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Archive for May, 2008

openSUSE LiveUSB with KIWI

May 21st, 2008 by

liveusb sysinfo

As mentioned on previous post, today I’m playing with LiveUSB creation. Coolo, our lovely (and busy 😉 ) openSUSE project manager discard his experimental test of making LiveUSB due to various specific problem with the USB.

I released factory snapshots of USB and CD images – the USB shows just too many USB specific problems to be worthy, so I kind of decided to kill this idea again ;( More…

Before taking the tutorial mentioned by Luiz Fernando, I’m trying with KIWI LiveUSB stick tutorial. I’ve followed the tutorial last month but the process unfinished yet due to the complaining from KIWI that the image doesn’t fit on my 2 GB USB Flash Disk. At the moment, I was stopped the process and planned to continue after buying another bigger flash disk. I take this conclusion with the assumption KIWI need more than 2 GB of USB disk.

Today I used same tutorial with another assumption 😉 , probably the problem occurred due to the annoying bug with KIWI in earlier version, not with the size of USB disk. KIWI using same image used by LiveCD (about 700 MB), so, 2 GB of USB disk should be fit with the requirement of KIWI for building live USB stick.

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Orbit, first impressions

May 20th, 2008 by

Today the Orbit started, with a very nice openSUSE booth. I’m showing Beta3, and so far it’s running quite good. So if you are in Zürich, visit the Novell booth! It’s quite easy to find, it’s the first one if you enter Orbit 🙂

Some Pictures from yesterday (setting up the booth):
orbit 2008 openSUSE flag! setup

Grr, i forgot to bring my camera today. The whole booth looks quite different now …

Help With Bug Hunting

May 20th, 2008 by

So far from what I’ve heard and seen, people really like the upcoming 11.0 release – yes it is now only a month away 🙂

To try and make sure it is even better come release date the guys and gals need good bugreports, and preferably not duplicate bugs. One handy tool for searching for your bug is Martin Vidner’s Bugzilla search tool. This has been formed into an OpenSearch plugin by the maestro that is Benji.

Basically all you need to do is head over to here and then select your search engine drop down menu and choose “Add openSUSE 11.0 Bug Search”. I have tried it in FireFox 2 and 3, but Konqueror should be pretty much the same.

Thanks to Martin and Benji for this lovely facility, and now there is no excuse for not filing correct bug reports 😉 Happy bug hunting.

UPDATE
Thanks again to Benji, he has corrected my mistake for adding the search option in Konqueror. Just do the following:
settings -> configure konqueror -> web shortcuts -> new
bnc search settings in konqueror

Playing with openSUSE on LiveUSB Stick

May 19th, 2008 by

Today (Tuesday in Indonesia, May 20, 2008) is a public holiday in Indonesia regarding Waisak day (Waisak is a Buddhist event). My agenda for this holiday is give a training session about Zimbra Collaboration Suite with openSUSE 10.3. The training session started on 09.00 am until 03.00 pm but I think I can spare about minimum 20% of my holiday time to an interesting stuff. It’s a public holiday and I don’t want to work all of the time 😉 .

The first interesting stuff is making a LiveUSB stick for openSUSE. It’s not a really new because KIWI has an entry about how to make a live usb on openSUSE wiki, but I give it another try after reading Coolo’s announcement about new factory snapshot on Sunday, May 18, 2008.

http://ftp.suse.com/pub/projects/FactoryLiveCDs/ has new live cds as of today. Please note that it also has the first experimental release of live usb images.

  • Plugin in usb stick
  • Check dmesg output about the device name (e.g. sdc)
  • Umount all possibly automounted file systems
  • bzip2 -cd <download>.raw.bz2 | dd of=/dev/<device_name> bs=4096

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openSUSE 11.0 Beta 3 Testing

May 19th, 2008 by

openSUSE 11.0 Beta 3 already available on factory repos since May 15 2008 (in Indonesia, GMT+7) and has announced on May 16, 2008, but I can’t directly tried it because one of my programmer staff has resigned last week, so, I must covering up his work for a while and I can’t go for an install fest 🙂 . I’ve finished downloading the iso-both kde live and the i386 dvd iso-on Friday, with standard downloading from mirror on ftp5.gwdg.de.

I tried beta 3 on Satuday, and having a problem while running KDE LiveCD. The LiveCD failed run with an error exception : “Failed mounting Read Only File System”. I think it was a problem with my testing computer, so I take another machine which ended with same result.

I think I would like to post the error on mailing list but I decided to wait an installation testing with DVD iso. on Beta 1 I’ve an issue with LiveCD installation but the DVD iso is worked without problem, so I think it would rather LiveCD problem than beta 3 problem in general.

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Redesign of YaST Expert Partitioner

May 16th, 2008 by

We are redesigning the YaST Expert Partitioner for openSUSE 11.1 and SLE11. The main idea is to have a navigation tree with all available storage devices on the left side and to display information on the right side along with buttons to perform appropriate actions. See the screenshot.

RPMs are available in the openSUSE Build Server in the repository home:aschnell. They are far from finished by you can already navigate in the tree and inspect you storage system. It should be possible to see where we are heading with the redesign. You can install them on your openSUSE 11.0 Beta 3.

Various Way for Promoting openSUSE

May 16th, 2008 by

openSUSE leaflet

Promoting openSUSE in Indonesia sometimes pretty hard and in another time is quite easy. Looks like a humor 😉 but it’s true. Why ?

