European Wafaa

First the obligatory pleasantries - Happy New Year to all, and may 2008 be a more prosperous one for you.

As mentioned previously, I have been unable to get my built in webcam working on my AR11S laptop and it was starting to annoy me. Thankfully halex has recently purchased a new VAIO laptop which has a similar camera and uses the same driver - a Ricoh R5U870. He worked out which driver it needed and managed to get it working and used cheese to prove it.

More details on the driver with source and installation instructions can be found here. Hopefully the maintainers of the drivers:webcam repository could find the time to create an rpm for it and add it to the repo (nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more). I will in the mean time play around and try and create a package for it, mind you I've never created a kernel module package so it could take me a bit of time to get it right Thanks again go to halex for this.

This won't concern all users, but it does apply to all those that have spiffy x86_64 based systems. Bongo has issues with CLucene on 64bit machines, this isn't a direct result of Bongo's code but more of CLucene's.

A bug has been filed upstream, but unfortunately very little has happened with it . You have two choices if running Bongo from source and wish to utilise the extra capabilities of your hardware:

1. Use the bundled Clucene under /import in the tarball
2. Apply the following patch to your system CLucene:

Index: import/clucene/src/CLucene/config/compiler.h
===================================================================
--- import/clucene/src/CLucene/config/compiler.h (.../trunk/import/clucene) (revision 150)
+++ import/clucene/src/CLucene/config/compiler.h (.../branches/remove-mdb/import/clucene) (revision 559)
@@ -146,7 +146,7 @@
#define CL_MAX_NAME CL_MAX_PATH
//todo: this is a temporary fix for a potential buffer overflow...
//should never use this
-#define CL_MAX_DIR CL_MAX_PATH*32
+#define CL_MAX_DIR CL_MAX_PATH*2

#ifdef _LARGE_FILES
#define LUCENE_MAX_FILELENGTH LUCENE_INT64_MAX_SHOULDBE


I have taken option number 2 and applied the patch to CLucene which you can get from my OBS repo. This means that you can truly run Bongo on 64bit machines running openSUSE/SLE and Fedora. I believe the patch has been submitted to Debian (but I'm not 100% on that one).

If people have any issues, please let us know - irc, mailing lists, forums or file a bug.

.Well thanks to good old Santa I am continuing to be a Sony Slut, I got a PS3 (the 60GB version) for Christmas

So far I love it, my intentions are to install openSUSE on it, but I'm slightly nervous about doing that even though the wiki makes it sound relatively straight forward. To those that have done this, could you report on the hardware compatibility and any tricks you needed to do to get openSUSE working flawlessly? My main concern is wireless not being supported, this would is crucial for me to install as my PS3 is two floors down and at the opposite side of the house from any wired network point.

In the mean time I have installed the Tango theme that Bastien Nocera created, which works very nicely, thanks. So at the minute I can fool myself that I'm running openSUSE on there (there's nothing wrong with a bit of dillusional thinking every so often ). My next step is to set up a media server to enable streaming to not just my PS3 (the main one though) but to all devices in the house, these include 6 laptops (all bar one running openSUSE), one desktop, one PSP and one N800 running OS2007. To get the PS3 to see the Media Server the latter needs to support DLNA, from what I can see MediaTomb and uShare both support these and are easily installable - either from Packman or from the Build Service. I was unable to get MediaTomb to be seen by my PS3, but uShare worked pretty much straight off. My only quibble with uShare is that it doesn't dynamically update with the available media, if I add a new file I need to restart the service and then re-scan for media servers on the PS3. I am going to try TwonkyMedia as that seems to be a pretty popular one for embedding into devices, one of which I would love to get. Again if you kind folk of the interweb could provide feedback, it would be greatly appreciated

I do have another issue once I have the "right" media server in place, the actual media to be played is very hit and miss Audio is fine as most of my stuff is in .mp3 (I know I should have it in OGG but as my N800 is the only portable device I have that supports OGG [with a bit of help and hampering my battery life] I'm happy to stick with the format) and there are no issues. The painful part is Video. I am running the latest firmware on the PS3 (2.10) which provides DiVX support, problem appears to be how the DiVX avi is created. All the media for my PSP works fine as that is in .mp4 and any .mpeg, but some of my .avi come up as "unknow data type" or similar. I can query the file and get the filename under info but nothing else Could someone point me in the right direction as to how to fix my video woes, please?

