Dropbox is an absolutely great tool to share your data between different computers and mobile devices. Your data is stored in the cloud from where you can publish files and photo albums and work collaboratively on documents. It works very smoothly, has a great performance, and provides client apps for Linux, Windows, Mac, iOs, Android etc., offering 2GB space for free.

That sounds perfect, where’s the catch?

You are giving your private data to a U.S. based commercial company, which recently had a credibility issue, some security problems, awkward terms of service changes, and the fact that the government can get access to your data.

ownCloud to the rescue!

This is where ownCloud might be your choice. It is an open source webdav server that can be deployed on your own webspace. It does not yet have all the features and smoothness of Dropbox but it’s catching up. The recently released version 3 comes with file-sharing, contacts and calendar syncing, and an online music player.

Installing it is quite easy: Just drop the uncompressed tarball to a standard webspace which provides php. After that you can configure the setup in a browser and are ready to go. This is how you can mount your owncloud directory on a linux workstation:

wdfs http://<your owncloud host>/files/webdav.php /mnt

The package wdfs is included in the openSUSE standard repositories. wdfs can be used as normal user, no root privileges and changing of /etc/fstab is needed. After you have mounted your ownCloud to the system it can be used just like a local filesystem.

My project for Hackweek IV was to bring openFATE to mobile devices, and have a shared framework, so we can easily create mobile versions of other opensuse sites, for example the build service.

I decided to use the jquery mobile framework and together with Andre we created a rails plugin that automatically switches iPhones and android devices to the mobile version.
(Use this link to test the mobile version with your desktop browser)

I also created a native app that is available from the market that wraps this mobile web interface:

My plan is now to create a similar interface for the opensuse build service
which offers some basic functionality, such as request handling, showing build status etc.

More→

We updated the openSUSE feature tracking tool openFATE yesterday.
The update includes:

• A nice browser search engine plugin, so you can search for features directly in your browsers search field.
• Notifications over hermes. You can now
  subscribe to feature changes by email or RSS. There is also feed available with
  all feature changes.
• The query results now have a sortable column for the score
• External references such as bugzilla links or other features can be added,
  the products can be edited.

The full changelog is available here.

I wanted to create DVDs from youtube videos
in an easy way, to be able to watch them on my TV.

At first, you need to download the videos.
This can be done with youtube-dl (1-click install for opensuse)

By calling: youtube-dl.py -l <youtube-url> the videos will be stored to your local disk.

The next step is to encode these video files to DVD compatible mpeg files, create a DVD navigation menu and
build the DVD image for burning.

For this I wrote a script that automates these steps by making use of tovid (1-click) and ffmpeg (1-click).

So, I’m going to create a DVD with some guitar lessons from youtube. It’s as easy as this:

> mkdir /tmp/flv; cd /tmp/flv;
> youtube-dl.py -l  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJw4hMjlRYw
> youtube-dl.py -l http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njPMjKUWnZ0
> youtube-dl.py -l http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdIjuTAiWtI
> youtube-dl.py -l http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhdItoEqaRU

> flvtodvd -i /tmp/flv -o /tmp/dvdout -t "Pink Floyd"

To finally burn the DVD, you can use a burning application of your choice and use the created DVD structure at:
/tmp/dvdout/dvdxml,
or call:

makedvd -burn /tmp/dvdout/dvdxml.xml

Note: The created mpegs have a data rate of about 10mb/min.