Conary 2.0.20 is a maintenance release.

• Dependency checking can now be run without computing the dependency order.
• Added closeDatabase parameter when creating an updateJob to prevent that updateJob from closing the database when it's destroyed. This is a workaround to support CNY-1834.
• Build dependency temporary tables incrementally instead of rebuilding them each time. This results in speedup for group building approaching 50%.

• Updates after a local update of a package that is referenced in multiple groups now function again. (CNY-2882)

Today I created a blueprint I intend to promote for Launchpad’s Rosetta workflow. Titled “The process by which translation teams can better handle collaboration” (and its matching full specification), it is my intent to describe a mechanism by which translation teams can better administrate the contributions sent by Rosetta users, provide useful feedback and take a first step toward a better relationship with upstream projects.

I kindly invite those interested in the same topic to subscribe to the blueprint and add their feedback to the specification page, specially those who like me have their feet in both upstream and Rosetta worlds.

Once upon a time, I ran a very short-lived Internet radio station called Smerpcast. I pretty much crammed all of the crap I liked onto a playlist and sent it up to a friend who “borrowed” some of BTI’s bandwidth to make it happen. Folks listened, some of which confessed to enjoying it, but wish that I’d tone down on Rachel’s “Full on Night”. Whatever.

So, now there’s muxtape, which seems neat and all that, but I can’t help but feel that the RIAA is one step away from serving all of the users on there a big fat summons or at least execute a DMCA takedown on the whole thing.

Until that fateful day occurs, I give you Smerpcast: Muxtape Edition 2008. Hope you like it.

A few days back I was browsing gnomefiles.org to find some app, and I started to browse a bit in different categories.
I found some apps, that have no publicity, but are simply great, and people should at least try them.
I urge you to post as a comment your favorite apps, which you feel don’t get as much publicity as they should have.
For starters (my point of view) :

Cream - a great GUI for vim, that makes editing files a breeze (yet to package for FL, as the installer has some issues )

Dear LazyWeb,

I will be giving a presentation on using Python for System Administrators at the Chicago Linux User Group on Saturday (July 5th) and I was wondering what topics people would like to see included in such a presentation.  I plan to talk about subprocess, optparse, configparser but not quite sure what else people would like to hear about.  So people of the vast internet, please tell me what you would like to see in a presentation about using python for system administration.

My good friend Mario Đanić (pygi) wrote a very interesting article on what he calls a “broken on birth” attitude towards DVCS adoption in many open source groups. I was very intrigued as to how one would allow different developers use their own (i.e. favorite) DVCS to work on their project, and yet be able to pool everything together in order to release a given set? If you want to learn about his ideas, about GitoriousKDE or have some relevant feedback for him, drop him a line.

Conary 2.0.19 is a maintenance release.

• Removed unnecessary repository accesses that were occuring while determining local system changes during an update. (CNY-2876)
• "import os" within recipes now functions again. (CNY-2879)

Dear Lazyweb,

I am working on this Python application that remotely checks if a machine needs to be updated and then returns the results.  What I am wondering is what is the best way to execute commands on the remote clients, right now various linux distributions?  I was thinking to run the commands via ssh.  This would require ssh keys added to the remote machine and a user that is able to run privileged commands (apt, yum, conary, etc).  The other idea I had was to have a daemon on the client computers that would listen for triggers to run the commands and then return the results.  What I am asking the lazy web is what is the preferred or standard (if any) method for executing remote commands via python?

How would you like to win a brand new Foresight t-shirt.  Well we are looking for a new tagline and the winner will get a Foresight t-shirt featuring the new tagline.  The deadline for submissions is Friday July 11th, 2008 by 12am(CDT)/6am(UTC) .  Please email all tag line submissions to Kevin Harriss (specialkevin_AT_foresightlinux.org).  The winning tag line will be chosen by the Foresight Council of Users.  I wish everyone the best of luck.

How would you like to win a brand new Foresight t-shirt.  Well we are looking for a new tagline and the winner will get a Foresight t-shirt featuring the new tagline.  The deadline for submissions is Friday July 11th, 2008 by 12am(CDT)/6am(UTC) .  Please email all tag line submissions to myself (specialkevin_AT_foresightlinux.org).  The winning tag line will be chosen by myself and the Foresight Council of Users.  I wish everyone the best of luck.

