unethical blogger

Let's all pretend I have a Geeko-related pun for "SCALE." Anyhoo, SCALE, otherwise known as the Southern California Linux Expo, is coming up in February (25th - 27th) and yours truly will be present and accounted for.

Yes, those are bus tickets you see there. I will be heading down from Oakland to Los Angeles by bus instead of flying for ideological reasons, so I'll try to be in a good mood when I arrive!

At this year's SCALE, the openSUSE project is making a big splash. Contributors and ambassadors will be showing up from all over the globe to show off openSUSE, talk nerdy, socialize and eat tasty snacks supplied by Cruise Director, GNOME Accessibility contributor and openSUSE Board Member Bryen Yunashko, who just got his annual haircut in preparation for the momentous occasion! ;) If you're in the area, check out this amazing speakers listing and be sure to register as soon as possible!

I'll be covering the specifics of SCALE more in the coming weeks, so stay tuned and I hope to see you there!

For openSUSE users constantly on the go, the security of your network traffic at random airport/coffee shop/university wireless hotspots can become a big issue. Even with WPA2 or WEP encryption, your traffic can still be insecure and visible to the owner of the hotspot if left unencrypted. For some sites you can try to be sure to always use their HTTPS versions, but you've got to trust that the site owner has implemented their encryption properly and aren't inadvertantly leaking your data to third party observers of traffic.

If you're fortunate enough to have an ISP that offers VPN service, such as Sonic.net, you can use a VPN (Virtual Private Network) to encrypt all of your traffic between you and the end-point of the VPN.

Note: You can also use independent VPN providers like SuperVPN, but you should be certain you can trust them.

Below is a step-by-step screenshot guide for using IPSec-based VPN with NetworkManager under GNOME and KDE4.

Step 1: Right-click on the "network" icon in the GNOME Panel (the little two-computers icon), and select "Edit Connections..."


Step 2: Select the "VPN" tab from the "Network Connections" window that pops up, click the "Add" button.


Step 3: Your VPN provider likely supports one of three kinds of VPN protocols: PPTP, OpenVPN or IPSec (Cisco-compatible). In my case, Sonic.net offers an IPSec-based VPN, so I'll select the "Cisco Compatible VPN" type.


Step 4: The next step in the setup wizard will ask for a number of details provided by your VPN provider. Yours will likely be different, so be sure to consult your VPN provider's documentation for the appropriate values. Once you've entered all the necessary information, click "Apply"


Step 5: Now that the VPN connection titled "Sonic.net VPN" has been created, I can enable it by right clicking on the "network" icon again, and selecting the connection under the "VPN Connections" menu.


Step 6: Success!

Step 1: Right-click on the "network" icon in the KDE. (the little network icon) and select "Manage Connections..."


Step 2:

Select the "VPN" tab from the "Configure" window that pops up, click the "Add" button. Your VPN provider likely supports one of three kinds of VPN protocols: PPTP, OpenVPN or IPSec (Cisco-compatible). In my case, Sonic.net offers an IPSec-based VPN, so I'll select the "Cisco Compatible VPN" type.


Step 3: In the "Add Network Connection" window you can configure the VPN with all the information supplied by your VPN provider. Once you've filled out the information and click "OK".


Step 4: Once the connection has been added, you can right-click the network icon and select the connection you just created, and hey-presto! VPN!


Step 5: Success!

SUSE Security guru Marcus Meissner sent out a message this morning finally ending "official support" for openSUSE 11.1. As of yesterday, Novell now no longer supports the release, but fear not! Project Evergreen looks to continue supporting the release which initially debuted in December of 2008 (official Evergreen project page here).

Meissner sent out a number of interesting statistics in his email today, detailing how many security updates and bugfixes openSUSE 11.1 saw during its 25 months of official support:

Number of released patches (compared to 11.0):

Total: 707 (+63)

• Security: 467 (-18)
• Recommended: 236 (+79)
• Optional: 4 (+2)

Included in the email was a list of the "most patched" packages as far as bugfixes and security issues, a depressing list to say the least. For 11.1, the worst offenders as far as security is concerned were:

1. Firefox
2. Adobe Acrobat Reader (a.k.a. "acroread")
3. Java
4. Linux kernel
5. Flash player

The newly formed Evergreen team is certainly going to have their work cut out for them :)

In mid-October we wrote about openSUSE 11.1 being put out to pasture and the openSUSE team's decision to rapidly end-of-life the release. In the world of open source, what does "end of life" actually mean for users? As resident security expert Marcus Meissner stated in the original announcement:

SUSE Security announces that the SUSE Security Team will stop releasing updates for openSUSE 11.1 soon. Having provided security-relevant fixes for the last two years, we will stop releasing updates after December 31st 2010.

