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inadyn and openSUSE Raspberry Pi

May 20th, 2015 by

We’ve seen how to install no-ip.
Fortunately, there’s not only this service but other services too. Just for reference, here are some (not only free):

http://www.dyndns.org
http://freedns.afraid.org
http://www.zoneedit.com
http://www.no-ip.com
http://www.easydns.com
http://www.tzo.com
http://www.3322.org
http://www.dnsomatic.com
http://www.tunnelbroker.net
http://dns.he.net/
http://www.dynsip.org
http://www.sitelutions.com
http://www.dnsexit.com
http://www.changeip.com
http://www.zerigo.com
http://www.dhis.org
https://nsupdate.info
http://duckdns.org
https://www.loopia.com
https://www.namecheap.com
https://domains.google.com
https://www.ovh.com
https://www.dtdns.com
http://giradns.com

Let’s see one of them https://freedns.afraid.org. After you register, go to Dynamic DNS link (on the left top box-for members).
Add your host with type A and subdomain and domain what you like as host.

Now there’s going to be a list of your host names. Right click on the Direct Link and copy the link. You should keep the alpha-numeric key. The address will be something like http://freedns.afraid.org/dynamic/update.php?[alpha-numeric-key]

Now it’s time to install the client. I’ve found it from https://github.com/troglobit/inadyn.

1. First of all, install the needed programs to build the service.

$ zypper in gcc-c++ gcc git libopenssl-devel make nano

2. Then

$ mkdir inadyn

$ cd inadyn

3. Download the program from ftp://troglobit.com/inadyn/

$ wget ftp://troglobit.com/inadyn/inadyn-1.99.9.tar.xz

and decompress it

$ tar xvfJ inadyn-1.99.9.tar.xz

4. Go to the directory

$ cd inadyn-1.99.9

5. Compile and install

$ make

$ make install

6. Create the confing file

$ nano /etc/inadyn.conf

with the following content

--username USERNAME
--password PASSWORD
--update_period 3600
--forced_update_period 14400
--alias HOSTNAME,alphanumeric key
--background
--dyndns_system default@freedns.afraid.org
--syslog

The bold words are the ones you should change. Remember the alphanumeric key is the one you got from right click on the Direct Link.

7. Start the client. Create the service file.

$ nano /usr/lib/systemd/system/inadyn.service

8. Add the following content.

[Unit]
Description=inadyn Dynamic DNS Update Client
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=forking
ExecStart=/usr/local/sbin/inadyn

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

9. Start the service

$ systemctl start inadyn.service

and enable the service

$ systemctl enable inadyn.service

10. Reboot and check if the service is running.

$ ps -A | grep inadyn

you should get results something like:

1526 ? 00:00:00 inadyn

no-ip and openSUSE Raspberry Pi

May 19th, 2015 by

We’ve seen how to install openSUSE image on the SD card.
Next step is to be sure that we can have access from outside our house (since most of the times, Raspberry Pi is located at home).

To do that we use Dynamic DNS services. A free service (so far) is No-IP. Most of the routers support it. You can use your router’s service. But what if you want 2 different host names on the same IP? Let’s say you have different ARM boards on the same router or you have a server etc.

1. First of all, install the needed programs to build the service (same as I did with ZNC)

zypper in gcc-c++ gcc git libopenssl-devel make nano

2. Then

mkdir noip

cd noip

3. Download the program

wget http://www.no-ip.com/client/linux/noip-duc-linux.tar.gz

and decompress it

tar vzxf noip-duc-linux.tar.gz

4. Go to the directory

cd noip-2.1.9-1

5. Compile and install

make

make install

While it install’s the software you will prompted to enter the username & password. Once that is done it will ask you teh refresh interval … leave it.. to have the default value. You are required to answer some more questions … just ans NO an d you should be good to go.

6. Start the client

/usr/local/bin/noip2

To check if the service is running, use the command:

/usr/local/bin/noip2 -S

and the results should be like

1 noip2 process active.

