A better to install Google Chromium browser on openSUSE

I noticed that I forgot to install Google Chromium on my netbook. Unforgiveable.

Off to http://software.opensuse.org/search 

Key in Chromium in the search box and hit Search.

You will see the 1-Click install button a little lower. Click on it, sit back and enjoy your ride.

Note if you have missed it, this is for openSUSE only.

And they say GNU/Linux is hard...sheesh

Credits to http://ariya.blogspot.com/2009/10/chromium-on-opensuse.html

Ubuntu to store copies of all users' address books

Everywhere I turn to nowadays it's always cloud this and that. To those clueless people, IT IS NOT NEW!

What is called cloud computing has been around for ages. If you have ever used an online FTP/File server to up/download stuff, used Gmail as your primary office and email suite, then you have been a cloud head all these time.

And now Canonical in all their effort to take a piece of the cloud action decides to sync all address books and Tomboy notes to the one.ubuntu.com. An excerpt from Elliot Murphy's mailing post :

This release was uploaded to Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) a few hours ago, narrowly beating the final release freeze, so it will have a LOT of new users. We're putting the final touches on the server side of https://one.ubuntu.com and by the time Ubuntu 9.10 is released on October 29th every single Ubuntu user will have an address book stored in CouchDB that replicates with one.ubuntu.com, and Tomboy notes that are replicated via a web API at the application but then stored in CouchDB and carried along in the CouchDB replication that we have set up. Optionally they can also store all their Firefox bookmarks in CouchDB and have those replicated as well. We'll be doing our best to help teach application developers to use CouchDB in order to "cloud-enable" their apps. A couch on every desktop!

You can read the full post here.

What are they smoking? Ubuntu so far has done much good to the FOSS world. Is this a sign they want to be evil? I certainly hope not.

Malaysian Government FOSS Conference - MyGOSSCON 2009

OSCC MAMPU will organise MyGOSSCON 2009 from November 5th to 6th at PICC (Putrajaya International Convention Centre).

This this the Government of Malaysia's premier FOSS event that bring together government organisations, OSS community and the industry to share on how OSS is being used to transform the public service delivery and create unprecedented value proposition for the business organisation.

The conference theme for this year, “Leveraging OSS To Ride The Economic Wave” focus on information technology implementation in the current global economic scenario where governments and business organisations are continuously seeking innovative, practical and viable solutions. It is especially in times such as these where the value proposition and case for OSS can be demonstrated.

The call for papers is now open.

For further information please go to the conference portal http://mygosscon.oscc.org.my/2009

Of being sick and the timing

Great, just woke up about an hour and a half ago. Now what? Responded to some mailing list post, in retrospect may not have been the best decision for someone who is still hazy.

The medication for my fever indeed worked so well that I found myself sleeping most of the time the last couple of days; if only it was continuous sleep and not waking up every few hours or so and feeling gloomy. Seriously, why can't the doctor just gave me something that will knock me out for say 6 hours at a stretch or something?

My fever came about at the worst possible time of the month, I missed two workshops back-to-back. Why can't I get sick over a long weekend or something?

Ok now I am mostly cured of my fever and am wide awake at 230am in the morning. Simply marvelous. Got a text message from the boss reminding me of an important meeting at 9am (any meeting that is ever unimportant?).

Maybe popping another em pills will do the trick? Great, chemically induced slumber. Ah well, time to get some water and perchance to sleep.

Some Stuff for Nasir

An excellent guide here for enabling your Broadcom wifi:

http://www.susegeek.com/networking/fix-bcm4311431243214322-wireless-in-opensuse-111-and-earlier/

Just gotta watch out on the kernel version. If you are unsure check it out by typing :

uname -a

For us HP Mini 2140 users, it is usually the pae kernel.

For multimedia stuff :

you can easily turn it into a rocking multimedia machine....Just navigate to :

http://opensuse-community.org/Restricted_Formats/11.1

And then choose you desktop environment click on the the codecs-gnome.ymp or codecs-kde.ymp files.

