Desktop files contain a lot of information about KDE/Gnome/X11 applications (e.g. names, icons).
Displaying this data in the package selector allows to provide a more detailed package description. The user can easily see which applications are included in an installed package.
Running these applications via mouse click is technically possible, but unfortunately security concerns don’t allow it. Please let me know if you have an idea how to solve this issue.
First of all we want to provide an general web based interface with the
functionality which is already provided by the YaST command line interface.
This API is based on the REST (Representational state transfer) architecture. This is a
simple interface which transmits domain-specific data over HTTP.
Please have a look to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer
for more information about REST.
The second aim is to provide a YaST Web UI which can be used by every
web browser.
The current state of the project is an existing YaST-Webservice on the
host side which provides the REST based interface.
On the client side we have the concerning YaST-Webclient which can be
used be any web browser.
YaST-Webservice and YaST-Webclient are running as a webserver
(currently lighttpd) on different or even the same computer.
So the aim is to configure a host via the internet in a simple and
safety way.
The YaST Webclient communicate via HTTP(s) with the YaST Webservice. The
user has to authenticate ( username, password ) to the host via PAM
(Pluggable Authentication Modules) which is available on every linux system.
The YaST Webclient sends requests ( e.g. create a user, install patch) to
the YaST Webservice. This service checks if the user has the right to
execute this request via PolicyKit. For each kind of request there is
PolicyKit rule defined. These rights has to be granted to the concerning user.
After permission check the request will be send via DBUS to the SCR agent of
YaST. The return value will be given back to YaST-Webclient in XML or JSON
format.
Patches will be handled by PackageKit. These requests will also be sent from
the YaST Webservice to PackageKit via DBUS.
Have a look the openSUSE buildservice project
YaST Webservice (home:schubi2)
There are all needed packages for version openSuSE 11.1 and above.
As some additional packages (e.g. lighttpd) are needed which are not on openSuSE 11.1 you should add a
repositories ( e.g. factory ) in order to provide these packages.
The simplest way for installation would be to use zypper:
zypper in yast2-core-2*.rpm
zypper in ruby-dbus-*.rpm
zypper in yast2-webservice-*.rpm
zypper in yast2-webclient-*.rpm
After you have installed these packages you can start the YaST-Webservice-Server with
rcyastws start
The server is running as “localhost:8080” with which you can connect with a web browser:
http://localhost:8080
This “pure” web page shows the available modules which can be used via the REST interface.
This REST API is described under
http://localhost:8080/doc_interface.html
Additional configuration stuff like
– setup Hostname and Port
– setup HTTPS connection
– granting permissions for an single user
– AVAHI support
can be found here:
http://localhost:8080/doc_config.html
After you have started the YaST-Webservice-Server you also can start the YaST-Webclient:
rcyastwc start
Now you can use any browser and connect with http://<name of your computer> to your
computer.
The default rights of the YaST Webservice are set to root only. So you can login with the root password
of that machine.
Following features are implemented:
– setting languages
– setting system time
– setting user permissions
– installing patches
– managing local users
– export user SSH-keys
– starting,stopping,status,… of services
– configuration of ntp server
Have a look to the following screen shot it order to give an overview how it looks like:
Known Bugs
-The first call of an menue entry will be slow cause an additional process will be started.
The second one should be much more faster 🙂
-Permissions will sometime not be shown correctly (just click “search” again) Bug 470645
As we get more and more PHP-, Perl- and other applications like openSIS, Koha, Moodle, … in the Education repository, the question turns up, how to package those applications “the right way”.
A normal user, who wants to use one of these apps, might just choose to install the package and has the problem how to proceed afterwards. openSUSE sadly has no “post config” scripts like Debian based distributions – even the SuSEconfig scripts are deprecated. So all a packager can currently do is:
For the Education project, I’m currently thinking about two ways to make the life of the admins easier.
First: think about “wrapper packages” around the normal packages. I’ll take moodle as example. The normal moodle package installs the php-scripts, an apache configuration and some other config stuff – but will not setup the complete moodle instance. So the user has to install the mysql database himself. An additional wrapper package can do this for him. This package comes with a SQL-Dump of the current moodle version (therefore requires the exact moodle version), and uses a stored mysql-root password to create a new database and insert the database-dump. If needed (for example: the user enables the “user LDAP-Auth wherever possible” checkbox in a (to be written) yast-edu module), additional tasks can be triggered by the wrapper package.
We can also think about calling a “generic” YaST module after installation of such a “needs postconfiguring” package. If we define a place (say: /var/adm/YaST/postinstall/) where packages can place a file containing some important questions to configure the application, and someone writes a YaST module which can be started, this would perhaps be “very cool”. If the user has entered his values, the YaST module can start one or more scripts (coming with the package) and feeds it with the entered values. The biggest questions for this solution:
Think about a file like this:
<package name=”moodle”>
<questionpack type=”string” action=”/usr/share/moodle/scripts/install_database”>
<question arg=”1″ type=”string”>What’s the database password?</question>
<question arg=”2″ type=”string”>What should be the name of the new database (suggest: moodle)?</question>
<question arg=”3″ type=”string”>What’s the username of the new database user?</question>
<question arg=”4″ type=”string”>What’s the password of the new database user?</question>
</questionpack><questionpack action=”/use/share/moodle/scripts/configure_auth_backend” type=”selectbox”>
<question arg=”1″>What auth-backend should be used?</question>
<answer value=”1″>ldap</answer>
<answer value=”2″>mail</answer>
<answer value=”3″>passwd</answer>
</questionpack>
</package>
I think, there’s room for many enhancements in this area – what do you think ?