Why yes, it is doable.

I’m not even sure we want to consider making a Cocoa# UI for it yet. ;)

My latests posts have attracted a fair number of comments (thank every and each one of you for taking the time… really!), most of them in response to the issue at hand. Every now and then someone questions the validity of one of my chosen topics, claiming that it should be published on Planet X (my blog is syndicated on quite a few planets) because it doesn’t talk about technology. I understand that someone people may not enjoy reading every single topic that may be published (not only by me), for I am one of them… honest!

Anyhow, my friend Jonathan Jesse’s comment on my latest post got me thinking… maybe I should write something about this same topic: what do I think about people writing about anything on Planet Ubuntu for instance.

Now, Jonathan… I’m not picking on you bud.

I wonder if political posts such as these really should be syndicated on something like planet.ubuntu.com. I know I have different political leanings then you based on the posts that I’ve read and I try to limit my posts to planets to only the topic on hand. Feel free to disagree with me. That’s the beauty of freedom of speech…. I just hope that you aren’t assuming that everyone who posts on planet.ubuntu.com or reads p.u.c agrees with your political ideas.

From the main page at Planet Ubuntu:

Planet Ubuntu is a window into the world, work and lives of Ubuntu developers and contributors.

I most definitely do not assume that everyone who reads Planet X agrees or shares my ideals and/or principals… it would be naive to think that way, and just flat out against Ubuntu (the ideology, not the distro)! Some people like to write howtos… some write about their favorite recipes or music… I reserve my right to talk about the things that are part of my life, sometimes about politics. I don’t expect that every single subscriber will want to read every single word I write… as I mentioned before, I don’t read everything I’m subscribed to. For those posts that don’t tickle my fancy, all I have to do is press the “j” key on Google Reader (or “n” on Liferea) and presto! A brand new post automagically appears!

I would like to hear your view on political posts appearing on something like planet.ubuntu.com

Fair enough. The short answer is: I’d be very interested to know this facet of many of the contributors to open source that are syndicated on these planets. You see, there’s much more about me than translations, BillReminder or my interest in the political future of my nation. I also love fishing, ice hockey, Clint Eastwood’s westerns, Reuben sandwiches, and… and… so much more. Off course I don’t expect that everyone will care about any of these. But there are a few people out there who find this a reasonable way to know the real me, specially when one lives so far away and with no means to meet in person.

The bottom line is that when my blog was added to Planet X, I was never asked to only write about X, or to create a feed that only talks about X. I’m not trying to wash my hands here, but this was the deal offered to me… and I accepted it. Maybe people who control/administer these aggregators will one day change their regulations in order to provide a more specific and filtered content? Until then, I ask all of you guys/gals who may be annoyed by some (all?) of my articles to simply press the “x” key on your news reader of choice… and exercise your freedom of choice.

For some reason I can’t seem to be able to check the last 2 boxes.

PS: For those who don’t care or don’t want to read about this, exercise your mouse/keyboard and skip this post.

it is amazing just how little real information gets its way to the American public these days. What we Americans call news must be the equivalent of a soap opera or comic stand up everywhere else in the world! The problem is so serious that for those who were born here and never left the country that you end up becoming utterly unaware of what else is going on around the world or, even worse in my oppinion, not knowing what kind of terrorism (our government calls it Foreign Policy) we are perpetrating outside of our borders.

So, while we are spoon fed news about celebraties sexscapades, wild fires and floods (here in American only off course) and useless bits of information, the real news end up filtered out and tossed in the censorship bin. How do you govern/control over a huge population who believe they are free to do whatever they want? The answer is easy: get them out of the equation! As long as we go about our lives thinking that nothing is wrong around us, there is not reason to revolt.

How many people know that Kucinich presented several articles asking for the impeachment of Bush? That our stupid oil-war in Iraq has killed over 1.2 million civilians in Iraq? When was the last time you saw a video/picture of our young soldiers coming back in a coffin? It is as if there was nothing going on and we go on with our lives. How much coverage did our networks give to these issues? Not enough! In any other part of the world, if a president was being considered for impeachment, guess what would be on all news television and newspapers?

