Planet Pardus

Pınar Yanardağ: Kaptan 4 Preview

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 07:28:21 +0000

(Kaptan Pardus welcome wizard which aims to help user to configure basic settings on first boot.)

Note: This is the Beta release for Kaptan 4. Design (graphics, colors, layouts) can change until Pardus 2009 stable release (30 days to launch! \m/)

Kaptan4 looks like Kaptan3 but it is fully written in Qt4 and Python. As always, comments are appreciated

More screenshots ->
(more…)

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Gökmen GÖKSEL: Pardus 2009 Alpha Released

Thu, 28 May 2009 05:30:24 +0000

We just released Pardus 2009 Alpha with great work of our team and release maintainer \o/ Alpha includes KDE 4.2.3 with some of backported changes, Linux 2.6.30_rc7 and also a series of new managers for end-users. You can grab it from here.

A little time left for the final release ;)

Erkan Tekman: GSoC 2009 Lineup for Pardus

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 13:22:15 +0000

For the second year straight, Pardus has been a Google Summer of Code mentoring organization. This year a total of 6 Pardus projects have been approved and as a change we have 4 non-Turkish-speaking students.

The students and their projects / mentors are as folows:

Ezgi Çiçek OpenOffice.org Turkish Grammar Support / Gökçen Eraslan
Mehmet Ali Akmanalp Fingerprint Authentication Support / Gökmen Göksel
Rohan Anil PAM Face Authentication / Onur Küçük
Sarath Lakshman Web-based Image Creation Tool for Pardus / Ekin Meroğlu
Marcin Kurczych Pulseaudio Manager for KDE4 / Ozan Çağlayan
Caio Nascimento Bug Reporting Tool for KDE4 / Pınar Yanardağ

One important observation is that only one of this year’s projects is Pardus specific and 4 of them will likely to have their place in upstream KDE.

Congratulations to all accepted students, and “Happy hacking”…

Gökmen GÖKSEL: Nokia Developer Summit, New NM \o/

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 15:11:08 +0000

While watching some great talks in Nokia Developer Summit, Monaco I decided to blog about our new Network Manager which is made with great capabilities of KDE, Qt and Comar.

If you remember from my blog entry about Network Manager Plasmoid, Pardus uses Comar layer for all stuff that needs by a desktop user; networking, user operations, service operations, display management, disk management etc. It also integrated with PolicyKit; so you can define atomic privileges per user. Comar also provides great API that helps Qt’s “Code less, Create more.” thought ;)

For example, to connect a profile that you have in your wireless profile list:

>> import comar
>> link = comar.Link()
>> link.Net.Link['wireless_tools'].setState('Monaco','up')

That’s all ! And if you need a privilege for this operation Comar will call PolicyKit-Kde4 for asking you a password ;) Comar uses D-Bus for communication and it is possible to make aysnc calls just by using async key and proper function to notify by current operation.

And this is the New Network Manager of Pardus !

Don’t forget to watch the screencast in here !

If everything goes ok I will be at Akademy Gran Canaria and I hope we will show you a lot of impressive tools that we made ;)

Gökmen GÖKSEL: Pardus lands to GSOC again :)

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:51:34 +0000

Like last year we have been accepted to Google Summer of Code \o/ You can catch a list of avaliable projects from here.

Good luck Pardus Dudes :)

Ozan Çağlayan: GSoC 2009

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 20:57:00 +0000

We're now a part [0] of the 5th Google Summer of Code! The students have a few days to learn about each participating organization before the applying.

Take a look at our Ideas page [1] and don't ever hesitate to propose your own idea!

[0]: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/search/label/gsoc

[1]: http://en.pardus-wiki.org/SummerOfCode2009Ideas

Gökmen GÖKSEL: News from Pardus

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 21:41:55 +0000

The Team works great in these days :) We have Qt-Creator, Qt 4.5.0 and KDE 4.2.1 in our development repository just after release announcements :) For KDE 4 based technologies I finished my work on Sysinfo just follow;

Now it uses Solid for Network status, Disk info and CPU info. Also with great helps of Will Stephenson I added Solid::Networking support for updating network status system widely to the our Network-Manager Plasmoid ;)

Gökmen GÖKSEL: Network-Manager Plasmoid

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 23:44:47 +0000

We had a good time at Camp KDE, Jamaica. We met great people (hackers :)) and we tried to explain importance of KDE for Pardus and importance of Pardus for KDE.. As we said there we are working on our ideas to be useful for upstream too.. Here you are;

Pardus Network Manager Plasmoid:

Network Manager DataEngine;

Now we can use new shiny PolicyKit KDE4 ;) You should watch screencasts [1] [2] .. And always sources are in Pardus repository. Have fun !

Koray Löker: Something happening in the deep waters of FLOSS world...

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 14:03:00 +0000

After the cheap/consumer products for film making became competitive with professional ones technically and the web 2.0 and relevant innovations made video sharing easier than ever, people started to think about some opportunities of a free film making as in free speech as in free software...

