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openSUSE Mirrorlist Improved

December 16th, 2008 by

Peter Pöml has created a dynamic list of our mirrors with accurate information about which repositories they mirror.  You can reach the link via the openSUSE wiki.  The data in the mirror list is used by our download redirector download.opensuse.org to point users automatically to mirrors close to them.

Btw. if anybody else wants to mirror openSUSE, please read these Instructions about it.  We love to increase our mirror infrastructure and there are some regions that could use additional mirrors.  Even if you only mirror parts of the openSUSE tree, you’re welcome!

Thanks a lot to all the mirror admins that mirror openSUSE – and to Peter for his continous improvements to the infrastructure!

Posted in Distribution | 2 Comments »

Contrib Repository Kicked Off

December 11th, 2008 by

During this week the so-called Contrib repository has been finally really started after the discussion come to a halt some time ago.  Contrib (see here for details) is a repository managed by community members that will be frozen at release time to make more packages available for openSUSE users.  It is a kind of “Universal” repository for third-party packages.

To see how it works, I updated today Greg KH‘s smugbatch package that I put into my home project a couple of months ago and submitted it to contrib with the following command:

osc submitreq create home:a_jaeger smugbatch openSUSE:Factory:Contrib smugbatch -m \
"Add smugbatch to CONTRIB"

This produces an email to the opensuse-contrib mailing list and now my request gets reviewed by the maintainer team of Contrib.

Thanks a lot to Alexey for starting the contrib project a couple of months ago and to all volunteers that are driving it now!

Btw. smugbatch is a command line tool to manage photos on SmugMug – you can see some of my photos at my personal SmugMug page.

Posted in Build Service, Contrib | 1 Comment »

Testing “Scratch” – the easy programming language

December 7th, 2008 by

Some german teacher point me to “Scratch” a few weeks ago. This week, I tried to create a package for openSUSE.

The good news: Ubuntu people already tried to package scratch for debian – but they use a perl script, which installs scratch for each user – again, and again, and again….

Well – as Scratch runs via “Squeak”, which is available for openSUSE since a long time now, it took me just a few minutes to create a simple wrapper script calling squeak and loading the scratch image. The only things left to do:

  • unpack the scratch image (I currently use the ubuntu file for this – otherwise I have to unzip the exe file, let’s look at this for the next version)
  • add a desktop icon
  • add a desktop entry
  • place everything in the filesystem

ready.

As result, every user on a system with the scratch RPM can now run scratch without any further actions. Sometimes packaging can be so easy 😉

But, yes: that’s only packaging a binary into a RPM – normally, we want to compile the source so we have full control over the binary. If someone has a problem with this package, I might not be able to help, because I haven’t seen the source and therefore have no chance to help. But perhaps, with requests from Ubuntu and openSUSE users, the developers of scratch open their sourcecode to the public.

So: have fun, playing around with Scratch…

Posted in Build Service, Distribution, Packaging | Comments Off on Testing “Scratch” – the easy programming language

GMC LiveCDs Seek Testers

December 5th, 2008 by

Coolo just announced on the opensuse-factory list:

Strictly speaking it’s not Factory, but I put the GMC live cds at the usual place: http://ftp.suse.com/pub/projects/FactoryLiveCDs/

It would be good to give the 11.1 kernel some testing.

GMC stands for Goldmaster Candidate – which means that these LiveCDs might be declared next week as goldmaster – and goldmaster is another name for the final release.

Note that we currently have no full repository for openSUSE 11.1 out – the one available contains RC1 and factory is not building at all, the sources are updated but not the binaries.  We use for building the distribution the 11.1 distribution in the openSUSE Build Service.

Posted in Distribution | 6 Comments »

openSUSE 11.1 Goes RC2

December 3rd, 2008 by

Yesterday Coolo released openSUSE 11.1 RC2 internally to fix all existing bugs marked as shipstopper.  We use now the SHIP_STOPPER flag in bugzilla to mark bugs as blocking the release (see our wiki for the usage of SHIP_STOPPER) and not anymore BLOCKER (which blocks testing or development).  If you want to search in bugzilla for the currently open SHIP_STOPPERS, you can use this query.

We also found one really annoying bug in our configuration that lead to the following output:

$ rpm -q –queryformat ‘%{vendor}\n’ glibc
openSUSEopenSUSE:11.1 openSUSE:11.1

Therefore, the openSUSE Build Service is currently rebuilding all 11.1 rpm packages with a corrected vendor tag.  Also a couple of packages where checked in to fix bugs so that we soon get RC3.

If RC3 passes all tests, we hope to release it publicly as Goldmaster – the release date is still the 18th of December.

Due to the time it takes to release a build publicly, we are not releasing any RCs besides RC1 to the public.

I’m running RC2 on my machines now and I’m quite happy with this release.

Posted in Distribution | 13 Comments »

Saschas Backtrace: Yabsc for Builder

December 1st, 2008 by

Today i tried out the Program called: yabsc. With http://software.opensuse.org/search?q=yabsc you can install the Program with one Klick. After the Installation the Program read the hints in the “.osc” Directory, and uses your Identity and Password for Checkin to Build Service API.

