OMG! SUSE!

Trimming the fat with Fluxbox

rtyler — Sun, 22 May 2011 20:11:43 +0000

One of the oft touted reasons to use openSUSE is the stellar support and packaging for a wide-variety of desktop environments, normally leading people to think of the four mainstays of the Linux desktop: GNOME, KDE, LXDE, XFCE. While the amount attention focused on the "big four" is certainly the lion's share, there is still a lot of attention paid towards less popular window managers and desktop environments like Enlightenment, Openbox, Window Maker or Fluxbox.

Window managers, unlike desktop environments, strive to follow the unix philosophy of "do one thing, do it well" so you won't see a lot of the bells and whistles you might be familiar with from KDE or GNOME. On the flip side however, you'll see reduced memory and CPU usage.

On his blog, Alexander Naumov posted a great little step-by-step tutorial on getting Fluxbox up and running on a fresh install of openSUSE. If you're running an older machine or just want to try out a more minimalistic window manager, I cannot recommend Fluxbox highly enough. It holds a special place in my heart as my favorite minimalist window manager, especially on lower-end hardware.

Evergreen to pick up after 11.2 end of life

rtyler — Fri, 20 May 2011 12:00:00 +0000

Back in January we wrote about the Evergreen project, which started as a community-driven movement to provide long-term support for openSUSE 11.1.

Recently, the openSUSE security team announced that official support for openSUSE 11.2 has been discontinued just as [openSUSE 11.1] did after it's 18 month support cycle. Users who still have 11.2 installed have two options if they wish to continue to stay updated:

Upgrade to 11.3 or 11.4
Continue using 11.2 with long-term support from Evergreen

During the course of it's year and a half lifetime, the 11.2 release had:

317 security updates
172 recommend updates

With Evergreen support for 11.2 ramping up, it is certain that we'll see many more updates to the release in the future. If you're interested in either using or testing the Evergreen support for 11.2, I highly recommend reading through the wiki page on the subject and perhaps even joining the mailing list

Yet another Flash Player security update

rtyler — Wed, 18 May 2011 16:25:58 +0000

Security Team member Thomas Biege published an advisory this morning more critical security updates in..you guessed it: flash-player.

According to the security announcement this package update affects openSUSE 11.3, 11.4 as well as SUSE Enterprise Linux Desktop 10 SP4 and 11 SP1. This announcement also mentions that this is a remote code execution vulnerability, which means not updating to the latest flash-player package will leave you open to attackers running programs and exploits on your machine!

Adobe has posted more details on this bulletin on their site if you're that interested in the different issues this fix addresses.

For most users, you'll just need to follow these steps:

Open up Yast2 or click on the "Online Update" applet running in your GNOME or KDE panels
Select the flash-player update and install it
Make sure you restart all of your browsers, this will ensure that no program is running the older vulnerable flash-player package
Relax with a Long Island Ice Tea

Poll: Are you using 11.4 yet?

rtyler — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 12:00:00 +0000

It's been a little over a week since openSUSE 11.4 was released out into the wild. As with any release of any single piece or collection of software, there will of course be a few pretty annoying bugs, but have they been enough to hold you back from trying out 11.4?

Have you taken the plunge, still cautious?

We want to know!

If you cannot see the poll above, try this direct link

SUSE Studio jumps on the 11.4 bandwagon

rtyler — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 14:00:00 +0000

With the release of openSUSE 11.4, I would like to start talking more and more about SUSE Studio. While SUSE Studio might not be a terribly useful tool for the average end-user, for power-users and developers it is quite an impressive piece of technology, built on top of openSUSE and KIWI.

For developers, imagine creating an image of the ideal test machine, complete with repositories from the openSUSE Build Service already enabled and all the necessary dependencies already installed. SUSE Studio does that.

For power-users, imagine having a USB stick or a Live CD with your completely personalized, custom version of openSUSE. All set up and ready to go, whenever you need it. SUSE Studio does that.

With the initial release of 11.4, SUSE Studio announced support for 11.4 appliances. Which means you could create a custom openSUSE 11.4 appliance while your ISO was downloading off BitTorrent.

Now the team has gone a step further, allowing you to upgrade existing 11.3 appliances to openSUSE 11.4, with a single button click on SUSEStudio.com. See below:

(In case you're wondering, the SUSE Studio mascot is named "Dister" and he's a robot. A friendly robot, with three friendly fingers.)

Search openSUSE, powered by Google

rtyler — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 20:23:10 +0000

Community member Brandon Philips introduced search.opensuse.org to the world on the opensuse-project mailing list. The site is a simple, fast Google-powered search engine for openSUSE.org, the forums, the wiki and the mailing lists.

If you're interested in checking out the code behind search.opensuse.org, head on over to the repository on Gitorious.org.

On release day, it is like a big dump truck

rtyler — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 13:15:00 +0000

Shortly after the initial release of openSUSE 11.4, I posted some giant BitTorrent links to speed up your downloading of openSUSE. Now that the initial flood of downloads has come and gone, I wanted to report back with some statistics shared by openSUSE Contributor Marcus Rueckert.

Note: These numbers are for BitTorrent downloads only.