Oh and if anyone wants to have a game of Resistance Fall of Man or Rainbow Six - Vegas over the WAN, or if you just want to hurl abuse at me you can find me on PSN using the same Nick as on IRC. If you aren't sure what that is look at my Build Service Repo for a hint

James this seems slightly less generic:



Aaron the choice is yours

I'm slightly late in the day with saying this, but seeing as I have remembered.....

Happy 1st Birthday Bongo


So how far have we come along in a year?
*We have removed about 50,000 lines of code and added about 43,000 lines of code.
*We have a vibrant, friendly and IMHO great community.
*Hopefully we will be able to replace the "Alpha" moniker soon,
*We have done two full releases (third is imminent - honest)
*We have an rPath Appliance available for testing and use.

How far have we got to go? To be honest, we still have some way to go till we reach world domination.
*Our community needs to grow, we could do with a few more hackers joining in - Python and C with a bit of C++ and JavaScript
*We will be switching to the true OSS style of releases - Early and Often

2008 may be the year of the desktop, but 2008 will also be the year of Bongo. Many thanks to all that have made this first year fly by, and long may we continue

Well we couldn't let our 1st birthday go without any presents now could we?

0.2.92 is out in the wild . OK so this isn't quite 0.3.0 but it is pretty damn close, there are some issues that need ironing out prior to that milestone being declared. Please see the M3 Release Notes for more info. As always you can get this release from my openSUSE Build Service repository for Fedora 6, 7, 8; openSUSE 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, Factory. Mandriva 2007; Ubuntu 6.06, 7.04, 7.10; Debian 4 will be coming soon (I hope).

One of the big changes in this release is the mail store backend. It has been moved to a maildir style rather than mbox. There are ofcourse several other changes but why read this when you can have a play for yourslef? With that in mind:



I would like to thank openSUSE for providing such a great service with the Build Service, it makes our life as a project so much easier to get our product out there.

Well no sooner have we all recovered from our party hangovers and we have yet another release of Bongo. Yay for sticking to New Year's resolutions!

0.2.93 is out and both the Build Service and rPath have the latest release. To quote Lord Moo:

From my last "outstanding" list for 0.3, Hawkeye has been mostly
addressed (small bugs remain, though), and no-one has sent me any
Dragonfly nominations so that's probably not going to change too much.

One huge change in this release is that we've changed how mail/etc. is
stored on-disk to a maildir-type format. This is a big change this late
in the process, and one I'm not totally happy about. The reasoning for
this is because certain IMAP clients were causing extreme load on our
mbox system which was virtually impossible to relieve. By 0.3, though,
we will have reached the on-disk format which will remain for 1.0.

A new application in this release is the backup/restore tool. It does
need a little bit more testing, and there are probably still bugs, but
enables admins to backup/restore individual mail stores with all the
meta-data we associate with files.
As always you can check out the Release Notes and install with a click on openSUSE

So it's been over three months since the request and as of yet no word on the "Chosen One". The one thing is the powers that be must be close to a decision, the official job notification shows that the vacancy is not available (incorrect number, closed position, etc.). Would this be one of those cases where no news is good news? For the openSUSE community maybe, but not for me. I haven't heard anything on my application, so i guess it won't be me Shame, I had hoped to get some form of feedback.

Well I wish "The One" all the best, and look forward to the openSUSE future.

