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Watching 360 video on openSUSE

December 29th, 2016 by

In this post, there how to watch 360 videos on the Linux platform without the need for special technical magic. To do this, just use the package QMPlay 2, A player based on QT that fulfills its function very well. In addition to being versatile and effective, bringing an incredible amount of features for you to use, including touchscreen monitor recognition to navigate the video preview.

To watch 360 video, first press PLAYBACK the main menu, then choose VIDEO FILTERS, and finally enable the SPHERICAL VIEW option to use the 360 viewing function.

For testing, I provide my 360 video on the link below for download. And to finalize at the end a demonstration video of the software running as the installation links ONE CLICK INSTALL in my openSUSE repository.

Video example for download AQUI!

Source in Brazilian Portuguese (Alessandro de Oliveira Faria A.K.A. CABELO): https://assuntonerd.com.br/2016/12/29/assistindo-video-360-no-linux/

 

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Posted in Ambassadors, Artwork | 1 Comment »

How to build OS images without kiwi

December 26th, 2016 by

kiwi has long been the one standard way of building images in openSUSE, but even though there exist extensive writings on how to use it, for many it is still an arcane thing better left to the Great Magicians.

Thus, I started to use a simpler alternative image building method, named altimagebuild when I built our first working Raspberry Pi images in 2013 and now I re-used that to build x86_64 VM images at
https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/home:bmwiedemann/altimagebuild
after I found out that it even works in OBS, including publishing the result to our mirror infrastructure.
It is still in rpm format because of how it is produced, so you have to use unrpm to get to the image file.

This method uses 3 parts.

  • a .spec file that lists packages to be pulled into the image
  • a mkrootfs.sh that converts the build system into the future root filesystem you want
  • a mkimage.sh that converts the rootfs into a filesystem image

The good thing about it is that you do not need specialized external tools, because everything is hard-coded in the scripts.
And the bad thing about it is that everything is hard-coded in the scripts, so it is hard to share general improvements over a wider range of images.

In the current version, it builds cloud-enabled partitionless images (which is nice for VMs because you can just use resize2fs to get a larger filesystem and if you later want to access your VM’s data from outside, you simply use mount -o loop)
But it can build anything you want.

To make your own build, do osc checkout home:bmwiedemann/altimagebuild && cd $_ && osc build openSUSE_Leap_42.2

So what images would you want to build?

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Posted in Distribution, Toolchain | Comments Off on How to build OS images without kiwi

Highlights of YaST development sprint 29

December 22nd, 2016 by

It’s Christmas time and since (open)SUSE users have been nice, the YaST team brings some gifts for them. This is the result of the last development sprint of 2016.

As you may have noticed, in the latest sprints we have been focusing more and more in making SUSE CASP possible. That’s even more obvious in this last sprint of the year. For those that have not been following this blog recently, it’s probably worth to remember that SUSE CASP will be a Kubernetes based Container As a Service Platform.

But our daily work goes beyond CASP, so let’s take a look to all the highlights.

More improvements in the management of DHCLIENT_SET_HOSTNAME

In the previous report we presented the changes introduced in yast2-network to make the configuration parameter DHCLIENT_SET_HOSTNAME configurable in a per-interface basis.

One of the great things about working in an agile an iterative way, presenting and evaluating the result every three weeks, is that it allows us to detect room for improvements in our work. In this case we noticed some discrepancy in the expectations of Linuxrc and yast2-network and also some room for improvement in the code documentation and in the help texts.

Thus, we used this sprint to refine the work done in the previous one and tackle those problems down.

Improved error message

Ensure installation of needed packages

Another example of iterative development. We already presented in the report of the 26th development sprint a new mechanism to detect when the user had deselected during installation some package that was previously pre-selected by YaST in order to install the bootloader. Since the new functionality proved to work nicely, we decided to extend it to cover other parts of the system beyond the bootloader.

The software proposal now contains an error message including a list of missing packages or patterns, in case the user deselects some needed items.

Warning about missing packages

After clicking the Install button the installation is blocked, the user must resolve the problem either by selecting the packages back or by adjusting the respective YaST configuration (e.g. do not install any bootloader and disable the firewall).

Blocking an incomplete installation

Rethinking the expert partitioner

May we insist one more time on the topic of using Scrum to organize our work in an iterative way? 😉 As our usual readers should already know, we structure the work into minimal units that produce a valuable outcome called PBIs in Scrum jargon. That valuable outcome doesn’t always have to be a piece of software, an implemented feature or a fixed bug. Sometimes a document adds value to YaST, specially if it can be used as base to collaborate with people outside the team.

Our readers also know that we are putting a lot of effort in rewriting the whole storage layer of YaST. That also implies rewriting the most powerful tool known by humanity to define partitions, volumes, RAIDs and similar stuff – the YaST expert partitioner.

It would be great if we could use the opportunity to make it both more powerful and more usable. You can take the first part for granted, but we are not so sure about our UI design skills. That’s why we wanted to have a base to discuss possible changes and alternative approaches with UX (user experience) experts. And we decided that it was worth to invest some time to create a document collecting the state of the art and some ideas for the future and to send that to SUSE experts in UX and to anybody with some interest in the topic.

Here you can find that fine piece of documentation. Take a look to that document if you want to peek into YaST developers’ mind. That’s the kind of stuff we discuss when we are about to start rewriting something… specially something that need to serve hundreds of different use cases.

And of course we would like to know your ideas or thoughts. We usually discuss this stuff at the public #yast IRC channel and at the yast-devel mailing list. But if you prefer so, you can simply open an issue at the repository hosting the document. Whatever works for you.

Rethinking yast2-network

But that was not the only documentation PBI finished during this sprint. Inspired by the first fruits of the storage layer reimplementation, we decided yast2-network also deserves a reincarnation.

