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A week in the Green Tail …

February 16th, 2013 by

Fosdem + Hackaton

Green Tail
As any hackaton, you finish a bit exhausted. but what the hell, how rich was this week!

I will not come back on the long (could we say impressive) list of things done.
Wiki Marketing
or Artwork todo.

A enormous thanks to all participants :
Carlos (victorck), Carlos (CarlosRibeiro), Izabel (IzabelleValverde), Kostas (warldofff), Ilias (zoumpis), Marcel (tux93), Richard (ilmehtar), Michal (|miska|).

Also they deserve a full bunch of applause, thanks to SUSE’s people!

Augustin, Jos, Will, Christopher, Adrian, Henne, Jurgen, Kenneth, Cassio, Alberto, Ralf, Roland, James, Jan, Ludwig, Cornelius, Suzanne and at least a big dozen of others…

For your clear engagement, your support to empower our community, your advises, your welcomes, and being so kind with the turbulent community’s Geekos we were…

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Posted in Artwork, Events, Hackweek, Marketing | 2 Comments »

Live USB GUI

February 14th, 2013 by

Here is a new tool that provides a simple zenity based GUI frontend to live-fat-stick script. The live-fat-stick script allows you to create multi boot USB stick/HDD which has vfat partition on it without formatting or removing existing data on it, it uses whole ISO images to boot so the image is still usable to create more live USB sticks or burn CD/DVDs. In live mode the device’s vfat partition can be mounted to access/modify and save files.

Currently live CD/DVD isos of openSUSE 12.2(and derivatives) including all from susestudio, Mint, Ubuntu(and derivatives) and Fedora are supported. Fedora iso is not copied but is extracted on the USB device instead as it does not support booting from iso image yet.

Here is Live USB GUI in action:
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Posted in Derivative, Desktop, Distribution, Systems Management, Usability | Comments Off on Live USB GUI

Use Skype 4.10 with openSUSE 12.3 x86_64

February 11th, 2013 by

I’m testing PulseAudio 3.0 on openSUSE 12.3 RC1 and it might be helpful to hang this information out here where Google can find it:

To use Skype with openSUSE 12.3, you need to download the Skype package for openSUSE.  If you’re using a 64 bit machine/install, like most of us nowadays, you also need some 32 bit compatibility packages, included with openSUSE.

  1. Download Skype from http://www.skype.com/en/download-skype/skype-for-linux/
  2. Select openSUSE 12.1 32 bit (the most recent openSUSE version for which they offer Skype at time of writing) and save the package
  3. As root,

    zypper in skype-4.1.0.20-suse.i586.rpm alsa-plugins-pulse-32bit

    to install the package, its 32 bit requirements, and the 32 bit ALSA plugin for PulseAudio it also needs, but doesn’t/can’t specify automatically.

Happy calling.

 

Posted in Desktop, Sound | 3 Comments »

Announcing the release of openSUSE Edu Li-f-e 12.2.2

February 6th, 2013 by

Li-f-e just got better. This update follows the release of openSUSE Edu Li-f-e 12.2 way back in September 2012,  is made up of same packages but includes the updates available from official openSUSE and all the additional repositories such as Build Service Education, Packman etc.

Get it from here:Direct Download | Torrents | Metalinks | md5sum

Have a lot of fun…
Your openSUSE Education Team

Posted in Derivative, Desktop, Distribution, Education, GNOME, KDE, openSUSE 11.2 | Comments Off on Announcing the release of openSUSE Edu Li-f-e 12.2.2

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!

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Posted in GNOME, KDE, Kernel, Packaging, X.org, XFCE | 7 Comments »

Proprietary AMD/ATI Catalyst fglrx 13.1 (9.012-1) rpm released

January 21st, 2013 by

Proprietary AMD/ATI Catalyst fglrx 13.1 (9.012-1) rpm released

Sorry this article should have been published Saturday, but some trouble (error in a updated module) locked me outside of lizards), Thanks to Matthew to have fix it in the meantime

fglrx 13.1 amd-ccc & fgl_glxgears

fglrx 13.1 amd-ccc & fgl_glxgears

Notice

This release concern only owners of radeon HD5xxx or above.
For older gpu, the fglrx-legacy is still 12.6, and thus didn’t work with Kernel 3.6, 3.7, 3.8
SDB:AMD_fgrlx_legacy
Beware of that fact, and prefer the free open-source radeon driver which came out of the box from your openSUSE distribution.

