Carlos Gonçalves

Announcing ENOS 2009

2009-08-23T22:14:00.005+01:00

(See the announcement in English bellow)

Pelo terceiro ano consecutivo, toda a comunidade portuguesa de openSUSE reúne-se num só espaço com o intuito de dinamizar o projecto openSUSE em Portugal.

O ENOS 2009 (acrónimo para "Encontro Nacional de openSUSE 2009"), organizado pela comunidade portuguesa de openSUSE e pela Associação de Informática de Castelo Branco, decorrerá na magnífica cidade de Castelo Branco, Sábado 26 de Setembro, tendo como ponto de encontro o Instituto Português da Juventude de Castelo Branco pelas 10 horas.

O objectivo do ENOS é dar a oportunidade aos utilizadores portugueses de openSUSE de se juntarem assim como dar aos participantes uma visão introspectiva dos últimos desenvolvimentos do projecto openSUSE e estimulá-los a participarem na comunidade, tudo num ambiente bastante informal e aberto.

Para além do convívio, troca de ideias e discussões dos mais diversificados temas possíveis, também decorreram durante o dia apresentações e BoF's tais como:

O projecto openSUSE desde à 365 dias (Carlos Gonçalves, openSUSE)
Integração de Open Source vs Software Proprietário (Engº João Batista, Novell Portugal)
Linux na pós-produção áudio (Ricardo Antunes, UrbanaFM)
BoF: Moonlight (Andreia Gaita)
BoF: Packaging com o Build Service (Carlos Gonçalves)

Também este ano será possível submeter-se aos exames de certificação LPI, através da empresa nacional DRI, Master Affiliate do LPI em Portugal, com um desconto de 50% nas certificações - os interessados deveram informar a organização com pelo menos 8 dias de antecedência da sua intenção.

Assim, convidam-se todas as comunidades, associações e instituições, empresas e individuais a participarem.

Embora o encontro seja totalmente livre, agradece-se o registo na página do evento ou por email para eventos () opensusept () org por forma a ter uma ideia do número expectável de participantes.

Para informação mais detalhada, queira por favor consultar a página oficial do evento em http://pt.opensuse.org/Eventos/ENOS

Com os melhores cumprimentos,
A organização do ENOS 2009

English Version (note: it differs slightly from the above in Portuguese)

For the third consecutive year, all the Portuguese openSUSE community users will be meeting will the main goal of boosting the openSUSE project in Portugal.

ENOS 2009 is the third yearly edition of the event and will be held in the Institudo Português da Juventude (IPJ), Castelo Branco, Portugal on Saturday, 26 September.

About

The acronym ENOS stands for ‘Encontro Nacional de openSUSE‘, a Portuguese expression which can be translated to ‘National openSUSE Meeting‘, an event meant to unite the Portuguese openSUSE users, as well as provide the participants an inside view into the latest developments in the openSUSE project and stimulate them to take an active part in the community itself.

Schedule

The current schedule, subject to changes, defines the following (GMT timezone):

10:00 - Gathering at Institudo Português da Juventude
11:00 - ENOS kicks off
- 11:15 - 11:50 - The openSUSE project since 365 days ago (Carlos Gonçalves)
- 11:50 - 12:00 - Coffe Break
- 12:00 - 12:45 - Open Source vs Proprietary Software Integration (Eng. João Batista) Batista)
13:00 - 14:30 - Lunch
14:30 - 17:00 - IPJ
- 14:30 - 16:00 - Audio post production on Linux (Ricardo Antunes)
- 16:00 - 16:30 - (pending talk)
- 16:30 - 16:45 - Coffe Break
- 16:45 - 17:30 - Birds of a Feather
  - 16:45 - 17:10 - BoF: Moonlight (Andreia Gaita)
  - 17:10 - 17:30 - BoF: Packaging with Build Service (Carlos Gonçalves)
- 17:30 - 18:30 - Activity (suprise)
- 18:30 - 19:30 - Ideas & Discussion ; openSUSE Install Party ; LPI Certification
+19:30 - Castelo Branco at night

The LPI (Linux Professional Institute) seeks to become recognized as the global leader in the certification of Linux professionals while advancing the Linux and Open Source movement through strategic partners, sponsorships, innovative programs and community development activities.

The ENOS organization has the pleasure to announce that we agreed with the LPI Master Affiliate DRI to allow interested people to certificate themselves with the LPI certification during the ENOS meeting (50% discount), which is a really good opportunity to everyone get their own LPI certification!

