Marko's Blog

LinuxTag conference program online

2010-04-14T10:08:00.000+01:00

After three months of intense planing, we finally managed to publish a first version this year's conference schedule. Feel free to send us your comments at vp@linuxtag.org!

LinuxTag: Call for Projects

2010-02-21T18:00:00.000Z

LinuxTag's philosophy is to promote cooperation between companies and free software projects. Income from the participation of profit-oriented companies allows LinuxTag to finance a professional platform where open projects get the chance to present the broad diversity of free software to the public.

LinuxTag is looking for projects to participate in this year's exhibition. The Call for Projects contains everything that project members need to know about the conditions. Sharpen your pen and send us a substantive description of your project! Despite the deadline ends March 24, 2010, we operate on a first come first serve base - don't loose time! Read everything about the application process in the Call for Projects.

Looking for a job? My team is growing...

2010-01-25T11:27:00.000Z

Oxford University is a great place to work and Oxford a beautiful small town to live. Our team is looking for an Apple Mac specialist. Find the the job description and application documents at the OUCS website.

LinuxTag 2010 - Call for Papers

2010-01-09T22:09:00.000Z

Just a short reminder that LinuxTag's Call for Papers is open till January 29th. Despite we are already accepting submissions since late November, Nils and I finally managed publishing the official documents to LinuxTag's website. Spread the word and submit your proposals. I am thrilled to read what has happend during the last year!

Behind the scenes: LinuxTag's Brötchen-Marathon

2009-12-29T15:26:00.000Z

The holiday season is time to thank family and friends. I would like to thank Elke for her great achievements: Elke transformed the project's lunch, which Wolfgang and I initiated with a simple soup for about 200 people in, into a delicious lunch for double the amount of people.

Thank you Elke for giving LinuxTag back its familial feeling. Without you counting crusty rolls, slices of cheese and sausage, and even grams of butter LinuxTag would not be able to serve such a delicious lunch since two years. Furthermore I would express my thankfulness to all volunteers making not only the Brötchen-Marathon but every year's LinuxTag such a successful event.

Read more about the project's lunch at O'Reilly (German only).

LinuxTag reboot?

2009-11-24T18:58:00.000Z

Probably you already got it from the news, celebrating a decade of LinuxTag e.V. the governing body behind Europe's largest event for Linux, Free Software and Open Source, we decided to open up our organisation as much as possible for feedback, criticism and future activists.

The official announcement is available in German from our Wiki. Basically we urge everyone interested in our event to take this chance to get in touch with us and discuss one's ideas how the event should improve or how one would like to contribute to it. So if you have an idea, want to join our team or just have some good words, please get in touch: reboot@linuxtag.org.

PS. I myself have not made a decision how I will participate in the upcoming LinuxTag next summer. Due to a lot of discrepancies in the last three year's work with our actual partner, I will most likely play a role behind the scenes and work on the conference program.

Changes

2009-05-09T16:51:00.000+01:00

Last two month have been very exciting: I finally submitted my thesis and moved to Oxford.

The thesis has been submitted April 17th and I am now awaiting the reviewers to grade it. As soon as I get my mark, I will publish it including the source code.

Moving from two places - Nuremberg and Spiesen-Elversberg - to abroad has been quite stressful. Therefore I had to reduce my involvement in several projects and I expect to be able to join these activities not before July. I will post first impressions from Oxford soon.

In case you would like to stay in touch: my german landline number should work fine, otherwise send me a few lines and I provide you my new contact details.

LinuxTag 2009: Call for Projects

2009-03-09T20:09:00.000Z

LinuxTag's philosophy is to promote cooperation between companies and free software projects.

Income from the participation of profit-oriented companies allows LinuxTag to finance a professional platform where open projects can present the broad diversity of free software to the public. LinuxTag is looking for projects to participate in this year's exhibition. The Call for Projects contains everything that project members need to know about the conditions. To participate, send a substantive description of your project by March 24, 2009.

Apple iPhone, Adress Book and Google Sync

2009-02-11T15:46:00.000Z

Google announced yesterday a new service for syncing Gmail contacts and up to five Google calendars with mobile devices, even the iPhone by offering M$ ActiveSync for compatible devices.

As expected set-up is quick and easy, even directly from the iPhone, and it works even though the beta state rather. As long as your contacts do not have more than one mobile number. But there is at least one new problem to solve: how to get Apple Adressbook sync again with Gmail?

Since Mac OSX 10.5.3 there is a new feature that enables Apple Address Book sync with Gmail by using the Google Data APIs Objective-C Client Library - not only for iPhone and iPod touch owners. It works very well, although not all fields are synced correctly. Maybe this is the niche commercial solutions like Spanning Sync.

However to re-enable the "Sync Now" function, i found a two command solution at Google mobile help. By default, the sync client for Google is an "app client", which means it requires some other address book to run (MobileMe, Yahoo, Exchange or an iPod contact sync) to run. To enable Google sync client to operate as a full sync client, you have to change the client type from "app" to "server". This will enable the "Sync now" button and will make sure Google sync is run every time a sync is run.

To change the Google sync client type, open a terminal window and type (one line)

sudo defaults write /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/GoogleContactSync.framework/Resources/ClientDescription Type 'server'

Then type the following one line command to restore the permissions on the plist file:
sudo chmod 644 /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/GoogleContactSync.framework/Resources/ClientDescription.plist

You can now go in Address Book's preferences and enable Google contacts sync, without needing to enable Yahoo sync or plug an iPod for sync to work. Optionally go into iSync > Preferences and add the iSync menu to your menu bar. This let's you see when it is syncing, and sync it manually.

