Why do I have Blue Savanna by Erasure going round in my head?

Yay!

Boo!

Who?

PT103 essay finished, and ready to hand in.

Must add notes on cross-distro .spec files to GPP Live!.

Liz and I were at the Malt Cross this morning about the placement we're doing there in a couple of weeks time, and then this afternoon was a practice with the band for tomorrow's New Wine Ordinands conference, which I'm doing sound and CTP at.

Out for a ruby with Liz and Jo tonight - rock on!

Packages uploaded today:

• abiword[-plugins-*/-clipart]
• galeon
• libwpd
• ots

Get 'em while they're hot!

Nice one Luis for moving the web-based info on the packaging project to GNOME Live!, and removed some seriously outdated info in the process - check out the new location here.

Rob: Best ... Easter story ... ever! After the Easter story of course.

Built and uploaded my first packages for 9.3, you can get them from here. Please ignore all the stuff about APT for now, the repositories for 9.3 have not yet started being built, but you can access the packages directly.

Available in the usr-local-bin area are the following packages: gaim, gnome-themes-extras, gnome-volume-manager and mail-notification. Available in the suser-jogley area are the following packages: camE and giblib.

The package containing my public key to verify the signing of the packages is also available.

Just over half an hour until the world's favourite Time Lord returns to our screens...

Tick tock...

England won 4-0 this afternoon, one step closer to next summer's World Cup finals.

It really is a professional distribution, in fact, I'd go so far as to say it's the finest release I've had the pleasure of using in all my years in the community. Now, sure, I'm biased, I used to work for SuSE and they put out some real quality releases during my time there, but this is simply the best.

I'd been using the betas (I'm on the beta test programme), so I knew it was shaping up well, but let me give you some of the highlights: GNOME 2.10, KDE 3.4, OOo 2.0-pre, Beagle, Firefox.

First thing that is noticable as a change from previous SuSE releases is that in the software selection part of YaST, you have the choice of setting up either a KDE or GNOME based desktop. Naturally, I chose GNOME, and was delighted to find at the end of the install that it had done the "right thing" and also then selected GDM as the display manager - and it had been themed to match the new bootsplash theme. Consistency of look is very important, that extra bit of polish makes a real difference.

Having booted for the first time, I then logged in. GNOME first, here's a shot of the default GNOME setup in 9.3. The theme is Industrial, and in the panel you can see the rocking netapplet, resapplet, SuSEplugger, which handles hot-plugging and new hardware (this may well be replaced in future versions under GNOME by gnome-volume-manager which will shortly be available as a ULB package), SuSEwatcher, which monitors the availability of online updates, as well as launches for Evolution, Firefox and OOo Writer.

Next, I logged into KDE. Note the consistency in the look and feel between the two desktops (and no, I don't know where that black dot came from, I swear it wasn't actually there), and again we have SuSEplugger and SuSEwatcher. All in all a very good pair of primary desktops. All the others you'd expect are also included, Xfce, Window Maker, Openbox, etc, so if you like an alternative desktop experience, or have lower-spec hardware, you're very well catered for. Across all desktops, the same menu structure is maintained, and it's very well thought out, so you'll never get lost or confused there.

Both GNOME and KDE screenshots were taken on a new account to show the default look, here's my own desktop to really show off the capabilities of SuSE 9.3 as a desktop. I'm using the Nuvola theme from GNOME Themes Extras (coming soon as a ULB package), and you can see a Beagle-enabled version of Firefox (details on how to achieve this are in the distribution's release notes), GKrellM, Tomboy Notes, Beagle itself, as well as GNOME's weather and battery applets in my panel, amongst other things.

I still have yet to suspending my notebook to disk, when I last did it (with an early beta), it didn't quite work as expected, so I'm a little nervous about trying again, but I understand it's working great for a lot of people. I've also yet to setup NdisWrapper with the drivers for my WLAN card, although this has always worked fine in the past, and I'm planning on making a script available to do this automatically for other people with an Acer Aspire 1710.

