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1-Click Bug Reporting?

August 23rd, 2009 by

First off, let me blow the dust off of my Lizards blog account 😉

Now that Bug iconwork and school has started to settle down, I’ve gotten back in to testing openSUSE’s newest version, 11.2. One of the things that annoyed me a little, though, was having to open Firefox to report or search for a bug in Bugzilla. So with a little inspiration from the Windows 7 beta’s links to “report a problem” everywhere, I created a desktop icon and panel launcher to automatically launch Firefox and open the “enter new bug” page on our Bugzilla.

You can download this icon here (right-click and Save Link As). Perhaps this is something that should be included with the pre-release versions of the OS starting in 11.3? What do ya’ll think?

Update: Due to a suggestion by Pavol Rusnak, it’s now in openFATE – #307492

Posted in Factory, openSUSE 11.2, Quality Assurance | 5 Comments »

Cliced Hybrids

August 13th, 2009 by

Marcus and me have been busy improving the USB experience. So here is how to use it:

download the live cd of your choice from http://download.opensuse.org/factory/iso/ and make sure you grab build218 or later. And then do something like I did:

linux-vgqb:~ # ls -l /dev/disk/by-id/*usb*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 13. Aug 10:04 /dev/disk/by-id/usb-Kingston_DataTraveler_II+_5B751D8C1994-0:0 -> ../../sdb

So I use /dev/sdb in my commands to shorten it, normally I would use /dev/disk/by-id/.. directly to avoid overwriting my hard disk image.
(more…)

Posted in Base System, Distribution, Factory | 1 Comment »

openSUSE@ARM: GSoC status and final spurt

August 12th, 2009 by

I was buried with work in the last couple of days, so whats new on my GSoC-project:

  • a lot of patches went into factory and some more are queued
  • fixed issues with qemu
  • most yast packages already building
  • zypper builds, but requires some more bugfixing
  • X11 builds
  • cross-compilation stable, speed is good

Todo:

  • create image (bootable to console)
  • create image (bootable to x11 on beagleboard)
  • evaluate switch in webfrontend for cross-feature
  • project documentation/GSoC

Posted in Architectures, Base System, Build Service, Factory, Packaging, YaST | Comments Off on openSUSE@ARM: GSoC status and final spurt

Enlightenment is coming…

August 10th, 2009 by

It’s scheduled to release Enlightenment-DR17 Desktop Shell as a Christmas gift and we glad to announce the update of SOAD to the version 3.2.0. It’s a current openSUSE-11.1 with all updates and Enlightenment set as a prime GUI.

We tried to cook a nice documentation. Please examine it before you consider to download the images:
General Documentation
USB-stick readme

The EFL is compiled from official 3-rd pre-release sources and pretty stable here.
Software is updated and several nice utilities added as well. We created some modest GUI customizations/presets and hope that you like them.

Our TODO list is to fix all errors with “Ecomorph” and provide it for LiveCD and USB systems.

We wish to say “HUGE THANKS!” to “cyberorg” (Jigish Gohil) and “schaefi” (Marcus Schaefer) for their help with this release.

Have fun!
Regards,
SOAD Team

P.S. active mirrors:
GWDG.DE
Yandex.ru

Posted in Desktop, Distribution | 4 Comments »

Comparing openSUSE 11.2 and Kubuntu Karmic LiveUSB setups

August 8th, 2009 by

Some days ago, KDE 4.3.0 has been released by the KDE community and I myself as a loyal GNOME user was just curious about this new release of the KDE4 desktop environment. Thus I took a test-drive of both openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 5 and the Kubuntu Karmic Daily Build as of the 8th of August 2009 – both are shipping with KDE 4.3.0. Utilizing my Eee PC 901 I setup LiveUSB sticks of both distributions and I’d herewith like to share my findings with the openSUSE community. As you might have noticed, openSUSE Milestone releases provide the ability to deploy the LiveCD ISO image directly to USB flash media as of 11.2 Milestone 4, which is a great step ahead from my perspective. So, let’s get started:

1. openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 5 – (so far) non-persistent

Only one single step is needed here 🙂 Couldn’t be easier!
# dd if=openSUSE-KDE4-LiveCD-Build0201-i686.iso of=/dev/"usbdrive" bs=4M
2. Kubuntu Karmic Daily Build as of the 8th of August 2009 – persistent

While this setup is a bit “harder” to complete it delivers (at least from my perspective) the smoother solution – so far!
Mount the ISO to /mnt/ and rsync the whole content to a FAT32 partition on the USB flash media (here labelled “ubuntu”)
# mount -o loop karmic-desktop-i386.iso /mnt/
# rsync -avh /mnt/ /media/ubuntu/
Now install GRUB (Syslinux should work as well, but I myself prefer GRUB here)
# grub-install --no-floppy --root-directory=/media/ubuntu/ /dev/"usbdrive"
Create a GRUB configuration file /media/ubuntu/boot/grub/menu.lst with the following content
default 0
timeout 3
hiddenmenu
###
title Kubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) Daily Build 08-Aug-2009
kernel /casper/vmlinuz file=/preseed/kubuntu.seed boot=casper persistent quiet splash
initrd /casper/initrd.lz
Last but not least, resize the FAT32 partition labelled “ubuntu” to its minimal extent and create an ext2/3 partition labelled “casper-rw” within the remaining free space.

