Home Home
Sign up | Login

Deprecation notice: openSUSE Lizards user blog platform is deprecated, and will remain read only for the time being. Learn more...

Factory Progress 2011-07-18

July 18th, 2011 by

I’ve noticed the following changes that might interest people using and developing openSUSE Factory:

Package changes

GNOME 3.1.3

The GNOME team plans to have GNOME 3.2 in for openSUSE 12.1 and thus have updated to the current development release 3.1.3. They have also started removing old GNOME 2 packages that are not needed anymore.

systemd

Frederic gave an update on systemd integration. The graphical bootloader allows now to switch during boot between systemd, SysVinit and also shell code.

Also, Lennart Poettering wrote in his “systemd for developers” series about socket activation where he uses cups as example.

Read the rest of this entry »

[gsoc] osc code cleanup – summary of week 8

July 17th, 2011 by

Hi,

here’s a small summary of the 8th (coding) week. This week I spent
most of my time with rewriting the working copy code.
Done:

  • added support to add and delete packages
  • added some “abstractions” for the tracking file format:
    currently packages and files are tracked in a xml file
  • thought about the package update algorithm. Basically
    it’ll work like this (verfy simplified version):
    – perform update in a tmpdir (phase 1)
    – if the tmp update finished, copy/rename all files to
    the wc (phase 2)
    Advantage:
    If the update is interrupted in phase 1 the wc wasn’t touched
    at all and nothing should be broken.
    If the update is interrupted in phase 2 the wc is _inconsistent_
    but a subsequent “update” call can resume the update and everything
    should be consistent afterwards (in this case only files are
    copied/renamed)

TODO:

  • implement update + commit algorithm

If everything works as expected most parts of working copy code
cleanup should be finished after this week.

Marcus

new package squidview available

July 17th, 2011 by

squidview

squidview is one of the software, I’ve always build and installed on each squid proxy server I build for me or customers. It’s small, stable, and usefull. So it was a clear real nice candidate to be use to improve my obs and packager skiil.
I would like to thanks T1loc, yaloki, mrdocs, coolo, alin, and all others great packagers around, for helping and teaching me during the process.

Introduction

Squidview is an interactive console program which monitors and displays squid logs in a nice fashion, and may then go deeper with searching and reporting functions.

(If you don’t know what squid is or does this program is probably not for you.)

To use squidview you must at least have read access to squid’s access.log file. You may need to see your administrator for this. Squidview uses this text log file for all operations. It does not generate its own database for tasks.

homepage www.rillion.net/squidview

Features

Squidview has a number of functions. Navigate the log file with the cursor pad keys, jump to a certain day or switch to a different log file. Search for text or large http/ftp requests.

Put squidview into monitor mode: see the latest activity updated every 3 seconds (this is light on cpu load).

Reports can be generated listing the heavist Internet users and the most popular visited sites. See how many cache hits squid makes to save network traffic.

Squidview is released under the GPL.

Examples / Usage

The selected line shows a request made for a .gif at the shown time. As luck would have it, the 'H' indicates a cache hit 🙂 In this mode user traffic can scroll by.

What the above would be if viewed with less.

A tally of all users against the bandwidth they used. Kept current in near real time.

A quick investigation into the recent history of one user.

Installation / Repositories

I’ve just made a submit request against openSUSE_Factory to get it included directly, but in the meantime, you could install it from the repository server:proxy as many other useful & related packages

For example adding the repository under openSUSE_Factory

zypper ar -c -f -n "server:proxy" http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/server:/proxy/openSUSE_Factory "server:proxy"
zypper in squidview

Builds available for :

The package is build successfully against : SLES10, SLES11, openSUSE 11.3 to Factory

Have Fun!

Steampunk beautiful theme for KDM and ksplash

July 17th, 2011 by

I created packages for the nice KDM and ksplash theme Steampunk. For this theme a matching color scheme, wallpaper and mouse theme exist and those are packed in the same rpm. Youtube shows the theme in action for Kubuntu, the version in the rpm is distribution neutral. The rpm can be obtained from the home:rbos repository, I hope you enjoy the theme.

Improved Kernel Package Retention in 12.1

July 14th, 2011 by

A long awaited feature of the openSUSE update stack is finally here!
Since some time, it has been possible to tell libzypp to not delete old
kernels on update:

multiversion = provides:multiversion(kernel)

in /etc/zypp/zypp.conf. That way, you don’t have to worry that a
brand new -rc kernel from Factory makes your system unbootable. This however
solves one problem and brings another one – you have to manually delete the
old kernel so that your /boot partition does not fill up. openSUSE 12.1 will
provide a solution to this, you will be able to tell what kernels you want to
keep after an update, other kernels will be deleted. The configuration is the
same file, /etc/zypp/zypp.conf:

## Comma separated list of kernel packages to keep installed in parallel, if the
## above multiversion variable is set. Packages can be specified as
## 2.6.32.12-0.7 - Exact version to keep
## latest        - Keep kernel with the highest version number
## latest-N      - Keep kernel with the Nth highest version number
## running       - Keep the running kernel
## oldest        - Keep kernel with the lowest version number (the GA kernel)
## oldest+N      - Keep kernel with the Nth lowest version number
##
## Default: Do not delete any kernels if multiversion = provides:multiversion(kernel) is set
multiversion.kernels = latest,running