Collaborative, transparent, libertarian model of film making was (and in many aspects still is) a dream yet... 16mm. cameras were a great step for independent film making, specially for those who tried for an alternative point of view in documentary making... The opportunities today is fascinating contrarily to the 16mm. world.

I couldn't write to my English section before but I was taking some notes since last year May, when the first open movie (in the terms of FLOSS) was released by Blender Foundation and the Montevideo Netherlands Media Arts Institute... Elephants Dream was a big milestone both for the maturity of the FLOSS video tools at work and the film making concept with this highly FLOSS influenced model...

Today many projects, manifests can be found on the www... I'm writing my MA thesis on this issue actually, so I'm really interested in new examples, cases in this issue, please leave a comment if you know others...

Briefly, I would like to list the popular and relatively old projects of this concept but I'll continue to put some more works, texts and links further...

Not necessarily free ones:

http://www.plumiferos.com/ One of the successes of the Elephants Dream, a feature animation from Argentine which is been produced by the Blender. (It seems not to be an open (source) movie, but in the context of 'how the open source tools are successful in film making process' it is a good example...)

http://www.echochamberproject.com/ Kent Bye is a film maker who is trying to make an online, collaborative film by using many open source tools and the model itself... I wish Bye could use the free editors like Kdenlive, Kino etc. (Cinerella is something else... really... its nice but... :) )

http://www.myspace.com/mymoviemashup That's not really connected to the open source impact but these kind of cases make the open film making more understandable and possible... Can you imagine how the Linux kernel would be without the Internet? I see some of these projects as the spreading network of the open movie concept...

http://interplast.blogs.com/interplast/2007/04/a_story_of_heal.html Sometimes, I get interesting responses for FLOSS and related concepts... Some people think that the films which are proposed as open/free are just amateur and incompetent ones and they have no other choice... Well I just run away from those idiots for sure, but for who can't... You can give this example as a powerful answer... An Academy Award (Oscar) Winner Documentary, licensed with a Creative Commons...

http://lcmedia.typepad.com/theamericanrevolution/ The American Revolution is another open source documentary tryout on a specific subject: WBCN-FM, the radio station of progressive rock in the golden age of it (I assume those years were the golden age of the progressive...). They seem to be confused about the distinction of open source / free software in the analogy of open source films... They want contribution but they don't talk about the licensing issue much...

Projects which are free as in free speech and free software:

http://orange.blender.org The legendary project which produce "Elephants Dream"... It was a very well example of how the open source model works even in film making process... and it made Blender much more powerful and known... I really admire this one...

http://www.digitaltippingpoint.com/ Exciting project about a documentary database of open source culture... DTP is suggesting about 260 hrs footage of interviews and other documentary material for those who is interested in making an open source documentary about open source... That's one of my best...

http://straycinema.com/ That's another favorite project of mine... Stray team is seeking for many contributors for their film database and any editors who are volunteer to use this database for producing films... Every year the community select the screening list from the projects and launch a festival... Now the best part, the goal of the community is making David Lynch the leader contributor for 2010... Good luck guys, my fingers crossed!

http://www.opensourcecinema.org/ This site is important for me... As you saw at the top, there are many examples of different parts of a "free film / open movie concept" however there were no concrete effort to make these cases a part of a new film making movement... OpenSourceCinema tries to do this... and you can see most of these examples and many other in there also...

P.S. One of our users Affan Taner (who studies film making and started to use FLOSS technologies recently) shot an advertorial for kdenlive, the video editor for KDE. You can watch it in YouTube! or download however you prefer...

P.P.S. (late edit) I've completed my M.A. thesis on open source film making, especially focused on the case of Elephants Dream. You can find it here

Pınar Yanardağ: What’s in my head..

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 12:16:03 +0000

Whenever I try to be a stable blog writer (one post each month seems fine, huh? =)) I just FAIL. So I’ll write a summary of last few months, ..

A couple of days ago, I got the following e-mail from Google Diversity Team that was saying I am one of six award winners to attend linux.conf.au:

Thank you for your application to the Google-Linux.conf.au Diversity Delegates Programme. After careful review by a committee made up of Linux.conf.au organizers, Linux Chix, and representatives from Google - your application has been selected as one of the 6 award winners!

I had a list of talks in mind to attend @linux.conf.au. But unfortunately, it seems I can hardly get the visa on time (remember the MySQL case -and other side of the coin.. *click*)

Wonderful news.. but,.. well.. just news. =)

* It’s 19th of Jan. but I forgot to tell you Project 366 was succesfully finished! I started Project 366 just for want of trying, but lately it became a long-year album. I see how Photojojo was right. It’s an amazing way to document travels and accomplishments, relationships, .. and so on. Time moves surprisingly fast.

Btw, i made a video from all Project 366 photos:

Project 366 (2008) from Pinar on Vimeo.

I have some supercalifragilisticexpialidocious plans about school, ah.. frak school.

And at last, I started to use KDE4 on my daily system, but it’s more like a mutant (using Nautilus as a file manager is enough?)

