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openSUSE Build Service Build Checks

September 8th, 2008 by

Last week, Adrian announced that the openSUSE Build Service uses the same build checks that the internal autobuild uses and that these have been enabled for builds of factory and for builds of packages against factory.  This is an important step for building packages with the OBS since it means that a package that builds in the OBS, will not anymore fail once it has been submitted to build for factory.

We now have put all checks in packages so that they can be easily enhanced: brp-check-suse, rpmlint (the polices are in the rpmlint-Factory package) and post-build-checks.  The rpmlint checks are run after the package has been built, the brp-check-suse scripts might be run during the build since they contain specific rpm macros and finally post-build-checks is executed at the end.  The goal is to move everything to rpmlint checks.

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Posted in Build Service, Distribution, Packaging | Comments Off on openSUSE Build Service Build Checks

small Qt based mail biff

September 8th, 2008 by

Some days ago I was asked what this little button bar on my desktop is and I explained that it’s only a small program I wrote to keep track on my mail folders. I know there are many many programs out there which already does the same but for some reason he liked it and encouraged me to blog about it 🙂

qbiff runs as a server client application and is able to manage mails stored in the maildir format. The server should run on the machine which locally stores the data and the client or multiple of them can run on the desktop you have an eye on. The connection(s) between the server and the client(s) are SSL connections, even though there is no mailcontent which is transfered the information how many mails, how many new ones and what mail folders exists might be an information not everybody needs to know about… so I chose a secure connection 😉

If the file .qbiffrc exists the user can control which mail folders should be checked, if the file doesn’t exist all folders the server finds at start up will be used. Each folder is represented by a button. Whenever a new mail arrives the button changes its color and notifies the user with a tip window about the current mail situation of this folder. A click on the button runs a user defined program whereas the first parameter is the path and name of the folder. In my setup I call mutt respectively to read the mail in the folder

So it looks basically like this…

Packages can be found in my home Project at:

  • http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/sax2
  1. Install the package qbiffd on your server
  2. Install the package qbiff on your client, server and client could be the same machine
  3. Edit the file /etc/sysconfig/qbiff on the server and setup at least the  QBIFF_USER which should be the same user the mails belong to and the QBIFF_FOLDER which is the base directory of your mails
  4. Run the server by calling rcqbiffd start
  5. Run the client by calling qbiff-client. The default password for the SSL certificates is “linux“
  6. click on a folder button and read the note about how to setup a personal mail reader script

If you want to create your own certificates you need to check out the code at

  • svn co https://svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/qbiff/qbiff-head .

and run the following commands:

  1. cd cert-server && make distclean && make
  2. cd ../cert-client && make distclean && make
  3. cd ..
  4. ./.certinstall on the server and the client

Posted in Desktop, Network | Comments Off on small Qt based mail biff

opensuse-tutorials is up online

September 7th, 2008 by

There are fedora-tutorials, ubuntu-futorials website on the web, for anyone who envies, of course, we have opensuse-tutorials either.

This link is for those who doesn’t don’t know it yet.

feel free to register and contribute to it.

http://opensuse-tutorials.com/

Tags:
Posted in Marketing | Comments Off on opensuse-tutorials is up online

HOW TO: Remove the annoying KDE error “kio_media_mounthelper” when unmounting usb device

September 6th, 2008 by

With KDE3 and with some usb sticks or drives, could happen that if you try to safely remove them, with the classic right click –> safely remove, you’ll get an error from kio_media_mounthelper.

The error say that: The device was correctly unmounted but couldn’t be ejected

This is only a really annoying warn because the media has been unmounted so we can safely remove it, but how can we remove that?

I found the fix on Mandriva bugzilla (bug #39762)

The solution is really easy, is infact enought download that script (kdeeject)

Once the script has been downloaded do the following as root:

chmod +x kdeeject
mv kdeeject /opt/kde3/bin/kdeeject

now we will get that warn no more!

Just for knowledge, that script ask to hal if the device could be ejected, if not the media is only unmounted, if yes it is ejected too.

I hopes that to be usefull for lots.

Andrea 😉

Posted in Desktop, KDE, Usability | Comments Off on HOW TO: Remove the annoying KDE error “kio_media_mounthelper” when unmounting usb device

Lizards HowTo for Blogger

September 6th, 2008 by

I have started to create an initial HowTo in the openSUSE wiki to explain how to blog on lizards.openSUSE.org.

If you’re a blogger using lizards.o.o, I hope this information is helpful  for you – and I’d ask you to update it with everything you find useful.

Posted in lizards.openSUSE.org | 1 Comment »

openSUSE Board Election Comments

September 6th, 2008 by

The first openSUSE board has been appointed a year ago and now the elections are starting.  We have formed an election committee that is organising it (see here for details – thanks to Marko, Andrew, Claas and Vincent for running the elections!).

I had some good discussions with Pascal, Andrew and Marco during hackweek about the board and Pascal and myself have the same vision for the board.  Both Pascal and myself committed to blog about the board elections and Pascal beat me to it (see here and here for his two posts).  I’m not blogging to refute what Pascal wrote, I’m writing this to give my personal view as well – as the current chairman of the board.

