So, you heard all the buzz about installing GNOME 3.8 on openSUSE 12.3? You love GNOME, but still are ‘stuck’ in the old way of working and heard that the ‘Classic’ mode might be the solution for you?

Well, GNOME-Classic has now been integrated into the GNOME 3.8 repository for openSUSE 12.3 and been tested… after some small issues in the initial phase (integration errors: I simply did not pay attention to the classic mode), I can produdly present you:

GNOME Classic as an option in GDM:

GDM 3.8 – GNOME Classic as Session option

Once logging in with the GNOME Classic session selected, you will be greeted with a FULL GNOME 3 Desktop, but with a set of pre-defined extensions enabled (This is in essence ALL it is: just a collection of extensions that are pre-selected for you).

Don’t mistake this for GNOME 2.x, or an attempt to bring GNOME 2.x back.. it’s merely there to bridge you over to GNOME 3.

If you do not see the GNOME-Classic option, you likely do not have gnome-shell-classic installed (it is not selected by default).
zypper install gnome-shell-classic

the GNOME 3.8 for openSUSE 12.3 – Repository

You have eagerly been waiting for it, maybe you even dared to install the test repositories published during the last few days… if you happen to be amongst the ones that reported issues with it, then ALL THANKS go to you!

GNOME 3.8 was released on March 27 2013; the openSUSE GNOME Team worked hard, day and night, to give you this nice release for openSUSE 12.3, which was released on March 13 2013, as quick as possible, without skipping the QA entirely.

HOW do you get it?

The basic pre-requisit is a fully updated openSUSE 12.3 GNOME installation, where you add the GNOME 3.8 repository on top.
zypper ar -f obs://GNOME:STABLE:3.8/openSUSE_12.3 GS38
zypper dup --from GS38

There should not be any more questions than ‘Are you sure’ and zypper will do the rest; on your next login, you will be greeted by GDM 3.8 and login to GNOME 3.8.

NOTE for users of Non-English installations: due to new language strings, it is very well possible that part of your UI is not translated; this is due to optimizations in the way openSUSE prepares language packages and bundles, but in this situation it ‘fails’. The best way around this is to install gnome-shell-lang explicitly.

Should you, despite the testing done by various people, run into any issues, please let the openSUSE GNOME Team know about this. The best ways to reach us:

- on IRC: #openSUSE-gnome @ irc.freenode.net
- by mail: openSUSE-gnome @ opensuse.org
- For things that we can not solve with a few mails / chat lines, please register a bug at https://bugzilla.novell.com, Make sure to mention that you run GNOME:STABLE:3.8.

If you’re a little bit less  brave to just put it on your disk, but still would like to explore the options: there are life images being forged, which you can download HERE.

INTEL Graphic Chip Users
Please note that there is a known issue in the X-Stack of openSUSE 12.3, which GNOME 3.8 happens to expose. The fix for this has been released as an online Update (package Mesa); If you ensure your system is fully patched prior to installing GNOME 3.8, you should be all safe.

As some of you certainly already know, we are working hard to push GNOME 3.8 as an addon repository to you.
All should be ready and a ‘test’ repository is in place (for brave souls!).

The gnome team conducted several tests so far and this seemed to work all just fine…. but it is limited testing.

Do you want to test some more? Feel free, let us know of issues!

how: (as root)
zypper patch (Make sure ot be up-to-date first...)
zypper ar -f http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/dimstar:/broken/openSUSE_12.3 GS38
zypper dup --from GS38 (preferably from a pure root tty login - you never know)

That should be it!

If all goes well, you should not see any odd dependency questions (if you do, please let me know.. I’d want to eliminate them as much as possible).

Thanks for your tests! The more brave people tests, the higher the quality of the repository can get.

Have a lot of fun! And happy GNOME 3.8-ing

First the good news: GNOME 3.8 for openSUSE 12.3 is shaping up rather well, despite the heavily overloaded OBS, we have a first ‘draft’ repository working.

The bad news: no, it is not just ready yet for ‘prime’ use. There are a few ‘easy upgrade’ issues to be sorted out… currently, zypper/YaST ask some ugly questions about no outdated packages to be removed.

Are you brave and curios? Feel free to add the home:dimstar:broken repository to your system (mind it: it DOES say broken in the name!). Ok, our tests showed it’s not completely broken if one answers all the yast questions smartly and ‘truthful’.

We believe though, having checked in fixes for all of the issues encountered and OBS is busy building again… about 30% already done. Once the builds are published in my ‘test project’ again, we will do some more checkups and if everything goes well, will release it into the wild.

