I want to inform our users that thanks to the efforts of Philippe Makowski, we’ve got Firebird in openSUSE now. He took over the package we had in Build Service, rewrote spec file from scratch, fixed quite some errors and adjusted package in many ways. And as the result Firebird package was finally accepted yesterday (1st of September) into openSUSE Factory.

What is Firebird and why you should be interested? Firebird is open source RDBMS (relational database management system) and it is derived from Borland InterBase 6.0. It won SourceForge 4th Annual Community Choice Award in category Best Project for the Enterprise and was nominated in other categories as well. I can continue and mention features it has, but I think that the best approach will be to point you out to the following web page:

It is some time already since I encountered this game for the first time. I tried it because one guy on irc was speaking about how addictive it is. I didn’t believed him, tried it and became addicted. I overcome this addiction over the time. I’m not addicted anymore, but as this game is freely available I want to warn our users about this dangerous game 😉

So what is this game all about? Well, it is quite simple. You have to move boxes to get three or more same boxes in one line (either horizontal or vertical). When you achieve this, boxes will be destroyed. Your goal is to destroy boxes while they are on fields marked by green or yellow color. These fields will either vanish (green one) or get weaker (yellow one will turn into green one, chained boxes will get unchained). Level is finished when you destroy all marked fields (you can’t destroy all boxes as you get new one for every destroyed box). And why it isn’t so easy? Because you can move the box only if it will form the line.

Do you know what the HackWeek is about? Well probably most of openSUSE community members do. HackWeek is a week when we (at SuSE) don’t work. Well, we work but on anything we want and we don’t work on our regular duties. We can work with whoever we want and we can even take some community members to our workplace to help us. I’m really looking forward to this event. Well and as I’m quite a new at SuSE, this is my first HackWeek. So I’m even more excited.

This not really something new. Factory development is open for few weeks already. But what does this mean? What changed and how?

First thing that has changed is that our internal only tools doesn’t work anymore. So everybody has to use BuildService to send packages to the openSUSE. Even people inside. That’s a good. So now even community members can see how package is developed and developers will more probably notice submitrequests.

Currently there are several MySQL versions released by SUN. Latest version marked as stable is MySQL 5.1. This version is in build service for some time already and you may noticed that it is on it’s way to Factory (no yet there, but working on it). Other newer releases are 5.4 and 6.0. 5.4 is currently in beta stage and date of stable release should be announced later this year. 6.0 is in alpha stage and it might take quite some time till it will be released as stable.

After some discussions which happened on mailing list lately, I decided that server: database repository can use some more adjustments. Some people complained about changes I introduced with MySQL 5.1. One point of view is that using factory version on production server is a bad idea but on the other hand, where would you get something newer for your old openSUSE to let it survive a little bit longer before upgrade to newer version? I’d like to introduce following repository scheme which should solve these problems…

Do you know what Geeko Builder is? No? So let’s talk about it a little bit. Everybody probably knows who Geeko is. Geeko is that chameleon in SUSE logo. And what is Geeko Builder? It is a web application where you can dress up your Geeko. You can choose where to put him, what he should wear and few similar things. One disadvantage I found is that you have to choose from limited number of items and backgrounds available already in builder and you can’t upload your own background or item. After creating your Geeko, you can download your picture in big resolution and use it as a background or as an avatar. Other interesting thing is that after saving your Geeko, your image will appear in gallery where people can vote for it. And the best pictures will win some price in the end according to the site.