As of last Thursday (March 17th), the numbers broke down as follows:

Full DVD images downloaded: 8228
Live CD images downloaded: 4009

If you're not terrifically familiar with the way that BitTorrent works, all users are constantly sharing data with one another but users fall into two buckets: "leechers" and "seeders." The "leechers" are users who don't yet have the complete file, while the "seeders" have fully completed their download and are only uploading to the other users. In short, having a lot of seeders means you have a good healthy torrent and downloads for new folks will be fast.

As of last Thursday, both the 32-bit and the 64-bit DVD images had over one thousand seeders, 20% more seeders than leechers too! That is incredibly awesome!

Marcus went on to say:

I tested on friday morning and peaked at 11.2MB/s download speed for torrent which is almost max speed of my line.

This means if you download the DVD image right now, you are likely going download openSUSE as fast as technically possible!

Footnote: The title is a reference to a rather famous comment on a series of tubes

openSUSE to be part of Google Summer of Code 2011

rtyler — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 12:00:00 +0000

Last Friday, Google announced the list of projects selected to participate in the Google Summer of Code program, among them: openSUSE.

The Google SoC program is an absolutely fantastic way to get university students involved in a number of open source projects over the summer by offering a stipend to students and a donation to projects. In essence, Google gives students a little money up front and then a good chunk more at the end of the summer pending their project's "completion" (while their project need not be successful, they must have done a good job working on it, decided by their mentors).

Students

First things first: April 8th is the application deadline.

There is a great list of SoC project ideas on the openSUSE wiki or you can submit your own. As part of the inaugural 2005 class I suggest you get in touch with the community before submitting your application.

Working with the community is one of the best things you can learn this summer, we're here to help!

There is an application template on the openSUSE SoC organization page that you will also probably need :)

Mentors

If you'd like to become a mentor, you can submit a request with this form.

You can find more information about this year's SoC via the Google Summer of Code 2011 website. I look forward to seeing what great projects get accepted this year!

Vote: Help decide the way openSUSE is versioned

rtyler — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 18:24:36 +0000

After a number of threads across various openSUSE mailing lists discussing "what to call the next release of openSUSE," Program Manager Andreas Jaeger created a survey to help the community decide that very question.

The discussion originally started (as far as I can tell) in the openSUSE Factory mailing lists with the fundamental question: what do we call the development version: "openSUSE 11.5" or "openSUSE 12?"

What happens after this survey is completed? Andreas goes on to say:

This is the first iteration. Coolo and myself discussed to use a second survey with the group of winners on connect.opensuse.org

If you're interested in helping make openSUSE's versions clearer and more concise moving forward, I highly recommend you participate in the survey!

Sharing openSUSE with the world, via MirrorBrain

rtyler — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Some of our readers might not know this, but the release of openSUSE 11.4 is actually the second release that OMG! SUSE! has had the opportunity to cover, the first one being openSUSE 11.3.

Shortly after the 11.3 release, I reached out to some of the folks responsible for coordinating the distribution of terabytes of openSUSE on release day. I managed to interview Peter Pöml one of the creators of MirrorBrain, the brain (weak-pun intended) behind distributing some of the biggest projects on the internet, including openSUSE.

At a high level, MirrorBrain allows a central server such as download.opensuse.org utilize a vast network of "mirrors" for distributing enormous amounts of data in such a way that users are downloading from a mirror that's "close" to them. For example, if you're in the UK, MirrorBrain will try to bounce you to a UK mirror, failing that a european mirror, and so on.

Enough with the formalities, put on your Miner's cap and let's dig into the interview.

OMG! SUSE!: The openSUSE project uses a tool called MirrorBrain, which (correct me if I'm wrong) tries to automatically redirect users to their closest mirror based on a geographic lookup of their IP address. When did openSUSE start using MirrorBrain and what motivated the switch?

Peter: By the end of 2006, a new openSUSE release (10.0 maybe?) was just being issued. There were serious problems with stability of the download server during the "peak". At the time, I joined a new team to work on the openSUSE Build Service. That team used the same download server to publish their work, so I came into contact with this part of the infrastructure. As Apache guru, the server crashes were seriously irritating me and it was clear to me that something should be done about them. Thus, I started working on a solution and made it my obsession for the next three years. The Build Service team kind of had to do without me. However, the Build Service benefitted most from my work, more than anything else. See below :-)

You probably realize, as I did at the time, the utter importance of the download system, because a working download is the life blood of openSUSE; its aorta, so to speak. (Users take this for granted, of course.)

If you think about delivering openSUSE, you might first thing about CD and DVD images. However, that's only a part. And it is the part that's not difficult to deal with. The images account for about 3 requests per second (peak), which is easily to deal with with a simple Perl script that you can hack up in half an hour. That's what other projects do successfully. openSUSE also had such a script, but it had some performance issues.

The real challenge was that we redirect more than ISO images. We have to handle requests on:

updates
network installs
packages built by the build service

When the build service was presented, it quickly became popular, and we soon realized that we need a powerful content delivery for all those things.

Therefore, we are talking about 300-500 requests per second to be handled and redirected. That made a good design necessary. In the beginning, a handful of people at SUSE gathered to think about the needed feature and the design, but with one early exception I'm the only one who ever worked on it.

If it weren't for the build service, it would have been easy to do the following:

redirect requests for ISO images via a little Perl script
distribute updates by giving the clients lists of mirror URLs and let them pick a mirror, just like Fedora does with yum.