Before the deadline of December 31st came, there was already talk about extending support for openSUSE 11.1 by the openSUSE community. Shortly after the new year, openSUSE project Evergreen was born, a community-powered attempt at extending long-term support for 11.1.

Currently Evergreen is still very much an experiment but community member Wolfgang Rosenauer, who originally proposed the project, is actively working with a few other contributors to get all the infrastructural and technical issues worked out so the Evergreen project can start pushing out updates. If you're interested in joining the project, Wolfgang has created a mailing list you can subscribe to in order to get started.

This is a cross-post from our sister site: OMG! Ubuntu!

openSUSE users intrigued by Ubuntu’s popular desktop applets will soon be able to install and use them on their own desktop.

Nelson Marques, openSUSE contributor, is the noble soul responsible for bringing the best of Ubuntu to openSUSE users’ desktops. But why?

I guess it comes down to taste.

Marques is a fan of the “indicator-initiative”, the simplified menus, applets and orderings for user application interaction that have fast become one of the most iconic pieces of the Ubuntu experience.

Developers now keen to bring this enhanced usability to other desktops serves only as a testament to the impact that the indicator’s and their ilk have had.

Writing on his blog Marques says:

"From my personal point of view… a distribution ‘distributes’… and despite this software isn’t attractive for some openSUSE users, I’m happy it is available (totally or partially) for all those who want to test it."

The knock-on effect of wider adoption across distribution lines is ‘more use = more bug fixes.’

The repository containing the ‘Indicators’ is to be available after the next release of openSUSE, due March 16th this year.

So what’s up and running so far? The familiar panel line-up of Sound Menu, Messaging Menu and the MeMenu are all, in varying degrees, working well in openSUSE right now.

As Ubuntu 11.04 matures nears the end of April more patches and bugs fixes will creep in thus further enhancing the experience for GNOME openSUSE users.

Unity is also in the process of being ‘supported’ by the team however the on-going development of it during the coming months may result in delayed availability for openSUSE users.

If your curiosity has been piqued by this project I highly recommend checking out Nelson Marques' full blog post.

Over the last months significant work has been done on the Linux Kernel to improve performance under heavy load in various user cases – including common desktop scenario's. This started after the 2.6.35 release of the kernel (openSUSE 11.3 contains 2.6.34) with the VM-scalability patches by Nick Piggin. Nick's improvements help desktop interactivity during heavy disk usage, for example when you are copying large files or when Ktorrent is writing a lot of data. These patches have had a hard time getting into the kernel, even though Master Tux (Linus Torvalds) himself was very happy about the improvements – it was complicated code. But most if not all of the improvements will make it into openSUSE 11.4. And it turned out there was some low-hanging fruit as well.

A few weeks back, SUSE kernel hacker Mike Galbraith released the third version of a patch, only 224 new lines of code but greatly increasing the performance of the desktop under load. Some tests performed by Mike Galbraith showed that this patch can drop the maximum latency, the time needed to switch between tasks, by over ten times, and the average latency of the desktop by about 60 times. Just when you thought that your 4 year PC was old and you had to buy a new one... A patch shows up that could make such old hardware reasonably performance again!

Linus Torvalds himself was again happily surprised that it is possible to change so much with so little code., as he mentioned in an email. Testers around the world are echoing his statement. The code has been tested on various systems, from cutting edge systems to small net-books and it seems to work similar everywhere.

One of the major problems we all Linux users had was the responsiveness of our desktop interface. Regardless of the GUI we used (mo matter if it's GNOME/KDE/XFCE/LXDE or anything else) transferring many large files or upgrading our system or making any other disk operations, made our environment too slow and this was not good at all, especially for professionals where time is actually money.

This patch automatically creates task groups per user session, limiting the impact of some heavy processes running on the background on desktop interactivity. It's amazing how something so simple can bring so admirable results!

