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Archive for October, 2016

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…)

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!

Proprietary AMD/ATI Catalyst fglrx 15.12 rpms released for LEAP 42.2

October 15th, 2016 by

Warnings

There’s no warranties the drivers will work, for you!

If you are satisfied with the open-source radeon drivers, don’t risk to break your computer !

Still there will NEVER be a fglrx driver for recent kernel and xorg. So if one of those component change in Leap fglrx will be broken.

Actual situation

Since last december, AMD doesn’t published any update about fglrx so the version is still the 15.12.302 published. A few days ago our beloved Leap release manager Ludwig ask me by email, if there will be an available drivers for Leap 42.2.

Today, after hacking a bit the last Sebastian Siebert’s script I’ve been able to build the drivers for Leap 42.2 RC1, and the driver install fine, and xorg start on my HD5750 (but that’s all what I can tell).

I will rebuild the driver once Leap 42.2 will hit its final stage.

Repository

zypper ar -cfg -n FGLRX http://geeko.ioda.net/mirror/amd-fglrx/openSUSE_Leap_42.2/ FLGRX

zypper -v refresh -f FGLRX

zypper -v install fglrx64_amdcccle_SUSE422 fglrx64_core_SUSE422 fglrx64_graphics_SUSE422  fglrx64_opencl_SUSE422 fglrx64_xpic_SUSE422

Future

AMD has stopped any development for FGLRX, so it is already considered obsolete. But on the other side they make a lot of effort to bring radeon and amdgpu (the free and open source driver) to a decent performance level.

I don’t have that much usage anymore of my AMD gpu powered computer, and my HD5750 is now 8 years old already, so I can’t promise to be able to follow up with changes.

Cleanup

I removed all the obsoletes packages letting only the last one for each openSUSE version still available. Also the server has no more copy of openSUSE github artwork. If this missing to someone, don’t hesitate to ask.

Have fun

Reducing YaST rebuild time by 30%

October 11th, 2016 by

Here comes the YaST team again trying to flood your aggregator with blog post! Now it’s time for the story of how we reduced the critical path of the rebuild time of YaST RPM packages from 42min 2s to 29min 40s.

Chapter 1: where to optimize

Of course, the first step to start fixing something is finding out what exactly needs to be fixed. In our case, this breaks down into

  1. knowing the dependencies, and
  2. knowing the individual build times.

Dependencies

It is tempting to figure out the dependencies by yourself, by parsing the spec files. But it is hard to do right, and, more importantly, a reinvention of the wheel. The Build Service must know all this to be able to schedule the builds, and provides a convenient way to access it, with osc dependson:

$ osc dependson YaST:Head openSUSE_Factory x86_64
[...]
yast2-x11 :
   yast2-devtools
yast2-xml :
   yast2-core
   yast2-devtools
yast2-ycp-ui-bindings :
   libyui
   yast2-core
   yast2-devtools

Individual build times

For each source package, the Build Service produces not only binary RPMs but also a _statistics file, available in the web UI or via osc getbinaries. We were interested in the total build time, although the data was of limited use because packages can be built on machines with vastly different power and this information is not included.

Chapter 2: how to optimize

Once we knew which screws needed to be tightened, it was time to do it. Fortunately we had more than one tool for the job.

Stop using Autotools

Autotools (automake, autoconf and configure) took up a majority of the time needed for building YaST packages. Now that most of those packages are written in pure Ruby, we don’t need autotools there checking for portability problems that we don’t have. Autotools are a leftover from the times 15 years back when they were the only sensible option. We have wiped them out where possible and have been switching to our own set of Rake tasks.

Stub the APIs used in tests

We run a mixture of unit and integration tests at RPM build time. The downside of this is that we pull in many of the run time dependencies. Fortunately Ruby is a dynamic language and makes it easy to replace interfaces by stubs. That enables us to cut those dependencies.

In fact, we also have some Perl code, notably in yast2-users. Although the stubbing techniques across languages are messier than with pure ruby, they are still effective for our purposes.

Do not build specialized documentation

This one is simple: if the development documentation is only useful for people that will check out the git repo anyway, then leave it out from the RPM.

Appendix: the details

Enough of high-level explanations, we we promised you graphs, code and all kind of gory details, and a promise made is a debt unpaid. So there we go.

Dependency graphs

A picture is worth a thousand words. That’s why we came up with this small tool to generate a graphical representation of the dependencies of the YaST packages. In the resulting graphs displayed below, a node is a source package in the build service, and an arrow means “needs for its build”. Redundant arrows are omitted (that is, we’ve erased an A→C if both A→B and B→C existed).

We can see that the most prominent conclusion is that there is a large number of packages that depend on yast2, a collection of basic libraries.

But on top of that, in the original graph there are 6 more layers, and the graph is not very dense there. After our fixes, there are only 4 layers that are more dense.