By default GNOME is the selected at installation time for openSUSE 11.1.

Select open with and just follow the prompts.

One-click install is an extremely cool feature for the openSUSE platform. There are many one-click installs available for instance:

Broadcom Wireless
http://www.susegeek.com/networking/fix-bcm4311431243214322-wireless-in-opensuse-111-and-earlier/

NVIDIA Drivers
http://en.opensuse.org/NVIDIA

ATI Drivers
http://en.opensuse.org/ATI

There are lots more one-click installs on the Net. Google is your friend.

Cheers...

SLED 11 on my HP 2140 - Part Deux

I finally removed SLED 11 from my HP 2140 Mininote. What happened was a case of itchy fingers. I added openSUSE OSS and Non-OSS repos and accidentally did a "zypper up" without looking.

Urggh, it updated alright just that after a shutdown it refused to boot cited some issues with the / (root) partition. Ah well, it worked well while it lasted.

No noticeable performance issue when I was doing SLED 11. It was getting kinda boring coz it just worked! But I was pleasantly surprised that it was bundled with OpenOffice.org 3.1; IIRC, OO.o 3.1 was not even released when SLED 11 was launched back in March.

Yeah I know it's quite sad to be so darn excited over a boring old office suite....

On the other hand, the same firewall issues from its openSUSE upstream is still present in SLED 11. It seems that when the firewall is up you can't connect to a SMB share or a CUPS server (though port 631 is explicitly opened for incoming, just like in Fedora).

I just pulled down the firewall and downloaded and installed Shorewall. Ahh..at last some sanity.

The multimedia support in SLED 11 is quite spotty at times. Well, the playback was superb with no issues of lagging or video artifacts but the available codecs available are just very limited.

While Moonshine was installed to allow playback of WMA and WMV files, I found that more esoteric file formats such as MKVs and RMVBs simply wont play nice with Totem or Xine. Heck even some xvid (or divx AVIs) files won't play. I have tons of AVIs and RMVBs, that won't do.

So I added Packman's repo:

#zypper ar http://ftp.skynet.be//pub/packman/suse/11.1 Packman

Added the "restricted bits" like gstreamer-0_10-plugins-ugly and gstreamer-0_10-plugins-bad and libxine1-codecs.

And back to multimedia goodness.

But then a thought sank in; since each openSUSE version only has support for 24 months and SLED 11 could potentially be used for far longer than that, what will happen when Packman decides to dump the 11.1 repo?

I mean if I never format the netbook then perhaps I could live with it. But never is a big word and the techie in me will never hear of it, never formatting my Linux installation means I hardly do stuff to it. I cannot say for others but sometimes my frack ups are so huge it requires nothing less than a rebuild.

At least with a RHEL Desktop there is the RPMFusion repo. Hmm..unsure about going all Shadowman for my netbook since Fedora 11 absolutely hates the on-board Marvell LAN and decides to ignore my Broadcom wifi. At least with only one connection I can do a yum for wl-broadcom.

Ah well, back to the green embrace of the Geeko.

Well, bye bye SLED 11, it was a joy.

If only it was a joke.....

Today's lunch was an elightening affair. A good friend of mine shared with me an interesting story relating to his beloved's job interview for a science officer in an un-named Government agency.

Well, this lady have years of experience in her line and was not all bothered by a pre-interview test. So off she went to book up on the impending test. Seems all are normal.

Until she saw the questions. Instead of questions to test her technical competency or some of those mind-twisting IQ questions supposingly to see how smart or sane you are, she was presented with retarded questions like, "What was the motto of the PM's first 100 days", "Which country did the PM went to last?".

WTF? Seems like it's more of a loyalty test than anything else.

I really hope it is a joke. I really do. But then again the ruling regime no longer surprises me with its foot in mouth policy.