Just a quick reminder that the kernel team is going to be holding a Bug Squashing Day tomorrow to reduce the number of kernel bugs in bugzilla, get rid of duplicates and invalid bugs, and to test and review fixes for kernel bugs. So, put your bug-stomping hat on and join the kernel bug massacre tomorrow!

The bug slaughter commences tomorrow, starting at 00:00 UTC and lasting all day. Join in on Freenode in the #opensuse-kernel channel.

Happy bug squashing!

Spent a little while today getting an EV-DO card working with openSUSE 10.3. It was nowhere near as difficult as I was expecting it to be.

I found a decent resource on this site, though it specifies Ubuntu. I’m using wvdial to connect, and it’s fairly straightforward. The page makes it look more complex than it is, so I’m going to boil it down a bit more…

Here’s the wvdial config (found at /etc/wvdial.conf):

[Dialer Defaults]
Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0
Baud = 921600
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Init3 = ATM0
Area Code =
Phone = #777
Username = xxxxxxxxxx@vzw3g.com
Password = vzw
Ask Password = 0
Dial Command = ATDT
Stupid Mode = on
Auto Reconnect = on
Compuserve = 0
Force Address =
Idle Seconds = 300
Auto DNS = 1


The modem line may be different depending on what device it’s assigned. I’m using a V740 Cardbus card with a SIIG Expresscard adapter that converts it to USB.

Just take the wvdial.conf that I’ve displayed there, change the username to be your device’s phone number (plus @vzw3g.com) and then save the file. Run wvdial and you should be connected in a flash.

Regular old wireless would still be a bit faster, but this does great in a pinch when hotel wireless is either unreliable, or when you’re at a show and the wireless connections have died from too many connections. (Which, it seems, they inevitably do…)

Here’s a great chance to get involved with openSUSE — no development experience required. We’re having a bug smash on Friday from 09:00 to 18:00 UTC in #openSUSE-Factory on Freenode.

The announcement is over on news.opensuse.org, and we’ve sent it to the announce list as well — but we could use more help in spreading the word! Please send the info to anyone who might be interested in joining in.

This is the first bug smash event we’ve done in a while, but I hope to see this become a regular event. This is a great way for contributors to help openSUSE devs focus on real issues rather than wading through a lot of duplicate or defunct bugs in Bugzilla.

This will help close irrelevant bugs, and draw more attention to relevant bugs that still exist.

I’d like to thank everybody who’s helped get this organized so far: Christoph Thiel, JP Rosevear, Stanislav Visnovsky, Duncan Mac-Vicar, Jiri Srain, and Andreas Jaeger. (I hope I didn’t miss anyone!)

If you have additional input on what we can do to help with bug triaging, please feel free to leave a comment. And remember — you can do this any time, bug smashing is not limited to bug smashing days!

Quick reminder — we’re having a Packaging Days event tomorrow and Saturday. A number of openSUSE contributors will be holding an online workshop all day April 4 and April 5 on Freenode in #opensuse-buildservice.

Anyone is welcome to join, but it is helpful if you have some experience compiling software.

What will you learn? The event is designed to teach you how to create packages using the openSUSE Build Service. If you have any favorite applications that you’d like to see packaged for openSUSE — or if you’re a developer of any packages that you’d like to see packged for openSUSE — this is for you.

If you’ve been meaning to learn to package, this is definitely for you. Lots of openSUSE contributors with tons of packaging and build service experience will be standing by to answer questions. (OK, sitting by, more likely, but still…)

You’ll probably want to have an account in the build service, and look over the docs linked on the wiki about creating packages.

See the wiki page for more info, we’d love to have you! (Thanks to Dirk for pinging me to put out the reminder.)

I’m happy to announce that the openSUSE Project has been accepted to Google’s Summer of Code 2008! Now the real fun begins!

We’re now in the “interim period” for students to discuss application ideas with mentoring organizations. (That’d be us.) Students will then have from March 24th through March 31st to apply to Google. See our ideas page, and Google’s SoC 2008 FAQ for more info and timeline.

Kudos to Google for acting quickly on this — applications for organizations were due last Wednesday, and I was notified this afternoon that we had been accepted. That’s pretty speedy, given the number of applications I’m sure they had to read through.

Just a quick reminder — there’s a KDE team IRC meeting tomorrow (Wednesday, March 12) at 19:00 GMT/UTC.

The meeting happens on Freenode at #opensuse-kde and the following topics are on the agenda for tomorrow:

• openSUSE-KDE Easter egg painting
• talks at LinuxTag and Akademy
• kdepim testing results
• KDE 4 blocker list revisited, topics for 11.0
• potential SoC projects
• old action items

Also, the following standing items:

• We should think about our future work (see KDE/Challenges)
• KDE4 packages and development environment on openSUSE
• Identifying SUSE specific issues vs upstream issues more closely
• Bug reports against KDE component

Barring emergencies (it’s the week before BrainShare… lots going on in Novell-land this week!) I will be there. Hope to “see” you there as well.

Just trolling Planet SUSE and I see that Andreas Schneider has released source code for csync, “a user level file synchronizer to provide roaming home directories for Linux.” This might be something very interesting…

I use several Linux boxen, a laptop and a couple of desktop machines. I’m always interested in better ways to sync my info and data between them.

Miguel has a great round-up of Mono-related projects from Hackweek, which includes a Gtk# client for Bugzilla, a revamp of the regular expression library for Mono, packaging Mono for Maemo4, and much more.

He also mentions Tasky, which seems to be taking off already — I’ve spoken to folks from two other distributions this weekend at FOSDEM that are talking about packaging Tasky for their distros. It’s pretty impressive to think that a tool can go from design to development to distribution to thousands (millions?) of Linux users in just a few weeks.

One of the advantages for open source is that there are many opportunities for code-reuse — one of the tragedies of open source is that code-reuse doesn’t happen as often as it could, for a number of reasons. I’m always happy to see when something developed for one project — like YaST — can be used to benefit other projects that aren’t directly related to the main project.

That’s a long-winded intro for the news that the YaST team has separated its user interface library from the rest of the YaST infrastructure, so that other applications can take advantage of the UI library:

The YaST UI library provides a very simple API to build rather complex but still consistent user interfaces. The particular implementation of the interface depends on the chosen backend - Qt, Gtk+ or ncurses. The primary target for this library is YaST, Yet Another Setup Tool developed for installation and configuration of SUSE products.

However, the library was very deeply tight to the rest of YaST infrastructure which made it nearly impossible to use it outside of YaST. Not anymore. Very soon, there will be packages available in openSUSE that provide the library independently of YaST, so any application that might need to provide both graphical as well as textual interface can easily do so. They provide also examples how to use the library from pure C++.

This is exactly the kind of thing that makes open source so damn awesome. With any luck, we’ll be seeing all sorts of applications taking advantage of this YaSTy goodness, and saving time by not having to re-invent the wheel.

I love the smell of fresh alphas in the morning! Stephan Kulow is making it dead easy to test the latest and greatest openSUSE with Factory live CDs. So, if you want to hack on Factory, but don’t have a spare system to run it on (and don’t want to be running bleeding edge software on your main desktop) then these CDs are for you. (They come in tasty GNOME and KDE flavors, too!)

So, if you’d like help hack on openSUSE, lend a little testing assistance, or if you just want to bask in the warm glow of software that’s being prepped for openSUSE 11.0, grab some live CDs and have fun with it!