About a week ago I was at LinuxTag spreading a word about openSUSE. It was great event and I really liked it. And I was on of the four lucky guys that won Googles Nexus One. Hurray! And now what I want to write today about… I was migrating all my stuff from my Palm Centro to Nexus One. And one of the things I was using my Centro for was tracking how much petrol does my car consume. I was writing in plain text file and I was thinking about writing some script around that… But never had the time to actually do that. But now with Nexus One, my log is synchronized with Google Docs. So I don’t have to take care of the synchronization part. So I sat down and wrote a simple script to compute my cars consumption and I want to share it with you. Originaly I wanted to use googlecl, which is available in openSUSE Contrib, but it had some problems with Google Apps, so I decided to use curl instead.
Do you also feel that Hackweek is nearby? So many people will be working together on so many interesting stuff. And when you are working in large groups around the world, sometimes you need to talk about code snippets. And then you use something like pastebin.com. But there are many similar services on the web. And I already encounter on openSUSE IRC people using for example fpaste.org. So why don’t we have some paste thing to show that we are the openSUSE guys and girls? My guess is that nobody cared enough to create other one then opensuse.pastebin.com. But I was part of the Umbrella team, so I want to have everything nicely integrated… So here I come with openSUSE Paste.
Original title was ‘MySQL dropped from openSUSE!!!‘. I wanted to have some shocking title, but I changed it as I don’t really want to scare you so much 😉 But it is partially true, there is no mysql package in openSUSE anymore. But of course we DID NOT really dropped MySQL. In fact, we now have more MySQL in openSUSE then we ever had! Do I got your attention? Read on 😉
For those who didn’t know, last week there was an event called LinuxExpo in Prague. And we off course went there with the Czech part of openSUSE Boosters team to talk about openSUSE. Other colleagues also helped with running openSUSE booth. And some of our community members we standing around talking to people as well.
We had our HP TouchSmart machine with us (same one as we had on FOSDEM), but this time we had only one of them. But to make things more attractive for visitors, we took steering wheel with pedals with us and we had Torcs preinstalled. So people wasn’t only touching our desktop and playing with camera, but also racing.
During last two week I was among the other things investigating how to implement search through all openSUSE web pages. As part of our Umbrella project, we want to make all our webs look unified and search through all of them is a part of this goal. So what I tried and what are my conclusions? Let’s see…
Customized Google Search
First idea would be to use Google search. They are offering customized search for anyones web. They are good at searching and we wouldn’t need implement anything by ourself. Other upside of this approach is that we wouldn’t need any infrastructure for this. They will let us use their machines.
Few weeks ago I was at FOSDEM. It was really amazing experience. I meet many interesting people, learned quite some thing and I returned full of enthusiasm. Open Source events are really great.
But all the fun wasn’t over even after the FOSDEM. I spent few more days in Bruxelles attending MySQL packagers meeting organized by SUN/Oracle. We spent quite some time talking to each other. We learned what MySQL people are doing and how. And they learned how do we deal with MySQL and what is troubling us. And many good things will come from this.
I really like our openSUSE Community. Do you remember that before 11.2 release there was a possibility to try new openSUSE without installing it? Well, our community member Jaromír Červenka did it again! Original blogpost in Czech can be found here. For those who don’t speak Czech, some basic overview in English.
Once upon the time, there was a virtual machine. It was using KVM and it was managed by gentle libvirt. But it was kind of lonely. But as it was young and fresh new openSUSE, it wanted to see more people. So Červajz made a passage for it through the firewall. And now it runs ssh, vnc and even web service and it can talk to everybody.