With the progress the boosters made on the openFATE preview instance, we can now edit features and handle them. A screening team has been formed some time ago and now it’s possible to really start working on features.
I’d like to invite everybody that’s interested to join the openFATE team and discuss how to handle features on Thursday, 11th of November, 16:00 UTC on IRC freenode, channel #openSUSE-project.
Beside many other amazing things which happened at the openSUSE Conference 2010, Stefan Schäfer gave a talk about his project called Invis Server. It is a very specific server solution for the small and medium business, based on the openSUSE distribution. The Invis Server is perfect software for all production installations in small business use cases, also to be maintained by consultants in that space.
All needed services such as printing, mail, web and file server, database and groupware are there and get preconfigured at installation. For daily operation in the users network, there is a simple yet powerful web interface.
In the discussion after the presentation it turned out that Stefan would be fine with moving the Invis Server Project nearer to the openSUSE project and get a larger community find together to power up the project on openSUSE distributions.
As a result we decided to found the openSUSE Invis Project. The idea is to create an openSUSE Distribution flavor with solid packages coming from openSUSE Factory together with some specifically packaged sources ready to power the Invis Server. The openSUSE Buildservice will be used to build the needed packages and create the product images. The first tasks will be to clean up the package list and do some packaging to be able to create a convenient openSUSE-Invis CD.
The openSUSE-Invis Mailinglist was set up and is waiting for your subscription. Please show up there soon to help us to move this idea forward.
Systemd is a replacement for SystemV init and in heavy development since the first announcement on April 30th by Lennart Poettering. Thanks to Kay Sievers’ work, we have packages for openSUSE curent Factory stream as well. I gave them a try a couple of weeks ago but somehow did not succeed with getting a working system. At LinuxKongress I met Lennart and decided to give systemd another try. I still could not log into the system due to it using NIS and automount for NFS home directories and started debugging this together with Kay over IRC in a virtual machine first. Once we had a workaround for me, I used systemd on my workstation and Kay and Lennart fixed the problem in systemd properly. I run into a couple of more problems and thus were fixed quickly so that the last release – systemd 11 – works fine on my workstation running openSUSE Factory (Factory is the development version for the next openSUSE release, in this case for 11.4).
The role of init, whether it’s SysV init, upstart or systemd, is to initialize the system (it’s the first process that gets started by the kernel) so that users can login, starts all the essential services, e.g. the cups daemon for printing, and handles session management. So, it’s a system and session manager.
So, what’s so cool about systemd? (more…)
With the release of Qt 4.7.0 it’s time to use it to build KDE packages destined for openSUSE 11.4. This means that Qt 4.7 will shortly land in KDE:Distro:Factory repositories. In a couple of months’ time it will be followed by betas of the KDE 4.6 releases. If you are using KDF just because it’s the latest KDE release, consider replacing it with KDE:Release:45 now, which will remain 4.5 and Qt 4.6 based.
You can get the latest Qt release with Qt Quick/QML and latest Qt Creator by staying with KDF.
In other KDE related news, Choqok in openSUSE Factory, 11.2 and 11.3 is being updated to 1.0rc3 to fix Twitter authentication. Amarok 2.3.2 is out and packaged in KDF, and will shortly be available for older versions in KDE:UpdatedApps. And KOffice 2.3beta1 is available for testing in KDE:Unstable:Playground. So if you’ve been admiring the Krita art showcase and think you can do better, grab your tablet and the latest code built for stable KDE releases and push some pixels! The new Bluetooth UI for KDE, BlueDevil is in testing in KDF, alongside the new PulseAudio UIs coming in 4.6, and akonadi-googledata 1.2.0 is in KDE:Extra.
As usual use software.opensuse.org to find the right repo for the KDE version you use or ‘osc repourls <reponame>’ if you prefer not to click.
Today I and some hundred others on LinuxTag in Berlin attended a keynote by Mark Shuttleworth, the “head dreamer” of the ubuntu Linux distribution.
He had pretty few slides with hardly any words on it. The headlines were “Cadence”, “Quality” and “Design”. As I have been working towards openSUSE quality, this interested me most – so this is what this text is going to be about. His thoughts were mostly what I was thinking anyway.
Quality works like this: if Factory (equivalent of Debian/sid or whatever it is called in ubuntu) breaks horribly every other week, few people will feel inclined to keep running on Factory or even on factory-snapshot. Mark spoke about a difference in number of testers of “one or two orders of magnitude” (which would mean a factor of 10-100 in mathematical terms). And having fewer testers during development can only mean lower quality for the final release.
This is why efforts should be taken to ensure a working Factory. Automated testsuites and reviews were specifically mentioned, among others. Some packages like gcc include own test-suites, but most do not. When asked how that was handled in ubuntu, he described an approach with scripts using computer vision, recognizing/clicking buttons which most likely referred to sikuli which has many similarities to what I did, just with a different focus (more user-friendliness) and quite some sophistication. Also for text-mode there is still good old “expect”.
