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Archive for the ‘Base System’ Category

ARM support for openSUSE Buildservice and openSUSE – Status update

April 26th, 2009 by

Its a while since I posted the status about the ongoing work for ARM support in the OBS and for an openSUSE port. It all started with my participation in the OBS development as an external contributor. Then, on Hackweek 2008, we had the idea to enforce a new solution other than the traditional methods of compiling code either natively or via a cross compiler on a host system. The idea was to give build scripts as much of the target enviroment as they need to just work without changes in the packaging definition – in order not to change thousands of package descriptions which define a linux distribution.

A lot happened in the meantime. And I can now report some significant progess in bringing the joys of OBS and openSUSE also to all the ARM users:

  • I held a talk about cross build in OBS on FOSDEM 2009 – documenting the solution
  • ARM support is in the source tree for OBS and the publicly available packages
  • ARM support is activated in the public OBS
  • OBS 1.6 release is currently in beta – this release is the dedicated version for ARM
  • The Linux foundation will bring the joy of OBS to an even wider audience
  • Some preparations have been done for porting Base:build to ARM – we can mix cross compilers an native emulated code now
  • A Summer of Code project will be done to accelerate the development of an openSUSE @ ARM port
  • To accelerate the openSUSE @ ARM development itself, we want to involve more people of the community. We have an IRC Channel #opensuse-arm for OBS and openSUSE @ ARM – i invite you to visit us there. We will also find a solution to bring the needed changes into the openSUSE Factory codebase so regular build for openSUSE can take place once the base system is working. I will inform you once we have a working base system that can be used to port many other packages. The soon starting Summer of Code Project “Porting openSUSE to ARM platform” is intended as the starting point here.

    The next steps are to bring in all the useful applications into OBS, so you have the wide range of applications that is already available for x86 or powerpc then also on ARM. You will see interesting things happening during the next time here. To support this, more and more of the tested ARM targets will be made available also on the public OBS. I will follow up with status updates.

    ARM support in openSUSE Buildservice – currently broken

    April 26th, 2009 by

    With this message I want to make you aware that the ARM builds inside OBS are currently broken. This is due to an update of the buildservice worker code on Friday. This update removes the limit of 2 GB for the build results from the buildservice. Also, the performance of the buildservice backend code has been improved for high loads with lots of new events.

    We are now faced with an incompatibility of the underlying QEMU emulator with this new code to extract the build results in the combination of XEN and QEMU user mode. You can in fact see in your build logs for ARM error messages like:

    … saving built packages
    /usr/src/packages/DEBS/dsme-tools_0.6mer3_armel.deb
    Unsupported ioctl: cmd=0x0002 (0)
    FIGETBSZ: Function not implemented
    Unsupported ioctl: cmd=0x80041272 (4)

    We are working on a solution already. A new QEMU with this and another issues fixed is already under test and has been dropped to openSUSE:Tools:Devel/qemu-svn. I will inform you when we have this fixed in the public build service.

    Edit system on iso image

    April 2nd, 2009 by

    I start maintaining yast2-repair and first bug which I start solving is that repair from DVD menu doesn’t work same as from installation menu. Find where is problem and also test if fix is correct is not trivial. I describe below how to modify inst-sys on DVD or software on LiveCD.

    (more…)

    Registering your shiny new HP Mini-Note 2133

    February 6th, 2009 by

    So you just got an HP Mini-Note 2133 pre-loaded with SLED 10?  Great, right?

    Well…  It’s not been so great for a lot of people.  It seems that HP simply put this laptop together, half-assed a SLED load and sent it out into the wild.  I’ve had a ton of problems with it, the two major ones being that I couldn’t register the machine with the Novell Customer Center (not even with my site license) it ships with a non-working wireless card.

    My wifi fix was simple, buy a new usb wifi dongle…  Registration, however, was a little easier to fix (after some wailing, gnashing of teeth, and chat in #opensuse-GNOME… thanks captiain_magnus!).

    If you attempt to use YaST to register you copy of SLED on the 2133, you’ll be re-directed to a “special” Novell Customer Center login.  It’s a little different than the normal one in that it wants an HP license, not any other SLED license you may have.  The biggest difference, however, is that it’s broke.  It simply refreshes the page when you click submit and sends nothing to Novell.

