For those who don’t follow openSUSE news, here‘s a summary of what people did during hack week, including some nice GNOME-related things, as well as improvements for the openSUSE distribution.
Archive for the ‘Linux’ Category
Fruits of Hack Week II
Thursday, February 21st, 2008New colleague at work
Tuesday, February 19th, 2008Yesterday was the first day with Vincent Untz as a member of the openSUSE GNOME team. For those who don’t know him, he’s one of the top-involved persons in upstream GNOME, having been part of the Foundation board, the release team, and maintainer of several modules, etc, etc, so his role on the team will help a lot in making openSUSE and GNOME better.
Looking forward to see what he helps us getting to.
Hack week II
Monday, February 18th, 2008Last week was Hacking week at openSUSE, so here’s a summary of what I did:
- I moved all my OSM-related packages to the Application:Geo repository in openSUSE’s build service. And I added a couple of packages I needed to build maps for my GARMIN GPS unit: mkgmap and osmosis, which have helped me in making the first 100% free map of Spain for GARMIN GPS units
Of course, the map is incomplete (compared to the P2P’ed maps GARMIN users in Spain use), but this should probably get more people to contribute to the maps. Here are some screenshots of the maps on a Que PDA (thanks to Miguel Blanco):
- I lost lots of time at the beginning of the week trying to make Mapper (a fork of maemo-mapper to provide more OpenStreetMap-oriented features) work, fixing some build problems (patches are upstream now) and packaging it. It still doesn’t work very well though, crashing a lot, but this will improve soon.
- I started working on a GNOME client for the openSUSE build service. Most of the time was spent doing tests with Python in general and the OSC Python API in particular, so the result is not that fantastic, but at least I’ve got now a good base from where to continue the work. You can find the (clean) work in my git repository:
git clone http://www.gnome.org/~rodrigo/git/osc-plugins.git
openSUSE 11.0 installer
Monday, January 21st, 2008I have been running with a 10.3 openSUSE system updated to FACTORY for some time now, but last week, I downloaded the boot ISO to test a fresh installation. And I was immediately delighted by the new installer, which seems to be the same as always but with a much better UI.
gnome-control-center/gnome-settings-daemon 2.21.5
Tuesday, January 15th, 2008Release 2.21.5 for gnome-control-center and gnome-settings-daemon are now ready for your testing pleasure. This is the first release of gnome-control-center depending on the standalone gnome-settings-daemon (which was previously part of gnome-control-center), which is also used by the new GDM.
Testing is largely needed, so please report bugs/suggestions/patches to either the gnomecc-list or Bugzilla.
openSUSE packaging day
Friday, November 30th, 2007Today’s packaging day at openSUSE, a good opportunity to get your hands dirty with the openSUSE build service, which allows people to build packages for many SuSE, Fedora, Ubuntu and Debian versions, and to get your favorite piece of software packaged for your favorite distribution.
The action is taking place for the whole day at #opensuse-buildservice in irc.freenode.net. Also, if you prefer to get in contact with fellow GNOME packagers, #opensuse-gnome is the place to go, in the same network.
Some hints for people wanting to attend:
- Packaging standards for openSUSE
- Information about the build service
- You might want to have a try at osc-plugins-gnome, a set of plugins for OSC (the build service command line client) that will be integrated soon into OSC itself, and which offer extended functionality to deal with patches and spec files.
- GNOME packaging policy
PulseAudio for openSUSE 11.0
Thursday, November 22nd, 2007In the last few days, we have been working on packaging PulseAudio for openSUSE Factory (what will be openSUSE 11.0), and here are the first results. This page contains instructions on how to run and test it, and Cyberorg‘s blog contains more information and screenshots.
This starts to mark the end of our beloved esound, although GNOME still needs some work, which is one of our next steps, helping upstream GNOME in fixing all the issues.
Version control systems
Friday, November 9th, 2007I left last night jhbuild compiling all GNOME modules, included meta-gnome-proposed, to find this morning it failed on libtelepathy because of missing darcs in my system. Installed it and watched it work until it came to another module needing bzr, installed again, and then, a few minutes later, another module complained about missing mercurial. And so far, so good, but this makes 6!! (if not more, it’s still compiling ) version control systems needed to compile GNOME unstable, that is: CVS, subversion, git, mercurial, darcs and bzr.
While I have nothing against people writing/using their own tools for whatever they want, it started to look to me, exaggerating, of course, like the Linux distro market, where, if we continue the trend (fortunately, the number of distros is not increasing, like it did a few years ago), we’ll be having almost a distro per Linux user. So, although I don’t know in detail all of these VCSs to really understand why they all exist, is this really needed? Wouldn’t it be better to have 2 or 3 very good VCSs that fit most people’s needs? If not, I’ll write my own 
openSUSE board
Thursday, November 8th, 2007Since SUSE announced the opening of its distro, openSUSE has been taking steps to evolve to a community-driven distribution, and today, another step has been taken with the creation of the openSUSE board. As you can see in the newsitem, the first board has been appointed by Novell, but in the future the board will be elected by the community. And as a proof of the success it’s going to have, the first board includes our Federico!
OpenOffice.org help
Monday, October 29th, 2007A friend of mine, who is preparing an exam for working for the government in Galicia, has OpenOffice.org as the selected office suite. While this is great news, that public administrations go the free software route, it is a problem, since she’s asking me about good documentation, and, given my minimal knowledge of OpenOffice, I haven’t been able to answer her questions very well.
So, dear lazyweb, what documentation should I point her to? Helping her means helping getting free software better accepted in users-centered environments (that is, if she’s having problems finding good documentation, lots of people might be in the same situation, given that she’s not the only one preparing exams for the Galician government), so please, where is there good step-by-step documentation for OO.o?