Have dropped Luis from Planet SUSE out of pragmatism. I really respect Luis, but as far as I can make out he's no longer using SUSE, and I think his posts are far more at home solely on Planet GNOME.

I encourage anyone who's interested in QA or GNOME to continue reading his blog, I know I shall.

In other news, first day of placement went really well. Survived a whole morning of doing a kids' holiday club!

Uploading gnome-themes-extras and ulb-themes for openSUSE 10.0. Also uploaded galeon a couple of days ago, but forgot to mention it

Both those themes packages are noarch incidentally, so please feel free to try them on architectures other than x86.

Off to St Luke's in a moment...

Start the full-time part of my placement at St Luke's tomorrow, which I guess means that as of then I'm officially a second year. Blimey!

Not much SUSE work to comment about today, waiting for some stuff back from within Novell at the moment before I can announce the Big Project^TM.

Welcome to Planet SUSE, Holger. Holger is VP for Product Management at SUSE.

I've done updated beagle packages for openSUSE 10.0 (beta 3) to include all the options I normally have enabled (except the Epiphany extension until I build Epiphany itself), and use the "proper" Beagle icons.

The following packages are now available via APT for openSUSE 10.0 beta 3:

• In the usr-local-bin component:
  mail-notification
• In the suser-jogley component:
  camE, giblib

Will be adding more as and when I have time, including Michael's TNEF plugin for Evolution.

Well, it looks very nice, and to demonstrate this, I've done a little gallery of the install as far as seeing the GDM login screen. Image 13 includes a link to the bug associated with what you see. Filed at least one other bug as well.

Plan to do builds of the following excluded packages at some point: mail-notification, galeon, epiphany as well as diving into the abiword package, I think it's about time the plugins and clipart were separated out like in the as-official-as-they-come packages (mine).

Big w00t for the replacement of suseplugger under GNOME with gnome-volume-manager, won't do a replacement gnome-session just to stop susewatcher starting unless people really want me to.

Neil and Emma coming round tonight, Neil and I were housemates in Lancaster for a year, and the two couples - us and them - led worship at each other's weddings. Neil also provides my web space and DSL.

Right, ISOs all downloaded, final CD burning as I type, just about ready to go once a quick query is answered, if anyone knows the answer (it's below) please let me know.

Looks like apt is included, which is pretty cool.

So, my query is this: With 9.3, I had to use twofishSL92 as the encryption type in /etc/cryptotab because I'd created my encrypted filesystem on a previous version. I had to do this manually.

• Will I still have to do this?
• Or will/should it be done automatically?

Well, what to say? It was simply an amazing fifteen days, and we saw God do fantastic things. Most fantastic of all was seeing hundreds of people come to know Jesus. Others received healing - I heard reports of physical healing as well as lots of emotional healing - and lots of people being envisioned and equipped for what God's calling them to.

Personally, we got to see a lot of people we hadn't seen in a while, made some new friends and worked with some really talented and anointed worship leaders, which was a real privilege.

So, some links:

• Soul Action
  This is a new charity that was launched at the conferences. It's backed by TEARfund and is the latest part of the Soul Survivor Family. It exists because to pray for the world's poor is fantastic, but they can't eat prayer. It will envision Christians to serve the last, the least and the lost wherever they are, equip them to do so, and connect them with each other. The first big project will be Soul in the City: Durban in 2009, but you can get involved right now.
• Craig Borlase
  Craig and his wife Emma were in the same cell group as us for a while in Watford, and we saw them at the conferences. Craig's a writer, who's currently working on a new book, as well as doing stuff for Delirious? and TEARfund.

My photos of the conferences are now available in the gallery.

Started going though my Inbox, down to 112 mails in it now.

Beta3 still downloading, CD2 is almost finished, it's going a lot quicker now I've switched to ftp.gwdg.de rather than ftp.opensuse.org.

Had a bit of a cull on blogs on Planet SUSE - removed the ones that had moved more towards talking about Ubuntu than SUSE. If anyone at SUSE can get Holger to email me (I don't have his address) I'd be happy to add him, and anyone else who's working on [open]SUSE.

Sonja: Rock and roll! If only I had a PPC machine to test it on. One of the funnest things I did while I was at SuSE was some of the initial testing when the boxed product was being made available for PPC, getting the bootloader installed on the lime iBook we had in the office was fun fun fun...

Downloading 10.0 Beta 3 (i386) at the moment, will start dealing with mails and backlogs for Planet SUSE tomorrow, although cool to see it listed here.

I'm back.

Please don't flood me with emails (currently downloading 3270 of them!) I'll deal with things over the next few days.

/me sleeeeeeeps...

So just reading through Planet SUSE while waiting for my mail to download^[1], and a couple of thoughts...

• Would be great if openSUSE.org had an RSS feed of latest changes
• We're moving more towards SUSE staffers, which is great, and something I'd wanted from the outset, and would like to see more of -- email me^[2] -- but those non-staffers who I've added over the last year or so seem to be moving to another [great] distro. Now, the great thing about Linux is choice, but I'd like people to let me know if they're not going to be SUSE-oriented, so I know if their feeds need to be removed.