Invitation

Anyone interested in attend should sign in or email eventos () opensusept () org so we can have a better idea of how many people we should expect (tip: you will not leave the event without some openSUSE goodies! ).

For more detailed and up-to-date information please see the official event page.

The Community

Mailing list: opensuse-pt@opensuse.org
IRC: #opensuse-pt on irc.freenode.net
Web: http://opensusept.org

Thanks To

Big thanks to Associação de Informática de Castelo Branco, Novell, IPJ, and Castelo Branco City Council for the support!

Looking forward to see you there!

More on Smolt

2009-07-29T01:39:00.003+01:00

Minutes after I posted The new shiny Smolt client I've received lots of feedback via email, IM and Novell Bugzilla. The most annoying bugs were:

~~Bug 525324~~ - [home:cgoncalves:playground] the Privacy Policy window has not scrollbar

~~Bug 525322~~ - [home:cgoncalves:playground] smolt does not display special chars

All known bugs were fixed and Smolt 1.3.2 tagged.

Q: So, what's really new?!
A:

Smolt KDE4 popup made by Thomas Goettlicher:

X-KDE-autostart-phase=2

Qt.ToolButtonTextBesideIcon (the text appears beside the icon) is now default per Nuno Pinheiro's suggestion:

Window size auto-adjusting:

As you can also see BNC ~~#525322~~ is indeed fixed.

I'm preparing a Smolt RPM update to submit to openSUSE Factory to get included in time for openSUSE 11.2, though you can try it already by using my home:cgoncalves:playground repository:

openSUSE 11.1:

# zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/cgoncalves:/playground/openSUSE_11.1/ home:cgoncalves:playground

openSUSE Factory:

# zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/cgoncalves:/playground/openSUSE_Factory/ home:cgoncalves:playground

# zypper ref home:cgoncalves:playground
# zypper in smolt-snapshot smolt-popup

As always, please give us feedback!

The new shiny Smolt client

2009-07-26T12:00:00.006+01:00

It has been a long since I last blogged (last dating from January)... I haven't blogged since then mostly because I'm not that good when it comes to write more than 5 lines of text and also because I've been busy with my studies/exams which have finished 2 weeks ago. So... what I've been up to in these last 2 weeks?! Well, first week was dedicated to random useless stuffs like catching up on new movies, going out with friends (lots of drinks involved, obviously!) and, most of all, sleeping (yesterday when I woke up and looked at the clock it was 4pm!) - it fells so good sleeping with nothing to worry you about, doesn't it?!

Since end of last week I restarted working on my Smolt Qt Client, which was born during first semester exams (nothing to do in that boring and meaningless period, right?). But before I continue, let me quote what the Smolt project is all about:

Smolt is, very simply, a hardware reporting tool for Linux based systems. It was originally written for Fedora and now also supports SuSE, Debian and Ubuntu. It gathers information from users, and stores them in a queryable database with a web frontend that produces statistics.

More information about Smolt here. The original Smolt client was written in GTK but the Smolt maintainer decided to replace it by mine - "With great power comes great responsibility".
The client is quite a straightforward port of the GTK one as you can see:

Smolt GTK client

Smolt Qt client

Noticed the new "Distribution" tab? In a near future it will provides distribution specific information such as installed packages. It has been developed by Sebastian Pipping as a Google Summer of Code 2009 project to support Gentoo, though support for other distributions are currently under development (openSUSE/SUSE Linux, Fedora and Debian):

I will be fixing last bugs found to then push a new release version out late this week, so before openSUSE 11.2 feature/version freeze. In the meantime if you want to try it and even report bugs, checkout my home:cgoncalves:playground repository for the smolt-snapshot package:

openSUSE 11.1:

# zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/cgoncalves:/playground/openSUSE_11.1/ home:cgoncalves:playground

openSUSE Factory:

# zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/cgoncalves:/playground/openSUSE_Factory/ home:cgoncalves:playground

# zypper ref home:cgoncalves:playground
# zypper in smolt-snapshot

Please, give us feedback! We want to know your opinion about Smolt!

openSUSE 11.1 KDE3 - torrents and final thanks

2009-01-12T21:48:00.008Z

Torrents are now available:

openSUSE 11.1 KDE3 Live CD: i686 (md5, sha1), x86_64 (md5, sha1)
openSUSE 11.1 KDE3 Live USB: i686 (md5, sha1), x86_64 (md5, sha1) (instructions)

Thanks to...

