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Toms´ Musings about…

June 7th, 2008 by

Some time ago, I saw this posting about the new blogging platform. Well, I played with this a idea a bit and thought, this would be a good opportunity. 🙂

So who am I? Well, I’m with SUSE (or SuSE, S.u.S.E.?) since 2000 and mainly in charge with documentation. Apart from that, I’m known to attack heavily XML and XSLT stylesheets, to some degree I work also with Python. As you have suspected, yes, I’m also a long time DocBook user (should I say advocate?) and helped migrated our old LaTeX sources to DocBook years ago. And I love to play with typography and the like.

Yes, you guessed it: It’s very likely that I will write about DocBook, XML, XSLT, Python, typography and anything in between. Of course, anything what I think it interesting too.

Stay tuned! 😉

Posted in Miscellaneous | 2 Comments »

Installation Source creation status

June 6th, 2008 by

There is some work going on to put installation source creation functionality into kiwi.
At the moment kiwi can use prepared installation sources such as:

  • BuildService Repositories
  • mounted DVDs
  • FTP trees

But what if you have a local Build Service building some binary only packages and you wish tp make a installable media set from, say, “SLES + binary only drivers”?
You can use the inter-BS-Connectivity feature to only build the drivers (and not the whole distribution) in your BS and then create an installation source from your main BS project.

This is possible since release of the package kiwi-instsource which extends the functionality of the config.xmlfile to allow the compilation of an installation source from scratch.
Hereby “scratch” means directories containing .rpm and .spm files. Of course some information must be provided for the metadata creation — but this is also all in the config file (with one known exception — the PDB data).

The rest is figuring out which packages must be on the installation source.
Since it is perfectly ok to have conflicting packages in instsources, there is no dependency check or package resolving in this stage. The information must come from the user.

Therefore the package list may become rather long and I already plan to implement some simplification.
These plans include:

  • allowing more than one <repopackages> section
  • implement outsourcing blocks in separate files using XML functionality

Tags: ,
Posted in Build Service, Software Management | 1 Comment »

Find Your Monitor

June 6th, 2008 by

Quite often I get bugreports that the hardware detection doesn’t find the monitor. Well, what should I do? We run a Video BIOS function for it, and if the BIOS can’t see the monitor, we’re out of luck.

But maybe not? It can well be that running BIOS code in Linux is not the best idea either.

To shed some light I wrote a small (6.5k if you must know) DOS-program and put it on a bootable CD. If that can’t detect the monitor it’s probably the BIOS’s fault, if it works blame, well, someone else. 😉

On a side note, the program was created with the usual gcc. It’s really surprising what you can do with a nice include file and a linker script.

Posted in Systems Management, YaST | Comments Off on Find Your Monitor

openSUSE 11.0 Now Available for Pre-order!

June 5th, 2008 by

openSUSE 11.0 Boxed EditionIt was quietly put up on the Novell store front page but openSUSE 11.0 is now available for pre-order! The boxed edition of openSUSE, which I have long been buying, has stayed the same, kinda bland looking white with a big lizard for a long time. But with 11.0 comes a new design that looks extremely slick and cool.

I also noticed the rather large notice on the American store page for openSUSE 11.0, which reads “Order to be shipped upon product release June 19.”

Hopefully that means they’ll try to avoid the tough time I and several others had getting a boxed edition in the United States (pre-ordering openSUSE, then getting it five weeks later, or four weeks after public release). They also don’t have the promotion from last year, where if you pre-ordered openSUSE 10.3 you got free shipping. Maybe that’s a trade-off for getting it at a reasonable time, if so I’m cool ;-).

UPDATE: According to an email Novell just sent out, free shipping is back if you pre-order, at least in the US. Also, a commenter said there is free shipping in Germany too.

Posted in Marketing | 6 Comments »

openSUSE 11.0 and Vista Users (Poor souls): How’s Dual-booting?

