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Improve Software Quality

June 12th, 2010 by

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.

Posted in Build Service, Factory, Quality Assurance | 1 Comment »

Road to 11.3 : when pattern are not your friend, pre selection can be a trap

June 10th, 2010 by

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.

Posted in Architectures, Base System, Factory, Kernel, openSUSE 11.2, Quality Assurance, Software Management, YaST | 3 Comments »

Happy 15th PhP

June 9th, 2010 by

Did you remember the June 8th 1995 ?
There was a annonce here

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi/msg/cc7d43454d64d133

Announcing the Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools) version 1.0.

These tools are a set of small tight cgi binaries written in C.
They perform a number of functions including:

. Logging accesses to your pages in your own private log files
. Real-time viewing of log information
. Providing a nice interface to this log information
. Displaying last access information right on your pages
. Full daily and total access counters
. Banning access to users based on their domain
. Password protecting pages based on users’ domains
. Tracking accesses ** based on users’ e-mail addresses **
. Tracking referring URL’s – HTTP_REFERER support
. Performing server-side includes without needing server support for it
. Ability to not log accesses from certain domains (ie. your own)
. Easily create and display forms
. Ability to use form information in following documents

Here is what you don’t need to use these tools:

. You do not need root access – install in your ~/public_html dir
. You do not need server-side includes enabled in your server
. You do not need access to Perl or Tcl or any other script interpreter
. You do not need access to the httpd log files

The only requirement for these tools to work is that you have
the ability to execute your own cgi programs. Ask your system
administrator if you are not sure what this means.

The tools also allow you to implement a guestbook or any other
form that needs to write information and display it to users
later in about 2 minutes.

The tools are in the public domain distributed under the GNU
Public License. Yes, that means they are free!

For a complete demonstration of these tools, point your browser
at: http://www.io.org/~rasmus

—
Rasmus Lerdorf
ras… @io.org
http://www.io.org/~rasmus

Now 15 years after, great way. And daily basis work with it. Thanks Rasmus, Thanks PhP dev’s, thanks openSUSE packagers … For those who need php applications, framework, lib and so just have a look at this long list of what is ready to use on your favorite distribution

http://packages.opensuse-community.org/index.jsp?searchTerm=php&distro=openSUSE_112

Tags: , ,
Posted in Contrib, openSUSE 11.2, Server | Comments Off on Happy 15th PhP

AcetoneISO2 and LXDE

June 3rd, 2010 by

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

Tags:
Posted in Accessibility, Build Service, Desktop, Distribution, Factory, openSUSE 11.2, Usability | 2 Comments »

FLISOL 2010 GYE – Some Late Numbers and Experiences

June 3rd, 2010 by

I know, I know… it is a bit late ( more than a month ) since FLISOL took place in Guayaquil-Ecuador this year… but a lot a time consuming activities have stopped me from reporting some results. Even though more than a month have passed, I think I should let you know what happened.

Compared to previous years, the event of this year was relatively smaller. An approximate of 200 people assisted, from which for the ~80% it was their first time that assisted to FLISOL, 50% of visitors had not used or heard about FLOSS before, ~13% were below 18 years old and ~75% were between 18-35 years old.

There are 3 things that I would like to point from this year’s event:

  1. Most of the event was organized by the new members from Kokoa ( ESPOL’s Free Software Community ), who I send my congratulations since it was a very good start. They were just newbies and took the challenge of organizing the biggest FLOSS event in town. As an old Kokoa kore member I know how difficult can be to organize FLISOL, and I can say those guys did a good job.
  2. One of the rooms that caught most of the attention of the visitors was the gaming room. It mostly attracted the young visitors from different genres. I think that gnu/linux is a niche that has started to be exploited in the gaming area. Personally I have tried some games since the very first time I had openSUSE (SuSE Linux back then) installed and I have seen how good known titles and good quality indie games are coming to gnu/linux. I think that with openSUSE GameStore , some gamers and developers from the openSUSE community we can try to promote our lovely green as a good platform for gaming.
  3. Last but not least, I would like to say thanks to Jarflex, ESPOL’s Digital Culture Club, Ecuagamers and all the people who contributed to make this event possible.