Release note about 13.1

This Catalyst fglrx 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

Release Note

A release note is available on AMD website

Fixed issues

    [368958]: Driver release version is added to GL_VERSION
    [367282]: Bblank VGA display after resume from suspend
    [367245]: X crash for AMD PowerXpress™ A+I High-Performance mode on Ubuntu 12.10
    [366820] Performance of Valve Linux games
    [366805]: Segmentation fault when exit QtOpenGL applications such as AMD CodeXL
    [366425]: Xserver getting exit upon resume from suspend on RHEL 5.8
    [364107]: VariBright not working when change AMD PowerPlay™ settings in AMD Catalust Control Center:LE
    [363638]: VariBright doesn’t work after resume from suspend on “Trinity” platform
    [350759]: Flickering cursor when run some full-screen OpenGL games with CrossFire enabled
    [347895]: OpenGL performance on “Southern Islands” ASICs
    [344996]: 16 re-frames doesn’t work for H.264 @Level 5.1
    [337240]: Corruption when resize the Konsole window
    [304016]: One display goes black after changing from multi-display desktop from single independent

Sebastien Siebert making script

Sebastian Siebert post about 13.1

If you have any problems with the driver, don’t be afraid to report to Sebastian (German and English bugreports are gladly accepted).
he will try, as far as I am able to reproduce the bug. Together with the necessary system information, he will go directly to the right place at AMD to have the bug fixed in the next driver release.
Thank you very much, Sebastian.

See below what to do in case of troubles.

Or you can also ping him on irc (freespacer)

fglrx & 3d effects kde 4.9.5 on openSUSE 12.2

fglrx & 3d effects kde 4.9.5 on openSUSE 12.2


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Posted in GNOME, KDE, Kernel, X.org, XFCE | 2 Comments »

OpenStack on openSUSE

January 11th, 2013 by

Do you want to play with cloud software on your own machines?
Some people have been working to package the current OpenStack version “Folsom” for openSUSE (tested on 12.2) and add scripts to configure it into a working state.
You need 2GB of RAM and 3+ GB of free disk space under /var/lib/
Then you do

wget https://raw.github.com/SUSE-Cloud/automation/master/scripts/jenkins/qa_openstack.sh
export cloudsource=openstackfolsom ; bash -x qa_openstack.sh

This is a script we use for continous integration testing, but it is as useful to setup a simple environment for development, testing or demoing.
Folsom packages are still rather rough and might see some change over the coming weeks.

If you want the older stable version, you can use the above snippet with cloudsource=openstackessex
however, there are some known bugs in that old version and backports are really hard.

Soon there will be Grizzly packages upcoming. More is to come…

P.S. To interact with your cloud, you need credentials, which are automatically sourced from /etc/bash.bashrc.local (it is admin:openstack) and then you use commands like
nova list and glance image-list
but there is also a web-interface that allows you to do most actions in a browser – even VNC, if you use KVM instead of the default lxc.

Posted in Distribution, Factory, Systems Management | Comments Off on OpenStack on openSUSE

Making different openSUSE liveCDs

December 29th, 2012 by

In my last post I explored the various liveCD creation methods out there, and I really wanted to try one of the others for openSUSE.
Thus I did so today in less than two hours.
I used Debian’s liveCD as basis and replaced the userspace with an openSUSE-11.4-GNOME-liveCD one (later ones likely do not work as systemd is not compatible with old 2.6.32 kernels).
And it worked like a charm. If you want to try it yourself, you need openSUSE and an empty directory with 5GB free space. Then you do as root:

zypper -n in clicfs squashfs cdrkit-cdrtools-compat
wget -O Makefile http://lsmod.de/bootcd/Makefile.aufslive.11.4
make

This will take a while to download the two isos and then at least another 3 minutes for the processing.
If that seems too hard for you, you can just download the finished iso and try it with qemu-kvm -m 1000 -cdrom xxx.iso

Do not let the debian logo in the bootloader confuse you. Just press enter there.
When running in KVM from RAM, this boots up in 18 seconds, while the original iso took 33 (measured from pressing enter in bootloader to the time the CPU load goes down). However, with physical media the difference will be less pronounced. Some of the difference comes from the faster gzip decompression. Unfortunately debian’s kernel does not support squashfs-xz, so I could not try that.

