult for the end user. Accessibility related software and hardware tend to be quite specialized, and are only required by a very small percentage of the overall user market. As a result these tools are often expensive. For example, the leading, proprietary Windows screen readers cost in the ballpark of $1000 US for a single user license. In the case of the hardware, a braille display with just 24 cells can cost three thousands dollars (or more). Figuring out how to make the hardware more affordable is a difficult problem to solve, but we can at least reduce the overall costs faced by users through Free Software.

4 – How did you get involved with GNOME Accessibility?

Piñeiro: In my case it started when a former contractor asked Igalia to provide support for automatic testing. Accessibility technologies are also used to implement automatic testing (like the Mago project). As one of the outcomes of that work, I implemented a basic ATK implementation for Clutter. Then we decided that it would be useful to use that work for accessibility purposes. I contacted the Clutter maintainers to see if they would be interested. They were, so we started to include that functionality in Clutter itself. As part of that work, I began interacting with the GNOME Accessibility developer community and also attended the Boston Summit where I met Joanmarie Diggs who is one of the Orca developers.

Joanmarie: In 2006 Massachusetts announced their decision to make ODF the official file format of the Commonwealth. At that time, I was an Assistive Technology Specialist working at the Carroll Center for the Blind and, due to some issues surrounding the Commonwealth’s decision, a number of companies began paying us a visit to talk about free desktop accessibility. One of those companies was Sun Microsystems, which in those days was where much of the GNOME Accessibility development effort was housed. Orca was amongst the items presented to us, and for the first time I saw something I had wanted for the bulk of the previous decade, namely a screen reader that didn’t cost $1200 and which users and instructors could truly make their own by providing input and contributing code. At the time, my non-work systems were running Kubuntu, so it was just a matter of crossing over to GNOME and getting up to speed on Orca and how things worked in the GNOME community.

5 – Where do you get your feedback to improve the development of accessibility generally? Is there just a community involved?

We get a considerable and ongoing amount of input from the community. For instance, GNOME’s Orca mailing list has lots of discussion and can always be relied upon for timely feedback. The participants of that list range from basic users to individuals with enough knowledge to compile and install Orca from master in order to see if a new feature meets their needs or a proposed fix solves a problem. Some users even provide patches for proposed fixes or features to the developers.

We also get feedback from other sources. For example, when local governments want to migrate their desktops to Free Software solutions, they conduct evaluations of the accessibility tools, and provide us with feedback and/or a list of requirements.

6 – How can someone who wants to help join forces? Do they need to have any special hardware equipment?

Anyone interested in contributing should take a look at https://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/ or http://projects.gnome.org/accessibility/. There they will find information about accessibility in GNOME, the different areas (development and non-development) in which they help, and how to get in touch with us. Having access to assistive hardware devices is not required, unless of course someone wants to provide a feature or fix based on a specific type of hardware or a particular device.

7 – What has been achieved in this Hackfest and what are the next steps?

Being able to bring the free desktop accessibility developers — a group of individuals who are normally scattered around the globe — together in the same room for five full days of discussions was extremely valuable: We were able to talk about how GNOME does things versus how Qt does them; about the differences between Gecko and WebKitGtk; about what Orca needs from the toolkits, how AT-SPI provides it, and what challenges are faced by those toolkits when providing that information via ATK. It is essential that we achieve the most reliable, performant, and standardized accessibility implementation possible, and this event brought us closer to achieving that goal.

The most immediate next step is to implement solutions based on the conclusions reached during the hackfest. Beyond that, we need to keep working together to find answers and reach consensus on the questions and issues which remain unresolved.

Anyone interested in contribute can take a look at http://projects.gnome.org/accessibility/

Thanks to GNOME accessibility team!

This article is contributed by Kamila Součkova

Introduction

As the btrfs wiki says: “Btrfs is a new copy on write filesystem for Linux aimed at implementing advanced features while focusing on fault tolerance, repair and easy administration.” Although under heavy development, it has become stable enough for personal use, and there are plenty of reasons to try it. What distinguishes it from earlier filesystems is that it has been designed with scalability and robustness in mind: it can handle huge files (up to 16EiB — a lot!), it can pack lots of files and directories efficiently, has built-in error detection methods (checksums of data and metadata), support for transparent compression, integrated multiple devices support (RAID-0, RAID-1 and RAID-10 so far) and more — see here for a more complete list.

In this how-to I will focus on one particularly neat feature: snapshots. Btrfs allows you to make read-only or writable snapshots of the state of your filesystem without wasting space with redundant data. Together with YaST’s Snapper module, this makes tracking FS changes and undoing undesired modifications a breeze.

Some Background

So how does btrfs do all that snapshot awesomeness? The answer is, it uses subvolumes. Subvolumes are something like separate filesystems within one partition: you can have several filesystem roots in the same container. With copy-on-write (COW) this means that “almost-separate filesystems” can share duplicate data and therefore save space. (Note: Subvolumes do not have a fixed size, they grow and shrink with the data they contain.)

With snapshots, one creates a copy of the whole filesystem within a new subvolume on the partition. As data is actually duplicated only once it is changed, making snapshots is both time- and space-efficient.