As we did in the past with yast2-storage and libstorage, the first step is to collect as much information as possible about what can be currently done with the module and how it behaves in several situations, specially in tricky or complex scenarios. The outcome was three documents, one about the behavior during installation (installation.md), a second one about AutoYaST (autoinstallation.md) and another collecting general features (features.md).

CASP: merged dialogs for root password and keyboard layout

CASP is a product targeted to a quite specific use case with simplicity as a main priority. The installation process has been streamlined to a minimal set of dialogs to configure just the very basic stuff. Among other removed things, there is no step to configure the system language. That can be a problem when entering the root password (the only user that will be created during installation), since the language settings screen is normally also used to select the keyboard layout.

The implemented solution is shown in the screenshot below. As you can see, the keyboard layout and root passwords selections are merged into a single step. As a bonus, we made both widgets more reusable, opening the possibility to place the root password widget or the keyboard layout selection anywhere.

Keyboard layout and root password screen

Storage reimplementation: handling GPT disks in the installation proposal

After several sprints reporting small steps forward, in the 27th sprint we were happy to announce that our testing ISO for the new storage stack was fully installable under certain circumstances. As we reported, it worked in UEFI or legacy systems with the only requirement of having a pre-existing MBR partition table in the disk.

Now we can say it also works with GPT partition tables and even with systems with a mixture of both technologies.

Making the GPT scenario work was much harder that it sounds due to several factors, like the strange way in which parted handles partition types in GPT or some peculiarities in the way the space is distributed in such partition tables.

But now our test ISO can install a fully functional system in the four combinations of MBR/GPT partition table and UEFI/Legacy boot, as it can be seen in the next image.

Storage proposal in several scenarios

The storage reimplementation gets its own openQA instance

But there are better ways than screenshots to prove that something is working, even to prove it keeps working after future modifications. And in (open)SUSE we have one of the best tools for that – openQA.

We have always considered having the new stack tested in openQA as the first big milestone in its development (and we are finally there!) but we are aware that openQA.opensuse.org is already quite busy testing a huge combination of products, architectures and scenarios… even testing releases of openQA itself. Fortunately openQA is free software and can be installed anywhere so we created our own instance of openQA to test YaST stuff, specially the new storage layer.

So far, that instance is hosted in the internal SUSE network, which is enough for us to get continuous feedback about the changes we introduce. In addition to installing the new instance and configuring it to continuously grab and check the latest testing ISO, we had to introduce several changes in the ISO itself with the goal of keeping our tests as aligned as possible with the tests performed in the current Tumbleweed version by openQA.opensuse.org.

For example, we made sure the ISO was properly signed to avoid the need to always pass the insecure=1 boot argument. We also included several packages that were missing in order to make sure the ISO included all the software checked during the so-called MinimalX test and to make sure it shared the look and feel with a regular Tumbleweed, since many openQA checks are screenshot-based.

From now on, we can back every new feature with the corresponding integration tests, something crucial to ensure the quality of a piece of software meant to handle storage hardware.

Making Snapper work without DBus

As you may know, some YaST team members are also the main developers and maintainers of Snapper, the ultimate file-system snapshot tool for GNU/Linux systems.

Normally the snapper command line tool uses DBus to connect to snapperd which does most of the actual work. This allows non-root users to work with snapper.

There are however situations when using DBus is not possible and not being able to work in those situations was limiting Snapper’s usefulness. Now with the latest version all snapper commands support the –no-dbus option. This evolution is worth a blog post by itself… and, of course, we have it. To know all the details check this post at Snapper’s blog.

CASP (and beyond): improved roles

Do you remember the system roles feature introduced during development sprint 16 and improved in subsequent sprints? In case you don’t, let us remind you that system roles allow to define many settings of the installation just by choosing one of the offered roles. That’s only possible, of course, in products making use of that feature, like SLES.

For CASP we will have 3 different roles, as shown in the following screenshot.

CASP system roles

The main difference between these three roles is the selection of patterns to be installed. But apart from that, the Worker role will offer an extra step during installation allowing the user to specify the address of the so-called Administration Dashboard.

Configuration screen for the Worker role

That relatively small detail implied the development of a full new feature in the installer – the ability of a given role to define it’s own specific configuration, including the dialog to interact with the user. As expected from any other installation dialog, you can go back and forward without loosing the entered information. If the user goes back and selects a different role, then this additional dialog is not run again.

That new feature is, of course, not specific to CASP and could eventually be used in other products and roles. Just as a crazy example, openSUSE could decide to introduce a role called “NTP server”, running the YaST NTP server configuration right after the user selecting the role.

Other CASP related features

As already said, we have been focusing quite a lot on introducing features that are needed for CASP. It’s worth mentioning, in case it’s still unclear, that CASP will NOT ship its own adapted version of YaST. All the features introduced in the installer are in fact configurable and available for all other products as well. There is only one YaST codebase to rule them all.

Let’s briefly describe some of the introduced CASP-specific (at least for the time being) features.

CASP always uses Btrfs as filesystem for the root partition. At the end of the installation, the root btrfs subvolume will become read-only. All the other subvolumes will stay as read-write, as shown in this screenshot taken right after rebooting at the end of the installation process.

CASP subvolumes

It makes no sense to update from any existing product to CASP. Thus, CASP media should not show an “update” option when booting, even if it’s still possible for advanced users to pass the UPDATE boot parameter. Since we needed to modify the installation-images package, we took the opportunity to make the “update” option and other settings configurable in a per product basis and we unified SLES and openSUSE packages, so now they share a single branch in the source code repository.