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Gökmen GÖKSEL: A new stuff with the power of plasma !

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 00:35:38 +0000

I have just finished my talk at Camp KDE, Jamaica about “KDE and Distros” with great partnership of Marcus D. Hanwell (slide is here), I talked about Pardus Technologies and showed people our plasmoid for service-manager which works with our sub-system COMAR.

When great projects come together results comes great !

Also I have a great video while it is working .. All of these written in Python, PyQt4 and of course PyKDE4 ;) You can grab the source from here.

Ozan Çağlayan: Pardus 2008 RC1 Gaza is out..

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 23:46:00 +0000

Today we announced the first release candidate of Pardus 2008.2. It's mainly a bugfix release with a lot of improvements over the previous beta. But let me emphasis on the code name "Gaza".

We're all watching the humanitary crisis over there, our hands are tied. Nobody acts, nobody talks. Israel continues its Genocide and there's nowhere to run for those trapped in Gaza. They are truely the victims of some very big plans that we even don't know about. It's bad, it's sad..

There's nothing more to say, the photograph explains the violence very well. Just think about them and feel their pain.. There is always hope.

Pardus 2008.2 RC1 Announced

Amine Chadly: Vista is out...

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 09:23:08 +0000

The hardware is nice...
I am the lucky owner of a Dell Xps M1330 laptop, and last week I just had too many problems with my laptop running vista family basic to my taste. Previously I actually found that the system was pretty good so far. I had overcome many of its shortcomings thanks to open source software, and the system was actually quite (and to my surprise somehow) stable :-)

... and so the problems start rising

I had a first alert with a nvidia video driver update. Seeing that an recommended update was available, I just installed following the usual click-click protocol. Once that bugger installed, my fan just went on full speed. Oh, no problem I thought, the little guy must have run into some cpu intensive little thingie and we'll be back to his usual quite mode soon. Well, no you silly, it just decided it was his new cruise speed now. Then my second thought was the usual stupid but weirdly very effective way out, so I just went and rebooted the computer. No luck, the fan would go off right from startup and would never get back to normal speed. So thanks to actually checkpoints made before upgrades, I kissed the recommended upgrade good-bye and the fan got back to normal sound levels. Then I had just a regular vista upgrade that would fail with some cryptic error code, that I actually really didn't have time to go check for a while... with the concern in mind that I could be potentially more exposed to danger that I usually am with a fully patched system. But the final straw was that I couldn't copy a zip file from the network neighborhood. I had just a popup box telling me that I didn't have the privilege to do that. What da ?!?! Tried to run the explorer with admin privileges didn't change this, and I finally had to catch the file with my friend's usb key. There is probably a (correct) way to do this, but I just don't feel like searching when I am using that os. If I have to play the adventurous way, I'd rather do that on a libre system.

And so let's try something new...

That's why since a few days, the laptop is now running OpenBSD. I have wanted to try this one for a while, and being in vacation, I just decided it was the right time ;-)

I went on the install just the way it's written in the booklet given with the cd, and had no problem with that... I just changed a couple of values on the way to make the /tmp and /var more comfortable in terms of available space. And voila ! OpenBSD was booting in his usual blue background text.
Due to some restriction, the wireless card doesn't work right away, you need to download a firmware first. In my case achieving that is quite simple : plug the wire and ask the friendly dhcp server for an ip address :
# dhclient bge0
once you have access to the Internet, you can then add the package containing the package..
# pkg_add http://damien.bergamini.free.fr/packages/openbsd/wpi-firmware-2.14.1.5.tgz

From there, if you do as sir Schneier (and I ;-) does, a simple dhclient wpi0 will put you online through your wireless card.

From that you probably will want to set your $PKG_PATH to a mirror close to you, and then add mozilla-firefox.
pkg_add mozilla-firefox and voila...

More to come, as I am getting to have more fun with the fish...

Gökmen GÖKSEL: Oxygen YALI ?

Mon, 22 Dec 2008 10:13:32 +0000

I saw this pretty project on Planet and I really like their theme for installer. I looked at source and made some changes for YALI.. Finally the result;

Ozan Çağlayan: Pardus review on SourceCast

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 11:09:00 +0000

SourceCast is an open-source podcast site which streams open-source related reviews. In their 6th episode, they reviewed Pardus Linux together with nVidia's PureVideo technology and Adobe's 64-bit flash player release.

The podcast starts with "Istanbul Not Constantinople" :)

http://sourcecast.org/

Ozan Çağlayan: "Beta" label taken off from Google Chrome

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 22:29:00 +0000

Today, Google released[0] their fifteenth Chrome release and took off the "Beta" label from it. This release contains a lot of improvements especially for audio/video playback problems.

Navigating through a blog entry on blog.chromium.com , I've just discovered a cool feature of Google Chrome: DNS pre-fetching[1]. When visiting a web page, Chrome transparently caches (or namely pre-fetches) their DNS query results, boosting the overall navigation performance. This feature makes a lot of sense because after loading a web site, the browser waits in an idle state, doing nothing useful at all. This pre-fetching technique is conceptually similar to the branch prediction mechanism[2] used in modern computer architecture.

