» FOSDEM 2009 deadline soonish

Reminder: if you would like to organise a Developer Room or Stand at FOSDEM 2009 on behalf of your Free or Opensource project, contact us before the deadline, which is soonish: Saturday 2008-11-22, 23:59 CET.

» smplayer 0.6.5.1: configuration migration

If you are using the excellent video player frontend smplayer that is available for openSUSE in the Packman repository and plan to upgrade to the latest 0.6.5.1 release, be aware that the author changed the smplayer configuration directory location, going from ~/.smplayer to the XDG standard compliant ~/.config/smplayer The application does not implement any automatic migration, so you need to do that yourself, as follows (you can simply copy/paste those two lines into a shell where you are logged in with your regular user account, not root):

mkdir -p ~/.config
mv ~/.smplayer ~/.config/smplayer

» openSUSE 11.1 countdown

The openSUSE release countdown banners have been updated, with new languages (pt_BR, hu, id, bg, jp and wa) as well as counting down to 11.1 It automatically localizes depending on the preferred language as configured in the user's browser, with support for the following languages: English, German, Czech, French, Danish, Russian, Polish, Dutch, Finnish, Spanish, Italian, Greek, Swedish, Croatian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Hungarian, Romanian, Slovenian, Chinese (traditional and Taïwan), Hindi, Bulgarian, Japanese and Walloon. Again, thanks a lot to everyone who contributed those translations. And as it is rendered on the server, it always points to the right number of remaining days before 11.1 release (diffed against 12:00 CET). The artwork is by Jakub "jimmac" Steiner.

Here is how to use it on your website/blog:

• normal version (256x256 px):
  <a href="http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_11.1"><img src="http://counter.opensuse.org/11.1/medium"/></a>
  
• small version (130x130 px):
  <a href="http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_11.1"><img src="http://counter.opensuse.org/11.1/small"/></a>
  
• large version (400x400 px):
  <a href="http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_11.1"><img src="http://counter.opensuse.org/11.1/large"/></a>

If you always want it to point to the latest distro release countdown, then just remove the /11.1/ part from the URL, e.g. <img src="http://counter.opensuse.org/medium"/> instead of <img src="http://counter.opensuse.org/11.1/medium"/>

» mpg123 1.6.0 in packman

Yesterday, I upgraded our mpg123 package in the Packman repository to the latest upstream version 1.6.0. I'm only blogging about it to inform that I've also split the package into more subpackages:

• libmpg123-0 contains the libmpg123.so.0 shared library as well as almost all the output modules, that are now installed under /usr/lib(64)/mpg123-0 instead of /usr/lib(64)/mpg123 in order to enable parallel installation of binary incompatible versions of mpg123 (that differ on their SONAME) as well as to be compatible with our shared library packaging policy
• the output plugins for the arts KDE sound system daemon as well as the esound GNOME sound system daemon have been moved into their own subpackages, respectively libmpg123-0-arts and libmpg123-0-esound, in order to minimize dependencies on the main package as well as because those sound daemons are pretty much obsolete nowadays, given that alsa can do software mixing of channels since quite some time and that GNOME has moved on to Pulseaudio on openSUSE 11.0 and later
• the mpg123 command-line program is contained in the package mpg123, as before, and obviously now requires the libmpg123-0 package

Basically, it just means that you shouldn't be surprised that suddenly there is a package libmpg123-0 that pops up if you upgrade the mpg123 package. Furthermore, if you want mpg123 or applications that use libmpg123.so.0 to send their output to the arts and/or esound daemons, you must additionally install the packages libmpg123-0-arts and/or libmpg123-0-esound, respectively.

» FOSDEM 2009 call for devrooms, stands, lightning talks

So here we are, Tias and I just published the call for devrooms, stands and lightning talks for the FOSDEM 2009 conference that will take place at the somewhat unusual date of 7th and 8th February 2009 in Brussels, Belgium.

» Bilski Decision, business methods patents begone ?

Very interesting read on Groklaw, and definitely good news for almost everyone in the IT industry. But I wouldn't conclude to Shantanu's "Microsoft Has A Problem: Software Patents Go Up In Smoke" for several reasons:

1. software patents aren't gone yet, not by any means, but the Bilski decision seems to at least discard the most ridiculous and invasive ones
2. we still have to see how that court decision translates into what the USPTO will grant as patents or not, as the fact that a patent should be granted or not doesn't really relate to what patent offices actually grant (just think of what the EPO has been doing for years)

Note that Microsoft has filed material against business methods patents together with Dell. This is understandable, because Microsoft is also frequently attacked on trivial patents. And thanks to Redhat for submitting material too. Looks like a great decision and a big step forward against software patents, but I'll believe it when I see it.