The build service however could not be handled by either of this methods. Since it pushes out new packages at an extremely high pace (more than once a minute). There is simply no time for mirrors to synchronize and for the mirror system to stabilize. They'll always lag and be out-of-date by definition.

That's the reason for the design of MirrorBrain. It runs all client requests through a single system (also because we wanted to be able to be in a position to count things), and it keeps track of the mirrors contents and does that for ISO images, updates and buildservice packages alike.

The openSUSE build service would impossibly have succeeded without MirrorBrain. It can't work without it.

But the DVD and CD images' distribution is a bagatelle, from the perspective of MirrorBrain. Those 3 req/s don't surface in the graph of a server that constantly gets 300 req/s. They certainly don't cause any noticeable load. And finally, all the hard work is done by the mirrors! Their bandwidth, hardware and manpower which they contribute is what makes openSUSE whir.

You'd have to look very, very hard at openSUSE's apache stats to see any effect of the recent release on openSUSE's infrastructure.

For the mirrors however, the release causes a very noticeable peak, since the files are huge (while the request is tiny, which is all that MirrorBrain has to handle). I worked hard to collect as many mirrors as possible, over three years, so that openSUSE enjoys the help of about 150 mirrors at this time. This number seems to do the demand justice, and there hasn't been a shortness of bandwidth since a long time - the US being an exception, where we had only a few mirrors sometimes and openSUSE wasn't popular enough to find more.

Finding mirrors and keeping them working correctly means to communicate with mirror admins and to carefully listen to users. One has to have "big ears" to get hold of problems that surface for users. Of all the problems that occur, only a very tiny fraction is reported in public forums, or even directly to us. Thus, if one happens to hear about some problem it usually affects many people, and has to be taken very seriously.

Another design goal of MirrorBrain was reusability and modularity, because an in-house solution didn't seem to have the chance to grow enough. So MirrorBrain is open source and freely available to other projects, and attempts to suit them as well. OpenOffice.org and the Free Software Foundation use MirrorBrain, and Sourceforge uses components of it. The users that I know of are collected here.

OMG! SUSE!: Does MirrorBrain incorporate any "health" or speed metrics to try to determine if a mirror is slowing down? Could you tell us a bit about how MirrorBrain determines what the "best" mirror for me is?

Peter: Every mirror is checked once a minute with a simple request that it has to answer within 20s. The time seems generous, but has to take into account that many mirrors are far away, on the other end of the world so to speak, it can take that long to talk to them.

In addition, when assessing mirrors content we do some trickery to make sure that the mirror is 100% capable of delivering large files (>2G, >4G) correctly and supporting partial transfers (to complete a previously aborted transfer).

Since mirrors often are older systems, there are still about 30% among them that don't do this correctly.

Further health metrics havn't proven necessary. We had a lot of ideas initially, but either they were to difficult to put into practice or not so much needed in reality, as real-world experience showed.

For the distribution of ISO images, it would be quite useful to survey mirrors more closely and monitor their "performance", because:

A user is directly involved and sitting in front of his computer.
Web browsers don't do error checking on downloads
Due to the size of the files, a drop in performance can easily catapult the download time from an hour to 3 days.

This is where torrents come into play, because (at least for some savvy users) they improve on this. Even though distribution via torrents is not known for the good speed that you can reach when downloading from fast mirrors.

There's a lot that could be done in regard to monitoring, and I'd love to see contributions.

Regarding other files (not ISOs), we have pursued a different approach. We have large control over the download client that is used to download packages and updates, and we have made the client robust to deal with slow or broken mirrors. MirrorBrain is not only a redirector, but also a Metalink generator. Metalinks contain all the information that is needed to find packages on mirrors and make sure they are 100% intact. MirrorBrain serves Metalinks to zypper and YaST, so they can download packages in parallel from multiple mirrors at the same time, do error correction and automatically deal with most mirror problems that way.

This method could also used for ISO images (see: Best way to download openSUSE) and it would be ideal if web browsers would natively support this technology. For now, this isn't the case though. I have been working hard on a standard for the Metalink Download Description format for more than a year, because protocol standardization would probably lower the barrier of such implementations, and the standard has been published in March this year.

Regarding mirror selection, the client is geolocated by GeoIP and the network prefix and its autonomous system is looked at. The process is illustrated here. Mirrors from the same country (or same continent) are preferred, or in the case of some countries there's a special configuration that makes sure that a useful choice is made. For instance, it could be a nearby country that works best (New Zealand -> Australia), or it could be a country far away that works much better than a neighbouring country (Mozambique -> Germany instead of South Africa). This presentation from FOSDEM contains such an example, which shows that a simple proximity- or geolocation-based choice is not enough.

From all mirrors that are eligible for a request, a weighted randomized choice is made, so that powerful mirrors can get a larger amount of requests than small ones. It is also possible (and necessary) to restrict some mirrors to their country, autonomous system, or network. For many mirrors, international bandwidth is scarce and needs to be protected.

OMG! SUSE!: For openSUSE 11.4 and subsequent major releases, how could MirrorBrain or the openSUSE distribution infrastructure improve to make the release process smoother and faster?

Peter: Did the 11.3 release leave something to desire in this regard? From what I heard, it went smoothly. There is always a little discussion whether the use of Akamai during the first day makes things faster or slower, but apart from that I didn't hear complaints. However, I'm mostly not involved anymore and miss most of the communication going on.

