• You’re still carrying around your precious autoyast config files on an unencrypted usb stick?
• You have a customized installation disk that could reveal lots of personal details?
• You use ad blockers, private browser tabs, or even tor but still carry around your install or rescue disk unencrypted for everyone to see?
• You have your personal files and an openSUSE installation tree on the same partition just because you are lazy and can’t be bothered to tidy things up?
• A simple Linux install stick is just not geekish enough for you?

Not any longer!

mksusecd can now (well, once this pull request has been merged) create fully encrypted installation media (both UEFI and legacy BIOS bootable).

Everything (but the plain grub) is on a LUKS-encrypted partition. If you’re creating a customized boot image and add sensitive data via --boot or add an add-on repo or autoyast config or some secret driver update – this is all safe now!

You can get the latest mksusecd-1.54 already here to try it out! (Or visit software.opensuse.org and look for (at least) version 1.54 under ‘Show other versions’.

It’s as easy as

mksusecd --create crypto.img --crypto --password=xxx some_tumbleweed.iso

And then dd the image to your usb stick.

But if your Tumbleweed or SLE/Leap 15 install media are a bit old (well, as of now they are) check the ‘Crypto notes’ in mksusecd --help first! – You will need to add two extra options.

This is how the first screen looks then

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.

live-usb-gui now offers choice of scripts to use, depending in your need you can either use live-fat-stick with vfat partitioned stick or live-grub-stick script which works with any partition format supported by grub2 including vfat, must be used if you have iso bigger than 4G.

live-grub-stick can now create bootable USB from openSUSE installation media isos (standard DVD or NET), difference from --isohybrid option is that the data already on the stick is not touched, the whole iso is available on the stick so you can use the stick to copy it around apart from being able to install from it.

Two new options --suse-persistent(for openSUSE live ISOs) and --ubuntu-persistent(for Ubuntu and clones) are now available, using these options allows live sessions to be persistent over multiple boots, even when used on vfat partition. Again the way it is used does not need change in partition format of the stick, existing data on the stick remains untouched.

Feel free to fork https://github.com/cyberorg/live-fat-stick if you want some more enhancements.

Important note: The driver does not work on openSUSE Tumbleweed. Unfortunately, the version of X-server is too new for the driver.

SHA1 is obsolete by now. The script used SHA256 for integrity of the downloaded files.

New Feature from packaging script:

• systemd support

Resolved Issues:

• [SWDEV-82980] Ubuntu 15.10 fails when building the .deb packages

Link: AMD Catalyst 15.12 Release Notes

Downloads:

• Script: makerpm-amd-15.12.sh
• SHA1: makerpm-amd-15.12.sh.sha256

Installation guide (English):
http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:AMD_fglrx#Building_the_rpm_yourself

Bruno Friedmann will build the new RPM packages in the fglrx repository. Stay tune!

If you find any issue with the driver. Don’t hesitate to contact me. I am in contact with AMD and can forward your issue to the right place. Feedback are welcome.

A report of your system is very helpful beside your feedback. You can generate it with the script:
su -c 'sh makerpm-amd-15.12.sh -ur'

Have a lot of fun!

Sebastian
openSUSE member / Official AMD Packaging Script Maintainer for openSUSE
German Blog: openSUSE – proprietären Grafik-Treiber AMD Catalyst 15.12 als RPM installieren

Why not a second turn?

Being a board member (present at almost every conference call, reading the mailing lists and other task) consume free time. It has increased during the last semester too. And we’ve got some new business opportunities here at Ioda-Net Sàrl in 2015, and those need also my attention for the next year(s). I prefer to be a retired Board member, than not being able to handle my responsabilities.
But I’m not against the idea of a "I’ll be back" in a near future. Moreover with a bit more bandwidth in my free time, I will be able to continue my packaging stuff, and other contributions.

What a journey!

With the new campaign running, I found funny to bring back to light my 2013 platform written 2 years ago. And spent 5 minutes on checking the differences with today. I’m inviting you to discover the small interview between me and myself

1. Which sentences would you say again today?

I’m a "Fucking Green Dreamer" of a world of collaboration, which will one day offer Freedom for everyone.

Clearly still a day by day mantra and leitmotiv. But even if I’m dreaming, I never forget that
Freedom has a price : Freedom will only be what you do for it.

2. Which thing you would not say again, or differently ?

Well, as there’s no joker card, let’s start by this one:
"A Visible Active Board > A Visible Active Project." With the experience and time, and interaction, (the one who said fight, get out please :-)), I would said this is not as easy as it sound first.
I’m pretty sure, I was more quieter since I was on the board, than before. Because it’s too hard to make a clear distinction, when you just want to express something as "a simple contributor": you are on the board, and then whatever you can try to trick the fact: you’re still a board member.

So making the Board visible like a kind of communicant Alien, will certainly not improve that much our project.
It’s written everywhere, almost everybody agree, the board is not the lighthouse in the dark showing you the future.
Anyone, I repeat, anyone in this community is a potential vector of a future for openSUSE.

So in my past platform "Guardians of the past, Managers of the present, Creators of the future." I would replace Creators of the future by kinda "enabler"

3. In the last 2 years, where did openSUSE mostly evolve?

I think we moved from a traditional way of building distribution to some creative alternative, the rolling but tested Tumbleweed, and the hybrid Leap are really good things that happened.
I believe that if we have also some hard time on mailing list, which are exhausting, they also have a positive aspect (yeap:-)). If we fight, then it’s certainly because of our faith in something. Is this one defined? Not sure! But I’m pretty convinced that all members around have a good image of it.

