Dunno why, but I just had that song "Here I go again on my own..." in my head just then ...

Anyway, in the real world, today was the last day of Induction Week at college. Well, not quite, because tomorrow is the Focus [student spouses' group] induction. Now I know I'm a student rather than a student spouse, but I'm needed to play guitar in the band for the service. This morning, I was leading one of the stations in a Liquid Worship installation in the college chapel, and last night was in the band for the college service, so my guitar's getting a lot of action this week.

10.1-Alpha1 is out, debating whether to grab it, or 10.0-Gold as my next update. Reckon I need to create some space for a Xen VM to install the bleeding edge in (so I can be maintaining packages there as well as for the stable tree).

Time for bed.

home.rubberturnip.org.uk and gallery.rubberturnip.org.uk have been down for most of the day because of electrical work at the house. Once I got back from college, I opened up the machine they ran on as well to take out some dead hardware (crappy 6 year or so old ATA-66 card and 2 hard drives, 40G and 12G killed by the ATA-66 card). The remaining disk in the machine is only 9G, and 91% full - eek! Took the opportunity of having to power the machine down anyway to do a kernel upgrade.

Induction week continues, and is going well. JGK asked me during his session on note taking that some of us returners were sat in to be available to help if I'd give an impromptu lecture on methods of aiding learning to demonstrate the importance of good notes. That was fun. Of course, tonight is the most important event of the week.

"Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble ..."

"The anti-war protester Cindy Sheehan was arrested yesterday after she and hundreds of others demonstrated outside the White House."

What happened to her freedom of speech or association?

Have patched OTS to build with GCC 4.x, and am now building the new version of the stable abiword tree (2.2.10), will then rebuild abiword-beta 2.3.99 so both have the OTS plugin enabled again.

In other news, the latest gimp-beta is already uploaded, it's version 2.3.4. Don't expect huge differences from Friday's package other than a sane version number

Officially as of yesterday, because that's when the new academic year really started. So yesterday afternoon was the reception to welcome the new students to college, we had afternoon tea with lots of cakes, and it was lovely. In the evening, we went to the Cadland which was also lovely. We'd spent the morning at church, where I'd done CTP for the 9.15 service, before leading the 11.15.

This morning was the start-of-year communion service, which went very well, and then I went and visited a couple from St Luke's in the afternoon.

Uploading beagle 0.1.0 packages, along with updated versions of some dependencies. The packages have pretty well every possible option enabled, including the Epiphany extension, although that's in a separate sub-package. Also, some of the packages are available optimised for i686, as well as the usual i586. You may want to delete the content of ~/.beagle/Indexes before running the new version.

Congratulations to Neil and Emma who had delivery this evening of Lauren Elisabeth, weighing in at 8lb 11oz just after 18:00 BST. Mother and baby both doing well.

Uploaded gimp-beta packages. The package version is 2.3.3.20050923 because it's today's CVS.

Thanks to Justin for changing the config on Planet SUSE to use the UTF-8 character set, accented characters are now displayed correctly.

Remember my ideal portable audio device? Well, I think I'd like to add a couple of extra features that would make this the perfect thing to carry around:

• PalmOS powered PDA
• Mobile phone (doesn't have to be 3G or anything)
• Clam shell/flip design^*

If any company wants to make a quick buck (well, pound...) make something like this. I can't be the only person who'd buy one.

^*The audio device controls could be on the outside, so you didn't need to open it to listen to music/radio, allowing it to be carried in the pocket. The lid would operate as you would expect for the phone functionality - opening it would answer an incoming call, closing it would end a call - plus it would give access to the PalmOS interface through which all the device's functionality could be controlled.

Welcome to Planet SUSE, Andreas. Andreas created the Yoper distro, but now works for Novell, and is responsible for the SUPER branch of the OpenSUSE project.

Also, Andreas has helped me demonstrate that the new Planet code doesn't fix the Blogger/Atom problem inadvertently.