I'm happy to see that Google nicely fusions all of the modern computer science/architecture aspects into a solid web browser and it's gonna rock!

[0]: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/google-chrome-beta.html

[1]: http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?answer=96788

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branch_predictor

Erkan Tekman: “Does Open Source Software Need Marketing? Why and How”

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 18:25:00 +0000

From Sandro Groganz' blog:

Next week, Thursday, I will present in Istanbul, Turkey on “Does Open Source Software Need Marketing? Why and How”.
Here’s further information from the invitation letter:

We would like to see you among us for the Open Source Marketing seminar jointly organized by TUBITAK UEKAE and IBM-Bilgi Center for Advanced Studies, to take place on November 27th at 13:00 in Istanbul Bilgi University Dolapdere Campus.
The seminar will be delivered by Sandro Groganz, the founder of and consultant for the open source marketing firm InitMarketing. Detailed info regarding the seminar is provided below.

Date: November 27, 2008 Thursday
Time: 13:00
Place: Istanbul Bilgi University Dolapdere Campus

Thank you in advance.
Best regards
Pardus Project // TÜBİTAK UEKAE

Does Open Source Software Need Marketing? Why and How

The market share of Open Source software will double within the next four years. More and more new companies provide Open Source products right from the start and established players release their source code under an OSS license.

These days, everyone knows that Open Source is a viable business model - but how does one successfully market an Open Source product? A download link alone will not suffice. It rather needs a strategy combining traditional marketing with community relations and social media marketing.

This presentation will showcase examples from the Open Source domain and provide hands-on advice about how to unfold a vital Open Source ecosystem where geeks and customers alike contribute to value creation.

Looking forward to seeing you there! Thanks to Erkan Tekman of Pardus fame for organizing it.

Gökmen GÖKSEL: Service-manager for KDE4 with COMAR and PyKDE4

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 10:13:31 +0000

These days we are working hard on Pardus KDE technologies for our next release “Pardus 2009″; within these tasks first job is porting (and redesigning) our *-manager family to KDE4.

We have a COnfiguration MAnageR called COMAR which uses D-Bus for communication. COMAR provides a powerful and extendible API for managing anything such as package, network, x.org, bootloader, disk or system service which are also described in model.xml.

From COMAR.Api.qt4 example:

import comar

# Create link
self.link = comar.Link()

def handler(package, exception, results):
    # do something with these info..
    print package, results

# Get all services from comar
link.System.Service.info(async=handler)

It will get you all services status and their info asynchronously to the handler method. Also if you want to start “openssh” service you can call it like;

link.System.Service["openssh"].start()

When you do this, COMAR will call the PolicyKit-KDE(3) and asks password if you have privileges for this action.(I will show it in action)

Yes, COM

Pınar Yanardağ: An(door)id

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 20:37:42 +0000

Since I successfully unlocked & signed into my Google account last week (it was only one step further: an edge or 3g connection! :)), I am happly using Android. It has nice features and geeky enough–except it rapidly drains battery (i turned brightness down to 0% as a workaround, but still sucks).

I am currently writing this entry via its browser. But I get bored.. Let’s be a bad girl ;P

*pinar hits enter*
*pinar types “reboot” to address bar*
*pinar hits enter*
…………………………………………………………………………….

Wha? What happened? Why my phone restarted? Aww, did it evaluate everything i write as a system command? I must kiddin’, huh?

But unfortunately, I’m not kiddin’… It is really the most bizarre flaw I’ve ever seen.. You can read more from here.

PS#1: Note that, only Android 1.0 TC5-RC29 or earlier are vulnerable and a patch has released already.
PS#2: Don’t even try to type “rm -rf /”
PS#3: Oh, and there’s that, too.
PS#4: Aomm, and there was that, too.

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Gökmen GÖKSEL: Yalı4: Porting something to Qt4

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 01:50:10 +0000

Yali is the first Pardus software a user encounters. Basically, it recognizes the hardware and installs Pardus software from the installation media (i.e CD) to a hard disk partition user selects. Yalı was developed mainly with Qt and Python (PyQt ..) but for supporting new technologies (there is Qt4 now and it rocks !)

I ported Yalı Qt3 version to Qt4 named as Yali4 (to avoid chaos; we still use Qt3 version for some of other projects); while porting I have totally changed some approach in visual design.

General UI:

In general I used Qt Style Sheet support for design basics; a centered shiny background, transparent icons and graphics in screens and some WidgetStyle from Qt Style Sheet examples. For screens I prefer QStackedWidget which supports transparency too and some signals for walking between screens. (Also while desining YALI’ screen infrastructure I tried to make it modular — I will blog it later. )

Standard widgets of Qt4 are enough for YALI but for making something shiny I made some tricks;

For each partition I used a QRadioButton (which has already have checked/unchecked state) and QSplitter to seperate them (each splitter width calculated from partition size).