    They’re pretty sneaky about hiding your license number as well.  It happens to be on your restore DVD.  It’s located on the right hand side below the HP logo and the “2133” text.  It’s in a series something like NNNNNN-XNN, where N’s are numbers and X is some letter.

    To get around the registration bug, have your license number handy and fire up your terminal.  Use ‘sudo’ or just ‘su to root and issue the following command:

    suse_register -n -a serial-hp=NNNNNN-XNN

    Where “NNNNNN-XNN” is your registration code.  Sit back and wait, it took almost 20 minutes for this command to finish for me and you’ll receive absolutely no indication that it’s functioning.  Once it’s done, you’ll simply be returned to your prompt.  Fire up YaST or your favorite terminal emulator and check your repositories.  You should now have a Novell repository added.

    Enjoy!

    Do You Want Multiple Kernels on Your System?

    February 3rd, 2009 by

    Today, I’d like to mention another rather hidden feature of openSUSE 11.1. The package management is finally able to keep multiple versions of packages, if they support installation of parallel versions. A typical example of this is of course kernel. A lot of people want to keep the old, functional, kernel around when installing a kernel update and now there is a way to do it.

    Open /etc/zypp/zypp.conf in your favorite editor and change this value:

    multiversion = kernel-default,kernel-default-extra,kernel-default-base,kernel-source

    The list contains names of packages to be installed via ‘rpm -i’ instead of ‘rpm -U’. Just adopt it to your the kernel flavor you are using.

    Of course, there is a catch – there are no means to limit the number of package versions to be installed this way. The reasoning is that there is no automatic way to guess which versions to remove (in case of kernel, everyone has its own definition of working kernel) So you have to uninstall additional kernels you don’t need anymore manually.

    Enjoy!

    Build maemo-apps with openSUSE BuildService ? – It works !

    January 27th, 2009 by

    build serviceThe openSUSE Build Service is an open and complete distribution development platform. It’s the infrastructure for a development of the openSUSE distributions. But this powerful tool can do much more! The upcoming version 1.5 will also have cross-build support and thus be able to build e.g. ARM packages on x86 hardware .

    maemo.org loko Maemo is the platform for mobile devices like the N810 and has been developed by Nokia in collaboration with many open source projects such as the Linux kernel, GNOME and many more. (more…)

    Modding the openSUSE flashlight

    January 19th, 2009 by

    The openSUSE flashlight

    The boxed version of openSUSE 11.1 comes bundled with a LED-flashlight. Nice black and sturdy aluminum, Modern design with 9 white LEDs, no old-fashioned bulb that would produce more heat than illumination. Not flimsy, not heavy, just practical and quite bright. Batteries included. Exactly what I like.

    But alas, this high-tech-toy is not perfect. The LEDs produce a strange unnatural light, which makes people look really sick. It gives a bluish-greenish tint to everything. This I don’t like. Okay, it is state of the art with regard to white LEDs, so this is no real reason to complain. Still, it leaves room for improvement.

    Let us adjust the color of the light, so that objects look more natural. This posting explains you how to do it in 3 easy (or 4 not so easy) steps.
    (more…)

    RPMLINT Wiki Side overworked

    January 8th, 2009 by

    I’m an new Packager in OpenSUSE BuildService, and i like this work. But if i would like to package for Factory, RPMLINT gives me any Errors or warnings. But these things to fix, are very difficult. Our Wiki Side for RPMLINT doesn’t contain many Error or Warningcodes.

    But yesterday i’ve found an Side, with other Errorcodes from RPMLINT. Today i imported these Codes to our Wikiside http://en.opensuse.org/Packaging/RpmLint. I think it is not possible to list all codes on the Side. But i wish, that the side includes more Codes in the future.

    No i would like to make an Call for contribution. If every Packager insert the codes, that he knows, we have an good library soon.

    And on this Moment i would like to make an request about helping- Thank you all for the hard Work.

