European Wafaa

And so the fun ends, as today is the last day of HackWeek III and also my last day (hopefully not ever) here in the Nurenberg Offices

I managed to grab Will Stephenson for a brief chat on camera about KDE and how it fits in with openSUSE, many thanks Will.  I also had some discussions with several people just to make sure I squeezed the last out of “ChatWeek”.  I spoke with Marko Jung about the upcoming Board Elections for a fair while, and we can’t stress enough how important this event is for the whole openSUSE Project.  For those that are keen to stand for election, please follow the Notification instructions here.  Also, those that do wish to stand, you will have to fund your own election campaign as neither Novell nor SUSE have the budget to fund a campaign like Obama or McCain.  The one advantage that we do have over the US elections is we won’t be anywhere near as long and drawn out, also we’ll be a lot friendlier (I hope).

I would like to thank everyone at SUSE and Novell for inviting so many external community members to Nurenberg for HackWeek III, this was the largest by far and was an absolute winner!  I would like to especially thank Andreas Jaeger and Michael Loeffler for co-ordinating the event for us; Martin Lasarsch who even though he was feeling decidedly crappy thanks to a persistent cold was able to perform his host duties impecably; Sonja Krause-Harder for allowing me to occupy part of her office, Marco Michna for being that great shadow that appears when you need him; and also to the un-related to openSUSE but just as important to me AirBerlin, a mighty fine example of how flying can still be enjoyable, in this day and age of tight fisted, service void, unpleasent airlines.

I am currently working on editing the video that I have, and will try and get something out ASAP, honest.  If there are any animation supremos out there that would like to do a bit of animation wizardry, please let me know!

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away .....

Que scrolling text and huge orchestra! OK so George Lucas has nothing to fear (yet ).

I am pleased to announce that the first interview from HackWeek III is available on openSUSE TV. In this episode I speak to Cornelius Schumacher. I must apologies first to you the community for not doing enough filming, but also for the relatively poor quality of the audio and video. Believe it or not I had some technical issues with my equipment which meant that some items were useless (have a guess which one when you see the interview).

The main fact of the matter is that I did do some, and hopefully I or others in the community can do more. This is something for the community, by the community - not just a one horse show, so if anyone would like to join in then great just let me know.

You can see the interview below or here. Remember openSUSE TV has numerous ways of keeping upto date with shows - RSS, Miro, and iTunes. I will get the original .ogg files onto tube.opensuse.org shortly.

*UPDATE*
I am really sorry to Gabriel, Aaron and the rest of the Banshee Team. You can and should of course use the great Banshee with the RSS feed to subscribe to openSUSE TV, it's really easy and "Just Works (tm)". The advantage for GNOME users is it's out of the box goodness

In this the second interview from HackWeek III in Nurenberg openSUSE's very own KDE king Will Stephenson speaks about KDE in openSUSE. I admit I forgot to ask him about his thoughts on the whole version question that is burning a great hole on the Factory Mailing List. You can view the video either below or directly here. You should ofcourse be subscribed to openSUSE TV to catch new episodes as soon as they come out (Banshee works a treat for this )



Don't forget any contributions welcome, whether ideas, hints & tips, video or whatever

In this the Last of the interviews from HackWeek III in Nurenberg we talk to a few of the openSUSE team, covering a wide range of sections from SUSE Studio, to Core Services and also throwing in some words of wisdom from [daemon] and notlocalhorst. For some reason I just couldn't get the scene transitions to work correctly - Sorry. Many thanks to Garrett Le Sage, Flavio Castelli, Marco Mishna, Sonja Krause-Harder and Martin Lasarsch for their time. You can view the video either below or directly here. You should of course be subscribed to openSUSE TV to catch new episodes as soon as they come out (Banshee works a treat for this )



Don't forget any contributions welcome, whether ideas, hints & tips, video or whatever

UPDATE
My sincere apologies to Flavio for misspelling his surname - corrected now.

There is something out there that has been growing slowly to try and help get better native support for hardware, and that something is Smolt. It was initially put into practice by the Fedora Project and I'm very glad to say that openSUSE is joining in the action

This is nothing terribly new, Smolt has been available on openSUSE for sometime, it was included on the DVD media and is in the Main OSS repo since 10.3. As with Fedora, it is purely an opt in item. So why the heck should one opt in with Smolt? Simple really, without getting decent metrics on the hardware being used by people running Linux it's hard to ensure that we have as best an "out of the box" experience as possible. Not only that but it will also enable a better Hardware Compatibility List to be compiled showing all components as nowadays many machines have the same components.