Time to Test It

Preparations

You will need the btrfs tools (package btrfsprogs). The Snapper YaST module provides a nice interface for btrfs’s snapshot functionality. You may create a new btrfs partition just for experimenting, or convert an existing ext3/ext4 filesystem. As for conversion, this is done using btrfs-convert; the good thing is that it can preserve the original ext FS and one can easily go back to it (see the wiki page for more info). Alternatively, openSUSE offers btrfs as an option during installation since 11.3.

Listing Snapshots

Once you have a partition, you can look at its snapshots with
snapper list
or view plain btrfs submodules/snapshots with
btrfs subvolume list

Note that in the snapper listing snapshot #0 is always the current system. Also note that for btrfs snapshots and submodules are the same thing.

Snapper Configs

Snapper keeps configs for your partitions; you can view them with
snapper list-configs

Configs allow you to specify when to make snapshots, how many of each tipe should be kept etc. They are stored in /etc/snapper/configs; config templates are in /etc/snapper/config-templates.

In case your root filesystem is btrfs, Snapper will have created a config that makes a “pre” and “post” snapshot pair whenever you use YaST or zypper in addition to the “timeline” snapshots.

You can create your own configs (e.g. for /home or whatever) with snapper create-config:
snapper -c create-config [-t template]
You need a config whenever you want a path other than the default /. (Always specify it with -c.)

Making Snapshots

To make snapshots manually use either
snapper [-c config-name] create --description "something that tells you what this is"
(and see snapper –help for more options); or the vanilla

btrfs subvolume snapshot /[subvolume-name]

A snapshot made with the former command will show in snapper list; one made with the latter will appear as a directory named in. Side note: Snapper actually stores its snapshots in/.snapshots/.

Viewing Differences

To see the differences between snapshots you may either mount the snapshots somewhere (with snapper mount , or simply browse to the snapshot location) and see for yourself, or use the very convenient snapper diff:
snapper diff
will give you the list of files changed between the two given snapshots;
snapper diff
will show you the files’ diff.

Restoring Previous Snapshots

To restore a snapshot made with snapper use
snapper undochange []...
You can also specify ranges, as in snapper undochange 42..47.

To do the same with vanilla btrfs use
btrfs subvolume set-default
where can be found out with btrfs subvolume list and then unmount and remount.

Snapper GUI

Snapper also provides a YaST GUI for comparing and restoring snapshots or individual files.

Final Words
Btrfs does not have an error-correcting fsck yet, so just now it is not ready for systems that require high reliability. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it ­— it merely means that you should keep backups, which you should do anyway. So go ahead and give it a try! Its snapshots feature (together with all the other awesomeness) makes it a really worthy filesystem for both personal use and servers, and with Snapper managing snapshots is really convenient.
Note: Kernel 3.1
Fixes from kernel 3.2 have not been backported into 3.1 yet, so you may want to use the 3.2 kernel. See e.g. https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=733843 in case you get crashes with 3.1.

References and Further Reading

BTRFS wiki

Linux.com Tuturial

openSUSE Snapper Portal

As Benjaman Brunner announced yesterday, openSUSE 11.3 has reached end of life.  As a quick refresher, openSUSE releases new versions every 8 months, and each version has a life cycle of 18 months.  As 11.3 was released in July of 2010, the time has come to embrace our newer versions, including the successful release of 12.1 in November of 2011.

As Brunner’s announcement indicates, we worked hard to maintain 11.3 while developing its subsequent two releases (11.4 and 12.1.) And of course, we’re already gearing up for 12.2, slated for release in July.  And the first milestone release is already just around the corner.  You’ll be able to try out Milestone 1 on February 9th.

The roadmap for openSUSE 12.2 is as follows:

As always, testers and contributors are welcome throughout the release development process.  Join the Factory Mailing List and have a lot of fun!

Announcement by Jigish Gohil

openSUSE Education team is proud to present another edition of openSUSE-Edu Li-f-e (Linux for Education) based on openSUSE 12.1. Li-f-e comes loaded with everything that students, parents, teachers and system admins of educational institutions may need.

Softwares for mathematics, chemistry, astronomy etc, servers like KIWI-LTSP, Fedena school ERP, Moodle course management etc., full multimedia, graphics, office suite, many popular programming languages including AMP stack, java, C, C++, python, ruby, latest stable Gnome and KDE desktop environments and lot more is packed in this release. More about softwares included here.

To know more about openSUSE Education project, file bugs, request enhancements, participate, or to get in touch with us visit Education Portal.

Create live USB stick or DVD with this image. About 15GB disk space and 1GB RAM is required for installation, more is better. Please note that we release 32bit image only, for users with RAM 4G or more install and use kernel-pae package.

Hosted at sourceforge.net

Direct Download | md5sum

Hosted at opensuse-education.org

Direct Download | new metalink | old metalink | md5sum | torrent

Use download manager or Metalink client such as aria2c for most efficient way to download.

You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
Happy holidays…

Booting your system and services

In openSUSE 12.1, systemd starts up and supervises openSUSE operating system and its services. This means a number of steps usually including the following:

• mounting your disks (checking for errors if needed),
• starting the firewall and other security tools,
• starting services like mail, databases or web servers,
• connecting the network and networked filesystems,
• starting the graphical system and the login manager which brings you to your desktop

When up and running, systemd keeps tabs on the services and starts new ones (like printing) on demand, when they are needed.