    Kernel Of The Day Build Service Projects

    January 8th, 2009 by

    People interested in openSUSE and kernel development probably know about the existence of the Kernel Of The Day (KOTD). This is the latest and greatest code from the internal kernel source repository that is build once a day and synced out to ftp.suse.com. The intention of the KOTD is to ease the testing and running of development snapshots that likely become the next maintenance update.

    Some people might have noticed the Kernel: projects that produce a quite heavy load on the build farm. These are KOTD projects that are mirrored to the openSUSE Build Service every night around 4pm CET if there are changes in the internal source repositories.

    Currently the following KOTD projects exist:

    Additionally there are two projects that are related to upstream kernel development:

    • Kernel:Vanilla includes the latest sources from Linus Torvalds’ linux-2.6 GIT tree
    • Kernel:linux-next includes the latest sources from Stephen Rothwell’s linux-next GIT tree

    With the help of the openSUSE Build Service running the KOTD became even more convenient since the project repository can be added to zypper. Besides that it is now very easy to build external kernel modules (KMP) matching the KOTD.

    Saschas Backtrace: Interview with Petko D. Petkov on Netsecurify

    December 24th, 2008 by

    Petko D. Petkov is one of the founding-members of the Gnucitizen-hacker-network. They work inbetween internet, computers and security and always have very interesting projects going on, for example the “House of Hackers” a social-network for hackers and security experts. The Gnucitizen define themself as “a leading information security think tank, delivering solutions to local, national and international clients“.

    Thier latest project is Netsecurify, an automated, webbased, remote testing tool, that enables security-testings of applications. One of the primary goal of the projects is not only to have a pioneering sort-of feeling, but foremost to support low-profit or non-profit organisations to have a robust and stable security-testing tools for free. They think of organisations, that otherwise would not be able to affort security experts and testing. We had a short interview with Petko D. Petkov on Netsecurify, their motivation, software design and overall goals.

    What does the tool Netsecurify exactly do?

    Netsecurify is a remote, automated, vulnerability assessment tool. The tool follows the SaaS (Software as a Service) model, i.e. it is a service which runs from Amazon’s scalable computing infrastructure. In it’s core, the tool performs several assessments, all based on open source technologies, and also provides recommendations through a flexible recommendation engine. The tool also allows 3rd-party organizations to enhance the reports.

    Netsecurify is very simple to use. All the user has to do is to login and schedule a test for a particular network range. Once we approach the specified scheduled data, we run the test. When the test is done, the user is notified via email or by other means which we are working on at the moment. The user then logs in and downloads a copy of the report. For security reasons, the report is destroyed 30 days after it has been completed.

    What was your motivation for starting the project?

    The primarily motivation for starting this project is to provide free, quality, flexible, automated information security testing tool which can be employed by charity organizations, 3rd world countries, and in general, organizations and companies who cannot afford to spend money on security. Also, a huge motivational factor is the fact that no one has done a project like this. We are the first to do it. 🙂 This is pretty cool.

    Who are the people behind the project and how is the project organized (agency, virtual, decentralized)?

    Technically speaking, the people behind Netsecurify are GNUCITIZEN. However, we welcome anyone who is interested to join us and help us improve it. Because the testing engine is based on open source technologies which we have glued together and we are continually enhancing, we are planning to contribute back to the community everything that we do and as such close the circle of energy. In theory, this makes the entire security community part of the Netsecurify project.

    What is the basic design concept and how do you think will the project develop and evolve?

    We have a scalable backend and very easy to use and flexible frontend. In between we have several APIs which allow us to expand the service as we go. The tool hasn’t been just built from scratch. There was a lot of thought and design considerations put into this project before the actual code. We follow the KISS (Keep it Simple Stupid) principle. We find that this approach works quite well for us. In the future we are planning to continue simplifying and enhancing the product.

    Do you have other projects planned, that will be coming at us in the future?

    We always have. Expect to see more from the GNUCITIZEN team soon.

    Thanks to Martin Wisniowsky (mw@node300.com)

    Original Link to this Interview: http://digitaltools.node3000.com/5minutes/interview_with_petko_d_petkov_on_netsecurify_testing_tool.php