After the Program-Launch you see a Image like this:

yabsc1 Main Menue

On the left side you can see the Projects on your Watchlist. In the Center you see the Packages from the selected Project or Subproject. You can see the Buildlogs and Commitlogs directly.

On the second Tab “Workers”, you can see a image like this:

yabsc

Here you can see the “actual” Status in the openSUSE Buildservice. In this tab you can follow the Buildlog on the fly.  This is an very good thing 🙂

The third tab, labeld as “submit requests”, you can see your Requests. But for this Function i haven’t an image, so i haven’t actually submit requests.

Now i can say, this is an very good, and very short Programm. Try it out!

Tags:
Posted in Build Service, Distribution, Documentation, Packaging | 1 Comment »

Smolt and openSUSE

December 1st, 2008 by

This morning I realised that openSUSE appears on the hardware database smolt the first time. We are introducing smolt with openSUSE 11.1 in the installation workflow. People can choose to send up their data to the smolt database. All that is of course done anonymously, the data is stored under a unique UUID which can not be tracked back to the submitter (Privacy Policy here.)

Smolt is a project started by Fedora to collect information about the hardware that is used with computers running Linux. We at (open-)SUSE were seeing this demand as well and also were discussing a solution. But it became clear quite quickly that it does not make sense to have a per-distro solution for that – if we want to have momentum with a hardware database a combined effort promisses the most.

On Linuxtag 2007 I was first time involved in meetings were people from the Fedora project offered us to participate in smolt. It became clear that the idea behind smolt is what we also wanted. The working athmosphere was (and still is) open, friendly and productive and thus we decided to join in. With openSUSE 11.0 we first time shipped a smolt client, but not in the installation workflow.

Smolt isn’t finished yet. While it is a stable infrastructure thanks to Mike McGrath and friends who work on it there are still some things that could be improved. Maybe there is somebody in the openSUSE community interesting in joining the smolt community and help? That would be great because the contributions from our side are still limited and I think it would be great if everybody would bring something to the party.

Smolt is not limited to Fedora and openSUSE btw. Other distros are invited to participate as well. With that I think smolt is a great thing for Linux overall. Hopefully some time in the future it will help us to convince more hardware manufacturers that supporting Linux is important for them.

An interesting read is also http://www.linux.com/feature/118322

Ah – yes, of course you should not forget to actually use smolt and send up your hardware data when installing openSUSE – we can still climb up in the OS list on http://smolts.org/static/stats/stats.html 🙂

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Distribution | 3 Comments »

ARM support for openSUSE Buildservice and openSUSE

November 18th, 2008 by

ARM architecture going more to desktop style applications had been in press frequently during the last weeks. On top of were press releases of ARM and canonical officially announcing an ubuntu port in one of the next releases for the ARM architecture. Applications are more of type nettop or advanced PDA like the nokia n810, than what is currently known as traditional embedded applications (just to name a few examples).

This has been due to the fact that licensees of the ARM architecture, big semiconductor companies from the Top 10 list, have begun shipping a new generation of “mobile PC in the pocket” of System on a Chip semiconductors. They include now a really high clocked ARM core, DSPs for Video/Audio processing that can even decode HDTV streams, and OpenGL 2.0 capable HW engine and the peripherials included to build PDAs, mobile phones or nettops. All that within the energy budget of a mobile phone, and not of a Desktop PC. The google G1 phone had been one of the first products of this generation, although its software uses these features only in the beginnings.

What now does this all have to do with the openSUSE Buildservice and openSUSE distribution? As you might already guess it, we haven’t been sleeping either. And I am not a advocate of ubuntu on an .opensuse.org website. So read further what we have done so far.

(more…)

Posted in Architectures, Base System, Build Service, Distribution, Packaging, Toolchain, Virtualization, Wiki | 18 Comments »

Follow The Netbook Road

November 6th, 2008 by

As many people will have noticed from my ramblings on twitter and identi.ca and also from my sporadic almost dumb sounding questions on IRC (thanks very much for your patience in IRC btw), I have been working on getting a usable installation of openSUSE on the eeePC 701 – both GNOME and KDE4. As I have a 4GB SSD model my aim is to have a feature full install taking up no more than 2.6GB. Yes I know this doesn’t help those with the 2GB model, but I’m scratching my own itch here ;). Ultimately I would like to be able to create USB and CD images of the builds in time for 11.1’s release which is in about 43 days time, problem is KIWI does not like me 🙁 but I will persevere and see what I can conjure up in time. I am a happy user of openSUSE 11.0 with XFCE on my eeePC at the moment, but I fancy a bit of a challenge and a good dose of stress and anger trying to get it to work will be a welcome distraction from the stress and chaos I have to deal with at work 🙂

So what packages am I looking at putting on there? Below are a couple of tables of applications and what I have selected for each DE including ASUS eeePC related drivers (ACPI/Events) and also bluetooth; I have tried to stick to those that come with the DE e.g. all KDE apps are KDE4 variants, and if a DE provides an app for a function I try to use that.  So the first iteration of the table is:

