Some time ago Danish public television were doing a segment about how home users could save money with free software, for that purpose they filmed at our weekly SSLUG lug meeting in Copenhagen. Unfortunately the footage didn’t make the cut and wasn’t part of the show that was actually aired.

However, this Friday there was a segment in international news program ‘DR2 Udland’ on DR2 (the “intellectual” niche channel of Danish public television), about the French police moving to free software – and public authorities in general saving money and benefitting from software freedom, and for this segment the footage was used.

Here you see SSLUG president and Exherbo founder Bryan “kloeri” Østergaard and Exherbo developer Anders “arkanoid” Ossowicki at our weekly lug meeting, and some of the other guys in the background (Eskild, Jan, Kristian and some others):

Here you see Henrik’s Dell laptop running openSUSE and KDE:

No time for chitchat? Click here!

Using openSUSE is incredibly easy, when you know how – but figuring everything out by yourself with no prior knowledge of GNU/Linux is no small task. In fact, I’m sure that a very high percentage of the people who try to migrate fail and quit, and often the showstoppers are really very basic issues. Therefore I’ve written and maintained a beginner’s guide to openSUSE in Danish for every release since SUSE Linux 9.3, documenting the basics needed to getting started using openSUSE as a home desktop OS. For openSUSE 11.2 I’ve decided to maintain the guide in English instead. You’ll find it here:

http://opensuse-guide.org (Thanks to the board for granting permission to use a *opensuse* domain name)

Some people may wonder why I don’t just use the wiki. Which is a good question, but:

• I want to control the direction and vision for my work
• I’m considering putting ads on it at some point
• Using the wiki can be limiting technically and possibly even legally
• The guide is GFDL’ed with no invariant sections, so you can fork it if I get hit by a bus or don’t do a good job.

I’m very interested in feedback of course and will continue to update and incrementally improve the guide.

The “Installing Software” chapter has an embedded screencast using the <video> element – more and better screencasts are planned – only works with Firefox 3.5/Seamonkey 2.0 of course (I’d appreciate it, if someone could tell me whether it works with recent Google Chrome on MS Windows or not, doesn’t seem to want to work with Chromium).

The long wait is almost over. 11 long months have passed in the unusually long release cycle since openSUSE 11.1, and tomorrow 11.2 will be released. The repositories are already available so I updated my RC2 installation to the gold master yesterday. Naturally 11.2 comes with all the latest and greatest from upstream, as well as a bunch of new SUSE features, here are some of the highlights.

Base System

• Live CD ISOs are now hybrid ISOs – simply ‘dd’ it to a USB stick to create a live USB.
• Online dist upgrade (‘zypper dup’) has been available since 11.0 but is now officially supported.
• Ext4 is now the default file system.
• A -desktop kernel flavour is provided configured specifically for desktop use.
• Zypp now uses Aria2c for download management and is supposed to cache mirror URLs so it should work even when the download.opensuse.org redirector is down.
• There’s no xorg.conf anymore. X is configured by HAL/autodetection instead of SaX2. I guess this should be considered an improvement, but it’s also likely to cause problems for some.

KDE

• For once reason has prevailed over politricks and KDE is again the default desktop on the DVD after some years of openSUSE having no default desktop.
• Firefox is now the default browser in KDE, but don’t despair, SUSE employee Lubos Lunak has performed miracles to make it use the KDE file dialog, be aware of KDE applications/file associations and integrate well in other ways.
• OpenOffice.og comes with KDE 4 integration (icons, file dialog, general look and feel)
• Much of the artwork has been done by Pinheiro to create a special openSUSE look and feel, while preserving the look and feel of upstream vanilla KDE
• YaST control center has finally been ported to Qt4
• All default apps are now native KDE 4 – including Kaffeine, Konversation, K3b and KNetworkManager – of which SUSE employee Will Stephenson has been the primary developer.
• Kopete comes with support for Facebook chat, written by SUSE employee Duncan Mac-Vicar.
• PulseAudio doesn’t run by default and Phonon Xine backend is installed by default.
• KDE 3 is finally no longer supported (but is still available on the OBS).

The Project

Of course many things have happened on the project level in the past 11 months too. Some of the highlights are:

• Factory is now open for everyone
• Presumably openSUSE should follow a fixed 8 month release schedule from now on (November -> July -> March -> November and so forth)
• The openSUSE Boosters team has been created.
• openSUSE releases now only receive security updates for 18 months (used to be 24)
• Susestudio.com has come into existence providing a webinterface for creating your own custom images – and even testing the image before downloading it – using some kvm and vnc magic.

The Issues

All distro releases have bugs – including openSUSE, many of which will of course be fixed via online updates in the coming weeks and months. However so far I’m not aware of any major bugs that will cause a lot of grief to legions of people.

