BitTorrent Sync on openSUSE

Recently, I discovered BitTorrent Sync, which seems to satisfy most of my file syncing demands. It's encrypted client-side, cross-platform and works behind NATs and firewalls. While it is currently still proprietary (who cares, really), it is available for many devices. Besides the usual Windows / Mac binaries, you can find it on Android's Play Store. …

sudo authentication across sessions

Since I've been asked this recently, if you want to avoid typing your sudo password again after opening up another shell session (with konsole, gnome-terminal, screen or whatever), simply add the following to /etc/sudoers (use sudo visudo to modify the file): Read http://www.sudo.ws/sudoers.man.html for the details.

Dynamic iptables port-forwarding for NAT-ed libvirt networks

Libvirt is particularly awesome when it comes to managing virtual machines, their underlying storage and networks. However, if you happen to use NAT-ed networking and want to allow external access to services offered by your VMs, you've got to do some manual work. The simplest way to get access is to set up some  iptables …

openSUSE Board candidacy

Hello fellow geekos, Let's start with a little introduction for those that don't know me. I've been involved in the openSUSE project for more than 3 years by now while being among the top ten contributors to Factory for most of the time. I mainly develop the Python and Go stacks as well as OpenStack. …

OBS: Introducting the “refresh_patches” source service

As you know, RPM (and DEB and ...) package building is a repetitive process and you would want to automate it as much as possible. In the context of the Open Build Service(OBS), source services can help you with exactly that. Over the time, the OBS community has implemented a whole range of source services. …

Open source project licensing

Whenever you decide to publish some code somewhere in the internet, you have to think about the license. For many of us not being lawyers, this is a rather random choice. Given what we've been told is best, we usually just use any GPL flavor or Apache, MIT or BSD and don't spend much time …

OBS 101: How to treat packages with multiple spec files

If you have an OBS package containing multiple spec files, you may have discovered that OBS only builds the spec file matching the OBS package name. If you want to have the other(s) spec file(s) built, you should use a link, don't use copypac! For example, devel:languages:python / python-nose is a OBS package containing four …

GNU screen window title and SSH

If you want to keep track of all your GNU screen sessions, it's helpful to set the window title to the current machine you ssh'd into. One way to achieve this is to put this into your .zshrc (.profile should work too): # Set/reset hostname in screen window title SSH'd machine: if [ $TERM = "screen" …

Official Last.fm scrobbler for openSUSE

Good news, the official Last.fm audio scrobbler is now available for openSUSE through the Packman package repositories. Why do I care, you might question yourselves and you're partly right, openSUSE already ships a big bunch of multimedia apps (like Amarok, Clementine and Banshee) that all have Last.fm support built-in. However, for all of those you …

Two little Firefox search helpers

One thing I missed after switching from rekonq to Firefox are KDE's web shortcuts. It turns out that Firefox allows something similar, you can set shortcuts for your registered search engines: Nothing new so far, it turned out that the only thing I missed was a search for Novell Bugzilla entries and for openSUSE's feature …