Should/Could we produce something like a “Windows-Installer” for openSUSE? Or is it enough to provide special “wrapper packages”? Or is “what was hard to write, should be hard to install” still a valid answer?
There are many approaches to managing software packages. Some users like to use command line tools like zypper. Others prefer a GUI tool like the YaST2 package selector. And even within such a GUI tool, there are many ways to deal with the packages you’d like to install, update or remove: Install a bunch of packages that make up a functionality like “KDE desktop” or “web development”, find one specific package with a known name, or just look through packages that are available. That’s why there are different filter views for those different approaches.
How do you select any of those filter views? In previous versions of the (Qt) package selector, we used to have a combo box to do that:
That’s somewhat unusual, and there have always been critics who claimed that we should use tabs instead. Our standard reply was always that this would not really be helpful because there are so many of them; you’d run out of screen space quickly, and with the number of filter views we have, this would look overwhelming and confusing:
Ugh… not good. Not even at this screen resolution. Now think about 800×480 netbooks and more verbose languages like German, French or Hungarian. No way to make this fit on the screen. And left/right scroll buttons are the last thing you want for tabs.
So, what else could we do?
(more…)
kupdateapplet shows a popup that asks the user to send his/her hardware profile to the smolt project.
I think kupdateapplet isn’t the appropriate application for showing this notification because smolt has nothing in common with update installation.
I’ve written a tiny python-qt script that shows the smolt popup.
You can find a package called smolt-qt in my build service home. Feel free to test and comment!
With openSUSE 11.1 on the road we developers can use some time for new ideas. One idea on my mind for month was to show the dependencies of storage devices in a graph. Using graphviz and QGraphicsScene a first version was running within few days.
It’s far from finished. Some items still missing are:
Will be available in Factory within the next weeks. Further improvements are welcome.
This is just a short reminder that in openSUSE 11.1, it is possible to search online for packages in YaST as described in this blog (thanks to Lukas and Bubli for making this reality!).
In short, just type on command line:
/sbin/yast2 webpin_package_search
and you will get this UI for an online search and install of packages:
Enjoy!
Today, I’ve played a bit with an idea to allow starting of YaST Server module from the YaST System Services module.
The only visible difference is the additional “Configure…’ button at the bottom of the dialog. This button would be active only if there is a YaST module associated with the entry. After clicking it, the respective YaST module would be started:
With this simple principle, the YaST control center ‘Network Services’ section would be reduced to:
And all those YaST modules would be available from ‘System’ section:
This approach could be used even further. You can see that the ‘Network Services’ section contents do not really match the section name anymore. In fact, most of the items could be moved to other modules as well. E.g. introducing a module for authentication/authorization, which would cover Kerberos client, LDAP client, etc. The NFS client is in fact a part of the new Disk Partitioning module already. So, the section could vaporize completely.
However, there are drawbacks. The biggest one I see is a ‘starting point’ problem. Just imagine you want to have a Apache2 running in your system. Until now, the YaST HTTP module is installed and can be used to bootstrap your configuration – it will install the packages and help to set up the basics. But with the new approach, the apache2 package is not installed, therefore System Services module would not see the apache2 service (init script) and does not show it at all! I’m not sure how to address this. Maybe the best would be to attach the YaST module to apache2 package or HTTP server pattern and the Software Management module would become such starting point. Would it be better? I don’t know.
Then, there is an issue of a quick access – if you are moderately experienced user, you know what you are looking for and you start a proper module right away. But to figure out what is the configuration starting point if it’s hidden in another module, that might be a blocker.
I’m sure there are more problems. Anyway, I find the idea quite useful for reducing the number of YaST modules. What do you think?
YaST uses style.qss located in /usr/share/YaST2/theme/current/wizard by
default. If you want YaST to use a different style sheet (e.g. the style shown
while installation) you can set the $Y2STYLE environment variable:
Y2STYLE=installation.qss /sbin/yast2 disk
I’ve added a new hotkey to YaST which allows to modify the style sheet on
runtime. Pressing [Ctrl] + [Shift] + [Alt] + [S] in a YaST module opens the Stylesheet Editor. Now you can load a style sheet and modify its style rules.
The Stylesheet Editor can be very usefull when you want to design your own style for the YaST Qt4 UI.
This feature will be available in openSUSE 11.2. If you want to use it now all you need is yast2-qt version 2.18.2. You can find the latest version here:
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/tgoettlicher/openSUSE_Factory/
Let’s extend the application to make it even more useful!
* add support for YaST-Repositories
* add Support for different architectures
* use always a random temporary directory
Now, it looks like this:
You can grab it out of my home: in the openSUSE Build Service (for openSUSE 11.0).
Start it with “repoviewer”, add the repository’s url, select the type, the architecture and hit “Go!” .
You can choose the architectures only for the “highest” type of the family as they list the “lower” types, too.
So to see “ppc” packages. use “ppc64” in the combobox and later “ppc” in the “Arch” column.
For big repos (like factory) it takes some time to download and parse the metadata.
Also try in a console-window:
unset DISPLAY; repoviewer
😉 thanks to libyui, that just works !
Update: You can access also local directories (like mounted CDs/DVDs).
Just use “file:///” and the full path ! E.g.: “file:///media/SU1100.001/”
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