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R is available for openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise on the openSUSE Build Service. Unfortunately it is not so easy to find because the search engine requires more than two letters in the search. However, you can find a complete list of 1-click install links here. Thanks to Detlef Steuer who took care of preparing the page

I have just packaged enGrid for openSUSE 11.2. You can install it from this page, using 1-click installation.

Enjoy

JabRef is a very good multi-platform (it works on Linux, Mac, Windows) tool to manage BibTeX files, with advanced functionalities like automatic management of journal abbreviations, integration with Lyx and many more. You can find the RPM for openSUSE 11.2 in my repository on the openSUSE buildservice.

Enjoy

Happy holidays to everyone reading my blog!

Today I’m stuck at home, since there are no buses and the university is closed due to inclement weather. In these pictures you can see how much snow it came in one night!

Kile, the KDE LaTeX editor, does not pull texlive as dependency in openSUSE 11.2. To have a fully working installation, simply install the texlive-latex package. You can do that very quickly typing the following command in a root terminal:

• zypper in texlive-latex

and answering “yes” to proceed.

Installing OpenFOAM^® on openSUSE 11.2 is very easy, and can be done using, at least in part, the system tools, to take advantage of the new compiler. The steps of the procedure are the following:

• Use YaST to install
  • the C/C++ development pattern in YaST
  • cmake
  • libqt4-devel (required to build paraview)
• Create a directory called OpenFOAM in your home directory
  • mkdir ~/OpenFOAM
• Enter the OpenFOAM directory
  • cd ~/OpenFOAM
• Download the OpenFOAM sources from the GIT repository
  • git clone git://repo.or.cz/OpenFOAM-1.6.x.git
• Download the third party packages from the OpenCFD website
• Extract the third party packages corresponding to your architecture in the ~/OpenFOAM directory
• Rename the ThirdParty-1.6 into ThirdParty-1.6.x
• Remove the following directories from the ThirdParty directory containing
  • cmake
  • gcc
• Edit ~/OpenFOAM/OpenFOAM-1.6.x/etc/settings.sh to set
  • compilerInstall=System
• Open your ~/.bashrc file in a text editor and add the line:
  • . $HOME/OpenFOAM/OpenFOAM-1.6.x/etc/bashrc

  and source your ~/.bashrc file with the command (thanks to friesenjunge )

  • source ~/.bashrc

• Enter the ThirdParty-1.6.x directory
  • cd ~/OpenFOAM/ThirdParty-1.6.x
• Rebuild Paraview with the following commands (you need qt4 development libraries installed in your system. Check the README file coming with OpenFOAM for a list of working versions)
  • rm -rf paraview-3.6.1/platforms
  • ./makeParaView
• Enter the ~/OpenFOAM/OpenFOAM-1.6.x directory
  • cd ~/OpenFOAM/OpenFOAM-1.6.x
• Rebuild OpenFOAM typing
  • ./Allwmake

This will rebuild the whole OpenFOAM and paraview, and provide you a fully working installation. However, the paraFoam reader might have some problem to properly show results in paraview. I could not solve them, however there is an alternative reader available on the OpenFOAM unofficial wiki, that can be compiled as follows. Note that the installation procedure assumes you have OpenFOAM 1.6.x installed and properly configured as explained above, and that paraview has been compiled successfully on your system.

• Download the code from here.
• Extract the archive in a directory of your choice. It is not important where, since the reader will be installed in your OpenFOAM tree. I will assume you extracted it in ~/vtkPOpenFOAMReader-r173-20090920
• Create a directory where to build the reader. For convenience I will call it ~/vtkReader.
• Open a terminal and enter that directory
  • cd vtkReader.
• Type the command:
  • ccmake ~/vtkPOpenFOAMReader-r173-20090920
• You will see a screen generated from cmake.  Simply press “c” to configure.
• Another screen will appear with the following variables defined on the basis of your OpenFOAM installation
  • CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE
  • CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX
  • ParaView_DIR
• Accept the proposal by pressing “g” to generate the configuration file and exit.
• In the same terminal execute the commands
  • make
  • make install
• Copy the file pvFoam in ~/vtkPOpenFOAMReader-r173-20090920/BSD/ into your ~/OpenFOAM/OpenFOAM-1.6.x/bin directory, to be able to run paraFoam with pvFoam, exactly as done with paraFoam.
• Refer to ~/vtkPOpenFOAMReader-r173-20090920/readerPanel.pdf for details on the reader interface.