CASP is targeted to big deployments extended all over the world. To make possible the synchronization of geographically distributed nodes, the UTC timezone is enforced in every CASP installation. Thus, we implemented support for products to enforce a given timezone in the installer. Take into account this is different from a default timezone.

Last but not least, it has already been mentioned that the CASP installation workflow will have very few steps. That also affects the screen displaying the installations settings summary. In comparison to a regular SLES, some options must disappear because they are not configurable and some other sections must be added because they are not longer presented as a separate previous step. So far, this is the appearance of the installation settings screen in the current CASP prototype.

Installation settings in CASP prototype

…and a surprise about the blog

We also prepared a Christmas gift related to the blog. The technical aspects are solved, but we are ironing out the administrative details. So you will have to wait until the next sprint report to see it in full glory. But, as the Spanish proverb says, “good things are worth waiting for”.

See you next year

That’s enough to report from our December sprint, we don’t want to bore you with every small bug fix. And talking about things that are worth waiting for, our next report will very likely be published at the beginning of February 2017.

That’s because we will put our Scrum process on hold during the Christmas session. We will restart it on the second week of the year, after the visit of the Three Wise Men. In several countries, it’s a tradition that the Three Kings bring gifts to the kids that have been nice, so let’s expect they bring us some new members for the team!

Posted in Distribution, Factory, Programming, Quality Assurance, Software Management, Systems Management, Usability, YaST | 3 Comments »

AMD/ATI Catalyst fglrx rpms, end of an era!

December 7th, 2016 by

Long time not talking about fglrx rpm, mostly because they’ve got no update since last December 2015.

Short Summary

In a word as hundred, fglrx is now a dead horse!

Dead horse

We had the hope of getting it working for Leap 42.2 in October, but except freezing kernel and xorg, you will not get what you would expect: a stable xorg session

Say goodbye fglrx!, repeat after me, goodbye fglrx.

If you are locked down and forced for any reasons to use fglrx with your gpu, and are still using 42.1, then don’t upgrade to 42.2, without a plan B

It has no more support from AMD upstream, and that’s it!, if someone want to break its computer, it’s still possible to pick the last files and try it by yourself, but the repository will never contain it for 42.2 (see below how-to)

That’s said, I’m not still sure, to keep for a long time the repository, I’ve been managing since 6 years now.

A bit of history

In 2010, when we were working hard to get 11.1 out, the news that no supported ATI (at that time) will be available for end-users, as we have for nvidia gpu

I didn’t check back the irc log, but we were a few, that would like to have this still available, by pure commodity. Especially that I’ve just exchanged a non working gpu by my new hd5750.

I remember the first chaotic steps, how to build that, and create repeating builds, what about the license? Did we have the right to offer a pre-build rpm etc. I spent some time fixing all of this stuff.
And start the build on real hardware. Hey afterward kvm was really in infancy stage.

Release after release amd/ati and openSUSE, the driver was build, on hardware for each supported distribution. When beginning of 2013 Sebastian Siebert, who got some direct contacts with AMD, release
his own script, we collaborate to have the possibility to build on virtual machines, which allow me to simplify the build process, as having on kvm for each openSUSE release supported.

Afterward, AMD start to split fglrx with the fglrx for HD5xx and above, and fglrx-legacy. So 2 drivers to maintain, but as always with proprietary software, the legacy version became rapidly obsolete,
and non usable. Not that bad, in the meantime the AMD effort on the free and open source radeon driver, quickly overcome the performance of legacy.

Still from 2013, to 2016 I’ve been able to propose ready to use rpm for several version of openSUSE’s distributions. I think the repository serve quite well end users, and I never got big flames.

I can’t avoid to mention the openSUSE powered server and sponsored by Ioda-Net Sàrl that has serve this objective so well during that time frame.

Future of the repository

Now that fglrx is becoming obsolete, I think seriously about why the repository online should stay online.

At openSUSE project level, we still have 13.1, 13.2, 42.1 and 42.2 that are mostly active. 13.1 is already almost out of the game of evergreen,
13.2 will follow soon, and I don’t know yet the exact plan for 42.1, but it will certainly go out of maintenance in less than a year.

If you feel or have the need of the repository, please express that in the comments below.

Wait there’s amd-gpu-pro, no?

Yeap there’s a closed driver, called amd-gpu-pro, available, for newer cards. But there’s two things that bring me out of the game, first I don’t have those newer gpu,
and don’t have the need to replace my hd5750 for the moment. The second and certainly the most important, those drivers are only available for Ubuntu or at least in .deb format.

I will certainly not help proprietary crap, if I don’t have a solid base to work with, and a bit of help from their side. I wish good luck to those who want to try those drivers,
I’ve got a look inside, and got a blame face.

For crazy, and those who don’t love their computer

So you want to loose your time? you can! I’ve kept in raw-src directory all the script used to build the driver.
They differ a bit compared to Sebastian Siebert last version in the sense of making Leap 422 as a possible target.
If you dig a bit around, you should be able to build them, but you’re alone on that way, you’ve been warned!

I’m not against a republished version, if someone find a way to make them working, just drop me a message.

That’s all for this journey, Have Fun! 🙂

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Posted in Distribution, Kernel | 15 Comments »

Highlights of YaST development sprint 28

December 2nd, 2016 by

November is over, Santa Claus elves start to stress and the YaST team brings you one of the last reports of 2016. Let’s see what’s new in YaSTland.

Harder to ignore installation warning

The “installation settings” summary screen usually reports some non-critical errors displayed as a red text. Although the installation can proceed despite those errors, they are usually serious enough to lead to problems. That’s why we decided to introduce a change to highlight them a little bit more, making them harder to overlook.

The following screenshot shows the newly introduced confirmation dialog, presented before proceeding with installation.