Process 1516, started as noip2, (version 2.1.9)
Using configuration from /usr/local/etc/no-ip2.conf
Last IP Address set EXTERNAL IP
Account USERNAME
configured for:
host HOSTNAME
Updating every 30 minutes via /dev/eth0 with NAT enabled.

Auto start the client on reboot

But what if you reboot? You want to start the client everytime you reboot. This can be done with systemd.

1. Create the service file.

nano /usr/lib/systemd/system/noip.service

2. Add the following content.

[Unit]
Description=No-IP Dynamic DNS Update Client
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=forking
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/noip2

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

3. Start the service

systemctl start noip.service

and enable the service

systemctl enable noip.service

Create an SD card for your Raspberry Pi B and B+

May 18th, 2015 by

Most of the projects around the Internet use Raspbian as main Raspberry Pi distro. Unfortunately, Raspbian doesn’t work for me. Minibian worked. So I serched other distros. My favourite is Arch Linux because there are plenty of programs that I need for projects, but it needs some extra steps from terminal to create the SD.

Here we’ll see how to create an SD card of openSUSE. There are plenty of information at the wiki page https://en.opensuse.org/HCL:Raspberry_Pi
. I’ll collect the information I need for projects, I’ll write next.

I used 13.1 as distro because it’s easier for me to resize the SD card.

1. Download the image (openSUSE-13.1-ARM-JeOS-raspberrypi.armv7l.raw.xz) from here:

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/ARM:/13.1:/Contrib:/RaspberryPi/images/

decompress the image.

2. Find the device name of your card

cat /proc/partitions

usually it’s going to be /dev/mmcblk0.

and create the card (as root)

sudo dd if=openSUSE-13.1*.raw.xz of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=4M;sync

3. Since I didn’t use a monitor (HDMI or DVI), I had to do some extra steps before boot my raspberry pi.

a. Delete the file /var/lib/YaST2/reconfig_system to start headless.
b. Resize the ext4 partition with Gparted.

4. When boot the Raspberry Pi, use the following

ssh root@IP

user: root
password: linux

Now the first command will be

zypper ref

and then update

zypper up

Developing developers: From end user to developer

May 6th, 2015 by

We’ve seen how to gather some people and create a community (at least that’s the quick tutorial how it worked for us in Greece).

The product is cool (any product) but here we have people. They should know WHY they join a community as volunteers. Is it because they want to help FLOSS to make the world a better place? Is it because it is Fun? Is it because they like the pros that open source provides? Is it because they like to help other people? Find out WHY people want to join-form a community.

The key to increase the number of the members is to attend to events. Here a quick tutorial how to do that. The best possible scenario is a developer to come to your booth and join the team. But this is 1% possible to happen (maybe less). Usually developers we’re searching, they have their favorite distro/project and they don’t change so easy.

The best thing is to join events where you can find end users (end users = users they’re computer science students where they focus on windows, users that their computer being used for facebook/twitter/office suite). Why? Because those users can do some work that the developers hate. What’s that?

0. Junior Jobs. Write a junior jobs list where someone can find exactly what to do and how to do it. The list could have the following.
1. Report bugs to bugzilla. So developers can fix it (of course developers have to be polite and help end users to provide possible broken data etc).
2. Documentation. Developers just hate to write documentation.
3. Translation. Usually developers use some “strange” language. So if someone asks you, please be polite and reply.
4. Promotion. Everyone call it marketing. The term marketing seems that the distro/project earns money out of promotion. Maybe the best term is engagement. This is needed because if it’s the best distro/project among others, how more potential users will learn about it? And if it’s the best, if no one uses it, then it’s useless.
(more…)

How to promote your conference

April 11th, 2015 by

Promote your event

Local open source community is bigger now and next step for you is to organise (or join) global conferences. One part of the organisation is the promotion of the conference. You want to have as many visitors as you can.