Think that the new presidential hopefulls are any better? Wrong! I could never trust someone whose loyalty is far stronger to his organization/group/posse than to his own countrymen. McCain will be yet another dictator with world domination fever. Obama? So much for a change we can believe in. I could never vote for someone who’s main concern is the well being of the State of Israel or who asks his supporters to pay for Hillary Clinton’s $22 million debt from her failed presidential bid! I want a president who puts us, American people first in their agenda. Cut funds for our imperialistic armed forces, and our obssession with finding water in Mars and use that money to pay off our own debts!

People who try to speak up end becoming motives for jokes… How many times was Ron Paul ridiculed during the presidential debates? Apparently it was funny to them that we have been printing money like it was for a game of Monopoly!

I could go on, believe me.

Now you got a opportunity to play World of warcraft for free for 10 days. It wont cost you a thing.

You can create a account, download and start playing today.

Just go here: Teaser playing

At the beginning i must admit that this review may be a little biased, but in the end you’ll see that’s a good thing.
Couple of months back I read that Foresight Linux just hit number 2.0 release. After some reading, I found that it’s a distro that has the latest and greatest from Gnome (which in my case is a must as I’m a Gnome freak ), so I decided to give Foresight Linux a try.

1. Installation
Foresight is a rolling release distro, which is a great feature. You don’t have to go through a painful process of upgrading when a new version is released (like Ubuntu or Fedora), but you can install some former Foresight release like 2.0, upgrade it via conary and in a few minutes your FL installation is up to date.
Thumbs up Foresight for this.
Foresight as we speak has a DVD installation disk or 2CD version, but there are ongoing plans to keep it to just 1 CD.
I downloaded DVD image from Foresight site, burned it and went on with the installation.
Installation process is as smooth as you would’ve imagine.
Foresight uses anaconda as a installation tool (graphical, point and click, smooth tool),which will hold you by the hand and guide you through the whole installation process.
The only troublesome step in this process is the partitioning part, but that’s common in all distros and OS.
Here’s how the install process looks like step by step.
1. Booting up Foresight CD or DVD

2. Booting process on a way to anaconda initialization

3. Installation welcome screen

4. Installation info

5. Selecting time zone

6. Selecting partition layout (be wary, this is the most tricky part)

7. Custom partitioning (one of the options)

8. Entering user information

9. Setting up network devices

10. Selecting boot manager

11. Ongoing installation

12. Installation complete - Reboot and enjoy Foresight Linux

2. Booting up
After the installation Foresight greeted me with a fine splashy theme, green themed GDM, and also green Gnome theme, which I must admit is not as fancy as Fedoras, but also very slick looking.
I don’t have default Foresight desktop screenshot at hand, but I can show you what you can roughly expect upon boot.

and what my current Foresight desktop looks like

Example default Foresight apps consisted of :

and more default Gnome apps.
This selection is very nice by my standards.

3. Working with the system
As all of us I needed to install some apps and fiddle with the system to make it more suitable to my needs
Foresight uses conary as a package manager which, as I’ll describe in detail later, is a great tool.
To keep your system up to date you simply issue the following command from the terminal
sudo conary updateall
or run PackageKit manager and update the system via gui (which has also a nifty option to notify user about available updates via tray).

To install a package (f.e. gimp) you simply issue a command
sudo conary update gimp
or via PK gui as described before.
Minor quirk is that Package Kit frontend to conary doesn’t have option to search by packages description (f.e. “jpg tool”) but in the near future this will be solved by ongoing development of PackageKit conary backend.
If you won’t find a package you’re looking for in the FL repos, you can always browse rbuilder and most of the times you’ll find that package in someones personal repo.
If you’re ever lost with something, you can look for an answer in the Foresight Guide, that consist of many helpful tips.
Userguide in Gnome menu