ETA: approx end of this week.

Happy hacking all!

Update 2013-4-09: The now released ‘home:dimstar:broken’ repository seems to be much smoother than a few days ago… no more errors in my tests from zypper. Can anybody confirm this?

So, having done all the package updates in the last few days, having fix a few failures and being patient with the openSUSE Build Server, we should be ready to release this to the wild later during the day.

The instructions to install remain the same as in the original post: I suggest to not only use ‘zypper up’, but really do zypper dup: there might have entered one or two new packages which would not change vendor otherwise… alternatively, you can use the yast software installer and ‘switch all packages to the GS36′ repository…

Any issues? Let us know! The bug tracker still is open for your issues and I’ll try to answer comments as in previous posts.

Registration went smooth and some nice goodies were handed over. Always nice to get some gifts. And my geeko family at home is growing Will need to get additional food supplies I guess.

The first slot of talks I ‘lapsed’ with socializing on the floor only; Great people around and good to finally put a face to IRC Nicknames.

Bernhard M. Wiedeman explains about openQA, its flexibility, its powers and limitations. From the GNOME Team PoV, we should get much better aligned with Bernhard, making sure we actually tests things which we know are sensible to break. In fact, we did that just a few weeks back, when we asked to get ‘gnucash’ on the list of tested applications, simply as historically, this app just always had issues (mostly packaging issues).

Google, Grep and usbmon: Klaus explains us his motivation to learn how the USB Protocol works, how to analyse and reverse engineer it. The findings were interesting and the evolution of computer equipment could clearly be seen: his scanner, which is connected on USB, communicates actually using a parallel port protocol, which in turn has SCSI Commands embedded. Not too surprising, when we look at the history of connection buses for Scanners: First SCSI connected, later migrated to PP (thus, for ease of the vendors, passing SCSI commands on a parallel port), then moved on in time to USB (again, only wrapping this around).

Heading off for lunch, which, for a university restaurant, is on a very acceptable level. Had worse food in better places. Taking the price into account, it is a good deal.

ownCloud under the hood: Klaas gives an overview of ownCloud, some outline in the features and makes developing apps/extensions to the system appealing. The typical difficulties of webdav / full foilder sync are smartly avoided by tracking IDs for changes and rolling them up to parent folders. Thus any folder has information about children’s changes. This helps in stopping the scan at early stages, before parsing the entire folder trees. Well done!

LibreOffce – What’s new: Michael Meeks owns the stage: Never sure with MMeeks if he found the right job or if he missed his carreer: he is GREAT at programming AND presenting (allthough, a very fast speaker, so some people might have difficulties following him at times). Anyway: greatly enjoyed listening to Michael and almost wanted to git clone the LO Tree. But probably not with the conference WLAN.

Crashing the kernel for fun: Stefan Seyfried explains why it can be good to crash/hang the kernel and his journey on finding ways to do so.

Then, off for an evening out! Great fun. Make sure to catch the talks on the videos that are being recorded from the conference.

About the conference
I was fortunate to receive full sponsorship to participate at oSC12. One way of the project to ‘thank’ its active contributors. Thanks openSUSE!

THANK YOU FOR THIS

But, it’s time to move on and say good bye to this test repository, who’s sole purpose was to allow for packages to be published while not everybody jumps on the repositories.

I will remove this repository later this afternoon / evening.

Should you be one of the users, please change your configuration to point to the GNOME:STABLE:3.6 repository; the packages are the same and no real change should happen to your system (zypper might still want to do some work for you though).

The times of waiting is finally over.

First of all, GNOME 3.6? What’s so cool and special that you want it?
The highlights of the GNOME 3.6 release are:

• Big improvements to notifications, including a redesigned Message Tray, smarter notifications, and other tweaks and refinements.
• An enhanced Activities Overview with an improved layout.
• A greatly enhanced Files application, with functional file search, a new Recent location, redesigned interface and lots of bug fixes and handy new features.
• Integrated Input Sources, which makes inputting different character sets (eg. Japanese or Chinese) fast and easy.
• Accessibility on demand, meaning that universal access features like the Orca screen reader can be enabled with the push of a button.
• A new Lock Screen. This provides an attractive view when the device is locked, plus handy functionality like media controls and notifications.

And what does it look like?

The all new GDM Login screen:

GNOME 3.6 / GDM

And a GNOME 3.6 session:

Running GNOME 3.6 session

Now, you are all eager to get this on your system too… but HOW?