Conclusion:

What I’m currently curious about and the major reason for posting this comparison actually: Could some fellow openSUSE community member extend my current solution to beat the Kubuntu setup not only in ease of creation but also in regard of usability? The major difference here is that the openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 4/5 LiveUSB setup isn’t persistent while the Kubuntu one is due to the casper-rw aufs overlay partition.

Posted in KDE, openSUSE 11.2 | 7 Comments »

28 Partitions on a Single Disk? No Problem!

August 5th, 2009 by

So far it was only possible to have upto 16 device nodes for a single disks. This restricted the number of usable partitions. As a workaround kpartx could be used to create device mapper mappings for further partitions but that was never fully integrated in openSUSE.

With version 2.6.28 the kernel supports upto 256 device nodes per disk, much more than the partition table allows. But since the implementation is not straightforward, the additional device nodes are assigned dynamically, user-space programs may need to be adapted.

For openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 5 YaST was extended to support this new kernel feature.

Some quick tests showed only problems with LVM. If you are interested in this feature and have the possibility please give it a try so that we find remaining bugs.

Posted in Base System, Kernel, openSUSE 11.2, YaST | 1 Comment »

The Desktop DingDong

August 5th, 2009 by

Just incase you’ve been living under a rock on Mars there is a certain feature request in openFate. Both Michael and Zonker have posted on the matter but as they are both Internal (as in they get paid by the Big N) I thought I’d throw my external views (these views are not solicited by anyone other than me, yadayadayada) into the pot.  Now I know I was asked to put my thoughts down and send them into the mailing list, but to be honest the whole discussion has turned into a childish “My dad’s got bigger knuckles than your dad” style flamewar and there are multiple threads on the one topic.  Personally I have now switched off of the discussion on the lists as it’s hard to follow and frankly going nowhere.

Firstly I’d like to think that Frank had no malice in filing the feature and only had the best intentions for KDE and openSUSE at heart.  The problem is there doesn’t seem to have been enough background checks and verification of facts prior to unleashing this handgrenade of annoying pointlessness.  If you default on a loan/mortgage/credit card you are in jeopardy of loosing assets.  The same can be carried over to this discussion.

(more…)

Posted in Desktop, Distribution, GNOME, KDE | 10 Comments »

openFATE feature 306967, KDE default

July 31st, 2009 by

There are pretty many pros and cons and even more people with their opinion about the feature. I’d like to summarize what has been said in the discussion in the feature itself and during yesterday’s openSUSE project meeting. Unfortunately the only sure thing is whatever decision is taken – it will be wrong for some. This is why, at this time, we have no default – because openSUSE has strong GNOME and KDE implementations, we offer them side-by-side as equals.  And we made 2 years ago on opensuse-project the decision that we stay with “no default” desktop.

So what do we have so far?

  • a feature request from one of the KDE e.V. board members
  • the feature asks to make KDE default. Reason for that, is to make openSUSE more simple for newbies and to make openSUSE the best KDE distribution around
  • Through the discussion in the feature I’d translate that feature into put the radio button as default to KDE on the desktop selection screen during installation instead of today’s status where everybody needs to make a choice between
  • the highest rated feature in openFATE until today
  • a majority of people supporting this feature (currently approx. 90% pro, 1% neutral, 9% against)

(more…)

Posted in Desktop, Distribution, GNOME, KDE, openSUSE 11.2 | 12 Comments »

New Package: Association Subscribers Manager 3.0

July 30th, 2009 by

I’m happy to announce, that i imported the Assuma Manager to openSUSE. Special Thanks goes to David Haller. The Package can recieved in KDE:KDE4:Community.

More Infos there: http://www.opendesktop.org/content/show.php?content=109313

Tags: , ,
Posted in Contrib, KDE, Packaging | Comments Off on New Package: Association Subscribers Manager 3.0

Improved mirror selection for India

July 29th, 2009 by

Recently, it became evident that users in India don’t get good mirrors. This was solved by configuring a few German and US mirrors to serve users from India.

Courtesy of Adrian Reber from Esslingen University of Applied Sciences, there is an illustrative screenshot that visualizes the efficacy of this. The world map shows accesses to their openSUSE mirror by country (live view). In openSUSE’s MirrorBrain configuration, this mirror is set up to receive German, Danish, Polish, and Indian requests.

The background is that India has bad connectivity to neighbouring countries, but good connection to German and US mirrors. Therefore, now a few German and US mirrors are configured to serve India. The screenshot below demonstrates this for the mirror of the Esslingen University of Applied Sciences:

world map showing client distribution of accesses to an openSUSE mirror in Germany

world map showing client distribution of accesses to an openSUSE mirror in Germany

The world map clearly shows how the mirror gets nearly exclusively German requests, as well as those from India. The same happens for some other German and some US mirrors.

Note that if a mirror in India should become available (would be nice!), it would automatically be preferred, and the other mirrors become fallback mirrors.

While it is not new that we do this, the screenshot of Adrian’s analysis illustrates the issue very nicely. We have similar configuration for a number of countries, where a mirror selection purely based on countries and regions wouldn’t work. For this kind of tuning, we depend on user input.

Hints about how to improve serving our downloads are always appreciated. Please write to admin at opensuse dot org with input in this regard. Thanks!

Tags:
Posted in Apache, Distribution, Miscellaneous | 5 Comments »

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