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Archive for 2010

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Upstream holiday

October 24th, 2010 by

The openSUSE Conference went really well last week. There was an amazing range of material and the audience’s participation in every talk I attended showed that the openSUSE project has moved past the show-and-tell presentations of a company and its customers to a community using the event to share knowledge between its members and develop.  As part of the openSUSE Boosters team, I was in it up to my neck.   On Wednesday I started with a talk on image building for application authors which was well attended but I think I should tweak towards users’ needs as there weren’t many app authors present.  I gave a talk about the upcoming KDE features that will be in openSUSE 11.4 on Thursday, because  openSUSE 11.3 had KDE 4.4 but due to the 3 month difference in both projects’ release cycles, openSUSE 11.4 will have the KDE 4.6 releases of platform, workspaces and apps.  That equals a lot of changes, so I summarized them for people who don’t read Planet KDE as avidly as I do.  The Lizard Lounge event in the SUSE building on Thursday night gave everyone a chance to catch their breath drinking limited edition Old Toad SUSE beer.

On Friday I gave a spontaneous BoF on KWin’s current and upcoming features.  Can you name the four ways to show your desktop in 4.5?  I only had 3 until a member of the audience pointed out a 4th.  And yesterday I supported Chani’s workshop on developing for Plasma using Javascript and QML, which piqued the audience’s interest by showing how KDE’s high-level services like the Plasma applets framework and the KConfig configuration storage library add value to the glamour of QML and QGraphicsView.  To enable all of the audience to participate, I’d prepared another live image, this time an SDK based on KDE trunk, Qt 4.7 and latest Qt Designer 2.0.1 with all the headers and developer docu on board.  This paid off, as unlike at Akademy, most people didn’t have developer builds ready to go on their laptops.  Within minutes we had copies booting from everyone’s USB sticks and people were working through the included git repository of tutorials prepared by Chani, making flags change colour on click and saving applet state using only a schema file and a Qt Designer config UI.

Unfortunately the talks weren’t recorded live, but a number of people who were in other tracks at the time have already asked me about the KDE talk so I’ll record it again and upload it for you, and Chani and I will polish the Plasma material and get it online at some point.

So having talked myself hoarse, I’m taking this week off to hack on upstream KDE code and get my plans there nailed down before the upcoming soft feature freeze.  In the past I tend to notice the freezes once they are past (whoops!) meaning that my openSUSE work was doomed to sit in a branch until it could be integrated next release.  I hope to get some Network Management features in now and work on polish across the desktop while I’m not handling bug reports, righting wrongs on the lists and fixing build failures.  See you in a week.

Posted in Boosters, Events, KDE | 2 Comments »

openSUSE Conference

October 23rd, 2010 by

I am home from the openSUSE Conference 2010 and finally landed on the sofa. I don’t know why conferences are so exhausting, but they are for me. My brain slowly becomes sorted again and starts to reflect what happened on the conference. Wow, I can say that I didn’t expect it to become such a great event. There were so many interesting and enthusiastic discussions about topics concerning the openSUSE distribution or about things you can do under the openSUSE umbrella.

The fun side of community and technology was inspiring people all over, in opposite to some situations I remember on the last years conference where we had to deal with unpleasant topics. This seemed to have completely went away, instead people were aiming to solve problems together in a constructive way or, even more fun, worked on new things without so called stop-energy.

It seems to me that a kind of openSUSE core-community stabilizes. People know each other, it has sorted who finally really is interested in openSUSE and continously contributes. That builds trust, and to that adds the self confidence which results out of the good quality of the recent distros we as a community were able to release. This nicely turned out for me in the strategy discussion lead by Jos. People were supportive, sorted out issues here and there, but moved ahead and came to decisions together on a topic which had endless and partly unpleasant discussions on mailinglists before. The power of meeting face to face on the one hand, but also signs that we learned from the last years and grew up.