OMG! SUSE!: How does the openSUSE project ensure that all mirrors that users are being redirected to have the absolute correct files at the time of a release?

Peter: Registered mirrors pull the images before they are released. They are first synchronized in a directory that is not readable to the public (and the team makes sure that the mirrors replicate these permissions, so the new stuff doesn't "leak"). The release team then waits and checks mirrors periodically, to see when enough mirrors have the files. Then a time is agreed on when the permissions are "flipped" to open the directory, a procedure often called "bitflip release" which is also employed by other Linux distributors.

The reason behind this is that it takes time to spread the files to the mirrors (it could take 3-5 days), and it works best if the files become publicly available within a short timeframe on all mirrors at once. If files become available only on one or a few mirrors, they'll soon be swamped completely by downloading users, which doesn't please the mirror operators (and neither the openSUSE project).

OMG! SUSE!: Many existing openSUSE users, myself included, use Zypper to upgrade from previous releases. The packages are all downloaded from download.opensuse.org, just like ISO images are. Do you have any numbers to give us a rough idea of how much traffic upgrades produce?

Peter: An upgrade generally consumes less bandwidth than a DVD download, because unnecessary stuff isn't downloaded in the first place. It causes more requests on download.opensuse.org (let's say, a thousand requests) instead of the single request for the image. All that runs through MirrorBrain of course.

OMG! SUSE!: Releases typically "go live" around mid-day in Europe and early morning in the United States. Do you have an idea when traffic "peaks" after a release?

Peter: Usually, after 6-10 hours. All traffic that download.opensuse.org receives follows a clearly visible circadian rhythm. The release peak also follows this and overlays it.

OMG! SUSE!: This has all been incredibly informative, as it stands right now, are there any other major hurdles or challenges faced when distributing openSUSE?

Peter: I would like to point out that contributions to MirrorBrain would be important, to keep the project alive and improve it further. It is important to make it more attractive for more users, to strengthen its user base. A contribution could be development (a web frontend is needed, e.g., and IPv6 geolocation), sponsoring of the development of a new feature and fixing of bugs, testing, packaging, documentation, testing the documentation, or lastly (but not least) a donation. Donations can ensure all of the above. We have a donations link on the site and feel free to spread the word.

I'd like to take this opportunity to publicly thank Peter for taking time out of his busy schedule to share so much information with us about distibuting a major operating system like openSUSE.

You can learn more about MirrorBrain at mirrorbrain.org.

Rapidly downloading openSUSE 11.4 with BitTorrent

rtyler — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 17:02:13 +0000

You have no doubt heard the wonderful news about openSUSE 11.4 and it's incredible awesome-ness. Thanks to a number of seeders, Bit Torrent is likely the fastest way to get it.

BitTorrent is decentralized by nature, so instead of needing to download an installation DVD from a single openSUSE mirror, you can download it from tens or even hundreds of different sources. A great way to stress-test your network connection too! ;)

If you have a newer AMD or Intel (Core 2 Duo) chip, you'll likely want the 64-bit version of the torrent, for all other machines (including netbooks, older laptops and desktops) you'll likely want the 32-bit torrent. Either way, here's some handy direct links to the torrent files:

Installation DVD
32-bit	64-bit

KDE Live CD		GNOME Live CD
32-bit	64-bit	32-bit	64-bit

The torrent files should open automatically when you click on the links, if they don't you can install either Transmission (GTK) or KTorrent via YaST and then just double-click the downloaded torrent file.

Transmission (for 11.3)

KTorrent (for 11.3)

Join the virtual launch party!

rtyler — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 12:30:00 +0000

The openSUSE community is a truly world-wide community, which makes celebrating a major launch such as the release of openSUSE 11.4.

A few folks in the community are putting together a virtual launch party in Second Life to celebrate the event with their peers worldwide.

The crew is hosting the launch party every day for three days from March 9th to March 11th at 16:00 UTC or 8 a.m. "Second Life time". Aside from the typical Second Life shenanigans such as dancing, fly, and chatting, there is also some live DJing for the event. Making the virtual launch party, a virtual dance party too.

Yours truly attended the party on the 9th already and I'll be perfectly honest with you, I was surprised how much fun it was. Having a live DJ and a bunch of other openSUSE fans goofing off in Second Life was a great way to chit-chat and hang out with folks on the other side of the planet.

As Bruno mentioned in his original post about the party, there's going to be:

goodies
dance partying
openSUSE 11.4 installation movies
discussions with geekos
free drinks ;)

If you're interested in joining the festivities, make sure you've registered an account and downloaded the client from secondlife.com. Once you're logged in to Second Life, go to the Macedonia area coordinates: 183,213,21 or search for the "Geekos" group, and teleport on in!

Since Second Life is a 3D virtual world, it is pretty demanding on your computer so Bruno recommends:

To access that 3D virtual world, you need a recent computer 1.5Ghz or +, and good internet access >3500/300bps, and a 3D enabled graphics cards like radeon HD4xxx or more, Nvidia Geforce >9600, Intel > i945 & Intel Extreme

Hope to see you there!

