On November 16th there was the release of openSUSE Leap 42.2. On November 24th, I had the opportunity to present openSUSE Project at school.

I was asked to make an introduction to FLOSS in general and more specific about openSUSE Project. The school was for middle aged people, for persons who quited school to work and conftibute financially to their families. There were 3 classes that they taught something computer related. It was a great opportunity for them to learn what FLOSS is and what makes openSUSE great Linux distro.

I busted the myth that “Linux is hard because you have to be a hacker, it’s terminal operated” I showed them how to install openSUSE Leap step by step (pictures) and also how to use GNOME (pictures). I mentioned our tools to make a very stable distro and finally I showed them that it’s not only a distro but there are people (the communtity) that take care of the software.

There were plenty of questions about linux software alternatives, how to install, if they can replace Ubuntu/Windows with openSUSE and what is perfect suit for specific systems. Each student took a DVD with stikers and a card with Greek community information. Professors will organize an install fest for their lab and/or laptops of their students.

I would like to thank Douglas DeMaio for managing to send me DVDs and stickers and Alexandros Mouhtsis that managed with his professors to organize this presentation. Finally, I would like to thank Dimitrios Katsikas for taking pictures.

You can find the same post at my blog.

I see the official documentation has full tutorial for RHEL 6 or CentOS 6 and RHEL 7 or CentOS 7. The main documentation covers Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

openSUSE already has the Nextcloud client packaged in Tumbelweed and the Server is in the PHP extra repo! Personally, I prefer to install eveything from official repository, so when an update is available, I can have it without a glitch. This tutorial describes how to install Nextcloud using command line. I followed the official documentation of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS installation.

Why choose openSUSE Leap? openSUSE Leap is a brand new way of building openSUSE and is new type of hybrid Linux distribution. Leap uses source from SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE), which gives Leap a level of stability unmatched by other Linux distributions, and combines that with community developments to give users, developers and sysadmins the best stable Linux experience available. Contributor and enterprise efforts for Leap bridge a gap between matured packages and newer packages found in openSUSE’s other distribution Tumbleweed. You can download openSUSE Leap from the site https://software.opensuse.org/.

Make sure that ssh (sshd) is enabled and also the firewall either is disabled or make an exception to the apache and ssh services. You can also set a static IP (check out how).

First of all, let’s install the required and recommended modules for a typical Nextcloud installation, using Apache and MariaDB, by issuing the following commands in a terminal:

Create Database (optional since it’ll create eveything automatically)
Next step, create a database. First of all start the service.

The root password is empty by default. That means that you can press enter and you can use your root user. That’s not safe at all. So you can set a password using the command:

Where newpass is the password you want.

Now you set the root password, create the database.

mysql -u root -p
#you’ll be asked for your root passwordCREATE DATABASE nextcloudb;

GRANT ALL ON nextcloudb.* TO ncuser@localhost IDENTIFIED BY ‘dbpass’;

Database user: ncuser
Database name: nextcloudb
Database user password: dbpass

You can change the above information accordingly.

PHP changes
Now you should edit the php.ini file.

nano /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

change the values

post_max_size = 50G
upload_max_filesize = 25G
max_file_uploads = 200
max_input_time = 3600
max_execution_time = 3600
session.gc_maxlifetime = 3600
memory_limit = 512M

and finally enable the extensions.

extension=php_gd2.dll
extension=php_mbstring.dll

Apache Configuration
You should enable some modules. Some might be already enabled.

a2enmod php5
a2enmod rewrite
a2enmod headers
a2enmod env
a2enmod dir
a2enmod mime

Now start the apache service.

systemctl start apache2.service
systemctl enable apache2.service

Install Nextcloud from source code (option 1, preferable)
Before the installation, create the data folder and give the right permissions (preferably outside the server directory for security reasons). I created a directory in the /mnt directory. You can mount a USB disk, add it to fstab and save your data there. The commands are:

mkdir /mnt/nextcloud_data
chmod -R 0770 /mnt/nextcloud_data
chown wwwrun /mnt/nextcloud_data

Now download Nextcloud (find the latest version at https://nextcloud.com/install/). Then unzip and move the folder to the server directory.

wget https://download.nextcloud.com/server/releases/nextcloud-10.0.0.zip
unzip nextcloud-10.0.0.zip
cp -r nextcloud /srv/www/htdocs
chown -R wwwrun /srv/www/htdocs/nextcloud/

Make sure that everything is OK and then delete the folder nextcloud and nextcloud-10.0.0.zip from the root (user) directory.