Preventing users to shoot their feet

Make DHCLIENT_SET_HOSTNAME configurable on a per-interface basis

But that’s not the only usability-oriented enhancement on this sprint. We also reworked a bit the network configuration dialog.

For home users is very common to use a fixed hostname -set during installation- for our beloved linux box. But in some circumstances it’s better to set the hostname of the machine dynamically using DHCP, something YaST has always allowed to do by just ticking a checkbox that used to be in the network configuration screen. See “Change Hostname via DHCP” below.

The old network settings screen

That checkbox used to modify the system-wide variable DHCLIENT_SET_HOSTNAME, which was fine in scenarios in which only one of the network interfaces was configured via DHCP. But with several network interfaces connected to different DHCP-enabled networks, some problems arose.

During installation, if network configuration is used, Linuxrc creates the ifcfg files with DHCLIENT_SET_HOSTNAME='yes' for all of the enabled or configured interfaces and this value has precedence over the global one.

So the main problem was that YaST only allowed us to modify the global variable and setting it to ‘no’ did nothing because it was enabled for some interface.

During this sprint we have fixed that and now the user interface offers the possibility of choosing which DHCP interface will be used to decide the hostname.

The new network settings screen

Apart from choosing one of the existing interfaces, the new setting can also be set to ‘no’ or to ‘any’. In any case, YaST will always configure the system-wide options and the interface specific ones in a consistent way, so the behavior is always predictable.

But YaST is not the only way of configuring the network, so it’s always possible to have an unpredictable configuration. Fortunately, those potentially problematic scenarios will be detected by YaST and reported to the user.

Detecting dangerous scenarios in network settings

Partitioning in CASP

In the previous report we already explained how are we improving the installer to support the definition of the ultra-streamlined installation process of SUSE CASP, the new Kubernetes based member of the SUSE family.

In this sprint we introduced several additional changes to enable a different partitioning approach, more guided and automatic than ever. In a CASP node it makes no sense to use the advanced settings offered by our storage proposal, like encryption or LVM. Moreover, CASP relies on Btrfs to provide some of its cool and advanced features, like transactional updates.

As a result, although the regular SUSE and openSUSE releases will keep offering all the current possibilities in the same way than ever, in CASP the partitioning step will be skipped and the automatically calculated proposal will be simply displayed in the installation summary.

The new CASP installation summary

Clicking on the proposal will allow to re-target the installation to a different disk (or disks) in a similar way than the regular installer, but the options will be more limited. Again, no easy way to use LVM, encryption, separate home or any file system type other than Btrfs.

Selecting the partitions in CASP, no proposal settings button

The expert partitioner is still available during CASP installation, but using it will show an extra warning, since it implies a much bigger risk than using it in a regular SUSE or openSUSE system.

Expert partitioner warning in CASP

Improved debugger integration

We have improved the Ruby debugger integration in YaST. So far you could start the debugger using the y2debugger=1 boot option or by setting the Y2DEBUGGER=1 environment variable. The new feature allows starting the Ruby debugger also later when the YaST module is already running.

Simply press the Shift+Ctrl+Alt+D keyboard shortcut (D as debug) and it will start the Ruby debugger. It works during installation and also in installed system (just make sure the byebug Ruby gem is installed).

Unfortunately this new feature works only in the Qt UI, the ncurses UI is not supported (currently it does not handle the debugging keyboard shortcut at all).

After pressing the keyboard shortcut the debugger window will pop up:

New debugger integration

Storage reimplementation: it’s alive!

It took us one more sprint than originally expected, but finally we can say the testing ISO for the new storage stack is fully installable.

We fixed the UEFI + MBR partition table scenario we already had almost working in the previous sprint (turns out it was not that broken in Tumbleweed after all) and we adapted yast2-bootloader to be also able to deal with legacy (i.e. no UEFI) booting using the new storage stack.

As a nice result, our testing ISO can be used to install a perfectly functional system in both UEFI or legacy systems with the only requirement of having a pre-existing MBR partition table in the disk. It only shows a couple of error pop-ups related to the calculation of the proposal of software to be installed, but nothing that would prevent you from replacing whatever operating system you have with a new shiny openSUSE-based experiment.

This milestone opens the door to start testing the new stack with openQA, the same system that helps to guarantee the robustness of all the recent SUSE and openSUSE versions.

Storage reimplementation: preparations for the storage proposal

Now that yast2-bootloader starts to be ready to work with the new storage stack in more and more scenarios, it’s time to adapt the only component that still complains during the installation.

In order to make that task doable during the next sprint, we invested some time in this sprint analyzing the interaction between the software proposal calculator and the old storage layer. The outcome was a small document detailing what needs to be adapted in the proposal and in the new stack. The perfect input for a task in the next sprint.

Help for power-users with short memory

Our beloved YaST is packed with magic tricks below the surface. Many of them are very useful to debug installation problems or to better understand how the YaST internals work. Unfortunately developers tend to not be that good at blindly memorizing stuff and the functionality is so well hidden that most newcomers would have hard times finding it… until now.

We have added a couple of new keyboard shortcuts to show a summary of all the advanced hotkeys, so now you only have to remember one key combination instead of a dozen of them. In both text (ncurses) and graphical (Qt) mode, it will be enough to press shift+F1 to get the advanced help displayed below. Since some terminal emulators could already use that combination, ctrl+D F1 can also be used in the ncurses interface as an alternative.

Advanced Hotkeys help dialog

Contributions keep coming!

As we have already mentioned in previous sprint reports, an important part of our daily job as open source developers is helping casual (and not so casual) contributors to bring their ideas and code into YaST and related projects.

This time that (hopefully not casual) contributor was Devin Waas, who wanted to improve the installation to make the life of cloud-lovers easier.