On the tenth day, openSUSE 11.4 changed everything

rtyler — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 11:30:00 +0000

The long wait is finally over! Looking back over the past 9 days, we've covered some of the awesome new developments that are bundled into openSUSE 11.4.

It's out! It's out! Go to software.opensuse.org, start your download and then come back over here and I'll tell you about all the awesome in this release of openSUSE.

I mean it. Click that link, and start the download. I'll wait.

Alright then, first let's talk about the game changers in openSUSE 11.4. First up is LibreOffice, which we talked a little bit about on Day Two already, but let me re-iterate: openSUSE 11.4 is the first major Linux distribution to ship LibreOffice. This release contains the result of thousands of hours of work by the LibreOffice community, all to create the absolutely best open source office suite on the planet. LibreOffice 3.3.1 in this release is faster than OpenOffice.org, more translated and offers more features thanks to the contstruction of The Document Foundation.

If a really righteous office suite isn't enough to get your blood pumping, how about Firefox 4. The world's most popular browser gets a major overhaul in this release of openSUSE. Thanks to some healthy competition from Microsoft and Google, the folks over at Mozilla have had a fire lit under their arses. As a result they've pulled out all the stops for Firefox 4, which contains some vast speed improvements such as taking advantage of hardware accelerated graphics cards when available and various UI tweaks. As if optimizations weren't enough, they've also bundled support for some of the bleeding edge video standards on the web as well as solid HTML5 support.

Pretty snazzy huh?

Let's zoom out to see the big desktop picture here. Eleven-four bundles major upgrades in three major environments:

XFCE 4.8: The new XFCE brings a massive revamp of the core of XFCE. The team behind the speedy desktop environment gutted some of the older, more antiquated libraries and infrastructure and built 4.8 on top of faster and more modern toolkits used by other desktop environments. This means in the new XFCE you can browse remote filesystems and mount/unmount filesystems more easily than before. On top of that, the new XFCE plays much nicer with multiple monitors than before. Jinkeys!
GNOME 2.32: We've already covered some of the updates in openSUSE 11.4's GNOME support, but here's a short recap. In 11.4, the team has included GNOME 3 and GNOME Shell support for users who feel like experimenting with the future of the GNOME desktop. For users who aren't quite as experimental, fret not! 11.4 bundles GNOME 2.32, which looks like it will be the last GNOME 2 release ever. The 2.32 release includes a plethora of bug fixes, speed improvements and updates to a number of applications that are bundled with the standard GNOME desktop.
KDE 4.6: As I mentioned in our post on KDE, I've been terrifically impressed with the recent improvements both in the UI and performance of the new KDE. Thanks to some incredible work by some of the KDE crew who work with openSUSE, major applications like LibreOffice and Firefox look fantastic in KDE as do many other GNOME applications.

openSUSE 11.4 has so many great improvements across the board, that it's really hard to list them all in any capacity. The openSUSE marketing team did an admirable job trying to put together an expansive list of highlights, which I still don't think does this release justice.

If you'd like to learn more about openSUSE 11.4, there's some comprehensive documentation on the openSUSE wiki.

Existing openSUSE users: You should be able to follow these instructions to upgrade your machine. Personally, I just booted from the DVD and used the "Update" portion of the installer, which is also an option.

New openSUSE users: You can try openSUSE with a Live CD (GNOME or KDE flavored), or grab an installation disc from software.opensuse.org.

Ten Days of openSUSE, Day Nine: Suspense

rtyler — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 19:15:53 +0000

In the lead up to the upcoming openSUSE release 11.4, I figured we could highlight some major new developments that are coming in this release. Thus far we've already talked about:

Alright guys, I admit it. I ran out of time to write an article today.

I spent too much time playing with Second Life last night in preparation for the openSUSE 11.4 Virtual Launch Party. If you're on Second Life, you can find me under "rtyler", hope to catch some Geekos in Second Life.

Only a few more hours to go until 11.4, WOOHOO!

Ten days of openSUSE, Day Eight: K-D-WHEEEEE!

rtyler — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 18:45:32 +0000

In the lead up to the upcoming openSUSE release 11.4, I figured we could highlight some major new developments that are coming in this release. Thus far we've already talked about:

As a long-time GNOME user, this post and some of the contents within it are difficutl for me to write. The openSUSE team has traditionally done a great job of packaging up GNOME and KDE, and even smaller more lightweight desktop environments like XFCE and LXDE.

With 11.4, openSUSE really knocks it out of the park with KDE 4.6 which I must say, is bloody fantastic! So fantastic that I've actually started to use the KDE Plasma Netbook workspace, which has gotten even better in KDE 4.6 . Not only that, my wife now has made the plunge from Mac OS X to an openSUSE-powered laptop with the KDe plasma netbook workspace. It's just that good!

Bundled with this big update of KDE are a couple of applications that got updates like Amarok which we covered previously and KOffice 2.3.1.

THe new release of KOffice, a great alternative to LibreOffice has received a great amount of performance and stability love from its developers. As it's become more rock-solid, it's support for reading the OpenDocument format along with some icky Microsoft formats has improved.

To be honest, I've had a hard time summarizing what's special about KDE in openSUSE 11.4 versus KDE in 11.3, any way you cut it I'm out of my comfort zone (there is a write-up on news.opensuse.org though). I will say this though: KDE 4.6 in the new openSUSE is visually stunning and fast. The KDE team has done a phenomenal job speeding up KDE and bucking the trend of software getting slower over time.

