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…
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openSUSE news!
OpenSUSE 11.0 alpha 2 release was recently announced. The development and testing are going on, and openSUSE 11.0 is candidate to be a nice openSUSE release. Here there are the most important new features introduced in this release KDE 4.0.1 GNOME 2.21.90 Linux 2.6.24 OpenOffice.org 2.4 Beta Alsa 1.0.16rc2 D-Bus 1.2rc2 Recently some mockup for the new openSUSE 11.0 look have been proposed on the openSUSE wiki, and they look very cool! Give them a look here. Another important novelty from the openSUSE community is the possibility to apply for membership for all the users who are making continued and substantial contribution to the openSUSE project. You can find more…
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PalestraLinux is back!
PalestraLinux, an italian site dedicated to Linux was recently moved to their new site, hosted at Netsons. The old site is still on here. I would suggest to all my Italian friends with a passion for Linux to visit it in the next weeks. It is going to be a nice and interesting portal.
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Octave 3.0.0 is out!
Octave 3.0.0 has been released and can be downloaded from the Octave download page. A summary of the new features and changes made in this version is available here.
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Some Maths with openSUSE
The openSUSE build service contains various scientific applications which can be easily installed using the 1-click installation technology introduced in openSUSE 10.3. Among these, of particular importance for Maths, we have three powerful tools like: Maxima and its graphical frontend wxMaxima (OpenSUSE 10.3 Build Service page here) Maxima is a symbolic manipulation software descending from Macsyma, developed at MIT, which was an inspiration for modern symbolic manipulators. Scilab (OpenSUSE 10.3 Build Service page here) Scilab is an open source numerical computation platform developed in France by the Scilab Consortium at INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique). It allows interoperability due to its open nature and can…
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Adobe Reader 8 plugin for Firefox on openSUSE 10.3 64 bit
I recently upgraded Adobe Reader to the latest version available on Adobe’s site, and I lost Firefox embedded reader for PDF’s. On 64 bit systems, openSUSE adopts the nspluginwrapper plugin to be able to use 32 bit plugins for Firefox. As a consequence, a little of configuration is necessary when upgrading Adobe Reader. The steps are the following: Install Adobe Reader 8 from www.adobe.com using the RPM. Open a terminal as root (use the su command and insert root’s password) and type: ln /opt/Adobe/Reader8/Browser/intellinux/nppdf.so /usr/lib/browser-plugins/nppdf.so This will create a symbolic link to the plugin library. In the same terminal, type: nspluginwrapper -i /opt/Adobe/Reader8/Browser/intellinux/nppdf.so to configure the plugin with nspluginwrapper.…
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Mandriva 2008: simply powerful
I have quickly tried Mandriva One 2008 first through the GNOME live CD, and it looked so good that I decided to try it more by installing it on my desktop. Up to now, I’m very positively impressed by this distribution, due to the great care they put in details, the fresh artwork and its simplicity. The live CD contains a full version of desktop and it is installable to reduce the download size for users with slow connections. After you boot in the live CD, you find a link on the desktop to install it on your hard drive, through a very simple guided procedure which leads you…
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openSUSE for education and science
The openSUSE project has recently started an education project to group the educational applications, in order to make them easily available. The goals of the project, together with the necessary information to take part to it, are reported on the openSUSE Edu page, managed by the Education Team. A Desktop applications list and a Server application list are available, which can be installed on openSUSE through the Build Service. Some scientific application and libraries, like maxima and openMPI, are available also through the science repository, always hosted on the openSUSE buildservice.
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Samba and openSUSE 10.3
Using samba with openSUSE might cause some issues in certain conditions due to the presence of SuSEfirewall2, which blocks network high ports of your system. However, it is possible to configure the network to allow samba to work properly. The prodecure is simple, and can be done using YaST, as follows: Use YaST -> Network services -> Samba server and Samba client tools to configure samba accordingly to your needs, and select to open the firewall ports. This properly sets SuSEfirewall2 to open the static samba ports 137, 138, 139 and 445, but doesn’t open high ports, required for some features like network browsing. Open YaST -> System ->…
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Anjuta 2 on openSUSE 10.3
OpenSUSE 10.3 comes with anjuta 1.4.2 as default C/C++ development tool for GNOME. However, anjuta significantly improved from that release and it’s now at 2.2.2. This more recent and advanced version of anjuta can be quickly installed (thanks to Jpr, Mw and Sbrabec of the openSUSE GNOME Team, who packaged it) from the openSUSE buildservice using the one click installer. To perform the installation, just click here, look for the anjuta 2 package in the GNOME:STABLE repository for openSUSE, and click on the 1-Click Install icon. Among the new features of anjuta, there are the integration with glade to design graphical interfaces and a new redesigned and improved user interface,…