For cloud guys out there retrieving logs of a failed installation is was a huge problem. Now, thanks to Devin, all you need is a running a rsyslog server and you’ll be able to easily access your installation logs from there.

A drawing is worth a thousand words

As a matter of fact, the newest Tumbleweed release allows us to specify the IP address of a remote server from the bootloader through the “Loghost flag”. Linuxrc will take care of setting up a UDP broadcast for dmesg contents and YaST installation logs.

This is just a first step. Devin promised further improvements of our newly implemented remote logging system. And he codes better than he draws, so stay tuned!

Storage reimplementation: LVM-based proposal

As we already mentioned in previous reports, when we started to develop the partitioning proposal we first focused in the scenario of a partition-based proposal with one or several MBR-style partition tables. That looked like the most complex scenario due to the limited number of primary partitions, the alignment problems, the overhead introduced by the EBR (extended boot record) of every logical partition and so on.

A couple of sprints ago, we got that working so we started to work on the LVM-based proposal. It took a little bit longer than expected but now we are able to generate LVM-based proposals for almost every possible scenario. The goal was to have them working in our mocked test cases. So probably the new LVM-based proposal cannot still be used to install a fully functional system, but it is backed by a full load of tests that prove we can handle many situations, from trivial to really tricky ones… and believe us, things can get quite tricky if you mix logical partitions with their EBR overhead and LVM volumes with their PE size rounding and their metadata overhead.

Bugs, bugs, bugs

In this sprint we kept the already commented approach of making the fix of low-priority and small bugs part of the Scrum process. As a result we accounted for approximately 50 deaths of those annoying creatures.

Conclusion

Looking at the report, we could say it was a quite successful sprint. But to be honest we were aiming even higher. Quite some interesting PBIs (features or bug-fixes in Scrum jargon) were almost done at the end of the sprint. But following Scrum philosophy, we never blog about almost-done stuff.

Thus, if nothing goes wrong things will be even better in the next report in three weeks. So have a lot of fun trying the new stuff and stay tuned for more!

Posted in Base System, Distribution, Factory, Network, Programming, Systems Management, Usability, YaST | Comments Off on Highlights of YaST development sprint 28

openSUSE project presentation at school, Nov 24th, 2016

November 29th, 2016 by

On November 16th there was the release of openSUSE Leap 42.2. On November 24th, I had the opportunity to present openSUSE Project at school.

I was asked to make an introduction to FLOSS in general and more specific about openSUSE Project. The school was for middle aged people, for persons who quited school to work and conftibute financially to their families. There were 3 classes that they taught something computer related. It was a great opportunity for them to learn what FLOSS is and what makes openSUSE great Linux distro.
(more…)

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Posted in Ambassadors, GNOME, Marketing | Comments Off on openSUSE project presentation at school, Nov 24th, 2016

YaST Team visits Euruko 2016

November 23rd, 2016 by

As promised in previous posts, we want to share with you our experience and views from this year annual Ruby conference Euruko. Maybe “our” is too much to say, since we only sent one developer there. So to be precise, these are Josef Reidinger’s experience and views on the conference.

This year Euruko took place in Sofia, capital of Bulgaria. It turned out to be a great conference place. Public transport works very well, everyone speak English and even when it uses Cyrilic alphabet, almost everything is written also in Latin one.

That being said, let’s talk about the conference content. Fortunately all the presentations were recorded so you can watch them yourself. But since it would be quite some hours of video to go through, we have reviewed some presentations for you including access to the corresponding videos.

Highlights

Let’s start with the three presentation Josef specially recommend to watch.

Keynote by Matz

He speaks about how Ruby 3 will probably look in distant future. With “distant future” meaning “for sure not in next two years”. If you cannot wait, it’s worth mentioning that Ruby 2.4 will be released on December.

Ruby 3 will use guild membership concurrency model. The most interesting part of the talk is digging into rationale of typed versus non-typed languages and what can be the Ruby future in that regard.

Rules, Laws and Gently Guidelines by Andrew Radev

Interesting view about common design principles, common mistakes when applying them and looking to them from different angles. Also explaining how to handle situations in which several design principles seem to contradict each other.

Elixir by Jose Valim

Interesting intro to Elixir language. What it is, why it make sense to use it and what are its benefits. Josef’s impression was that Elixir’s idea is similar to isolated micro-services communicating via messages, with nice introspection and scalability.

But we have more team members with something to say about Elixir. Like Imobach, who has been playing with Elixir (and Phoenix) for some time now. And Imobach really likes Elixir, so he would like to add some more bits of information for those who are interested.

For example, he would like to highlight that Elixir uses BEAM, the Erlang virtual machine, so great support for concurrency is backed in the platform. Concurrency sits on the concept of Erlang processes and it’s pretty common to use them for all kind of tasks (from computation to storing state, etc.). Imobach would like to encourage all developers out there to take a look to OTP (Open Telecom Platform). Who needs micro-services at all?

Last but not least, take into account that Elixir is a functional language, so if you have an object-oriented mindset (like most Ruby developers) it will take some time to wrap your head around it.

Other presentations

Little Snippets by Xavier Noria

Summary of common inefficiency in small snippets. Small things that matter, although most of them should be already known by the average Ruby developer. (Video)

Since we mention the topic, some YaST team members has found this cheat sheet by Juanito Fatas about Ruby optimization to be quite useful.

