European Wafaa

With the release of openSUSE 11.0, NetworkManager 0.7 was included by default. This wasn't the official release of NM0.7, but it was stable enough for inclusion. Thank you for taking the decision oh Nuremberg Gods - it works a charm!! This is thanks to tambeti and the rest of the Mobile computing team in NUE, they spent a lot of time and effort ensuring that NM in openSUSE works as it should.

As people may remember I had a lot of issues getting 3G to work with openSUSE 10.3. All of the problems have disappeared now, as under GNOME (I haven't tried with KDE yet) it really does work out of the box

I have a Vodafone branded Option GT 3G+ PCMCIA card. To get the thing to work is litteraly three steps - one less than on windows:

-1. Put the card into the slot

-2. Left click the NM applet



-3. Select the "Auto GSM network connection" option

Voila you are now connected to your mobile provider.



A lovely icon of a tower with radio waves is displayed to ensure you are aware of the network type. It is not tied to this specific model of 3G modem, I have heard that the new USB modems work a charm too. If you aren't sure about you modem, plug it in and check dmesg</>, you should see something similar to:

pccard: CardBus card inserted into slot 0
nozomi 0000:03:00.0: Init, new card found
PCI: Enabling device 0000:03:00.0 (0000 -> 0002)
ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:03:00.0[A] -> GSI 18 (level, low) -> IRQ 18
nozomi 0000:03:00.0: Card type is: 2048
nozomi 0000:03:00.0: Version of card: 3
nozomi 0000:03:00.0: Initialization OK!
nozomi 0000:03:00.0: Device READY!

My only niggle with this is that NM currently doesn't report on you data usage, so if you happen to have a pre-arranged plan (say GBP10 for 1GB) you can't see how much you have left. This isn't a major issue for me, but would be a "nice to have" feature. Once again big kudos to all the guys and gals that made this happen, this was one point that a lot of people at LRL UK mentioned and some of the Ubuntu faithful even installed openSUSE 11.0 just for this fact alone (supposedly until the next bunty release, but I'm sure they won't go back).

This happened at the end of July, but for some reason slipped through the net. Tasque 0.1.6 was released, and adds additional backends (Evolution Data Server, SQLite) to the existing Remember The Milk. Get it if you haven't already.

Firstly I am sorry for yet another shameless plea for help, but this is a matter that I feel very strongly about - just as much as I feel about openSUSE and Open Source.

This is aimed mainly at British citizens or residents and those from an overseas territory, or a Crown dependency. So what am I asking help for? Well as some of you will know, the British government of the day decided to close down all the military hospitals (at one of which I was a patient) in the UK. Sadly the decision proved to be disastrous.

On their current tour of duty alone, 2 Para have sent back over 50 casualties back to the UK, and that many can not be accommodated in the single dedicated ward to military personnel at Selly Oak near Birmingham; when all the other casualties from other battle groups are added to this figure how can one ward in an NHS hospital be expected to cope? Well it just can't, this is not being disrespectful to Selly Oak, just fact. Individual troops are sent home to recover relying on over committed NHS visiting services to provide treatment.

There is a petition with 10 Downing Street to rectify this issue, but a lot more than 5000 names are needed for this petition, and quite cynically, Downing Street has put a time limit of 19 August 2008 for this to be achieved. So please, please help; let all and sundry know about it and try and get your friends and family to sign up even try your LUG.

This is not sanctioning conflict that our men and women are serving in, that is a political issue that the troops have little say in. They follow their orders and carry them out to the best of their abilities, in doing so many die but many more are injured both physically and mentally. Surely those that serve their country deserve the best possible care and treatment? Britain I'm ashamed to say has started to treat her service men and women as second class citizens, and this must stop!

Again, please sign the petition if you are at all able to.

Whilst waiting for my train back home from a client meeting in London last week, I decided to pop into the news agents and see what magazines they had to while my journey away. As I approached the tech related stand I was drawn uncontrollably to a magazine. No matter how hard I fought the urge, I was unable to break away. Yes, the force was strong with this one!