Ye olde days (SysV init)

systemd replaces the old SysV init system, which is basically a loose collection of shell scripts in /etc/init.d (sometimes /etc/rc.d in other distributions). Those scripts would be called depending on the “runlevel” of the system, based on symbolic links to the scripts themselves in the /etc/init.d/rcX.d directories. Each directory there represented a runlevel number, with their order and interdependencies managed through the naming of symbolic links to those scripts, using numbers from 00 to 99. Upon booting, the system would go to a designated runlevel, starting all the scripts associated to that runlevel. While a bit brittle, this system was reasonably clear and understandable, although the scripts were usually quite big and complicated.

New and improved: systemd

Instead of shell scripts, systemd uses “.service” files that define various features provided by systemd, a bit like the old SysV init scripts but with an easier and more declarative syntax than bash.

Dependencies and events

Instead of starting the scripts based on a predefined number of runlevels, systemd uses dependencies and events to decide when to start a service. For example, once a network device is initialized, systemd starts the network service. Once a connection is made, network based services like NFS (Networked File Storage) and Samba (file sharing) can go ahead and start up. If there is no network, systemd won’t bother starting them. And without a printer attached to the system, printer service CUPS isn’t needed either.

systemd uses sockets and dbus for starting services and in this way allows on-demand starting of daemon processes, watching the sockets for requests from applications. For example, only when you try to print will the print service be started.

Starting and stopping services

systemd can start as many services as needed at the same time, respecting the dependencies and needs of the system. This, combined with the fact that it does not need to start a shell interpreter for each individual script, results in faster boot times.

Services in systemd can be disabled, enabled, started, stopped, restarted and reloaded just as the scripts in SysV but unlike SysV, the applications controlled by the script are closely monitored and controlled. Where SysV would not notice services going down (due to crashes for example) systemd will attempt to re-start them. And when systemd stops a process, you can be certain it has been stopped (thanks to using the cgroup kernel feature), whereas in SysV, processes sometimes managed to wrestle themselves out of control of the scripts.

Standardization

systemd strives towards standardizing init scripts which used to be different for each distributions. This should reduce the maintenance burden for distributions as they will share more work but it of course requires them to adapt to a common standard first. This means using the standard “systemctl” for controlling services instead of the /etc/rc* files. Currently, openSUSE still supports the rc-style files (providing symbolic links in /etc/rc.d ) so you can still run services by hand. systemd is also backwards compatible with the old-style init scripts which means that “non” standard (not included in systemd) scripts will keep working. For more details and a list of limitations in that regard please refer to here.

Using systemd

Let’s go over some features of systemd which are relevant for ‘normal’ users as well as system administrators.

Managing services and (auto)mounting devices

Devices marked via udev rules are marked as units in systemd and their udev properties can be used as configuration sources to set dependencies for device units. systemd also maintains mount and automount points and (un)mounts devices where needed. For every automount point we have a matching mount point. To let systemd automount a device, add “comment=systemd.automount” to an fstab line option, and the mountpoint is automatically handled as a automount point. This can be used for networked filesystems nfs and cifs. /etc/fstab is used as an extra configuration for these mount points. systemd also supports target units which are logically grouped and in turn these groups can be controlled together.

Stability and emergency features

Systemd automatically computes dependencies between services when running and is able to break dependencies cycles that is when a loop between services happen, systemd will break it once detected, your system will continue to work without user interaction. It also supports creating a snapshot and later restoring the system state and can be used in cases like emergency shell and provide an easy way of suspending services. However this feature is not persistent, and it is only kept in memory and is flushed after a reboot.

New System tools

A system adminstrator will welcome the new tools like systemctl to administrate the system. For example to check the status of the mysql.service, run:
$ systemctl status mysql.service
mysql.service - LSB: Start the MySQL database server
Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/mysql)
Active: active (running) since Wed, 02 Nov 2011 10:53:34 +0100; 24h ago
Process: 3242 ExecStart=/etc/init.d/mysql start (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
CGroup: name=systemd:/system/mysql.service
├ 3578 /bin/sh /usr/bin/mysqld_safe --mysqld=mysqld --user=mysql --pid-file=/var/run/mysql/mysqld.pid --socket=/var/ru...
└ 4191 /usr/sbin/mysqld --basedir=/usr --datadir=/var/lib/mysql --plugin-dir=/usr/lib64/mysql/plugin --user=mysql --lo...

What is really cool with systemctl is its tab completion. on first level for command like systemctl will show you wich action you are able to run. On second level it will show which service name you can use like systemctl start my will complete to mysql.service

Disable/Enable a service

 systemctl disable mysql.service
 systemctl enable mysql.service

Note that chkconfig is systemd aware and will show you when a service is systemd native or not.

