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Installing Ruby 1.9 on openSUSE 11.2

April 6th, 2010 by

It’s been a while since I’ve posted or been active in the community, so I thought I’d toss an update out there.  I’ll cross post this on my personal blog and on Cool Solutions (modified for SLEx 10).  This is a pretty rudimentary post as installation from source is pretty straightforward, but perhaps it’ll be useful to someone.

The only requirements for this build that I’m aware of at this time are make, gcc, and the openssl/openssl-devel packages.

The default Ruby distribution in 11.2 is 1.8.7, contrasting the current stable release of 1.9.1.  If you already have Ruby installed via zypper, you’ll need to uninstall it (‘sudo zypper rm ruby’), otherwise the first step is to grab the latest release from http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/.

Next, unpack your release (replacing 1.9.1-p376 with the build you downloaded):

tar xfvz ruby-1.9.1-p376.tar.gz

Change to the extracted directory and run the config script:

cd ruby-1.9.1-p376 && ./configure

Build the release:  Note that you can allow jobs to run simultaneously with the -j switch, see make (1) for further details.

make

Install the release as root:

sudo make install

To verify that 1.9 is indeed installed, issue:

ruby --version

Posted in Documentation, Miscellaneous, Usability | 1 Comment »

Russian openSUSE community

March 30th, 2010 by

Hello everybody,

I want to share some ideas about the success of the Russian openSUSE community, and try to answer the question about its popularity. As you can see it is one of the top places:

The reason for the high popularity of this distribution in Germany is of course the fact that the German SuSE distribution and the main branch of development is located in Nuremberg. Popularity in the U.S. is due Novell – an American company, and of course the language is English. But why are so many people in Russia choosing openSUSE?

Good question. One of the main things that influence the choice of distribution – the quality and localization. The global community plays a top role for quality of distribution and local make it appropriate for Russian language users (of course a local community can be as part of a global community).

Perhaps most important is the documentation. And of course, not everyone wants (or can) read the documentation in English. Everyone wants to read the documentation in their native language. The distribution may be in a good shape and stable, nice and convenient, but without documentation it will use very few. Translated documentation is very important to the community. The translation must have a high quality, understandable, and as it must be kept up to date.

For the community its also profitable that 2 guys from the community working for Novell (in Nuremberg and in Prague). This provides better communication between “developers – community”. It helps to be closer to the project. This allows you to always be aware of all the major news of the project. And of course the translation is much better if they are engaged not just as a translator, but the employee who works on the distribution.

Of course this also applys for software. Although it is not as important as documentation, it still makes an impression on the quality of distribution. Everyone wants to work with the software in their native language %)

A successful community is a group of people who love openSUSE, who understands why the software should be free, who wants to make openSUSE better and better… every day.

Tags: ,
Posted in Contrib, Documentation, Forums, Localization, Wiki | 5 Comments »

Xen para-virtualized openSUSE 11.2

February 10th, 2010 by

I had to install Xen para-virtualized openSUSE 11.2 (PVM), lucky for me 11.2 DVD iso has broken xen kernel so it does not install, the live CDs do not have any xen kernel at all so they are not useful either. After reading up all the posts on the bugzilla and forums about the subject, found the way to get it done, here is a howto for anyone else who is looking for the solution.

1. Set up http installation source

Install web-server pattern from yast to install apache2 in Dom0

Edit apache configuration /etc/apache2/default-server.conf to follow symlinks, it should look something like this:

#Options none
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks

Mount the DVD iso and copy all the files to your webserver root.

mount openSUSE-11.2-DVD-i586.iso /mnt -o loop
mkdir -p /srv/www/htdocs/suse-11.2
cp -ar /mnt/* /srv/www/htdocs/suse-11.2/
cd /srv/www/htdocs/suse-11.2/boot/i386/
rm *-xen*
wget http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.2/repo/oss/boot/i386/initrd-xen
wget http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.2/repo/oss/boot/i386/vmlinuz-xen
ln -s initrd-xen initrd-xenpae
ln -s vmlinuz-xen vmlinuz-xenpae
cd /srv/www/htdocs/
wget http://download.opensuse.org/update/11.2/rpm/i586/kernel-xen-2.6.31.12-0.1.1.i586.rpm (or the latest)
mv kernel-xen-2.6.31.12-0.1.1.i586.rpm kx.rpm
rcapache2 start

2. Start installation via “yast2 vm-install”, select para-virtualization and as installation source use http://dom0IP/suse-11.2/
3. The hack part:
When the install is about 80%  or “Stop” the reboot after the completion of first stage install, switch to tty2 by using “Sendkey > ctrl+alt+F2”.

chroot /mnt
rpm -Uvh http://dom0IP/kx.rpm –force

Reboot and let the install run its course, at the end of it there should be working domU

Edit: If you have fast internet connection available during install, add the update repository as “Addon product”, with that in place the above hack will not be necessary.

