Plymouth in openSUSE Factory

As some of you know, I have been working on plymouth support in openSUSE. This was a feature that was requested already some time ago, but nobody found the time to actually implement it. 

Since a couple of weeks I have been working on getting plymouth to work and to resolve the known issues. This can be tracked on the following link :  http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Plymouth 

With the help of teammembers of the openSUSE KDE team (tigerfoot, einar77), the issues were resolved and Plymouth got accepted in openSUSE:Factory

To get full support for password requests and displaying text, the initrd was enhanced with some additional libraries and fonts. The luks initrd script was reworked to get plymouth support for the password requests and a patch was submitted to the maintainer of the package cryptsetup. 

The full set of packages (including all the latest patches, etc), can be obtained from the OBS project home:tittiatcoke. Plymouth of course can be directly obtained from Factory. 

I would like to ask everybody to test the new Plymouth packages and to fill bugs for things that are not working or to indicate these on the webpage : http;//en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Plymouth. 

Currently we are working on the openSUSE branding for Plymouth, so that we can complete the new boot experience. 

KDE:Unstable:SC has become alive again

I know that for quite some time the KDE:Unstable:SC repo didn’t contain any recent snapshots. The repo was used to test the 4.8.0 tarballs and since then no more updates took place. 

However since today that has changed. As of now KDE:Unstable:SC contains a very recent snapshot of the KDE SC 4.9 and the packages got published. As always the target is to provide weekly snapshots of the KDE SC 4.9 and other packages. 

At this moment the kdemultimedia packages (juk, kmix, kio_audiocd, etc) are still on the 4.8.2 level as that the main KDE repository is moved from SVN to GIT. As soon as this has been completed, the packages in KDE:Unstable:SC will be updated with the next possible snapshot. 

I have been running snapshots of KDE 4.9 and I have to say that the stability is quite good. Most of the changes are the rewrite of plasmoids, etc to the new QML language. 

Enjoy!

Chromium browser got accepted into openSUSE:Factory

After maintaining the Chromium browser in the openSUSE Contrib repositories, the last few weeks things got accelerated and as of this moment the Chromium browser has become officially part of openSUSE:Factory (the future 12.1). 

The first step wa taken about 3 – 4 weeks ago when a separate development project was created (network:chromium). From there onwards it was just a matter of getting the package in the right shape for Factory and making sure that all legal and security conditions were met. Those who are tracking the updates of Chromium in this devel repo, might have noticed that a number of rebuilds were triggered for the 16.0.880 version of Chromium. This all had to do to get a single spec-file that would satisfy both Factory requirements but also would be able to build for the older distributions. At this moment this special repository offers builds for 11.3, 11.4, Factory and also for Tumbleweed. 

I am quite proud on this fact and I hope that the openSUSE Chromium users will be happy with this fact. 

At the moment I am preparing an update to the 16.0.891 version and hopefully sometime beginning of next week the new snapshot will become available.

openSUSE KDE:Unstable:SC repo becomes Trunk again !

A little warning to those that have switched over to the KDE:Unstable:SC repo. The target is that either tonight or tomorrow a new Trunk snapshot will be loaded in this repo. That would mean that the Unstable becomes unstable again  

I have already been building a number of snapshots based on the opened KDE 4.7 trunk and have to admit that things are still looking very stable and even kdebindings is compiling well  

But this might of course change from the moment that KDE 4.6 has been released and the focus shifts to the newer 4.7 release. 

I will keep you posted on the developments around this repository, but this would be the moment to switch over to KDE:Distro:Factory if you want to get the RC1, RC2 and KDE 4.6 final version for your openSUSE system.  Currently it contains RC1, but this would change in the next few days once RC2 is released. 

openSUSE KDE:Unstable:SC repo builds newer snapshots of 4.6 with all openSUSE patches

Are you using the openSUSE KDE 4.6 Beta 2 packages and you would like to try a newer version ? Then for the time being you could switch over to the KDE:Unstable:SC repository. 

About 2 weeks ago, I copied the official KDE 4.6 Beta 2 packages over from the KDE:Distro:Factory repository to the KDE:Unstable:SC repository. This has two effects, namely:

1)   People using 4.6 Beta 2, can easily update to a slightly newer version to see if bugs have been resolved, without loosing important patches that are openSUSE specific. 

2)   It gives us, the openSUSE KDE team the change to easier and faster adopt to a newer release (e.g. RC1, RC2, etc), as that all patches are matches on a weekly basis to the newer source code. 