Rails + Kafka by Terence Lee

Apache Kafka is yet another messaging system. This talk did not manage to convince Josef to use it, but maybe it makes sense in some scenarios like HPC or HA. (Video)

Graphql on Rails by Marc-Andre Giroux

The typical REST setup is sometimes not scalable enough due to the excess of endpoints. The Graphql language is designed to specify what resources are needed from a server in a single query. The result is returned as JSON and the request specification looks also similar to JSON. Caching is done on client side. Interesting for web stuff and already used by Facebook, Shopify and others. (Video)

Evolution of engineering on call team by Grace Chang

How to maintain services, how to scale when the grow, preventing burnout and so on. Specially interesting for us since there are many similarities with YaST maintenance. Maybe the end of the talk is a bit theoretic and idealistic. (Video)

Sprockets by Rafael Franca

Not specially interesting intro to assets generation used by Rails. People doing some assets generation with Rails would most likely already know all the content. (Video)

Contribute to Ruby core by Hiroshi Shibata

Presentation about Ruby core development infrastructure, rules, etc. Certainly not the best talk ever. (Video)

Consequences of insightful algorithms by Carina C. Zona

Interesting presentation about conflicts between algorithms and real humans, especially with data-mining. Unfortunately, the second half turned to be too emotional and not technical enough for Josef’s taste :). (Video)

Viewing Ruby Blossom – Hamani by Anton Davydov

Introduction to yet another Ruby web framework. Not that interesting for us. (Video)

A Year of Ruby, Together by Andre Arko

Introduction on how the open source community infrastructure behind Rubygems and Bundler is ran. How they get money to improve stuff, how they maintain their servers… Good talk about hard times keeping open source infrastructure alive. Interesting talk for any open source project. (Video)

What I Have Learned from Organizing Remote Internship for Ruby Developers by Ivan Nemytchenko

Talk describing an attempt to scale internship for a lot of students. Josef had a small chat with the author about Google Summer of Code after the presentation. He looked interested. (Video)

The Illusion of Stable APIs by Nick Sutterer

Not Josef’s cup of tea. The presenter probably went a little bit too far trying to be funny all the time. The core of the presentation was about three examples of API that needed to be changed “just” because the rest of the world changed. So the whole presentation can be shortened to one sentence – your API will only remain static if the world remains static. (Video)

Conclusion

That was all from Sofia. See you again in approximately one week, just in time for the report of our 28th Scrum sprint.

Posted in Events, Programming, YaST | Comments Off on YaST Team visits Euruko 2016

Highlights of YaST development sprint 27

November 10th, 2016 by

Another three weeks of development come to an end… and our usual report starts. Take a look to what we have been cooking.

Read-only proposal modules

This week, during SUSECon 2016, SUSE announced an exciting upcoming new product. SUSE CASP – a Kubernetes based Container As a Service Platform.

That has, of course, some implications for the installer, like the need of some products (like CASP) to specify a fixed configuration for some subsystems. For example, an established selection of packages. The user should not be allowed to change those fixed configurations during installation.

We have implemented a possibility to mark some modules in the installation proposal as read-only. These read-only modules then cannot be started from the installer and therefore their configuration is kept at the default initial state.

Software and firewall proposals as read-only

In this sprint we have implemented a basic support in the proposal framework, in the future we could improve the respective proposal modules to better handle the read-only mode.

Per product Btrfs subvolumes handling

The ability to have read-only proposals is not the only improvement we have introduced in YaST to make SUSE CASP possible.

When Btrfs is used during the installation, YaST2 proposes a list of subvolumes to create. Unfortunatelly, that list is hard-coded and it’s the same for every (open)SUSE product… until now.

Starting on yast2-storage 3.1.103.1, a list of subvolumes can be defined in the product’s control file along with additional options (check out SLES and openSUSE examples to learn more).

<subvolumes config:type="list">
  <subvolume>
    <path>boot/grub2/i386-pc</path>
    <archs>i386,x86_64</archs>
  </subvolume>
  <subvolume>
    <path>home</path>
  </subvolume>
  <subvolume>
    <path>opt</path>
  </subvolume>
  <subvolume>
    <path>var/lib/libvirt/images</path>
    <copy_on_write config:type="boolean">false</copy_on_write>
  </subvolume>
</subvolumes>

This specification supports:

  • Disabling copy-on-write for a given subvolume (it’s enabled by default).
  • Enabling the creation of a subvolume only for a set of architectures.

Improved AutoYaST Btrfs subvolumes handling

AutoYaST Btrfs subvolumes handling has been also improved. Using almost the same syntax as for product control files, you can disable the CoW behavior for a given subvolume.

Of course, if you don’t need such a feature, you won’t need to adapt your profiles to the new syntax as it’s backward compatible. You can also mix both of them:

<subvolumes config:type="list">
  <subvolume>home</subvolume>
  <subvolume>
    <path>var/lib/libvirt/images</path>
    <copy_on_write config:type="boolean">false</copy_on_write>
  </subvolume>
</subvolumes>

On the other hand, if you’re running SLES, you’ll know that a subvolume called @ is used as the default Btrfs subvolume. Now is possible to turn-off such behavior in the profile’s general section.

<general>
  <btrfs_set_subvolume_default_name config:type="boolean">false</btrfs_set_subvolume_default_name>
</general>

Disable installer self-update by default

We have talked many times in this blog about the new self-update functionality for the installer. As expected, this functionality will debut in SLE-12-SP2 but with a small change in the original plan. In order to ensure maximum consistency in the behavior of SLE-12-SP1 and SP2 installers, the self-update functionality will be disabled by default. Not a big deal, since enabling it to get the latest fixes will be just a matter of adding a boot option in the initial installation screen.

Storage reimplementation: adapted EFI proposal in yast2-bootloader

The previous report about the status of the storage stack reimplementation finished with the following cliffhanger “we have in place all the ingredients to cook an installable ISO“. So, as expected, we worked during this sprint in adapting the bootloader proposal to the new storage layer. As you can see in the following screenshot, we succeeded and the installer can already propose a valid grub2 setup to boot an EFI system.