Locations
systemd service files are mainly stored in /lib/systemd/system

Start stop your computer
 systemctl reboot
 systemctl halt
 systemctl poweroff
 systemctl emergency
 systemctl rescue

Get informed

 systemd-analyse --time: give your boot time of your system
 systemd-analyse --blame: find which service took too much time to boot
 systemd-analyse --plot > bootchart.svg : see your boot, in a graphical chart
 systemctl dot : Use a command line like systemctl dot --order | dot -Tsvg > systemd-order.svg to generate a graphical dependency tree

Debug
You can activate a debug mode on startup by adding on the boot line:

 systemd.log_target=kmsg systemd.log_level=debug

Moving backwards

While we do not recommend anyone using sys V init on 12.1, people who wish to choose it as the default can do so by installing sysvinit-init package (it will uninstall systemd-sysvinit package) or changing their grub options. Even if you don’t use systemd, don’t try to uninstall its package, it might break your system. You don’t need to remove systemd-sysvinit in case of emergency, if you let installed the sysvinit package you can boot with traditonnal init by adding on your boot line init=/sbin/sysvinit et voilà !

openSUSE 12.1 has been released a few weeks ago. A major new technology we introduce in this release is ownCloud, which we ship in a separate repository. ownCloud is a web application which lets you set up your own cloud – a place for you data where you can share it with others or use it over multiple devices. As YOU will own the data, it’s great from a privacy and security point of view.

However, setting up ownCloud, while not particularly complicated, is still vastly more difficult than navigating to a website which offers you convenient ways of giving them your personal data. If the convenience offered by companies like Dropbox, Canonical or Facebook is so much greater than what is offered by technologies which protect your freedom, you don’t really have a choice as common user.

openSUSE 12.1 offers a solution: mirall. While this tool has not yet solved all problems in the world, it makes deploying your ownCloud as easy as a few clicks and makes your files available for you off-line (a feature ownCloud itself lacks). Read on to learn what mirall has in store for openSUSE users!

Cloudy times

Today computer work is not limited to a single machine any more. People have the urgent need to share their data over various computers, ie. desktop computers, laptops and such.

For that the buzzword “cloud” is a promising solution. In the first step, the cloud offers not much more than storage that is accessible from everywhere, but nowadays the cloud also offers content and functionality. Lots of enterprises have jumped on the cloud and fly through the sky towards a billion dollar business… The idea is that users push their data into the cloud and feel the spirit of freedom from cellphone, laptop, computer, gps device, or any other device.

Privacy

Who owns the data that is pushed into the cloud? The user who pushed it of course.

But where is the data? Well, you can’t answer that question, because the only thing you know is an url where you pushed your data. Where on the planet the physical computer is the domain is pointing to, you have no idea. And even if you had its worthless because you still don’t have access to it. You don’t know where your data was mirrored to, you don’t know who has access to the machine, you can’t be really sure that your data is not investigated, used for whatever tests or analysis.

But wait, isn’t the data a very valuable thing for you? So you’d better control where its going, right? You do not want to push it to a server of a company from abroad where not even your countries laws work. And, even if you decide to delete your data, how can you be sure that the data is really going to be deleted? Maybe its just removed from the view you have on it… And who guarantees your data is not sold to the highest bidder?

You need a cloud that is controlled by you.

openSUSE and ownCloud

The freedom of software and data is very valuable to the openSUSE Project and we would like to help you escape the deceptive arms of those who offer you some convenience in exchange for control over your data. A first step was providing spideroak in openSUSE 11.4 which, unlike most competitors, encrypts your files and thus offers more protection for your privacy. But your data is still ‘somewhere else’ and we prefer to offer something you would really own.

ownCloud serving music

Fortunately there is a very appealing solution for that called ownCloud. This project, started two years ago by Frank Karlitschek as a part of the KDE family (but in no way limited to KDE users), offers a very up-to-date, slim but extendable and standard based cloud web app. Written in PHP and without difficult dependencies it installs on nearly every web space, even the cheapest one.

Just a week ago, Frank announced the start of ownCloud Inc. which “will help [the ownCloud team] to spread ownCloud and free cloud services in general – way more than we could have done without”. This will bring additional resources to ownCloud development, making it the most promising Free Software solution for protecting your Freedom in the cloud!

Vision of Integration between openSUSE and ownCloud

We want to integrate the ownCloud as good as we can into the openSUSE desktop to get the most out of it for the user.

First, it should be very easy to install an ownCloud. Webapps can be ugly to install for not so experienced users, but should you bother? The idea is to have an installation on either your local machine, a machine in your local network behind a firewall or on your domain just a few clicks away. If you want to remove it again, the de-installation should again be dead easy. This includes of course the wiping of the data which was on the cloud.

ownCloud and GNOME Calendar

Second, you might want to move your cloud. Lets say you worked with a local installation and like your ownCloud. Now you want to push it to the internet. That also should be just a few clicks, including all the data you already maintain in your ownCloud.

Furthermore, ownCloud will integrate into desktop applications where useful, for example as storage for contacts and calendar data, simply as file share via webDAV or as music storage for Amarok, as central bookmark server or notes platform.

All data you work with in the desktop apps should also be accessible via the ownCloud web interface in case you travel.

Mirall

As a starting point of integration openSUSE has a tool called mirall. It was started by Duncan Mac Vicar and extended by Klaas Freitag in a SUSE hackweeks to implement the described vision. The first and foremost target with mirall is to provide a very easy to use tool for un-experienced users which hides the complex client/server issues from its users completely.

Mirall starts in the system tray on your desktop and if you click on it, it checks if your system is already connected to an ownCloud. If not, it offers you to either connect to an existing ownCloud by providing a URL and credentials or if you want to install a new ownCloud.

For a new installation mirall gives you the choice between a local installation on your machine or an installation on a ftp accessible web space which you can rent from every other ISP for very little money. mirall will download and install the latest ownCloud on that webspace and automatically create a configuration for you.