If you've never tried KDE before then openSUSE 11.4, which comes out Thursday March 10th, might just be the perfect time to give it a test drive and see what you think.

Ten Days of openSUSE, Day Seven: Going, Going, GNOME!

rtyler — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 18:21:01 +0000

In the lead up to the upcoming openSUSE release 11.4, I figured we could highlight some major new developments that are coming in this release. Thus far we've already talked about:

The 11.4 release of openSUSE, dropping this Thursday (March 10th), is bringing more GNOME to the table than ever before. It might be a bit difficult for me to summarize, since there's simply so much stuff in this one major jump forward for GNOME on openSUSE (some of the nitty gritty bits covered here already).

Do you remember when you last installed another Linux distribution? Maybe it was Fedora, maybe it was Ubuntu, maybe it was Mint. With all three distributions you were probably left unsatisfied with just one GNOME inside the box. Well hot dog! Guess what! The new openSUSE packs not one, but two GNOMEs inside of it. ;)

GNOME 2

For the less experimental, and typically more productive days, 11.4 will contain the last major release of the GNOME 2.x series, 2.32. This is the standard GNOME desktop we've all come to know and love, with a few more refinements both visually and technically (i.e. bug fixes).

GNOME isn't just a window or desktop manager, it's a "desktop experience" which means whenever there's a "GNOME update," there are a lot of updated applications that come along with it such as:

Evince, the PDF viewer became far more accessible by integrating to with Orca the GNOME screen reader.
Empathy, the universal IM client, added "meta-contact" support so you can keep all your friends and their cutesy nicknames grouped into a single contact encompassing their screen names from multiple networks. Empathy also seems to have gotten more secure and add the ability to log chats in this release (putting those in the same sentence feels contradictory).

GNOME 3

If you're feeling like peering into the GNOME crystal ball, openSUSE 11.4 ships with a GNOME 3 preview, which includes a beta version of the ever-so-slightly controversial "GNOME Shell." The Shell is a core part of the upcoming GNOME 3 desktop experience, and contains a lot of new and interesting ideas around the desktop experience. While it still has some lingering quirks that need to ge hammered out, the GNOME team has been moving so fast as of late, that the version of GNOME Shell that's bundled with openSUSE 11.4 is already out of date!

If you're really anxious to try out GNOME 3 and GNOME Shell, there's a live USB flash drive image around here somewhere, that you can boot your machine, or a virtual machine from and "try before you buy."

Suffice to say, 11.4 includes a fantastic number of improvements, particularly for GNOME users. With only a few days left until release, yours truly is getting a bit impatient waiting for all these goodies!

openSUSE, Banshee and the root of all evil

rtyler — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 11:30:00 +0000

You may or may have not been following some of the controversy surrounding Banshee on Ubuntu, if you haven't I'll try to bring you up to speed as impartially as possible.

The next major release of Ubuntu, Natty Narwhal, is bundling the popular music player Banshee. Most openSUSE users are already familiar with the glory that is Banshee, so this is a good thing right? Not entirely.

Remember way back when, when we talked about Banshee allowing you to purchase Amazon MP3s from within the app? One of the features that the Banshee team added was a Banshee-specific "referral code" that generates an additional source of revenue for the GNOME Foundation.

For months Banshee users on openSUSE and many other distributions have been sending 100% of the Amazon referral revenue to the GNOME Foundation whenever they purchased a song or album.

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, wants a cut of this revenue. Well, "cut" may not be the right word, perhaps "all" is more appropriate. Last I checked the "agreement" that Canonical made with the Banshee team was that Canonical was going to take 75% of referral revenue, and then pass 25% on to the GNOME Foundation.

That seems fair right? After all Canonical is a business that has built itself almost entirely on GNOME and the open source community right? They've gotta make money somehow! The plot has one more twist to offer!

You might recall me mentioning how awesome Banshee is (it really is a great app), well Banshee development has been largely funded by drumroll please Novell, who also happens to sponsor a lot of GNOME, Mono, KDE and openSUSE development. In fact, until Aaron's recent departure from Novell, two of Banshee's core contributors both worked on Banshee for Novell (the other being Gabriel).

continue reading after the jump

Recap

Novell funds development of a great open source music app
Said great music app generates some Amazon referral revenue which is sent straight to the GNOME Foundation
Ubuntu bundles great music app with upcoming release, but decides to take the majority of the revenue generated that would otherwise go to the GNOME Foundation
Hijinks ensue

In my opinion, Ubuntu is perfectly within their rights dictated by Banshee's license but that doesn't make their decision to do what they're doing any less "dickish." Canonical better tread very carefully with actions like this, for a number of open source contributors the "spirit" of open source is just as, if not more important than the open source licenses themselves.

What do you think? Much ado about nothing, or should we all grab pitchforks?

Ten Days of openSUSE, Day Six: Rock Out!

rtyler — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 19:18:27 +0000

In the lead up to the upcoming openSUSE release 11.4, I figured we could highlight some major new developments that are coming in this release. Thus far we've already talked about:

We're down to the final stretch! Only a few more days until openSUSE 11.4 is finally released! (March 10th)

We've talked about LibreOffice and Scribus, but now let's talk about something fun (not that spreadsheeting isn't fun..). Music.