EFI proposal with the storage-ng ISO

Does that mean that the testing ISO for the new storage stack is already fully installable? Unfortunately not. Why not, you ask? The reason is, in fact, kind of fun.

The current partitioning proposal only works with MS-DOS style partition tables because we wanted to address the most complicated case first. On the other hand, we intentionally restricted the adaptation of the bootloader proposal to the EFI scenario. And you know what? We found out that combination (MS-DOS partition table + EFI) does not currently work in Tumbleweed, so it neither does in our Tumbleweed-based testing ISO.

We will work during the following sprint to support another scenario. And hopefully we will not choose again an unsupported or broken one. 😉

Letting libYUI run free: first visible steps

As you know, YaST has both a graphical and a textual interface. They run on the same code thanks to an abstraction layer called LibYUI. Originally it served YaST only, but over time other projects started using it, notably the admin panel in Mageia. Moreover, the developers of those projects started to contribute fixes and improvements to LibYUI… faster than we can cope with.

Recently we decided to give the people outside the YaST team more power in the LibYUI project. To make that possible ensuring it does not affect YaST stability, we have been enabling more continuous integration tests.

As a first fruit of the revamped collaboration, we have merged a fix contributed by Angelo Naselli of Mageia regarding selection of tree items. As soon as we complete our continuous integration setup (of course we will keep you informed), more fixes and improvements will come for sure.

More bug squashing and bug paleontology

In the previous report we presented our new effort to integrate the fix of low-priority bugs into the Scrum process. During this sprint we refined the idea a little bit more, distinguishing two separate concepts (each of them with its own PBI) – fixing of existing bugs and closing of too old ones.

The first one doesn’t need much explanation. We managed to fix around 25 non-critical bugs in YaST and if you are using Tumbleweed you are probably already benefiting from the result.

The second task was not exactly about fixing bugs present in the software, but about cleaning bugzilla from bug reports that were simply too old to be relevant any more. Like bugs affecting very old versions of openSUSE that cannot be reproduced in openSUSE 13.2 or Leap. We must be realistic about releases that are already out of support and the limited human resources we have. We closed around 80 of those ancient bugs.

no_country_for_old_bugs

So overall, we cleaned up around one hundred bugs from our queue. Still a long way to have a bug-free YaST, but undoubtedly a step in the right direction.

More coming

We are already working in the next sprint that will hopefully bring several new improvements for CASP, quite relevant progress in the storage reimplementation, several usability improvements, some bugfixes and even some news about this blog.

To make sure you don’t get bored while waiting we are also planning to finally publish the report about our visit to Euruko 2016.

Stay tuned!

Posted in Base System, Distribution, Factory, Programming, Systems Management, YaST | 6 Comments »

Basic Nextcloud installation on openSUSE Leap

October 28th, 2016 by

Nextcloud Logo

I see the official documentation has full tutorial for RHEL 6 or CentOS 6 and RHEL 7 or CentOS 7. The main documentation covers Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

openSUSE already has the Nextcloud client packaged in Tumbelweed and the Server is in the PHP extra repo! Personally, I prefer to install eveything from official repository, so when an update is available, I can have it without a glitch. This tutorial describes how to install Nextcloud using command line. I followed the official documentation of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS installation.

Why choose openSUSE Leap? openSUSE Leap is a brand new way of building openSUSE and is new type of hybrid Linux distribution. Leap uses source from SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE), which gives Leap a level of stability unmatched by other Linux distributions, and combines that with community developments to give users, developers and sysadmins the best stable Linux experience available. Contributor and enterprise efforts for Leap bridge a gap between matured packages and newer packages found in openSUSE’s other distribution Tumbleweed. You can download openSUSE Leap from the site https://software.opensuse.org/.
(more…)

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Apache, Documentation, Server | 2 Comments »

Highlights of YaST development sprint 26

October 20th, 2016 by

We did our best to keep you entertained during this development sprint with a couple of blog posts ([1] and [2]). But now the sprint is over and it’s time for a new report.

Squashing low priority bugs

One of the main reasons to adopt Scrum was to ensure we make a good use of our development resources (i.e. developers’ time and brains) focusing on things that bring more value to our users. In the past we had the feeling that many important things were always postponed because the developers were flooded by other not so important stuff. Now that feeling is gone (to a great extent) and we have a more clear and shared view of the direction of our development efforts.

But there is always a drawback. We have accumulated quite some unsolved low-priority bugs. That was an expected consequence, but still it was starting to feel wrong. On one hand, it makes us feel uncomfortable – replying “this will have to wait” so often is not nice, even if it’s for the shake a bigger goal. On the other hand, the amount of low-priority stuff was affecting the signal/noise ratio on Bugzilla, making harder to distinguish the important stuff.

So far, dealing with those low-priority bug was something that each developer did on his own, as permitted by the time dedicated to Scrum. In sprint 26 we decided to make that effort an explicit part of the process and to devote a significant portion of the sprint to it. As a result we closed or reassigned a total of 135 bugs that were just sitting in our list.

Yes, you did read it right. One hundred and thirty five bugs.

Storage reimplementation: our testing ISO can already destroy your data

On the previous sprint we already showed a screenshot of the installer using the new storage stack to calculate a partitioning proposal. Now the installer can go one step further. As you can see on this animation, the changes are now committed to the disk, meaning the system is actually partitioned, formatted and installed.

Installation with the new storage stack

The process is interrupted after installing the software, when trying to configure and install the bootloader. That was expected because yast2-bootloader has still not been adapted to use the new stack. First of all, because we wanted to leave some fun for sprint 27. But also because we used this sprint (26) to document all the requirements of yast2-bootloader in relation to the new storage stack. Now we have in place all the ingredients to cook an installable ISO.