I will try to write down what I did during openSUSE global conferences and some local events.

BEFORE THE EVENT

0. Web page

There MUST be a web page and a system that accepts registration, paper submission, information etc. Write everything that visitor should know about the conference.
We use OSEM in openSUSE. Check out https://events.opensuse.org

1. Blog blog blog.

You’ll have some announcements for the conference. Dates, the place, new website, call for papers announcement, hotels that visitors can stay, schedule, keynote speakers etc. Usually, every open source project has a central blog or news site. You can write the articles there. Try to make fuzz by publishing your articles often.
Global communities can translate the announcements to their language and promote the conference locally.

Local communities are formed by members with blogs who publish on different planet sites. You can make a schedule so everyone can publish the announcement every other day. More eyes will see the announcement and will apply either as speaker or visitor.

Two things you want to have is contributors+visitors and sponsors. If your project is famous, then it’s easy. If not, then you better publish the initial announcement to magazines, newspapers, technical blogs-sites. If you don’t have access, then you better send it by e-mail or fax and then call them and ask them if they got the text. If they publish it, you’re lucky.

Translate those announcements and publish them, so local population will see that there’s a conference coming.

2. Promote to other FOSS conferences

There are plenty of FOSS conferences around the world.
* Community (local or global) has to apply for a booth and/or, if it’s possible, present why someone should attend.
* At the booth, you should have promo materials of your conference and give away to local LUGs or hackerspaces to hang posters at their places.
* Another cool thing is to have free coupons for beer at the conference. If beer isn’t the solution, then find another thing that can be found only at your conference and give free coupons.
* Wear special T-Shirts with the logo or #oSC or “Ask me for the conference”. You show people that you’re organizing something and can ask you questions.
* Finally, go to other project’s booth and invite them. You can ask them if they want to have a booth at your conference or apply for a presentation.

3. Messages to post

Create a list of messages you’ll post to social media.
First of all, you should post the announcements.
Then create a list of general messages that you should post before the conference. Content will be related to the subject of the conference or the country etc.
When you have the schedule ready, create a post with the name of the person (mention him/her on the social media), the title of the presentation (mention if it’s a famous project).
The messages can be 2-3 per day but not the same time. Try to have 4-5 hours time delay between tweets.
(more…)

How to organize-start an open source community

March 26th, 2015 by

This is an attempt to make a list of things that someone-group of people can follow to develop a healthy community or team. This post is an overview of what I did with Kostas for the Greek openSUSE community.
A small detail is that we were only 2. So we took decisions fast. We didn’t have to vote or something.
We had an “advantage” because we have an awesome global community and we asked for something we weren’t sure how to proceed.

Let’s start:

0. Have a clear goal. What you want to do. Have a big goal that some parts aren’t “visible” when you start.
1. Web page: This is the web page-blog that will show information about community, the distro or the project. Make it visible on planets. BE CAREFUL. Don’t focus on how to make a great site-blog using personal wordpress, drupal etc. Set it up on blogger and start post articles. You want CONTENT (write an article every other day). Don’t spend time to maintain or secure your web page.
2. Mailing list: Ask the project if they can setup for you. If not, then try to find alternatives such as google groups.
3. IRC Channel
4. Forum: Prefer to ask from the project to setup a section for your language. If your project doesn’t have forum, then ask a LUG or tech forum to use their’s. Do not have your forum setup in your host for the same reasons as before. Don’t spend time to maintain or secure the forum.
(more…)

How to organize your trip, your project’s presence to a conference

March 26th, 2015 by

We saw some ideas about how to organize a release party for your project (we like to party!!!). Another part of marketing is to join conferences to promote your project. I write some thought from my experience. Please, if you have any idea you want to share, be my guest.

