I already mentioned this repository several times on my blog. It is the repository where I’m trying to keep bleeding edge stuff for MySQL. I’ve been updating it recently and we’ve got new package there and some interesting updates I want to mention.

Last time I informed you about Media Wiki theme I’ve been working on for our Umbrella project. There were plenty of reactions to the screenshot. I’ll skip the positive feedback and let’s talk about the negative one. Most of the negative feedback was about the color. Some people didn’t liked that it is grey and not green. Robert responded to this and instead of citing him, you can read his whole reaction here. In short, grey has some advantages against green (high contrast, elegant, neutral, …) and we can use green elsewhere and for highlighting.

As you may or may not know, I’m part of the openSUSE Boosters team and I’m working on umbrella project. Part of this project is to make all openSUSE pages look similar. What I was working on during last week was to addapt Roberts Bentoo theme for Media Wiki. And as I posted to my workreport that it is available internaly (as it is curently running on my machine only) I’m posting here sample screenshot 😉

It’s been some time already since I informed you about server: database: UNSTABLE repository in openSUSE Build Service. Today I want to mention what is going on there. As the name of the repository suggests, it’s probably not the best idea to use anything from here on your production servers 😉

This weekend we were on LinuxAlt conference with my colleague Pavol Rusnak. It was really nice event, we met quite some people. I also learned some new things during the talks but I’m not going to write here about talks as others will surely write about them more deeply. I’m going to write something about the feedback we received and what we talked about with people.

This is going to be just a little note. Tomorrow starts two day conference LinuxAlt in Brno in Czech Republic. I’m planning to attend as a mere mortal (no presentation or such). So if you want to speak to me in person, you can probably catch me there somewhere. I’ll be wearing some openSUSE t-shirt and I’ll probably have some other openSUSE/Novell stuff with on me. I’m attaching one of my latest photos to this blog post.

We are going to release openSUSE 11.2 soon, so I want to let you know about one problem you may expect. One of the openSUSE 11.2 features is support for ext4. Well, if you will just click on next all the time during the installation, default filesystem for your root partition will be ext4. What is the problem with that? Well, ext4 in current kernel has barriers enabled by default. It’s not a problem, it’s a feature, but it has some unpleasant side effects which you may encounter. Let’s take a closer look.

We have announced Junior Jobs in the Monday and we already have the contributions! People are interested! It’s not in factory yet but it’s on its way there. Let’s be more specific. Currently I’m speaking about bug 546020. David Binderman reported missing free in barcode package. As this is easy to fix, it was marked as a Junior Job. And here comes our community member, Marek Belisko, fixes the bug and sends us submit request. It was accepted by package maintainer and resend to the Factory. He also fixed bug 432596 in libunwind. And again, his fix was approved and it is on its way to the Factory. Once these two fixes (and some more) will be accepted in Factory, his name will be in changelog of these packages forever!

Have you always wanted to be openSUSE Contributor? What was stopping you? You just didn’t know where to start? Well every package has some maintainer and you can try to find some problems, fix them and then submit fix to the maintainer… But in the beginning you may encounter too hard problem or you’ll fix it few days after maintainer does it or even you’ll do the fix for old version which wouldn’t be needed after planned update. And of course it’s not so easy to find something that is broken 😉

Some additional notes about openSUSE Conference 2009. This time I want to mention my talks and point you to my slides if you are interested in them.