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Andreas Jaeger

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Comments on Phoronix Benchmarking openSUSE 11.1

December 16th, 2008 by

Phoronix has run some tests comparing the openSUSE 11.1 release candidate (RC1), Ubuntu 8.10, Fedora 10 and Mandriva 2009.0 on Intel Atom.

We have looked at the results and they are not good for openSUSE 11.1. I’ve talked with a few engineers and want to present below our first analysis.

While the benchmarks were done on a specific hardware, they might be relevant for other hardware as well.

Note that the numbers I cite below are not benchmark numbers comparable to the one Phoronix measured, they are measured on totally different machines by different engineers and not all are done as real benchmarks.  But they show some of the problems.

(more…)

Posted in Distribution | 18 Comments »

openSUSE Mirrorlist Improved

December 16th, 2008 by

Peter Pöml has created a dynamic list of our mirrors with accurate information about which repositories they mirror.  You can reach the link via the openSUSE wiki.  The data in the mirror list is used by our download redirector download.opensuse.org to point users automatically to mirrors close to them.

Btw. if anybody else wants to mirror openSUSE, please read these Instructions about it.  We love to increase our mirror infrastructure and there are some regions that could use additional mirrors.  Even if you only mirror parts of the openSUSE tree, you’re welcome!

Thanks a lot to all the mirror admins that mirror openSUSE – and to Peter for his continous improvements to the infrastructure!

Posted in Distribution | 2 Comments »

Contrib Repository Kicked Off

December 11th, 2008 by

During this week the so-called Contrib repository has been finally really started after the discussion come to a halt some time ago.  Contrib (see here for details) is a repository managed by community members that will be frozen at release time to make more packages available for openSUSE users.  It is a kind of “Universal” repository for third-party packages.

To see how it works, I updated today Greg KH‘s smugbatch package that I put into my home project a couple of months ago and submitted it to contrib with the following command:

osc submitreq create home:a_jaeger smugbatch openSUSE:Factory:Contrib smugbatch -m \
"Add smugbatch to CONTRIB"

This produces an email to the opensuse-contrib mailing list and now my request gets reviewed by the maintainer team of Contrib.

Thanks a lot to Alexey for starting the contrib project a couple of months ago and to all volunteers that are driving it now!

Btw. smugbatch is a command line tool to manage photos on SmugMug – you can see some of my photos at my personal SmugMug page.

Posted in Build Service, Contrib | 1 Comment »

GMC LiveCDs Seek Testers

December 5th, 2008 by

Coolo just announced on the opensuse-factory list:

Strictly speaking it’s not Factory, but I put the GMC live cds at the usual place: http://ftp.suse.com/pub/projects/FactoryLiveCDs/

It would be good to give the 11.1 kernel some testing.

GMC stands for Goldmaster Candidate – which means that these LiveCDs might be declared next week as goldmaster – and goldmaster is another name for the final release.

Note that we currently have no full repository for openSUSE 11.1 out – the one available contains RC1 and factory is not building at all, the sources are updated but not the binaries.  We use for building the distribution the 11.1 distribution in the openSUSE Build Service.

Posted in Distribution | 6 Comments »

openSUSE 11.1 Goes RC2

December 3rd, 2008 by

Yesterday Coolo released openSUSE 11.1 RC2 internally to fix all existing bugs marked as shipstopper.  We use now the SHIP_STOPPER flag in bugzilla to mark bugs as blocking the release (see our wiki for the usage of SHIP_STOPPER) and not anymore BLOCKER (which blocks testing or development).  If you want to search in bugzilla for the currently open SHIP_STOPPERS, you can use this query.

We also found one really annoying bug in our configuration that lead to the following output:

$ rpm -q –queryformat ‘%{vendor}\n’ glibc
openSUSEopenSUSE:11.1 openSUSE:11.1

Therefore, the openSUSE Build Service is currently rebuilding all 11.1 rpm packages with a corrected vendor tag.  Also a couple of packages where checked in to fix bugs so that we soon get RC3.

If RC3 passes all tests, we hope to release it publicly as Goldmaster – the release date is still the 18th of December.

Due to the time it takes to release a build publicly, we are not releasing any RCs besides RC1 to the public.

I’m running RC2 on my machines now and I’m quite happy with this release.