From the talk quality the conference for me personally was one of the best FOSS conferences I have attended until now. All keynotes were done with great passion, uniquely and addressed specifically on current topics in our community. Hennes on the first day painted a good frame for the whole conference in his unique style. Cornelius and Vincent on day two were also great, they did not play friends just to let the sun shine on the conference, but for me they proofed that the openSUSE community has built a fundament were we not only accept each other but can work together werever it makes sense to tackle the higher challenges. Gerald speaking on Friday was repeating facts of the relationship between Novell and openSUSE. It was good hear it again that Novell wholeheartly supports the openess of the openSUSE project and what that means from a corporate point of view. Today Frank was introducing the project Brezen which will increase the ease of use of openSUSE a lot for the user and free software developers. Great that there is already code, I am really looking forward to see stuff coming into our distro.

You see, quite a lot happened on osc10. I will continue writing but I am too tired now…

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Posted in Boosters, Events | 1 Comment »

RTFM!

October 23rd, 2010 by

Before and during the openSUSE conference, some nice people (Jens-Daniel, Jürgen, Darix) created the following site for you:

http://rtfm.opensuse.org http://doc.opensuse.org

Thank you guys! I like the thrilling name. 😉

It’s a static page (at the moment?) and collects the current documentation from several products and projects. Probably you will see more to come in the next weeks.

Have fun!

Update (AJ since Thomas is ill) 2010-10-27: Based on the feedback received, we’re going to  change now rtfm.opensuse.org to docs.opensuse.org. So, you can reach the fine side under http://docs.opensuse.org and http://doc.opensuse.org.

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Posted in Documentation, Marketing, Usability | 11 Comments »

Fotostream from openSUSE Conference 2010

October 21st, 2010 by

Yet another foto stream from the openSUSE conference. You see the desktop leads from KDE and Gnome (Cornelius Schumacher and Vincent Untz) giving a talk about the past and future of the free desktop, Stephan Kulow about the future of the distribution, Bernhard Wiedemann about QA testing and so on.

Most important may be the presentation of the openSUSE board (mainly by Pascal Bleser) how they plan to found an independent foundation for openSUSE as non-profit organization. An important rule of that foundation is that it is independent of any company (no majority of Novell here) but can handle sponsoring, partnering and trademark questions.

We had also very filled rooms during the OBS talks, but I was unable to take pictures at that point of time unfortunately 😉

Posted in Board, Build Service, lizards.openSUSE.org | 2 Comments »

Matryoshka

October 20th, 2010 by

A matryoshka doll, also known as a Russian nesting doll or a babushka doll, is a set of dolls of decreasing sizes placed one inside the other. A set of matryoshkas consists of a wooden figure which separates, top from bottom, to reveal a smaller figure of the same sort inside, which has, in turn, another figure inside of it, and so on. Matryoshka Doll

Virtualization is a concept similar to the Matryoshka analogy. There is another system running inside the host machine. So it is box in a box. There are many virtualization techniques available at the disposal of the user; vmware, virtualbox, xen to name a few which requires lots of resources. Another alternative which is OpenVZ , container-based virtualization for Linux. Each container performs and executes exactly like a stand-alone server; a container can be rebooted independently and have root access, users, IP addresses, memory, processes, files, applications, system libraries and configuration files.

Here is a quote from TechRepublic Blog :

In the past we have looked at using OpenVZ for container virtualization on Linux. OpenVZ is great as it allows you to run compartmentalized “servers” within an operating system so you can separate systems, much like running virtual machines on a host system. With OpenVZ, you can get the benefits of virtualization without the overhead.

The downside of OpenVZ is that it isn’t in the mainline kernel. This means you need to run a kernel provided by the OpenVZ project. By itself this isn’t necessarily a problem, unless you are running an unsupported Linux distribution, and also if you don’t mind a bit of lag from upstream security fixes

So what is an alternative; well maybe lxc is the answer.According to http://lxc.sourceforge.net/

The  container  technology  is actively being pushed into the mainstream linux kernel. It provides the resource management through the control groups aka process containers and resource isolation through the namespaces.