For all those using my Cheese packages, I apologise for not updating them to the latest release - 0.3.0. There is a valid reason for this (honest), and that is that the new release needs gstreamer-0.10.15 and unfortunately that isnt in the Build Service yet. There are plans afoot to rectify this in the very near future.

On another note mw and myself have been battling to get Cheese backported to the older distros and especially SLES/SLED10. The news I'm afraid is not good, from our trials and tribulations it can't be done Well it could but it would be exceedingly messy and a heck of a lot of overhead to support - Cheese requires features in X that weren't introduced until openSUSE 10.2 - so it would mean providing new X packages etc and we can't do that at the minute. I know this is going to annoy some folk especially as they threw the gauntlet down for me (which I picked up with much gusto - foolish man!). As soon as the new gstreamer packages are done I'll crack out a new roundel of cheese.

Oh, openSUSE 11 may have Cheese included then again may not

In the interim of getting new gstreamer packages on the Build Service, I have built new packages of Cheese locally and uploaded them to my server. You can grab a copy from here, the tarball includes cheese; -lang (required); -debuginfo (helpful) and the src.rpm. I had just built 0.3.0 last night and then this morning I noticed the new release, so I did the same. Please try them out and let me know of any issues. I am aware that 0.3.0 doesn't play ball with some webcams as well as 0.2.4 did, not sure why though. If you do have problems try and be as verbose as possible.

So it looks like Bongo is getting a bit more visibility within distros, a fact that pleases us all in the project. We found out last night that Bongo is being proposed for inclusion in Fedora 9 Many thanks to David Nielsen for this.

All you Fedora fans, please help by testing and providing feedback. Once it is accepted either in the main distro or in one of the Fedora specific repositories I will look at possibly removing Bongo from my Build Service repo, this depends on if older versions of Fedora are included by the former.

Yes Bongo is going to be represented at SCaLE6x

Many thanks to Stu Gott for volunteering to man Bongo's booth at the event, and also to Gareth Greenaway for inviting us and to Ken VanDine for pointing him in our direction We are greatly honoured by the recommendation.

If you are going to be at this glorious event please pop by and show your support, also if you are willing to help out then please let us know - Stu could do with a bit of help (Please note I am not passing aspersions on his mental state!). I am not going to make any promises as to any goodies being dished out, you will just have to go along and tempt lady fate. All I ask is that you come along and join in the fun.

Hearty congratulations to Federico and more importantly to Oralia (she's the one that does the work ) on their new arrival - Luciana. You have a whole new experience ahead of you of which most of it will be happy and joyful. The sleepless nights are made out to be worse than they really are - well as long as you're a heavy sleeper then you will be fine

Felicidades por tu bebe

I may have had my head firmly planted up my derrier the last week or so as I seem to have missed a lovely new repository on the Build Service. There have been two "Community" repos for a while on there - GNOME:Community and KDE:Community - both of which provide a great service to the openSUSE community. They are now joined by the Mono:Community, which provides additional Mono based apps like DekiWiki, MojoPortal and the latest Banshee etc. This is great as it now means that one doesn't have to search too hard ,and minimise the number of repos that zypper has to check.

After a lot of work and a fair ammount of pain we now have our next Milestone release of Bongo. The M3 release is now final and out there. Please report any issues you have

0.3.0 is out and both the Build Service and rPath have the latest release.

There are a couple of new distros added to those already built (can you guess what they are?), and many thanks to openSUSE for constantly improving the wonderful Build Service. So the full list of distros with architectures and locations for packages are:

SUSE 10.1 x86 & x86_64
openSUSE 10.2 x86 & x86_64
openSUSE 10.3 x86 & x86_64
openSUSE Factory (11.0) x86 & x86_64
SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 x86 & x86_64
Fedora Core 6 x86 & x86_64
Fedora 7 x86 & x86_64
Fedora 8 x86 & x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise 5 x86 & x86_64
Mandriva 2007 x86
CentOS 5 x86 & x86_64

As always you can check out the Release Notes and install with a click on openSUSE