Flexibility of Qt4 gave me this;

You just need some CSS tricks like this;

  QRadioButton::indicator { width:1px;height:1px;border-color:white; }
  QRadioButton:checked { border:6px solid rgba(255,255,255,180); }
  QSplitter::handle { background-color:rgba(255,255,255,0); }

and some colors and icons;

  metaTypes = {"ntfs" :{"bgcolor":"#18D918",
                        "fgcolor":"#000000",
                        "icon"   :"windows"},
               "hfs+" :{"bgcolor":"#C0A39E",
                        "fgcolor":"#000000",
                        "icon"   :"other"},
               "ext3" :{"bgcolor":"#7590AE",
                        "fgcolor":"#FFFFFF",
                        "icon"   :"linux"}}

  partition.setIcon(QtGui.QIcon(":/gui/pics/%s.png" % icon))
  partition.setStyleSheet("background-color:%s;color:%s" % (meta["bgcolor"],meta["fgcolor"]))

I’m done time is 03:50 now :) For more information about Yalı feel free to get in source at Pardus SVN.

Ozan Çağlayan: Tweaking Adobe Flash Player 10 (1)

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 20:51:00 +0000

Adobe Flash Player lets you modify some plugin settings through the sytem-wide configuration file /etc/adobe/mms.cfg[0]. As you may have noticed, flash player uses /tmp/plugtmp* directories for storing some sort of temporary files and it doesn't delete them causing a lot of stale plugtmp directories in /tmp. If you want those directories to be removed when you exit your browser, just add the following line to /etc/adobe/mms.cfg and save it:

AssetCacheSize = 0

[0]: Flash player 10 administration guide

Happy hacking.

Pınar Yanardağ: It’s a one way ticket..

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 03:30:40 +0000

Finally, I returned to hometown after a painful roadmap (San Jose -> Denver -> Frankfurt -> Istanbul). But the only thing that makes those hours quickly spendable is the people I met –hopefully I can always find some interesting people to talk with This time, at my last transit flight (after 4 + 9 hours on air) I met with two men, it was really funny. In fact I just asked if they want a dark Twix or not, but one of them told me he’s just too tired to eat. So I wondered if they’re from CA, too.. Then we started to talk. After a while, I realized one of them was wearing a Microsoft t-shirt

- Uhmm.., you’re working for Microsoft?
+ Yes, we are.
- Oh, I’ve just attended to a summit in Google. Actually.. I am working for a Linux distribution.

Then we started to laugh.. and some kind of funny fan stuff. Then it went like that:

+ So what are you doing exactly?
- I am from the security team, I am tracking vulnerabilities and fixing them. And you?
(they started to laugh, and I was trying to figure out why :))
- Hey, what’s wrong?
+ We’re from Microsoft’s security team!

I think it was a really nice conjunction, think about that: you find somebody to talk -> you’re colleagues -> and you’re working in the same specific area + they are from a very different point of view.. So we talked about security, open source, Microsoft & Novell and so on. And Android! Damn, despite unlocking it successfuly, I still can’t sign in my Google account.. They were really nice people and shared their knowledge about unlocking phones So I realized I have some extra things to do rather than just network unlocking.

And at last.. the funniest part of our conversation:

+ So why are you working for open source anyway?
- For freedom!

PS: I spent my Halloween in California’s Great America and had a lot of fun. Picturezz ->

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Erkan Tekman: Pardus’ Google Summer of Code Experience

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 09:59:00 +0000

from Open Source at Google blog:

For Pardus' first year in Google Summer of Code™, it was not a surprise for us that most of our applications were from Turkey, since Pardus is the most well known Linux distribution in our country. But as nearly every review about the project mentions, we are working on our global awareness, and we hope to get more international applications in the coming years. This year we had 17 student applications and 5 students were accepted to the program; four of them completed their projects successfully.

the full article is here

Faik Uygur: Pardus’ Google Summer of Code Experience

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 07:29:16 +0000

For Pardus’ first year in Google Summer of Code™, it was not a surprise for us that most of our applications were from Turkey, since Pardus is the most well known Linux distribution in our country. But as nearly every review about the project mentions, we are working on our global awareness, and we hope to get more international applications in the coming years.

This year we had 17 student applications and 5 students were accepted to the program; four of them completed their projects successfully.

Cihangir Besiktas, worked on adding Internet sharing capability to Pardus’ network manager application. The project’s aim was to make an Internet connected box to act as a gateway to its internal network so that other boxes in the network can connect to Internet. By only selecting the interface that is connected to Internet and the interface that Internet is going to be shared to, everything can be done automatically by the network manager. All the work done by Cihangir has been integrated into the network manager and is now part of the latest release of Pardus. Cihangir kept a blog about his project and documented his work.

Isbaran Akcayir, worked on adding 802.1x support to Pardus’ network manager application. 802.1x provides authentication to devices attached to a LAN port and it is based on Extensible Authentication Protocol. Although it is possible to connect to the network with wpa_supplicant package from the console, Isbaran added a frontend into Pardus’ network manager for easy configuration and connection to 802.1x networks. The work done by Isbaran is integrated into network manager and now is part of the latest release of Pardus.