Of course you can also initiate the synchronisation using the command line. Use this to run it periodically using launchd or cron:


/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/GoogleContactSync.framework/Versions/A/Resources/gconsync --sync gconclid --register 1 --username user@gmail.com --password PASSWORD --syncmode fast

Wonder why this is a so mac centric post? On my Linux workstations I am using Sunbird in combination with the Provider for Google Calendar plugin and the Google contacts extension for Thunderbird since ages without having any trouble. But getting the the Apple stuff to work right with Google took me quite some time. Kudos to Michael Shick!

Definite tea gadget

2009-02-04T11:16:00.000Z

I hope the designer finds a manufacturer for his amazing product. I would by some..

Find more stunning designs at designboom.com.

Submit your proposals for LinuxTag now!

2009-01-28T10:35:00.000Z

Although LinuxTag is about five months away, you should consider submitting your proposal for a presentation about your favourite Open Source project.

The program committee for the 15th LinuxTag is seeking exciting and suitable proposals for the lecture program on topics including, but not limited to, the following: Open hardware, Software and development, Application examples and case studies, Free software in education, research, and administration, Collaboration among several projects and initiatives, and Cool New Inventions and Experiments (CNIE). In addition, LinuxTag has chosen three core themes for its 2009 conference program. The program committee is seeking proposals on these themes in particular: Mobility, Processes, and Responsibility

Interested speakers are asked to submit their papers until February 8th, 2009. After this deadline it's unlikely that proposals are accepted. Find the terms and conditions of the Call for Papers at LinuxTag's website or download a nice formatted print version (PDF).

Happy Holidays!

2008-12-18T12:00:00.000Z

We wish you merry christmas and a prosperous new year!

[flv:http://blog.markojung.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/elfes.flv 400 300]

After christmas we will travel to Berlin to Chaos Communication Congress (25C3) and LinuxTag's Free Software End of Year Lounge- hope to see you there!

HP Color LaserJet 3600dn an Max OSX 10.5 (Leopard)

2008-12-14T18:40:00.000Z

After my good old Brother black & white laser printer died some months ago, I decided to buy a HP Color LaserJet 3600dn after a huge market comparison and literary study. I am quite happy with the printer. It is working perfect using CUPS on Linux on all of my favourite distributions out of the box. So i thought using this printer with Apple's latest Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard) would be child's play.

But unfortunately Apple does not ship a fitting driver and the software provided by HP is not really compatible with Mac OSX 10.5. Of course you can use the basic printing feature, but if it comes to duplex printing there is now way to get this enabled with the tools provided by Apple and HP.

Fortunately I encountered at Open Printing a project of Linux Foundation a port of hpijs for Mac OSX. After downloading and installing all three required packages (Footmatic, Ghostscript and hpijs) all printer features worked just fine. Kudos to all guys working on Open Printing!

Was my expectation to have this working out of the box by Apple - the owner of CUPS - too high? I do not think so. Most interestingly there is a relatively long discusion in Apple's discussion oard, which has been closed without any official statement or solution. Hopefully Apple includes Footmatic and hpijs in one of their future releases or releases at least a support document for this issue.

Seminar on trust for the openSUSE Build Service

2008-12-02T16:33:00.000Z

A few weeks ago I gave a presentation related to my thesis at Saarland University. The talk mainly presents the chosen algorithm and how we will incorporate it into the openSUSE Build Service.

If you are interested in the mathematical foundations of my project and how I try to predict trust relations between individual users you should read my short paper on implementing the Appleseed algorithm as trust metric for the obs. In addition to this I published the presentation, in case you prefer slides over written text

Questions, criticism or feedback is highly appreciated!

Download links

paper (pdf, 0.4 MB)

presentation (pdf, 1.9 MB)

My first week with KDE4

2008-11-07T16:13:00.000Z

Being a Gnome user in my department made me a kind of outsider. Nearly all my colleagues use or even develop KDE. After half a year harassment, I finally decided to switch to KDE4 with my update to openSUSE 11.1 Beta 4.

The first two days were really tough: many of the concepts behind KDE4 are totally different from Gnome and Mac OSX so I had to get adjusted to it. As a former Gnome user I really like the idea of having not hundreds of configuration options per application. In my opinion the distributor should provide reasonable defaults for the desktop and it's applications. Having tried the latest Fedora 10 preview and Kubuntu 8.10 I must admit, that openSUSE 11.1 delivers today the best KDE4 experience. Kudos to my colleagues from the KDE desktop team - you do a great job!

Nevertheless KDE4 has some disadvantages over the existing desktops: some parts of it, especially KWin, Plasma and Kontact are relatively unstable and crash regularly. On the other hand many features from existing KDE3 applications are still missing or do not work as expected. But you have the choice: all KDE3 applications are still available and of course you can mix them. For this reason I respect all KDE developers that work during the major version transition on two different versions of their application.

I am right now using exclusively KDE4 applications - even Kontact for my calendars (private Kolab, Google Calendar, Novell Groupwise and several iCal-based calendars) and Amarok2 for my huge music collection. The only thing that I did not migrate yet is my messenger. Despite the fact that one of Kopete's developers is one of my room mates I am still using purple, which integrates well into KDE4. The only thing that does not work is compositing: KWin does not like my graphics card or its driver.