If you decide to switch repository, then make sure that you keep an eye on this blog, as that on a certain moment the KDE:Unstable:SC will switch to very unstable snapshots of the future KDE 4.7. I will however blog here to let you know that you should switch back again repostories, before I will publish the first KDE 4.7 snapshot. 

Feel free to contact me over email or on IRC (tittiatcoke) if you have any questions about this. 

So far KDE 4.6 has been a very stable release and also KDEPIM 4.6 is looking better. Let’s hope that the last glitches are also resolved, before KDE 4.6 is released. 

Additional package for Chromium (on packman)

As most of you already found out, Chromium is not that easy when it comes with MultiMedia. Due to the heavy patches from Google to ffmpeg, it does not work just to build chromium against the standard ffmpeg libraries. For distributions like openSUSE, Fedora, etc this brings issues as that ffmpeg code is still legally a no-no. 

There were some attempts in the past to solve this issue, but they failed. At the moment I have created a new package chromium-ffmpeg which delivers the missing libffmpegsumo.so library. The package is available from packman and it builds the patched ffmpeg code. 

It still doesn’t really work 100%, but it should resolve some multimedia issues that people have been experiencing with the openSUSE Chromium package. 

In the meantime Chromium has already reached version 10.x.x.x, so check out the changes. 

Still alive and kicking !! New snapshots and reorganization for openSUSE’s KDE4:Unstable repository

I guess that maybe some people were wondering how come that it was so silence around the Unstable repository for openSUSE. There are two reasons for it. First one is that I have been on holidays and I promised my family that I would stay away from a computer as much as possible. Secondly in August the KDE repositories were changes and optimized. This meant not only a new name and/or location, but also we had a good look at what was provided by each repo.

For the KDE4:Unstable repo it was agreed that the new repo name would be KDE:Unstable:SC and that it should only provide the standard KDE:SC packages with the build-required libraries. This means that application like Amarok, choqok, konversation, etc are no longer provided through this KDE:Unstable:SC repository. SVN snapshot versions of these applications can be found in the new playground (KDE:Unstable:Playground) repo or released version can be retrieved directly from either the openSUSE:Factory repository or in case of an older distribution from the KDE:UpdatedApps repository.

After the release of openSUSE 11.3, KDE:Unstable:SC was moved to the newer snapshots of the upcoming KDE 4.6 release. Unfortunately with the new 4.6svn tarballs, the python kdebindings is no longer building and therefore the kdegames package is no longer building the kajongg game. So far this has been the only victim As that KDE:Unstable:SC is only offering a weekly snapshot and that some people would like to keep more up-to-date with the changes of the KDEPIM module, I decided to create a new repository that would hold daily updates of just the three KDEPIM related packages.

Hopefully i will blog more frequently in the future

For those interested in the right places of all the new repositories :

KDE:Unstable:SC http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Unstable:/SC/<openSUSE_Version>

KDE:Unstable:Playground http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Unstable:/Playground/<openSUSE-KDE version>

KDE:UpdatedApps http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/UpdatedApps/<openSUSE_version>

Stay tuned !!

KDE SC 4.5 rc1 available for openSUSE

Since yesterday evening the openSUSE KDE4:Unstable repositories contains the KDE SC 4.5 rc1 packages. Also the special repository that contains KDEPIM 4.5 snapshots, was updated to a version that seems to work pretty well.

I am not using IMAP, so I can’t comment on it’s status. But the POP accounts are working very well and also filtering is active. At least it allowed me to move away again from Thunderbird to this Kmail v2 solution. A very good job done by the KDEPIM developers!!

openSUSE Chromium finally plays webM video’s

It is a great week for all the people that are enjoying the wonders of Chromium. Especially now with the newer version of ffmpeg (0.6), which is available on packman, chromium is finally able to play the new webM format.

No additional configuration is required. Just update/install the ffmpeg package from packman together with the chromium package from Contrib and you can watch webM video’s.

New snapshot available in KDE4:Unstable repository

Another week, another snapshot

As of this morning the KDE4:Unstable repository for openSUSE contains a newer snapshot (4.4.86). As that openSUSE:Factory now contains Qt4 4.6.3, all targets for KDE4:Unstable are build with the same Qt4 version, which brings a lot of stability and bugfixes.

A few people already indicated that they find the latest version becoming more responsive and that things seems much faster than previous versions.

I would say grab the new version and try it yourself.

Enjoy!