If you configure this and the above multiversion variable, then after each
kernel update, during a subsequent reboot, a script will compare the list of
installed kernels with the multiversion.kernels setting and delete those that
are no longer needed. Examples:

  • Keep the latest kernel and the running one if it differs. This is similar to
    no enabling the multiversion feature at all, except that the old kernel is
    removed after reboot and not immediatelly after installation. BTW, you
    probably always want to include “running”:

    multiversion.kernels = latest,running
  • Keep last two kernels and the running one:
    multiversion.kernels = latest,latest-1,running
  • Keep the latest kernel, the running and a my test kernel with a fancy
    patch:

    multiversion.kernels = latest,running,3.0.rc7-test

If you want to try it, it’s all in Factory already. Check if these packages are
recent enough and uncomment the two variables in zypp.conf:

$ rpm -q --changelog kernel-desktop mkinitrd libzypp | grep -B2 312018
* Fri Jun 17 2011 mmarek@suse.cz
- rpm/post.sh: Touch /boot/do_purge_kernels on package install
    (fate#312018).
--
- Add purge-kernels script to automatically delete old kernel packages
  on boot, based on configuration in /etc/zypp/zypp.conf, variable
  multiversion_kernels (fate#312018).
--
* Tue Jun 21 2011 dmacvicar@suse.de
- Add configuration template for automatic kernel
  purge (feature#312018) to zypp.conf
$ grep ^multiversion /etc/zypp/zypp.conf
multiversion = provides:multiversion(kernel)
multiversion.kernels = latest,running

Happy updating!

Zippl again – now in the package

July 12th, 2011 by
Zippl

lightweight presentations

some might remember my hackweek project Zippl. I blogged about it more than a year ago. Zippl is a lightweigt presentation tool, a bit like prezi, a hipp tool for that purpose, where all ‘slides’ sit on one large canvas and during the presentation a kind of camera moves over the canvas.

I liked the idea and did Zippl as I wanted to play with Qt’s QGraphicsView. It takes a simple xml file as input which describes the presentation and animates it as shown in the video in my older blog.

First I thought it doesn’t make sense to continue that project. But recently, somebody asked if I have built in the feature back to the previous spot as I promised almost a year ago, as he wanted to do a presentation with Zippl. I couldn’t believe, and so I spent an evening in the weekend to polish Zippl a bit. And because its easy with OBS, I quickly built an rpm package for various openSUSEs.

Now that I worked on it a bit again I found it could also make sense on tablet devices, for example to run cool Hello New User animations or small presentations for ant Tilly to get some sponsorship for the new bike. Could be fun.

If you want to check it, please install from my home repository.

Presentation resolution on netbooks

July 11th, 2011 by

I recently got ASUS Eee Netbook R051PX, nice little machine, however small annoyance it has when plugged to projectors for presentation is that the default mirrored resolution is just 800×600, the gnome-display-properties does not allow the selection of 1024×768, xrandr comes to the rescue:

Run the following as normal user in terminal to get the required resolution.

xrandr --output LVDS1 --panning 1024x768
xrandr --output VGA1 --mode 1024x768

Note: just in case wordpress eats up – character, there are 2 – before output, panning and mode.

[gsoc] osc code cleanup – summary of week 7

July 10th, 2011 by

Hi,

here’s a small summary of the 7th (coding) week. This week I spent
most my time with the project and package classes which manage osc’s
working copies.

Done:

  • basic working copy layout
  • checks to detect broken/corrupt working copies
  • locking support (in order to lock a working copy (for instance when
    doing a commit or an update))

TODO:

  • add “core” methods like update, commit, diff etc.
  • (auto-) repair methods (to fix broken working copies)

Marcus

Open Hardware License released by CERN!

July 9th, 2011 by

A very nice complement to the Open Source Hardware Definition that the Open Hardware Summit team has been curating for the past year is the Open Hardware Initiative announced by CERN, including the Open Hardware Repository recently launched there.

A bit of a legalistic focus when there are real hardware specs to peruse (who knows, maybe even some of Cornelius’ work is in there 🙂 ), but I think it is cool that after the Definition we now have the CERNOHL License.  Now, let the BSD vs GPL vs Apache vs MIT-with-crumpets discussion begin 🙂

[gsoc] osc code cleanup – summary of week 6

July 4th, 2011 by

Hi,

here’s a small summary of the 6th (coding) week. Unfortunately I had
to spent more time with university stuff than I expected – that’s why
I didn’t finish the complete todo for this week.
I did some code restructuring and started to work on the class for the
source route.
TODO:
– rewrite the project and package working copy classes:

  • the new working copy format will be incompatible with the current
    format.
  • the basic layout will look like this:
    prj
    |
    —> .osc/ (stores prj _and_ pkg metadata)
    |
    —> pkg1
    #       |
    #        —> <files>

    |
    —> pkgN
    #       |
    #        —> <files>
    So all metadata is stored in the prj/.osc dir instead of prj/pkg/.osc
    The advantage is that we can support a complete package
    “restore” (without the need to download the package again):
    cd prj; rm -r pkg; osc revert/restore pkg;
    (that’s possible because the metadata is stored in the prj/.osc
    dir).
  • to convert old project/package working copies to the new format
    the “osc repairwc” command can be used (at least that’s the plan)

Feedback is always welcome.

Marcus