Concluding my first KDE4 test week I must say it changed my mind: I really like my new desktop and it makes fun to work with it. For me it is absolutely unacceptable now that people, which did not give KDE4 a fair chance by testing it at least a full work week, raise their complains that KDE4 is generally unusable or totally unstable. Everyone has to decide on his own if he wants a stable, well maintained KDE3 desktop or support the development of the future desktop. KDE does a great job making the transition as comfortable as possible and I think users should thank them for providing two desktop alternatives.

PS: I prefer using sudo instead of su. To configure this behaviour in kdesu you have to add to your ~/.kde4/share/config/kdesurc the following line:

    [super-user-command]
    super-user-command=sudo

Thanks to André & Tom for this hint!

More than 50% already casted their vote

2008-10-14T15:40:00.000+01:00

After five days (including about one and a half day downtime) more than 50 percent (120/237) of the eligible voters already participated in the openSUSE board election.

This is quite good, but as Zonker already stated we hope to get this rate as close as possible to 100%. I hope the remaining openSUSE members or delegates will not miss their chance to take part in the decision who will run our project for at least the next year. If you are not decided yet, you shoud read through the candidates' platforms in the wiki. In addition to this most of the candidates hang around in the #opensuse-project channel on Freenode or answer your questions by private mail.

Perspektive Open Source

2008-09-29T10:00:00.000+01:00

As some of you may have heard LinuxTag acts as consultant for Messe Munich for Perspektive Open Source within the Systems trade show. My friend and colleague Wolfgang Drotschmann handles all Free Software projects' booths at the open source pavilion. As a last call for participation I post his announcement again:

Subject: Aufruf zur Beteiligung an der Perspektive Open Source auf der SYSTEMS in München
From: Wolfgang Drotschmann

Liebe Projekte,

auch dieses Jahr wird die "Perspektive Open Source" (POS)
http://www.perspektiveopensource.de/
im Rahmen der SYSTEMS (vom 21. - 24. Oktober) in München stattfinden. Das Thema "Freie und Quelloffene Software" wird seinen Schwerpunkt in Halle B2 haben, wo sich wieder Aussteller einem vorrangig businessorientierten Publikum präsentieren werden. Was wäre aber Open Source ohne die Beteiligung der Freien Projekte? Der Veranstalter, die Messe München, hat für sie darum eine Fläche reserviert, und den LinuxTag e. V. gebeten, deren Verteilung zu koodinieren.

Wer von Euch Projekten möchte also als Aussteller bei der POS dabei sein? Bevor Ihr alle "JA!" ruft, lest bitte erst weiter.

Ausrüstung für ein ausstellendes Projekt auf der POS

Für jedes Projekt steht im wesentlichen ein Demopoint zur Verfügung. Strom, Internet, Standbau und Fläche werden von der Messe bereitgestellt, genauso wie eine sinnvolle Anzahl von Ausstellerausweisen für das Standpersonal.

Technische Ausstattung (Computer, Notebooks, Monitore etc.) und Informationsmaterialien (Postkarten, Flyer, Poster u. v. a. m.) bringen die Projekte mit. Aufgrund der begrenzten Fläche wird es eher nicht möglich sein, mit einem Beamer arbeiten zu können.

Läßt sich diese "Grundversorgung" nicht mit Eurem Standkonzept in Einklang bringen, so versuchen wir unser bestes, Eure Anforderungen mit dem Standbau der Messe München zu koordinieren, bitten aber schon jetzt um Verständnis, dass dies nur in begrenztem Maße möglich sein wird. Die konkrete Aufplanung findet direkt mit dem Standbauer der Messe statt, wir als LinuxTag e. V. sind hier nur die Vermittler.

Da der bereitgestellte Platz leider limitiert ist, müssen wir gemeinsam eine Lösung finden, die allen Beteiligten möglichst gerecht wird. Wir bitten alle interessierten Projekte daher, ein kurzes Feedback zu den beiden Fragen zu geben:

a) Zielgruppe der POS
Wer soll mit dem Stand angesprochen werden? Wir möchten darauf hinweisen, dass wir mit der POS explizit und im Unterschied zum LinuxTag eine fokussiertere Zielgruppe ansprechen: Wir erwarten schwerpunktmässig IT-Leiter und Entscheider hauptsächlich aus kleinen und mittleren Unternehmen und Behörden. Die Vorkenntnisse dieser Teilnehmer hinsichtlich Linux und Open Source ist vermutlich mitunter limitiert, umso größer ist jedoch das Interesse, Informationen über konkrete Lösungen zu erhalten.
Projekte, die auf diese Zielgruppe mit ihrer Darstellung besonders eingehen, haben bessere Chancen auf einen Stand.

b) Projekt-Präsentation
Gerade die Präsentation ist ein wichtiger Faktor, um Besucher von den positiven Eigenschaften von Open Source zu überzeugen. Auch wenn wir davon überzeugt sind, dass technische Gesichtspunkte sehr wichtig für das Verständnis des Projektes sind, so sollten wir auf diese nur wohldosiert eingehen. Um Besucher anzuziehen und mitzunehmen, sollten
die vielfältigen Möglichkeiten genutzt werden, um die Idee des Projektes anschaulich zu erklären. Dazu gehören:

- Poster und Standdekoration,

- ein Rechner oder sonstiges Ausstellungsstück, das den Inhalt des Projektes in den Mittelpunkt stellt, und vor allem

- ein Standteam, das aktiv auf Besucher zugeht und eine Kurzvorstellung des Projektes vorbereitet hat.