Before starting, make sure to have your openSUSE 12.2 installation fully updated, easiest by using
zypper patch

If needed, repeat the above until there is nothing left to be done… and NOW we’re ready for the FUN

zypper ar obs://GNOME:STABLE:3.6/openSUSE_12.2 GS36
zypper mr -r GS36
zypper dup --from GS36(Should you see issues with obs://GNOME:STABLE:3.6/openSUSE_12.2, you can also use http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/GNOME:/STABLE:/3.6/openSUSE_12.2)

The steps explained:

adds a new repository, called by GS36, to your system
zypper ar obs://GNOME:STABLE:3.6/openSUSE_12.2 GS36 enables the repository to auto-refresh as needed. After all, you will want to get any updates we’re eventually to publish there as well
zypper mr -r GS36 Actually do perform the upgrade, preferring packages in GS36, allowing others to be pulled in as needed.
zypper dup --from GS36

NOTE: This has all been tested on pristine openSUSE 12.2 installations and is considered to work reasonably well. There are for sure small things to be cleaned out here and there (work is still in progress). NO tests have been done with any 3rd – party Repositories enabled!

Found an issue?

Any issue you think is worth to be mentioned is easiest brought forward to us on the #opensuse-gnome IRC Channel (freenode network) or by email (opensuse-gnome [ at ] opensuse.org). We will try to help resolve issues as much as we can.

I know you are all eagerly awaiting it!

* AND IT JUST HAPPENED *

GNOME 3.6 (at least what has been released so far; official release date is tomorrow, so there can still some more packages appear) has been submitted and accepted into GNOME:Factory.

* FACTORY USERS *

GNOME:Factory, as you all know, is the staging project where all packages are being tested against each other and, once deemed working, be forwarded to openSUSE:Factory, to be included into our next release of openSUSE.

GNOME:Factory is NOT compatible to 12.2 (due to dependencies).

* BUT *

Don’t be afraid just yet: All this great work has also been submitted and accepted into a new repository GNOME:STABLE:3.6 (which, at this moment, is not published; we will be doing at least a few integration tests on 12.2 before crashing _your_ machine(s).) If all goes well and may the OBS be with us (giving us the build power we need), this should not take too long.

Once all this is ready, we’ll let you know here again!

* BUT BUT *

_YOU_ are really brave and don’t mind crashing your machine… should this happen, you are
a) capable of extracting log files (even if NO gui comes up
b) formulate readable bug reports
c) FIX the bug

then there is even a repository for 12.2 published (actually, it is GNOME:STABLE:3.6 published in a different namespace). So if you feel adventerous and comply to at least 2 of the 3 points above, then you are allowed to use the repository home:dimstar:broken on your machine and get up to GNOME 3.6 (don’t do this just now: the repository is in a full rebuild due to the checkins!)

* WHAT MORE *

What? you want even MORE??? Well, formulate your needs, and we’ll find a way to make you work on them

After all, this is a community effort! We need YOU to make this all possible.

Hope you’re having a lot of fun!

The openSUSE GNOME Team

* THE END *

So why am I so happy? It resolves a nasty bug the gnome-team was trying to chase, namely the fact that keyboard shortcuts stopped working a while back. Once the issue was identified (the obvious switch from XInput to XInput2 by gnome upstream), there were two solutions: revert XInput2 usage in gnome or get X up-to-date and live happily ever after.

Needless to say, we chose the hard way and started working on the X.org packages.Now, they were solid, but packaging wise everything bug in good shape. A lot of patches applied, many of them not part of the upstream codebase, never sent upstream, or simply not interesting for upstream.

Vincent did a great job in cleaning up the packages, splitting the huge collection in small and manageable pieces (and enabled the awesomeness osc collab offers: upstream version tracking). I took the liberty to work on updating the packages to their latest versions afterward and reworking the main package a bit, especially after having run into issue with xorg being updated, but I forgot the driver packs… boring details, nothing to worry about.

So, you want to test it?
That’s a bit trickier.. most of this work already went back to obs://X11:XOrg (the package cleanup and split) but the updates are so far only available in my bracnh (obs://home:dimstar:branches:X11:XOrg). Not all driver packs were updated (namely: nouveau is still missing), as I focused on my virtual machine.

Yet, after having completed these steps, I’m sure to get the needed boost in motivation again to finish it and to move those packages forward to Factory. Only that we reach Milestone 4 already; wish this would have happened earlier.

So long! Happy testing and machine breaking!