An integral part to any modern desktop experience is great music and openSUSE tries to meet everybody's musical needs by shipping numerous players such as: Banshee, Amarok and Rhythmbox. What I consider the holy trinity of popular open source music apps.

Banshee

If you're a lover of Banshee then you may have read about some of the updates already in this post on GNOME in 11.4 over at news.opensuse.org. The upcoming release of openSUSE (11.4) bundles Banshee 1.9.3 which is another stepping stone release to Banshee 2.0 which is due out in mid-Aoril.

Packed into Banshee 1.9.3 are a number of bug fixes and improvements for developers, but from a user's perspective you can expect to find this Banshee more stable and more integrated with a number of new devices such as the Nexus S and Xperia X10 mini pro.

Amarok

The openSUSE team decided to bundle Amarok 2.4.0 for KDE users, and everybody else I suppose. This point-release from the Amarok crew, nicknamed "Slipstream", includes plenty of bug fixes, performances improvements, new features and support for new devices. The biggest feature addition that I've found in this release is transcoding! With Amarok in the new openSUSE 11.4, you can convert files from one format to another right there in Amarok!

"Slipstream" also includes faster music collection support and has brought with it some great improvements to tagging. It literally takes two clicks to tag music in the new Amarok.

Rhythmbox

openSUSE 11.4 also bundles the popular GNOME media player Rhythmbox. Although I've written the name "Rhythmbox" out more times than I can count over the psat week, I'm stlil double-checking whether or not I've spelled it correctly. Anyways, Rhythmbox 0.13.3 will be available for 11.4 users and this release of Rhythmbox is likely going to be the last "big" release of the music manager before GNOME 3.

Unfortunately the Rhythmbox folks don't make their changelogs easily parseable, so the best I can mention is that this release includes plenty of bugfixes and ... other stuff. (update: Bertrand pointed out this link for Rhythmbox changes)

Ten Days of openSUSE, Day Five: Scribus

rtyler — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 18:00:55 +0000

In the lead up to the upcoming openSUSE release 11.4, I figured we could highlight some major new developments that are coming in this release. Thus far we've already talked about:

On the fifth day of openSU-SE my true love gave to me, fiiiiveeee goollldeeen ringggggssss!.

Just kidding, on the fifth day of our countdown to openSUSE 11.4 I wanted to highlight an impressive new application that is making it's debut with this release: Scribus. If you're not "in the know" for desktop publishing applications, Scribus is:

Scribus is powerful software that helps you create great looking documents of all kinds. It also comes with a lot of support options to help you achieve the best result.

As I'm terribly un-talented when it comes to just about anything spatial, I couldn't honestly tell you how great Scribus is in openSUSE 11.4, but the folks I've talked about it with seem pretty excited about it.

If you're interested in taking Scribus 1.4 for a spin on openSUSE 11.3, be sure to click the shiny button below!

Install Scribus 1.4 for 11.3

Ten Days of openSUSE, Day Four: GRUB2

rtyler — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 17:50:54 +0000

In the lead up to the upcoming openSUSE release 11.4, I figured we could highlight some major new developments that are coming in this release. Thus far we've already talked about:

Day four of the count down to openSUSE 11.4, I've covered the kernel, some higher level apps and today I wanted to jump all the way back down to the beginning. The beginning of every experience with Linux, Windows and Mac OS X starts with the bootloader.

The bootloader is responsible for getting your computer from "POST" (power-on self-test) to the operating system. Think of it like the ignition switch in your car, something has to get things going and for computers the bootloader is it.

Historically, openSUSE has shipped with GRUB. GRUB has long been the bootloader of choice for Linux users running on PCs, and has now been supplanted by GRUB2.

In order to preserve stability for users, the openSUSE project still defaults to GRUB for now, but GRUB2 is available for testing in 11.4 for those users willing to take the plunge. If you're interested in trying it out, check out this page on the wiki for more details and how to get yourself booted if you get stuck.

So what's so special about GRUB2 compared to the original GRUB? The folks who maintain Ubuntu's "community documentation" wrote up a nice comparision that you can take a look at if you're interested, but here's the highlights:

With GRUB2 you can boot LiveCD ISO images straight from your hard drive
Better graphical boot menu support
Themes!
Rescue mode
Improved speed and reliability
Auto-detect other operating systems like Windows, etc.

Personally, I run openSUSE on my laptop, so I rarely see the bootloader but I'm glad the openSUSE team's attention to detail encompasses the entirety of the computing experience from start to finish.

If you're a dual-booter, be sure to grab openSUSE 11.4 on March 10th and try out the fancy new GRUB :)

Ten Days of openSUSE, Day Three: Browsing

rtyler — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 12:00:00 +0000

In the lead up to the upcoming openSUSE release 11.4, I figured we could highlight some major new developments that are coming in this release. Thus far we've already talked about:

The countdown to openSUSE 11.4 is down to seven days, and on this third day of openSUSE I wanted to highlight the big change in web browsers in the newest release of everybody's favorite Linux distribution.

With the major shift towards web applications for both personal and professional use, fast and modern browsers have now extraordinarily important. Whether you're accessing GMail on your home desktop or working with Salesforce or other web-based professional applications, the browser is where most users spend time these days.

