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Archive for December, 2014

Standing for re-election: openSUSE Board Election Jan. 2015

December 27th, 2014 by

My name is Robert Schweikert, IRC handle robjo, and I am standing for re-election in the upcoming openSUSE Board election in January of 2015.

With the end of 2014 my first term on the openSUSE board is already coming to an end, time flies. During my first term we collectively have seen many changes to our project. Many of these changes were difficult and I would say we had a rough ride for a good chunk of th last 2 years. I think, and am hoping others agree, that I was able to help smooth some of the rough spots and help the project move into what could now be considered calmer waters. It was not easy, but I am glad I was able to contribute.

Since 2009 I work for SUSE in the ISV Engineering team. When I started I primarily worked with IBM on joint projects. I also worked with other ISVs helping them with questions regarding their application on top of SUSE Linux. In recent years my role has transitioned and I am now focused on Public Cloud work, working with our partners.

I have been using SUSE Linux, now known as the openSUSE distribution since the beginning, i.e. I still remember when SUSE Linux 10 was released. I have been contributing to the project for many years, not from the get go, it took me some time to move from user to contributor, by maintaining packages, more recently also maintaining and publishing openSUSE images in the public cloud, and helping with organization of events. For the past two years I also had the privilege to contribute to the project as a board member. I would very much enjoy being able to continue my contribution to the board for another 2 years.

Looking forward I see the need that an effort needs to be made to re-invigorate our project. As a whole the distribution “business” has lost some of its appeal and shine. Something that is certainly to be expected. Never the less even in a world that is getting more and more dominated by cloud services, containers, and whatever else, distributions are a necessity and the openSUSE distributions always stands out as one of the top notch community distributions. We have also proven that there is still plenty of innovation potential with the recent merge of Tumbleweed and Factory, turning what was previously a pure development stream into a usable rolling release. The credit for this of course goes to the Factory team, release team and many others that contributed to the new tools and backend infrastructure that make all this possible. Re-invigoration for me not only means being proud and excited about such major technical accomplishments but also means we need to be better organized when it comes the representation of our project at FOSS events. Although the new booth box material is great we have had a difficult time getting things organized and helping those that want to represent the project at events. I want to continue to push on this part and help make the distribution of material better. There is plenty of work to be done at the board level and I am asking for your vote in the upcoming election to allow me to continue what is already in the works and help start new initiatives to re-invigorate our project.

LTSP client goes Banana Pi!

December 16th, 2014 by

The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer running ARM processor that plugs into your TV/PC monitor, mouse and a keyboard, it is capable of running Linux and can be made to do many interesting things.The Banana Pi is a what Chinese ingeniousness came up with after they checked out Raspberry Pi, they made a lot more powerful knockoff. This is a “How-to” use Banana Pi as LTSP client. (more…)

It’s hoolihoolihooliday and what fun I can do?

December 16th, 2014 by

I know I’m old losah! Nowadays it’s all about pads, phones and mobile this and mobile that. Install some cool stuff from app store and start mangling. I was amused how much you can do with these small entertainment units but then comes small detail that is not that cool over 20% stuff that is downloaded from Apple store is games and those neat utilities are just 5%. I don’t know what education means but it’s after games so I think it’s good thing. What I’m trying to say stop playing for a while (it’s good thing to do. Don’t get me wrong), put pad/phone down and look around what kind of world we are living in 2014.

Nah Open Source/Free Software doesn’t matter anyway

In year 2014 wasn’t just year on Linux getting into you hands as Android. It was strange year in Linux land. Probably biggest Linux hater from Redmond that called Linux Cancer said ‘hey Free Software and Open Source are cool! We take cherrys like Apple and sell them to you in nice package and there nothing wrong with that (And I’m with them.. it’s what they can do if you buy it)’. Small IoT (Internet-Of-Things, Industrial Internet or choose your favorite term) ARM SOC boards are so Nineties. MIPS made proud comeback! Once it was SGI’s own bitch but now there is growing mass of small very cheap wireless boards started to flow in. All supporting Linux and most have also Android. Targeted to next big thing that you are doing when not playing.

In Finland where I’m located this have been year of economical rumble (read economical crash). Mass layoffs, industrial work places are getting rare and Nokia was sold to that huge firm from Redmond. Selling Nokia out was end of Finland’s mobile dreams as they now have new tablet and fear not also Jolla is launching their new shiny Sailfish tablet and got very good funding through indie-go-go. Ok nobody really wants this tablet because of Android but it’s good to see there is guys and girls that still think with punk attitude and believe that very small firm like Jolla can produce something that big players can’t.