Oh, so you are interested? Good First thing is to install Smolt - zypper in smolt or select it from your preferred package manager. Once installed you have several options:
smoltGui - The Graphical Interface to the application.


smoltSendProfile - The command line interface to the application. Collates your data and sends it (once you're happy).


smoltDeleteProfile - The command line interface to remove your machine's profile (should you wish to).

Once you've sent your hardware details by either method, you are provided with a link to view your hardware profile. from here you can tweak your profile (with the Admin password provided specifically for your profile) and change the status for the individual components, and this includes: I don't use this/I don't know, Breaks System, Doesn't Work, Requires 3rd Party Drivers, Works but required additional configuration, Worked out of the box.

There are two views for the website, a Basic/Simple View:


Or an Advanced/Full List view:


Currently all metrics go back to the central Smolt servers and are available from there, but due to the distributed nature of the Smolt server architecture that doesn't need to be the case. Hopefully openSUSE can get their own servers which will in turn talk to the other Smolt servers and alleviate the load somewhat. So please join in and register your hardware to try and improve hardware support on Linux. Using metrics garnered from tools like this we and other projects have a better chance of getting hardware vendors to do the right thing and release either open specs for their kit or help us help them in creating open drivers.

UPDATE
There are currently two bugs that kind of hinder Smolt. They are Bug 460099 and Bug 444585

As is pretty common nowadays I have a storage system accessible over the network at home. Some people have a server, others have NAS units etc. Mine is the former, a Samba server providing file and print services to my various machines.

The problem lies with my smallest machine - an eeePC 701. As some may know there are issues with various SDHC cards, funnily enough I just so happen to have one of these problem cards a 16GB Transcend Class6 card - Coincidence? I think not someone just hates me So I'm left with little space for loads of files etc. Not a problem, just open up the filemanager and browse the network and Bob's your auntie! Whoa horsey, not so fast. You see I'm not using GNOME or KDE on this little white beauty, so no Nautilus or KDE simplicity. I am however using the compact and bijou XFCE, with its functional (give or take a couple of items) Thunar filemanager. Problem is Thunar doesn't do Samba browsing so I can't just do smb:/// to see what Samba servers are where etc.

I did however stumble upon a very good tip from El Reg, as I've always sucked at dealing with Samba and CIFS from the command line. Thank fully they're doing a tweaks article for the Acer Aspire One which runs XFCE on a Fedora base (openSUSE needs to get in on this OEM lark more, and not just put SLED on there). Low and behold they tell you how to mount a remote share and browse to it using Thunar, thanks chaps.

For those that wish to avoid browsing to other sites what you need to do is this (replace the variables obviously - $BLAH):

Create a folder locally somewhere, I chose the desktop as it is relatively empty. Then run sudo mount -t cifs //$SERVER/$SHARE $LOCAL_FOLDER. When it asks for a password, that's the password on the server not your local machine.

Now I have much more storage available to me whilst connected to my network

So there's been a bit of buzz lately about dropbox, and thanks to Jorge Castro I'm able to partake in the fun. First thing I had to do was package the delightful thing - there are only packages available for Fedora9 and Ubuntu 8.04 Chaps, the openSUSE Build Service is the kind of thing you need to use

Any ways, I have finally managed to package it for openSUSE 11.0 and as always I give you the convenience of

At the minute it needs glib >= 2.16 which limits what it can build on, but they are fixing this with the next release, once that happens I'll re-do the 1Click to cover all releases. For those that would like to use it and try it out but don't have the required invite give me a shout on twitter/identi.ca/jaiku, any other forms of communication will not be responded to.

OK people listen up… please?

Thanks! OK, just a reminder that you have less than 160 hours to register for the openSUSE board election if you haven’t done so already.

For the mathematically challenged, 160 hours is just under seven full days! Yes, that is how long you have left to get your membership application in to be able to vote on the upcoming board election. It is also the amount of time you have left to get your notification of intention to run for the first community elected Board.

You can only run for the board if you hold openSUSE Membership, you can only vote for your favourite candidates if you have openSUSE Membership. Do you see a pattern here? Good!

Also it would be good if all of the current candidates could ensure that they have filled in their platforms on the openSUSE wiki as requested before then. Some have already, I appreciate that people are busy, but if you want to be on the Board (or vote for the board) you have to be prompt. Slackers will not be tolerated!

