An initial Namoroka openSUSE package is now available from OBS’ new mozilla:alpha repository. I’ve chosen to not reuse mozilla:beta just yet as I still ship TB3.0b and SM2.0b from there and the Namoroka package would try to automatically update systems away from Firefox 3.5.

There are some news and changes on the mozilla side of things within openSUSE which I want to share.
As others have already written Firefox 3.5 is now available in Factory and older distributions in OBS.
These packages feature a new openSUSE specific addon called SUSEFOX if you install the openSUSE branding (which is the default obviously). This addon uses a currently experimental/incomplete webservice to offer the available content plugins (e.g. Flash and Java). I hope to get this backend finished and ready to use soon but there are some open questions about how to do it exactly.
Also there are some new places for “mozilla in openSUSE” discussions:

• a mailinglist mainly for development purposes opensuse-factory-mozilla@opensuse.org
• a IRC channel #opensuse-mozilla

Both should help to bring people together who are interested in contributing to that area. So see you there with your feedback and ideas.

Tomorrow (2009-05-14) is Thunderbird and SeaMonkey TestDay again and this time the focus is on Linux. So if you are a Thunderbird or SeaMonkey user or want to become one this is where you should join in to get those really stable and usable.
To support that event and our openSUSE users there are new current snapshots of TB and SM in the mozilla:beta buildservice repository.
And let me cite the following from their testday page: “… and the fact that it’s openSUSE’s community week we would like to focus this week’s bugday to bugs that are happening on Linux.”

A few days ago Mozilla Labs announced the release of Prism 1.0 Beta.

I always was following from the side how it evolved but never tried it myself up to now. As it moves slowly out of the labs status I started to package it for openSUSE and so it is available now through the openSUSE Build Service’s “well-known” mozilla:beta repository as prism and prism-refractor which is the Firefox addon helping you to create webapps even easier.

So start to play around with it and … have a lot of fun!

Firefox 3.5b4 which is available in mozilla:beta since its upstream release finally hit openSUSE’s Factory today.

Give it a try and check out the new features!

I’ve released a Thunderbird 3.0b2 test package in mozilla:beta today. This is the initial package for openSUSE and may (actually does) have some issues but it still should be usable basically. Feel free to report packaging issues to Novell’s bugzilla. (Please ignore the outdated extension warning at startup.)

For deeper testing the application I recommend in general to join the upstream QA effort and especially today’s Test Day. The Thunderbird community is aware of these openSUSE packages so if you like you can do the testing using these while you always should mention their origin in upstream reports (since there might be also packaging issues).

Update:
There are some things I missed to mention earlier:

• MozillaThunderbird3 can be installed in parallel to MozillaThunderbird to make it easier testing the package.
• Thunderbird 3 saves its profile to .thunderbird3 instead of .thunderbird (which is different from upstream) to avoid breakage of the TB2 profile.

Someone asked me for a package for SeaMonkey 2 which is currently under development. So here it is in mozilla:beta with most likely some rough edges. It’s an early preview package and not meant for production use but if someone wants to give me some feedback feel free.
It’s currently not possible to install it side by side with SeaMonkey 1.1 but I’ll probably make that possible in the near future.

Yesterday I took the time to update to Firefox 3.1b2 (upstream release announcement) in mozilla:beta and fixed the outstanding build issues (gcc complaints) for 11.1 and Factory. What is still missing are the translations so it’s only available in en-US for now. Not every feature from openSUSE’s Firefox 3.0 package has been ported to 3.1 yet (namely gconf/lockdown integration) but it’s rather complete besides of the two things above.

As with the release of openSUSE 11.1rc1 I’ve enabled openSUSE_11.1 for the mozilla repository. So feel free to add it to your local repositories.

Another news is that I’ve added the package MozillaThunderbird-lightning which contains Mozilla’s calendar extension for Thunderbird. I’ve planned this years ago but for different reasons (including gcc bugs that didn’t happen until Duncan asked me to add his Lightning package to the mozilla repo just yesterday). The reason for adding that extension was simply that you can’t get it as x86-64 version from upstream.

And as of today openSUSE 10.2 was removed from the buildservice which means that there are no more mozilla updates for that platform. I’m wondering how many people out there still rely on those since it’s possible to reenable support for that again but I’ll only consider that if there is real demand for it. So let me know and speak up 😉