... Benjamin Weber, Masim Sugianto, Andre Duffeck and Magnus Boman for have mirrored openSUSE 11.1 KDE3 Live CDs and USBs.
... Marcus Rueckert for have created torrents, and Andreas Jaeger (you know why ;-) )
... Stephan Kulow for the useful tips given on how to create the ISOs.
... Stephan Binner for patches, suggestions, and feedback.
... Joe Brockmeier for the release announcement.
... you (!) for the time spent reading this crap of blog :-P

Finalizing, even though I strongly encourage users to upgrade to KDE 4 not only for how awesome it is (KDE 4.1.3 on openSUSE 11.1 is solid as rock!), but also because KDE 3 will be officially unsupported and thus not included on openSUSE 11.2 and later versions, I would like to hear what's in users mind about a possibility of having KDE 3 and openSUSE 11.1+ KDE3 Live CDs maintained and released by the community - any volunteers?

(Yes, I use KDE 4 and hell not stepping back to KDE 3! heh)

openSUSE 11.1 KDE3 - urgent mirroring (updated)

2009-01-10T12:53:00.004Z

Update: Situation is again under control. Benji Weber, Masim Sugianto and Andre Duffeck have setup mirrors (THANKS!) - see MIRRORS file. Temporarily the Live CDs (not the USBs) will be automatically redirected to Benji's.

Since the release announcement of the Unofficial KDE 3.5 Live CD for openSUSE 11.1 the server where the ISOs are hosted at has been running out of bandwidth due to the huge amount of requests for downloading those files, and since the server also host other important client accounts, the sysadmin offered me two choices:

disable the account
get mirrors around

In the meantime I was forced to move the files away and wait for some mirrors to fight back all the download requests. So, whoever can provide mirroring of these files please contact me (comment, email or IRC)! Torrents are also allowed and recommended!

My apologies for any inconvenience caused...

P.S.: I didn't expected all this traffic around the ISOs... the openSUSE 11.0 KDE3 Live CDs didn't get that many attention. Well, it's a good sign though ;-)

Unofficial KDE 3.5 Live CD for openSUSE 11.1

2009-01-09T19:09:00.004Z

Quoting "Unofficial KDE 3.5 Live CD for openSUSE 11.1" story from openSUSE News:

Want classic KDE on openSUSE, without the full DVD download? Carlos Goncalves has you covered. openSUSE 11.1 Live CDs and USB images featuring KDE 3.5 are now available for download.

Created by openSUSE community member Carlos Goncalves, the KDE 3.5 Live CD and USB images contain openSUSE 11.1 plus several key updates.

In addition to KDE 3.5, the Live CD offers OpenOffice.org 3.0, Smolt, Amarok 1.4.10, KDEPIM3, Firefox 3.0.4, K3b, and many other useful applications. You can see the entire package list here: package-lists-openSUSE

And, of course, openSUSE has the current KDE releases covered as well. You can download the official openSUSE 11.1 KDE4 Live CDs based on KDE 4.1.3, or if you want to follow KDE development, Stephan Binner has created a KDE Four Live CD featuring KDE 4.2 Beta 2.

Note that the KDE 3.5 live CD is an "unofficial" release. Even though it's not a formal release, we're excited by the work Carlos has put into supporting KDE 3.5 and showing what can be done with the build service. Want to create your own Live CD featuring openSUSE? See Carlos Build Service Live CD project on creating a Live CD here: home:cgoncalves:LiveCD, and Masim's "How to Make openSUSE 11.1 KDE 3.5 LiveCD or LiveDVD" article.
Download

openSUSE 11.1 KDE3 Live CD and USB are available for i686 and x86_64 architectures:

openSUSE 11.1 KDE3 Live CD: i686 (md5, sha1), x86_64 (md5, sha1)
openSUSE 11.1 KDE3 Live USB: i686 (md5, sha1), x86_64 (md5, sha1) (instructions)

If you want to report any bug found use Novell's Bugzilla for better tracking. Feedback can be sent via email, IRC and comment in here.

A huge thanks to Stephan 'Beineri' Binner, Stephan 'coolo' Kulow, and Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier for their assistance and effort!

We hope that the openSUSE community will find it useful and have a lot of fun with KDE 3.5!

Mirrors administrators around the world, I think I will need your help! Please mirror these files and let me know the URL so I can point people out to your mirrors instead ;-)

openSUSE 11.1 has been released!

2008-12-18T13:16:00.010Z

openSUSE 11.1 just got released a few seconds ago!