Posted in Distribution | 13 Comments »

KDE 4: Hiding of Task Bar is now Part of openSUSE 11.1

October 24th, 2008 by

When I blogged a couple of weeks ago about KDE3 and KDE4, I mentioned that hiding of the task bar is the number one missing feature. Yesterday I talked with Will Stephenson – he was hacking on the sofa in the hallway – and he showed me some new stuff including this one which is now in openSUSE 11.1 Beta3.

To enable it, do the following: (more…)

Posted in Desktop, Distribution, KDE | 2 Comments »

Why do we Release openSUSE on Thursdays – or why do we Slip?

October 22nd, 2008 by

openSUSE 11.1 Beta3 is a bit later than expected (it should go out later today). Of course, this raised couple of questions why. So let me explain how a build of a Beta release works in general from release manager perspective and what are the reasons for the slip.

The usual process we use can be summarized as follows:

(more…)

Posted in Distribution, Packaging | 12 Comments »

Retiring from the openSUSE Board

October 8th, 2008 by

I have served as chairperson of the openSUSE board the last year and would like to announce that I decided to pass the honours on for the next election period.  I’ve made this decision out of personal plans for the next year that will not allow me to devote as much time to the board as it deserves since I’ll be some time on paternity leave.

In my professional role I will stay involved with the openSUSE project and I will support the new chairperson fully to make a smooth transition. The new chairperson will be announced at the same time as the new board members, at the end of this election.

I enjoyed being openSUSE chairperson – working together with excellent board members (thanks Coolo, Federico, Francis, and Pascal), internal and external community members to move openSUSE forward in areas like openSUSE “members” (I would really love to see a better name), forums, the distribution, marketing (getting Zonker onboard was part of it) and also getting these elections setup.

Btw. I have given some comments (like here) on the board previously.

Posted in Board, Elections | 2 Comments »

openSUSE Membership Applications…

September 25th, 2008 by

The openSUSE board met yesterday to go through all the open membership applications.  Since many applied in the last days, we had to go over 67 applications.  Additionally there were some members that applied after the deadline for voting, we did not look at their applications for now and will handle them later.  Out of the 67 applications, we postponed 6 since we first needed to answer some more questions, approved around 30 and rejected the rest. So, we have right now 211 approved openSUSE members.

Details about membership are in the wiki but let me explain a bit more what membership means using some practical examples.

(more…)

Posted in Board, Elections | 1 Comment »

KDE3 and KDE4 for openSUSE

September 10th, 2008 by

As Zonker announced yesterday (and I copy some lines from his message), the KDE team has decided to take the following course of action after receiving a great deal of feedback on the issue of KDE 3.5 inclusion in openSUSE 11.1 – and state of KDE 4.1:

  • KDE 3.5 will be part of the DVD media for openSUSE 11.1, though space constraints may require to slim the package selection for 3.5 slightly.
  • KDE 3.5 will be included in the main selection page under “Other Desktop Environments” (during installation).
    This way new users will learn KDE4 directly and those users updating from a previous openSUSE release will not see this dialog at all.  Those that want KDE3 to install anyhow will still be able to easy install it.
  • We encourage and support contributors who are interested in maintaining KDE 3.5 for future releases of openSUSE, however the Novell employed part of the KDE team will shift focus to maintaining the KDE 4 packages for the openSUSE releases after the next one.
  • While KDE 3.5 will be on the openSUSE 11.1 media again, KDE 3.5 will not be included on any 11.2 “official” media or repositories, but the community certainly has the option of creating live CDs with KDE 3.5 packages for 11.2.
  • The Novell KDE team will only be addressing high priority bugs for KDE 3.5.x from this point forward. Again, this does not preclude community contributors from supporting KDE 3.5.x, and we encourage them to do so.
  • We will work on an easy migration from KDE3 to KDE4 desktops so that settings and data will persist.  This has already been started for openSUSE 11.0 and will continue to get improved.

We’d like to thank all the people who helped provide constructive feedback while we evaluated the best course for the next release of openSUSE. While we know that no solution is guaranteed to make every user happy, we think that we’ve reached the best compromise for openSUSE 11.1 and beyond, to ensure a smooth transition. (more…)

Posted in Desktop, Distribution, KDE | 1 Comment »

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