Part of userguide content

4. What’s next
After installing Foresight and fiddling with it I noticed some packages that I prefer (like mpd, sonata) are missing from official repos, so I started to read up on conary and rmake.
Creating apps in Foresight is very easy and somewhat unique (at least from my point of view).
Firstly you need to setup a development environment, which is pretty easy following the wiki guidelines.
This step is connected with setting up an account at rbuilder, what can be done in a matter of seconds.
To create a package you need to write a recipe, which basically tells conary how to build a package step by step.
With the aid of conary macros most recipes are very easy to create, and easy to understand.
Example of conky recipe
class Scrot(CPackageRecipe): #defining a class for package
name = 'scrot' # defining name of a package
version = '0.8' # defining version of a package
buildRequires = ['giblib:devel'] # selecting dependencies required to build this package
def setup(r):
r.addArchive(’http://linuxbrit.co.uk/downloads/%(name)s-%(version)s.tar.gz’) # pointing the source archive
r.Configure() # running a macro to run ./configure
r.Make() # running a macro to run make
r.MakeInstall() # running a macro to run make install

then all you have to do is to tell conary to cook the recipe by issuing
cvc cook scrot.recipe
Tasty huh?
If it all goes well, there will be a package with css extension created which you can install with command
sudo conary update package.css
Easy ain’t it? Believe me, for me, non IT guy, it was a breeze.

What stands out for conary with creating packages is also :
a) build requirements
Conary is such a smart piece of software that it’ll advise you what dependencies needed for building you left out.
b) rmake
After creating package with conary, you can build a binary for other people to use and install. To do it you deploy a smart tool called rmake, which in shortcut builds package in a chrooted environment thus making sure that the recipe you’ve written is well prepared.
Conary and rmake have many more great features, but this review is long enough, so I’ll write about them some other time.

5. Community
I must admit that Foresight has the best community I’ve come across, and believe me, I used to be an avid distro hopper .
When I had a problem with something and needed help, guys from Foresight Team helped me greatly.
As I’ve mentioned I messed around with creating packages, helping sometimes at IRC channel or forum and before I knew it my work has been recognized and I’ve been offered and voted in as a new official member of Foresight Linux Team. Nifty, huh?
You can reach Foresight team and users at

To sum up this lengthy review : What do you get from installing and getting into Foresight Linux?
You get a fast, responsive, up to date, easy to maintain, slick looking desktop, along with powerful yet simple to use package manager, and a great opportunity to become a member (or even a developer) of a fine team.
And If you’re a Gnome freak like me, you must try Foresight out because it has the latest and greatest from Gnome.
Hint : There are also XFCE and KDE versions ongoing, if you’re interested in other DEs.

Do I need to say more? I encourage you to try out Foresight Linux, you won’t be disappointed.

• Promoting all the custom packages to the expected development label for that defined version


• Creating the new appliance group on that expected development label with the expected name for the product definition, but with code copied from the current appliance group

1. Create a new product version from the main page of the product (again, formerly known as "project").
   • Be cautious of what you use for the "namespace" and the "major version" value because these make up part of your new Conary label for the product.
   • Be aware that the advanced options for each image can be specified by expanding the section using the little chalk icon on the right side of the row for that image in the set list.


2. Use Manage Images --> Create a set of images from a product definition, stepping through selecting the product version and initial ("Development") stage, to see what group name and label are expected to have a binary build of the appliance in order to generate images from the set. This has an expected format of group-shortname-appliance=shortname.rpath.org@namespace:shortname-version-devel (replacing shortname, namespace, and version as appropriate for your product and version)


3. Set up your local development environment with an appropriate Conary context for the expected label.


4. Promote custom packages and non-appliance groups from their existing label to the new expected label. If necessary, make modifications to accommodate their new home.


5. Use cvc newpkg to create a new group with the expected group name, and copy the recipe from the existing label to the new group. At this step, be sure to rename the recipe file to match the new group name, and open the recipe file to make adjustments throughout to match its new home.


6. Continue development work as usual on this new label.


7. Use the new rBO interface features to generate images when necessary, and use cvc promote as always to promote from one stage to another in a release management process (though be sure to conform to the expected values for that product definition: -devel suffix for devel, -qa suffix for test/qa, and no suffix for release).


8. After releasing the updated appliance on the new label, change all the custom packages, non-appliance groups, and appliance groups on the old label to redirect to their new locations on the new label (see this wiki page for more info on changing these to use a redirect recipe).

After my last post, it seems a few people are interested in Summa. I’m pleased to announce that 0.1 will be out “soon”. Don’t worry—I’ll be sure to let you all know the minute it does.