Projekte, die sich besonders kreativ in der Darstellung ihres Themas zeigen, haben besondere Chancen auf einen Stand.

Als Projekt bei der POS mitmachen

Wir bitten alle interessierten Projekte, sich informell via Mail an projects@linuxtag.org so rasch wie möglich zu melden. Bitte beschreibt dabei kurz, was Ihr zu den beiden Punkten Besucheransprache und Projekt-Präsentation machen würdet.

Da die Perspektive Open Source und die SYSTEMS in zwei Monaten beginnen, freuen wir uns über eine kurzfristige Rückmeldung, sei sie positiv oder negativ.

Dazu benötigen wir einen Ansprechpartner (Name, E-Mail, Telefon), der als verantwortlicher Standmanager für das jeweilige Projekt auftreten würde.

Wir freuen uns, dass wir zusammen mit der Messe München und den anderen Partnern der Perspektive Open Source die Möglichkeit haben, das Potential hinter Open Source zu zeigen. [...] Ermöglicht wird das alles allerdings nur durch Eure Leistungen in den Projekten und Initiativen, denn diese bilden die Grundlage von Open Source. Dafür möchten wir Euch und allen Euren Projektmitgliedern danken.

Über Euer Interesse und eine Teilnahme an der Perspektive Open Source würden wir uns sehr freuen - wir warten auf Rückmeldung!

Viele Grüße,
Wolfgang

Deliciously awesome

2008-09-26T19:00:00.000+01:00

Quendor's success story on baking hist first muffins reminded me of two interesting blogs I have read some days ago.

First I would recommend reading 'Cupcakes take the Cake' at Blogspot. They are very creative and I hope the cakes are also as delicious as they are beautiful. Eventually we can design a special LinuxTag design as desert for next year's LinuxNacht?

Google's Android

2008-09-25T20:51:00.000+01:00

This Tuesday I followed Google's invitation to ICC Munich to their product marketing event err developer days.

After a much entertaining Keynote by Chris DiBona (open source programs manager at Google) I was able to choose from six concurrent sessions. I decided to attend the Android related talks to see how serious Google is on creating an free and open platform for cellphones. After half an hour marketing bullshit bingo there was an Q&A session. Interestingly every second question started with "Apple's IPhone has .... How can I achieve this with Android?" There have been some critical questions which have been answered with "This is a quite good question. Bla, bla, bla." and my question concerning a Roadmap till 2010 and when the full source code will be released was just answered with "soon".

After this unfruitful first presentation I had to readjust my expectations and as expected most of the talks only scratched the surface and rarely showed interesting code. Fortunately Google cared really good for their guests, besides refreshments, lunch and many snacks the event specialists created a geek-friendly environment in the foyer of the ICC. I spent much time there talking to friends and Google engineers.

To my complete satisfaction the Advanced Gears session by Dion Almaer has been exactly the presentation I was expecting from the whole event: for each component of the Gears framework the presenter gave a short introduction, presented use-cases and some good readable, sometimes advanced code examples along with quite impressive demonstration videos. Thank you Dion, I really enjoyed your talk.

Not totally surprising there was a live stream from the joint T-Mobile, Google press conference announcing G1, world's first public available cellphone running Android. Whilst I did not watch the media event, I took a first row seat in the final wrap-up session. Again Chris did a quite good job. Android's astonishing features were present very funny and also competently.(Unfortunately this part of the presentation has been tagged as a private video an YouTube.) Later on I was able to play a little bit around with the device. In my opinion it looks more like a developer prototype than a market ready product. The keyboard feels much better than others of this size but my concluding result is that I will have to wait for the next generation of Android devices to fulfill my requirements for a up-to-date cellphone.

Aside from the fact that I luckily was able to fiddle around with the device, there are now more open questions than before. My biggest concern is how open this platform really will be. Hopefully Google fulfills its promises accompanied by frequent releases of the Android SDK including the whole source code of the Android platform under a really free license.

openSUSE election status update

2008-09-25T15:20:00.000+01:00

A bit longer than four weeks ago the board announced the first openSUSE board election. With the beginning of the next phase of the election process, I would like to give you a short status update.

Since the initial announcement we raised the openSUSE member count by 50% to now 212 approved openSUSE members. I am impressed by the enormous interest in participating in our project.

And we have a total of ten candidates running for a seat in the next openSUSE board:

Non-Novell

Pascal Bleser (pascal.bleser@opensuse.org, platform)

Peter Linnell (mrdocs@opensuse.org, platform)

Tuukka Pasanen (tuukka.pasanen@ilmi.fi, platform)

Alex Rodriguez (alexio44@opensuse.org.ni, platform)

Jakub Rusinek (jakub.rusinek@gmail.com, platform)

Bryen Yunashko (suserocks@bryen.com, platform)

Novell

Marco Michna (konichiwamonsta@gmx.de, platform)

Stephen Shaw (sshaw@decriptor.com, platform)

Henne Vogelsang (hvogel@opensuse.org, platform)

Federico Mena-Quintero (federico@novell.com, platform)

What is next?

During the next two weeks, each of the 212 openSUSE members is able to give voting privileges for this election to another user (which is not an openSUSE member). This person should be an active contributor of the openSUSE community and needs an account at users.openSUSE.org which has been created before September, 1st 2008.