Lucky for those users openSUSE 11.4 comes with a couple of major new web browser additions such as Firefox 4, Chromium 11 and for our KDE bretheren, Konqueror now uses a fully WebKit-based backend.

If you're an Opera user, you can grab Opera 11 from opera.com.

Any way you cut it, the new openSUSE is ready for just about anything you throw at it. Flash support, you betcha. HTML5, got it. Fast JavaScript applications, definitely. This release of openSUSE is great for both the casual and professoinal web user, enjoy!

Ten Days of openSUSE, Day Two: LibreOffice

rtyler — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 12:00:00 +0000

In the lead up to the upcoming openSUSE release 11.4, I figured we could highlight some major new developments that are coming in this release. Thus far we've already talked about:

The Kernel

With 8 days to go until the release of openSUSE 11.4, why not highlight: LibreOffice! (since Jos already spilled the beans)

As far as I know, openSUSE 11.4 will be the first major distribution to bundle LibreOffice with a release, something the folks in the underground SUSE ice cave seem pretty happy about.

What's the big deal about LibreOffice? Remember OpenOffice and how it was pretty good but occasionally had some annoying quirks that seemed to take forever to get fixed. Lots of things have changed for the better with LibreOffice.

For starters LibreOffice is developed under the umbrella of The Document Foundation which strives to foster development and partipation in the LibreOffice community.

This focus on open development and a merit-based leadership means end-users like us get to see more bug fixes and newer features faster! Already the LibreOffice guys have incorporated a number of outstanding improvements that were not yet incorporated into OpenOffice (such as the go-oo.org changes)).

The version of LibreOffice shipping with openSUSE 11.4 is faster, less buggy and will continue to improve at an incredible pace compared to the old OpenOffice, this is a good thing!

If you're upgrading to, or installing openSUSE 11.4 on March 10th, you should get the latest LibreOffice but if you can't wait until then, click the shiny button and grab LibreOffice for 11.3!

Install LibreOffice 3.3.1 for 11.3

After you install and decide that LibreOffice is the best damned office suite you've ever seen, you might want to consider showing your support for The Document Foundation, who would really appreciate your help!

An anecdote about community

rtyler — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 16:45:00 +0000

I wanted to take a moment to share an anecdote from SCALE (Southern California Linux Expo), where the openSUSE team was out in force.

When you break down the make-up of any given open source project, it can usually be divided into three major components: technology, vision and community. Without great technology, a project has difficulty getting traction. If the project lacks a good vision, it can quickly stagnate with indecision on where to go next. The glue that ties it all together is the community, the people involved. If the community doesn't have a friendly, welcoming environment, it becomes increasingly difficult to involve new people to keep things moving forward.

The openSUSE community in particular, has always been one of the really great parts of using openSUSE. This past weekend I got to see a very real demonstration of a great community.

While working the booth, we occasionally had the tedious job of placing "Upgrade to 11.4" stickers on the hundreds of openSUSE 11.3 DVDs we were handing out to visitors.

At one point, as traffic to the booth slowed, I pulled out a big stack of unstickered DVDs and started to put stickers on them. Seeing an opportunity to help out a couple openSUSE ambassadors stepped over, grabbed a stack of DVDs and started placing stickers on them.

The entire weekend was like this, openSUSE community members seeing something that needed to get done, and just doing it. All in all, I was very impressed with everybody's willingness to go the extra mile to help promote openSUSE to hundreds of people.

Incredible.

Ten Days of openSUSE, Day One: The Kernel

rtyler — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 12:00:00 +0000

In the lead up to the upcoming openSUSE release 11.4, I figured we could highlight some major new developments that are coming in this release.

At the core of every Linux distribution lies the Linux Kernel, the heart of it all. The kernel the most fundamental part of the operating system, allowing programs to interact with your processor, hard disks, keyboard, etc. The kernel coming in 11.4 contains quite a number of great improvements.

"Kernel activity patch," which we had previously talked about makes the openSUSE desktop feel faster and more responsive than ever.
Hoardes of new drivers adding better hardware support than ever, including a number of new input devices (including some new Wacom hardware, which I'm particularly pleased about).
Multi-processor support for Ext4, the default filesystem openSUSE uses. If you have a dual-core notebook or desktop, openSUSE 11.4 will give you faster data access than before
Plenty more that I cannot properly enumerate.

For all the gritty technical details, the folks over at kernelnewbies.org put up this handy summary of changes.

Mark your calendars, only 9 more days to go!

OMG! Identi.ca!

rtyler — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 12:00:00 +0000

After some prodding from openSUSE Community Manager Jos Poortvliet I'm pleased to announce that OMG! SUSE! can now be found as @omgsuse on Identi.ca. To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure if @omgsuse on Twitter should be used the same manner or differently from the account on Identi.ca, so it will be an interesting experiment.

Not familiar with Identi.ca? Think of it like a slightly less-popular open source version of Twitter. It's largely dominated by users of open source software, which makes it a great venue for "preaching the choir" about openSUSE and all things open source. If you're interested in giving Identi.ca a try but you're already using Twitter, you can easy connect your Identi.ca and Twitter with the click of a single link in your private control panel.

If you're looking for a good application to manage both Twitter and Identi.ca, be sure to check out Gwibber which is readily available for 11.3.

Install Gwibber for 11.3