» Novell Client 2.0 public beta

Novell just released a public beta of their Novell Client for Linux (version 2.0). It is available here, both for SLED 10 SP1 and openSUSE 10.2 (at last!). Note that unfortunately, it's as an ISO and not as a package repository, but well (loop-mounting to the rescue). Will test it ASAP at work.

» SCO lost, part one

Not that we didn't expected this to happen, but now it's "official" (or a court ruling, rather): Novell owns the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights. Yes, Novell, not SCO. "SCO lost, part two" will obviously be about SCO vs IBM. Read the full story at Groklaw.

» Interviewed

Anica published my "People of openSUSE" interview on news.opensuse.org, and it's just the beginning of a big batch of them. And an interview of Stephan "coolo" Kulow, the new openSUSE project manager, has been published as well. Thanks a lot to Anica for her work, I really think it's an excellent initiative, likely to help building some bridges amongst people in our community.

» webpin CLI 0.8.1, moved to openSUSE Build Service

I've just built webpin 0.8.1, which is just a bugfix release (fixes a crash when there are no mirrors configured in smart, thanks to DimiG for reporting + a few small fixes for the dark theme). I also removed webpin from my own repository -- if you're interested in using webpin and keeping up with new versions, please add the openSUSE:Tools repository from the Build Service to your favourite package manager. Quick instructions are here: http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/files/webpin/README

» OpenProj: a serious MS Project killer

Now this (openproj) looks like a serious MS Project killer ! (thanks to Alberto Passalacqua for the link) It's opensource and free of charge, written in Java and hence runs on many platforms (including Linux, MacOSX and Windows). Licensed under the OSI-approved CPAL 1.0 (Common Public Attribution License) which looks OK (grants right to redistribute and modify, as well as forces availability of source code) and sources are said to be available really soon. Gave it a quick shot and it really seems to be sporting all of Project's features (computes effort to duration, etc...) -- it even looks a lot like Project's UI, I just hope it doesn't have all the bugs.. I guess not ;) w00t!

» Webpin CLI 0.8

And here's 0.8, with somewhat hackish (hardcoded) colour themes, which is quite useful when you're using a terminal with a dark background. See the screenshot below: the first call to webpin uses the "dark" theme (--theme=dark), the second one uses the default "light" theme (--theme=light): Note that you may also configure it permanently in your ~/.webpinrc by adding the following two lines: [Output] theme = dark

» Webpin CLI 0.7

Just released and built webpin 0.7, with the following new additions:

• proxy support, but currently "only" HTTP and Basic authentication (not HTTPS nor Digest)
• smart support: when smart is installed and you pass --smart, webpin displays whether the repositories containing package search matches are in your channel list in smart
• zypper support: same as above, but the option is --zypper and.. obviously it compares with the list of repositories configured in zypper (requires to run webpin as root, unfortunately, that's a limitation of zypper)
• updated man pages
• started to modularize it a little to unclutter and hence the packages are not noarch any more, as stuff is installed under %py_sitedir/webpin

Update: now also available from the openSUSE Build Service, in these repositories: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/openSUSE:/Tools/ (add the subdirectory that matches your distribution).

» VNC+SSH on an existing display

I frequently use this trick to connect to a remote X display:

ssh -L 5900:localhost:5900 remotehost \
   'x11vnc -localhost -nolookup -nopw -display :0'

where remotehost is.. well, the hostname or IP address of the remote server. Once you see "The VNC desktop is...", open another terminal and type the following command (still on the client):

vncviewer localhost:0

What it actually does is open a ssh tunnel that forwards from port 5900 on your local client to the port 5900 on the remote server, into x11vnc. x11vnc connects to an existing X display and exposes it through the VNC protocol. The second command is just to connect your favourite VNC client to the local port 5900 (which then goes through the encrypted ssh tunnel and is forwarded to x11vnc on the server). All you need to do is to enable ssh on the server (which is probably already the case) and install x11vnc on the server. You can find my openSUSE RPMs of x11vnc in the X11:RemoteDesktop repository in the openSUSE Build Service (choose the appropriate subdirectory, depending on the openSUSE version you're using). More information about Karl Runge's brilliant x11vnc here: http://www.karlrunge.com/x11vnc/