openSUSE news

[openSUSE.fi]

openSUSE Conference 2013 3rd day
22 July 2013, 7:43 pm

Just as we started the conference with great energy and enthusiasm there is always a time to part ways until the next reunion. Some tears drop and hugs are given as we separate physically until next year. The openSUSE Conference’s final day and reporting is now detailed below. Please read on and maybe you will find some great news for next year. In the mean time, we encourage you to participate of our team. We welcome everyone interested in contributing to an awesome project. Perhaps the best work can be done through your help in between conferences and once the meeting is on again, you can share all the progress you will have made in our community.

 

Day three! As usual with every openSUSE party, the candles are blown really late and the result was the everyone was late for sessions on sunday. More than one member suggested having the sessions start an hour later for next conference.

Keynote The day was opened by Jos Poortvliet talking about how an open community works. He shared the changes that we have to do as a community to adapt to the changes in the world and influences that come from people who desire to contribute. For example, he shared the new thinking of big companies about open communities where the work is done in a “horizontal” manner. Meaning that all members of this community advance and work together without leaders or a boss to tell them what to do or where to steer. Instead, the challenge of new companies is to make all their employees contribute at the same level of their boss. This principle is learned from open communities.

Visible and invisible rules

The way communities work is by visible and invisible rules. The visible rules are our documented processes and guidelines like the code of conduct used in conferences, community interactions and our strategy. Our culture is our way of thinking and acting in the community and as new members watch others and see how things are done they repeat the behavior forming a culture within the group.

When you write these invisible rules down, 5 things happen: they become hard to change and mandatory-to-follow, but you do create clarity for newcomers and people can trust that their work will have certain results. Unfortunately, bureaucracy has a tendency to keep growing – probably one of the biggest downsides of rules. Therefore, the community needs to find a balance between the challenge of setting regulations for the community yet not becoming a bureaucracy hard enough that innovation and participation stagnate.

Change

Changing invisible rules is extremely hard in a community with such diversity like the openSUSE community. Therefore, to change rules you need to make the imperceptible come out. Jos Poortvliet suggested setting rules that are written down or , in other words, to be made known publicly to the rest of the community. Meaning that all members of the community are to understand general procedure for submitting work and participating in the community’s governance. Now, following the ‘monkey see, monkey do’ principle, you need to find out what people are strong community members and convince them that change is needed. They have to be agents of change, once they are, make this visible and slowly but surely, things will move.

Other talks Izabel Valverde on the Travel Support Program

Izabel, our current Travel Team Coordinator took the stage to share her views on the new application of the Travel Support Program. The program helps our openSUSE members to attend conferences and events around the world. The program is currently sponsored by SUSE.

The program works through a reimbursement method after submitting a general funds request form crafted by the Travel Team. The changes made this year include a new form and a new control system for taking in requests from community members. The Travel Team keeps a list of events that our members attend. 11 requests were approved so far this year.

For oSC 2013 26 people were approved for travel support. A big increase since last year when the program started. However, the team will require people to follow the new rules to make sure that all requests are taken care of properly.

openSUSE Connect will feature a form for those interested in travel support. Meaning that you will have to create a profile at openSUSE Connect and then request for travel support.

Kostas and Stella on Conference Community Organization

Kostas and Stella shared the many things they had to do in order to launch the first community-organized conference. There was a lot of help needed and eventually the conference team, although initially the conference team received a lot of help this help decayed over time.

There were a lot of lessons learned and the Kostas and Stella are sure happy to share their experience with the conference in Croatia next year. They made a request to include the board to help organize the conference and also members of the team at the locations where the conference would be held.

openSUSE Conference 2014

As announced during this years’ conference, a new openSUSE Conference will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia next April. There are currently 6 volunteers looking to boost the organization of the conference next year. This team’s experience is vast in organizing events for Open Source communities. A strong support for next year’s conference, the very president of Croatia has created a group to focus on Open Source technologies and their spread in the country.

The venue will be the University of Dubrovnik. Established in 2003 and having ties to the 17th century, the venue is expected to also help and support the organization of the conference. Although the university buildings are located in various areas of Dubrovnik they are relatively close to each other.

The city features museums, city walls to explore, and forts to see. Something that our Geekos will enjoy knowing is that the hit series Game of Thrones is currently being filmed in various areas of this city. Food, hikes and other activities will amuse those in attendance. This conference sure promises to entertain everyone!

Other subjects included during the conference include freelancing, coding for openSUSE, managing press releases for a project, even Legos made it to our conference. LPI Certification, Open Source hardware, Firefox OS, and openQA.

While the conference for this year has come to an end, we take to ourselves all the good that came from it. Now it is probably the new norm that our community will be in charge of organizing these conferences.

Last but not least, this conference has its moment! After the group photo there was a special moment for Carlos Ribeiro. We signed for him a large geeko money in order to thank him for his incredible job with the Artwork.

Thank you Carlos!

 



Last Party of the conference!  