The openSUSE Project is proud to announce the release of openSUSE 11.1. The openSUSE 11.1 release includes more than 230 new features, improvements to YaST, major updates to GNOME, KDE, OpenOffice.org, and more freedom with a brand new license, Liberation fonts, and openJDK. This is also the first release built entirely in the openSUSE Build Service.

Get a copy of it by downloading via http://software.opensuse.org, or if you want an original copy order the openSUSE 11.1 Retail Box for only 59.95 EUR/USD. With the supported version of openSUSE you not only get a complete end-user documentation, installable media for x86 and x86 64-bit systems, plus 90 days of end-user installation support, but you also will be contributing by giving some money to the openSUSE project itself!

Read the full announcement: openSUSE 11.1 Released!

Digg it: http://digg.com/linux_unix/openSUSE_11_1_Released

openSUSE KDE Bug Squashing Days (20-21 September)

2008-09-11T20:17:00.004+01:00

The openSUSE KDE team wants to dedicate some time on KDE bugs before openSUSE 11.1 gets released, focusing on reported KDE bugs on bugzilla.novell.com inviting the community to take part of it.

Let's stamp out bugs in KDE for openSUSE 11.1! The openSUSE KDE team is holding a Bug Squashing event to work the KDE bugs reported in bugzilla.novell.com. You can be a part of a bug-free KDE!

The openSUSE KDE Bug Squashing event is scheduled September 20 through September 21 (right after openSUSE 11.1 Beta1 release), and the main goal is to have zero bugs!

In order of priority, we have the following list:

Find duplicated bugs, and obviously close then as DUPLICATE;

Non openSUSE KDE bugs (KDE upstream bugs) should be:

Reported on bugs.kde.org (if not yet);
Added the upstream bug URL to the URL field on bugzilla.novell.com;
Closed as UPSTREAM (resolution field).

Filter KDE 4.0 bug reports and try to reproduce them on KDE 4.1:

If you can't reproduce close them as WORKSFORME and leave a comment as it was most probably fixed on KDE 4.1;
If you still can reproduce them, try to investigate why/how that happens (eg: step-by-step on how to reproduce) and state it's still reproducible;

Same as above but for KDE 4.1 - taking in consideration the quicklydevelopment of KDE4 it's really easy that those bugs reported have beenfixed meanwhile.

Help providing info for bugs marked as NEEDINFO

Set priority for bugs with Priority = P5(None).

Explore KDE3 and KDE 4.1 looking for bugs. See if KDE3 ones are fixed for KDE4. Bug report them.

Note: Bug squashers should start from higher severity/priority bug reports to lower ones.

To successfully achieve all these tasks, the openSUSE KDE team needs as many people as possible. All you need to help is one (or more) of the following to help us with debugging:

An updated openSUSE 11.0 or openSUSE 11.1 system
KDE 3.5.10 installed from KDE:KDE3 OBS repository
KDE 4.1 installed from KDE:KDE4:Factory:Desktop OBS repository

During the event the community will be in the #opensuse-kde channel on irc.freenode.org to help you out in whatever you might need. The openSUSE KDE mailing list is also a great way to communicate with the KDE community.

See the openSUSE KDE Bug Squashing Days page for more and updated information at http://en.opensuse.org/KDE/Bug_Slashing/20080920

Have a lot of... openSUSE KDE Bug Squashing Days! ;-)

ENOS 2008: a quick review

2008-09-08T17:50:00.010+01:00

As announced on openSUSE News, ENOS 2008 took place this Saturday, September 6th at ISEP, Porto, Portugal. The event started at 10:00 am (local time) and during 1h:30m people had the opportunity to meet each other in a non formal environment, and at the same time I gave away openSUSE t-shirts, caps, lots of stickers and PromoDVDs (thanks Novell, specially to Martin Lasarsch!) to them. At 11:30 we started the two scheduled morning presentations:

"The openSUSE 11.0 News" (Carlos Gonçalves, PDF) - as the name says, I presented the news of openSUSE 11.0, but also took the opportunity to do an overview of the openSUSE project since many of the attendance wasn't openSUSE users, and at the end random slides including information on how to get involved, how to communicate, openSUSE 11.1 roadmap, etc.

"Migrating from Windows to Linux" (Lívio Cipriano, PDF) - a great talk by Lívio on how to migrate from Windows to Linux with good points of view and tips to easily migrate even in enterprises environments, eg: start using cross-platform software such as OpenOffice.org, Firefox, and Thunderbird and later migrate to Linux - users won't notice much difference indeed.