Another thing that was not mentioned there, but which I was always thinking of as an odd shortcoming of openSUSE is that Debian has a “testing” distribution which is not like factory-snapshot. Debian/testing contains only packages migrated from sid after a certain time with no bugs above a certain criticality threshold. Of course, this needs a way to track automatically which bug applies to which package (something that ubuntu does in launchpad).
Launchpad is also nicely integrated with bazaar, so that adding “(LP: #12345)” into a changelog will cause the bug to have a link to the proposed fix and later be automatically closed, once the branch was merged into the main trunk.
This is not only cool, but plain useful. It can save a lot of work and frustration. I think Adrian Schröter will be working into that direction with better integration of buildservice into bugzilla and other openSUSE tools.
There is also a big human component. Especially with testers which are non-technicians. It is not so much about motivating them, but about not demotivating them (which can happen surprisingly easy in some cases). I have seen crash messages along the lines of “xxx has crashed. This is in no way your fault. You could help us by …” which is a very good thing in this regard.
Yet another related note: there are openSUSE-Promo and openSUSE-Biarch DVD iso variants which are so well hidden, that few people even know about their existence, so that there can not be much public testing. However, those are the variants that are given away to hordes of interested people at openSUSE booths around the world, but those are also the variants that are least tested. I still have bad memories of the 11.1 or 11.0 one which was degraded to coaster after three unsuccessful tries on different machines. If bandwidth or mirror-space is a problem, offering them only via bittorrent could be a solution.
Overall, still some way to go, but IMHO we are moving into the right direction.
So it’s time to take some hours to test our future version.
Today I start a fresh M7/Factory install : booting from pxe. The test case is build quickly a minimal server text mode.
Just uncheck the auto configuration, we are after all linux admin. Choose your partition keyboard, language (en recommanded for server) etc … normal.
Just before starting the install check software : click on installation resume . You will discover that base-system-pattern would like to install a kernel-desktop, wtf why we want a server !
So there’s a new ticket about that : https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=613216
I express the fact that it would be nice to have a new pattern selected when we choose minimal install server text mode.
And you what about your opinion about pre-selection or having a base-system-server pattern … Please comment, & vote on bugzilla
A pattern guru wanted to build a patch for that.
I am sure that most of you know and like acetoneiso2, a nice tool to menage isos and lots of other things. Latest release, 2.2.1 support only kde, gnome and xfce as DE and allow to open their file managers to browse files and mounted stuffs…
So, you know, FLOSS is our world.. i took the code, and improved it, just a trivial change, but really nice. I added LXDE/PcmanFM support, as you can see from the picture:
Now you can have acetoneiso2 run pcmanfm too.
The patched package is already into Packman repository and a submit-request (#41069) has been submitted to KDE:KDE4:Community repository, so hopefully, it would be available even there quite soon.
So people.. enjoy it 😀
Andrea
Testing is an important task. But testing daily openSUSE-Factory snapshots would mean testing the same things every day. This would be pretty tiresome to people.
And there is a lot of software to test, including software unknown to most testers or new versions of known software, so how should the tester know if the results were the intended results?
My answer is: leave as much as possible to computers. Computers do not get tired. Computers do not stop testing something after a dozen identical results. Computers do not forget.
The following assumes that you have read my text on making openSUSE install videos.
So far, I am rather satisfied with my automated installations.
At the end of those, I added some basic application testing, which already showed in MS7
openSUSE-KDE-LiveCD-x86_64-Build0625a.ogv dated 2010-05-21 16:08
an issue filed 28 hours later at bnc bug 608087
Only that it currently still needs a human to look at the results.
I was thinking to improve upon that by scanning (rectangular) parts of the screenshot for known good or bad images. If either is found, the test could be automatically marked as passed or failed.
On unknown images, a human would still need to decide which part of the image is relevant and if it is good or bad. This decision can then be used to avoid human interaction (hard work) in further runs of that test.
If we push this further, it could be similar to nagios for network monitoring. Telling when something breaks and telling when something is back working. It could have an overview page about automated test status, giving totals e.g. “50 working, 10 unknown, 3 failing”. With links to more details.
The advantage in adding the application tests after the install test is that the system starts out in a clean, reproducible way. One disadvantage I see is that a newly failing test could prevent following tests to work.
I have also been working to enable others to run my isotovideo script. For that I have cleaned up my code so that it no more contains paths from my system. The other thing is that I documented how to get it working at http://www3.zq1.de/bernhard/git/autoinst/INSTALL
MS7 installation videos:
openSUSE-KDE-LiveCD-x86_64-Build0625c.ogv openSUSE-KDE-LiveCD-i686-Build0625a.ogv openSUSE-GNOME-LiveCD-x86_64-Build0625b.ogv openSUSE-NET-x86_64-Build0623b.ogv openSUSE-NET-i586-Build0623b.ogv openSUSE-DVD-Build0625-x86_64b.ogv openSUSE-DVD-Build0625-i586b.ogv
For those who don’t know it yet, apache2-icons-oxygen is now in Factory 🙂
Go to www.javierllorente.com/tmp/ to see it in action.
If you want to try it out, take a look at README.SuSE included in the rpm package:
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