» List of openSUSE packages

Here is a little shell snippet to get the list of all the RPM packages that ship with e.g. openSUSE 11.3 (for other releases, just change the URL accordingly):

curl -Ls http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.3/repo/oss/INDEX.gz \ | zgrep '\.rpm$' | grep '^./suse' \ | cut -f4 -d/ | cut -f1,2,3 -d. \ | sort -fu

» Search and save the rainforest

Ecosia is a search engine that is powered by Bing and Yahoo in cooperation with the WWF: 80% of sponsored link ad revenues are spent on a WWF project to save some square meters of the rainforest in Brazil. "Some" is relative as, at the time of writing, it already covers four times the surface of Belgium :) More details can be found on the Ecosia.org website.

» openSUSE 11.3 released

There we are, openSUSE 11.3 has just been released to the masses :) Webpin (our package repository indexer and search engine) has also finished feeding itself with most 11.3 package repositories. And there is also a new version (1.2.2) of the webpin command-line client that supports 11.3.

» Even shorter openSUSE repository URLs: guessing the distro

I updated the documentation about even shorter and more portable URLs to openSUSE build service repositories. The thing is, the zypp stack (zypper and YaST2) send the version of the openSUSE it is running on as an HTTP header when performing an "add repo" operation. That is now used on the server side when a version is not specifically mentioned in the URL. e.g.: zypper ar -r http://r.opensu.se/network:utilities.repo

» openSUSE 11.3RC1 LXDE screencast

Our good friend and contributor Lee "oldcpu" Matheson did a nice screencast of the very lightweight LXDE desktop on openSUSE 11.3 RC1. LXDE on openSUSE is quite an interesting undertaking, as it was completely pushed, driven and implemented by members of our community, without a single minute being spent on time sponsored by Novell ;) Andrea Florio did most of the work and lead the charge from the beginning, so kudos to him as well. Definitely a nice addition to our already brilliant distribution. And thanks to oldcpu for his work, check it out!

• screencast of LXDE on openSUSE 11.3RC1
• same, without background music

» Shorter .repo URLs

A few days ago, I blogged about using r.opensu.se for shorter package repository URLs, including passing e.g. http://r.opensu.se/network:utilities/11.2/r to zypper ar -r to add a repository. Turned out it didn't work, because zypper wouldn't follow the redirect. So I rewrote that part by handing over such URLs to a CGI script that reverse proxies the .repo file from http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/ (it fetches the proper .repo URL and passes the result to zypper). To cut the long story short, this stuff actually works now :): zypper ar -r http://r.opensu.se/network:utilities/11.2/r

» opensuse-community.org an attack page

Apparently, the wiki on our opensuse-community.org website has been compromised. At least, so says Google ;) Well yeah, the blame is on me, the Mediawiki instance there is really, really outdated and I didn't keep up with security patches and upgrades. Sorry about that. I just spent a night installing the most recent Mediawiki version on another server (the one hosting the whole opensu.se sites), and moving over the content (I didn't keep the history though, we hardly need it). Until the DNS entry of opensuse-community.org is transferred to the other IP address, I've put a global URL forward to w.opensu.se Once the transfer is done, I shall poke Google to re-assess the security on the domain, and remove the current "attack page" protection. In the mean time, to avoid the safe browsing protection in Google searches, Firefox and Chromium, use the URL w.opensu.se It also hosts the subpixel repository and the 1-click-install YMP files. Just so you know. We're taking care of it. Slowly, but we do ;)