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Posted in Board, Elections | Comments Off on openSUSE Board Election Comments

Google Chrome on openSUSE

September 4th, 2008 by

As I guess everyone notice, Google has released their own Browser called Chrome. Based on Webkit (based on KHTML of KDE fame) it is a small, fast and foremost secure webbrowser. And if you are reading this, you likely know that it does not work on Linux, but only on Windows.

But wait … we have the Windows Emulator Wine and I am one of its developers…

This also explains the first comment from a colleague on Wednesday morning was: “Why don’t you have fixed Wine to run it yet?!?” We tried together to get the online installer to run, but not successful.

Over night however some other folks found out how to do it by using the offline installer.

So how to install Chrome:

1. Get the Wine 1.1.3 from the openSUSE buildservice Emulators:Wine repository.

Its available via the Community Repositories Module in YAST2 on openSUSE 10.3 and 11.0,
after adding this repository upgrade the wine package.

This piece of code run as root will do it on openSUSE 11.0:
zypper sa http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Emulators:/Wine/openSUSE_11.0/ Wine
zypper in wine

All other steps are done as desktop user from a regular shell.

2. Download the Chrome Offline Installer

wget http://gpdl.google.com/chrome/install/149.27/chrome_installer.exe

3. Install richedit native libraries.

While Wine contains richedit libraries they are not yet up to the task to help Chrome yet.
(This is likely to be fixed soon.)

To install them run:
winetricks riched20 riched30

3. Run Chrome Installer

wine chrome_installer.exe

This will popup a dialog where you can press return until Chrome itself starts.

Since we need to supply Chrome with some Options to make it work with current Wine, you need
to close it again. Click anyway any crash messageboxes.

4. Run Chrome itself

We need to supply Chrome with some additional commandline options to make it run with Wine,
so we need to do start it by hand (instead of clicking on the convenient Desktop Icon already there).

cd ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/profiles/*/*/*/Google/Chrome/Application
wine chrome.exe --new-http --in-process-plugins

5. Surf!

And of course the obligatory screenshot:chrome wine opensuse

Most of the funny workarounds above will actually vanish in the next Wine releases, now that the Wine developers can actively debug it.

The WineHQ Application database entry has the ongoing discussion of getting it to work and links to the Wine bugzilla entries.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Desktop | 4 Comments »

Funny Output For Some

September 3rd, 2008 by

Last week (aka Hackweek 3) I worked on a Linux From Scratch system.

A colleague dropped by and asked me what kind of power supply were sufficient for a certain machine. I thought “ok, let’s just ask lshal|grep battery
My hope was that the hardware would not only measure the voltage of the battery but also the current drained from it.

What I found was kinda funny from an Electrical Engineer’s point of view:

lshal output for laptop battery

So what? “voltage.current”? Voltage? Or current? Or multiplied?

After laughing a bit I thought seriously about bug report, but it isn’t a bug apparently.
I find those things funny, can’t help it. I therefore consider this an Easter Egg of HAL.

Still, if anyone knows if a laptop can tell me the current current (SCNR), let me know.

Cheers,
Jan

Posted in Hackweek, Miscellaneous | Comments Off on Funny Output For Some

Unifying Progress During Installation – Continued…

September 3rd, 2008 by

So, my code from the hackweek is now in the YaST Subversion and the packages submitted for build.

Now the fun part begins, as some YaST developers noticed very quickly. There are several parts of YaST that got broken – e.g. YaST Partitioner on the running system spotted by Arvin, or sw_single not really adapted spotted by Bubli, …

Thanks to those I’m working with Kobliha to fix the issues as they come. So, if there is a progress in YaST (typically related to package installation) that does not behave as expected, it is certainly worth a bug report.

Posted in YaST | 2 Comments »

arm worker on i586 host

September 1st, 2008 by

Last week I joined the obs-cross “task-force” 😉 and Martin Mohring posted two nice articles about it ([1] [2]).

Today I played with it and got a i586 worker to build for arm.

Here’s a summary what I did:

  • Installed a cross-obs, as done in Martin’s article
  • Copied init_basesystem and build from /usr/lib/build/ to /usr/obs/server/build (to have the same changes as for ‘osc build’ for the worker)
  • search for “my %cando” in bs_dispatch, bs_repserver and bs_worker and change 2 lines to:


    • 'i586' => ['i586', 'armv4l'],
    'i686' => ['i586', 'i686', 'armv4l'],

  • (note: this is just a hack to get it running – our obs-experts are already working on a smarter solution)
  • update: not needed anymore!: added BUILD_USER=root at line 1201 in file /usr/obs/server/build/build to make dh_testroot happy (HACK!)
  • update: use this! Edit /usr/lib/obs/server/build/build , uncomment line with “-rfakeroot” and comment out next line. Also replace “-rfakeroot” with “-rfakeroot-tcp”
  • run sh /usr/sbin/qemu-binfmt-conf.sh
  • start the worker (on the same machine! – otherwise at least install the mentioned qemu!)

    • Now the worker gets a job assigned and does the same magic arm-build as shown in Martin’s posts.

    An enhancement would be to let the workers advertise their “cando”-archs and assign the jobs according to the info recieved by the workers.

    Posted in Build Service, Hackweek | Comments Off on arm worker on i586 host

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