Mehmet Ozan Kabak, worked on a common notification manager to be used by Pardus’ manager applications. This project was inspired by the Growl application for Mac. Mehmet successfully completed his project which has become a qt4 based, skinnable notification management system working on dbus. He kept a blog while developing and documented his project. The latest release of Pardus is KDE3 based, so it is not possible right now to integrate Mehmet’s work. But with the next release of Pardus, hopefully it will.

Türker Sezer, worked on an easy to use wizard base Pardus CD/DVD/USB distribution media creator GUI application. Pardus does not provide a package selection screen in its installation program YALI. So his project would allow anyone to create a customized Pardus distribution. He completed his project successfully Also while developing his own project, he helped us to fix our live CD creation problems in our own application. He is going to be working on his project. After fixing some layout and usability problems, he is going to package his application and it will become installable from Pardus repositories.

Our first year was beneficial for us and we hope also for our students. Congratulations to all of them and their mentors!

Pınar Yanardağ: Mentor Summit @Google, Mountain View

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 05:12:36 +0000

photo by Austin Ziegler

I was at Google Mentor Summit this weekend. It was at Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California. It was really amazing to meet with other FOSS developers.

It took 22 hours to arrive CA but hopefully I was strong enough to directy go to the welcome party.

First of all, I’d like to thank Chris DiBona, Leslie Hawthorn, Cat Allman, Ellen Ko and any other Googlers who participated to organize such a wonderful summit. I really had a great time.

During the summit, I attended several sessions including Android related ones (which made me to buy a TMobile G1 yesterday!) and Distro Leader’s summit that Donnie (from Gentoo) proposed (Karsten Wade from Fedora, Joe Brockmeier from OpenSuse, Steve McIntyre from Debian showed up) and we talked about how to get introduced more people with Linux. And of course, Sam’s Open Souce Game Development session was one of the greatest ones.

pic. from open source security session

I also led a session called Open Souce Security. It took much more time than I thought (90 minutes instead of 30′). A lot of participants from various level of security showed up– Google Network Security Team Leader, Eugene Teo from Redhat Security Team, developers from Tor project (you can remember Jacob Appelbaum from his Cold Boot Attack Research) and so on. At first minutes, I got really excited because there were a lot of security experts who have much more knowledge and experience than me. But the session went quite good and we mostly discussed about tracking vulnerabilities, disclosing security flaws, patches to OSS projects that possibly have security vulnerabilities and criterions of accepting them, and GSoC students’ secure coding.

I’d like to thank some of my friends that I met at the event -in order of appearance

* Eugene Teo from Redhat Kernel Security Team. I knew and respect him from OSS security society- it was really nice to meet and talk about security with him.

* Donnie Berkholz from Gentoo. He’s currently Gentoo council member and maintains X.org–which I think is a quite hard job

* Sam Lantinga, lead software engineer and leader of the group of gameplay programmers on World of Warcraft, Blizzard Entertaintment. *cool* He’s also the creator of fabulous library, SDL. He became one of my closest friends during these two days. I’m really so lucky to meet with him.

* Nils Kneuper and Mark de Wever from Wesnoth. We used to know each other with Nils but I totaly forgot that he’ll attend to this event. But thanks God, we met at lunch by chance! Mark is also a cool guy from Wesnoth and *i think* he had a great time while watching me when I was drinking *natural* Green Tea (it was the worst thing i’ve ever drunk. ahh.).

* Austin Ziegler, from Ruby Central. He is a cool photographer and ruby person and I am looking forward to see his group girl photos.

* Selena Deckelmann, from PostgreSQL. I always glad to meet with other women in computing. I am looking forward to participate in a WiC project with her.

* Mike Melanson, Justin Ruggles, Reimar Döffinger from ffmpeg team. They were really funny people and we had a great time while Mike was talking about the times that Ismail’s complainings on Turkish support

* Alisson Yagi Costa, from Umit. We went to San Francisco and Santa Cruz with him and his words to describe me were quite remarkable :“you’re not normal, but you’re not strange”

Of course there are much more people to mention here. I’d like to see all of them in the next summit!

PS#1: There are some photos (the giant anroid, too!) on my Flickr set: Mentor summit, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Stanford, Palo Alto.

PS#2: To Turkish readers: I merged my Turkish blog (and RSS’ also) with this blog address, so from now on all my entries will be in English. Thanks!

copyleft ~ pinguar for ..the mythical woman month.., 2008. | Permalink | 3 comments

Bahadır Kandemir: Let the games begin! (First round)

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 23:30:00 +0000

Yeah, we haven't published Pardus 2009 roadmap, that's right, but that doesn't mean we don't have one :) Everyone has a secret roadmap and list of cool features, I'm the first to give a clue. I won't spolit other's TODO lists, you have to wait a little more. Ok, ok, I can't resist, KDE 4 will be our primary (it won't be the only one) desktop environment.