At 13:00 we headed to a shopping nearby to lunch and continue the informal conversation we were having before. Hot topics: openSUSE, Ubuntu, KDE, GNOME, Novell, community. Back from lunch, we had scheduled interesting and full afternoon talks:

"YaST - a programming platform. PackgeKit and PolicyKit" (Ricardo Cruz) - it was mainly a technical talk about YaST. Ricardo showed us how simply is to create a "Hello World!" windows, buttons and some widgets. He also introduced PackageKit and PolicyKit.

"Oxygen, a pillar of KDE4" (Nuno Pinheiro, PDF) - Pinheiro's main goal with this presentation was to demonstrate that Oxygen is not a KDE icons theme, but rather much more stuff than that.

(Coffee Break, free cookies!)

"Qtractor, an Audio/MIDI multi-track sequencer" (Rui Capela, PDF) - Linux Audio hacker on his spare time Rui spoke about his audio/MIDI multi-track sequencer Qtractor application, gave audio demos using it, and highlighted some Linux Kernel Real Time 2.6.{26,27} issues as for example the time lag problem kernel-rt is facing at the moment.

"Mono - introducing Mono and its features" (Andreia Gaita) - what can I say... awesome talk! Andreia presented Mono and MonoLight, what made them, developers, develop such technology, what we can do with it, etc. This talk was indeed one of the reasons to people have attended ENOS 2008.

After these talks we went into several discussions while some participants were doing the LPI exams and raffled (no money involved obviously) the biggest Tux I had ever seen sent kindly by Novell. Later around 19:15 many said goodbye and drove back home and a few others stayed for a bit longer where we moved to a restaurant to have dinner.

Gallery

See the rest of the photo gallery

ENOS 2009:

ENOS 2009 already has place, Castelo Branco, and it will be organized by Associação de Informática de Castelo Branco. Anyone interested in helping us is highly welcome. I hope see you next year! ;-)

The Community:

Mailing list: opensuse-pt@opensuse.org (subscribe)
IRC: #opensuse-pt on irc.freenode.net
Web: http://opensusept.org/

Big thanks to Porto Linux, ISEP, and Novell for the support!

Thanks to all attendees for participating!

P.S.: there are two presentation PDFs missing. I will add them as soon as possible.

ENOS 2008: news and changes

2008-08-21T14:20:00.004+01:00

NEWS and ChangeLog:

Oxygen chief artist Nuno Pinheiro will attend ENOS 2008 and give a talk entitled - "Oxygen, um pilar do KDE 4"
Agenda has been rescheduled
Meeting point is auditorium H2, ISEP, Porto.
Maps added
openSUSE Install Party

See you there!

Encontro Nacional de openSUSE 2008

2008-08-11T01:01:00.011+01:00

The acronym ENOS stands for 'Encontro Nacional de openSUSE', a Portuguese expression which can be translated to 'National openSUSE Meeting', an event meant to unite the Portuguese openSUSE users.

The purpose of ENOS is to give an opportunity to the Portuguese openSUSE users to be together, as well as provide the participants an insight view on the latest developments on the openSUSE project and stimulate them to take an active part on the community itself.

ENOS 2008 is the second yearly edition (read about ENOS 2007 here) of the event and will be held in Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto (ISEP), Porto, Portugal on September 6th.

This year we will have special guests giving some talks:

Ricardo Cruz (YaST-GTK maintainer) will introduce us YaST and how easily is to create a module for it. PackageKit and libzypp will be be introduced.

Andreia Gaita (Mono developer) presenting Mono open source project, sponsored by Novell.

Rui Capela (Linux Audio hacker) will talk about his audio applications, focusing on Qtractor, an Audio/MIDI multi-track sequencer application.

(click to enlarge)
As in last year, attendees will have the opportunity to do the LPI Certification Exams at the event with a 50% discount off by LPI Master Affiliate DRI. Email eventos@opensusept.org to sign in.

Anyone interested in attend should sign in or email eventos@opensusept.org so we can have a better idea of how many people we should expect (tip: you will not leave the event without some openSUSE goodies!).

Big thanks to Porto Linux, ISEP, and Novell for the support!

openSUSE 11.0 KDE3 Live CDst

2008-08-03T16:05:00.006+01:00

I have been reading since openSUSE 11.0 GM release a lot of comments posted in many forums and blogs about the "lake" of KDE3 CDs. This big noise around got my attention specially because I was one of the KDE users that shared people's preferences of using a very stable KDE version - KDE 3.5 - for daily use instead of the bleeding edge KDE 4.0.