I hope in the future, we will have aufs patches in our normal openSUSE kernels and add an aufs-live mode to kiwi. That would help with the problems we hit with clicfs when memory runs out (and it can not be freed by deleting files either).

Tags:
Posted in Base System, Distribution, Factory, Kernel | 1 Comment »

LiveCDs

December 27th, 2012 by

As few of you might know, I made my own SUSE-based LiveCDs a while ago, using (like Knoppix) cloop compression with iso9660 and my own kernel code for file-based overlay to make it writeable. You might be amazed at how fast it runs in KVM. However, the kernel part has bit-rotten and there are other techniques out there today, so I took a look around at how others do their LiveCDs.

But first some broader overview. To make a LiveCD, the biggest problem is that CDs are not writeable (and even modern Flash devices do not want to be written too much). Embedded devices using flash had the same problem. Various approaches have been used in the past to solve this:

  • adapt all software to write into ram-disks e.g. by having symlinks (hard to create and maintain)
  • load all software into RAM (only for small distributions)
  • use file-based overlaying such as unionfs or aufs to have software write into RAM (lsof, pwd, and hardlinks can be tricky)
  • use block-based overlaying (problem: can not easily free disk space again)

Also compression is used to fit more onto a CD. And interestingly, this usually also speeds up booting because it is faster to read 10MB off a CD and decompress it into the original 30MB than to read 30MB from such a slow medium.

Now, to the distributions.

  • openSUSE has the classic DVD installs that use special installation-images and run in RAM and then there are the real LiveCDs that are created by our kiwi tool, use block-based overlaying and LZMA compression of a ext3 by means of our FUSE-based clicfs.
  • All of the other distributions use squashfs for compression. Mageia employs dracut for initrd and unionfs for file-based overlaying
  • Debian uses aufs for file-based overlaying
  • Ubuntu uses overlayfs for file-based overlaying
  • Fedora uses an ext4 filesystem image contained in a squashfs with dm-snapshot for block-based overlaying, thus being most similar to openSUSE

I also spent some time benchmarking (on my AMD A10-5800K) the various technologies with a simple script using Debians uncompressed rootfs of 495132 KiB as data.
squashfs supports three different compression methods: lzo, gzip and xz (aka LZMA).

  • squashfs-lzo: size:220992 compression:11.1MB/s decompression:134.4MB/s
  • squashfs-gzip: size:203328 compression:15.5MB/s decompression:88.9MB/s
  • squashfs-xz: size:176064 compression:6.5MB/s decompression:22.5MB/s
  • cloop(gzip): size:213348 compression:16.2MB/s decompression:49.6MB/s
  • clicfs(xz): size:185300 compression:16.7MB/s decompression:18.2MB/s

This has some surprises: even when using the same compression method, sizes can differ by 5% and speed can differ even more.

If you want to compare numbers on your system, memory throughput is also interesting:
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null bs=1M count=100000
104857600000 bytes (105 GB) copied, 12.4499 s, 8.4 GB/s

Overall, clicfs is performing OK, considering that it already takes care of the overlaying, but for my own LiveCD I would prefer Debian’s method and I am wondering how it would work.

Tags: ,
Posted in Architectures, Base System, Distribution | 2 Comments »

new osc buildlog –strip-time option

December 17th, 2012 by

Hi,

as of late each line in the buildlog is prefixed with a “timestamp”. If you do not need
this information just run “osc bl –strip-time …” (this will remove the leading timestamp).
Additionally there’s a new config option to permanently enable the stripping:
osc config general buildlog_strip_time 1
(by default “buildlog_strip_time” is set to False).
The “–strip-time” option is also supported by the “localbuildlog” and “remotebuildlog”
commands.

Marcus

Posted in Build Service | Comments Off on new osc buildlog –strip-time option

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