I'm working on COMAR, our friendly configuration manager, who's behind the curtain. You know the Network Manager, or any manager application on TASMA, right? COMAR is a dog breed and TASMA is collar. All managers are simply (well, ok, not that "simple". i'll blog about it, i promise) D-Bus clients and use COMAR service to configure system. COMAR provides an easy to use API with access control features so GUI developers won't have to worry about low level configuration stuff. Users also won't have to worry about system configuration, of course; we're extending API when necessary, developing GUI's asap and provide them easy to use command center.

I won't go deep into COMAR architecture, that would be boring. But no magic happens in COMAR, i have to say that, it's all Python code. Alright, maybe as magical as a Khayyám poem; some say code is poetry, and there are great poets around ;) Every call made through COMAR is handled by a Python script, that is distributed with related PiSi package (our own package management system), and COMAR API developers write that magical Python files (if one has to suffer, that should be developers, not users). Wireless tools package has a COMAR script to handle network connections, ethernet tools package also has one, etc. We all love Python, we adore Python. Our package manager, many TASMA applications, our boot system also written in Python. Did I mention we love Python?

COMAR is behind the curtain, there won't be any remarkable changes for users. But there will be tones of new features and API's for GUI developers. Users can expect more from GUI developers: new manager applications, KDE 4 plasmoids (now we have two KDE developers) and new TASMA. Mock-ups will be here soon. 2009 will be legendary. Just wait for it...

Cihangir Beşiktaş: The Project's Documentation is available now

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 11:50:00 +0000

You can reach the documentation of the project, Internet Connection Sharing Module, in the svn directory: http://svn.pardus.org.tr/uludag/trunk/gsoc/net-sharing/docs/

Erkan Tekman: linux.com reviews Pardus 2008

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 08:10:00 +0000

My experience with Pardus was quite positive. The attention to detail, right down to skinning Amarok with the Pardus colors, is matched by the elegance of the installer and the efficacy of Kaptan and PiSi. Booting and running Pardus is quite speedy on my old AMD Sempron 2800+ with 512MB RAM; other distributions with similar features (such as Ubuntu) run slower on the same hardware. In short, I think Pardus is a distribution worth looking at for any Linux users who aren't happy with their current choice.

yazının tümü burada // the article is here

Mehmet Ozan Kabak: Notification Manager Documentation

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 12:06:00 +0000

Documentation of the notification manager is ready. You can download it from doc/documentation.pdf on SVN. It explains the general architecture and gives a how-to on sending notifications from your own programs. It also contains skinning tips.

Erkan Tekman: Bir dilekçe

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 08:32:00 +0000

TÜBİTAK UEKAE Müdürlüğüne,
Gebze

6 Ağustos 2008

Pardus camiası oluşturma çalışmalarımız kapsamında 5 Şubat 2007 tarihinde kaydettirmiş bulunduğum ozgurlukicin.com alanadını Pardus'un yaygınlaştırılması ve Türkiye'de özgür yazılım camiasının geliştirilmesi amacıyla kullanılmak şartıyla Enstitünüze devrediyorum. Alanadı kayıtçısı nezdinde bu yönde gerekli işlemler tamamlanmış olup, alanadı halen TÜBİTAK UEKAE adına kayıtlı görünmektedir.

Bilgilerinizi arz ederim.

(imza)

Erkan Tekman

(adres)

Mehmet Ozan Kabak: Notification Manager RC

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 13:39:00 +0000

Pardus Notification Manager 1.0 Release Candidate is ready. To try it checkout the code from SVN repo and do the usual "./setup.py build" and the "sudo ./setup.py install".

To use the sample client program for sending notifications execute the client.py script. It will wait for a command, you can send a sample notification by issueing the following: notify "c00L notification" "whazup dude?"

In addition, you can use the installed config.py to configure the notification manager.

Apart from bugfixing and writing some documentation, my GSOC 2008 project is over :)

Cihangir Beşiktaş: Internet sharing is ready to use

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 15:59:00 +0000

You can now use the program to share internet.

To get the program, use svn command:
$svn co http://svn.pardus.org.tr/uludag/trunk/gsoc/net-sharing/

Then change the working directory to:
$cd net-sharing/openvpn/model2/

Then get the content of model.xml to /etc/comar/model.xml,
and copy tr.org.pardus.comar.net.share.policy file to /usr/share/PolicyKit/policy/ directory.
After that you have to register Net.Share 's share application with the command:
$sudo hav register share Net.Share link.py

Now you are ready to use it, change the directory to:
$cd ../network-manager/
and run it:
$./network-manager.py

The other work is on NM's GUI.
In the GUI push the "Share Connection" toolbar, and set enabled the checkbox, then select the profile name that goes to the internet(it is recommended that this profile's state should be up), then select the profile name that will share the internet to the internal hosts(recommended to be Ethernet based network). Then push the apply button. Now if any failure occures, it will be informed to your screen, if succeeds, an information box meaning that it is ok to share will be shown. Ok it and now enjoy the sharing of your internet with your clients.
To help you, one moment of this progress is:

Koray Löker: From a visual artist, a support for a "funny and serious" project...