The process of installing KDE3 on openSUSE no matter what desktop environment users were using was quite simple to follow:

# zypper install -t pattern kde3

or if you just want a clean KDE 3 base:

# zypper install --no-recommends -t pattern kde3

or even by selecting "KDE3 Base System" pattern on YaST. Easy, isn't it?

Well, for those lazy people who don't want to install openSUSE with KDE4, GNOME, XFCE or any other and then install KDE3 I have a gorgeous news: openSUSE 11.0 KDE3 Live CDs are now available!

openSUSE 11.0 KDE3 LiveCD (i686)

openSUSE 11.0 KDE3 LiveCD (x86_64)

MD5SUM and SHA1UM

Kiwi config (32bit) and Kiwi config (64bit)

These Live CDs are also installable CDs and were creating using the openSUSE KIWI Image System. They contain the latest official updates as also the latest packages from KDE:KDE3, KDE:Backports, KDE:KDE4:Factory:Desktop, and KDE:KDE4:Factory:Extra-Apps repositories as of this time of writing.

Big thanks to the KDE Team and Kiwi Team that supported me since the beginning encouraging and helping me in this adventure ;-)

Note: these ISOs are not officially supported by openSUSE nor Novell. If you want to report any bug found use Novell's Bugzilla for better tracking. Feedback or for any other purpose please contact me via email (cgoncalves [at] opensuse [dot] org).

Re: openSUSE adopts Canonical's strategy to promote the project

2008-08-01T16:42:00.006+01:00

Replying to "OpenSuse adopta estratégia da Canonical para promover o projecto" (aka "openSUSE adopts Canonical's strategy to promote the project") posted by Bruno Miguel:

The openSUSE project does this for quite long, even maybe before Ubuntu exists.
The news here is that now we have a specific page to users request them easily instead of emailing.

Just to clarify to avoid wrong conclusions about openSUSE/Novell... :-)

LAN party for children

2008-05-09T23:17:00.010+01:00

Oeste Digital Network (ODN), a tech group part of a Portuguese association which I am involved in, some days ago was invited by ANAE (Education and Animation National Association) to join a *particularly* mini LAN party for children between 4 and 7 years old. This LAN party will take three days (Friday to Sunday, and afternoons only obviously) in June, and the goal is to ODN take care of the games. Therefore computer games will be needed!

Since ODN is trying more and more to put proprietary software out of the way we are looking for open source game solutions to run on the 15 laptops that will be available. Digging a while for this "requirement" it seemed to be more difficult than we thought it would be - most of the games aren't suitable for kids and others are not really playable or appealable judging by their point of view. Currently we are looking for three to five games, which at least one should be multiplayer.

So, please if you are aware of good open source games for this range of ages let me know!

P.S.: If you are still wondering why this event is so *particularly* then what would you think if I tell you that it will be hosted in a bus hã!? ;-) Yeah, that's right, in a BUS!!

Linux 2008

2008-04-07T14:18:00.003+01:00

Caixa Mágica and Sysbase for the 6th consecutive year are preparing Linux 2008, a National Open Technology Meeting event at the Auditório da Lispólis, Pólo Tecnológio de Lisboa, Telheiras, Portugal, coming up in 15 April.

Among many talks, "Linux in the low cost PC market" by Mandriva CEO François Bancilhnon, and "Debate: Definition of Open Standards and of Interoperability" by many known Portuguese and international people, including Manager Novell Portugal João Batista, would be personally the top moments of the day.

Also, there will be a short presentation about the recent decision that PSA Peugeot Citroën made for have choose SUSE Linux Enterprise for its desktop and server machines - 20,000 desktops plus 2,500 servers.

Unfortunately I will have to miss Linux 2008 due to an exam that I have to do (damn Maths!) ...

If I can't go to FOSDEM... [2nd part]

2008-02-24T21:58:00.002Z

If I can't go to FOSDEM...

2008-02-24T11:17:00.004Z

... than FOSDEM *MUST* come to me!

Dear FOSDEM 2008 attendees,

Unfortunately I couldn't go to FOSDEM 2008. I can't either find much photos available on the Internet nor videos at all. So... I'm begging you to upload some photos and videos from FOSDEM 2008, specially from the openSUSE booth and talks.

Best regards,
Carlos Gonçalves

To be continued...

Now that's what I'm talking about!

