openSUSE Day (Chile) on June 18th, 2009.

We are hoping to have students, young people, professors, teachers, and professionals from many fields as well. Actually everyone is welcome to attend the event. We’ll have presentations, stands, gaming, and of course the fun install fest (openSUSE 11.1). And yes, you can have an original openSUSE 11.1 Live DVD if you are one of the first 400 people to get there (Thanks Zonker!).

Where? Meet us at Universidad Andres Bello (UNAB), Campus República, República 239/Subterráneo R3. Check the map here.

Time? 10 AM though 8 PM.

Talks:

• Rafael de la Horra, from UNAB: Education for Professionals and the Free Software Environment.
• Enrique Herrera, from Linux Latin America: GNU/Linux, 10 years of progress.
• Myself, openSUSE Ambassador: SUSE Studio.
• Patricia Albornoz, SUN Campus Ambassador: Netbeans and openSUSE.
• Francisco del Castillo, from the Air Force: Linux and the Air Force.
• Rodrigo Romo, from IBM/Tallard: Reducing Costs with IBM and Linux.

See you there. Join openSUSE and have a lot of fun!

Gnome-Shell on openSUSE 11.1

It’s been a while since I installed gnome-shell for the first time and tried it. Let’s say that after a few system re-installations, just because I only have one machine and stepped into the Milestones lands , now I am back to good for production 11.1 and Gnome 2.24, without those annoying system beeps at shutdown (PulseAudio?). Gnome 2.26 ad tools seemed fine, but I would just rather wait a few months or next release to check if that does not happen anymore.

openSUSE 11.2 M2 (Gnome)

Well, today I downloaded the Gnome Live CD first, and had no luck at all. That was no fun watching the busy cursor over and over again after selecting the Live Cd option from the Menu so I decided to get the DVD just to see if things went different (actually not the only reason for), and sure they were. First, I installed the KDE Desktop, not a deal through the install process. Then came the first log in and all well. Of course I chose the Ext4 file system and I can tell it feels faster than our good old Ext3 .

Then it was time for Gnome. As usual, default install took longer than KDE’s. One thing I removed from the software was Desktop Effects, since I started to believe that that could cause the problem with the Live CD Media. So on through the install process, it went down really well. Then at first log in I got alerted over GDM and Metacity. I got this:

By default, the Slab Menu Icon looks like this when Main Panel’s Size is 24 pixels:

Looks like your computer is not your computer, right? Well, I just resized Main Panel so it looks like the following picture:

I must admit that I like the default theme. Absolutely new, darkish, professional. First time I feel comfortable “out of the box”. One feature that is not workig 100% is the System Monitor. At this time I cannot switch between tabs. The rest of the system is pretty running smoothly to me. Here you have a screenshot of my desktop:

Qt4.5 repo for openSUSE 11.1

Glad to have it: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Qt45/openSUSE_11.1/
Right now it feels that my notebook runs faster with it. I have read there are some issues with plasmoids, but I only use a few of them so I am not aware of those issues, which are always welcome to be reported at the bugzilla system.

zypper update works now

Yes, after a couple days of downtime in openSUSE’s servers, its update system is up. Great!

Changing the openSUSE SLAB’s appearance

The default SLAB looks like this:

Since I don’t need to have the Documents ad Places tabs, I will change their values by calling gconf-editor. So, in therminal:

:~> gconf-editor

My time with openSUSE

I have been less than a year using the openSUSE distro and I can say it is more than I expected. Coming from a deb-based system,  I got used to the rpm, and I feel fine with it, besides packages I use the most are rock solid, pretty much like the whole distro.

Well, when I started looking at the openSUSE distro, and what I could do for it, I just didn’t know where to start. The official website is a cool start point. There you can find all kind of guidelines. Then my best two bets were Translation and Marketing. I’ve been actively contributing with translations and I must say it’s been a great experience, everyone out there has been cool and helpful.

Also I must mention Joe Brockmeier, openSUSE’s Community Manager, and Martin Lasarsch of Core Services. They have been very responsive always.

I am more than ready to keep on colaborating with openSUSE. I am sure it is the best distro for me.

Gtranslator in openSUSE 11.1

You can install kbabel under Gnome still, but I just wanted to use gtranslator for the first time.
First thing to do is logging as root. Then install the following packages:

• gconf2-devel
• gtkspell-devel
• gtksourceview18-devel
• gtk2-devel
• glib2-devel
• libsoup-devel
• gucharmap-devel
• libglade2-devel
• gdl-devel
• db43-devel
• make
• gcc
• gnome-common
• autoconf
• automake
• libtool
• intltool
• gtk-doc
• gnome-doc-utils-devel
• libgtksourceviewmm-2_0-devel
• libdb-4_5-devel

I take for granted you already have installed the subversion package. If you don’t have it, now is a good time to get it. (zypper in subversion).

Now you can create a new folder where you can download gtranslator’s source. I decided to create the new folder in /home/ricardo/gtranslator. Then run a terminal session, go to the just created folder and type:

svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/gtranslator/trunk gtranslator

Now we are ready to compile and install gtranslator, so we need to type:

• cd gtranslator
• ./autogen.sh
• make
• make install

And gtranslator should be in the directory /usr/local/bin. Off to contribute! =)

And I got the openSUSE contributor box =)

I would like to thank openSUSE for sending me the contributor box which includes: A t-shirt (openSUSE logo on front, iContribute string on the back), an install DVD/CD, a couple stickers, a start up guide book, a lightflash, and a Linux Magazine subscription offer. That is what I got for being a member of the translation team. So if you want to start contributing, visit www.opensuse.org and check out how you can participate.

openSUSE 11.1 contributor box.

Qt 4.5 to be LGPL

Good news for KDE users, Qt developers, and the open source community in general. As stated by Nokia, Qt cross-platform User Interface (UI) and application framework for desktop and embedded platforms will be available under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL) version 2.1 license from the release of Qt 4.5, scheduled for March 2009. Read more about it here.