However, for release, there are a few pre-requisites we need to fix: namely, icons. Simply put, the icons we are using at the moment are “place-holders” (ideally).

Right now, here are the icons we need:

• summa-feed-unread (16×16 only)
• summa-feed-read (16×16 only)
• summa-item-unread (16×16 only)
• summa-item-read (16×16 only)
• summa-item-flagged (16×16 only)
• summa-all-feeds (16×16 only) (though hopefully we can just take the one from ephy)
• summa-tag (16×16 only) hopefully we can use the one I stole from Tomboy, by jimmac)
• summa (all sizes)

Anyone willing to make these icons up would not only receive an iCookie, but also the never-ending admiration of Ethan Osten and myself (for what that’s worth).

In addition to icons, here’s a quick “todo” list of items we want to address before 0.1:

• Fix autotools/makefiles (both hardcoded path issues, configure issues, and lack of make install)
• Fix ATOM parser to suck (much) less
• Fix issues with hardcoded icons
• Miscellaneous bug fixes
• General code cleanup

Some folks have already expressed interest in contributing to Summa. We’re more than happy to have you helping out, especially if you’re working on the above issues. That said, if you’re interested (and please, for now, only those of you who are truly interested in contributing immediately), please send an email to both Ethan and myself, at senoki@gmail.com and wcfarrington@gmail.com respectively.

Once 0.1 is out the door, I’ll be sure to broadcast the location of the code for all to grab, but for now, we simply want to keep a tight focus on getting 0.1 out the door before any rush (imaginary or no) of developers running at the project.

As this is my first post on Planet Foresight I just simply want to say that I’m honored to be a part of Foresight Team, which by this step extended by more nation - Poland
My blog is mostly written in Polish, so you will probably have problems understanding it as this is a tough language (unless you want to learn it as LanceHaig ), but I’ll stick with English for my Planet posts, which I hope will be understandable for you.
What’s upcoming from me ? More packaging, a Foresight review (which I have to finally finish), and more action involving IRC and Forums.
Thanks for your decision for having me here and till the next post.

Last week, my schedule was extremely hectic. Among deadlines and preparing for the upcoming vacation, we also attended the Parish Life Conference  organized by All Saints Orthodox Church. We enjoyed the talks (especially the lecture  Frederica Matthewes-Green gave).

The News and Observer published an interview. Interesting read.

trying to find firebird db for a package

Been suffering from a nasty stomach flu since yesterday and, needless to say, it hasn’t been fun for me. Spent the entire day trying to get some rest but was too restless to fall asleep. I don’t know how many times I checked my email or browsed my rss feeds! Out of the many tabs I opened and closed in my browser, one remained open at all times: a link to a book called Essential SQLAlchemy!

Having ventured into the SQLAlchemy and Elixir world a couple of months back (if you’re curious, check out my bookie code in my personal svn server), I felt that the documentation was a bit too “thin” to get me where I wanted to get: replace BillReminder’s database layer with a more pythonic and, hopefully, easier and cleaner code. Now, a couple of months later I felt compelled to give it another chance, maybe with the aid of this book. My only concern is, with so many other things going on with my life, will I find the time to go through the book and make the US$34.99 purchase? Don’t get me wrong, I love buying books but with 2 young kids and the economy deteriorating before my own eyes, one has to prioritize one’s needs.

I then saw a link to Safary Books Online and started drooling at the possibility of having a zillion technical books available to me from any computer! But once again the price tag brought my ambitions to a halt… and now I’m left to “enjoy” the remaining effects of my stomach flu and wish I were a literate fly inside a Barnes & Nobbles mega store!

We believe that the performance problems introduced in the recent update of rBuilder Online have been resolved. Our tests and monitoring are showing stable and acceptable performance. Friday (27 June) night (22:00 US/Eastern) rBuilder Online and other rPath web services will be off-line for maintenance while we add additional hardware to support our growing demand.

This means that if you are now experiencing markedly slower repository performance than you were before 21 June, or if you are experiencing significant variations in repository performance, please let us know.

that is why I wear dark clothes

Well it has been a while since the Bongo team has released a version and there is good reason for this.