1. Hoping the the final worship leader for this week has emailed me his songs at last
2. Oi! Holger!

Added Sonja's blog. Nice to break the male domination.

• Added link to openSUSE on Planet SUSE
• Connection here is really slow, but trying to check a couple of prospective blogs to also add to Planet SUSE, they may have to wait till I get home though
• Soul Action - look at it

Just a quick reminder since some people seem to have missed, I can't really respond to any queries until the 25th, and I'm bound to have a backlog then.

Cheers all

So people know where I'll be over the next couple of weeks. Annoyingly I'm going to be away when Beta1 of 10.0 comes out, and so won't be able to get testing until I get back. So here's the grand plan for the next two weeks or so:

• Tuesday 9th
  Head down to Somerset to Amanda's parents'.
• Wednesday 10th
  From Amanda's parents' drive to Shepton Mallet for the start of this year's Soul Survivor conferences. We're there for all three events. Hopefully I will be able to be online to check email, maybe even blog, and if time allows, do some translation work for GNOME 2.12. Can't guarantee any of that, so don't expect a response to anything for a while.
• Thursday 25th
  Return to Nottingham, knackered, sleep for a week.
• Wednesday 31st
  Start my college placement at St Luke's, Gamston.

Paul: Setting up a Planet's dead easy, just grab the latest code snapshot from PlanetPlanet and read the docs in the tarball. You need no php (unless you want your HTML to be PHP generated, maybe to draw in includes from somewhere else) and you certainly don't need a DB. All you need is a fairly recent Python install - SuSE's will do just fine. Take a look at the docs, and also the examples included.

Well, today I've gone twenty nine years without dieing - let the festivities commence!

Amanda and I went out for a chinese last night, which was very nice. Went to Republic in Beeston, a very contemporary restaurant. Tonight we're going to The Last Post for drinks and a pub meal.

Oh yes, should mention that my comments about Mozilla and Galeon last night were a comment on the ever-shifting Mozilla API, not Wolfgang's quite proper policy of keeping the packages updated.

If Epiphany's being dropped from 10.0 as well as Galeon, I'd better start doing packages of that too I guess - it is the official GNOME browser after all, however much we may hate it.

A great man has been lost. This is profoundly sad news, Robin Cook was a man of integrity, ethics and insight.

Seems you can get a YUM repository for a version of SuSE by sticking /yum on the end of the URI of the APT respository. So the 9.3-i386 repo is available here.

Thanks, Richard.

Correction: for 9.3-i386 only I think at this time.

With reference to Marcus' post.

The QT vs GTK YaST issue is about two things. The first is consistency of interface. For end-users, it makes sense if the system's central config tool looks the same in its widgets etc as the rest of their desktop. The second is that at the moment, even if you use GNOME, a whole bunch of KDE libraries are loaded at login because of starting SuSEwatcher/plugger. A lot of these also have to be loaded when starting YaST because of the QT dependency. A GNOME desktop with GTK+ front-ends for these tools (eg gnome-volume-manager instead of SuSEplugger) removes this issue to some degree.

With you on Mozilla, man that's a pain in the butt. Everytime Wolfgang builds the new Mozilla, I have to rebuild Galeon.

Oh yes, I use the ncurses version too :)

Seb:

• YaST is written in C++ IIRC
• Polling people is all very well and good, but the sort of poll you're talking about is fraught with problems. Themeing can't just be about what people like, default themes have to be accessible enough that those with accessibility needs aren't prevented from changing the theme appropriately for example. The more neutral the better in terms of colours as well, it's the same as when you're selling a house, make the colour scheme neutral and it's easier for someone to see themself living there
• YUM is actually from Yellow Dog (YUM stands for Yellow Dog Updater Modified), and when Red Hat released their professional edition as Fedora, the core developers took the decision to change to using YUM for package management. One SuSE staffer has made YUM packages available for SuSE 9.0-9.3, and APT can generate YUM repositories quite easily. I wouldn't be surprised to see YUM included in 10.0

Paul: Looks like it could be a SNAFU with $HOME/.gnome2/session - take a look and see if there are two instances of gnome-panel. If there are, familiarise yourself with the format of the file - note the first character of each line and the contents of the final line, and if you feel brave, manually edit it then relogin (don't save the session when logging out).

It's GNOME bug #309506.

Have decided not to update the dbus-1 and hal packages for 9.3 in order to be able to build the GNOME 2.11 version of gnome-volume-manager because it involves an API change, and too many other things depend on it.

Guessing that the betas of 10.0 will have the new API, and they'll also have g-v-m included (see bug #71059 if you have access).

Updated gnome-session and gconf2 packages are now built and uploading. They remove the automatic starting of suseplugger and susewatcher when logging into GNOME, as well as providing this message at first login:

Right, the last few problems have been ironed out, and I now have the full GNOME 2.11 build from SuSE, once I'd got some other packages beaten into submission.