  KDE GNOME XFCE
Terminal Konsole GNOME-Terminal Terminal
Text Editor Kwrite Gedit Mousepad
Web Browser Konqueror Epiphany Epiphany
File Manager Dolphin Nautilus Thunar
Music Player Amarok2 Banshee xfmedia
Video Player Dragon Player Totem xfmedia
PDF Viewer Okular Evince Evince
IM client Kopete Pidgin Pidgin
IRC client irssi Pidgin Pidgin
Office Suite OOo OOo OOo
E-mail Kmail Evolution Claws-Mail
RSS Akregator Liferea Liferea
Calendar Korganiser Evolution Orage
Addressbook Kaddressbook Evolution Claws-Mail
Flashplayer Yes Yes Yes
Java Java-1.6 Java-1.6 Java-1.6
Codecs Xine Gstreamer Xine
Photo Viewer Gwenview F-spot Ristretto
FTP Client Dolphin Nautilus Gftp
Networking NetworkManager NetworkManager NetworkManager
Total Space Taken Up 2.6GB / 2676552k 2.7GB / 2752336k 2.6GB / 2718412k

 

As you can see KDE4 takes up the least amount of space followed by XFCE with GNOME dropping into third place.  This surprised me as I actually expected XFCE to be way ahead in the lead.  I then tried to minimise the number of applications and tried to use apps that could multi task, still prefering those that are included as part of the openSUSE distro:

  KDE GNOME XFCE
Terminal Konsole GNOME-Terminal Terminal
Text Editor Kwrite Gedit Mousepad
Web Browser Konqueror Epiphany Epiphany
File Manager Dolphin Nautilus Thunar
Music Player MPlayer Totem xfmedia
Video Player MPlayer Totem xfmedia
PDF Viewer Okular Evince Evince
IM client Kopete Pidgin Pidgin
IRC client irssi Pidgin Pidgin
Office Suite OOo OOo OOo
E-mail Kmail Claws-Mail Claws-Mail
RSS Akregator Claws-Mail Claws-Mail
Calendar Korganiser Claws-Mail Orage
Addressbook Kaddressbook Claws-Mail Claws-Mail
Flashplayer Yes Yes Yes
Java Java-1.6 Java-1.6 Java-1.6
Codec Framework
 ffmpeg Gstreamer Xine
Photo Viewer Gwenview Eye Of GNOME Ristretto
FTP Client Dolphin Nautilus Gftp
Networking NetworkManager NetworkManager NetworkManager
Total Space Taken Up 2.6GB / 2662540k
 2.6GB / 2682516k
 2.6GB / 2716364k

As you can see KDE is still the leader, but GNOME has managed to close the gap significantly.

You will notice that there are some notable applications missing from both tables, both from the Mozilla family – FireFox and Thunderbird.  I chose not to use FireFox as the browser as I have been experiencing some icky lockups with it, and this is irrespective of platform.  I decided against Thunderbird because it just did not like to display correctly on the 7″ screen, even the version supplied by Xandros refused to display nicely.  As KDE4 doesn’t have a native IRC client yet I have chosen irssi, i will update the list when a native KDE4 client is available – most likely Quassel.  Also as it stands Kaffeine is not available for KDE4 yet, when that happens I would imagine I would replace MPlayer with it.

Both the GNOME and KDE4 builds were based on a minimal X install – for GNOME add gnome-panel and gnome-session; for for KDE add kdebase4-session, kdebase4-workspace and kde4-win; XFCE was based on the supplied pattern.  One thing I did notice is that 11.1 (Beta4) seems to have put on a bit of weight in comparison to 11.0, a base install appears to be ~400MB more O_o.  I am going to to do a verification shortly and file a bug so hopefully I can thin them out even further.

If people have any recommendations or suggestions as to what applications to use, then please let me know.  My next step is to create both ISO and USB images, any and all help would be much appreciated – SUSEStudio access would be even better ;)  This list is not meant to be the be all and end all, but more a matter of itch scratching.  Yes I know I could reduce the space taken up if I didnt bother with any of that non-free codec crud, and drop flash from the equation, but I’m pragmatic and ultimately want to see people use openSUSE.  Get them using our distro first, once thatis established then we can educate them on the ugly side of things.  Once I manage to create the images with the above package list i will look at creating a completely free version with no colsed codecs/apps.

Once again I’d like to thank all those on IRC for there help and advice – JP Rosevear, James Wilcox, Stephan Binner, Will Stephenson, Martin Schandler and Hubert Figuiere.

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Posted in Distribution, GNOME, KDE, XFCE | 3 Comments »

Followup “10 Things …”

October 28th, 2008 by

I put the post “10 Things …” into the wiki. I rearranged the order a little bit, but basicly it’s the same page. If you have suggestions how to expand it, feel free to do it. The main intention was to write down things that users always ask me on events, of course it could be extended to a general “Tips and Tricks for openSUSE users”. But keep in mind that we already have the Users FAQ. Thanks for the comments, i will start writing an article or chapter how to buy new hardware for Linux soon.

Posted in Distribution | 2 Comments »

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