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Playing with openSUSE on LiveUSB Stick

May 19th, 2008 by

Today (Tuesday in Indonesia, May 20, 2008) is a public holiday in Indonesia regarding Waisak day (Waisak is a Buddhist event). My agenda for this holiday is give a training session about Zimbra Collaboration Suite with openSUSE 10.3. The training session started on 09.00 am until 03.00 pm but I think I can spare about minimum 20% of my holiday time to an interesting stuff. It’s a public holiday and I don’t want to work all of the time 😉 .

The first interesting stuff is making a LiveUSB stick for openSUSE. It’s not a really new because KIWI has an entry about how to make a live usb on openSUSE wiki, but I give it another try after reading Coolo’s announcement about new factory snapshot on Sunday, May 18, 2008.

http://ftp.suse.com/pub/projects/FactoryLiveCDs/ has new live cds as of today. Please note that it also has the first experimental release of live usb images.

  • Plugin in usb stick
  • Check dmesg output about the device name (e.g. sdc)
  • Umount all possibly automounted file systems
  • bzip2 -cd <download>.raw.bz2 | dd of=/dev/<device_name> bs=4096

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Posted in Build Service | 3 Comments »

openSUSE 11.0 Beta 3 Testing

May 19th, 2008 by

openSUSE 11.0 Beta 3 already available on factory repos since May 15 2008 (in Indonesia, GMT+7) and has announced on May 16, 2008, but I can’t directly tried it because one of my programmer staff has resigned last week, so, I must covering up his work for a while and I can’t go for an install fest 🙂 . I’ve finished downloading the iso-both kde live and the i386 dvd iso-on Friday, with standard downloading from mirror on ftp5.gwdg.de.

I tried beta 3 on Satuday, and having a problem while running KDE LiveCD. The LiveCD failed run with an error exception : “Failed mounting Read Only File System”. I think it was a problem with my testing computer, so I take another machine which ended with same result.

I think I would like to post the error on mailing list but I decided to wait an installation testing with DVD iso. on Beta 1 I’ve an issue with LiveCD installation but the DVD iso is worked without problem, so I think it would rather LiveCD problem than beta 3 problem in general.

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Posted in Artwork, KDE, OpenOffice.org, Usability | 7 Comments »

Redesign of YaST Expert Partitioner

May 16th, 2008 by

We are redesigning the YaST Expert Partitioner for openSUSE 11.1 and SLE11. The main idea is to have a navigation tree with all available storage devices on the left side and to display information on the right side along with buttons to perform appropriate actions. See the screenshot.

RPMs are available in the openSUSE Build Server in the repository home:aschnell. They are far from finished by you can already navigate in the tree and inspect you storage system. It should be possible to see where we are heading with the redesign. You can install them on your openSUSE 11.0 Beta 3.

Posted in Systems Management, Usability, YaST | 3 Comments »

Various Way for Promoting openSUSE

May 16th, 2008 by

openSUSE leaflet

Promoting openSUSE in Indonesia sometimes pretty hard and in another time is quite easy. Looks like a humor 😉 but it’s true. Why ?

Problem

There is a number of problem for promoting openSUSE. It’s not about openSUSE itself. In general it has a relationship with problem while promoting and implementing open source application in Indonesia. Most of the problem related with the point of view about open source. It’s about open source mindset. Some people usually asked, “is this quite easy to migrate our existing system into openSUSE ?”.

The piracy issue is the second largest problem. People used Windows application because they used it with piracy license. There is no license cost. It’s not for personal used only. Some of them are a company that should be used a legal license. In the past, I’ve found that various company, from small to medium company currently used piracy product for their system. If we asked them, “Hey, why don’t you buy a license for your commercial used ?”, the answer is, “It’s too expensive for us.”

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Posted in Marketing | 7 Comments »

Speed and Memory Usage of zypp in 11.0 Rocks!

May 15th, 2008 by

Duncan has done quick some measurements comparing zypper, yum and smart which show that zypper – the command line tool that openSUSE uses for package management – is now (finally 😉 not only comparable to yum and smart but even faster.

I would be very interested if somebody would do some extensive benchmarking to see whether zypper is faster overall and handles the corner causes as well.

Just compare: Setup for installation with yum is 19s whereas zypper needs 10s. Creation of meta data caches needs 4 minutes with yum and zypper rocks with 18s.

Memory usage: zypper needs maximal a bit over 18 MB while yum needs more than 180 MB and smart more than 60 MB.

If you run zypper – or the package management GUI applications, you really see that the team has done a great job to speed up and use less memory than before.

Posted in Software Management, Systems Management | 6 Comments »

Zimbra Collaboration Suite 5.0.X Auto Install Script

May 15th, 2008 by

zimbra-logoopensuse logoI’m playing with Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) for about 2 years, and quite satisfied with the stability, feature and administrative console. Before applying Zimbra I used standard postfix for office mail server.

Zimbra released with 2 licensing schema, commercial and open source license. Their open source license provided with Yahoo Public License.

I’m currently using Zimbra 5.0.4 on openSUSE 10.3. Manual installation could be found in my personal blog : Zimbra Installation on openSUSE 10.3. You may need a small modification into ZCS installation script because ZCS originally released for openSUSE 10.2.

After deploying Zimbra on openSUSE 10.3 for such company (part of Indonesian openSUSE community project for increasing openSUSE usability and our promotion project of openSUSE usability for server side), I make a deal to write a small script using bash. It’s pretty simple and looks like a primitive script with just cp, tar and mv 😀 . I will make a nice graphical user interface after learning C++ or Java 😉 .