June 4th, 2008 by

Stephan Kulow asked on the Factory mailinglist if anyone was dual-booting Windows Vista and openSUSE 11.0:

Both me and the reporter of bug 396444 have a broken vista
boot after RC1 instalation (I ignored the problem as I did
not boot vista since quite some time, so it could just as well
be broken with alpha0).

So I wonder if other's vista is still functional? Unless I
know what's causing this, this bug is one of those that will
delay 11.0, so please help me.

Since there weren’t many people on the mailinglist who were, if you do boot Vista and SUSE 11.0, with success or otherwise, please let us know on the opensuse-factory@opensuse.org mailinglist 😉

Posted in Base System, Quality Assurance | 2 Comments »

11.0 Installation Walk-Throughs Mostly Done!

June 3rd, 2008 by

openSUSE 11.0 Installation Welcome PageI’ve got the openSUSE 11.0 installation walk-throughs mostly done! I say mostly, I did get the DVD installation tutorial completely done and published, but since we have a little over two weeks, if anyone has anything to add or correct to it, there’s plenty of time to do so. I also mostly finished a walk-through of the Live CD installation, but I’ve still got a few screenshots to add and corrections to make, so if you’ve got time take a look at both and help out, help us make them awesome easy to follow by release day!

I thought about just copying the instructions from the 10.3 Installation tutoral and adjusting them to 11.0, but since there were so many changes in the installation it would be more trouble than it would be worth.

So let’s raise a toast to the YaST developers for making the new installers really nice and spiffy! And thanks to Jonathon Arnold, hieronymus on Twitter, for providing me with the screenshots for the DVD installation!

Also, since I think this is my first post on Planet SUSE, hey everybody! I’ll just link to my bio.

Posted in Documentation | 3 Comments »

Home again …

June 1st, 2008 by

Today, well actually yesterday, was the last day of Linuxtag in Berlin. I was a little bit worried because i had to make sure the openSUSE day and the booth running smooth. So sorry if i had kind of bad temper in the morning … Thanks to everbody who helped at the booth, when i went down from the conference room to look at it it ran perfectly!

We had again a mixed count at the talks … I’m not sure which talk was visited the most, probably the Laptop 2.0 talk from Timo, Holger and Helmut (yes, i got your papers …), or the Talk from Marcus about Wine. Very close follower was Henne with his Freevo talk. I taped all the talks, but to be honest i’m not sure if the recordings are that good … quite hard for me to tune the picture on a tiny display. We will see it on Monday …

At the booth we gave away approx. 1700 openSUSE 10.3 PromoDVDs if i counted correctly, there was just one box with 60 DVDs left, because it was hidden somewhere. We also gave away a lot of our new openSUSE Laptop stickers. The kind you can put over the one with the four color window/flag 🙂

So thanks again to all who helped: Moenk and his friends from Linux-club.de, Christian, Jan-Simon, the SUSE and Novell guys who helped also at the booth and of course the Linuxtag team! (sorry if i forgot somebody, i need sleep).

There will be more verbose mail on opensuse-project next week, stay tuned …

btw: no new photos today, my cam died … i managed somehow to break the display in my pocket. If you made photos at the Linuxtag, please add a link in the comments, thanks!

btw2: i hope everbody who drove home by train is home now. We heard there was a big problem with the trains in germany.

Tags:
Posted in Events | 2 Comments »

Making openSUSE 11.0 LiveUSB : The Easiest (and Fastest) Way

May 31st, 2008 by

LiveUSB desktop

In earlier post, I’m writing “How to build openSUSE LiveUSB with Kiwi” tutorial guide and thinking how to get same results with more easier tips. Another distro came with easy trick to make a bootable LiveUSB and I think openSUSE should be 😉 . Kiwi is a great tools for making openSUSE liveUSB, QEMU Image, VMWare Image, XEN Image and LiveCD Image but it would not fit with any situation.