Many Linux users that don't use 'high class' technology will be very happy with the way things are getting better with this patch, on the other hand users with cutting edge systems will get even more addicted to the boost of speed that their Linux desktop will gain. Having the ability to get more things done in less time will also affect the FOSS community since it will probably bring even more people to Gnu/Linux. It will also affect software engineers and everyone else around it. And hopefully more improvements will be done in the future. We will propably see this 224 lines of the code on the forthcoming 2.6.37 kernel. Project Tumbleweed or the Kernel:Stable buildservice repository are probably your best bets to get this quickly – otherwise you can of course wait for the next release of openSUSE in March 2011!

In a previous post I mentioned a "spat with Oracle" regarding the Hudson project. Since the acquisition of Sun Microsystems Oracle hasn't made many friends in the open source community, the most notable conflict occurring within the OpenOffice.org. The disagreements between the Open Office community and Oracle led to the creation of the LibreOffice project, the founding of The Document Foundation and the subsequent "mass exodus away from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice."

At first glance you might not think that this is a big deal, but LibreOffice is a big win for users! With the project's inception, LibreOffice incorporated some of the "go-oo" changes which add better interoperability and polish to the Linux office mainstay. The LibreOffice project is poised to improve the suite with much better speed and efficiency than ever before.

LibreOffice on 11.3 Thanks to some great work by the LibreOffice hackers associated with the openSUSE project, LibreOffice is packaged and ready for you to enjoy on openSUSE 11.3.

Install LibreOffice for 11.3

The team behind the incredibly well-done video transcoder Handbrake just released the first major release in what feels like ages. For those unfamiliar, Handbrake is a cross-platform tool for "transcoding" video, everything from AVI files and MP4s to ripping DVDs. If you've ever thought about ripping your DVDs to take them with you on your fancy Linux laptop, Handbrake will make your life easier.

So what's packed into this release, other than a oversized suitcase full of bug fixes and interface improvements?

• BluRay disc structure is now supported, while decryption isn't, reading unencrypted discs should work
• SSA subtitle support has been introduced.
• Support for encoding in the AC3 (also known as Dolby Digital) format
• Newer ripping and encoding libraries are bundling, improving video format support and encoding speeds
• Batch scanning let's you scan multiple files at once

Gee whiz, this all sounds nice doesn't it? I bet you wish you had a great one-click install process to get Handbrake 0.9.5, well today is your lucky day! Those charitable chaps that operate the Packman repositories have already packaged it up!

Install Handbrake 0.9.5 for 11.3 from the Packman repo.

Oof! The last post I wrote was all the way back in November! In case you were worried and I'm certain none of you except for maybe Bryen were, I am fine. Simply ran out of the time in the sprint towards the end of the year, I also got ensnared in a little spat with Oracle and another open source community I am involved with, sucking up what little free time was left after stuffing my gullet with turkey and over-spending on Christmas presents.

So what's happened since I dropped off the map? A whole freakin' lot has! I'm so swamped catching up I may just need a government bailout! (that joke still works in 2011 right?)

I'll have some posts coming in the next couple days covering what's been left uncovered for the past month and a half so stay tuned!

Feels good to be back :)

Last Friday we mentioned that a pretty serious X.org (display system) crash was giving the distribution team pause with releasing the third openSUSE 11.4 milestone. The bug was fixed over the weekend thanks to some great work by the openSUSE team and now it's on with the show!

On the road towards openSUSE 11.4, which is scheduled to be released in the spring of 2011, there are six milestones planned, meaning we are now halfway to openSUSE 11.4 and all the goodies it will be bringing with it.

If you want to take a sneak-peek at what is going to be available in 11.4, you can download the ISOs for 11.4 M3 here. What will you see if you take the plunge? A myriad of fancy new packages await! New releases of both GNOME and KDE along with a number of new versions of apps like LibreOffice, Banshee and plenty of others!

I can't yet vouch for how awesome this snapshot of the up-and-coming 11.4 is, but if the changelog is any indication, it will be a pleasant mix of the latest and greatast with the typical touch of Geeko reliability and flare, and of course, green!

You can read the full announcement on news.opensuse.org.

Over the past couple weeks Canonical, the corporation that acts as the driving force behind Ubuntu has been making a lot of waves, so to speak. First Canonical announced that the default desktop environment for the next(?) major release of Ubuntu will be their "Unity" project instead of the GNOME 2 desktop current versions of Ubuntu ship with. Following that announcement Canonical CEO, Mark Shuttleworth announced that Ubuntu would be moving towards the "Wayland" display server in the coming months.