Edit2: If the image still don’t boot, mount the disk image to edit grub’s menu.lst:

mount -o loop,offset=32256 /full/path/to/image/disk0 /mnt
cd /mnt
ln -s vmlinuz-….-xen vmlinuz-xen
ln -s initrd-…..-xen.img initrd-xen
vi /mnt/grub/menu.lst #to look like below:

title XEN
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-xen root=…..
initrd /initrd-xen

Posted in Documentation, Kernel, openSUSE 11.2, Virtualization | 2 Comments »

Cheat ocfs2-tools

February 9th, 2010 by

When running ocfs2 on cLVM, openais+pacemaker setup, you may run into something like described below.

The symptoms:

umount /data1
mspx1d0:~ # tunefs.ocfs2 –fs-features=sparse,unwritten /dev/system/data1
tunefs.ocfs2: Unable to access cluster service while opening device “/dev/system/data1”
mspx1d0:~ # mount /dev/system/data1 /data1
mspx1d0:~ # tunefs.ocfs2 –fs-features=sparse,unwritten /dev/system/data1
tunefs.ocfs2: Configuration error discovered while opening device “/dev/system/data1”

Here is how to get past cluster check when running ocfs2-tools.

From hb_gui or crm stop mounting of the file system and ocf::ocfs2:o2cb resources.

Install ocfs2-tools-o2cb package

Do normal stack configuration using /etc/init.d/o2cb configure, but do not auto start on boot. Read the fine ocfs2 manual.

Bring ocfs2 online: /etc/init.d/o2cb online ocfs2

Start ocfs2 service: rcocfs2 start

Update cluster stack on your partition with ocfs2 filesystem: tunefs.ocfs2 –update-cluster-stack /dev/system/data1

Do your thing with ocfs2-tools, such as: tunefs.ocfs2 -v –fs-features=sparse,unwritten /dev/system/data1

Stop ocfs2 service and unload o2cb: rcocfs2 stop && /etc/init.d/o2cb offline ocfs2 && /etc/init.d/o2cb unload

Re-enable ocf::ocfs2:o2cb resources and run tunefs.ocfs2 –update-cluster-stack /dev/system/data1 again. Re-enable mounting from hb_gui.  Hope there is a simpler way somewhere that I am not aware of.

Posted in Documentation, openSUSE 11.2, Server, Systems Management | Comments Off on Cheat ocfs2-tools

Writing man pages

February 7th, 2010 by

Here are a few resources for those among you thinking of writing proper documentation for your new project, or to contribute writings or translations to your favorite Community.

Man pages are written in Troff, the original UNIX typesetting system. Nowadays, few people (most notably man page writers and IETF RFC authors) regularly use this markup, but it is rather simple and elegant once you get to know it. For writing man pages, the learning curve is very good, as you only need to know a few macros and, just as if you were working on html and pilfering the sources of an existing  page doing just what you need, you have a wealth of examples to teach you right there on your trusty *NIX box. As the Wikipedia points out:

Troff features commands to designate fonts, spacing, paragraphs, margins, footnotes and more. Unlike many other text formatters, troff can position characters arbitrarily on a page, even overlapping them, and has a fully programmable input language. Separate preprocessors are used for more convenient production of tables, diagrams, and mathematics.

But you don’t need to master all that! For man pages, what you need is knowledge of the man macro package, originally written by James Clark and documented in man(7) or groff_man(7) depending on your distro. Troff input is processed from text files, so you just need your favorite text editor, and a bit of time to play with the markup to learn it in the process.

Here is a way to get started quickly: Linux Journal published a great tutorial a few years back, and the Linux Manual contains the ever-important style guidelines in man-pages(7). Start from scratch, or make a copy of an existing manual page and start editing. One more tip for you:

man ./foo.1

is your friend, to see what you just wrote and marked up in all its glory — and bugs.

