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Archive for July, 2016

Highlights of YaST development sprint 22

July 27th, 2016 by

openSUSE Conference’16, Hackweek 14 and the various SUSE internal workshops are over. So it’s time for the YaST team to go back to usual three-weeks-long development sprints… and with new sprints come new public reports!

With Leap 42.2 in Alpha phase and SLE12-SP2 in Beta phase our focus is on bugs fixing, so we don’t have as much fancy stuff to show in this report. Still, here you are some bits you could find interesting.

Installer memory consumption reduced

For our SLE customers we promise installations on machines with as little as 512MB of RAM. For Tumbleweed, 1GB is required – so the situation is more relaxed there.

But look at the total size of filesystem images that must be kept in memory during installation: 176MB for SLE12 (Tumbleweed: 224MB). This is leaving not much room to run programs.

The size has grown considerably over time, and we had to look for places to save space. We came up with some major areas for improvement.

The initrd and the installation system (the file system image containing the installer) share many files (mainly libraries). By removing any overlap, we were able to reduce the image size by 17MB for SLE12 (Tumbleweed: 30MB).

After the package installation starts, kernel modules and some raw libzypp cache data are no longer needed. By deleting zypp data we save another 3MB and kernel modules occupy even 29MB in SLE12 (Tumbleweed: 50MB). But we do this only on systems with less than 1GB memory.

So, compared to the available 512MB, these savings are quite substantial and will hopefully keep us going for a while…

Storage reimplementation: another step to an installable system

It’s time for our reimplementation of the storage layer to prove it can do the real work. Thus, we have integrated the new code in a set of modified Tumbleweed ISO images automatically generated in OBS. They cannot still be used to install a system, but the installer is already able to boot and reach the language selection screen (the first milestone we were aiming for).

We already had code that works in a simulated test environment (unit tests) and now we have a way to use that code in a real installer. Stay tuned for exciting news!

Make many extensions fit on the screen properly

For SUSE Linux Enterprise we offer so many optional modules that their listing did not fit on lower resolution screens. Below you can see how the screen looked before the fix – checkbox widgets and their labels do not fit so their bottoms are cropped.

Old interface with cropped extensions

We have to make sure YaST works across different interfaces, including text-based ncurses. That limits the set of widgets we can use when designing interfaces, so finding a solution to that kind of problems is not always easy. We also took the opportunity to add a filter for beta extensions, as you can see in the following screenshot.

The beta extensions filter in action

And finally you can see how it looks like with all the extensions, including beta ones. Instead of cropping elements we now have a scroll-bar in the right.

The new extensions UI in all its glory

Storage reimplementation: LVM unit testing

The next step in the storage layer reimplementation is adding support for LVM, since right now only regular partitions are supported. We always write a lot of unit tests to make sure the different pieces work in isolation before integrating everything together into the installer. During this sprint we created all the infrastructure for testing LVM at such level. Armed with that, we can start writing reliable code to handle LVM (something we have already started to do).

Improved patterns handling for system roles

We recently introduced the concept of system roles during installation. The chosen role affects the selection of package patterns. But we realized that the roles were not completely overriding the default selection of packages. Before the fix introduced in this sprint, desktop related patterns were included for a KVM server role and, thus, the systemd target was graphical.

The KVM Server role before the fix

Now, only the 3 patterns explicitly intended for the KVM role are selected, with no desktop related patterns. Accordingly, the system boots to text mode.

Fixed KVM Server role

Storage reimplementation: the future of booting

We have explained in several previous posts how we are collaborating with Grub and hardware architecture experts to make sure the new storage layer makes always sensible partitioning proposals. For that purpose RSpec has proven to be an excellent tool. It does not only allow us to have full unit test coverage or our code, but also the generated output has become the perfect base to discuss the expected behavior of the system in every possible scenario.

During this sprint, we spent quite some time together with SUSE’s Grub genius Michael Chang defining the best possible partitioning schema in x86 architectures. Once we had a human-readable and non-ambiguous specification, we modified our code to make sure the associated RSpec tests generated exactly the same specification as output. This way we make sure that our code works and that it fits 100% the experts expectations.

Kudos to Michael for his infinite patience with our questions and for coming up with an innovative way of using Grub2 that will allow us to boot in many tricky scenarios, eliminating the need of introducing a separate /boot in almost all cases.

Conclusion

As said, most of the sprint was invested in chasing bugs… and we don’t expect next sprint to be different in that regard. Even though, we hope this post to contain enough new stuff to keep you entertained and informed about what is going on in the YaST trenches.

See you in three weeks!

Tally ERP 9 on Linux

July 21st, 2016 by

Recently we implemented Tally ERP 9 solution for Antico Pumps. That itself is not interesting, the interesting part is they are using LTSP Fat client system on openSUSE. They have only one server from which all their client computers boot over the network, the clients do not have hard disk, client OS with all softwares they need including wine(Tally is Windows only software), as well as users’ data resides on the server. Once the client boots all the local resources are used so single low power server can be used to serve many clients.

Tally multiuser is served from a Samba share  on a NAS device, Tally folder is copied to samba share and path to Tally Data is changed so that it points there. Everything they need including printing and export(CSV) works from all clients. Same way Tally can be run on standalone computers. Neither Tally, Wine or openSUSE are modified for getting it working as it would under Windows environment.

Uninstall a patch using zypper

July 11th, 2016 by

Maintenance and security updates for the stable openSUSE Leap releases are automatically tested using OpenQA, and also receive community testing prior to release. In addition, many updates to openSUSE Leap are inherited from SUSE’s enterprise products, where they already receive thorough review, and automated as well as manual testing.

Should anything go wrong, here is how to “uninstall” an online update using zypper.

zypper in --oldpackage ` \
zypper info -t patch --conflicts openSUSE-2016-XXX | \
grep " < " | while read NAME C VERSION; do \
rpm --quiet -q --queryformat "%{name}\n" $NAME && echo "${NAME}<${VERSION}"; \
done`

Replace openSUSE-2016-XXX with the update in question. All involved packages are installed in a prior version. This, of course, is an alternative to using Btrfs snapshots. Note that the update will be offered again.

If you want to help review proposed online updates, just check the “untested updates” repo in YaST or add one of the -test repositories to receive updates early.

Future of Li-f-e: Linux for Education distribution

July 4th, 2016 by

We have come a long way since the first Li-f-e live media based on openSUSE was created, the current release is based on openSUSE Leap 42.1. Deployments by Indonesia’s education system is a shining example of openSUSE Education project’s accomplishment.

The openSUSE project has stopped producing live medias for Leap and also live-installer is dropped from live medias created for the Tumbleweed distribution. As Li-f-e is primarily a live distribution we would not be able to create any more medias without live-installer. So unless this situation changes we may not have Li-f-e based on Leap 42.2.

In the meantime I’ve had a look at Ubuntu to create Li-f-e based on the latest LTS release of Ubuntu-Mate, check it out here. Software selection available is kept identical to the Li-f-e based on openSUSE, however there is always a room for improvement, suggestions to enhance it are always welcome.