Over the last few months since the release of 0.3.0 the developers have been rewriting a large proportion of the store code. Alex realised that the old one was not as efficient as it could be when there were large volumes of mail stored in the system. This actually started when it was discovered that when using IMAP and connecting to your mail account if you tried to move large volumes of mail around it would error out or worse. The store is now almost done and the branch and trunk should be merged soon.

The other Alex has been bevering away at a new web front end for Bongo. After we had tried to fix what was broken in the old one we decided that the best way forward was to completely rewrite the whole thing. Now I don’t profess to know a whole lot about the subject but I know that it will be much easier to manage and work with which will make it easier for other people to contribute to the project.

I have probably summarised this far to much but I thought it best to let people know what we are doing.

As far as the Bongo appliance goes Stu and I have been working on a new incarnation of the appliance based on rPath Linux 2. This new version will allow us to utilise the newest version of rPath for the creation of the appliance. I have been working on other projects that have allowed me to gain valuable experience in the rPath packaging method and this will make it easier for me to administer and add features to the appliance.

Andy has been working on getting the Opensuse Builder to build a larger number of packages for different distributions and he has also packaged an experimental version of Bongo from svn. I hope to have that done soon for the appliance as well.

Lin has been busy bevering away at fixing and adding documentation to the wiki and I would like to say THANK YOU to him for all the work he has put in.

I hope I have not missed anything and if I have please let me know so I can add it to this post.

Well the heading says it all.

On my way in to work today I was almost flattened in by a granny in a BMW X5 and another one in a Jaguar XJ something(I did not see as I was trying to save my life). Both of the lady’s just changed lanes without even looking in their mirrors. The one could not even see her mirrors as they were folded away presumably to protect them when the car is parked. needless to say my heart was given a jolt each time.

During my travle into work I regularly comment on the fact that many people mostly young ones are smoking weed while driving in to work themselves. This of course is very dangerous not only for the people driving under the influence but also for other road users.

Today was no exception driving in I noticed the unmistakeable smell wafting up from the cars in fron’t as I came closer I noticed that the small micra or some such souped up minicar was so full of smoke I am sure the driver and passengers could not se out.

I wonder what it will take to make these people realise what they are doing to themselves and also what they could potentially do to others. The only way things are noticed in the current society is if some innocent child is gruesomely dispatched from this world and all the graphic details are spread about in the news.

I hope that such an occurrence is not needed for this.

It’s been a while since I posted last.

That tends to happen when one is busy.

I’m settled in here at Georgia Tech now—enjoying my classes and what-have-you. Naturally, this has cut down a little bit of my personal, and GSoC, time; however, things still don’t seem to be falling too far behind. I anticipate that I’ll be back ahead of schedule in no time.

Beyond that, I was lucky enough to get myself one of the heavily discounted Macbooks at the Tech Barnes & Noble (including the “free” iPod Touch it comes with). It’s certainly nice, and OSX is definitely a bit of a venture from my normal day-to-day activities. I do anticipate to dual-boot this eventually, but as for right now, I’ve been setting up my OSX environment to be friendly towards the development I’m doing, through MacPorts and lots and lots of compilation. Hopefully I’ll have my environment set up suitable today, and then I can dive right back into development.

Since our update Monday, rBuilder Online has been experiencing performance problems. We are working to address these issues at high priority, and expect to have improved performance during the day tomorrow (Thursday, 26-June).

Thank you for your patience while we increase rBuilder Online's capacity to handle the increased interest from you, the rBuilder Online community.

Amazing! There’s no other better way to describe the turn around for the translation progress of BillReminder after yesterday’s post/pledge! In less than 24 hours there were 8 new translations available bringing the total of available translations now to 17! Awesome! I want to thank every single person who took the time to lend me a hand!

During the course of merging the new stuff into the repository, I was a bit confused as far as the work flow for people who have their projects hosted on Launchpad but not necessarily host the source code in their bzr servers. I immediately fired an email to the Launchpad mailing list but decided to also post it here for anyone who may be interested in the subject.

My questions were:

1. If I make a change to the message catalog (*.pot) of my project in its own repository (i.e. not bzr), will the message catalog stored in Rosetta be automatically updated with it once the code is synced?
2. If the answer for the question above is ‘True’, will then all existing translations be merged against the newer message catalog?