The possibility to give franchise to another person is for you the perfect chance to get a friend or colleague more involved in the openSUSE project. Do not miss this opportunity and help us to get as much people as possible participating on the election! Unfortunately I used a wrong variable in the mail template, the appointment of additional voters ends October 9th, 2008 at 12:00 UTC. I am sorry for this, correct emails will be send soon...

Until ballots will open on October, 9th 2008 (12:00 UTC) we have now two weeks of campaigning, which should be mainly driven by the candidates themselves. Potentially there will be a public IRC debate with all candidates, but this is not set yet. If you are interested and have time to support us organizing it, please get in touch now!

Concluding I would like to thank all candidates for standing, the openSUSE board for checking more than hundret membership requests, my colleagues from the election committee and Zonker for their great support.

Boared in the office?

2008-09-18T11:58:00.000+01:00

Everyone remembers the EepyBird's Mentos and Diet Coke experiments. Here is their latest idea: The Sticky Note experiment.

(Eepybird on Vimeo.)

In eigener Sache: Bcfg2 im Linux-Magazin

2008-09-04T20:05:00.000+01:00

In the new issue (10/2008) of LiNuX mAgAzIn you can find my new article on Bcfg2 - a configuration management system not only for Linux.

So why are you still reading, go and get your copy. Find the article on page 76.

Planet LinuxTag

2008-08-26T18:08:00.000+01:00

Probably the first visible result of the LinuxTag 2009 bootstrap camp is the release of planet.linuxtag.org.

There we aggregate blogs of the makers of Europe's leading exhibition and conference on Open Source and Free Software. With our planet we want to introduce you the persons behind LinuxTag and give you some insights in the organization.

Unboxing2

2008-08-22T02:58:00.000+01:00

After watching this video, you really want to have this smart phone:

I follow the frog!

2008-08-18T21:15:00.000+01:00

This weekend will be the third edition of one of my favourite conferences in Germany: FrOSCon.

FrOSCon is a two day conference on Free Software and Open Source, taking place for the third time on August, 23rd/24th 2008 at the Fachhochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in Sankt Augustin near the cities of Bonn and Cologne.

I was asked to give a presentation on my research I am doing for my thesis. Please join me on Sunday at 11:15 in lecture room HS5 on my talk "Who can you trust - a trust metric for the openSUSE build service". I will present my concept for integrating a community contributed user rating into the OBS to support collaboration and improve security in this distributed package building system.

Besides this you can find me most of the time at the openSUSE community booth in the exhibition area. I am looking forward to see you there!

Update: many LinuxTag core team members will be around. As far as I know you also can meet Elke, Florian, Guido, Michael, Oliver and Wolfgang this weekend in Sankt Augustin.

LinuxTag 2009 organization started last week!

2008-07-31T13:52:00.000+01:00

This year's LinuxTag closed it's doors exactly two month ago. Time for the core team to get together and reflect the second of five years in Berlin.

It has become a tradition that this meeting takes place at Linuxhotel, a gorgeous hotel in a private park situated half way between Essen and Bochum. For those who do not know Linuxhotel: during the week there are trainings on free and open source products and during weekends the hotel is open for these projects to meet and get some work done. I wish to express my gratitude to the whole Linuxhotel crew for inviting LinuxTag every year. Furthermore I would like to thank Reinhard for creating such an inspiring place dedicated to free software and open source.

The weekend started with a retrospective round so everyone got the chance to bring out the things he liked and disliked most at LinuxTag 2008. This filled the whole Friday evening and I must say that most of us have been very critical with our selves. In my opinion we did many things much better this year but we have a long way to go. I do not wish to emphasise concrete issues, instead I would like to emphasis that free software has grown up and got more professional. But for all that the people behind this stayed the same, got more support by new project members and probably moved forward to new projects.

I think the same counts for LinuxTag: it has got much more professional not only with its relocation to Berlin. Simultaneously to the professionalization we have to create a much more relaxed spirit and add many more fun events to our conference. Fortunately we did this year some good first initial steps in this direction by having guided city-tours, the developer-lounge, the Mom-and-Pop grocery store and the projects' lunch. Whilst our barbecue we have had several new ideas like a warm up party, a soccer-cup in Messe Berlin's Sommergarten or a badminton tournament in one of the empty exhibition halls. We also would like to have every evening a supporting programme. This year we have had LinuxNacht and Antigone 2.0 - a quite interesting play. So there are still two evenings free. If you have a good idea and would like to join us, get in touch! This brings me to the next point: even our core team got many new members for the crew and free projects teams, the conference team is lacking fresh blood. I would really like to see a fresh conference team with two new conference chairs breaking new grounds. Of course these guys would need the support from the former chairs but maybe the time has come for a generation change. If you are interested in participating in the organization of LinuxTag, please drop me a few lines. LinuxTag is organized like an free software project, meaning after meeting some initial requirements you can participate in any internal project.

Nevertheless I am strongly convinced that next LinuxTag will be a success. It will be our third event in Berlin, the cooperation with Messe Berlin works out for my ressort very well and we have never started organizing the upcoming event this early. So my team hopefully will have much more time for additional fun stuff to serve you a magnificent fifteenth LinuxTag on June, 24th-27th 2009 in Berlin!

openSUSE @ FrOSCon - call for volunteers

2008-07-29T19:54:00.000+01:00

In about four weeks a quite nice free and open source conference (FrOSCon) will open it's doors for the third time and in my opinion openSUSE should not be missed there.

