Hello avid gamers and game developers!

We decided to restructure and cleanup the games projects in the openSUSE Build Service. Before the change we had 8 projects for each game genre (action, adventure, arcade, board, puzzle, roleplay, strategy/realtime, strategy/turn-base) and one separate project for game libraries (so you can play games even on older distributions with obsoleted libraries).

This situation was causing more harm than good, so now we will only have one “games” repository with all game genres together. If you have already added old game repositories, please remove them and add the brand new one located at download.opensuse.org/repositories/games/ and then the directory of your distribution. The old URLs for the individual games repositories will no longer work.

If your favorite game is not yet packaged you can add it to the Games Wishlist at openSUSE wiki. Or even better, you can try to package it by yourself and when you are finished contact Pavol Rusnak and we will add the game to the repository. You can also ask on the opensuse-packaging@opensuse.org (subscribe) mailing list you have any troubles with the packaging.

Game On!

With RC2 for openSUSE 10.3 the openSUSE-Education project starts the last testing phase before we release the final version of openSUSE-Education 1.0 for openSUSE 10.3. At this point, the only things left for the release is fixing possible bugs in the current packages and working on the documentation.

Recent Changes

In contrast to the normal release work-flow, we updated many packages and even added new ones to the media. Below is an incomplete list of changes with this release:

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Zonker wrote the following:

I’m happy to announce that the openSUSE Project has been accepted to Google’s Summer of Code 2008! Now the real fun begins!

We’re now in the “interim period” for students to discuss application ideas with mentoring organizations. (That’d be us.) Students will then have from March 24th through March 31st to apply to Google. See our ideas page, and Google’s SoC 2008 FAQ for more info and timeline.

Kudos to Google for acting quickly on this — applications for organizations were due last Wednesday, and I was notified this afternoon that we had been accepted. That’s pretty speedy, given the number of applications I’m sure they had to read through.

Discussion about openSUSE’s participation in Google’s SoC 2008 is most appropriate on the opensuse-project mailing list.

Just in time for the KDE 4.0.1 release, the openSUSE KDE team has updated the KDE 4 packages in the Build Service to the KDE 4.0.1 state, featuring several improvements over the plain KDE 4.0.1 release and including further integration fixes.

KDE Four Live 1.0.1

KDE Four Live, the openSUSE KDE4 Installable Live CD, has also been updated to contain these packages and changes.

KDE Repository Re-structuring

After a long discussion and feedback period, the openSUSE BuildService repository layout for KDE packages has finally been overhauled.

There are: latest, stable and regularly updated KDE 4.0.x packages as well as experimental KDE 4.1 packages available. The repositories are kept in a modular state so you can choose how much of your system you want to be possibly affected by selecting one of the stable or unstable Desktop, Extra or Community repositories. As a result, the current KDE:KDE4 repository has now been frozen and will be removed in the future, so please update your repositories accordingly.

Of course the Backports and KDE3 repositories, which do not update any of your system libraries, are still available and will be extended even further in the near future.

~ Dirk

The KDE Community has announced the immediate availability of KDE 4.0.0. This significant release marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the beginning of the KDE 4 era. KDE developers, including our openSUSE KDE Team, have been working on getting toward KDE 4.0 for over 2 years.

The Start of Something Amazing: A Revolutionary New Desktop

The KDE 4 Libraries have seen major improvements in almost all areas. The Phonon multimedia framework provides platform independent multimedia support to all KDE applications, the Solid hardware integration framework makes interacting with (removable) devices easier and provides tools for better powermanagement.

The KDE 4 Desktop has gained some major new capabilities. The Plasma desktop shell offers a new desktop interface, including panel, menu and widgets on the desktop as well as a dashboard function. KWin, the KDE Window manager now supports advanced graphical effects to ease interaction with your windows.

Lots of KDE Applications have seen improvements as well. Visual updates through using vector-based artwork, changes in the underlying libraries, user interface enhancements, new features, even new applications — you name it, KDE 4.0 has it. Okular, the new document viewer and Dolphin, the new filemanager are only two applications that leverage KDE 4.0’s new technologies.

The Oxygen Artwork team provides a breath of fresh air on the desktop. Nearly all user-visible parts of the KDE desktop and applications have been given a facelift. Beauty and consistency are two of the basic concepts behind Oxygen.

See the rest of the visual guide for more information and images.

KDE 4.0 Packages, openSUSE-based KDE 4.0 Live CD

Regular KDE 4 Packages and an openSUSE-based KDE Four Live CD have been available throughout the whole cycle, and final versions of them are also available now. On openSUSE 10.3 you can use 1-click-install to get the KDE 4.0 desktop environment:

Or you can choose to install a more basic KDE 4 desktop. Developers can also optionally install the KDE 4 build dependencies: all the packages you need to have installed for compiling KDE 4.0 from source (experts only).

For the last issue of their openSUSE release series, Novell Open Audio has talked to Marcus Meißner, team lead of the SUSE security team, to learn about the processes triggered by a security incidence, proactive source code audits, teaching developers how to write more secure software and AppArmor.

The X Window System developer team at SUSE has released version 1.0.0 of the ATI Radeon R5xx and R6xx chipset driver it has been developing over the past few months for Novell’s technology partner AMD.

The source code was initially released to the public on September 18th. Since then numerous features have been added to the driver and numerous issues have been fixed in cooperation with the free software community.

Packages can be found in the openSUSE Build Service, and more information is available on our X.org wiki page.

The release of KDE 4.0 RC1, KOffice 2 Alpha 5, and Firefox 3.0 Beta 1 were all announced in the last week. As always, openSUSE packages are available in the openSUSE Build Service via 1-Click-Install. The openSUSE-based KDE development live CD “KDE Four Live” has also been updated.

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The GNOME and KDE teams have teamed up to provide two packaging days, from November 30th until December 1st (from any timezone to any timezone). It will take place on IRC in the #opensuse-buildservice channel.

We will help interested newcomers and already experienced packagers in learning all the little tricks and bits needed for creating good openSUSE packages of your favourite application with the openSUSE Build Service. A little existing experience in compiling software from source is recommended, and the wiki page also lists several other useful things to read.

So join our effort in creating more packages for your favourite Linux Distribution!

Dirk Mueller and Michael Wolf

The YaST survey has now been closed. More than 11,000 individuals participated in it. Thanks to everybody!

A PDF of the results is now available.