Once I arrived at the magazine, I understood why the force was so strong:


Yes Linux Format Issue109 has the Geeko emblazoned on the front cover, not only that the geeko is on the inside cover too:



Not content with just having the image of Geeko on there, the magazine goes on to have a six page spread on nothing but openSUSE 11.0, and boy do they like it (and why wouldn't they) To also confirm that openSUSE 11.0 is the dog's doodahs, their regular Distrowatch section had almost a page on openSUSE 11.0 again praising it to all sundry. The good thing is it wasn't written by any Novell employee and was completely un-biased, yes they had issues with a few things, but all in all they also came to the same conclusion - GREEN IS THE NEW BROWN!!

They had nice little quotes from several people, granted they were only from US based employees and not any of the European teams (only disappointing part of the piece). All in all a good read, and it was good to see that they acknowledge and understand that there is no default DE at install and that the Geeko loves all letters of the alphabet, not just the 7th and 11th letters.

As the self elected Director-General of the oBC's (openSUSE Broadcasting Corporation ) flagship oTV I thought you'd like to know on the latest with the channel.

I have upgraded the account so that we can make full use of Blip's features present and future. So this now means that oTV can reach users on pretty much any platform that users wish to use - iTunes (shame on you), Miro, other RSS based viewers (like Banshee). I have also enabled the mp3 transcoding option, which now means you can download the shows in audio only should you wish. The full list of formats that oTV now supports is OGG, M4V and MP3 more are in the pipeline. Currently there are 16 episodes on the channel, these include screencasts, and talks held at LRL USA and Day 1 of FOSDEM. I am endeavouring to get the rest of the FOSDEM videos up asap, as well as getting the LinuxTag series up. There is also the openSUSE Rooms Series which will be uploaded in due course. My current ISP isn't helping at the minute, but they'll be gone by Thursday.

If people have any videos that they feel should be on oTV please either mail me (I'm at the opensuse.org domain under awafaa), catch me on IRC I'm in most of the English openSUSE channels most of the time, or you can leave a comment. As always I'm very keen in feedback, so let that come my way too. There are a couple of episodes that haven't transcoded to all formats yet, and I'm working with Blip's tech guys and gals to resolve it. Thanks and happy viewing.

Thanks to the monopoly that Britain has I am without any form of DSL connection at the minute, I have a fault on my line at the exchange and only BT can deal with it and the SLA for them is looser than a lady of the night's morals!. My only link to the big tube in the sky is via my 3G card that work provide, and I can't really cane that as I do need it for business purposes.

So why should anyone care? A few reasons are:
1) I may not be on IRC.
2) If people use any of my 1-Clicks they will be inaccessible as they're hosted on my server at home (I'll change that to be on this server soon), in the mean time please use Webpin to find the package and then 1-click from there.
3) Videos being uploaded to openSUSE TV are on hold till my DSL link is back.
4) Anything to do with ForceV is unavailable (most folk don't have anything to do with it so no-one cares, but there are one or two out there).
5) If you speak to me by any means that gets through to me, be warned I'll be a real grumpy bastard!

Until then you all enjoy your big fat tubes to the interweb

Yes my new shiny net connection is up and running, to be honest has been for almost a week now. The guys and gals over at Be are brilliant! I genuinely can't praise them enough.

I'm off on some travels coming up, and there is an app that I quite like which allows me to watch telly on my computer without having to have a TV Tuner - Zattoo. This works in the UK, Germany, Belgium, France, Norway, Denmark, Spain and Switzerland, and they are adding more countries as they go along. This used to work like a charm on 10.3 and I thought I'd install it on my 11.0 machines (I'm taking both my Vaio and eeePC), problem it doesn't work out of the box

The solution is pretty easy though. So to get Zattoo running on your openSUSE 11.0 machine just do the following:
1) Ensure you have Adobe's Flash player installed (I don't know if it'll work with gnash or swfdec) zypper in flash-player.
2) You will need libcurl3 so add Yaloki's backport repo zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/pbleser:/backports/openSUSE_11.0 pbleser:backport, and install it zypper in libcurl3
3) Download the RPM from the website
4) Install gtkglext. A simple zypper in gtkglext will work
5) Install Zattoo. I personally just did zypper in $PATH/TO/zattoo-3.2.4.15876-1.i386.rpm
6) They (Zattoo) advise you to run /sbin/ldconfig /usr/lib/zattoo
7) Launch the app, I would recommend doing it from a terminal first time round so you can see any errors should there be any - zattoo_player

There you go, you can now watch TV without the need of a TV tuner, yes OK you need a net connection. What do you want , the moon on a stick?!