2008-01-14T23:02:00.000Z

Reading the latest Aaron Seigo's blog post I completely froze, for good!
To quote him:

(...)
i've got OpenSuse 10.3 on the new machine and i have to say that i'm more than pleased with it. i was afraid i'd miss apt-get ... but zypper rocks.
(...)
the rpm search through community contributions is yet another really great thing that has happened during my hiatus from suseland; really nice to see and something i'm sure to use again in the future...
(...)
after seeing 10.3 i was impressed enough to try it out again; i'm a little tired of the *buntu world these days and unhappy with some of their decisions. didn't help that on my last upgrade of my laptop, it rendered my system unusable due to a screw up in their evms packaging; this was doubly "humorous" as the system wasn't using evms at all. it was just installed and that was enough. this isn't the first time such a catastrophic update has come down those apt-get pipes so it's just in time for me that OpenSuse starts to look like its back on the rails again. there were even kde4 packages available as an option in the installer =)
(...)

I must say: welcome back aseigo!

Quickie: fglrx corrupting lower right corner

2007-12-28T21:47:00.000Z

Yesterday I kinda was forced to install the proprietary ATI drivers (ATI Mobility Radeon X600 on my laptop ) for 3D support reasons.
Installed the drivers smoothly, but after restarting X and after a few seconds using the laptop some "glitches" appeared on the lower right corner of my display. Even taking a screenshot it doesn't appear in it.

In the release notes ATI/AMD says: "Corruption may be noticed in the lower right corner of the display after the system is running for a long period of time". This might be true in some situations although my laptop wasn't running for that long...
Digging a bit with Google's help I found an useful tip - adding Option "XaaNoOffscreenPixmaps" "true" (Section Device) in xorg.conf fixes the fglrx bug.

As expected this bug not only affects openSUSE as it affects all Linux distributions, and can be found in the current version (8.443) and version 8.404, at least. I hope this bug gets fixed as fast as possible pushing a new ATI drivers release version out.

People of openSUSE voting system

2007-12-21T02:24:00.000Z

Hi Planet SUSE!
My name is Carlos Gonçalves and I've just been added to the planet, and would like to kick off requesting your attention for a moment, if possible :-)

The 'People of openSUSE' is a project which aims to let the people behind openSUSE become more visible to each other. Therefore we publish every week an interview at openSUSE News of someone from the openSUSE community or Novell working on the distribution, alternating between them.

Getting all this work done every single week isn't as simple as it might seems to be - we need to choose who will we interview, mail the person requesting him/her interview, parse the answers checking if everything is fine, and finally import it to openSUSE News making it readable, if nothing goes wrong...

To let all the community/openSUSE News readers happier with these interviews, we would like to know who should be in your opinion the next person being interviewed by us. Taking that in consideration, Stephan 'Beineri' Binner created an election page on the openSUSE wiki for that propose - voting on who should be the lucky one.
Thus, please vote and in case the person isn't listed yet, add him/her to the election list and here providing some info about him/herself.

Thanks in advance for your collaboration!

A new openSUSE policy?

2007-12-02T13:19:00.000Z

openSUSE 10.3 have been released on 4 October with tremendously lots of new and improved features, and since then many offers have been given for free to the people who helped the openSUSE team creating a better distribution.

To name a few:

Translators have got an openSUSE 10.3 retail box and an openSUSE t-shirt;
Packagers, those who joint the Packaging Day, got openSUSE t-shirts, baseball-hats, and even tuxs.

In my opinion this is an awesome openSUSE/Novell initiative to raise up some (healthy) competition between the people already involved on the project and people who never thought that contributing to an open source project could have had any returns for helping the project itself.

Even though if you don't know how to package or translate openSUSE into your language, or even if you don't want to do these things you can do something you like/want to help the project - eg: promoting openSUSE (events, blogging, LPIs), bug reporting, helping people on web forums, and IRC, writing articles on the openSUSE wiki, etc...

As always, Novell and the openSUSE team will give you full support, providing you anything you need to execute your volunteering task - at least, they did it for me ;-)

UA: I'm in!

2007-09-18T00:47:00.000+01:00

Saturday night I blogged about the counting down to end of the impatient waiting of the latest months to know if I would gather University and if so to where would I. University of Aveiro (UA) was my first option and I made it!
I'm happy, but not fully happy though... My mate didn't gather UA so he gathered University of Coimbra (UC) which is about 60km from Aveiro. Not bad at all.