Year 2014 also was big climate is changing year. USA and China make promise to cut their carbon dioxide emission till 2030. USA will do something and China says their peak will be 2030. Does this stop global warming probably not but at least now it’s official that climate is changing. How this is relevant with Linux? Most of these calculation are done in ‘super computers’ and those run tadaaaa… Linux. They don’t run Fedora or openSUSE because they are mostly very fast calculators but they run Linux kernel and something that as immortals never will know because most of them doesn’t calculate climate change things. They calculate nuclear war scenarios. Hello Dr. Falken shall we play a game? Linux++ and HP Machine anyone?

Firefox which is now 10 years old. They broke up with Google because as you can see they don’t need that search flow anymore. Firefox preset for searching in USA is now Yahoo, Russian Yandex and China Baidu. Mozilla also made bold moves with Firefox OS in 2014. More phones and if you need low end cheap phone so you should consider Firefox OS phone 25$ that is very cheap.

So what happened in Linux land

openSUSE made only one release 13.2 but then rumbled big changes in. openSUSE is also catching up popular rolling release method like Arch Linux with Tumbleweed but this year openSUSE upstream Factory also become a rolling release and then it get together with Tumbleweed. It’s good thing! Really things get tested and traditional releases are more stable. Hooray for that. There was and gigantic war against systemd and you can start sending me millions of hate mails for a start because I Like it! It’s modern and does everything that was wrong with Linux init. No more big tune this tune that complex learn curve up to your a** stuff very neat simple configuration. Ok it’s bloat.. but why don’t you start hating Linux kernel. It’s not very UNIX nether it’s doesn’t just one thing like BSD micro-kernel approach. But that is what I wanted to say about that. If you fork Debian just to have Sysvinit I think you are little bit over reacting but best luck to you I’m nothing but thumbs up get it rolling! At the end this feels like Pulseaudio hating campaign. Everybody hated it first but now nobody even notices that they are using it.

Also it becomes clear 2014 that Desktop Linux will never come. Time just passed by and people moved to other things and we have desktop Linux Google’s Chromebooks. In year 2014 It also becomes clear that nor Tizen or Ubuntu phone will be huge success at least it takes little bit longer. My hope is that X will die in great crash of meteorite or let me rephrase how about Wayland project will never take X-windows place and things never become sweet again. Canonical  shiny move with Mir display server will shake things up if it becomes successful. Time will tell how things end up will Mir be successor of X or should it be Wayland?

So what to give as present if you want to give Linux based device?

There is so many Linux gift list to choose from that I just link to them so you can choose from yourself.

This was how I see year 2014. Let’s meet interesting year 2015 which is just few weeks away and light will come back and darkness fade away.

New Proprietary AMD/ATI Catalyst omega fglrx 14.12 (14.501.1003-1) rpm released

December 13th, 2014 by

Hey Christmas time around! AMD give us a new version of fglrx, and Sebastian Siebert just release his script yesterday night.
So I’ve prepared the new version available for openSUSE 11.4, 12.1, 12.2, 12.3, 13.1, 13.2 and Tumbleweed.
Sebastian’s script contain a special patch for supporting kernel up to 3.17 and 3.18 version.
I should also share Sebastian’s surprize about the fact that this version didn’t got a beta/rc cycle….

I hope this release will give better results for all of you who own an apu (especially the recent one), and also fix a number of issue with the hybrid chipset intel cpu/amd gpu embedded.

See below how to report issue on Sebastian blog.

It will be the last build for all openSUSE version below 13.1 (except if patches are needed).
In January 12.3 support will definitively end. But I will let the drivers as is so you can still use them in case of.

Installation / update

Please refer to the wiki page SDB:AMD_fgrlx

New packaging schema

The driver is now splitted into different rpm that all need to be installed. Normally the necessary Require field is there and should happen automatically.

My advise is to check if you have them all installed.

for 32 bits

zypper install fglrx_xpic fglrx_core fglrx_graphics fglrx_amdcccle fglrx_opencl

for 64 bits

zypper install fglrx64_xpic fglrx64_core fglrx64_graphics fglrx64_amdcccle fglrx64_opencl

A notice for Tumbleweed users

The new release has now its package correctly named, previously they were called SUSEFACTORY, with the new version the package will contain SUSETUMBLEWEED in their name

openSUSE Education Li-f-e 13.2.1 out now!

December 6th, 2014 by

openSUSE Education Team is happy to announce the availability of Li-f-e built on the latest openSUSE release. Download and spread this love around.