WEB RESOURCES
Linux Journal: Writing man Pages Using groff
The Linux Manual: man-pages(7)
The Linux Manual: man(7)

BOOKS
Arnold Robbins, Nelson Beebe, Classic Shell Scripting (O’Reilly – 9780596005955) – Appendix A “Writing Man Pages” is for you.
Dale Dougherty, Tim O’Reilly, Unix Text Processing (out of print, released in the public domain) – all the Troff you could ever want, but not the man macros.

Posted in Base System, Documentation | 1 Comment »

openSUSE Wiki Changes

December 19th, 2009 by

There was a lot of dicussion in the openSUSE project about the project wiki which was suffering from something all successful projects in some point of time experience: There is a huge amount of documentation in the Wiki, however it seems a bit unstructured, sometimes outdated or not really maintained.

The brave openSUSE wiki team stepped up to change that. The decision is to set up a new wiki with a well selected set of extensions and now the content of the old wiki is going to be transfered to the new wiki. Of course there will be a rigorous quality check of the articles, as well as a new thought through structure. The goal of this huge amount of work is to provide a outstanding good and well consumable source of information for all people in and interested in the openSUSE project. That is a high goal and I admire the energy and dedication of the wiki team.

The new wiki is now in place. So if you also want to help, either with the motivation of a developer telling how things work, or from the upstream perspective using the openSUSE vehicle to push the project or simply because you want to help openSUSE to become even better, first read the Transition Guidelines and subscribe on the wiki mailinglist, since most of the coordination happens there.
There is also a Forum Thread going on around that.

Please help to make this a success – thanks 🙂

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Posted in Documentation, Quality Assurance, Wiki | Comments Off on openSUSE Wiki Changes

How to activate Flash Plugin for Google Chrome on openSUSE 11.2

December 9th, 2009 by

A couple of days ago, Google release a Beta version of Google Chrome for Mac and Linux. After installing the RPM I has been notice that the flash player doesn’t work. For make it work do the following as root:

cd /opt/google/chrome

ln -s /usr/lib/browser-plugins/ plugins

Restart Chrome and you are ready to watch some videos on youtube 🙂

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Documentation, KDE, Mozilla, openSUSE 11.2 | 20 Comments »

KIWI RELAX NG Schema Explained

December 6th, 2009 by

KIWI, invented by Marcus Schäfer, is a magnificent tool to build your own SUSE Linux distribution. It is also the backend of SUSE Studio.

For those who has used KIWI manually already know the details: KIWI’s configuration file is XML and based on a RELAX NG schema. This article give developers a little background of the history, a short overview of some design decisions around KIWI’s RELAX NG schema, and how to customize it to your needs.
(more…)

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Posted in Documentation | Comments Off on KIWI RELAX NG Schema Explained

Playing With XPath Expressions in The xmllint Shell

November 23rd, 2009 by

When XML is transformed into something else, in most cases XSLT comes to play. One of the challenges of XSLT is to select just the nodes you are interested in. This task is done by XPath, “a query language for selecting nodes from a XML document.”

However, it can be tedious to create a XPath expression, run the transformation, and check if you got the expected result. After hours of debugging you find out: It’s the wrong XPath expression!

To make it easier: Test your XPath expressions in the internal xmllint shell!

(more…)

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Posted in Documentation | 2 Comments »

DNI electrónico en openSUSE

November 21st, 2009 by

El otro día recibí un mensaje de correo electrónico sobre cómo usar el DNI electrónico en openSUSE (¡muchas gracias Miguel!). Si alguien pudiera revisarlo (no tengo DNIe) para añadirlo al wiki, pues… sería estupendo 🙂

He hecho un pequeño “howto” en blogdrake para hacer funcionar el DNIe en Mandriva Linux. Como openSUSE también es una distro basada en rpm, y tampoco tiene paquetes “oficiales” para el DNIe, probé en una máquina virtual con la 11.2, y funciona.

Quería pedirte que revisaras un poco los comandos, los completaras, y los pusieras en algún sitio para que la gente que quiera usar el DNIe en openSUSE no tenga problemas. Te resumo un poco aquí los comandos:
(more…)

Posted in Documentation | 5 Comments »

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