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Archive for the ‘Packaging’ Category

wxRuby is now on BuildService

March 22nd, 2013 by

I am happy to announce that i succeded in compiling wxRuby 2.0.1 on my Buildservice account and it is available to be installed in just one click for openSUSE 12.2 and 12.3.

wxRuby is an old but working library based on wxWidgets toolkit, till some day ago the dependency from SWIG 1.3.38 and some small errors raised during the manual compilation, made the use of this library the worst nightmare for beginners who was looking for a fast approach to GUI based programming in Ruby.

After some day spent to investigate about a possible upgrade of the SWIG dependency to the current 2.0 version, i produced some patches to fix this and the other annoying compiling errors, and finally, thanks to the Buildservice infrastructure, a wxRuby RPM compiled from sources with the relative patches are now availables for all openSUSE users!

As far i googled this should be the first distro to have a precompiled and working wxruby gem among its repositories (being compiled from sources the gem is generated for 32 and 64 bits architecture from Buildservice itself), so Rubyists take a look on software.opensuse.org, select the package coming from my home project account and enjoy!

openSUSE 12.3 Image available for ARM64 (AArch64)

March 5th, 2013 by

Howdy,

the openSUSE on ARM team was quite busy the last few weeks with getting openSUSE 12.3 for AArch64 (ARM64, also called ARMv8) ready. At the time of this post, we have finished around 4100 packages (out of ~ 6000) of openSUSE 12.3 built for AArch64, the ARM 64bit platform. With those successfully built packages, we’re also able to build a regular openSUSE image for you to try and run in the ARMv8 System emulator (ARMv8 Foundation Model).

This is a huge achievement and milestone for us, thanks to lots of helpful hands within openSUSE. Just to put this into perspective: This is not a minimal system with a couple of toolchain packages. It is also not an embedded variant of a Linux environment. No, this is the full featured, standard openSUSE distribution as you’re used to, ported to AArch64, up and running. We have built it based on (slightly newer versions of) standard openSUSE 12.3 packages, and the changes are mostly already merged back into openSUSE Factory. For all we know it’s also more successful package builds than any other Linux distribution has on AArch64! If you’d like to see the status yourself, please check out the OBS repository we created for this.

As an open distribution, it is important to make contributions easy and we worked hard to enable others to participate in our effort. We extended OBS to automatically spawn a Foundation Model virtual machine when you want to build for aarch64. This works remotely on the OBS server as well as locally using osc build. More information on this is available on the respective wiki page.

So, dive right into it:  Get the image and start with openSUSE on AArch64 by following our wiki page: https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:ARM/AArch64.

ATI/AMD catalyst fglrx legacy updated to new 13.1 version

January 24th, 2013 by

Proprietary AMD/ATI Catalyst fglrx legacy 13.1 (8.97.100.7-1) rpm released

Notice

This release concern only radeon HD2xxx to HD4xxx owners

The published Catalyst fglrx rpm version support openSUSE version from 11.4 to 12.3 (new repository) and also Tumbleweed (thus also kernel 3.8x series).
For testing with the next openSUSE 12.3 just use the new openSUSE_12.3 repo

The release note

Feedback

Sebastian Siebert will publish an article today, and he’s looking for feedback about the patches included to make it working on 12.3, so don’t hesitate to get in touch with him

Comments:

As I didn’t have a gpu card of this series, I can’t test it before publishing the rpm like for normal fglrx. If someone has a spare hd2xxx or hd4xxx, Could he(she) contact me?

Have fun!

xtrabackup for MySQL

October 14th, 2012 by

If you run data-driven applications like me, you are probably already running some kind of backup and have plans for disaster recovery. I hope you are not still using SQL dumps?

I have been using Percona XtraBackup professionally for MySQL backups for a while now. Especially if your database access is highly transactional you will find it useful that you can get consistent non-blocking, non-purging backups while continuing to serve transactions. Who wants downtime anyway?

Under the hood the software will take a dirty copy of the InnoDB tablespaces on disk, and extract binary logs required to bring all of these to a specific point in time, or rather LSN, using a patched version of the mysqld binary. The preparation / restore requires applying the binary log to the files which results in MySQL tablespaces and binary log files equivalent to how they would have been with a clean MySQL shutdown.

Mixing transactional with non-transactional database engines is possible if you are willing to accept some blocking time while backing them up. If you are using MySQL replication, you can also use this to create a new slave from either a master or to clone a slave from another without downtime of either.

The upgrade to the 2.0 series adds, among other things, parallel IO and parallel compression. This requires a new streaming file format xbstream in addition the previous tar. Think of it as a tar with multiple input pipes.

I added the xtrabackup package to openSUSE, it is available in the server:database project (repo, SLE 11) right now and will also be part of the next openSUSE release.

Remember that these are only tools. Love your data and protect your business. A copy is not a backup. A backup that isn’t monitored for success is not a backup. A backup that is not proven to restore successfully is barely a backup.

Contact me if you need help setting this up.

