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Alpha 7 is Out - Let’s Go Green

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So Alpha 7 was released yesterday and it comes shiny with all the new green artwork:

Other great things include more improvements to Libzypp so YaST and Zypper package management is extremely fast in comparison. Many congratulations to the whole Libzypp team who have been continuously working on it throughout the 10.3 cycle! Below is an example search for kcall with the Factory repository which contains thousands of packages:

opensuse:/home/francis # time zypper search kcall
* Reading installed packages [100%]
* Reading repository ‘20070803-120438′ cache
* Reading repository ‘20070803-121002′ cache
S | Repository | Type | Name | Version | Arch
–+—————–+———+——-+———————-+—–
| 20070803-120438 | package | kcall | 0.5.2svn20060206-121 | i586
real 0m11.292s
user 0m8.589s
sys 0m2.184s

This Alpha release also includes the new SUSE greeter:

The forums, mailing lists and IRC channels link there takes you to http://opensuse.org/Communicate which should make new users find things like IRC, the forums, and the mailing lists even more easily. There’s also an easy way for users to learn about the Linux Philosophy and open source.

The next release coming is the big Beta 1 on Aug 9.

Summer in Greece and openSUSE news catch-up

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As we do most years, I spent some time again with family in Chalkidiki, Greece (pictures).

I had almost forgotten just how beautiful it was. For the majority of the time the beach was incredibly clear and calm. Other highlights included being zoomed away on ringos attached to a boat, watching the sun set on the beach with my girlfriend, relaxing in a hammock for a few hours, and getting five or so mosquito bites on the last day (incidentally, they were the only ones I ever got).

Looks like a lot of exciting things have been happening in the openSUSE universe as well over the last couple of weeks, including:

• openSUSE News portal being finally launched. This is really something that openSUSE has needed for an awfully long time, so be sure to subscribe to the feed to get the latest news as soon as it is available.
• Frank from kde-look.org fame worked on creating suse-art.org during the SUSE Hack Week. It’s available and in full-swing now, and will hopefully act as an aggregation of all SUSE-themed things.
• 10.3 Alpha 6 was released; the most exciting new thing is the libzypp (package management) stack imported.
• Pascal released a really great webpin CLI client (latest changes).
• The Metapackage Handler (or one-click-install) is constantly improving.
• Will provides a detailed summary of the changes happening in KDE for KDE 4.0 on Novell Open Audio (talk starts at 40 minutes in).

Next thing coming: Alpha 7 out in two days!

openSUSE Build Service for other distributions and Collaboration

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We know that the openSUSE Build Service (OBS) is incredibly popular in the SUSE world, but outside of it this is not entirely true. However, it is great to see that more information on the OBS is getting out more and more these days. Most importantly, information such as that you can trivially build packages for other distributions, or that there are Build Service (licenced under the GPL, of course) packages available for other distributions.

Liquidat’s recent blog posts (Building Fedora packages using the OpenSuse Build Service and First results with OpenSuse Build Service) are a good case in highlighting an outsider’s take and first impression on the OBS. That is, in just a little while packagers from other distributions can start easily building and hosting packages directly on the OBS. Particularly for RPM-based distributions (Fedora, Mandriva), you require just a few conditionals in the RPM spec files in order to get separate packages quickly (as in 150 buildhosts’ type of quickness!) built for all relevant distributions. And this is a point that should really be stressed.

I find this kind of news exciting because it is a very palpable way in which we can maximise collaboration between our friends on other distributions. For example, other distributions could work together to also provide packages for the latest KDE, KDE4, Compiz Fusion, Mozilla family of applications, or on any of those other thousands of packages that are already in the OBS, and of course packages that are not in there yet, but that are available elsewhere. Distributions are not forced to package things in a particular way, so packages can always be built to the highest quality for each respective distribution.

If particular teams on each distribution (i.e. team X on Fedora and team X on openSUSE) would work together in maintaining some repositories, then there would really be some favourable advantages. It would be good for developers since we know that maximisation of collaboration avoids duplication of effort (where it is unnecessary), and it is great for users since it ensures that they can have more applications easily accessible, and more updates to these applications and packages available quickly. Basically the exact same reasons for why the Build Service is so useful to openSUSE itself.

Since the technology is fully available it would be great to see some things (i.e. some application or project repositories) going this way in the future.

Update: A couple more posts from the blogosphere:
* BuildService — how to use it
* liquidat on OpenSuse Build Service

Why Dark Themes and Terminals can Strain your Eyes

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I tend to regularly find myself in discussions or read blog posts where it is suggested that dark themes are “easier on the eyes” and hence a better way to go. While a darker theme means that there is less light entering your eyes, in general a dark theme can cause more problems.

Most desktop themes are all light-coloured. This is not only true on Windows, but with GNOME and KDE. Furthermore, around 99% of websites at least have a light-coloured background as well. Now, when you have a large dark terminal open, or your own website theme which is dark as well, you will inevitably have to go to a new webpage frequently which is incredibly bright in contrast. Or, you might launch another application.