I predict that the thing that will cause the most people to say “wtf!?!” in 11.2 is actually intended behaviour. YaST/zypper will not show nor perform updates that involve “vendor changes” (i.e. updating an official package to a newer version of the same software from packman) unless the user explicitly does some extra work.

You roughly have these coping strategies:

• Don’t worry about it and stick with the old versions included in the distro no matter how many 3rd party repositories you add.
• Manually go to the Repositories tab or the Versions tab in YaST Software Management, and manually select the updates you want – or manually specify the versions you want on the command line with zypper (note, you only have to do the extra work to change vendor once per package).
• Set AllowVendorChange = true in /etc/zypp/zypp.conf – this way YaST/zypper will update everything to whatever has the highest version number – and let you ping-pong back and forth between package vendors, if that’s what you want.

In the future the tools are expected to be improved, so that the vendor stickyness becomes less annoying and obtrusive.

Almost two years ago now, I bought some clothes in shop.opensuse.org for my nephew to be.

Since then my lil’ nephew has actually been born and grown big enough to fit the stuff.

I guess most cultured people above the age of 25 or so have played some version of Sensible (World of) Soccer on the Amiga at some point – younger people may have tried the not-so-great retro edition released for the Microsoft Xbox a couple of years ago.

Senible Soccer was one of the premier time consumers for me in my early teens – only rivaled by Civilization, Championship Manager, the turn based AD&D games and school. I still play SWOS now and then to this day using UAE and my Competition Pro usb joystick. The experience comes pretty close to the real deal. I still have an Amiga 600, but, well.. it’s not GNU/Linux with KDE, so I end up using UAE more.

I also competed at the annual Danish Open held by Amiga Club Denmark in 2004, 2005 and 2006, with some success. So as you can see Sensible Soccer is very much still alive.

Enter Open World Soccer. It’s a project that not only aims to create a free clone of Sensible World of Soccer but also to develop it further.

There’s a simple howto for compiling svn snapshots on openSUSE 11.1 here, and the project releases binaries for a distribution called Ubuntu also.

EDIT: Turns out Toni has been building packages on Packman since February. Unless you really want latest svn, simply ‘zypper in ows’.

It still seems to need quite a bit of work to be much fun but they’re off to a great start, so if you’re a C++ developer looking for a project to work on…

PS: And please, don’t bring up Kick Off or Goal, they completely lacked the sophistication of SWOS >:-)

If you use KDE4 with openSUSE Build Service repositories you should read this very carefully, because I will write this only once. A lot of major changes are happening right now.

Repository changes

A new set of repos have been created with KDE 4.2 packages, because of the factory repository moving to KDE 4.3 beta1 within 2-3 weeks. If you’re currently running KDE 4.2 from the factory repository and you want to stay with KDE 4.2 you should move to this set of repositories ASAP.

A new Playground set of repositories has been created for alphas, betas and CVS snapshots of KDE4 applications.

The Extra-apps set of repositories have been terminated. The packages can now be found either in the KDE4:/Community/ or KDE4:/Playground repos. Depending on the release status of the package.

For a complete overview of the different KDE versions and URLs for the repositories see this wiki page: http://en.opensuse.org/KDE/Repositories

Package naming changes

Until recently KDE4 packages where KDE3 packages also existed were layed out like this “kde4-[package name]“. That naming convention has been reversed. KDE4 packages will no longer have a prefix, and instead KDE3 packages will be prefixed, like this “kde3-[package name].

If you want to keep using some KDE3 applications after updating – e.g. Konversation or K3b – add the KDE3 repository for your openSUSE version and install kde3-k3b or kde3-konversation:
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/KDE3/

Installable openSUSE 11.1 Reloaded Live CD with KDE 4.2

Stephan “Beineri” Binner has created a respin of the openSUSE 11.1 live CD with KDE 4.2, called openSUSE 11.1 Reloaded. If you’re doing a fresh installation of openSUSE 11.1 and you want to use KDE 4.2 you should consider using this live CD to save yourself a bunch of trouble.

Get the ISOs here:
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Medias/images/iso/

If you encounter problems, consider reporting them on the opensuse-kde@opensuse.org mailing list or try catching Beineri in the #opensuse-kde IRC channel on Freenode.

You may or may not have noticed bug 439015. Which is hicolor icons being used in the Kickoff application menu, and not Oxygen icons as you’d of course expect and prefer.

So I went through the trouble of finding suitable Oxygen replacements for the ~130 icons in the openSUSE menu system making the desktop experience just a little more polished. I’ve submitted them to bugzilla and I expect them to be in openSUSE 11.2. I also rebuilt the desktop-data-openSUSE package with Oxygen icons in my home repository on the Build Service, enabling you to easily fix the problem on 11.1 too, with 1-click install

Here’s how it looks…

Hicolor (before)	Oxygen (after)