If you know anything about this, please feel free to reply.

I need your help to get BillReminder translated into as many different languages as possible! Up until now I have relied on a list of collaborators who know how to work with a message catalog template (i.e. pot file) and use it to generate a translated message file (i.e. po file). I’m aware that a lot of people probably don’t know what I’m talking about and/or may feel uneasy about working with text files and what not… so I decided to set BillReminder up for translation via Rosetta, which can be reached here.

Once you have registered to use Rosetta, and you are part of one of the many translation teams, it should be extremely easy for you to help out with the translation effort. I’m looking forward to seeing new languages added to the project just in time for an upcoming release.

Conary 2.0.18 is a maintenance release.

• The addRoleMember() and getRoleMembers() calls are now exposed via XMLRPC. (CNY-2862)
• Added support for package creator specific data to trove info and the getPackageCreatorTroves() repository call. (CNY-2855)

• A rare error that occurred when an updating containing several groups that contained different versions of the same package has been fixed. (CNY-2860)
• Some .car format files previously caused builds to fail; this has been corrected. (CNY-2871)
• Tracebacks no longer print each filename twice (bug introduced in Conary 2.0.16). (CNY-2872)

• When the configure script run by r.Configure() or r.ManualConfigure() fails, "command not found" messages are highlighted, and possible missing buildRequires based on those messages are sought in the repository. (CNY-2708)
• All missing buildRequires found by noticing programs used in source actions, build actions, and policies are reported immediately as well as summarized at the end of the build, to make it clearer why each requirement has been suggested. (CNY-2858)
• The r.addPatch() method now takes an optional patchName keyword argument, which is the name of the patch program to use to apply the patch. (CNY-2858)

The scheduled maintenance of rBuilder Online has been completed.

A number of fundamental changes have been made; for more information, visit:

http://wiki.rpath.com/wiki/rBuilder_Online

The "Recent Changes to rBuilder Online" section of this page contains an overview of what's changed.

If you have any questions or comments regarding rBuilder Online, the rPath Forum now contains a dedicated rBuilder Online board:

rBuilder Online board

Thank you for your interest in rBuilder Online.

I wrote before about top 14 first person shooter linux games, now it's time to let go the strategy game list. I hope you will enjoy some of the games as much as i do.
Here is the top 15 strategy games for linux.

1. Battle For Wesnoth

The Battle for Wesnoth, or simply Wesnoth, is a free turn based strategy game designed in June 2003 by David White.

David White based Wesnoth on the Sega Genesis games Master of Monsters and Warsong (also known as Langrisser). He wanted to create a freely-available, open source strategy game that had very simple rules, but had a strong artificial intelligence, and was challenging and fun.

2. Warzone 2100

Warzone 2100 is a real-time strategy and real-time tactics hybrid computer game, developed by Pumpkin Studios and published by Eidos Interactive. Outside of the story, Warzone 2100 only has a single faction, limiting some of the variety that can be expected from such games of its kind, although the faction is very complex. Essentially, Warzone 2100 plays much like Earth 2150 with 3D units and terrain, customizable vehicles, a lack of traditional standing infantry, use of “research” to acquire new technologies, and perceptible differentiation of vehicles types.

3. Spring

The game is mainly focused around multiplayer games over the Internet or a LAN connection. There are currently a few single player missions, built on the basic support for this through Lua scripting. There are also many skirmish AIs under development, allowing for offline play or extra players in an online game. Two skirmish AIs ship in the game package, as well as three maps and the XTA mod.

4. Battle Tanks

“Battle Tanks” is a funny battle on your desk, where you can choose one of three vehicles and eliminate your enemy using the whole arsenal of weapons. It has original cartoon-like graphics and cool music, it’s fun and dynamic, it has several network modes for deathmatch and cooperative — what else is needed to have fun with your friends? And all is packed and ready for you in “Battle Tanks”.

5. Bos Wars

Bos Wars is a futuristic real time strategy game (RTS). In a RTS game, the player has to combat his enemies while developing his war economy. Everything runs in real-time, as opposed to turn-based games where the player always has to wait for his turn. The trick is to balance the effort put into building his economy and building an army to defend and attack the enemies.