With a connected ownCloud to your desktop, it is now possible to configure other express upload directories through mirall to mirror your data to the ownCloud. Moreover, mirall allows to fetch the data from the ownCloud to the directory on your local machine. For example, if you have been at work and changed some data on your cloud, you can fetch the directory on the machine at home to get the last data from work to home. This is a manual action due to some limitations in ownCloud, see the next chapter for more information about this.

These functions are working with mirall today. More functionality will be implemented following the described vision and based on user feedback. Of course, patches are welcome! You can contact Klaas directly or talk to the ownCloud team.

Limitations of ownCloud

ownCloud currently offers webDAV as file interface solution. As webDAV is a well known and commonly implemented standard it works on a large variety of devices and operating systems. Users will be able to access their files from pretty much anywhere, including most mobile phones, Windows, Mac OS, Linux, BSD and more. However, webDAV does depend on a network connection and leaves no trace of the files when working off line.

mirall offers a partial solution to this, offering the files for off-line use and providing basic syncing. But this syncing does NOT take place on the file level! When the online ownCloud offers newer files than the local one, mirall will notify the user but only offer the choice of replacing the local files with the ones from ownCloud or the other way around. It does not know which files have changed. This is due to the limitations of the webDAV protocol. We do expect ownCloud to work around this and provide more advanced syncing possibilities in the future but it is a complicated problem and there is no solution yet. If you happen to be interested in syncing algorithms and want to help us find a creative way around this limitation, get in contact!

How mirall works around this limitation

Mirall creates so called Express Upload Directories for its user.

What are these doing? They connect a local directory with a directory on the ownCloud. Whatever changes you do in the local directory, either connected to a network or not, is going to be mirrored to the ownCloud right away or as soon as you go online again. No matter if change, add or delete files or directories, the changes go into the cloud. The local directory is the master.

What happens if changes are made to one of your Epress Upload Directories on the ownCloud? Well, the local directory is the master. That means, the changes to files on the cloud are going to be overwritten with the next syncing mirall performs.

If new files are added on the ownCloud, mirall disables the Express Upload Folder for you in order to not delete files on the cloud, because, remember, local is the master, and if remote are more files than local, following the logic, they need to be deleted. However, mirall tries to avoid that and disables the folder and you have the change to fetch from the cloud, that is, get the contents of the remote folder to your local system.

This means you have to be a bit careful with using mirall on several computers at once and it is currently not suitable for working collaboratively. Changes could be overwritten or lost if there are changes in both the cloud and your local system!

Taking this into consideration, mirall already solves a lot of the “where are my files” problems people have when they move from university→home→boyfriend and back.

Getting ownCloud and mirall

After all this reading you might want to know how to get mirall and start using it. Well, this is as easy as the proverbial pie. Installing mirall only requires you to click the one-click-install on the right and (after agreeing with the installation by giving your administrator password) starting it from the menu…

For users of openSUSE 11.4 and older, you can find more (and up-to-date) instructions on getting ownCloud and mirall installed on the openSUSE wiki.

Getting your ownCloud

Once you have mirall up and running, click on the tray icon. If you have no ownCloud configured yet, a dialog wizard will show up and offer you two options:

1. connect my ownCloud
2. create a new ownCloud

If you pick the first option, connect my ownCloud you have to enter the valid ownCloud url into the text field and hit Next. The next dialog asks you for username and password to connect to the ownCloud. After hitting on Next again, a summary page displays the result of the operation.

ownCloud Installation

If you choose to create a new ownCloud on the first dialog page, the next wizard page asks you if you want to create it on the local computer or on an internet domain you control. In both cases Mirall downloads latest stable sources of ownCloud from the ownCloud project page, extracts it on the local machine and copies it to the target system.

If you go for the installation on the local machine, Mirall will ask you for the root password to be able to copy files into the webservers application directory.

If you choose to install on your ftp accessible site, enter a domain name into the text field. On the next wizard page, a FTP-Url and credentials for FTP need to be provided.

Mirall uses FTP to access the webspace and creates a directory called ownCloud on the ftp site and copies the files there.

On the next wizard page, you need to provide credentials for the admin user of your new ownCloud instance. During installation the user is created automatically and after the installation finished you can use the credentials to log in.

mirall now downloads the latest stable release from the official ownCloud page and installs it on the target machine. It creates an auto config setup for ownCloud so that you do not have to do the initial setup step on first login, as you already provided the data through mirall. Your ownCloud is configured completely with that, and the ownCloud gets connected to your machine as described above.

After a successful installation, Mirall tries to create an express upload folder in your home directory named Mirall. It is automatically mirrored to the cloud. This step is skipped for security reasons if the folder already exists in your home dir.

Express Upload Directories

As described before, Mirall can create so called Express Upload Directories for you.

They basically connect a local directory with a directory on the ownCloud. Whatever changes you do in the local directory, either connected to a network or not, is going to be mirrored to the ownCloud right away or as soon as you go online again. No matter if change, add or delete files or directories, the changes go into the cloud.

The local directory is the master. Always keep that in mind!

What happens if changes are made to one of your Express Upload Directories on the ownCloud? Well, the local directory is the master. That means, the changes to files on the cloud are going to be overwritten with the next syncing Mirall performs.

