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OpenSUSE 11.0 was released on Thursday 19^th as scheduled in the release roadmap, and can be downloaded from the openSUSE site.

This version of openSUSE supports the 32bit, 64bit and PPC architectures, with a set of media constituted by the conventional, full featured DVD, the installable CD with the GNOME or KDE4 desktops, and the mini ISO CD for the network installation for the most experienced users.

The best innovations introduced in openSUSE 11.0 are listed in the sneak peeks written by Francis Giannaros, that you can read here. The detailed feature list can be found on the product highlights. The following list sums up the most important of them:

• Kernel 2.6.25.4
• gcc 4.3
• Xorg 7.3
• GNOME 2.22.1
• KDE 4.0.4 and 3.5.9
• Firefox 3.0
• OpenOffice 2.4
• Banshee 1.0

Installation

OpenSUSE 11.0 comes with a new, very elegant and clean installer, which has been redesigned both in the look and in the structure. The new installation based on images makes the installation process a lot faster and the automatic configuration significantly reduces the number of steps the user has to perform to configure his system. Of course the advanced configuration is always available, and it shows the usual YaST tools to set the details of the system up.

Hardware support

OpenSUSE hardware support has always been great, and this release keeps SUSE reputation. All the hardware of my DELL XPS m1330 was recognized immediately, including the wireless card and the webcam. The only detail which should be improved is the installation of the nVidia accelerated drivers, which still requires manual intervention, even if very reduced thanks to the 1-click technology.

GNOME

I think that the GNOME implementation of openSUSE 11.0 really deserves some special consideration. OpenSUSE has been a KDE distribution for years, with GNOME considered by many an inferior desktop in this distribution. After some releases (from 10.1 to 10.3), where the GNOME implementation improved, but still had some problems, openSUSE 11.0 clearly shows that GNOME and KDE now receive the same level of attention in openSUSE.

Of particular note is the amazing work done by Novell GNOME team for the implementation of PulseAudio, which was initially problematic for other distributions, with sound glitches when the system was under heavy workload. OpenSUSE has none of these problems: PulseAudio simply works out of the box, and the audio quality is amazing even when the whole CPU is used.

Configuring desktop effects in GNOME is really a 2 clicks operation, with the simplified tool included in the openSUSE GNOME Contol Center. You simply need to install the nVidia accelerated drivers and then to enable the effects. No need of complex configurations.

NetworkManager makes networking extremely easy, automatically reconnecting to your wireless network when it’s detected, and being able to manage mobile broadband, vpn and dsl connections with a single applet.

Banshee 1.0 include a large number of new features it would deserve a separate review to extensively comment all of them. The most interesting ones are the ability of reproducing videos, the integration with Last FM, the new engine to manage the media database, and the redesigned interface.

The new international clock integrates with the weather applet, to show the weather forecasts in each location listed, and of course, it can shows evolution appointments and to-do list, as it already did in its previous versions.

Some problem is present in YaST-gtk when managing printers, but the team has already fixed it and a patch should come through online updates very soon.

Conclusion

OpenSUSE 11.0 represents an important step forward for openSUSE. They got rid off of the package management problems introduced in openSUSE 10.1, which affected the distribution until openSUSE 10.3, and now they can be proud of having one of the fastest package managment tools in the Linux world. GNOME finally reached a good level of maturity, KDE is offered in two versions to grant stability to the users who need it and to provide cutting edge KDE 4 to those who want to experiment.

For the future. I think openSUSE needs to take some breath, working on stabilization and keeping to work on cleaning the distribution as they already did for openSUSE 11.0. I would like to see some more care for details (i.e. fully functional 1-click installs for codecs, well tested YaST modules, …), a less hurried release process to be sure that unexperienced user won’t find difficulties in accomplishing simple tasks.

However, great work Geeko!

Big Buck Bunny, the movie created using the open source software Blender and Gimp, is ready! You can see the trailer directly from the official site or buy the DVD. Great movie!

OpenSUSE 11.0 is close to its release, as you can see from the countdown below, and as usual also its Italian translations will arrive on time, thanks to the hard work of the translation team, which for this release is even bigger than for the previous one. You can see the translation statistics of our team here, and our position compared to other teams here.

Translations should be complete in openSUSE 11.0 starting from its Release Candidate 1, due on May 29. Please, if you test it, report all translations bug on bugzilla.novell.com, specifying where the translation mistake is (a screenshot attached to the bugreport is welcome), and assigning the bug to the Translation component of openSUSE 11.0.

I would like to thank the precious work of all openSUSE developers and especially of Karl Eichwalder at Novell, for his managing activity. Thank you also to all the members of the translation team I coordinated for this release:

• Andrea Florio
• Ezio Tonetto
• Giuseppe Bevacqua
• Giuseppe Salinaro
• Luca Giusti

A final thanks to all those who tried the beta releases and reported bugs. Have a lot of fun with this next release of openSUSE!

Today I visited Reimand Gardens in Ames, where I could admire various beautiful butterflies in the fascinating Butterfly Wing, where, after a very nice explanation about the varieties of butterflies present in the garden, you can literally walk among butterflies flying around you and admire them in all their beauty. The garden offers also Peter Pan’s path for kids, where you can sit surrounded by a very pleasurable set of trees and flowers, and an external path, where you can admire the roses collection (still not visible due to the long winter of this year), a nice small lake, birds, and of course flowers. You can see the pictures I took here.