1. Read the tech news
Read the news (RSS, social networks, mailing lists). There are many conferences that you can join (some conferences are annual). Unfortunately, the organizers might skip to sent you invitation because you’re either too small project without any marketing section or they forgot you for their reasons. You should contact them and ask them to join as community-project. Most conferences have call for papers period, where you can apply for a presentation.

2. Community Meetings
Now that you made the first contact, you should sent an e-mail to your project mailing list, informing them about the conference and asking for an IRC meeting. At the kick off meeting, someone MUST be the coordinator of everything (the tasks are following). Another thing that should be clear is how many members of the community will join. You have to decide early because you can book your trip and accommodation (if the conference is quite big, there won’t be any rooms available for you). Travel as a team. If you decide early, you can ask for sponsorship, like openSUSE Travel_Support_Program or GNOME Travel sponsorship (GNOME for smaller events).

(more…)

How to organize a release party for a project

March 26th, 2015 by

Part of marketing and organizing a community is the party of the local community to celebrate the new release. From my experience so far, people who join a release party want to have fun. They don’t want to see a presentation of new features of the release etc. We will see the steps to organize a success release party. Please add your opinion, since there are ways to improve.

Procedure:

1. Find a date.
The date of your party should be during a weekend (because it’s easier for people to join, since most people work during the week). Prefer to have your party during the morning. People from outside your city want to join the party and they have to travel to your city and back home. If you discuss with the members of your community about the date, you have to find 2 alternative dates for the party since you have to find the place for the party (see below), so if the owners of the place do not allow you your first date, then use the alternative. A good tool to find common dates is http://www.doodle.com/.

(more…)

Install VAMOX Icons and change your Desktop Environment

March 26th, 2015 by

I was searching to add some awesome icons to GNOME. After a long search, I found out that VAMOX icons rock!!! I liked the 3D nature of them. They come to 3 different versions. Take a look:

1. Vamox MATE
2. Vamox Ceibo
3. Vamox Celeste

I thought why not try to put them to obs? Is it the right tool? I made a research and found some other cool icons there. So I started reading and testing. A lot of errors. Since I’m end user, I thought I’m not going to make it. I better quit. So I deleted everything. The next day, I tried 2-3 times and it worked (the actual error was the name of the unzipped file). I tried it on my computer and it worked fine. Then I added Fedora as another repository and with the help of my friend Tom Tryfonidis, I added Arch Linux. Let’s see the result.

VAMOX MATE

If you like this result, go to vamox mate repository and choose your distro.

VAMOX Ceibo

If you like this result, go to vamox ceibo repository and choose your distro.

VAMOX Celeste

If you like this result, go to vamox celeste repository and choose your distro.

NOTE: It’s tested on openSUSE (GNOME, XFCE and MATE) and on Arch (GNOME)

Compile ZNC (IRC Bouncer) on Raspberry Pi

March 26th, 2015 by

There are many IRC Bouncers . My favourite one is ZNC. ZNC installation on server is a simple thing (zypper in znc). But what if you don’t have a server (avoid all the costs)? The best solution is a Raspberry Pi (it doesn’t matter if it’s B, B+, 2). It’s small, no power consumption, can easily setup as home small server. The only thing that it might disturb you, is the lights.

First of all, check out how you can install openSUSE on Raspberry Pi.

Now, you have to compile ZNC. There’s no package in the repositories. If developers read this, please please make an ARM package. Please!!!

First of all, you have to install the following packages (that’s what I did):

zypper in gcc-c++ gcc git libopenssl-devel make

Now, let’s download the last release (you can find the whole procedure at official page)

wget http://znc.in/releases/znc-latest.tar.gz

Then untar the file:

tar -xzvf znc*.*gz

Then you have to do some steps that usually do when you compile:

cd znc*

and run the command

./configure

Next command will take a lot of time to finish

make

When it’s over, run the final command:

make install

You’re ready to use it. Now login as user and run the command:

znc –makeconf

If you have an older configuration, you can use it (run only the command znc).