Hence I asked the organizers if they can provide the openSUSE project some space for an openSUSE booth and generously they agreed to this. Now I am looking for volunteers from the openSUSE community to support me driving the booth. You should have solid knowledge on openSUSE, be an outgoing personality and enjoy to share your know how with visitors.

To get an impression how much fun FrOSCon will be, have a look at more than 600 photos from the initial two events at flickr. I know no other event that offers for example a bouncing castle, free drinks for pre-registered visitors and a 5 Euro Kölsch-Flatrate at the social event.

If you have some spare time during the weekend on August, 23rd to 24th and would like to come to Sankt Augustin (nearby Bonn/Germany), you should not miss the possibility to participate at one of the coolest free software events in Germany. So hurry up and drop me a few lines and add yourself to the event coordination page in the openSUSE wiki. Thank you for supporting openSUSE!

To all sysadmins: thank you!

2008-07-25T12:50:00.000+01:00

Traditionally - mainly because I also have worked as sysadmin for years - I enjoy to celebrate SysAdminDay every last Friday in July.

I would like to thank especially all system administrators which support my work and keep the stuff running. For my work at SUSE/Novell this mainly is the SUSE R&D-Admin team. Kudos to Thomas and his crew for being available all the time and handling all kinds of requests very fast, efficient and straightforward. I deeply appreciate your work! Of course I also would like to express my thankfulness to all people at Novell's IS&T.

As a user of the openSUSE Build Service I also depend on the work from some of my colleagues from my team and department. I am grateful for being able to use such a fast, reliable and innovative service.

The LinuxTag-Admin team, which is completely volunteer driven, also deserves my gratitude. I would like to mention our team lead Kester and moreover Stefan and Michael from Speedpartner for sponsoring infrastructure and joining our team.

Furthermore I am fortunate to have Emme as my friend - it is highly reassuring to know you have someone to ask in cases you need a dam good tip or just another crazy idea to find another approach to a problem. The hack-nights with you have always been very inspiring!

Last but not least I send my greetings to my former colleagues and friends at the MPII.

Childrens interview german politicians on observation

2008-07-09T18:58:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I found this nice video at YouTube.

[youtube f9oRImp3_dM]

Trust metrics for the openSUSE Build Service

2008-07-07T15:12:00.000+01:00

After a lot of inspiring conversations with co-workers at SUSE and friends from the open source community I finally published a first abstract draft how we could add some metrics to openSUSE build service to create a trust system.

This article does not go much into particular neither explains concrete implementation details. Main target of this proposal is to have a basis for discussion. The article even goes beyond the focus on trust and proposes some additional metrics to support openSUSE users in their decision from which repositories they should obtain their software packages.

Within the next weeks I would like to discuss this with you. So if you are interested in this topic please contact me. Any suggestions, feedback or critics are highly appreciated.

Quite handy sample letters

2008-07-07T10:40:00.000+01:00

Even though these sample letters are in terms of webpages already shop-soiled, I lost my bookmark for them. So I would like to share it with you and conserve it by the way.

Firefox 3 and SSL certificates - Part II

2008-07-03T16:39:00.000+01:00

As written yesterday, Firefox 3 displays all SSL certificate errors as error pages. In the openSUSE default config, you need at last four clicks to accept a certificate with an unknown signature.

By setting the following two values you can reduce this to two clicks:

browser.ssl_override_behaviour = 2

browser.xul.error_pages.expert_bad_cert = true

Then Firefox 3 behaves like it's predecessor and you are not bugged by every self signed certificate. By the way: you should import CAcert.orgs root certificate at least for identifying websites into the keyring of your browser.

Kudos to Robin for mentioning the second configuration option to save another click!

Firefox 3 and SSL certificates

2008-07-02T19:25:00.000+01:00

In Firefox 3, SSL certificate errors are displayed in the browser as error pages.

I really like this improved new error page, because the click path you have to follow requires that you read through all information once and hopefully remember the correct click path next time you encounter a SSL certificate with an unknown signature.

Unfortunately this new feature gets after a while really annoying. Luckily users may configure this feature using about:config. I suggest you change browser.ssl_override_behaviour to 2.

Fussball-Weisheit des Tages

2008-06-25T18:38:00.000+01:00

Ich hoffe, daß die deutsche Mannschaft auch in der 2. Halbzeit eine runde Leistung zeigt, das würde die Leistung abrunden... Günther Netzer

Firefox's homage to Battlestar

2008-06-25T14:19:00.000+01:00

I really like Easter eggs, cheat codes, intros and all to other fun stuff coders and hackers add to their work.

The latest one I encountered whilst searching for some hints how to tweak Firefox to behave like I want it to is a nice homage to robots and Battlestar Galactica. Please see about:robots

And they have a plan.

Fussball-Weisheit des Tages

2008-06-23T12:05:00.000+01:00

"Die Kroaten sollen ja auf alles treten, was sich bewegt - da hat unser Mittelfeld ja nichts zu befürchten." Berti Vogts

Advertising: add me to your blogroll!

2008-06-20T20:44:00.000+01:00

Friends and readers of this blog: what should I say: please add me to your blogroll or set a similar link to blog.markojung.net.

Thanks!

After 162.254 kilometers

2008-06-20T13:24:00.000+01:00

the time has come to say goodbye to my 14 year old Opel Corsa.

He died last Thursday nearby Erlangen on a heart attack caused by a cooler failure. I have got this small allegiant vehicle as a gift from my mother in 2001. Since then it has driven me more than 90.000 kilometres during the last 7 years.