Yesterday I went to Aveiro to search for a room to rent but no rooms near to UA and/or without the needed conditions to live in. Today, I went back again to UA to make me as an official student, explored the campus and looked again for a room to rent. I had much luck because I met also two new students who were looking for a room to live in too. We all joint together and walked through the city. At the end of the day we discovered a nice flat near UA (north entrance) and liked it. Therefore we accepted the terms of the flat owner and agreed to stay there for, at least, this upcoming university year. Also, we met there a person who will be my colleague (same course) and lives next door from ours - yeah!

As I said, I can't say I'm entirely happy due to the non gathering of my (best) friend at the same university as mine, but at least I hopefully met student people and they seems to be good people so that's a nice step forward.

This week I will be preparing and packaging stuff to carry on into my new home where I will live for the next 5 years.

Tic Tac Tic Tac... less than 2h left!

2007-09-15T21:24:00.000+01:00

Within less than 2 hours I will know to where will live for the next 5 years! Of course I'm talking about university life...

My first option was Computers and Telematics Engineering at University of Aveiro (UA), and the second was Computers Engineering at University of Coimbra (UC).
I really hope I have the chance to gather University of Aveiro. It has an awesome Linux group - Grupo Linux da Universidade de Aveiro (GLUA), a large campus, well know professors. Although, it is a bit far from my home, so I will have to rent a house/room and get used to it completely in a few days with no dads around to make my meal, clean my own stuff, etc :-P

Nevertheless, it's probably I gather the same university and the same course with a friend of mine so things become easier than gather without know anyone.

UA campus

Tic tac, tic tac...!!!!

Another opensuse-i18n-pt calling!

2007-08-02T01:50:00.000+01:00

Don't worry, I won't bother you again with a calling for help with the openSUSE distribution translations...

I said in a blog post some time ago I had no time to help on it but I realized that António really needed a hand with the translations so I joined him (again). In just one/two weeks we have translated all untranslated strings and the fuzzy ones, so we are *almost* done! Even with 100% translated I'm saying *almost* because we have the last step to do - we now need people willing to test our translations in a proofreading way. How to do that? Well, for your lucky you only have to install the latest openSUSE 10.3 version and go to YaST -> System -> Language and setup the system to Portuguese (Portugal, of course), in case you don't have it already (YaST will automatically download some Portuguese localization packages).
After that, just do some clicks here, some clicks over there, reading every text looking for some translation mistakes - orthography, grammatic, out-of-context text, etc, etc.. To report the mistakes or simply for suggesting something to add/delete/modify you can contact me/António directly or evenvia opensuse-pt mailing list, IRC or forum. We are totally open to listen you! Bug us as much as you want ;-)

Keep in mind: 100% translated doesn't mean good quality translations! Move your ass and help us :-P

ENOS - 1 September, 2007

2007-07-08T02:00:00.000+01:00

The acronym ENOS stands for 'Encontro Nacional de openSUSE', a Portuguese expression which can be translated to 'National openSUSE Meeting', an event meant to unite the Portuguese openSUSE users.

The purpose of ENOS is to give an opportunity to the Portuguese openSUSE users to be together, as well as provide the participants an insight view on the latest developments on the openSUSE project and stimulate them to take an active part on the community itself.

// Note: The following info is obsolete. Please visit Events/ENOS page to make sure you are reading the newest news about ENOS.

Places and Dates

Date: 1 September, 11:00 am - 00:00 am
Places: Caldas da Rainha, Centro da Juventude and Parque D. Carlos I
Discussion Topics: Innovation, openSUSE Status, related projects, Open Source projects
Map: ENOS Map

Schedule

The current schedule, subject to changes, defines the following (all the times refer to Portugal Local Time):

11:00 am - Gathering at Parque D. Carlos I (wireless is available)
01:00 pm - Lunch at 'O Canas' restaurant
03:00 pm - Community Space at 'Centro da Juventude' (wireless is available)
- Talks
- Ideas & Discussion
+06:00 pm - Caldas da Rainha at night :-)

Routes

Photos Gallery

ENOS Gallery

Organization and Participants

Hosted and promoted by Carlos Gonçalves and by the openSUSE-pt community, with the support of the Caldas Rainha Network.

Be Involved

If you don't know how to help us, see the suggestions below:

Plan a session, workshop or a demo
Tell a friend so he/she can invite another person

Speakers and Discussion

"The upcoming openSUSE 10.3" - Carlos Gonçalves
"openSUSE-i18n-pt" - António Martins
"The openSUSE-pt community needs" - Tiago Santos