Obligatory Political Image

I recently received my sexy svelte fully loaded new phone - a Nokia E71, and boy is it good. It's actually that good that I will no longer be using my Nokia N800 anywhere near as much. There is one major problem that I have, but it isnt just with this phone model as the problem appears to be much deeper. From my relatively simple tests all Symbian OS9.1 powered devices are unable to function as modems under Linux

I have run tests on 3 different Symbian powered phones - S60 3rd Edition FP1 powered Nokia E71, Nokia N95 and also a UIQ3 powered SonyEricsson M600i. The issue I get is the following:

Sep 17 12:04:53 fveult01 kernel: hub 1-0:1.0: unable to enumerate USB device on port 1
Sep 17 12:04:53 fveult01 kernel: usb 2-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 2
Sep 17 12:04:54 fveult01 kernel: usb 2-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
Sep 17 12:04:54 fveult01 kernel: usb 2-1: New USB device found, idVendor=0421, idProduct=00ab
Sep 17 12:04:54 fveult01 kernel: usb 2-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
Sep 17 12:04:54 fveult01 kernel: usb 2-1: Product: Nokia E71
Sep 17 12:04:54 fveult01 kernel: usb 2-1: Manufacturer: Nokia
Sep 17 12:04:55 fveult01 kernel: cdc_acm 2-1:1.10: ttyACM0: USB ACM device
Sep 17 12:04:55 fveult01 kernel: usbcore: registered new interface driver cdc_acm
Sep 17 12:04:55 fveult01 kernel: drivers/usb/class/cdc-acm.c: v0.25:USB Abstract Control Model driver for USB modems and ISDN adapters
Sep 17 12:04:55 fveult01 kernel: usbcore: registered new interface driver cdc_ether
Sep 17 12:04:55 fveult01 kernel: usb 2-1: bad CDC descriptors
Sep 17 12:04:55 fveult01 kernel: usbcore: registered new interface driver rndis_host
Sep 17 12:04:55 fveult01 kernel: usb 2-1: bad CDC descriptors
Sep 17 12:04:55 fveult01 kernel: usbcore: registered new interface driver rndis_wlan

openSUSE is not alone in this issue, I have tried it on Foresight Linux too, and they have a slightly newer kernel than us. Basically what I'm looking for is some help from any kernel plumbers (yes there's the big plumbing convention on atm), to try and resolve this issue. Also if users of other Symbian powered devices could let me know what does/doesn't work with their Linux machines that would be really helpful - either leave a comment or mail me. If I use any of the phones as Mass Storage devices then it all works a charm and i can move files to and fro to my heart's content.

So what's the big deal if it doesn't work as a modem? Well apart from pissing me off, Symbian powers the bulk of the world's handsets. Most of Nokia's phones are Symbian powered, Samsung has a lot of devices powered by it, and to a lesser extent so does SonyEricsson. Certainly in Europe they are omnipresent, and being able to just plug it into any one of my laptops would be so much easier as I wouldn't need another device with a separate sim card to get onto the web. Yes Symbian is on its way to being Open Source but it isn't there quite yet.

Via Chris.

1. Take a picture of yourself right now.
2. Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair…just take a picture.
3. Post that picture with NO editing.
4. Post these instructions with your picture.

Yes it is I, FunkyPenguin, on my Party Political Soap Box calling out to all you unbelievers.

You have less than 23hrs till applications for membership for voting purposes is closed; you also have the same small amount of time to notify us of your intention to run for a position for the first community elected Board. I know there are some of you who have been thinking about running – it’s now or never to be part of the 1st. Sure you can go for it next election, but you should really go for it now

Remember you need to be a member before you can run for the Board!

For more info please see my earlier call.

Pavel raises a good question about trying to keep calendars in sync, and easily accessible. I too have this issue, but somewhat more so as I would like to keep Contacts/Calendar/Todo all in sync across multiple devices.

I have just received my shiny, lovely, svelte, sexy, functional, uber smart phone - a Nokia E71 - and would like to keep it in sync with my three laptops, and SonyEricsson K850i. How can I do this simply cleanly and with minimal cost and time? One option I'm about to try is ScheduleWorld. I have heard that it works, but the WebUI is pretty ugly, I can live with ugliness if it does what I need it to do.

Wow, people weren't lying when they said the UI was a pig - no amount of lipstick would make this pretty. I am able to sync my phone (actually any phone that can talk SyncML; this includes my Nokia N95, SE K850i and SE M600i) with Evolution, and Thunderbird. Unfortunately I have been unable to sync with Kontact.

Many thanks to Claes Backstrom for providing the SyncEvolution package via the oBS, I have a fully up to date addressbook/calendar/todo list in evolution

To get up and running is very easy just create an account on ScheduleWorld, install SyncEvolution and then:

1. syncevolution --configure scheduleworld

2. Once done you need to configure SyncEvolution to use your ScheduleWorld credentials. Fire up your favourite text editor and edit ~/.config/syncevolution/scheduleworld/config.ini

3. Once your details are all in there you can sync away with syncevolution scheduleworld.

This is a two way sync, so if you edit any details on the web it should pull them onto you desktop. You will need to follow the steps on the wiki to sync your phone, but needless to say it works a charm