There is very little information regarding LXC in the opensuse wiki and the only one available is still draft, yet provides enough information to start rolling up your containers.  Here is the preamble of the above mentioned page:

LXC is a form of paravirtualization. Being a sort of super duper chroot jail, it is limited to running linux binaries, but offers essentially native perfomance as if those binaries were running as normal processes right in the host kernel. Which in fact, they are.

LXC is interesting primarily in that:

  • It can be used to run a mere application, service, or a full operating system.
  • It offers essentially native performance. A binary running as an LXC guest is actually running as a normal process directly in the host os kernel just like any other process. In particular this means that cpu and i/o scheduling are a lot more fair and tunable, and you get native disk i/o performance which you can not have with real virtualization (even Xen, even in paravirt mode) This means you can containerize disk i/o heavy database apps. It also means that you can only run binaries that the host kernel can execute. (ie: you can run Linux binaries, not another OS like Solaris or Windows)

The same page also states there is not another HOWTO or documentation explaining how to use lxc with opensuse even though the lxc package has been part of the main oss repo since 11.2 version. Furthermore there are no scripts like lxc-fedora or lxc-debian  that will automate the creation or installation of opensuse. Now while it may be true that there are no opensuse specific scripts are available (at least I could not find through a Google search), though there is an interesting video on youtube showing the lxc with opensuse 11.2.

Based on the the information on the LXC wiki page, using the  SUSEStudio , I built an appliance which  is almost ready to use lxc. In order to create a container image, a very primitive lxc_opensuse script that will do a fairly basic job is also included. Once the script is issued,it will download opensuse 11.3 base system and the user can start playing with the wonders of lxc. For the impatient, who wants do discover Matryoshka, here is the link for  the appliance .

Have fun with Matryoshka !

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Posted in Virtualization | 1 Comment »

Geeko Comes to Schools

October 17th, 2010 by

Yogyakarta is one of the tourism destination in Indonesia. The unique Javanise tradition blend with some acculturation from outside culture. Recently I was asked by the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology and Office of Education, Youth and Sport of Yogyakarta to help them to prepare the computer lab for elementary and junior high school in Yogyakarta Province – Indonesia.

Well, this is the tough job. I work with some expert, teacher and education strategist to prepare the e-learning system. We should prepare learning/teaching material in digital format, train the teacher to use authoring tools and operating system, and prepare the schools to be ready to receive the PC’s. This government initiative will involve 500 schools in 3 years. Every school that involve in this program will receive 21 PCs.

We select openSUSE Li-f-e as the operating system in every pc. The selection is not because I’m an openSUSE member but we come to the conclusion that openSUSE Li-f-e is the most complete and well prepare distribution for education (well, I convince other expert, some of them are Ph.D, he..he…). This year there are 110 schools involve in this program, this means another new 2310 openSUSE installation and more than 4000 new users if we assume that every PC will be used by 2 students.

Not only give PC to schools we also should connect the schools to the provincial data center. This is really challenging task, some areas of this province is covered by hundred of hills with karst topography and with no terestrial internet connection. Many of the schools is in that area. The road ahead still far away and difficult, but see the face of the children who really enthusiast with the openSUSE make me really happy.

There are more picture on my picasaweb

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Posted in lizards.openSUSE.org, Marketing | 7 Comments »

LibreOffice 3.3 beta2 available for openSUSE

October 15th, 2010 by

We are going to switch from the OpenOffice.org to the LibreOffice code base on openSUSE.

I’m happy to announce LibreOffice 3.3 beta2 packages for openSUSE. They are available in the Build Service LibreOffice:Unstable project. They are based on the libreoffice-3.2.99.2 release. Please, look for more details about the openSUSE LibreOffice build on the wiki page.

The packages are beta versions and might include even serious bugs. Therefore they are not intended for data-critical usage. A good practice is to archive any important data before an use, …

As usual, we kindly ask any interested beta testers to try the package and report bugs.