I’ve search various topics and found some of them looks pretty interesting to try. After reviewing some tips, here is a tutorial guide to make openSUSE 11.0 LiveUSB with the easiest way :

BENEFIT

  1. Tutorial can be used on Linux or Windows
  2. Do not need to install openSUSE onto hard disk for making LiveUSB as it was with KIWI. Just download the LiveCD ISO image and a tools for make an extract of ISO content (7-zip on Windows and mount -o loop tips on Linux)
  3. Can used FAT 32 file system for interoperability (marketing hype 😉 ) and mobility of data. Flash disk could be accessing by various OS
  4. Simple, only need a few step
  5. Fast process, required a few minutes for copying ISO image and initrd process

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: , ,
Posted in Documentation, Usability | 35 Comments »

Social Marketing for a Little Green Lizard

May 29th, 2008 by

With only like three weeks until openSUSE 11.0 is released to the world, now would be a good time to start the buzz around it. OK, so there’s already been a lot of buzz around 11.0, for example this article from Ars Technica which reached the front page of Digg, not to mention our own countdown and openSUSE 11.0 pages. But there’s many more ways you and I can help people know about openSUSE 11.0.

If your into the whole Web 2.0/Internet/Social Networking thing, you know how much of a help and marketing tool (aka timewaster) it can be. The trick is to not bother people and throw openSUSE in their face every day (sorry Twitter friends!). But there are many ways you can use these tools to help openSUSE. Our own community manager Zonker has talked about using Twitter to spread openSUSE, and it does work. In terms of Twitter, however, it depends on who your followers are. For example, many of my followers are Linux or SUSE users already. How does Twitter help with those people? I’ll answer that in a minute.

A few days ago, I started an event on Facebook: openSUSE 11.0 Public Release (you need to be logged into Facebook to view) as a type of meta-event. It doesn’t have a specific real world location (the location is set to opensuse.org; the city, which is required, was set to Nuremberg, Germany for obvious reasons) but it serves to bring the awareness of openSUSE 11.0’s release, and also encourages anyone else starting an actual release event (such as a openSUSE User Group or Linux user group) to add their event to Facebook and link it from the above event. Within 3 days, the number of people confirming their “attendance” is growing, and at least one person has mentioned that she plans on hosting a release party.

So, do you have any other ways to help share openSUSE 11.0? Are there openSUSE groups or 11.0 release events on other social networking websites the community should know about? Let me know through the comments!

Oh, and openSUSE 11.0 Release Candidate 1 should be out today!

BTW, this is my first post. I’m Kevin Dupuy, and instead of rehashing it all here, I’ve got my bio up on the wiki here.

Posted in Marketing | Comments Off on Social Marketing for a Little Green Lizard

It builds!

May 29th, 2008 by

Out of total insanity I promised Adrian a couple of weeks ago to test local installation of the OBS build service and interconnect it with the build.opensuse.org instance. Last night I couldn’t sleep due to the heat, so I finally did. Half an hour later, everything was installed and set up correctly according to the README.SETUP instructions in the obs-server package. I’ve fixed a couple of small issues in the README while doing so.

This morning, Michael Schroeder fixed the remaining bugs in the scheduler so that it actually runs. And now it builds 🙂

Source and binary interconnects work fine, so I can e.g. branch a package that is somewhere in the openSUSE buildservice (some KDE:KDE4: package or even openSUSE:Factory) and modify it locally in a test project, and watch the resulting build failures. There are some smaller issues with “osc linkpac” and “osc branch”, but editing the _link  files directly works.This way one can do experimental changes to packaging without actually breaking the repository for all other users, or slow down the build power ressources for everybody else due to unnecessary rebuilds.

As a test case, I’ve imported KDE 4.0.5 packages into a local branch of KDE:KDE4:STABLE:Desktop for testing. More seems possible, like for example doing a daily rebuild of the KDE 4.

Really cool stuff. Buildservice guys, keep rocking!

Posted in Build Service, KDE | 1 Comment »

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