openSUSE Flash drive

I have this idea nagging me for a while about how to make our ambassadors live (and mine) easier. From time to time you need a flash drive with Live version of our favorite openSUSE to show it to people. Currently it is really simple to create one using dd. But once you do it, you cannot use flash drive for “normal” purposes. People somehow doesn’t appreciate flash drive that doesn’t contain vfat. So this project is about redoing openSUSE flash drive to make it way cooler and more usable.

This is just a little note related to my last blog about Jolla. I wrote that I’m pretty fine with messaging application although I don’t have many SMS yet in my phone. Well, I fixed that 🙂 I imported all my SMS messages from the backup of my Andriod phone.

I searched around and I found really interesting thread on talk.maemo.org that describes how to import SMS from n900. As they are doing it via csv, it was easy to put together a simple one-liner that would produce the csv from my SMS database. Now how to do it…

On Monday I wrote about my new amazing cellphone – Jolla – and one of the comments/complains I got was that I haven’t said anything about how you actually use the phone to communicate. Well, I don’t use cellphone to make calls or send SMS most of the time, but since I was asked about it and I already have phone for almost two weeks, I gathered few SMS and calls. So today it will be about communicating using Jolla 🙂

It’s been a week since my new cell phone – Jolla arrived. I was probably the last of the first ones (people who preordered) due to some issues with gmail (almost as if Google didn’t want me to switch from Android to Sailfish 😀 ). But as I finally got my new phone, it’s time to share my first impressions 🙂

Let’s start with obligatory unboxing. Box is nice. It opens a little bit unusually by sliding out. Content is pretty much what would you expect. If you are more interested, take a look at pictures bellow. I quickly opened it and started to play with what was inside 🙂 First setup was was pretty ordinary nowadays – wizard asking some questions for your setup – with few exceptions/things I would like to mention. First was that Jolla asked me for my name and it didn’t had a Czech keyboard, so I couldn’t write my name with all accents. I ended up hunting them character by character from various keyboards for other nations, but I managed to succeed (thanks to Polish, French, and some others) 🙂 There is already a request to fix it and workaround available in the forums. But I don’t complain, I understand that we are small country (although I know surprisingly a lot of Jolla users from my country) and thus we are not first priority. Other thing that surprised me more (I would say pleasantly) was language selection. I was looking what options are there and wanted to select US English. It is not there! There is only UK English 😀 So no simplified English on Jolla, although I haven’t come across anything where would I notice. Part of the initial setup was also tutorial to show the gestures. I already read about most of them upfront, so no big surprise there.

Everybody knows PulseAudio. It’s a really famous piece of software, some love, some hate it, some love to flame about it. I quite like like and I still haven’t flamed about it enough, so this is my turn to flame a little bit…

Why I like it?

I started using PulseAudio few years back. The reason why I gave it a try was a network mode. I used laptop quite a lot and I had big speakers connected to my desktop and I wanted to use them while lying in my bed. That kinda worked for a while but I found it not that interesting in the end. But as I was playing with PulseAudio, I found other interesting features I liked. Like having separate volume control for every application or option to boost the volume. So I started using it and kept on using it.

Recently I had some time to do some clenaups/changes/updates in server:database repo regarding MySQL (and MariaDB). Nothing too big. Well actually, there are few little things that I want to talk about and that is the reason for this blog post, but still, nothing really important…

MySQL 5.5, 5.6 and 5.7

MySQL 5.6 is stable for some time already, so it’s time to put it in the action. So I sent the request to include it in Factory and therefore in openSUSE 13.1. There is off course a list of interesting stuff you might want to take a look at before you update. If you don’t want to update, you can install mysql-community-server_55 from server:database repo and stay a little bit longer with version 5.5. On the other hand, staying with old versions is boring, so you can also switch to mysql-community-server_57 which provides new MySQL 5.7. So if you are into databases and especially into MySQL and forks (we have MariaDB 5.5 and 10.0 as well), we have plenty of toys for you to play with.

This Monday I was the first time guest and speaker at (contrary to it’s name) local Czech conference Europen. It was interesting experience. And I would like to share a bit of what I experienced. What made it different from conferences I usually speak at was the audience. Not many Linux guys and quite some Windows guys. I was told that this conference is for various IT professionals and people from academia interested in Open Source.