Have updated the Planet code on Planet SUSE. Hopefully this will fix the problems we'd had in the past with Blogger Atom feeds. To test this, I've switched Andreas's feed back to the Atom rather than the FeedBurner generated RSS. Seems to work, but Andreas, if you could post an entry with more than one paragraph, that would probably serve as a good test. Also, if Antje and Karl would like to be added to the planet, they'd be very welcome, get them to drop me a mail (no mailto: on their blogs). It'll be kinda neat to have a couple of blogs in German on the site.

That's right folks, abiword-beta 2.3.99 is out (along with plugins & clipart), and the packages for 10.0 are uploading as I type this, they'll be available by the usual methods.

Both versions of the sermon seemed to be pretty well yesterday, obviously not perfectly, but well enough for me to be pleased.

Right, got a little distracted from the sermon by the fact that the GNOME Blog applet simply wasn't working in RC1 (nor probably any preceding betas). Tracked the problem down to a hard-coding of the executable's location in GNOME_BlogApplet.server.in - have submitted a patch to fix it, if it doesn't make it into the next release, I'll do an updated package. (This entry is being posted with the applet). That's bug #117629 if anyone cares. Will also check the code in GNOME CVS to see if that's the root of the problem, suspect it's not, but just in case. Now, back to the sermon.

That's right, I've had a busy morning, but I can now announce some changes to the packages I maintain:

• suser-jogley has been merged into usr-local-bin for 10.0, although it will still be available for older SUSE versions as a separate entity.
• usr-local-bin is now available as a YaST repository as well as being accessible via APT, Rad Carpet, and straight, honest-to-goodness FTP/RPM

All the details can be found here.

Uploading the following packages: abiword-beta, abiword-beta-plugins-impexp, abiword-beta-clipart. Note there is currently no abiword-plugins-tools package, as there's a problem with the GIMP plugin at the moment, and Abi won't start if you have it installed. I'm going to see if there's an easy solution, and if there isn't, I'll disable that plugin and rebuild without it.

Update: This is Abi bug #9480, I'll do an updated build in the morning.

My plans for the weekend are very simple:

• Merge usr-local-bin and suser-jogley into one APT component (ulb) and also make it available as a YaST repository
• Hope that my current build of abiword-beta doesn't cause the problems I've talked about in the recent past, and I am able to upload it, ditto gimp-beta
• Look at building beagle 0.1.0 and its dependencies
• Put the finishing touches to Sunday's sermon

Update: As I was typing that list, the build died. Bug #117502.

Had a college pre-term social tonight at our house, a chance for new students to meet each other, as well as some of the returners. Had a really great time, and Steve and Ali who are the guys we're the link for stayed after to chat. Just a great night.

Tomorrow I attack my sermon for Sunday in earnest.

Bug #114173, comment #6: Denied!

Have added the feed from the LJ SUSE Community to Planet SUSE, as well as Lubos Lunak from SUSE Labs in the Czech Republic - welcome on board.

Was preaching at the midweek Communion service this morning. Arrived pretty bedraggled because of the rain. Steve (the vicar) suggested I wear a cassock - fantastic idea, because now I know what they're for: covering wet clothes, plus, I looked like Neo.

Kurt: get Beineri to email me if he wants to be added - I can only add people I know about to Planet SUSE...

Found the LiveJournal SUSE Community, posted this entry about Planet SUSE.

Is your name Pete? If it is, then follow this link right now!

Ah, the middle of the week.

Bug #114173: Make sure you use my patch guys, I want that %changelog entry

Having real problems with building packages, my Acer Aspire 1710 notebook gets very hot (very hot indeed) when the CPU is under heavy use (actually, even with the CPU ticking over at about 3% usage it's hovering around 60^oC), and when that happens for a long period of time, it starts just dropping processes, or gcc experiences internal errors (next time that happens I will log a bug report, I promise). The new AbiWord beta version will be built and uploaded just as soon as I can keep the CPU cool enough for long enough to build it, I promise. Anyone who can donate me a build machine with decent cooling in it will be my friend forever.

