Friday, March 11, 2011

» How to use tin to read the openSUSE Forums

The openSUSE forums also support the NNTP protocol (usually referred to as "news"). There are plenty of GUI news readers out there (thunderbird, knode, pan, ...), but as I'm using mutt to read my emails as well as irssi for IRC in screen sessions (in urxvt, I wanted a console based NNTP client for that as well. (No, I don't use lynx or w3m for web browsing, I'm not a masochist ;).)

Hence I installed trn.

Here is how to set it up to access the openSUSE forums with it:

  1. Obviously, first install trn:
    zypper install trn
  2. then run rtin once, which will give you an error message and exit, but that will create its configuration file tree in ~/.tin:
    rtin
  3. next, edit the configuration file ~/.tin/newsrctable and add the following line:
    forums.opensuse.org /home/XXX/.tin/foo foo
    (where you replace /home/XXX with your actual home directory)
    If you are not fluent with text editors, you can also simply execute the following command from a shell (just copy/paste it):
    echo "forums.opensuse.org $HOME/.tin/foo foo" >> ~/.tin/newsrctable
  4. now we can actually run rtin to connect to the openSUSE forums:
    rtin -a -g foo
    (note that the -a flag turns on color support, and -g foo tells rtin to connect to the server we configured as "foo" in ~/.tin/newsrctable)
  5. you are now greeted with an (almost) empty screen: press the y key (yank in/out) to get a list of all the forums in order to subscribe to those that are of interest to you: simply use the arrow keys to scroll the list and press the s key (subscribe) to subscribe those you want to follow

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Thursday, March 10, 2011

» Invalid Packman repository metadata signature

Marc Schiffbauer and I have been working on finalizing the repository generation process on Packman yesterday, and obviously we still have a bug: when refreshing the metadata of the Packman repository, zypper and YaST will complain that the signature of repomd.xml is invalid.

Sorry for the trouble, we're working on it.

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Monday, March 07, 2011

» Packman repository metadata broken

We hope to resolve the matter tonight, but right now, the repository metadata (repodata/) of the individual repositories (Essentials, Multimedia, Extra and Games) is broken because it is not updated correctly.

In the mean time, if you can't wait ;), please use the "top-level"/"big" repositories instead, they're fine.

To be precise: don't use e.g.
http://packman.inode.at/suse/openSUSE_11.3/Essentials
but use
http://packman.inode.at/suse/openSUSE_11.3
instead.

Sorry for the inconvenience :\

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Thursday, March 03, 2011

» The genius is in simplicity

I recently stumbled over min.us, a website for sharing/pasting images (sort of like pastebin, but for images).

It's not new per se, there have been quite a few image pasting sites already, such as imageshack.us, but what is striking at min.us is the extreme simplicity of its interface.

You open min.us, you drag and drop an image from your file manager / desktop / whatever, and you're done. Period. Brilliant.

Genius resides in designing things that are simple, or at least apparently simple. The success of Google Search with users does not only rely on its search algorithms and implementations, but also on the extreme simplicity and consistence of its user interface (at least as far as the landing page is concerned). Sure, nowadays, you'd think "why would I make a search page look any different from that ?", but back in the days, all the other search sites had very complex user interfaces (at least as far as I remember).

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