Automatic update of translation files

Recently openSUSE has adopted Weblate to perform and coordinate the translation of the software and the project’s web pages. The openSUSE’s Weblate instance enables everybody (from dedicated translators to casual contributors) to take part in the process and makes possible to coordinate the translations of openSUSE with the ones for SUSE Enterprise Linux, boosting collaboration between the translators of both projects.

As YaST developers, is of course our responsibility to ensure that openSUSE’s Weblate contains always the latest English strings to be translated. Making our developer’s life easier sometimes not only brings advantages for us but also for our users. Until now, after each code change we had to keep in mind to trigger the translation process for every added or changed English text. Sometimes we were not quick enough so that some English leftovers remained in our awesome YaST when being used in one of the 20 languages where the translation is normally 100% complete.

Now we finally set up a Jenkins job to automate the process of triggering the translation update after code changes. This saves the developers some work and makes the update of translations even faster.

Looking at Weblate numbers, you can see we have 20 languages that are about 100% translated, another 20 that are translated more than 75% and 37 languages which are translated less than 75%. So we still need some help to bring all languages to 100% coverage. If you are willing to contribute, why not join our team of translators? Check out the localization guide to get in contact with the coordinators of your preferred language to learn about how to contribute with translations, reviews or by any other mean.

Ensure installation of packages needed for booting

We got some reports of systems not being able to work after the installation in scenarios in which the user had customized the list of packages to install. That happened because, although the bootloader component of YaST pre-selects for installation all the needed packages, the user can override that selection and manually disable the installation of those packages.

To prevent this situation, or at least to increase awareness of it, the installer now alerts in the summary screen (the last step before proceeding to installation) if some of the required packages is missing, as you can see in the screenshot below. We still allow the users to shoot their own feet if they insist, but now we warn them very clearly.

Warning about de-selected Grub2 package

Progress in the low-vision accessibility of the installer

During this sprint, we have been working to make the (open)SUSE installer accessible to people with low-vision impairment. We already blogged about it looking for feedback.

One of the new color modes available in the installer

In a few days, some changes will land in Tumbleweed:

  • Alternative style selection (color and font-sizes). Currently, we offer four options: default (no changes), high contrast (cyan/green/white/black), white on black and cyan on black. Those styles are just a proof of concept in order to test the code changes and, most important, to get feedback from you.
  • A long-standing issue, which prevented to switch to high-contrast mode during installation (shift+F4), has been fixed.

Style selection at the beginning of installation
Although we have made some progress, it is still an ongoing effort and we hope to release more improvements during the upcoming weeks.

Recover from broken bootloader configuration

There are situations in which YaST Bootloader is not able to read the system configuration. For example, when the udev device originally used by Grub2 is no longer available. In the past that leaded to YaST crashes, requiring a manual fix of the bootloader configuration files. Now YaST correctly detects the situation and offers the option to propose a new configuration with correct devices.

YaST bootloader fixing a broken configuration

Disable autorefresh by default in local media

We have changed the default autorefresh flag for the new repositories added by YaST. In the past the autorefresh was enabled for all repositories except CD/DVD media and ISO files.

With the new defaults the autorefresh is enabled only for remote repositories (like http, ftp, nfs,…). The reason is that some local repositories might not be always available (e.g. external hard disk, USB flash drive,…) and the automatic refresh might cause ugly errors when starting the package manager.

Of course, you can still manually change the autorefresh flag after adding a repository if you need a different value.

Note: The default has been changed in Tumbleweed distribution only, Leap 42.2 or SLE-12-SP2 keep the old defaults. The zypper behavior is unchanged as well, it by default disables autorefresh for all repositories. Only repositories imported from a .repo file have autorefresh enabled. See man zypper for more details.

Tons of improvements in network bridge handling

YaST Network is Swiss Army knife for network configuration which comprehends the management of routing, bonding, bridging and many other things. But, to be honest, the management of bridges was not in the best possible shape. It had quite some usability problems and it was not 100% consistent with the way in which bridges are managed nowadays by Wicked in (open)SUSE. Until now!

This pull request with several screenshots and animations tries to summarize all the changes that have been done during this sprint. Like adapting old configuration files to the new conventions or unifying the UI to make it consistent with the one for managing bonding.

Revamped YaST interface for handling bridges

This revamp includes also quite some usability improvements:

  • “NONE” is shown instead of 0.0.0.0 for old bridge configuration.
  • The bridge master is shown in the enslaved interface.
  • The interfaces overview is updated after a bridge is modified.

Optimizing read of hosts file

It was reported that yast2-network was slow in system with a lot of entries in the /etc/hosts file. We took that as an opportunity to test the new profiler support in YaST. The profiler revealed the problem was in some slow calls to SCR, the layer traditionally used by YaST to interact with the underlying system… which sounded like another opportunity. This time an opportunity to expand the use of CFA (the component we are developing to steady replace SCR) and its Augeas parser. Since Augeas already supports parsing of /etc/hosts files, it was quite straightforward to implement that into YaST… and the result is quite impressive.

The time needed to execute the next command in a system containing a huge /etc/hosts with around 10,000 entries (quite an extreme case, we know) was reduced from 75 seconds to just 20.

yast2 lan list

As you can see in this pull request, we also improved CFA itself, greatly reducing the time needed for reading configuration files with Augeas.

That’s all… until next report

Once again, we must conclude the report telling that this was just a small summary of all the work done during the sprint and that we will be back in three weeks with the next report. Or maybe before, now that we are starting to get used to blog more often.

In any case, see you soon and don’t forget to have a lot of fun!

Posted in Distribution, Factory, Localization, Programming, Systems Management, Usability, YaST | 1 Comment »

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