Last party of the conference was perfect. After a hardsday work everyone waited for a party to relax and have fun. We all gathered at a Cocktail Bar with loud lounge music. Cocktails were served and everyone was laughing and having fun till late at night.

#oSC13 Info You can find lots of pictures from #oSC13 on openSUSE Greek Fans on facebook or on G+. Also on twitter you can follow @openSUSEConf or search for the hashtag #oSC13.

If you missed the chance to be here with us and have fun you can attend the conference and all the fun online from the live streaming that is set up in the venue. Also if you have any questions for the presentation you attend online there is an IRC Channel set up in order to make your questions.

Last but not least we have our local newspaper!



Source: openSUSE News

[openSUSE.fi]

openSUSE Conference 2013: The Infomercial
29 July 2013, 6:00 pm

Volunteers oSC13

One of the most exciting openSUSE Conferences is over. The community proved that everything can be done if people are anxiously engaged. Everyone had fun and was excited about these four days of conference. G(r)eekos had everything set up, from interesting presentations and workshops to night parties, lunch and dinner.

#oSC13 from the inside All visitors who came to the conference were delighted with the presentations. Keynotes, workshops and presentations about new technologies both software and hardware, community BoFs everything was there. Anyone could attend any session without any special knowledge from a presentation about openSUSE on ARM, an introduction to MySQL, openSUSE’s Release cycle, hacking RaspberryPi, learning about OBS packages and messing around with Puppet.

#oSC13 and Thessaloniki’s experience

Geekos having Fun!

All visitors enjoyed the Greek hospitality and the Greek sun! The venue of the conference was set up with many beach accessories by the volunteers in order to give the impression to visitors that summer is here! A mini beach bar was set up outside venue and 4 small pools for visitors to relax with a beer or a refreshment after the presentations. Visitors also had the opportunity to make a tour around the city of Thessaloniki and sightseeing. Everyone experienced the nightlife of Thessaloniki!

Everyone experienced how Greeks have fun with beers, retsina, drinks, cocktails, shots, BBQ and music. Last but not least, the walks inside the city were something to remember.

#oSC13 in total Two hundred sixty seven (267) out of three hundred ninety (390) people subscribed attended the event. It’s a community win for the conference and it shows how a small community can achieve a conference this big. All the work that is done for this successful conference is online on Trello (where we all communicated) and it is our legacy to the next openSUSE Conference organizers to have a place to start and also improve in order to have more successful conferences in the future.

Everyone is happy about organizing openSUSE Conference in Greek. No one anticipated to that kind of conference believing perhaps, that a community-organized event would not live up to the standards of prior conferences. It was an experience that only the G(r)eekos could give to everyone in attendance.

#oSC13 Info You can find lots of pictures from #oSC13 on openSUSE Greek Fans on facebook or on G+.

“I Love the Geeko, Greeko” is the song that Carlos and his brother dedicated to the Greek openSUSE Community. We hope that you all loved us, had fun and appreciated our work done.

Looking forward to see you next year in Croatia to a more successfull conference than this year’s conference!



 

Source: openSUSE News

[openSUSE.fi]

The Unforgotten Heroes of oSC13
31 July 2013, 3:00 pm

The sound of clapping hands was nothing unusual for us organizers and volunteers at the openSUSE Conference 2013. Everyone was eager to let us know what a great job we did, how wholeheartedly welcomed Geekos felt, and how absurd the amount of fun everyone had in Thessaloniki. We were, and still are, blown away by this! But what we haven’t done very well during the conference was distributing the praise we received, and that is what this article is about.

We, Stella Rouzi, Kostas Koudaras and Henne Vogelsang, the main organizers of oSC13 would like to thank a couple of people who have done a little more than just help. We want to thank people who shaped the event, who pushed it in the direction it took in the end, who poured a lot of heart and soul into oSC13. We thank:

Andres Silva for the logo

Andy came up with the design of the oSC13 logo, which was the most influential piece of artwork for this conference. We have discussed a lot about how we can combine openSUSE’s values, the meaning of this event for our community and Thessaloniki’s and Greece’s heritage into a theme and motto. He hit this nail on the head with his logo and we’re extremely thankful for your iconic design Andy!



Carlos Ribeiro for all the artwork There is a huge demand for visual things if you organize a conference. Posters, flyers, banners, t-shirts, badges, stickers and so on and so on. Somehow Carlos managed to get most of this done by himself. Everyone is still amazed by the sheer amount of artwork and layout he generated. He relentlessly pushed to the repository. Not only the day to day artwork, but also very creative things, like the Geeko Money. A lot of his work has set the mood for oSC13. Carlos you’re an artwork machine and we thank you for that!



Pavlos Ratis for the promo videos Another influential artist for oSC13 was Pavlos Ratis. Through the awesome videos he shot, cut and produced, Geekos all over the world were able to plunge right into the great city of Thessaloniki, get a feeling for our venue the Olympic Museum and get to know the people behind the Greek openSUSE community. Thank you Pavlos for your videos which provided a window into the future of oSC13!