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 10:56:00 +0000

Emrah Özesen is an interesting photographer who started his journey when he was in high school and used photography to dive into journalism during his college years, which were quite tempered politically. Later on, Özesen became a national athlet in Kayaking, where he documented numerous rivers in and out of Turkey both with wild landscapes and seeing the challange of man versus nature through his objective...

It is not so easy to live as an artist (or even as an athlete as long as you are not a member of national football team) in Turkey, so most of the photograph artists are also working as commercial photographers or take different professions and spare time for their passion. This situation makes any conceptual project quite valuable, sometimes even luxury for artists...

Özesen, politely donated 8 different pictures of his latest work which he made with jugglers. Following our motto, ...for freedom, Özesen chose Creative Commons 3.0 BY-NC-ND license to publish these great pictures. I would like to thank him personally by this note, where I also owe him an apology for writing this so late, approx. 1 month later than the release... Anyway... Thanks buddy, keep going so we can see much more...

Mehmet Ozan Kabak: Pardus Notification Manager Configuration Tool

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 16:32:00 +0000

Configuration tool of the notification manager is ready! The tool lets the user change the PNM config file in a user friendly environment, and saves the XML file back. The tool also validates XML files using an XSD and hence does not permit a 'wrong' configuration to be saved. This program uses the lxml library instead of the default pyxml, as the latter does not offer any XSD validation support.

Now the only remaining task is to have the PNM read the XML config file and behave accordingly. Then, we're all done :)

Cheers,

ozan

Erkan Tekman: Pardus 2008

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 13:23:00 +0000

From the Pardus web site:

One more step for freedom: Pardus 2008

New version of the Pardus project, Pardus 2008, improved by the latest technologies and up-to-date applications, has been released. As always, Pardus 2008, is being freely distributed under the terms of GNU General Public License (GPL). In compliance with the main goals of the Pardus project, Pardus 2008 has lots of new features for ease of installation and use, both at the infrastructure and interface level. In addition Pardus 2008 provides enhanced hardware support, stable and reliable Linux infrastructure and numeruous applications on a single CD. You will go through a brand new experience of freedom, using Pardus 2008

We wish you days in freedom, using Pardus 2008…

Cihangir Beşiktaş: Setting up bridge with comar methods

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 13:43:00 +0000

To share internet connection, i will use bridging. In order to do that, i implement some methods that add/delete bridge interface and add/remove interfaces to the bridge interface. These methods are:
*addBridge(br_name)
*delBridge(br_name)
*addInterface(br_name,if_name)
*delInterface(br_name,if_name)

and also i add a new interface to comar's model.xml file, named "Net.Share" and the above methods are added to these comar interface.

Mehmet Ozan Kabak: PNM now supports notification replies

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 23:38:00 +0000

Notification senders can now add buttons to the window that shows their notification. When this interactive mode is selected, the SendNotification() procedure of the PNM becomes a blocking procedure which waits until the user presses one of the supplied buttons or the notification times out. For applications involving a main event loop, the notification sender can make the SendNotification() call non-blocking by providing two callbacks to it. When the user presses one of the supplied buttons or a timeout happens, these callbacks are called. Both GLib and Qt main loops are supported. A screenshot is given above.

Cihangir Beşiktaş: OpenVPN Client GUI is coming...

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 13:28:00 +0000

Nowadays i am trying to add openvpn client connection feature to Tasma 's network-manager and soon it will finish. OpenVPN is an application that provides secure connection. To setup an openvpn connection, you have to enter the parameters:
-device type: tun/tap
-domain name or ip of the openvpn server
-port number - occasionally 1194
-protocol number UDP/TCP
-CA certificate
-client certificates: .crt and .key files
-Chipher type: no chipher, BF-CBC, AS-128-CBC, DES-EDE3-CBC

These parameters can be written to a configuration file (assume "client.conf") and the connection can be done easily with the command "#openvpn --config client.conf" if all the parameters are rigth and complete.

You can see codes by clikcing here

Cihangir Beşiktaş: Meeting with Pardus Developers

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 09:26:00 +0000

Today i went to TUBITAK UEKAE and meet Pardus project developers. The team was very nice and they were working hard to complete the new release of Pardus 2008. While they were doing these, i was studying on my project part that is about DHCP Server Configuration.

Pınar Yanardağ: Display Manager - Beta Release

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 05:01:55 +0000

Or Display Configuration Manager.. Hhmm.. name sucks, doesn’t it? =) (But it will stay like that until you suggest something cool =))

Anyway, we have released Pardus 2008 Beta this week. It comes with a new manager (I and Fatih - “the Xorg guy” =) were together in this) which enables you to configure Xorg server (drivers, monitors, dual screens etc.)

You can reach DM via Tasma -> System -> Display Manager or simply by typing display-manager command from the line. Please do not hesitate to share your opinions and bug reports via Bugzilla.

There’re some screenshots here:

(more…)

copyleft ~ pinguar for ..the mythical woman month.., 2008. | Permalink | One comment