So, how to build powerful mail server with Zimbra on openSUSE 10.3 ? Here it does :

  1. Install openSUSE 10.3
  2. Make sure you have a Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) for your hostname, ie : namahost.namadomain.com, not only namahost. Checked it out with YAST | Network Service | DNS & Host Name or by editing /etc/hosts directly
  3. Make sure you have more than 5 GB of free space. Please navigate into “Preparing your server environment” on Zimbra Wiki for more information.
  4. Setup your DNS server. For testing, you may only create name server and address record (NS MX & A records). Please refer to a nice article How to Setup BIND DNS Server. *We have a nice graphical setup DNS using YAST but it was written on Bahasa Indonesia* 🙂
  5. Download Zimbra-Auto install script
  6. Extract the script into /opt/zimbra-auto. I will make a flexible script in the future but currently the script will only worked with /opt/zimbra-auto until you editing the script
  7. Download ZCS open source edition for openSUSE. The script was originally written for ZCS ver 5.0.4. If you used the latest ZCS version, please feel free to make an editing into Zimbra-Auto script
  8. Getting started by running /opt/zimbra-auto/zimbra-auto-opensuse103.sh install script and follow the wizard.

Note :

  1. You may need add an exception port into firewall and AppArmor configuration
  2. I will make an entry on openSUSE wiki after reviewing the script

Related Entry :

  1. Installing ZCS 5.0.X on openSUSE 10.3 a complete guide by Bigmudcake
  2. Zimbra Installation on openSUSE 10.3
  3. Installing ZCS 4.5.x on either openSUSE 10.2 or 10.3 a complete guide
  4. Problem may occurred regarding AppArmor Setting

Posted in Documentation, Server | 1 Comment »

Indonesian openSUSE Community Monthly Meeting on Detik.com

May 15th, 2008 by

This is my first post in lizards.opensuse.org :-). Thanks to Beineri for activating this account.

Indonesian openSUSE Community (openSUSE-ID) monthly meeting will be held on Saturday, May 24, 2008, 09.00-13.00 am (GMT+7) at Detik.com head office Jakarta. Detik.com currently is the biggest online newspaper in Indonesia.

The monthly meeting called “Kopdar”, means “Kopi Darat” or offline/physical/face to face meeting.

This monthly meeting will be discuss some issue regarding openSUSE 11.0 release party on June 2008, preview about openSUSE 11.0 features, openSUSE remastering and share knowledge about zypper package manager.

Another topic is about our agenda on IGOS Summit 2 event. IGOS stand for Indonesia goes Open Source and IGOS Summit 2 is an event prepared by Ministry of Communication and Information Technology of Indonesia to encourage open source application usability in Indonesia. OpenSUSE-ID have a booth at the event. Well, it’s a small booth (2.75 m x 2.5 m with 1300 watt of electricity) but this booth is free of charge 😉 and we have a nice opportunity to promoting openSUSE.

We choose Detik.com as our place for monthly meeting to reached more user and (maybe) to get a nice publication about our activity. a friend of mine worked for Detik.com and he helped me to arrange this event. Thanks Andry.

So, if you are an Indonesian openSUSE lover, why don’t you join with us on Detik.com. Let share together !

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Posted in Events, Miscellaneous | Comments Off on Indonesian openSUSE Community Monthly Meeting on Detik.com

Wiki on a Stick

May 14th, 2008 by

Have you ever had the problem that you start writing something in a wiki, take some time to think, drink coffee and do other things and finally press Save in your browser and realise that your session with the wiki has already ended?

There is a very cool thing that helps here, I saw it on Christian Hüllers screen recently: woas or Wiki on a Stick. This is a single (not simple 😉 html file that you open in your browser and it comes up as client side wiki that allows to edit documentation offline in wiki syntax with a browser based editor etc.

The nice thing is that the result is still one file. It is not really nice because of tons of styles and javascript functions in it, but it is just one non binary. That allows to check it into a source controll system and the problem “Maintaining the docs in Wiki or at the source” is a bit easier to decide now. Nice.

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Posted in Miscellaneous | Comments Off on Wiki on a Stick

Discussing Garden Ornaments

May 14th, 2008 by

Well, it’s more the ornaments of the garden having a discussion 🙂

The GNOME Team are holding their meeting tomorrow Thursday 15th May at 1600GMT/UTC/ZULU (or translate it into your local time).  As always you can get sight of the agenda,the main themes for this week are PulseAudio, PackageKit, and installation patterns.

So if you have any suggestions, questions or complaints please join in on irc and get you voice heard.  Remember we are a community that like to work together.  If you want to try and influence anything within openSUSE then don’t be passive and sit in the background grumbling, stand up and join in.  This goes for all aspects of openSUSE, not just GNOME.  We won’t bite, but we may disagree.  From that disagreement we can hopefully get to an amicable compromise, or at the very least explain the decisions that have been made.

So please join use tomorrow and try and make GNOME even better under openSUSE 🙂  As it happens the KDE Team have their meeting today at 1800GMT/UTC/ZULU (translation to local).

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Posted in Events, GNOME | Comments Off on Discussing Garden Ornaments

Hamradio packages for openSUSE 11.0

May 13th, 2008 by

Together with Tim Fischer I’m packaging hamradio-related software in the “hamradio”-repository in openSUSE Build Service. We are now prepairing updates and start of packaging for upcoming openSUSE 11.0 .

If you are interested in helping us, feel free to contact us! Also if you miss a package in our repo.

I’ll blog on the progress here …

Edit: The repository is http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/hamradio/

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Posted in Build Service, Desktop, Packaging | 2 Comments »

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