You might have a dark theme for your favourite desktop environment, but even so it is a lot harder to escape the majority of websites which are not dark. When you do end up launching such a website, the pupillary light reflex causes your pupils to contract very quickly. The amount of light entering the eye suddenly increases (even more so in darker conditions), and persistent occurence of this as a sudden transition can strain your eyes. This is not too dissimilar to going for a sprint without jogging first. For this reason a well-lit work area is just as important: that is, for when you look away from the monitor and back.

Now, I do not want to imply here that a purely white wallpaper, theme, or website background is ideal. A more ideal colour is one that is just off-white, to reduce glare which can also cause eyestrain and vision difficulties.

RSIBreak is also a nice application that helps you avoid repetitive strain injury.

Touch-down in Nürnberg

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Benji and I arrived yesterday to the beautiful city of Nürnberg for Novell Hack Week. The city has a lot of nice things to see and we started the day by going to the infamous castle which has a pretty fantastic overview of the city; the inner city is all surrounded by a pretty large wall. Adrian has been a great and patient guide and friend to us throughout the time, and has taken us around quite a few wonderful places (more pictures to come soon). The city itself was pretty damaged during the war but there have been continuous efforts to revive the wall and other buildings to precisely the way they were before, instead of demolishing them and modernizing, which is really quite nice:

So what is it that we’re here for? As Nat announced a little earlier, for Novell Hack Week, a time when SUSE’s hundreds of developers get a chance to work on whatever they want for the whole week. idea.opensuse.org is acting as an aggregation for all ideas and suggestions.

There’s really hundreds of great ideas already, and things are getting quite exciting, but some of the ideas most interesting me are the openSUSE News Portal which is really something we’ve been in great need for, a Live+Installer media, and various other wonderful ideas with mockups from Jakub Steiner, such as Smoother Login Experience. I should end up working on the Software Portal, mainly doing web-related stuff. Really beginning to look forward to the innovations that come out of this week!

In other news, Jigish has some Compiz Fusion packages up-and-ready to test. I tried them out a couple of days ago and made a little video on my laptop. Some of the effects are getting very nicely polished.

openSUSE 10.3 Alpha5 is out!

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So openSUSE 10.3 Alpha5 has been released and there a lot of new exciting things in this one. Of particular interest to me is the 1-CD KDE install option (there is also a single installation CD for GNOME users), and the new ability to add remote package sources before the install even begins. The 1-CD KDE install even has a bit of KDE4, with several games in already, such as KPat (screenshot).

This second aforementioned new feature means you are able to add a repository from, say, the openSUSE Build Service, or other third-party repositories such as the NVIDIA ones, and have the installer use packages from there. This means you can start your operating system for the first time with the full composite effects of Compiz (also available on the 1-CD KDE install) even if you have an NVIDIA card, or with any other third-party packages. The new Compiz now also has a KDE window decorator, so you still have the same integrated KDE feel even when using it.

Another great thing to watch out for is KIWI, an Image System Builder, as the development on it is racing and its capabilities continuously increase. For now, it provides regular users with an easy way to create a Live DVD or CD by executing a simple command. What’s also very nice about it is the sheer extent of configurability it provides from a single XML file (such as creating an image with absolutely any packages that you like). KIWI is becoming just another example of the way in which openSUSE really drives innovation :).

Being an alpha release, there are of course a few bugs still lurking around, but nevertheless this is a really good time to start helping out by posting feature enhancements, bug reports, or general wishlist items in order to get them in or fixed for 10.3.

Alright you drooling idiots!

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Linux Distribution for Servers

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Some days ago, I decided to upgrade my server’s operating system, Fedora. Starting from Fedora Core 3, I have used yum to perform all the distribution upgrades, but for the seventh version of the OS I decided to go all the way re-installing it from scratch. I’ve been improving the server’s configuration files and automation scripts for the last 18 months, so it would be easy to have it up and running in no time. Actually, it turned out that the server configuration required less time than I had initially estimated. The time-consuming task was the transformation of Fedora to an operating system - almost - suitable for servers.
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Screenshot of a menu under GNOME: ROUND 2

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A few days ago, I had written a post about the difficulties I had encountered in an attempt to capture an image of a menu under GNOME. A reader, “mysurface“, who, by the way, has written an article about taking screenshots, was 100% positive that, after issuing ImageMagick’s import command, it is still possible to switch between running applications with Alt-Tab and trigger menus with Alt, before using the mouse cursor to select the area that will be captured.
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Server upgraded to Fedora 6

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A long time has passed since Fedora 6 was released, many of the initial bugs have been fixed, so I decided to perform an upgrade of the installation on the server that powers this web site. Everything has gone well, despite the fact that a few strange things happened during the upgrade.
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