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openSUSE 11.3 Launch Party in Nürnberg

July 16th, 2010 by

At the SUSE/Novell offices in Germany, we had a great launch party. With free beer, BBQ, sunshine, a clown and openSUSE 11.3 released, it was a great atmosphere!

More than 100 people showed up: some Novell employees, some former colleagues,  and also many folks whose faces I haven’t seen before. We were overwhelmed and excited by this and after an hour Michael Löffler had to buy some more meat for the BBQ.

I gave a short demo about some of the highlights of openSUSE 11.3. I demonstrated GNOME 3 preview with GNOME Shell, the new tracker indexer, KDE Plasma Netbook interface, ksuseinstall, the LXDE desktop,  SpiderOak and zypper.

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Linuxtag 2010 in Berlin

June 12th, 2010 by

Thursday morning at 5am I woke up, had a quick breakfast and traveled via Nürnberg to Berlin for LinuxTag 2010. I arrived around 12:00 at the fair and was surprised to see it the back occupied by around 7 persons. We had a small booth, so it was full. They were taking part in the workshop “Build your own multi-distro package” held by Michal. The openSUSE boosters had organized these workshops as practical hands-on experience sessions.

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Preparation for Mounting /var/run as tmpfs

May 3rd, 2010 by

Feature #303793 proposes to mount /var/run as tmpfs.

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How to Add New Packages to the openSUSE Distribution

March 23rd, 2010 by

I’ve added a new package (grub2) to the openSUSE distribution and like to share with you what needs to be done for it, I’m using the package “grub2” as example. To get a package in the distribution, it needs to be in the openSUSE:Factory project in the openSUSE Build Service.

  1. Get an openSUSE Build Service account.  It’s free, just go to the Build Service and register.
  2. Go to your “Home Project” and follow the link to “add a new package”, I use “grub2” as package and filled in the details.
  3. Now add all the files you need to properly build the package.  For openSUSE Factory, you need the spec file (grub2.spec), an empty changes file (grub2.changes) and all source files.
    1. Some of the next steps are done best by the openSUSE Build Service command line client osc, so you should install the current version on your system. If you’re running openSUSE, just do a “zypper in osc”, if you use another distribution, download it from the “openSUSE:Tools” project for your distribution (best way to find it search via our search interface for osc).
    2. I propose to check out the files with osc, e.g. “osc co home:a_jaeger grub2”.
    3. Use “osc vc” to add entries to the new changes file describing what you have changed in the package.
    4. Go to your “Home Project” in the web user interface and add “openSUSE Factory”  using “Add Repository” as build target.
    5. Build the package locally using “osc build”.  If it succeeds, submit all fixes with “osc ci” to the build service.
    6. Now it’s time to wait until the build succeeds on all platforms and distributions you have enabled – and if not to fix it until it succeeds.
  4. Tell the openSUSE Factory maintainers about the new package in an email to the opensuse-factory list with all details as explained here and discuss which devel package should be used for it.
    Note that all packages in openSUSE:Factory are developed in so called “devel projects”.  So, decide where your package fits best – or add it to “devel:openSUSE:Factory”. I choose the later.
  5. Submit the package to the devel project with “osc sr <your-home-project> <packagename> <devel-project>” and add a nice comment  (in my case “osc sr home:a_jaeger grub2 devel:openSUSE:Factory”).
  6. Once the submitrequest gets accepted, check that you are setup as maintainer for the package with “osc maintainer devel:openSUSE:Factory grub2”, if you are the maintainer, you have write and review access to the package.
  7. Submit the package from the devel project to openSUSE:Factory using osc. I did a “osc sr devel:openSUSE:Factory grub2 openSUSE:Factory”.
    Since the package gets submitted the first time, it will go through a good first review including a license check.  So, give the team a week or two for the review.  Eventually you’ll get noticed about the check in.
  8. Now you can update the package in the devel project at your own consideration and don’t forget to submit it timely again after testing to openSUSE:Factory so that people running Factory can use it.

I advise to read the documentation about Factory to understand the mentioned concepts and not just blindly follow my cook book.

Keep in mind that having packages in openSUSE is an honor and an obligation.  An openSUSE release gets fixes for 18 months and as a maintainer of the package, it’s expected that you take care of the package. With having it in Factory, please remember to update it in time for a release and keep in mind that we’re not doing any major updates in a released distribution.

FOSSCOMM 2010 in Thessaloniki, Greece

March 22nd, 2010 by

I’d like to pass on the following announcement by George Koutsikos:

This year, during the weekend of the 24th and 25th of April 2010, the city of Thessaloniki will be hosting one of the biggest Greek conferences of free and open source software (FOSSCOMM 2010). Communities as well as companies that develop open source code will participate. After the previous two successful fosscomm events in Athens and Larisa, to which more than 300 people attended, Thessaloniki’s turn has come! Those attending the conference are given the opportunity to become more informed about open source in general as well as exchange ideas with communities and companies in the open source world. Moreover, the event is a great opportunity for people to get to know open source software which can particularly help them with everyday as well as professional needs they might have. As always, the organization of the conference is based on volunteers and totally depends on sponsors. In addition entrance is free of charge for everyone throughout the event! There will be several booths, one of which will be dedicated to openSUSE Linux so that participants will be able to get cds/dvds and get informed about our beloved distro.

Info & details: http://www.fosscomm.gr

Feed Problems on lizards/spotlight Solved

January 4th, 2010 by

During the last couple of days the feeds used by news readers for both lizards.opensuse.org and spotlight.opensuse.org were broken.  This has been fixed now and I apologize that it took so long due to the christmas break.

If you still encounter problems with invalid feeds, please tell us – best way with a bug report using bugzilla.novell.com against the openSUSE.org project.

openSUSE Launch Event in Nürnberg

November 13th, 2009 by

Yesterday evening we celebrated the openSUSE 11.2 launch in the Novell/SUSE Linux offices. Around fifty people showed up – both openSUSE folks employed by Novell and externals.

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Updating from Factory to openSUSE 11.2

October 29th, 2009 by

As Stephan Kulow announced recently openSUSE 11.2 is now build in a separate project and openSUSE Factory contains changes that will not go into openSUSE 11.2. Therefore if you followed so far openSUSE Factory via e.g. “zypper dup” and want to switch to 11.2, you have to change the repositories that you are using.  If you installed openSUSE 11.2 RC1, you have already the right repositories for 11.2 setup.

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Developing for openSUSE using Devel Projects

October 22nd, 2009 by

With the opening of the openSUSE distribution so that everybody can contribute to packaging, we introduced the concept of devel projects and I’d like to explain a bit more what they are and why they are important.

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Speeding up openSUSE Build Service

October 16th, 2009 by

The last two weeks saw two improvements on speeding up the building of packages in the openSUSE Build Service: An ultra-fast scheduler and a binary cache for the worker. Both changes on its own should speed up the server that allocates jobs to the client – and the binary cache improves also the clients since they don’t have to download every package for every build.

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