Problem

There is a number of problem for promoting openSUSE. It’s not about openSUSE itself. In general it has a relationship with problem while promoting and implementing open source application in Indonesia. Most of the problem related with the point of view about open source. It’s about open source mindset. Some people usually asked, “is this quite easy to migrate our existing system into openSUSE ?”.

The piracy issue is the second largest problem. People used Windows application because they used it with piracy license. There is no license cost. It’s not for personal used only. Some of them are a company that should be used a legal license. In the past, I’ve found that various company, from small to medium company currently used piracy product for their system. If we asked them, “Hey, why don’t you buy a license for your commercial used ?”, the answer is, “It’s too expensive for us.”

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Speed and Memory Usage of zypp in 11.0 Rocks!

May 15th, 2008 by

Duncan has done quick some measurements comparing zypper, yum and smart which show that zypper – the command line tool that openSUSE uses for package management – is now (finally 😉 not only comparable to yum and smart but even faster.

I would be very interested if somebody would do some extensive benchmarking to see whether zypper is faster overall and handles the corner causes as well.

Just compare: Setup for installation with yum is 19s whereas zypper needs 10s. Creation of meta data caches needs 4 minutes with yum and zypper rocks with 18s.

Memory usage: zypper needs maximal a bit over 18 MB while yum needs more than 180 MB and smart more than 60 MB.

If you run zypper – or the package management GUI applications, you really see that the team has done a great job to speed up and use less memory than before.

Zimbra Collaboration Suite 5.0.X Auto Install Script

May 15th, 2008 by

zimbra-logoopensuse logoI’m playing with Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) for about 2 years, and quite satisfied with the stability, feature and administrative console. Before applying Zimbra I used standard postfix for office mail server.

Zimbra released with 2 licensing schema, commercial and open source license. Their open source license provided with Yahoo Public License.

I’m currently using Zimbra 5.0.4 on openSUSE 10.3. Manual installation could be found in my personal blog : Zimbra Installation on openSUSE 10.3. You may need a small modification into ZCS installation script because ZCS originally released for openSUSE 10.2.

After deploying Zimbra on openSUSE 10.3 for such company (part of Indonesian openSUSE community project for increasing openSUSE usability and our promotion project of openSUSE usability for server side), I make a deal to write a small script using bash. It’s pretty simple and looks like a primitive script with just cp, tar and mv 😀 . I will make a nice graphical user interface after learning C++ or Java 😉 .

So, how to build powerful mail server with Zimbra on openSUSE 10.3 ? Here it does :

  1. Install openSUSE 10.3
  2. Make sure you have a Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) for your hostname, ie : namahost.namadomain.com, not only namahost. Checked it out with YAST | Network Service | DNS & Host Name or by editing /etc/hosts directly
  3. Make sure you have more than 5 GB of free space. Please navigate into “Preparing your server environment” on Zimbra Wiki for more information.
  4. Setup your DNS server. For testing, you may only create name server and address record (NS MX & A records). Please refer to a nice article How to Setup BIND DNS Server. *We have a nice graphical setup DNS using YAST but it was written on Bahasa Indonesia* 🙂
  5. Download Zimbra-Auto install script
  6. Extract the script into /opt/zimbra-auto. I will make a flexible script in the future but currently the script will only worked with /opt/zimbra-auto until you editing the script
  7. Download ZCS open source edition for openSUSE. The script was originally written for ZCS ver 5.0.4. If you used the latest ZCS version, please feel free to make an editing into Zimbra-Auto script
  8. Getting started by running /opt/zimbra-auto/zimbra-auto-opensuse103.sh install script and follow the wizard.

Note :

  1. You may need add an exception port into firewall and AppArmor configuration
  2. I will make an entry on openSUSE wiki after reviewing the script

Related Entry :

  1. Installing ZCS 5.0.X on openSUSE 10.3 a complete guide by Bigmudcake
  2. Zimbra Installation on openSUSE 10.3
  3. Installing ZCS 4.5.x on either openSUSE 10.2 or 10.3 a complete guide
  4. Problem may occurred regarding AppArmor Setting

Indonesian openSUSE Community Monthly Meeting on Detik.com

May 15th, 2008 by

This is my first post in lizards.opensuse.org :-). Thanks to Beineri for activating this account.

Indonesian openSUSE Community (openSUSE-ID) monthly meeting will be held on Saturday, May 24, 2008, 09.00-13.00 am (GMT+7) at Detik.com head office Jakarta. Detik.com currently is the biggest online newspaper in Indonesia.

The monthly meeting called “Kopdar”, means “Kopi Darat” or offline/physical/face to face meeting.

This monthly meeting will be discuss some issue regarding openSUSE 11.0 release party on June 2008, preview about openSUSE 11.0 features, openSUSE remastering and share knowledge about zypper package manager.

Another topic is about our agenda on IGOS Summit 2 event. IGOS stand for Indonesia goes Open Source and IGOS Summit 2 is an event prepared by Ministry of Communication and Information Technology of Indonesia to encourage open source application usability in Indonesia. OpenSUSE-ID have a booth at the event. Well, it’s a small booth (2.75 m x 2.5 m with 1300 watt of electricity) but this booth is free of charge 😉 and we have a nice opportunity to promoting openSUSE.

We choose Detik.com as our place for monthly meeting to reached more user and (maybe) to get a nice publication about our activity. a friend of mine worked for Detik.com and he helped me to arrange this event. Thanks Andry.

So, if you are an Indonesian openSUSE lover, why don’t you join with us on Detik.com. Let share together !