NSA poster by David Westerfield

Recently, thanks to SOIT chairman Marek Mahut I heard about Clean IT Project. This project is supported by European Union and if you look at their site, the first thing you’ll see is one very disturbing paragraph. Paragraph that speaks about the need to fight terrorism and terrorist groups on Internet as they can misuse it to promote their activities, synchronize their actions and do some other evil deeds. What’s disturbing about that? Well, we all know how terrorists are used nowadays. Usually when somebody mentions terrorism, it is because he needs an excuse to get more power, limit our freedom or spend a lot of money on some meaningless project. And from the first paragraph it really looks like attempt for massive Internet censorship, restrictions and repressions. But after reading through the web, it gets a little bit better. Looks like the whole project is about discussion between governments and Internet providers about what they can do and what is possible. Discussions are good, right? And no legal output, just the guide lines and best practices. So it looks quite harmless now, doesn’t it? But there were still several things bothering me… As there was a contact e-mail provided, I wrote a short e-mail with few questions. Yesterday I got an answer so I want to share it with the public. You can read whole e-mail with two minor alterations. I changed formating a little bit (just white spaces and line breaks to make it more readable) and I left out e-mail address (because I don’t like spammers). If you don’t want to read the whole story, I will just summarize…

You all know that openSUSE is getting it’s ARM port, right? That many people is working on it hard every day. And there is big progress going on. Actually because of this great progress, results get published not as often (as Factory is changing all the time, obs doesn’t keep up with binary publishing). So if you want update your device, you are eagerly checking obs and watching number of packages being build at the moment dropping and dropping and where it is almost done and almost ready to be published, somebody fixes gcc and everything starts again 😀 But if you are patient, packages will get published eventually. And then you can be happy and play around. And so do I 😀 I have my ASUS Transformer, which is a great device and since it got openSUSE chroot, it is better then ever! So I wanted to share my excitement 😉 On 12.1 launch party I had a talk about openSUSE on ARM and I showed zypper running on ARM, today I’m going to show you YaST 😉 Reminds you of something? Yes, I published few photos of YaST on ARM in 2010 as well. But this time, it looks like openSUSE ARM port is going to live long and prosper!

As you may know, Google Code in is in progress. It is a great opportunity for high school students to participate in open source and compete in contributing to the projects. And I happened to be one of the mentors with few tasks contributing to our openSUSE Paste. I already mentioned one that was completed some time ago, today I’m going to write about two more!!!
Let’s start with non-technical stuff. As a result of one task openSUSE Paste got itself a logo! Actually several logos. You can get all variants from git. All were designed by Prajwala Parameshwa. But I admit, that I complained and kind of influenced the direction, so if you don’t like them, it’s my fault. If you like them, all glory to the artist who made them 😉 Why is there so many variants? There are three color variations – grey (just an ordinary paper), green (we are green distribution after all) and yellow (as sticky notes are). And for each color there is variant with/without border and with/without Geeko stamp on it. So we can choose different logo for every occasion 😉
Now let’s go to the technical stuff. You know that there are stupid spammers who are interested in spamming our beloved pastebin? And from time to time I go through the database and clean it up. Sometimes people ask me to. So I decided that it would be great, if I can just give some rights around to the people and create a group of moderators that can delete any paste that is clearly a spam or otherwise doesn’t belong to the pastebin. So I wrote a task about that and the same student that implemented the possibility to use use GET presets finished this task and made it possible for people from moderators group (currently that’s just me) to delete any post directly from the web. So if I know you and trust you and if you want to be moderator, ask for rights (having OpenID that works with openSUSE Paste is required) 😉

This is going to be a really short post. You all know, that SuSE was bought by Novell and Novell was bought by Attachmate, right? I know, boring business stuff, who cares, let’s code… Bear with me, it will be short 😉 When Novell bought SUSE, companies were merging into each other. Part of the last purchase by Attachmate was separating SUSE from Novell into its own business unit. So we are not Novell anymore. But since Novell times, we had this big Novell sign over our reception. But when I came to work today, I saw that somebody made a workaround for that 😉 And that’s what I wanted to share with you. Two photos – before and after 😉

There has been a lot going on in MySQL community and I didn’t blogged about MySQL for some time. So this is a small update regarding MySQL in openSUSE Build Service and in openSUSE in general. This post is intended to let you know what, where and in which version we’ve got in Build Service 😉 And as I recently dropped server:database:UNSTABLE repo, everything is now in server:database, so the where part is quite easy 😉

Last Friday we had a 12.1 launch party in Prague. This time it was in SUSE office. Why so long after the release? We wanted to make sure to have some new shiny factory made DVDs for our guests. And as we waited, it happened to be nearby St. Nicolas day. For those of you that don’t know Czech traditions, on St. Nicolas day, we have people dressed as St. Nicolas, devil and angel going through the city, visiting children. Good children will get some snacks from St. Nicolas as a reward, bad children will get potatoes or coal from the devil as a reward. We wanted to exploit this tradition a little bit and thus every guest got a little gift from St. Nicolas. As they were our community, sure they were all good 😉 But just in case, I dressed a little bit devilish 😉

It’s been a long time since I posted anything about openSUSE Paste. Frankly, there wasn’t much to write about. Last thing I wrote about was OpenID integration. And I found out, that not so many people actually use it or know about it. So I will post about it again sometime 😉 But more importantly there is Google Code-In running an I created task for openSUSE Paste and it is already completed! I have two more prepared for second round, so I hope there will be other improvements in near future as well 😉