Plenty good memories are strongly connected to this car. First to mention our trip from Saarland through whole Germany, Poland and all three Baltic states to Finland and there even further to Lapland, which Susanne and I did in 2003 - before Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania joined the European Union. Only these adventures would fill a book with hundreds of pages of interesting stories.

Furthermore this simple Corsa accompanied many holiday trips to Spain (mainly Barcelona), France (French Riviera/Côte d'Azur, Bretagne and Charente-Maritime), Netherlands (Amsterdam, Maastricht) and other European countries. Not to forget many weekend city breaks within Germany and the Saar-Lor-Lux region.

Farewell my good old car - I will miss you!

Fundstück der Woche

2008-06-18T12:21:00.000+01:00

Last weekend Susanne brought me an interesting present from UK:

Even I just converted back to openSUSE, I really enjoyed my first Ubuntu - UK's first fairtrade cola!

We tried lots of different recipes to get exactly the flavor we were looking for. A classic cola with a little extra edge to it. We wanted a cola with personality and a great flavor that people would love to drink. We took the recipes to lots of people in London, Birmingham, Bristol and Manchester and eventually everyone agreed we had found the right one. That's the great taste of Ubuntu.

(Quote taken from Ubuntu Trading Company Ltd.'s website.)

Disclaimer: Ubuntu Cola is not affiliated with the Linux distribution Ubuntu.

Dozens of interviews from LinuxTag

2008-06-15T17:11:00.000+01:00

Normally I do not listen to radio but more or less regular I tune in to RadioTux, a German internet radio with a strong focus on Free Software and Linux.

Ingo and his crew managed it this year to broadcast live on all four days from their booth at LinuxTag with more than 20 hours of interesting program. Home again they started to publish all interviews as pod casts. It may take some weeks to get all content online, but the interview with Elke and Florian is already available.

This pod cast may be a great chance to get informed about some of the highlights we have had at LinuxTag. My gratitude goes to the whole RadioTux crew - thank you for supporting our event.

Aus aktuellem Anlass

2008-06-13T13:38:00.000+01:00

Germany's new star of the computer science Olymp: http://www.elite-informatik.de has postponed its graduation ceremony on short notice due to organisational problems.

Unfortunately, the official website of the faculty of computer science does not provide any information on this subject. The only notice I have got is a mail from the secretary of the centre for bioinformatics, Mrs K. Jostock:

-------- Original-Nachricht --------
Betreff: Absolventenfeier
Datum: Tue, 27 May 2008 08:04:29 +0200
Von: Karin Jostock

[...] die nächste Absolventenfeier für die Informatik- und
Bioinformatikabolventinnen und -absolventen findet aus organisatorischen
Gründen nicht, wie zunächst vorgesehen, am 13.06., sondern erst am
10.07.2008 statt. Nähere Informationen entnehmen Sie bitte in Kürze den
Webseiten der Informatik. Außerdem erhalten die persönlich Betroffenen
vorher wieder eine Einladung. [..]

In my opinion this is real shame: if you expatiate upon the fact that you have won two projects within the German Excellence Initiative you should also be able to sustain the announced date of your graduation ceremony. An other well known elite university has already announced their dates until end of 2010.

Fortunately my graduation ceremony (which will be end of this year) has not yet been announced ;-)

Lazy service

2008-06-11T16:38:00.000+01:00

What happenes if the service at my favourite beergarden is lazy and my colleagues are in the right mood to start playing around?

I proudly present the first proove that the Bieramyde is not only a mysterious tale:

Picture credits: Martin 'notlocalhorst' Lasarsch

openSUSE Day recordings online

2008-06-10T13:24:00.000+01:00

As my co-worker Thomas Schmidt announced a few minutes ago: recordings of nearly all talks from the openSUSE day at this year's LinuxTag are now available for download. So if you missed LinuxTag or you want to wrap-up a presentation, this is a good chance to get in depth knowledge from some openSUSE developers:

Martin Lasarsch, zonker: The openSUSE project

coolo: Looking ahead to openSUSE 11.0

Adrian Schroeter, Klaas Freitag: Der openSUSE Build Service - Software for millions

Henne: Multimedia with openSUSE

Timo Hönig, Holger Macht Helmut Schaa: Laptop 2.0: Neues bei Power Management, Wireless und Energy Star

Marcus Meissner: Wine - Windows applications and games for Linux

Alexander Graf: Mac OS X virtualisation

Unfortunately the KDE talk has not been recorded. Therefore you can grab the slides from this and some of the other talks at the openSUSE wiki.

As one of the organizers of LinuxTag I would like to thank Martin and the whole openSUSE crew for supporting our event and providing these really good videos!

Jetzt auch in Farbe

2008-06-10T12:46:00.000+01:00

Finally, 10 days after LinuxTag closed, LiNuXnEwMeDiA AG has put the recordings of the Keynotes on their streaming archive website.

You can only watch them with a Java player. If somebody knows how to download the videos, please let me know.

Mobile blogging...

2008-06-09T22:21:00.000+01:00

This short entry is just a test. Hopefully I will now also be able to blog using my new gadget.

The next full post is already in the queue...

Fussball-Weisheit des Tages

2008-06-08T17:00:00.000+01:00

"I hope we have a little bit lucky." Lothar Matthäus

Dilbert really fast the old fashioned way

2008-06-06T15:27:00.000+01:00

If you prefer reading Dilbert in your browser without flash instead of the RSS feeds, you probably would like to update your bookmarks:

http://dilbert.com/fast

Thank you Axel!

openSUSE installation

2008-06-04T16:00:00.000+01:00

I must admit, the installation of openSUSE 11 (RC1) is astonishing. I used a mini-ISO containing just the installer with its basic components and downloaded everything else from the (internal) installation repository. The whole process faciliates a graphical interface but you can fall back to a text based one, if you have an unsupported video adapter or neccessary.

