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!

A couple of months ago, I picked up an Eee PC with the thought that it’d be a good thing to have on trips and whatnot — the last few trips I’ve been on, I’ve barely been able to open my laptop after the person in front of me has leaned back in their seat, whereas the Eee PC has such a tiny footprint that it’d be ideal for cramped spaces.

While it’s groovy that the Eee PC runs Linux, I’ve been thinking about how to put openSUSE on the little beast. Lucky for me, Sonja Krause-Harder is already working on it as a Hack Week II project:

(I wonder if desktop effects would have any prayer of working on the Eee PC?)

Nice work, Sonja! The files aren’t up yet for this, but Sonja writes that the documentation and whatnot will be up on the wiki later. I hope to bump mine up to 1GB of RAM from 512MB before I head out to Nuremberg on Sunday, and I wouldn’t mind putting openSUSE on it before then, too.

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a few days — in case you’ve (nearly) missed it, this week is Hack Week 2 (or is that Hack Week II? Revenge of Hack Week? Son of Hack Week?)  — we turn the developers loose for a week to work on “side” projects without having to worry about usual duties and deadlines. Or, as Hans Petter Jansson puts it, “the programmers at Novell, get to goof around with more or less whatever project we find interesting.”

You can see what Hack Week I helped create over on the SUSE Idea Pool. If you want to give developers some ideas on what to work on, you can add an idea on the ideas site.

A couple of interesting projects have caught my eye.  Federico Mena Quintero is working to reduce login time for GNOME. Hans Petter Jansson is working on a Mono-based app called “Sterling” for money management that would be more streamlined than GnuCash. Andreas Schneider and Sven Schober are working on a rewrite of lomoco, a tool to manage the vendor-specific options of Logitech USB mice. (Since I’m using a Logitech USB mouse right now, this one sounds fairly interesting to me…)

I’ll be profiling some of these projects in more detail in the very near future. If you’re working on something fun and interesting for Hack Week II that you’d like to draw attention to, drop me an email or leave a comment.  (Remove the “nospam” bit from the email before sending…)

While I was browsing Planet SUSE, I noticed that Duncan Mac-Vicar is working on faster package management and is looking for help in testing and such:

The whole stack is now designed as unix tools, so this will allow our repositories to ship solv files, which can in turn be downloaded by libzypp. So you don’t need to generate a cache locally if the solv file is already available on the server. This is not implemented yet.

There also other open issues. We don’t parse translations and only the suse media parser stores attributes like descriptions. Patches and packages are not installed (but this has also another reason I will talk about it later). The package management user interface won’t compile (I haven’t tried) yet.

This new level of performance would allow us to bring package management on openSUSE not to the smart or yum level, but a complete new generation ahead. And this will open the door for smooth integration with CIM and PackageKit and will bring fresh air during the road to the next generation of SLES and SLED.

If you are an openSUSE contributor, we do need help with testing, and there are lot of “mechanical” jobs to do which don’t require much experience with the platform (but compiling). If you want to see this in 11.0 and can contribute, please contact us .

Since I know we all want to have the fastest package management possible, I’m sure there will be a mad rush of openSUSE folks looking to contribute.

Oh, and Duncan totally gets it right here:

I haven’t blogged since some time. We have been working hard to get package management stack changes in so we can have them in one of the next alphas. I wanted to make a small pause and write about it because communication is (sometimes) as important as coding

Emphasis added, and I couldn’t agree more…