Summarizing, this year it was seen a collaboration between different groups and enterprises somehow related to FLOSS that , locally, was not seen before. This might be a further step of what was started in 2007 when we tried to take FLISOL from a FLOSS installation festival for FLOSS enthusiast to a FLOSS event that will catch the attention of people of different ages with different interests.

Until the next post people of the openSUSEsphere…

jaom7

PS.1: Some pictures by: @sarahjessi, Kmeng, @_abejamaya , Jarflex and Ecuagamers
PS.2: If you are interested or have some ideas related to openSUSE gaming [site] please write a comment or contact me.

Tags:
Posted in Events, Marketing, openSUSE 11.2 | 3 Comments »

openSUSE at FLISoL Chile

May 28th, 2010 by

As you already know, the Festival Latinoamericano de Instalacion de Software Libre event will be held this Saturday here in Chile.

In La Serena we are starting around 9 am at Universidad de La Serena campus Isabel Bongard, with plenty of fun talks and room for installations, I am more than ready to install our awesome green! =). By the way, I will be creating an ISO with SUSE Studio so everyone can grab it on USB devices.

Some talk topics we are presenting: KVM, Free Knowledge, Linux beyond the Desktop, and Contributing to openSUSE without having to be a developer.

I would like to thank Andreas and everyone at Novell who has been supporting the Ambassadors Program, shipping DVDs, Geekos, T-shirts that the audience really appreciates and do make a difference.

Posted in openSUSE 11.2 | 1 Comment »

automated openSUSE testing

May 25th, 2010 by

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

Posted in Factory, Quality Assurance, Virtualization | Comments Off on automated openSUSE testing

apache2-icons-oxygen is now in Factory

May 20th, 2010 by

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:
(more…)

Posted in Apache, Artwork, Factory, KDE | Comments Off on apache2-icons-oxygen is now in Factory

openSUSE-LXDE and Italian Press

May 14th, 2010 by

We all know we are doing well, we see that from your feedbacks, bugreports, obs submitreqs, and IRC. So guys.. Thank you a lot for supporting and helping us.

But do you think there is something better to see your work on a magazine? a national magazine? I guess it’s really exciting isn’t it?

Well we did it! The Italian Linux Magazine wrote two entire pages for us, and our live cd (together with XFCE one) was into the attached DVD or CD!

That was cool!!!

Andrea

Posted in Accessibility, Artwork, Build Service, Derivative, Desktop, Distribution, Marketing, openSUSE 11.2 | 2 Comments »

openSUSE at Universidad de Panama, FIEC

May 7th, 2010 by

Universidad de Panamá, Facultad de Informática, Electrónica y Comunicación. Conmemoración del X aniversario de la Facultad. On May 3, 2010 the openSUSE Ambassador was invited to talk about “Introducción a las características y ventajas de openSUSE, su relación con NOVELL y la comunidad de usuarios” (“An Introduction to New Features and Advantages on openSUSE 11.2, the openSUSE Project Community and the relationship with NOVELL”). When I did talk about openSUSE. People came from a few persons in the room to suddenly filling the whole space available for that room. Surprisingly, I had the opportunity to watch several girls between the audience so I thought there is a chance to organize a chix open source community or users group. Click on the link to watch photos

http://picasaweb.google.com/RICARDO.A.CHUNG/CaracteristicasYVentajasOpenSUSESuRelacionConNOVELLYLaComunidad#

openSUSE Ambassador Panama at FIEC, UP

openSUSE, Ambassador, Panama, FIEC, UP

openSUSE Ambassador Panama Talk at FIEC, UP

openSUSE, Ambassador, Univ. Panama, FIEC

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Accessibility, Education, Events, GNOME, KDE, Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, openSUSE 11.2, Usability | Comments Off on openSUSE at Universidad de Panama, FIEC

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