Now open your browser to the server IP/nextcloud

Set your administrator username and password.
Your data directory is: /mnt/nextcloud_data
Regarding database, use the following.
Database user: ncuser
Database name: nextcloudb
Database user password: dbpass

Wait until it ends the installation. The page you’ll see is the following.

Install Nextcloud using the respository (option 2)

If you want to have automatic updates of your Nextcloud instance when there’s a new version, you can add the repository. There are packages available for openSUSE Leap 42.1, 42.2 and Tumbleweed (we recommend openSUSE Leap 42.1). You should be an administrator, so you can install Nextloud on your server.

1. Add the Nextcloud repository.
openSUSE_Leap_42.2

zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/server:/php:/applications/openSUSE_Leap_42.2/ Nextcloud

openSUSE_Leap_42.1

zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/server:/php:/applications/openSUSE_Leap_42.1/ Nextcloud

openSUSE_Leap_Tumbleweed

zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/server:/php:/applications/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/ Nextcloud

2. Refresh your repositories

zypper refresh

3. Install Nextcloud (be careful you have to install LAMP first and change permissions of the files).

zypper install nextcloud

4. Open http://serverIP/nextcloud to install your instance (admin user account). Be careful to create another folder with the proper permissions for your data (as described).

5. Login and use Nextloud.

For more information about Nextcloud on openSUSE, check openSUSE wiki.

For any changes, check the github page.

For more configuration, you can follow the official documentation. That was the basic installation on openSUSE Leap.

The 8th Free and Open Source Software Communities Meeting (FOSSCOMM) took place in Athens (Greece), November 6-8th 2015 at the Technical Educational Institute of Athens.

The Conference started early on Saturday morning welcoming the participants and with the key note. Various presentations about open source software, hardware constructions and some workshops took place. Presentations such as Raspberry Pi arcade, openstack, OSGeo, ownCloud, Bitcoin and many more were quite interested by the visitors.

Greek openSUSE community was there with a booth and some presentations. On Saturday Alex P. Natsios presented “Enlightment on openSUSE”, an alternative GUI, and the other presentation was about “openQA”. Since openSUSE Leap 42.1 was very fresh, Alexandros Vennos took the opportunity to present what are openSUSE Leap 42.1 and Tumbleweed, the differences and what to install on what occasions. Presentation had title “openSUSE – Leaping Ahead”.

The booth was quite crowded. We had some left over DVDs of 13.2 but we proposed the visitors to install Leap 42.1. The question we were asked most was what is the difference between openSUSE Leap and Tubleweed and why to install and on what ocasion. We even created couple of bootable USBs from the ISOs of Leap. We had a Banana Pi running Tumbleweed with MATE playing a video loop of openSUSE Leap 42.1 KDE review. We gave almost all of our promo materials to the visitors since they were interested on openSUSE.

For more pictures check Flickr

Warnings

There’s really no warranties the drivers will work, for you!

If you are satisfied with the open-source radeon drivers, don’t risk to break your computer

All the trouble present in 15.9 will be there, like the failing gnome3 gdm start, see previous article from Sebastian, his scripts also available on the raw-src directory on the mirror, allow you to apply a quirk patch.

I’m considering the release of thoses rpms as experimental, they work for some, and sometimes are convenient. But they can also create kernel segfault on some configurations.
If you are in trouble start your openSUSE in rescue mode with nomodeset on boot line, and then zypper rm fglrx related packages, reboot and you should safely return to free radeon.

Story

Today, while packing my stuff for the SUSECON15 in Amsterdam, I was pleased on irc to have feedback of users
who were able to run fglrx Tumbleweed packages on their Leap 42.1

I’ve then start a Leap vm and hack a bit Sebastian Siebert’s script for 15.9 to add support for Leap.
The drivers build, and install correctly. I’ve also updated the one-click installer for people using this
technology.

Leap being available only for x86_64 bit plateform, the driver follow the same available arch.

Links to the new repository openSUSE_Leap_42

Have fun!