Both announcements have drawn a lot of praise and ire from all types of developers and users throughout the open source community, but what most folks tend to forget about is the importance of experimentation and taking risks in the open source world. Let's face it, you are simply not going to see news like this from Microsoft or Apple. As users of open source operating systems, we have the distinct advantage of being able to "mix things up" with the desktop user experience to see what fits well together and what doesn't. As it stands right now, I personally find the Unity desktop to be severely lacking, a constraining environment very similar to some of Apple's offerings such as the iPad. On the flip-side of that same coin, the "simplifying" (some might say "dumbing down") of the default desktop environment may turn out to be the missing link for a lot of users looking to leave Windows behind. Whereas I am never as comfortable as I am in a terminal application, a large number of people just need three, maybe four icons on their desktops: Internet, Chat, Write, Spreadsheet.

What does the Unity announcement mean for you, the openSUSE user though? In the short term, nothing really. Novell and Red Hat both continue to help push the GNOME and KDE projects along. In the long-term we might see "Unity" mature as a desktop environment or stagnate, either way openSUSE has traditionally done a fantastic job of supporting multiple environments well (LXDE, KDE, XFCE, GNOME) to meet the needs of a broad array of users, and I'm sure the project will provide a stellar experience for those Geekos out there that find themselves smitten with Unity.

The Wayland announcement is a far more interesting one as far as the future of the "Linux Desktop" is concerned, since it has the potential to unseat the X.org display server, the 30-year-old core to the entire Linux graphics stack. I'm currently in "wait-and-see" mode with Wayland, it may turn out to be the "pulseaudio of display servers", a good technology which was distributed in a way that seemed to guarantee angry users with broken desktops, or it may become the catalyst for a major shift in the Linux graphics world.

Right now, Wayland runs a number of X.org-based applications through a compatibility layer that would presumably be phased out over time. What happens then for developers? Must they then choose to target Ubuntu, or the rest of the open source world? We may end up with "Firefox for Wayland" and "Firefox for others" (others being Fedora, openSUSE, Arch Linux, etc). For better or worse, Wayland is different than X.org, which could mean good things for the Ubuntu community, but painful fracturing for the greater open source community that has been built atop X.org over the past few decades.

Regardless of whether or not you use Ubuntu, we as a community should actively encourage this kind of change, the open source community at its core should be a meritocracy. While Ubuntu pushes at the edges of the desktop experience, openSUSE will continue chugging along blending the best what the open source world has to offer.

Note: Silly penguin image borrowed from Club Penguin.

In between major releases, the project tends to release a number of "milestones" that provide solid testing points for the openSUSE development community. These milestones are in essence snapshots of the project's progress towards the major release, in this case 11.4 which is scheduled to be released in Spring of 2011. The currently released milestone is Milestone 2 which can be downloaded here

Earlier this week, openSUSE release manager Stephan Kulow announced that the next milestone release for openSUSE 11.4, Milestone 3, may slip the schedule a bit and be released next week

The most annoying M2 [Milestone 2] bug is still not fixed (Xorg crashes) and I don't consider releasing Milestone3 in this state useful

So I will cancel Milestone3 and move it to hopefully next week. If we can't get to the core of it, we may need to disable compositing use in KDE.

While it is unlikely that this will cause any disruption to the current release schedule for openSUSE 11.4, it's certainly something to keep an eye on if you're a big fan of fancy graphics and effects with KDE.

Image courtesy of TVTropes.com

This past summer, the openSUSE project discontinued support for openSUSE 11.0 which was first released over two years ago. The team is now preparing to end-of-life the 11.1 release of openSUSE according to resident security and alliteration expert: Marcus Meissner who mailed the opensuse-announce to say:

SUSE Security announces that the SUSE Security Team will stop releasing updates for openSUSE 11.1 soon. Having provided security-relevant fixes for the last two years, we will stop releasing updates after December 31st 2010.

The discontinuation of 11.1 means that ISOs for the release will be removed from the openSUSE download directories and the build service will no longer build packages for the release.