4. What would be an advice to your successor (even if he doesn’t care about it)?

We are a tooling community, we love tools. Beware of one thing, if you get hurt by a tool, you can become the worst asshole you’ve never met. With tools, you can also hurt other people.

My advise, watch your step and keystroke!

5. Something more you would like to share?

I’ve invested time and energy during 2014 and beginning of 2015, to run booth, talks, represent openSUSE’s project all around. It was awesome to go to those events and meet people, involved or interested about openSUSE.

Perhaps some of you don’t know, but we have friends all around us, in many communities, and when the magic about working together appears, it just blast my heart.

Thanks for reading and for your support during this period

Truly green yours

As with previous releases we have bundled a ton of softwares on this live DVD/USB specially packaged for education, along with the Plasma, GNOME and Mate Desktop Environments, full multimedia experience is also provided out of the box thanks to the Packman repositories. Only x86_64 architecture is supported, if you have a lot of machines that only support x86 then read on to find out how you can extend their Li-f-e.

You can of course very easily turn Li-f-e to full-fledged LTSP server to PXE boot machines in your local network. Booting both i686 and x86_64 architectures is supported. In case you need to PXE boot machines below i686 then you would have to install this package.

Happy holidays!

Get Li-f-e from here: Direct Download | md5sum | Alternate download and mirrors

In order to give the SUSE and openSUSE communities an opportunity to lurk into those review meetings, we have decided to create this team blog and post here the highlights after every meeting. Not all the fixes and features will be covered, but we’ll try to blog about the most exciting or relevant changes.

Obviously, many of those posts will be more exciting for developers and Tumbleweed users than for users of the stable release (bugfixes tend to be unexciting). But, as some kind of bonus track, Leap 42.1 users can always revisit the summary of what the recent release brought to the YaST (and friends) world.

The current sprint ends right before Christmas, so stay tuned!

I have adapted the AMD driver to the Kernel 4.4 (rc3). For the moment it works for Kernel 4.4-rc3. Unfortunately the AMD driver has a compatibility issue in combination with the GNOME Desktopmanager and X-Server. As a workaround, I recommend for GNOME another Desktopmanager such as lightdm until the issue is hopefully fixed.

Resolved Issues:

• [SWDEV-55204] Stuttering when running glxgears with VSync enabled
• [SWDEV-7339] Intermittent mouse cursor corruption

Link: AMD Catalyst 15.11 Release Notes

Downloads:

• Script: makerpm-amd-15.11.sh
• SHA1: makerpm-amd-15.11.sh.sha1

Installation guide (English):
http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:AMD_fglrx#Building_the_rpm_yourself

Bruno Friedmann will build the new RPM packages in the fglrx repository. Stay tune!

If you find any issue with the driver. Don’t hesitate to contact me. I am in contact with AMD and can forward your issue to the right place. Feedback are welcome.

A report of your system is very helpful beside your feedback. You can generate it with the script:
su -c 'sh makerpm-amd-15.11.sh -ur'

Have a lot of fun!

Sebastian
openSUSE member / Official AMD Packaging Script Maintainer for openSUSE
German Blog: openSUSE – proprietären Grafik-Treiber AMD Catalyst 15.11 als RPM installieren

Important note: The first beta version of openSUSE Leap (future openSUSE 42.1) was released a few days ago. However, the AMD driver has not been adapted yet to the new upcoming openSUSE version. In the next days I will working on this and release a new update for this script.

Important note 2: After some experimentation with the GNOME Desktopmanager, unfortunately it does not work with the driver. Because actually something seems to be amiss. To this end, I will contact the AMD developers. As a workaround, I recommend for GNOME another Desktopmanager such as lightdm until the issue is fixed.

Resolved Issues:

• [425910] Driver installation sometimes fails on Ubuntu 14.04.3
• [424450] Company of Heroes® 2 – Game crashes while running the performance test
• [424794] Middle-earth™: Shadow of Mordor – Corruption observed in game
• [424882] DIRT® Showdown – Corruption observed in game
• [425234] DIRT® Showdown – Game crashes after the loading screen
• [424802] DOTA™ 2 – Application hang observed while exiting the game
• [424255] AMD Catalyst™ Installer removing EGL links resulting in Xserver/Xorg load failure
• [423471] Unable to switch desktop mode after installing AMD Catalyst™ driver
• [423735] Renaming Counter-Strike: GO and other Steam game binary improves performance

Known Issues:

• [419960]: Vari-Bright on some configurations is not decreasing brightness as expected

Link: AMD Catalyst 15.9 Release Notes

Downloads:

• Script: makerpm-amd-15.9.sh
• SHA1: makerpm-amd-15.9.sh.sha1

Installation guide (English):
http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:AMD_fglrx#Building_the_rpm_yourself

Bruno Friedmann will build the new RPM packages in the fglrx repository. Stay tune!

If you find any issue with the driver. Don’t hesitate to contact me. I am in contact with AMD and can forward your issue to the right place. Feedback are welcome.

A report of your system is very helpful beside your feedback. You can generate it with the script:
su -c 'sh makerpm-amd-15.9.sh -ur'

Have a lot of fun!

Sebastian
openSUSE member / Official AMD Packaging Script Maintainer for openSUSE
German Blog: openSUSE – proprietären Grafik-Treiber AMD Catalyst 15.9 als RPM installieren