If new files are added on the ownCloud, Mirall disables the Express Upload Folder for you in order to not delete files on the cloud, because, remember, local is the master, and if remote are more files than local, following the logic, they need to be deleted. However, Mirall tries to avoid that and disables the folder and you have the chance to fetch from the cloud directory, ie. get the contents of the remote dir to local.
Warning This contains a risk: If you use the same ownCloud with more than one user or from more than one device at the same time, make sure to not lose data.

Check the Status of your ownCloud

Mirall opens a status dialog if you click on the tray icon and if there are express upload directories configured. The dialog gives information if the directories are in good status, ie. synced correctly, or they are disabled.

If they are disabled, the button fetch lets you pull the data from the ownCloud to your local directory. With that, local files can be deleted!

More information and the future

The latest information about mirall usage and features can be found on the openSUSE wiki and especially the Support Database article for ownCloud and mirall.

The plan is that mirall will continue to be developed and of course become available for more linux distributions. We hope to offer deeper integration in the desktops in openSUSE, expand on the functionality and take advantage of the other features of ownCloud like photo, music, agenda and system configuration synchronization.

Many thanks to Klaas Freitag for the extensive write-up this article is based upon (and of course the work on mirall)

We’ve seen a lot of positive feedback regarding openSUSE 12.1 via press, social networks, blogs etc. The interest in social media is significant with good conversations and new members, our facebook group has grown the last weeks by several hundred new members, the followers of our @openSUSE twitter increase and the recently launched  Google+ page is in the circles of over 3200 people.

Looking over twitter messages directed to our @openSUSE account, here’re just a few comments about openSUSE 12.1:

Really impressed (I’m not impressed easily) with all of the added configuration and customization @openSUSE 12.1 brings very polished – by OhHeyItsLou

Grats to the folks @openSUSE for releasing such a kick ass 12.1 super stoked to get owncloud up and running. Just need a native Android app – by kennonk

Hats off to the #openSUSE folks – 12.1 is a solid release. The #nouveau team deserves a big high-five too; great driver so far. – by deckerego

@openSUSE I’m wearing my #openSUSE t-shirt in celebration of 12.1 being released! – by OrangutanClyde

@openSUSE I’ve just upgraded my main workstation, everything looks so polished and well done! Thank you so much for this release! – by jfduque

Reviews by journalists included praise like:

All in all, this looks like one of the most exciting openSUSE releases in some time. – Joe Brockmeier on Linux.com

Download of openSUSE 12.1

As usual, our download server redirected all incoming traffic to our mirror network. The mirrors reported that we again saturated their connections for a couple of hours after the announcement, e.g.

ftp.halifax.rwth-aachen.de did up to 4.5 GBit/sec for openSUSE just with HTTP.  BitTorrent did 300-800 MBit/sec during the whole time. Total traffic spanning all projects peaked at 5.02 GBit/sec with a daily average of 2.44 GBit/sec.

Our download redirector counted  for the first 24 hours  the download of 93761 media, the distribution over the various types is:

• NonOss Addon CD BiArch:  1452
• 32-bit x86: 48075 (total)
  • Net: 2489
  • DVD: 31840
  • GNOME-LiveCD: 7392
  • KDE-LiveCD: 5561
  • Addon-Lang: 793
• 64-bit x86-64:  44234 (total)
  • Net: 2444
  • DVD: 32927
  • GNOME-LiveCD: 4031
  • KDE-LiveCD: 4378
  • Addon-Lang: 454

Also bittorrent was in high demand, at one point we had 1387 seeders and 2804 leechers but we missed to track the high point.  The tracker counted 12924 complete downloads via bittorrent during the first 24 hours.

Physical Media

We’re producing now PromoDVDs to distribute at events and via the openSUSE ambassadors, a separate announcement on how to get this will
come once we have the media. A couple of magazines are doing covermounts as well, e.g. Linux Pro Magazine and Linux Magazine will insert it into their worldwide newsstand subscription distribution.

Also, Open Source Press is producing a German openSUSE 12.1 box which is available soon (details), this retail edition is a version of openSUSE with a complete printed end-user manual, installation media, lot’s of vouchers and more.

Webpages and Infrastructure

Thanks to our translators, we updated the frontpage with localized announcements and even added some new languages for our front page like Polish, Lithuian and Thai.

The infrastructure itself has seen increased traffic due to the launch where many where interested in the new openSUSE 12.1 portal page.

Continue spreading the word!

Please continue spreading the word about openSUSE 12.1 – and answer questions on our forums, social media, mailing lists and in person. If you find articles and blog posts about openSUSE 12.1, add them to our wiki and speak about them.

Thank you

The openSUSE launch  was possible thanks to a world wide infrastructure of ftp mirrors that coordinated the release with us. We’d like to thank all of them. Moreover, we’d like to thank everybody  to make the changes to the websites so users could download their brand new openSUSE 12.1 and find information about it! We’d also like to thank the marketing team and anyone who helped for their awesome work (check out the Product Highlights if you haven’t yet!) and of course all contributors of openSUSE who helped to make this release possible!