Enjoy

This offering is not approved or endorsed by OpenCFD Limited, the producer of the OpenFOAM software and owner of the OPENFOAM® and OpenCFD® trade marks.

Skype is provided pre-packaged for openSUSE for 32 bit systems. However the RPM can be used without difficulty also on 64 bit systems, since openSUSE transparently manages bi-architecture packages. Unfortunately the 32 bit RPM does not install all the dependencies it needs to work correctly, and you have to fix them by hand as follows:

• Install the skype rpm by typing in a root terminal: rpm -Uvh skype-2.1.0.47-suse.i586.rpm
• Open YaST software installer
• Search and select the following packages
  • xorg-x11-libXv-32bit
  • libqt4-32bit
  • libqt4-x11-32bit
• Accept the additional dependencies proposed by the installer and proceed with the installation

At this point, you should be able to run skype without any difficulty.

Enjoy

This is the first of a series of posts to help openSUSE users that started to use KDE 4, or are new to Linux. Why KDE? Well, I tried it just to see how it is, I went back to GNOME, and I was missing KDE already after a few hours, and only after two weeks of using it. KDE 4 is not finished yet: some part of the migration process from KDE 3 to KDE 4 is still going on, for example in the PIM (Personal Information Management) department, but the environment is fresh, clean, extremely fast and responsive even with desktop effects enabled. In other words, I think they are convincing me it is not the KDE I knew. In a certain sense KDE learned many lessons from GNOME, when it comes to the desktop experience. KDE devopers simplified the user experience significantly, without giving up on functionality and options. But they did more: they made desktop effect clean and working efficiently on Linux with kwin, which is much smoother and much less annoying than compiz, at least on my system. I’m sure GNOME won’t sleep. A lot of work is going on for GNOME 3.0, and I surely appreciate the fact they delayed the release of 3.0 to provide a stable release, which was not done by KDE with 4.0/4.1 creating a horrible experience for its users and causing a lot of troubles to the distributions which adopted it.

Let’s go back to the topic of this post. Dropbox has no client for KDE, and I use dropbox a lot. Installing nautilus-dropbox is not an option, because it pulls a lot of GNOME dependencies, and it uses nautilus. Luckily, the solution is simple, because dropbox does not actually need nautilus and can happily use konqueror or dolphin. How? With the following quick steps:

• Download dropbox proprietary daemon from their website (do not use the pre-packaged nautilus-dropbox for openSUSE)
  • openSUSE 32 bit
  • openSUSE 64 bit
• Extract the content of the file in your home directory (For example: /home/alberto). The directory created is called .dropbox-dist and it is hidden, so you won’t see it if your file manager is not showing hidden files
• Open a terminal and execute the command: ~/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd
• Follow the instructions on screen to configure your dropbox as usual. The remainder part of this procedure assumes you set your dropobox folder in the default position (~/Dropbox).
• Create a symbolic link to dolphin in order to have dropbox use it instead of nautilus, by giving the commands (you have to be root to do this)
  • su
  • ln – s /usr/bin/dolphin /usr/bin/nautilus
  • exit
• Download dropbox-servicemenu-kde to have service menu functions in the dropbox folder
• Extract the file and enter the directory that the extraction created
• Open a terminal there and execute: ./install.sh
• Finally, make the dropbox daemon start on KDE startup
  • Start KDE System Settings
  • Go to the Advanced tab
  • Select Autostart
  • Press the Add script button
  • Add the command: /home/<replace_with_your_username>/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd after replacing with <replace_with_your_username> with your username (For example, alberto in my case)
  • Select “Pre-KDE startup” in the dropdown list

That’s all. Enjoy!

The lastest version of openSUSE has just been released today. The list of updated packages can be found on DistroWatch. The release candidates of this release were extremely promising, and hopefully will be able to make me forget the bad experience had with openSUSE 11.1. I’ll try it during the next weekend, so, stay tuned

In the meanwhile, you can get it yourself from the openSUSE software portal.

Note: Users with nVidia cards can find the packaged drivers using this repository ftp://download.nvidia.com/opensuse/11.2/

Enjoy