This is something that has been churning around for quite sometime, and initially caused a real shit storm in the Open Source world, what on earth could I be talking about? Yes, you guessed it - the Novell/Microsoft agreement.

Back in November 2006 when the initial deal was signed all hell broke loose. Novell and openSUSE lost some good and talented people because they felt that Novell betrayed them and the Open Source community. openSUSE got a lot of stick, and some very aggressive trolls popped up and fueled an insatiable FUD engine.

Things in general looked pretty ugly, the Geeko turned from the lovely cuddlley, friendly character to the demented freak of a cousin that a family would tolerate and only just tolerate. Jibes regularly made, horrible pranks played etc. (Yes I have an evil family). I'll not rehash the details here. Frankly it was not communicated well at the time, and what's evident after nearly two years is that many community members really don't know the details of the agreement - just that it's supposed to be bad, and deals with patents. From what I do know is that as part of the deal Microsoft agreed to purchase a bunch of SLE certificates which would enable them to effectively become a SLE reseller as part of the "interoperability" side of the agreement.

Thankfully after nearly two years of some pretty heavy firefighting and a heck of a lot of hard work and effort by all those in the openSUSE community (yes that includes Novell), the Geeko is once again loved! The question is: Will the love last this time?

Novell and Microsoft announced the other day that the certificate part of the deal was so successful that they're extending it. Great, Novell gets a wad more cash and Big N's shareholders get to see a return on their investment. One of Novell's biggest failings with the original deal was it's utter piss poor attempt at communicating, not just with the Open Source community in general, but it's own community (openSUSE and staff).

This time round they have made an attempt to rectify this, they asked some of the big players in Open Source for some feedback. One person to provide such feedback is Aaron Seigo, except he did it a little bit more publicly than Novell were expecting I think. Aaron basically speaks the truth in a calm reasoned manner.

His manner carries a lot of credible weight to it as far as Novell go, good job on that! The chances are you'll find it hard to disagree with what he's saying. If people do have issues with the way Novell does business with the Open Source community please learn from Aaron, if you want your message to be heard, listened to and actioned the way is his way. Screaming like some possessed pre-pubescent Oik on heat will get you nowhere!

One item that so many people seem to gloss over is that Novell as is Microsoft, is a business with shareholders that it has to respond to. One problem with that is syncing the interests of the corporate giant with that of the community minnow are very very difficult. I call the respective parties giant and minnow, because of the financial return to the shareholders that ultimately drive things, yes Big Ron is in the driving seat but only till they decide his driving license has expired.

Novell has done pretty good for a company that was so entrenched in the dark ways of proprietary work. It switched almost over night to being a mixed source company with a huge slant towards the good open ways. Some of the execs may well have not liked the idea of the deal, but as they have to think of the shareholders their hands were fairly restricted - they would be out on a limb with no job if the shareholders found out they walked away from $100 million because it offended some non-paying folk. One way that you can view the deal with Microsoft is to put Microsoft in the image of a Mother-In-Law to Novell, a mandatory dampener to an otherwise happy marriage.

Well that's pretty much all I have to say to the community about the matter, but I do have something fairly important to say to Novell - DROP THE WHOLE IP WORDING FROM YOUR PR!! This is probably the one real item that makes so many people's shit itch, you need to come clean about on the IP side of things. Those that aren't zealots are fairly ambivalent about the deal, if it wasn't for the whole effing IP statement.

From the original agreement, you and Microsoft disagreed about the patent situation what changed? Also be clear on your message, as one that plays well in certain business arenas can play extremely badly in the community. Being incapable of communicating or even worse being incompetent of communicating will anger both parties. Oh and if you cause any distress to the Geeko again, I'll come round to your house and kneecap you!