Is worth mentioning that the “layer” concept only works if the packages take roughly the same time to build; it would not be helpful if there were huge variations. To get a more accurate picture, we should have generated a histogram of build times. But the graph was good enough in our scenario… and we had to stop the analysis at some point. 🙂

The build dependency graph before our fixes:

YaST dependencies graph (before)

The build dependency graph after our fixes:

YaST dependencies graph (after)

Build statistics

If those graph are not geeky enough for you, here you are the detailed build statistics from the build service

<buildstatistics>
  <disk>
    <usage>
      <size unit="M">1118</size>
      <io_requests>15578</io_requests>
      <io_sectors>2156642</io_sectors>
    </usage>
  </disk>
  <memory>
    <usage>      <size unit="M">580</size> </usage>
  </memory>
  <times>
    <total>      <time unit="s">756</time> </total>         <!-- THIS -->
    <preinstall> <time unit="s">8</time>   </preinstall>
    <install>    <time unit="s">72</time>  </install>
    <main>       <time unit="s">555</time> </main>
    <download>   <time unit="s">4</time>   </download>
  </times>
  <download>
    <size unit="k">33564</size>
    <binaries>53</binaries>
    <cachehits>24</cachehits>
    <preinstallimage>preinstallimage.preinstallimage.tar.gz</preinstallimage>
  </download>
</buildstatistics>

Epilogue

This was definitely an interesting journey. We learned quite some things. Specially we learned that there is still room for improvement, but most likely the time reduction will not pay off for the time invested implementing those improvements.

We have to be realistic and keep working in other interesting stuff to fuel the next sprint report, coming next week!

Improving low-vision accessibility of the installer

October 7th, 2016 by

In our latest report, we promised you would not have to wait another three weeks to hear (or read) from us. And here we are again, but not with any of the anticipated topics (build time reduction and Euruko 2016), but with a call for help in a topic that could really make a difference for (open)SUSE.

Nowadays, YaST team is trying to fix a long-standing issue in the installer: low-vision accessibility. In the past, a user could get a high-contrast mode just pressing shift+F4 during installation. Unfortunately, that feature does not work anymore and, to be honest, changing to a high-contrast palette is not enough. Other adjustments, like setting better font sizes, should be taken into account.

Another option is to use the textmode installation and set some obscure variable (Y2NCURSES_COLOR_THEME) to get the high-contrast mode. But it sounds like the opposite to user friendly.

Some days ago, the team fired up the discussion in the opensuse-factory mailing list but we would like to reach as many people as we can to gather information and feedback about this topic. Getting some affected people involved in the process would be really awesome!

For the time being we’re already working on some improvements:

  • Adding a Linuxrc option so the user can set the high-contrast mode from the very beginning.
  • Fixing shift+F4 support.
  • Improving the high-contrast mode appearance. Below you can see a screenshot of the work in progress.

First prototype of the new high contrast mode

But we would like to hear from you. You can raise your voice in the already mentioned thread at the opensuse-factory mailing list or leave a comment in the related pull request at Github. If you prefer to have a chat, we’re also available on the #yast IRC channel at Freenode… and we love to see people there. 😉

Please, join us to make YaST even better!

Atualizando o Edison Intel no openSUSE

October 3rd, 2016 by

Neste post, disponibilizo os passos efetuados para atualizar o firmware do meu Intel Edison na plataforma openSUSE.

ATENÇÃO: Antes de iniciar deixo claro , que o leitor deste post é responsável por qualquer problema que venha a acontecer com o seu aparelho, logo: sendo de sua inteira responsabilidade e risco a utilização das instruções a seguir.

Primeiramente instale o pacote

# zypper addrepo http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:cabelo:desktop/openSUSE_Leap_42.1/home:cabelo:desktop.repo
# zypper refresh
# zypper install dfu-util

Faça o Download da ultima versão do firmware em https://software.intel.com/pt-br/iot/hardware/edison/downloads

Posicione a chave SW1 próxima ao conector micro USB de acordo com a figura abaixo e plugue os 2 cabos USB:

intel-edison-setup-1

E logo a seguir descompacte o arquivo recém baixado e execute o comando ./flashall.sh

yocto02

Se executar o comando sudo screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200, teremos a seguinte saida no console:

Starting Reboot…

******************************
PSH KERNEL VERSION: b0182727
WR: 20104000
******************************

SCU IPC: 0x800000d0 0xfffce92c

PSH miaHOB version: TNG.B0.VVBD.0000000c

microkernel built 23:15:13 Apr 24 2014

******* PSH loader *******
PCM page cache size = 192 KB
Cache Constraint = 0 Pages
Arming IPC driver ..
Adding page store pool ..
PagestoreAddr(IMR Start Address) = 0x04899000
pageStoreSize(IMR Size) = 0x00080000

