Hunting for a job as linux developer?

Are you seeking for a job as a open source software developer? Do you have experience with Linux and are you interested in develop software for Linux? You have knowledge of technologies related to laptops/mobile devices as e.g. WLAN, ACPI, Bluetooth, HAL, power management, device drivers or data synchronisation? You are a good C/C++ developer?

Then the SUSE/Novell Mobile Devices Team has probably a interesting job offer for you. We are looking for a talented, energetic Software Developer to increase our team. You can find the full job description here. SUSE offer competitive salaries and benefits. As far as I know the job location is not necessarily Prague.

If this sound interesting to you, mail us your application documents (for contact see here) and feel free to let me know.

Tech Tags: SUSE

TabletPCs: fix for xsetwacom

We had some trouble with rotation of wacom input devices on openSUSE 10.3/11.0 (see bugs #387127, #399016 and #391466) if the screen content get rotated via the XRandR extension.

The source of the problem was the way 'xsetwacom --list' try to identify the configured wacom input devices. The tool try to find them based on the device name (Identifier in xorg.conf) which don't work if you set other names than cursor, stylus, eraser or pad. But this is what SaX2 do if you configure a Tablet, they get named 'Mouse[x]'. Because of this (the patched version of) krandrtray (KDE) and resapplet (GNOME) were no longer able to find the devices which need to get rotated with xsetwacom.

To solve the problem I ported and extended an old patch from Stefan Dirsch from 2005 to the current package/source. With this patch xsetwacom now check the xorg.conf for devices which uses the wacom driver and check then the Type field/option for the device type.

The upcoming openSUSE 11.0 contains the patch already. For older openSUSE releases you can find updated packages in my openSUSE build service repository. All other people can get the patch for v0.7.9 and v0.8.0 of linuxwacom here.

Tech Tags: TabletPC Patches

KPowersave Test Cases

To improve the quality of KPowersave I've wrote some test cases for the most important functionality and features of KPowersave and added them to a test plan in the internal Novell Testopia system.

Since Testopia isn't available for external people I've added the same test cases to the SVN repository of KPowersave (see here) so that every interested person can follow the instructions and report bugs and regressions. You can get the test case also as a tar.bz2 package from ftp or as plain text files here.

All cases are about KPowersave running under KDE3. Every test run, against the latest KPowersave (SVN) version, and bugreport (with the number or name of the failed test case) would be appreciated.

Tech Tags: KPowersave

HAL 0.5.11 released

Yes, it's a delayed blog entry ... I forgot to blog as I officially announced HAL v0.5.11 and a hal-info package (20080805) last month.

You can download the source packages here:

• http://hal.freedesktop.org/releases/hal-0.5.11.tar.gz
• http://hal.freedesktop.org/releases/hal-info-20080508.tar.gz

A list with all changes since the last release can you find here or in the announcement email on the HAL mailing list.

Thanks to all contributors, testers and bugreporters which helped during the (too) long release cycle. I hope we see the next release faster (than the 8 months between 0.5.10 and the actual version).

Small note for openSUSE user: this HAL/hal-info version is already part of the upcoming openSUSE 11.0.

Tech Tags: HAL

HAL: v0.5.11-RC2 released

Due to problems with the 'parallel event processing'-patches I've opened a branch for hal v0.5.11. We reverted the relevant changes in this branch and added some patches from the list.
I've decided to stretch the announced release plan with a RC2 to get some time or testing. At the moment I plan to release the final 0.5.11 until Friday (2008-03-21) if there are no new critical bugs.

You can download the snapshots here:

• http://hal.freedesktop.org/releases/hal-info-20080317.tar.gz
• http://hal.freedesktop.org/releases/hal-0.5.11rc2.tar.gz

For openSUSE (Factory/11.0) you can find packages in my hal-beta openSUSE Buildservice Repository as soon as they get build.

For more information about the changes since the last release check this email. Please test the packages carefully and report bugs to the HAL mailing list or via freedesktop bugzilla. Special thanks to Rob Taylor and Sjoerd Simons for testing and patches.

Tech Tags: HAL

HAL: v0.5.11-RC1 released

I've released some hours ago the first release candidate of HAL v0.5.11 and a snapshot of hal-info (20080313). You can get the sources here:

• http://hal.freedesktop.org/releases/hal-0.5.11rc1.tar.gz
• http://hal.freedesktop.org/releases/hal-info-20080313.tar.gz

For more about the changes since the last HAL version (released 2007-10-12) and the last offical released hal-info package (released 2007-12-12) can you find here.

For openSUSE you can find packages in my hal-beta openSUSE Buildservice Repository (named as git snaphot to prevent problems with update packages later).

Please test the packages heavily and carefully. Please report bugs (no features get included until the final version, as already announced) to the HAL mailing list or via the freedesktop bugzilla.

Tech Tags: HAL

HAL: release schedule for v0.5.11

The next HAL version is on the way and since I manage this time the release, here the current release schedule for hal v0.5.11:

• feature and major changes go into until Wednesday (2008-03-12)
  
• HAL 0.5.11 RC1 get announced and offered as source package (2008-03-13)
• bugfixes and hal-info related changes until Friday (2008-03-14)
• release of new version on the weekend (2008-03-16), or depending on open critical bugs by Monday (2008-03-17) at the latest.

I would like to see atm these (major) patches go into the release:

• optimization patches (Rob Taylor)  [1] ff.
• TabletPC support (Danny Kukawka) [2]

So please review and test them carefully. Let me know, if there are other patches left, that need to go into the release.

Tech Tags: HAL