I've not yet done any server work with 9.3, my servers at home are all currently running 9.1, and only get rebooted for kernel updates, don't want to sacrifice the availability that doing an upgrade would entail, but my view is that as a desktop/notebook option, SuSE 9.3 Professional is a grea choice. Pre-Order it now from Novell's website.

Installed SuSE 9.3 today, and I have to say I love it, this is a thing of beauty. More about it, including screenshots, and promises of ULB packages tomorrow.

w00t! Beagle 0.0.8 is out, one of the coolest pieces of software around - get that goodness now (or, get SuSE 9.3, and feeeel the power)

Me? I'll be grabbing me them inotify-enabled kernel builds and tasting the goodness, yeah baby!

Working on a redesign for Planet SuSE, it's about time it worked in IE

Was digging around $HOME this morning, and found a couple of old photos from my days at SuSE UK, happy days...

Planning to start writing my PT103 essay tomorrow, have more-or-less planned it in my head, just need to find out if what I've planned will make up 3000 words. Also, the new carpet in the Common Room should be being fitted tomorrow, so could well be moving furniture back into it tomorrow afternoon.

[Ref]
First they came for the Asylum Seekers
and I did not speak out -
because I was not an Asylum Seeker.

Then they came for the Gypsies
and I did not speak out -
because I was not a Gypsy.

Then they came for the Travellers
and I did not speak out -
because I was not a Traveller.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak for me.

(With apologies to Dietrich Bonhoeffer)

Oh yes, and my site is fully working again now.

Term finished on Friday, so a four week Easter vacation in which I have to write an essay, revise for a Christology exam, and do week long placement.

A lot of people have emailed me saying they can't access my site. There appears to be a problem with server aliases, and I've reported it to my hosting company. The main site hostname works though, and here it is.

Calls for packages for GNOME 2.10 have gone out, I've been playing with the betas, and I have to say, melikie

Particularly on my "rock on!" list at the moment is gnome-volume-manager - a hyper-schweet piece of code if ever I saw one... I plug in my USB drive, and low, it is mounted, appears on my desktop, and a Nautilus window opens displaying its contents. umount? No, simply unplug it! (Not even the Less Free OS can do that - right click the systray icon, stop the drive, then unplug!). Pop a CD in the drive, and gnome-cd appears and starts playing, a DVD, and xine appears. When I plug in my camera, I am asked if I want to import my images, when I say yes, gtkam starts.

Apparently, I'm the first person to run Beagle on an encrypted filesystem! YES! In your face, world!

Wow, Marc, those images are mighty annoying...

Handed PT101 and PT102 essays in

Didn't get elected as off-campus vice-president either.

OOo 2.0 beta candidate has been released to the masses. I've been using pre-beta-candidate (alpha I guess ) releases on both SuSE, and the less free OS for a while, and my biggest issue is still the missing feature to display on 'Display 2' in Impress. This is a very useful feature for anyone with a modern notebook where the external VGA can be setup as display 2, or with a desktop with dual-head output, display 1 on a local monitor, display 2 going to a projector. PowerPoint does this (although the PowerPoint Viewer does not - cheers M$!), and it would make 'selling' OOo a lot easier if it did too.

[Note, especially where people are using something like Presenter in a church to do songwords, and would like to use a OOo Impress type thing to display notices before and after the service. It is most likely that the PC running Presenter will be in dual-head mode, since that's how it works best (ditto nearly all the other software packages of this ilk), and at the moment, Impress simply isn't an option there, spending a fortune to get PowerPoint shouldn't be the only option available.]

Got just over 1500 words done on PT101 last night, might try to have it finished this afternoon.

It's snowing like crazy again this morning, will take my camera with me to college to see if I can get some decent snaps of it.

Finished PT102, just short of the maximum word limit, last night. Have decided which PT101 essay to do now, will hopefully manage to make a start on it tonight.

Had three hours on Christology this morning, man that makes my brain hurt, looking at the period starting with the First Council of Nicaea, via Athanasius and Augustine to the Cappadocian Fathers and the development of the doctrine of the Trinity.

curl packages I uploaded yesterday seem to work okay.