Uploaded some packages yesterday to augment the SuSE lot, and working on gnome-session today, except...

gconf-sanity-check-2 executable not found in your path - should be installed with GConf

Gah! For some reason this isn't in the gconf2 or gconf2-devel package. Looks like I'm going to have to rebuild that first.

Andreas: I think it's a Blogger issue, because the same happens with your blog on planet n.

Can you try switching from Atom to RSS and send me the URL for that - it may be their Atom generator's busted.

And hey, now that we're going all "open" any chance you can bully more SuSE staffers into blogging?

Got my claim for help with health costs back today. Patient Services say that because I'm doing a degree I'm eligible for a Student Loan, and that that takes me over the amount of income they allow, meaning that I'm not eligible. Thing is that because I'm an ordinand, I'm actually not eligible for a Student Loan. They wouldn't believe me over the phone, and the Ministry Division Grants Officer is on holiday. Left a message, and he should be writing me a letter then he gets back, by which time I'll be at Soul Survivor, and so I won't be able to deal with it until I get back.

Watch this space.

A quick "hello" to James the Ubuntu user I bumped into in Beeston Sainsbury's this afternoon. I identified as a fellow member of The Way by the fact that he was wearing this t-shirt:

So, I've been thinking about OpenSuSE, and if it's really for real this time I'm drawing up a wishlist. Some are a bit silly, some are genuine suggestions of the way to go forward.

• Ditch SUSE and go back to SuSE. The old way of "spelling" it was a lot cooler, but let's not go back to S.u.S.E. okay?
• Port YaST's package manager and online update to APT. The sheer number of people who already just switch to APT as soon as they've set up a SuSE box is astounding, and this means that we have native-looking package management tools ready to use already for both GNOME and KDE (Synaptic and the existing YaST QT front-end)
• Extend gnome-system-tools support for SuSE to provide more of YaST's functionality with a familiar look for GNOME users
• Build machine access for trusted external people at least as soon as possible
• Move as quickly as possible to maintenance of some aspects of the distro by community volunteers. The experience of Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, Fedora, and any other commercial offerings that "go" Open Source is that once the community takes over and isn't clouded by the corporate "vision" things can really take off in a big way
• Testing machines would be very nice too so we can break stuff without being unable to work

By the way, blogging this from Stones Deli:Cafe in Nottingham thanks to their 30 minutes of free Wi-Fi access.

Update: Am now online at the Malt Cross thanks to the 30 day free trial with TeleGeneration who provide their Wi-Fi access, and wishing the people at the table with the power outlet would leave, since they're not using it.

Update 2: They moved!

Was sent a link to the current Linux Magazine, on the front page they have a story about Novell doing what a few of us said a while back they should do, and "Doing a Fedora" with SuSE. Thing is that the website that they point to (www.opensuse.org) doesn't exist yet. Here's the output of a bit of digging:

ogley@dhcp1:~> host www.opensuse.org
Host www.opensuse.org not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)
ogley@dhcp1:~> host opensuse.org
opensuse.org mail is handled by 42 lists.opensuse.org.

So, take a look at lists.opensuse.org - there's nothing there. The subscription link takes you to Novell's subscription page where there is no mention of OpenSuSE, and the archives are empty.

Is this a hoax? Does anyone at Novell/SuSE know anything about this?

Oh yes, want to see what we were saying about it almost a year ago?

• My thoughts, 23 October 2004
• Roger's thoughts, 24 October 2004
• Roger again, 29 October 2004

Right, I've templatified (is that a word? I doubt it...) the new look version of Planet SuSE and it now gets generated at the same time as the real version. Take a look and road-test it for me by clicking here. Please do let me know what you think, if you prefer it to the old look, ways in which you think it could be improved, or (perhaps most importantly) serious problems with your browser. If you have a browser problem, please do make sure you tell me which browser, and what version and OS you're using.

Have been working on the updated look for Planet SuSE this morning. The latest iteration is available here, any useful feedback would be, well, useful. I've not tested it with IE yet, but the current version doesn't quite work properly with it anyway. Note that the content of the new version isn't necessarily up to date, as it's not built from a Planet template yet. When I convert it, I'll make both versions available for a period till I'm happy to switch over totally to the new version.

The term MPV stands for Multi-Passenger Vehicle. My mum's old Mini could carry three passengers in addition to the driver. Three huh? Would that make a Mini an MPV?

Why is filling out a form the same as filling in a form?

Rob, Luis: There are still some kinks being ironed out of the 2.11 packages, take a look at he following bugs: 99664, 99665, 99695, 99708, 99709. (Note you must be wither a Novell employee or a SuSE Beta Tester to view those bug reports).

Also, these packages and the Mono packages from Novell don't play nice because of (at least) mismatched libgtkhtml-3.x library versions. The Mono packages are built against gtkhtml2-3.6.x, and the new package is 3.8.x.

Nice one Stefan at SuSE, all problematic packages have now been rebuilt, and as soon as the APT server has them, I'll get on with upgrading, and then the packages I'll be updating can be done.