Desktops

openSUSE 12.1 comes with the new GNOME Shell 3.2. We presented you with a taste of GNOME Shell on openSUSE 11.4. Since then, many bugs have been squashed and numerous small improvements have made life on the Shell more comfortable. Notifications are much nicer, you can now configure your online accounts in one place and Shell handles multiple-screen setups better.

Among the features is color management, something GNOME shares with KDE where openSUSE is the first to integrate the Oyranos color management system. Also new from KDE is Apper, an easier-to-use PackageKit front end.

Cloud things

It is 2011, and most of us use ‘cloud’ technology like having our files on Dropbox, friends on Facebook and music on Spotify. But these technologies are arguably dangerous from a security and privacy point of view. While not solving all problems yet, ownCloud aims to bring these services back under your control.

openSUSE is the first Linux distribution to support ownCloud with its own unique mirall desktop integration. For end users, mirall makes the difference between thinking that ownCloud is interesting and being able to actually use it. Read about mirall and ownCloud in our documentation to find out why!

For more demanding use cases in the small business area, our Virtualization and Cloud repository offers the latest versions of Eucalyptus, OpenNebula and OpenStack for openSUSE 12.1. And we support all the virtualization technologies including Xen 4.1, KVM and VirtualBox which can be managed with the latest virt-manager and open-vm-tools.

SUSE Studio users can already build unique versions of openSUSE 12.1, with custom package selections, artwork, scripts, etc. that can be deployed directly to Amazon EC2 or onto a variety of other cloud platforms.

Under the hood

openSUSE 12.1 includes Snapper, a new and unique tool that employs the snapshot functionality in btrfs to allow you to view older versions of files and revert changes. The integration of Snapper into the zypper package manager allows roll back of system updates and configuration changes.

openSUSE is also the first major distribution to ship the Go programming language, Google’s new open development language. Go is a fast, easy-to-use language that helps programmers handle multi-core, networked machines with the convenience of garbage collection and run-time reflection.

Keep tumblin’ and rollin’!

openSUSE 12.1 can of course also move to Tumbleweed, our cutting-edge rolling release repo which contains the latest stable versions of all software. Tumbleweed lessens the significance and change impact of major releases by updating systems continuously. Existing Tumbleweed users will have to make a small change to their repositories to stay current. For future releases of openSUSE this won’t be needed anymore.

Go and have a lot of fun!

“While the big updates include Snapper, systemd and ownCloud, there are also many smaller enhancements like the improvements to YaST or the work on zypper. And that is only what our own community did,”

said Bryen Yunahsko, member of the openSUSE Board.

“We’re standing on the shoulders of the gigantic open source community. I would not be surprised if openSUSE’s latest update has over 300,000 improvements that resulted from efforts in the open source community.”

For more details about the latest and greatest in openSUSE 12.1 visit opensuse.org/12.1 and read our extensive Product Highlights! If you want, go and download it right away from our mirrors.

Have a lot of fun!

Welcome to openSUSE 12.1!

Yes, it is almost time. Tomorrow openSUSE 12.1 will be released to the world, bringing a large number of new features and cool stuff. We’ll look at a few things today and show you some screen shots!

WARNING: Spoiler-alert!
WARNING: Pretty Pictures!

So what’s coming?

openSUSE 12.1 brings of course tens of thousands of changes and improvements by delivering you a fine selection of the best Free Software! Thanks to the awesome work of projects like Mozilla, GNOME, LibreOffice, Apache and many, many more you can browse the web, edit documents and have fun like never before. But besides what all these projects offer, openSUSE of course also has many unique things. Let’s go over some of the coolest stuff you can expect to be downloading tomorrow!

Desktop Awesomeness

Of course openSUSE 12.1 comes with the latest Free Desktops. GNOME, KDE’s Plasma Workspaces, XFCE and LXDE are again all there. For GNOME, this is a particularly big day: GNOME 3.2 is part of openSUSE!

GNOME 3.2

openSUSE 12.1 GNOME screenshot

As you might remember, we brought a GNOME 3 preview with openSUSE 11.4. Well, it ain’t preview anymore, we bring you the full GNOME 3.2 desktop now! This has been much improved compared to the preview, with both many performance and stability fixes as well as lots of features and usability improvements based on the feedback the developers got.

GNOME Shell brings a fresh, cool, new interface designed from scratch to satisfy the needs of today’s users. The interface focuses on getting out of the way and providing unobtrusive yet powerful notifications and deep integration of calendar, chat and other technologies. The UI elements and workflows are designed to be touch-friendly for use on tablets or desktops with a touch screen. By using the 3D acceleration capabilities provided by most of the computers these days, pleasing animations are used to give users an aesthetic look and feel and a much easier way of switching between applications.

KDE and the other desktops

openSUSE 12.1 KDE screenshot

Of course we ship KDE’s Plasma workspaces, both the Desktop and Netbook version. There is a number of improvements in there, including the Apper software management tool which replaces the earlier KPackageKit tool. Apper focuses on applications instead of packages, making installation and removal easier for less experienced users. Another big deal, relevant for both GNOME and KDE, is color management. GNOME ships the colord daemon for this while openSUSE is the first linux distribution to integrate Oyranos color management in KDE. You can read more about it in this blog by Uwe where he explains what this means, how it’s done and why you should care.