OpenSUSE 11.0 beta 1 was released today, and it’s available through the openSUSE site. All openSUSE users are invited to test it, with particular care about the installer, the package manager and the audio system, which now implements PulseAudio. The most annoying bugs are reported here.

Note: If you use VirtualBox, there’s a simple fix to be able to use the X server. At the end of the installation, the system will present a text based login screen. As reported by Benjamin here, it’s enough to login as root and use these commands to fix X configuration:

sax2 -m 0=vesa
rcxdm restart

The first openSUSE translation round started on April 1^st, and as always since Novell opened the translation process, it involves a lot of openSUSE users and volunteers that provide high quality translations of the 179491 strings required to localise openSUSE, and make openSUSE accessible to more people.

Since the beginning of open translation at Novell, the number of languages added to the distribution grew significantly, including many minor ones, as it can be seen from the list of translation teams which reports 57 teams for the development versions of openSUSE,

This year a new and powerful instrument to manage translation, POAT, was added thanks to Gabriel, who developed it and is making translation work a lot easier.

As for openSUSE 10.3, I will coordinate the Italian translation team, which is now bigger and is already working on the development version of openSUSE 11.0.

The final translation round, excluding release notes, will end on April 30th, and the testing period will start on May 2nd and it will finish on May 29th. All openSUSE users are invited to carefully test translations during this period or before, and to report bugs using Novell Bugzilla. Please, do not directly e-mail about translation bugs to me.

Thanks in advance to everyone will help in making translations perfect!

As a user of OpenFOAM who received a lot of free help from the developers, I think that helping spreading the voice of the OpenFOAM training course is the minimum I can do.

ICON organizes an introductory course to OpenFOAM  on Thursday 3rd April and Friday 4th April 2008, at Beaumont House, Windsor, UK. The main goals are:

• Introduce C++ within the OpenFOAM context
• Explore the OpenFOAM code structure and commonly used classes
• Analyse, modify and create basic solvers and utilities
• Understand and customise basic OpenFOAM libraries

You can find further information on the ICON site.

Last weekend it was a nice one in Ames, not too cold but still with the snow, so I took some picture of the city and of ISU.

Enjoy

I have just gave openSUSE 11.0 alpha 2 a try installing it in a virtual machine. I used the GNOME single CD. Here there are my first impressions:

• The installer improved significantly, with a lot cleaner workflow. There are some minor problems, mainly cosmetical, like popups in the top-left corner instead than centere, but in general it worked like a charm and in 20 minutes I had openSUSE 11.0 alpha 2 installed in my virtual machine.
• The desktop appears identical to the one of openSUSE 10.3, just with the PulseAudio icon in the notification area.
• The gnome main menu didn’t react to clicks on its button. The only way to open it is to right click on the button and choose the open option.
• The menu content is incomplete. For example YaST doesn’t appear there.
• The new package manager interface in YaST-GTK is not well organized, with huge buttons to select functionalities, and it’s very dissimilar from the corresponding Qt version.
• I experienced various crashes of the panel while trying to add applets.
• The international clock improved significantly and it now integrates weather forecasts. However when I was trying to configure it, it just crashed, making the whole panel crash too.

At this point I didn’t went further. The distribution is still under heavy development, as it is natural in alpha phase, and there are a lot of rough edges that makes it not ready for a regular usage.

Working in CFD, I often have to create contours plots starting from rough data in a text file generated by in house codes. This can be easily accomplished using gnuplot. Here you can see a simple example of what you can do.

Being an openSUSE user, I will explain how to install gnuplot on this distribution, but the instructions to generate contours plots are absolutely general.

• The installation of gnuplot on openSUSE 10.3 is straightforward. Just use the 1-click install link available here, and follow the procedure shown by the installer.
• Gnuplot requires the data to be saved in a text file organized in one of the two following ways:
  • One set of 3 coordinates (x y z) per line, with line breaks separating the data, and an empty line to separate the rows of the matrix of data.
  • One single value (z) per line, with line breaks separating data, and an empty line to separate the rows of the matrix of data. For example, if you have a 3×2 matrix of data, the corresponding file will be:

a11

a12

—- empty line —-

a21

a22

—- empty line —-

a31

a32

• Once the data to plot are prepared in that format, which can be easily implemented in all computational codes, just start gnuplot in a terminal, typing gnuplot.
• The instruction to plot a simple contour plot are the following, assuming the data file is called data.dat:
  • set size square -> It sets that the plot must be squared. Of course this is optional, and depends on the case.
  • unset title -> It removes the title. You can use set title ‘text’ to set an appropriate title if you want.
  • set pm3d map -> It configures gnuplot to generate contour plots.
  • set xrange [0:100] and set yrange [0:100] -> They set the range of the plot. Change the interval according to your data.
  • set format x “” and set format y “” -> They remove the numbers from the axes.
  • set cbrange [0:1] -> It sets the range of the colorbar in the contour plot. Values out of range are coloured as the closest extreme value.
  • set palette rgbformulae 22,13,10 -> It sets the colour palette. Please, see the reference for further information on this.
  • splot ‘data.dat’

• At this point, gnuplot is set properly to plot your data. Just check the plot by showing it with: splot ‘data.dat’
• If the result is satisfactory, you can easily export it to an eps file, with the following commands:
  • set term postscript enhanced color
  • set output “data.eps”
  • replot

Gnuplot offers a lot more features than those discussed here in short. Please refer to its documentation for further information. A useful guide which helped me to write this post can be found here.