Known bugs

  • only the LibreOffice branding package is available; you need to replace OpenOffice_org-branding-openSUSE with libreoffice-branding-upstream
  • shell wrappers are still ooffice, oowriter, …; we need to discuss the new wrapper names with other distros first
  • application stops immediately when you start it for the first time; just start it once again
  • extensions are not registered after the update from OpenOffice_org-* packages; a workaround is to reinstall the packages once again; We plan to remove the registration during installation; it will allow users to disable the extensions by themselves
  • some packages were not renamed, .e.g. OpenOffice_org-thesaurus, …; they are not built from the main LO sources; we will do it later
  • user configuration is stored into ~/.libreoffice/3-suse; we might try to share the directory ~/.libreoffice/3 after we fix the incompatible BerkleyDB; Well, we are not sure if it is enough and it is a good idea, so it will need some more testing
  • packages can’t be installed in parallel with the generic LibreOffice linux packages; the problem is that both builds use the libreoffice-ure package name; it will be solved in beta3; a workaround is to install the package using “rpm -i” instead of “rpm -U”
  • GNOME quickstarter is started by default; you might disable it in Tools/Options/OpenOffice.org/Memory/Enable systray Quickstarter
  • SLED10 build is not available; need more love

More known bugs

Other information and plans:

These are the first packages with new name. Please, be patient if they are not perfect. Please report unknown bugs.

The new packages automatically remove the obsolete openSUSE OpenOffice_org packages. It still will be possible to intall the plain OpenOffice.org packages in parallel, though.

Posted in Desktop, OpenOffice.org | 10 Comments »

openSUSE Conference KDE Team Party

October 15th, 2010 by

Next week is openSUSE Conference week! I’m using both my openSUSE and KDE blogs to remind everyone that we’re having a pre-conference meetup at 6pm for the KDE team before the real conference begins at Barfüßer in the Nuernberg old town. Remember a morning of keynotes is only fun if you have a thumping hangover from microbrewed beer (and if you’re a keynote speaker, from local schapps too)! If you are attending the conference or if you are just a friend of KDE in the area, please join in.

If you add your name to the wiki I’ll have an idea how big a table we need, I’ve provisionally got space for 20.

Posted in Events, KDE | Comments Off on openSUSE Conference KDE Team Party

Documentation

October 13th, 2010 by

Hi folks,

this post is just request for all obs-packagers. Please, don’t forget write some documentation about your projects (which you maintain or develop). I mean, documentation for developers. This make more easy to understand logic of program, connection between some modules inside or interfaces between widget/applet and “system/hardware part”. For sure, comments in source code (or in changelog) help, but some times they give not so much clarity.

This is not so complicated to write one-two pages about project, which you hack. This also can save time of new developers. They will not ask you about architecture of project, and that will save your time too 😉

I don’t know how will be better to do it: use wiki (create a new page) or add just text-file in source project. Anyway it’s not so important where will be this documentation, main things that this documentation will be exist 🙂

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Posted in Build Service, Contrib, Documentation, Packaging, Usability | 1 Comment »

systemd – and #osc10

October 8th, 2010 by

Systemd is a replacement for SystemV init and in heavy development since the first announcement on April 30th by Lennart Poettering. Thanks to Kay Sievers’ work, we have packages for openSUSE curent Factory stream as well. I gave them a try a couple of weeks ago but somehow did not succeed with getting a working system. At LinuxKongress I met Lennart and decided to give systemd another try. I still could not log into the system due to it using NIS and automount for NFS home directories and started debugging this together with Kay over IRC in a virtual machine first. Once we had a workaround for me, I used systemd on my workstation and Kay and Lennart fixed the problem in systemd properly. I run into a couple of more problems and thus were fixed quickly so that the last release – systemd 11 – works fine on my workstation running openSUSE Factory (Factory is the development version for the next openSUSE release, in this case for 11.4).

The role of init, whether it’s SysV init, upstart or systemd, is to initialize the system (it’s the first process that gets started by the kernel) so that users can login, starts all the essential services, e.g. the cups daemon for printing, and handles session management. So, it’s a system and session manager.

So, what’s so cool about systemd? (more…)

Posted in Base System, Distribution, Events, Factory | 8 Comments »

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