Or, I could just wait till I can be involved with official package building...

Welcome to Planet SUSE, Kurt Pfeifle.

Lars: The heartbeat 2.0 release announcement completely passed me by, that's pretty cool beans, nice one to you, AlanR, and the rest of the team.

Bug #113524 is now fixed - thanks to fehr @ SUSE, as may be #116331, if the version included is updated before 10.0 goes gold.

Interesting discussion on the openSUSE list about application startup times, that included this reference to nordi's helpful information on preloading apps. At the moment it only works out-the-box on KDE, but I'm going to give it a test under GNOME, and see how much difference it makes before possibly suggesting the appropriate change is made (probably for 10.1).

Also, elsewhere in the thread, apparently I'm "The Man", which AM at college has also called me. Quite a moniker, and one I'm rather proud of

A simply incredible morning. I don't know how many people there were in Nottingham city centre today at the Make Poverty History event today, but there were at least enough to form a white band of people around the council house on the Old Market Square. Karen and the other speakers spoke eloquently about the Millenium Development Goals, before we marched the (short) distance to the council house.

Once there, the bad weather couldn't dampen the spirits of the many people there showing their support for this immensely important cause. There was drumming, cheering, dancing, it was like a carnival for justice. The local (I assume local rather than national anyway) TV news were there as everyone involved with making the human chain gathered in front of the building.

Photos can be seen in the gallery.

Today is the latest Make Poverty History day of action. It's a day for local action, and so I'll be part of a big white band in Nottingham today. I'll take the camera, and there should be pictures in the gallery later. [More Information]

Welcome to Planet SUSE, Mike McCallister. Mike is writing SUSE Linux 10 Unleashed at the moment.

Further to my comments yesterday, I don't think we should allow ourselves to have a Debian-like interval between releases just because we may adopt a similar model of distro development, the current frequency is about right.

Great comments from Sonja, and since Planet SUSE is one of the ways to communicate, I'll offer thoughts here...

Do we need only one distribution, or maybe three trees I can see the benefit in multiple trees, I thought I'd blogged about this before, but can't find it, so probably not. I would see there being two permanent trees:

• Development
  This is essentially UNSTABLE, and where the bleeding edge work happens. In CVS terms, think of it as HEAD. Anything goes here, within the framework of agreement by the maintainers of the various components.
• Release
  This is as STABLE as we can get it, it's essentially whatever the last release was plus updates (of course there's also the support for previous releases, but that's a lower priority). No API/ABI changes allowed here, same policy applies as current SUSE update policy basically.

Then, there'd be a third tree that would come in as and when required:

• Beta
  You guessed it. This is the roughly equivalent to the current beta programme, represents a fork from Development, exists for the beta test period, and then becomes the next iteration of Release

As for who can contribute I've said before that there are some people (myself, Pascal, Richard B, the PackMan crew for example) who are respected and trusted in the community who would be an obvious first tier of community-based package maintainers. Thoughts?

Well, CD5 had just finished installing when I went to bed last night, did the minimal configuration required this morning, and I have to say this is one niiiice distro. Really, my only gripe is still bug #113524, but I've now uploaded YaST logs for it, which will hopefully help. It's not insurmountable (no pun intended) though, copy /etc/cryptotab from your previous install onto a removable disc of some kind (I stuck mine on my USB drive) and then copy it back into place post-install, then simply reboot and you will be prompted as normal for the passphrase (or to avoid rebooting, run /etc/init.d/boot.crypto start - have fun guys.

RC1 is out. Burning the CDs at the moment, then I'll start it installing while I go and prepare a sermon for next Thursday's midweek communion at St Luke's.

Pascal: if GTK 2.8.0 was ABI-compatible with GTK 2.0.0 (are you kidding me ?) 2.8.0 is backwards compatible with 2.0.0, but obviously, 2.0.0 cannot be forwards compatible with 2.8.0. Cairo should now also be a stable A[PB]I in its 1.0.x tree if I remember right.

