One of the great things we’ve got at openSUSE is openSUSE Build Service. Web service where we can commit sources and recipes and it will produce bunch of binaries for various distributions. Not just for openSUSE. We are friendly people and we love to work together with other distributions. After all, we all have a common goal – make open source succeed and defeat common enemies (some greedy people trying to steal some of our freedoms). OBS follows this path and it is a great tool that can help anybody to package his software for any distribution. It is easy to use and easy to get involved. We even have a public instance where anybody can submit a data and use package for his own purpose. If you want to build a package just for Fedora, we will let you do that. Of course we will be much happier if you’ll consider building it for openSUSE as well, but we don’t force you to do so.

Last week I was at LinuxTag in Berlin. It was a great event. This time it was my second year there. I really enjoyed the first year and so I did this time as well. I spoke to many people, learned new interesting stuff and my todo list got again somehow longer 😉 And I believe that I also showed some interesting stuff to the people at our booth. I was speaking about GNOME Shell to anybody who happened to be nearby and everybody liked it! Good work, GNOME guys! I’m glad I was able to be there and I want to share few pictures from the event with you, so even if you couldn’t make it there, you’ll see at least a little bit of what we were doing. We had a lot of fun 😉

My last but not least GSoC idea. This is about actual tool that already exists but is currently a little bit broken and needs rewrite with a bigger picture in mind.

This post is about one idea for GSoC 2011 regarding openSUSE Connect. I already wrote about it some time ago, but now is time to elaborate a little bit more. First of all, let me state, that I already found a qualified student, that wants to work on this idea and that has also some good suggestions. So I’m not searching for a student with this post, but I want to share with you the goals of this project and why I think it is important.

Last week I managed to attend virtual openSUSE 11.4 Release party in Second Life. I got registered there especially to able to attend this event so it took me some time to figure out how it all works. Although I’m still learning how Second Life works, I’m now able to perform basic tasks and move around freely. Big thanks to Morgane Marquis for helping me. I’m still learning new stuff and it’s fun.

Another of GSoC ideas that I volunteered to mentor for our GSoC was adding support for BitBake to the openSUSE Build Service. In this post I want to talk about why do I think that BitBake support for openSUSE Build Service will be useful and why do I think that OpenEmbedded is actually pretty cool.

Last week I started introducing my GSoC ideas. This is continuation of that post series. Today I’ll be writing about OpenID provider plugin for Elgg, what is it good for and why we need it.

You must already heard about this from everybody. Google Summer of Code 2011 is nearby and openSUSE wants to participate. Currently we are collecting ideas and mentors and we are going to apply. I also came up with few projects and volunteered to mentor them. I saw Thomas Thym introducing his GSoC ideas and I think it’s great to write a blog posts that introduce projects. So I’ll join and here comes the first project that many of you were waiting for – SaX 3.

Hackweek ended over a week ago. It was a lot of fun. I hope that some of you enjoyed it at least as much as I did. Unfortunately (or luckily? :-D), right after the Hackweek I was traveling to attend two conferences (firstly Znalosti 2011 in Slovakia and then FOSDEM (will blog about FOSDEM later)). Because of that I didn’t wanted to deploy what I was working on and I delayed the blogpost as well. So what was I working on? On our precious pastebin. My original idea was to make connection between openSUSE Paste and openSUSE Connect. It ended a little bit differently. Hackweek 6 plan When I was looking into technologies that could make such connection possible I decided to go for OpenID. It is in our (Boosters) long term backlog, to get rid of iChain and convert to OpenID. So I decided that OpenID is the right way to go 😉 First obvious feature that I implemented is that you can now log in using your OpenID. Why should you do that? Because logged users are not considered spammers regardless of how many links they are trying to paste. Some people already hit my quick hack to prevent spam robots from pasting too much. But that’s not all yet. You’ll also have your own personal list consisting of all your pastes. And you can even delete them! You can also create a key that applications will use to authenticate in openSUSE Paste to paste as you! Applications still need to be updated though. Other thing that I wanted to create was OpenID provider integrated into openSUSE Connect. I investigated few OpenID servers, but in the end I didn’t succeeded in time. Maybe next Hackweek. Hackweek 6 outcome

As all of you know already, Hackweek number 6 started yesterday. What I’ll be doing? Last Hackweek I started with project to run pastebin for openSUSE. Thanks to you I received quite some feedback. Mostly positive. The rest that wasn’t entirely positive contained some feature requests 😀 I guess it can count also as positive feedback in the end. One big feature was already implemented. Our pastebin support image pastes as well as code one. This was done mainly to help Sirko and our artwork team. Although user interface wasn’t really intuitive, it worked (UI is much better now in git repo, will be deployed in the end of the week). Other feature people asked for was ability to log in. So they’ll have their own history, control over their pastes and they’ll be able to skip spam checker (some people really need to paste something that looks like spam). So I decided that this Hackweek I’ll be working on this feature. Currently I got OpenID working for authenticating users. But there is still many features missing and I’ll need to find a way how to make it work within our openSUSE infrastructure. So far I didn’t succeeded in getting OpenID from our servers. So first two days are over and I made some progress, but there is still long way to go.