Latest stable evolution for openSUSE

Some people don’t upgrade software to newer version because they find building from sources little hard, tricky or time consuming. So here is an easy way to upgrade evolution to latest stable versions on openSUSE 11.4.

openSUSE 11.4 comes with gnome 2.32 so is evolution. Gnome3 released about 2 months ago and many people started using it.

If you are still using gnome 2.32 and want to upgrade evolution to latest stable version 3.0 without upgrading whole Gnome stack here is the repository you can use:

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/GNOME:/Evolution:/snapshot-3.0/openSUSE_11.4/

You can also use 1-Click-Install  Evolution-3.0

If you are using Gnome3, above repository will also upgrade your evolution with latest fixes in stable branch. Upgrading to evolution-3.0 will also upgrade evolution-data-server, gtk, glib and some other packages.

If you still want to stick with 2.32, but want all fixes in the respective branch, here you can get latest fixes of 2.32 branch:

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/GNOME:/Evolution:/snapshot-2-32/openSUSE_11.4/

You can also use 1-Click-Install Evolution-2.32

OBS is a great tool which I was discovering last week and will carry on doing so. We are planing trigger build on weekly basis. I am also working on building master (unstable) evolution and hopefully soon you will be able to use it.

Gnome Asia and Me

Last week was quite eventful, not just because of special cricket world cup we had but also we had Gnome Asia Summit in Bangalore on 2nd and 3rd of April. Overall experience was very good, met with many happy hackers and users.

Before summit we had hackfest and student training session. Like all other open source contributors who believe in sharing knowledge, I also felt good by sharing my limited knowledge with students. Our intention was to help students to get a start towards contribution to Open Source.

I covered these topics during my session :

• Version Control
• Git
• Compiling a package from source code / tarball
• Building a package using Jhbuild
• Solution of common errors during compilation

We also had some hands on sessions on git and bugzilla. It was great to see some enthusiastic students around. If interested you can download the presentation.

I had a lots of discussion regarding Linux, OpenSuse, Gnome3, contribution to open source and more with students. We distributed about 800 Opensuse 11.4 Dvds, many people installed it during conference and some of them started using Gnome3. I also did upgrade to 11.4 and now using Gnome3 and its simply awesome .

“Testing” from Past

Its never late to start! I always thought of writing something technical I am working upon, but laziness and binge thinking always drew me back. Lets break some traditions.

I started working with Novell about one and half years back as my first employer. I was assigned automation testing as part of development testing for SSLVPN (Access Manager) as my first project. There I learnt about different aspects of testing and automation.

I learnt and worked with QTP and developed some scripts, QTP has  powerful features, easy interface and wide range of users, thats why it is known as one of the best automation tool for Windows.

While going ahead our next task was to develop same scripts for linux and Mac. Mainly work was done in browser so I was suggested to use Selenium because of its ability to record tests in Firefox and compatibility to run them on different browsers (Chrome, IE, Safari and Firefox of course!) and on different platforms (Linux, Mac and Windows as well).

Selenium IDE is an ‘Open Source’ Firefox plugin which can record tests in HTML table format and gives you an option to convert them in any programming language of your choice (Pearl, Python, Ruby, Java etc). I decided to give ruby a try (no reasons why? though I was comfortable with none) . Ruby is not as popular as all these languages but was interested to work upon.

I started converting all my scripts in ruby and later modified them appropriately. Selenium RC is a server which provides libraries for all the languages supported by Selenium. Before running a script it is necessary to start Selenium RC server with appropriate environment set.

I left working on automation about an year back. May be I have forgotten or whatever but you can go to Selenium page for more details.

I would like to thank Shiva, Jency and Neeraj for helping me during the project. Apart from developing scripts I got little experience with Shell programming and Perl scripting.

We recorded many scripts and tested them across different browsers and different platforms. But I had to leave this project because I got an opportunity to work with an awesome Open Source project called  Evolution.

Hello Friends

hmmm my first post just want to say Hi !!