How kiwi can help to cleanup your system

September 25th, 2012 by

After some iterations of updating the system with zypper dup or yast and some years of service with the system you will find out that there is a lot of dust which is obsolete or has been forgotten. Recently I had the problem that I need to move my 32bit system to a 64bit system and thus the way to go was to migrate the running system into an image description, build a 64bit image from it and install that on the 64bit machine. But the most important part was to cleanup the running system and find out what it really contains. The report kiwi migrate created here was helpful and so I think it might be helpful for others too. Just call:

kiwi –migrate mySystem

It will end up with some data below /tmp/mySystem which of course can be removed at any time without any risk. Most interesting is the html report generated which you can view with any browser. So far kiwi collects the following information:

  • kernel version and kernel specific kmp packages
  • hardware dependent packages
  • installed gem packages
  • repository checkouts
  • rpm packages installed multiple times
  • rpm packages which could not be found according to the current repo setup including version and repo information
  • tree of modified files, packaged but changed
  • tree of custom files, those which doesn’t belong to any package or other part of the bullet list

basically the use case of kiwi migrate is to migrate the running system into an appliance description but I’m not there yet. There is still room for improvement but I think it still can help to cleanup the system and to see what is installed on the system and not managed by a package manager

I have tested this since openSUSE 11.4

Remember to have fun 🙂

AMD/ATI Catalyst fglrx & fglrx legacy news

July 31st, 2012 by

AMD/ATI Catalyst fglrx & fglrx legacy news

Explanations of Hell

During June, with the version 12.6 (8.980) AMD decide to drop support for legacy radeon chipset from its main fglrx package and drop the time based release cycle.
So now if you are the owner of radeon hd2xxx to hd4xxx chipset family you will have to use the -legacy- version of fglrx, and
consequently if you have a radeon hd5xxx or above, you have to use the standard fglrx driver.
Then start the hell. After getting the new developed script from Sebastian Siebert, I will be able to offer the two versions. Unfortunately the two drivers can’t coexist in the same repository, the legacy drivers wants to install in place of normal one. This imply another limitation, you can’t have two graphics cards with differents generation at the same time.
So I decide to clarify (is that possible? :-)) the mess, and split the drivers in two distinct repositories. I use that excuse to also change the ati (deprecated brand name) and use new names: amd-fglx and amd-fglrx-legacy.
Don’t worry about your exiting installation, I will provide a symlink during the next 6 months at least for the old repositories. But read carefully the rest of the story, and apply any changes needed to your installation to be sure to continue to safely use the right driver.
I also decided to remove any version below 12.4 (8.961) in all repositories, except for openSUSE 11.2.

I need your help to spread those informations around the internet, and be sure that every user that need this driver know where and how to use it right. Tweet FbLike G+ forums, mailing list, private blogs Go now!

Release note about 12.6 and legacy 8.97.100

Both version can handle kernel 3.4 and 3.5

Sebastian Siebert warn us about the state of legacy

AMD catalyst control center and fgl_glxgears

These cards with the unofficial support of openSUSE 12.2 can run in the ideal case, just under 2 more years. However, one must keep in mind that the legacy driver is looked after, while AMD continues and eliminates errors found, but will not add new features. This can mean, among other things, that the next version of GNOME or KDE will not run with its 3D effects, especially when used with a desktop or Tumbleweed extra repository.

Sebastian’s post

If you have any comments, be do on his blog. Don’t be shy, you can leave there the result of test in english too 😀
or ask in forums, irc and ping freespacer.
See below what to do in case of troubles.

12.2 Factory rpms are presently available, use at your own risk, and report bugs in forums and Sebastian blogs.
Anyways, factory and 12.2 should keep their effort on debuging and testing widely the free radeon driver.

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A New Font Repository

May 21st, 2012 by

what do you need when you write some text? Content, of course. Apart from your content you need an additional part to make it a shiny contribution: fonts! If you don’t know already: we have now a new repository dedicated just to fonts.

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new package postgresql-plr. Get the power of R inside your postgreSQL database

March 30th, 2012 by

I’m pleased to introduce you to a new available package for postgreSQL database.
The R procedural language extension developed by Joseph E Conway.

R Procedural Language for PostgreSQL

Introduction

PL/R is a library which allow you to add the power of R statistical engine in your database.
This article will show you how to add it and basic usage on a 12.1 installation.
(The package is also available for 11.4)

Become familiar with the project and how it can help you.
The homepage project : www.joeconway.com/plr/

We admit here, that you are able to manage a posgreSQL server instance, and have already one running.
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subversion with libserf – continued

March 15th, 2012 by

Further about my work on packages for Apache Subversion with support for serf / libserf / ra_serf, that repository access module was not made default in the 1.7 release after all. Anyway, version 1.0.13 of serf is now available in devel:libraries:c_c++ with the intention of getting this into and in Factory. You will find current Apache Subversion packages with fixed conditional compilation against serf in home:AndreasStieger:serf home:AndreasStieger:branches:devel:tools:scm:svn devel:tools:scm:svn for testing.

Updated 27/05/2012: repository locations
And again after SR#122507 was accepted.

ATI/AMD fglrx : giving back this time

August 19th, 2011 by

Dear flgrx’s users of rpm or ati-installer.run, this time I’m asking your help.
geeko love
Sebastian Siebert (freespacer) give his time to maintain the SuSE part inside the installer. Unfortunately he didn’t have high-end graphics card, nor double screen, and thus is not able to test nor report results to AMD.
He’s also spending time on irc and forum to help users when things goes wrong.

So how can we help him? Simply giving back a little amount of money, if you can afford it.
I’ve opened a pledgie for that : see the full explanation at
pledgie.com/campaigns/15879.

I really count on you. Spread the word.

ps : Catalyst 11.8 is out, stay tuned, I’ll be back this week-end.