*** Ready to receive application ***

U-Boot 2014.04 (Aug 20 2014 – 16:08:32)

Watchdog enabled
DRAM: 980.6 MiB
MMC: tangier_sdhci: 0
In: serial
Out: serial
Err: serial
Hit any key to stop autoboot: 0
Target:blank
Partitioning already done…
Flashing already done…
GADGET DRIVER: usb_dnl_dfu
#
DFU complete CRC32: 0x3756edb6
DOWNLOAD … OK
Ctrl+C to exit …
#
DFU complete CRC32: 0x3756edb6
DOWNLOAD … OK
Ctrl+C to exit …
#
DFU complete CRC32: 0x6ad212b0
DOWNLOAD … OK
Ctrl+C to exit …
#
DFU complete CRC32: 0xe511e42b
DOWNLOAD … OK
Ctrl+C to exit …
#
DFU complete CRC32: 0xe511e42b
DOWNLOAD … OK
Ctrl+C to exit …
resetting …

******************************
PSH KERNEL VERSION: b0182b2b
WR: 20104000
******************************
SCU IPC: 0x800000d0 0xfffce92c
PSH miaHOB version: TNG.B0.VVBD.0000000c
microkernel built 11:24:08 Feb 5 2015

******* PSH loader *******
PCM page cache size = 192 KB
Cache Constraint = 0 Pages
Arming IPC driver ..
Adding page store pool ..
PagestoreAddr(IMR Start Address) = 0x04899000
pageStoreSize(IMR Size) = 0x00080000

*** Ready to receive application ***
U-Boot 2014.04 (Jun 19 2015 – 12:05:55)
Watchdog enabled
DRAM: 980.6 MiB
MMC: tangier_sdhci: 0
In: serial
Out: serial
Err: serial
Writing to redundant MMC(0)… done
Writing to MMC(0)… done
Hit any key to stop autoboot: 0
Target:blank
Partitioning using GPT
Writing GPT: success!
Saving Environment to MMC…
Writing to redundant MMC(0)… done
Flashing already done…
GADGET DRIVER: usb_dnl_dfu
#
DFU complete CRC32: 0xb98db2f8
DOWNLOAD … OK
Ctrl+C to exit …
pageStoreSize(IMR Size) = 0x00080000

*** Ready to receive application ***
U-Boot 2014.04 (Jun 19 2015 – 12:05:55)
Watchdog enabled
DRAM: 980.6 MiB
MMC: tangier_sdhci: 0
In: serial
Out: serial
Err: serial
Writing to redundant MMC(0)… done
Writing to MMC(0)… done
Hit any key to stop autoboot: 0
Target:blank
Partitioning using GPT
Writing GPT: success!
Saving Environment to MMC…
Writing to redundant MMC(0)… done
Flashing already done…
GADGET DRIVER: usb_dnl_dfu
#
DFU complete CRC32: 0xb98db2f8
DOWNLOAD … OK
Ctrl+C to exit …
pageStoreSize(IMR Size) = 0x00080000

*** Ready to receive application ***

U-Boot 2014.04 (Jun 19 2015 – 12:05:55)

Watchdog enabled
DRAM: 980.6 MiB
MMC: tangier_sdhci: 0
In: serial
Out: serial
Err: serial
Writing to redundant MMC(0)… done
Writing to MMC(0)… done
Hit any key to stop autoboot: 0
Target:blank
Partitioning using GPT
Writing GPT: success!
Saving Environment to MMC…
Writing to redundant MMC(0)… done
Flashing already done…
GADGET DRIVER: usb_dnl_dfu
#
DFU complete CRC32: 0xb98db2f8
DOWNLOAD … OK
Ctrl+C to exit …
######################################################################################

******* PSH loader *******
PCM page cache size = 192 KB
Cache Constraint = 0 Pages
Arming IPC driver ..
Adding page store pool ..
PagestoreAddr(IMR Start Address) = 0x04899000
pageStoreSize(IMR Size) = 0x00080000

*** Ready to receive application ***
U-Boot 2014.04 (Jun 19 2015 – 12:05:55)
Watchdog enabled
DRAM: 980.6 MiB
MMC: tangier_sdhci: 0
In: serial
Out: serial
Err: serial
Writing to redundant MMC(0)… done
Writing to MMC(0)… done
Hit any key to stop autoboot: 0
Target:blank
Partitioning using GPT
Writing GPT: success!
Saving Environment to MMC…
Writing to redundant MMC(0)… done
Flashing already done…
GADGET DRIVER: usb_dnl_dfu
#
DFU complete CRC32: 0xb98db2f8
DOWNLOAD … OK
Ctrl+C to exit …
##############################################################################################

Se tudo funcionou corretamente, teremos a seguinte tela:

yocto03