The user interface is clear and simple but to me very appealing. I have seen the new design of the installer first at FOSDEM where the developers asked for feedback, whereby I would like to mention that nearly all ideas from the developer room in Brussels have been integrated to the current version.

After the welcome screen the installer asks the usual questions like language, keyboard layout, date, time and timezone. Then you can choose between GNOME, KDE 3.5 and KDE 4.0 and I really like the way SUSE does not give a recommendation to the user. In my opinion this solutions is the best way not to discriminate one of the big desktops.

After this choice openSUSE wants you to set-up the hard disk. Therefore the amazing partitioner suggests a new partition layout where YaST should propose a for more than 99% of all situations suitable solution. The partitioner supports LVM and Kernel-Raid and is really intuitive to use. To get LVM or RAID configured, you have to use in Ubuntu the 'alternate desktop CD', which is not only text based but much complexer and for a newbie in my opinion absolutely unusable.

The next step is to configure the authentication or create a local user and set the root password. I found it quite impressive that binding to a NIS or LDAP server is extremely easy. If the it staff does their job well (as they to at SUSE) YAST takes all information from the received DHCP offer and you just have to tick a select box - even for auto mounting NFS exports. I have to admit that I dislike the possibility to login a user automagically. In my opinion this is a strange behaviour of Windows you should not copy, but probably many people are used as much to it, so that they put their habit over security. For security reasons this option should not be enabled by default.

After this all important questions are answered and YaST presents a helpful installation summary where you can change even more things like the software selection or the default run level. In case you messed it up you can reset everything to openSUSE's defaults. The installation itself seems to me to be relatively fast. This may be due to the fact that it is based on so called base images which speed up the whole process by about 30 percent.

A well known Debian developer said that even a hen can install Debian, if you put enough corn on the enter button.Even if this rule also applies for openSUSE 11 (as for nearly every distribution), a newbie definitively would prefer the graphical installer from SUSE. If everything with openSUSE works as well as the installer I probably will just miss the .deb package format.

Find a full installation walktrough in the openSUSE wiki.

Nach dem Spiel ist vor dem Spiel

2008-06-03T18:12:00.000+01:00

Finally, LinuxTag 2008 is over and I am proud to have played a key role in the organisation team.

With more than 11.600 visitors we have had about 2.000 more attendants at this year's event. In my opinion this proves that our slight modifications on our concept work out well. Just to give you some facts: during the 4 day lasting show there were given in total more than 9,5 days of presentations and workshops and about 1.100m² exhibition space with more than 105 participating free projects and about 100 participating companies.

I would like to express my deepest thankfulness to all volunteers who contributed a lot to LinuxTag - without their help we would not be able to organize such a multifaceted event. First I would like to thank all volunteers from the free projects. We know that mainly all project booths are staffed by enthusiasts, who sacrifice a significant part of their holiday for our event. This year's exhibition was very professional and you all did a great job presenting your project. Second I would like to thank tarent and univention for sponsoring and Elke Moritz for organizing the free projects' lunch. They catered for more than 1.100 people during four days and I think it was tasty and satiably. In this connection I also would like thank Florian Auer and Guido Müller and their crew. Regardless which task had to be done - they did it extremely dependable in an unobstrusive way. I would also like to thank Melanie Schunk, Cornelia Schwobe and Nino Grüttke from Messe Berlin. Even if I see many small things to improve, you organized an amazing event. I enjoyed it quite much to work together with you and the LinuxTag core team, especially Wolfgang Drotschmann, to make LinuxTag happen. Concluding I would like to thank my colleagues at SUSE for their much patience and support. Last but not least my very special thanks go to Susanne for her understanding and encouragement during the last months.

As "Sepp" Herberger liked to say: “After the game is before the game.” Therefore I ask you to send me your feedback, criticism and praise on LinuxTag 2008. We need your comments to make next year's event even better. If you have something on your mind I would really appreciate you dropping me some lines at lt08feedback@markojung.net. In case you have taken photos, created some videos or other cool stuff, please tag them with linuxtag2008 and let me know.

Save the date: LinuxTag 2009 will take place June 24-27, 2009 at Berlin fairgrounds. Hope to see you next year!

Interesting links for LinuxTag 2008: [UPDATED]

3sat neues on LinuxTag

Hacking contest shows kernel security issue

Moenks Podcast (Part 1, Part 2)

Archived live streams (hopefully online soon...)

Hello world ;-)

2008-05-13T16:00:00.000+01:00

I thought I would never start blogging, but here it is: my first weblog where I try to write more or less regulary some notes on funny or interesting things I encounter.

First I will start a new series: migrating Marko (from Debian and Ubuntu) to openSUSE. I started a new job as working student for SUSE Linux Products GmbH where I got an exciting research topic for writing my thesis. Even I started using Linux with SUSE (I think it was around version 11/95) I switched starting with my employment at the MPII to Debian GNU/Linux in 1999. Because I am a creature of habit I have since them rarely used SUSE. But I think it is a extremely interesting experiment to switch to a totally different distribution, not like trying Ubuntu instead of Debian.

Let us see where it ends...