6. FreeCol

Is a turn-based strategy game based on the old game Colonization, and similar to Civilization. The objective of the game is to create an independent nation.
You start with only a few colonists defying the stormy seas in their search for new land. Will you guide them on the Colonization of a New World?

7. Freeciv

Is a Free and Open Source empire-building strategy game inspired by the history of human civilization. The game commences in prehistory and your mission is to lead your tribe from the stone age to the space age...

8. Glest

The core game allows the player to take control of two completely different factions: Tech, which is mainly composed of warriors and mechanical devices, and Magic, that prefers mages and summoned creatures in the battlefield.

9. Widelands

If you knew Settlers I & II™ (© Bluebyte), then you already have a rough idea what Widelands is all about. Yes, it is where the inspiration for Widelands came from.
In Widelands, you are the regent of a small tribe. You start out with nothing but your headquarters, a kind of castle in which all your resources are stored. In the course of the game, you will build an ever growing settlement. Every member of your tribe will do his or her part to produce more resources - wood, food, iron, gold and more - to further this growth. But you are not alone in the world, and you will meet other tribes sooner or later. Some of them may be friendly and trade with you. However, if you want to rule the world, you will have to train soldiers and fight.

10. FreeRA

FreeRA is an open source implementation of the famous game "Command and Conquer - Red Alert".

11. Jagged Alliance 2 - Stracciatella

Jagged Alliance 2 is a tactical role-playing game for Linux and MAC.

Didn't manage to the top These games didn't manage to be in top 10 list, but still worth to check them out and maybe try them.

12. FreeOrion
FreeOrion is a multiplayer, turn-based strategy computer game, inspired by the Master of Orion series.

13. Snowballz
Take command of your army of penguins as you blaze your path to victory!

14. UFO: Alien Invasion
It is the year 2084. You control a secret organisation charged with defending Earth from a brutal alien enemy. Build up your bases, prepare your team, and dive head-first into the fast and flowing turn-based combat.

15. Crimson Fields
The outcome of the war lies in your hands. You decide which units are sent to the front lines, and when to unleash the reserves.

My friend devnet told me today as we got some coffee about what was possibly one of the very first micro bloggers in history… when he finally gave me the link to this guy’s site I laughed so hard I almost had coffee (my precioussss) coming out of my nose! With posts such as “Tidying some pencils”, “Standing in the middle of the room” and “Looking at a wall”, it was really hard not to laugh!

So for all you professional Tweeters out there, check out the link for some fresh material… and the next time you “tweet” about how blissfull it is when you scratched your knee, every flippin’ hour, it may be a bit more interesting for those who somehow still manage to follow your feed.

I’ll be giving a talk on Foresight at the end of July at a relatively new LUG in the Twin Cities, Penguins Unbound.

I’ve met a few Foresight users in IRC that live in the Twin Cities over the next year. I hope you’ll come out and we can meet in person. Hope to see you there!

More information is available here.

These games are most popoular to play in Linux, all the games is playable without "wine" and most of them are free software.

1. Postal 2 - Share the pain

Scissors has released a free download version of Postal 2: Share the Pain. This is the complete multiplayer portion of the game, with the single player campaign removed.

2. Nexuiz

Nexuiz is a free, cross platform, first person shooter distributed under GNU General Public License by Alientrap Software. It started back in May 31 2005 with version 1.0 using DarkPlaces, a significanlty modified quake engine. The current version, 2.2.3, was released on January 26, 2007. Nexuiz’s logo is based on the chinese character “力” which means strength.

Several notable features of the game include

• ability to multiplay up to 64 players
• ability to generate bots for practice sessions
• dynamic lighting system similar to Doom 3

3. Sauerbraten

Sauerbraten (a.k.a. Cube 2) is a free multiplayer/singleplayer first person shooter, built as a major redesign of the Cube FPS.

4. America’s Army

America’s Army is a tactical, multiplayer, first-person shooter owned by the United States Government and released as a global public relations initiative to help with U.S. Army recruitment. The first version, Recon, was released on 4th July 2002. The current version 2.8.1 was released on 22nd Mar 2007.

It’s the first well known computer game used for political aims. The game is used as a playable recruiting tool and critics have charged the game serves as a propaganda device. A counter on the hom