Great to see the interview with Pascal "Guru" Bleser, but a couple of comments:

• Point 4: Yeah, I'm also looking forward to the move towards 10.0. Hopefully people like Pascal, the Packman crew and myself who are experienced in package building for SUSE will be able to get more involved.
• Point 5: The major gtk2 upgrade was very important between betas 2 and 3, and would have had API/ABI backwards compatibility . (I confess I can't confirm this from experience, I was on holiday during betas 1 and 2, so beta 3 was the first I actually got my hands on).

If you're on Planet SUSE, and you don't yet have a hackergotchi head and you would like one, please drop me a line.

Downloading RC1 - w00t! JPR's helped fix several GNOME bugs that I'd found in Beta4.

GNOME 2.12 has made it in thanks to the code freeze, AJ mentioned there's a couple of packages that weren't released in time, but they'll be in RC2. Nice.

Really good meeting at St Luke's tonight, and I'm not at all sorry to have missed this wretched display.

I was making my way to St Luke's today, using Nottingham's [pretty good] bus service. On the way, I was listening to Five Live on the AM/FM radio I was bought as a Secret Santa present one year at Pinnacle.net. To be slightly more accurate, I was trying to listen to Five Live, the reception was proving to be a real problem, and it made me think that it would be really handy to have a small (this radio is about 2"x1" and as thick as a AAA battery) DAB digital radio. Then I thought about the full list of specifications that would truly make me a happy bunny:

• Tiny form factor (although perhaps not so small as my current one)
• DAB Digital Radio
• OGG/MP3 playback with decent capacity
• Accessible as USB mass storage (so it'll work v. easily with Linux)

Anyone know of such a beast? If so, let me know...

Apologies for generally being very quiet at the moment, my placement at St Luke's is taking up a lot of time, so all I can really do at the moment is bug work, rather than contribute much on the lists. At some point, they may get flooded with responses from me though

Oh, I'll be able to add people to Planet SUSE if there are more [open]SUSE type hackers out there blogging - just let me know.

Watched the Wales-England match at the pub yesterday afternoon. We had lunch there beforehand, and because they no longer give cash back on debit card payments (because they now have a cash machine that charges), I opened a tab.

Now, at this particular pub, when you open a tab, they basically do nothing. They don't take your card, or swipe it so they have your details, they trust you to pay before you leave. Which is all very well and good, except it wasn't until we had got home and sat down after the match that I realised that I hadn't paid, and we had to go all the way back...

Been at all three services at St Luke's today, all pretty good, but we're pretty wiped now.

Using Openbox on beta 4, because of bug #115196.

Today's lesson is Always check the MD5SUMS of ISO images before burning the CDs. Should have realised that if I didn't check the images, the CDs would inevitably have a problem. The problem is with CD2, so at the moment I have an unusable laptop, and I'm downloading the image again using Amanda's desktop machine.

Update: Just checked the other discs, and only CD1 is good - what are the odds, so will now be redownloading all the remaining ISOs now. Bah!

Got the final two assignments from first year back today:

• CTW104: 61%
• CTP: 65%

That makes CTP my best mark of the year.

About to start installing beta 4...

CDs are burnt and ready to go. Stuff from / that I'll need has been copied onto /home, and cryptotab onto my USB keydrive (see bug #113524).

Will start the install Friday night and do as much as poss before hitting the hay, then pick it up for whichever disc change is due first thing Saturday morning. Then I'm off to St Luke's for the last morning of the holiday club. Then back home to finish it off before heading to the pub to watch the Wales v England match.

The tnef-plugin package will wait till I've installed beta 4, although it builds and installs, I just need to knock up the .spec.

Christoph: I'm just using the deltas to make the beta4 ISOs, starting one going whenever I manage to be sat at my desk. Planning to install on Saturday. Like you, I just couldn't resist