Sadly, XFCE and LXDE have not seen a huge amount of changes as there have been no major releases. But of course we ship the latest bugfix release of XFCE 4.8 and have done the usual round of artwork and other minor improvements.

ownCloud

Cloudy things

In the Cloud area, we have something very cool in store for you. It’s the latest ownCloud and openSUSE has done something really unique with it: we bring you the miral tool! And of course we have all the other latest cloudy stuff for you.

mirall rocks!

ownCloud is a way to have your files online available, syncing with your devices – without having to give your data (and privacy) to another company. Instead, you can host ownCloud either on your own server or on a rented space. Unfortunately, this makes ownCloud a bit more complicated than going to a random website. openSUSE’s mirall solves this problem!

mirall provides a system tray client which lets you deploy, configure and start an ownCloud instance on your own computer or on a rented webspace with just a few clicks. Afterwards, mirall makes sure that files are properly synchronized (and makes them available off-line, something ownCloud can’t do by itself!) and lets you add folders to be put on ownCloud.

You will be able to learn a lot more about mirall in the article which will be released the day after the openSUSE 12.1 release!

Other cloud software

openSUSE is an excellent guest OS for the cloud as can be experienced building solutions on SUSE Studio. With a new kernel, openSUSE is now ready to run directly on the Amazon EC2 cloud. On the host side, the latest virtualization technologies including Xen 4.1, KVM and VirtualBox can be managed with the latest virt-manager and open-vm-tools. Last but not least, openSUSE is the first Linux distribution to ship OwnCloud integrated into the desktop. And the openSUSE Virtualization and Cloud repository for openSUSE 12.1 offers the latest versions of Eucalyptus, OpenNebula and OpenStack for openSUSE 12.1!

New technology under the hood

openSUSE 12.1 introduces a number of improvements and innovations in the underlying technology of the distribution. This includes the unique Snapper tool offering file versioning, the systemd init system and the Google Go language.

Snapper in action

Snapper rolls back changes

openSUSE 12.1 is the first Linux distribution taking advantage of the snapshot functionality in the upcoming Linux file system btrfs. These snapshots of the file system are using copy-on-write, making them very space efficient. openSUSE 12.1 debuts Snapper which allows the user to interface with this technology.

The command line and GUI Snapper tools allow users to view older versions of files and revert changes. The unique integration in the zypper package manager of openSUSE allows users to roll back entire upgrades or software installations with the accompanying configuration changes.

systemd boots your system faster

systemd is the new init tool in openSUSE, controlling and speeding up the boot process. Developed in close cooperation with fellow Linux Distribution Fedora, systemd is especially interesting for system administrators due to its powerful socket- and bus activated service system. It also works closely with the cgroups kernel feature providing better security and control over the processes.

Write in go, compile with Clang or GCC

openSUSE is proud to be the first major distribution to ship the new Go programming language from Google as part of our release. Go is a fast, easy language good in handling multi-core, networked machines with the convenience of garbage collection and run-time reflection.

This openSUSE release is build with GCC 4.6.2 and link-time optimization, improving the overall performance of the software in openSUSE 12.1

Exciting times!

With all the cool stuff coming in openSUSE 12.1, we sure could write another 10 pages with features but surely most of you would be asleep by the time you’d have read it. Besides, in less than 24 hours you’ll probably be playing with it already!

So keep an eye on news.opensuse.org and remember to Have a lot of fun!

Freezing cold!

At this point, development is frozen to the point where only the most grave bugs will be addressed. Less serious issues will be fixed in the updates after the release. We must be careful not to introduce new problems!

That doesn’t mean problems should not be found: we need testing! We also need help fixing the most urgent problems (full list of known bugs in openSUSE 12.1). Help us shorten those lists by re-testing the problematic areas or by fixing the bugs; or help us find new pressing issues! You can find information on testing on the openSUSE Testing wiki page and you are most welcome to learn how to create a merge request to fix a bug!

Get openSUSE 12.1 RC2 from this page.

What’s new

The next release of openSUSE is expected to bring a large number of improvements and changes. Many of these are the ‘usual’ updates any Linux distribution offers. These include the latest Firefox, GNOME 3.2 and KDE’s Plasma Workspace 4.7. Under the hood, we have Linux kernel 3.1 and we expect to be the first to ship Google’s new programming language Go. We also overhauled our boot procedure introducing systemd and Grub2 (testing!) and of course we’ll ship the latest developer tools and libraries as well as all the sysadmin goodies openSUSE is known for!

But we also have some really unique treats. The coolest among those is Snapper, a btrfs-based tool which allows you to view the differences between current and previous versions of files on your system and lets you roll back the changes, bringing back lost files or undoing damaging overwrites.

Testing

Click for Second Life release parties!

The changes in underlying boot technology, the new tools like Snapper as well as the rest of the operating system need a good workout for the release! So now we need YOUR help! Go to the download page and grab your copy of openSUSE 12.1 RC2 and test it on your desktop, in a VM or on a laptop!

More information and other helping-out

We can use your help not only with testing but also with fixing problems! Thanks to the Open Build Service, this is easy as pie… Yes, openSUSE 12.1 is frozen, no new packages or major updates, but you can still BURP away!

If you don’t package or code, can help promote this release and organize a launch party to give this release some attention! Twitter and facebook fans: show your support for openSUSE!

Moreover, there are screenshots to be taken, release notes to be written and Documentation to be composed. We also welcome help with translation!