The deprecation of 11.1 follows a pattern recently adopted (as far as I can tell) by the openSUSE Security Team, which is to only support the last two releases of openSUSE. Meissner explained the justification of this strategy in his email:

The discontinuation of openSUSE 11.1 enables us to focus on the openSUSE distributions of a newer release dates to ensure that our users can continuously take advantage of the quality that they are used to with openSUSE products.

If you've not switched to openSUSE 11.3, I highly recommend you download it and upgrade so you're not left in the cold this December!

On Saturday, documentation lizard Thomas Schraitle wrote a brief post on the lizards blog to inform the world of a new openSUSE subdomain: RTFM.

With the hustle and bustle earlier this year with the english wiki move finding good documentation on the openSUSE Wiki has been a less-than-flawless endeavor. Whether or not the new rtfm.opensuse.org was intended to help alleviate some of that pain or not, it certainly looks like it will.

On the site you can find a number of fantastic user guides and quick-starts that are about as pretty as documentation can get! Unlike the wiki, RTFM contains statically generated documentation which should mean it will suffer far less from the "swiss-cheese syndrome" most wiki-based documentation suffers from (full of holes, get it?!).

If you're relatively new to openSUSE you might be interested in the GNOME Quick Start or the KDE Quick Start.

A special thanks to the chaps (Jens-Daniel, Jürgen, and Darix) who put this together and gave it the most perfect name imaginable!

Update: Bryen has pointed out that this documentation exists on doc.opensuse.org as well, which may be potentially less abrasive for those who have negative associations with the acronym "RTFM"

Towards the end of September I posted a little apology on Twitter regarding the slowdown in posts. I was busy getting married, while not strictly openSUSE news (or news really) I feel the OMG! SUSE! readership deserves an explanation.

Now that I have fully recovered from the event, and my writer's block has cleared up, expect a steady stream of OMG! SUSE! to start kicking back up again!

Earlier this week, our friend Bryen suffered a bit of misfortune and then something wonderful happened.

The community of people who appreciate Bryen's contributions to openSUSE and the GNOME Accessibility project took action and blew away the Pledgie goal by hundreds of dollars!.

Bryen already posted a "huge thanks" to the community, but I also wanted to extend my thanks to the community for helping him out.

When an open source community bands together to help one of their own when they're in need is really an inspiring sight to bear witness to. Over one hundred different contributors pitched in to help replace Bryen's stolen kit, which almost as impressive as the amount raised: over $2,300.

Once again, I'm impressive by how swift everybody's generosity has been, I wish Bryen the best of luck getting to the openSUSE Conference and hope he gets home safely thereafter.

A couple weeks ago when I was strolled around Oracle's incredibly synergized (but unfortunately yacht-less) conference I noticed that SUSE and VMWare were quite chummy on the show floor. It seems that Novell's push of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), openSUSE's more refined older brother, into the virtualization space is a lot bigger than just SUSE Studio.

VMWare is one thing, but what about the biggest cloud out there, you know, Amazon's EC2 service? Turns out Amazon EC2 now supports SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

For the uninitiated, Amazon's EC2 service allows your to run nearly an infinite number of virtual machines in Amazon's "cloud" (fancy word for "crapton of machines"). EC2 has been a godsend for startups and developers who need to keep costs down while leaving themselves room to grow, unfortunately for openSUSE/SUSE Linux users, EC2 has historically been more Fedora friendly.

The pricing for SUSE on EC2 is different than the pricing of Fedora! Presumably this is due to the bundled-support that comes with SUSE:

This offering comes with automatic maintenance that keeps the operating system up-to-date with Novell’s most current security patches, bug fixes and new features to deliver peak performance.

What this "automatic maintenance" means as far as your pocketbook is concerned is an increase in the price to the tune of a few cents per hour:

Fedora (Small): $0.085

SUSE (Small): $0.115

Do you think having SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on EC2 is worth the price hike?

While traveling abroad in Spain before heading off to the openSUSE Conference (which we covered here), our good friend Bryen a.k.a. "suseROCKS" was robbed of a number of items including his laptop.

Bryen is an important member of the openSUSE Marketing team and has been a great motivator for this blog in particular, really quite an unfortunate series of events with exceptionally poor timing for him.

As the guys over on OMG! Ubuntu! mentioned earlier, if you need a good deed for the day, consider donating to this pledgie campaign started by Bryen's colleague Stephen Shaw.

Help replace Bryen's stolen equipment