Alexandros Vennos for the photography

In the age of cellphone cameras you get a lot of snapshots of your conference, what you usually do not get that easily is quality photography of your event. Luckily we had Alexandros at oSC13 who produced a lot of awesome pictures of the people, the location and the mood of oSC13. These pictures are nice memorabilia for people who participated and a strong reminder why one should come to oSC. Quality pictures are also invaluable as marketing material for future events. We are grateful for your awesome pictures Alexandros!



DJ Tolis for the soundtrack

One of the most important things for us organizers was that Geekos have a place where they can hang out, chat and have a cold one. We believe that social interaction is what makes and brakes a conference. The oSC13 Beach Bar was exactly the location we had in mind for this and Tolis made this happen. He ran the bar, made sure we always had refreshments, arranged the lunch orders, and DJ’ed the bar all day and all night. Your bar was the social hub of oSC13 and we’re extremely grateful for this Tolis!



Iliana Dagli and Anastasia Trikaliti for running the registration

You only get one chance to make a first impression. That’s why you need people on your conference registration desk who are make visitors feel welcome, cherished and at home. Iliana and Anastasia where doing just that, they coordinated the check in, the geeko money donations and always had an ear for our visitors wishes and needs. During the 4 days of oSC13 a lot of Geekos helped out at the registration desk but you Iliana and Anastasia where running the show and we thank you for that!

Matt Barringer for OSEM

There is a tool at the heart of oSC13: OSEM, the Open Source Event Manager. And there is a man at the heart of this tool which is Matt. Without his heroic commitment to shake up the world of conference organization tools. Without him scratching our itch of a tool which is not only suitable, but made for free and open source conferences. Without his 34622 lines of code, this conference wouldn’t have been what is has been. Matt has truly shown us all the power of “Just do it” and we are and will continue to be grateful for that Matt!



Jürgen Weigert for broadcasting

The openSUSE community is a world wide community of countless Geekos. It’s not feasible for everyone to swing by Greece so it’s extremely important that it’s possible for the people who are no at the venue to participate of the event. Live video and recordings are a huge part of this effort and Jürgen is the Geeko who came up with the plan, the software and the setup to make this possible. Many people helped recording the event but you Jürgen organized it all and we thank you for that!

Lars Vogdt for the infrastructure

They say a free and open source conference is only as good as it’s wireless LAN. So here is another reason why oSC13 was this great: Lars Vodgt and his admin Kung-Fu. It is important to have a capable, creative and reliable admin in the background and Lars was just that. You are always helpful, reachable and fun to work with and you have provided and amazing infrastructure for the event, thank you for that Lars!

Agustin Benito Bethencourt for handling the money There is a dimension to any conference that is most important and most nasty to handle: money. It’s not all about the “Benjamins” but they certainly play an important role. You can be extremely grateful if you find someone who is willing and able to handle them. We have Agustin. This part is especially important if the group of people that is organizing the conference has no legal body to represent it, like it is the case with openSUSE. The tireless efforts of Agustin (and our main sponsor SUSE) have provided us with financial services that where fast and reliable. We are very grateful for you taking this out of our hair Agustin!

and so many more… Of course there where so many more people who made a difference: Thanasis “Zoumpis” Rousinopoulos and Efstathios Iosifidis who kept the social media going. Jos Poortvliet authored a lot of awesome content about oSC13. Nikos Chatzidakis and again Zoumpis prepared the OSEM android application. George Bratsos for managing the room volunteers. Stathis Agrapidis for handling all the printing and re-stocking of supplies. The nameless lady from the cafeteria, all the awesome visitors and and and and and….

Thank you all for being the awesome people you are and for letting that rub off onto our conference!

Source: openSUSE News

[openSUSE.fi]

openSUSE Milestone 4
12 August 2013, 2:47 pm



openSUSE Milestone 4, and final Milestone before starting the Beta process, is out for everyone to test. The process has worked out normally and although this Milestone came a few hours after it was planned, the process remains steady. openSUSE 13.1 is expected to be released in November of 2013 just in time for our second annual openSUSE Summit. The summit will provide an excellent opportunity for you to meet the people who took your contributions and made them part of the final openSUSE product. There will be plenty to talk about and it is also a good opportunity for you to present on what your worked on for 13.1. Do not miss the fun!

openSUSE 13.1 M4 This January a team of develpers started moving YaST codebase to Ruby. YaST utilized an old proprietary code that made it harder for developers interested in improving YaST to submit changes to it. With the Ruby translation, it makes it easier for anyone acquainted with YaST to contribute code to it. YaST is one of the software pillars for openSUSE. It is one of the oldest and most versatile system configuration tools out there and it is exclusive to openSUSE and SUSE. Is you want to find out more about YaST, go here. As you follow the link, you will notice that there is a good community involved into improving YaST. You can participate too if now Ruby makes it all easier for you to contribute. This milestone is the first to integrate the Ruby version of YaST, so when you test, give installation and configuration a good workout!

Other changes Aside from the freshened-up version of YaST, there’s the list of major changes:

update-ca-certificates now uses p11-kit as backend. With p11-kit it’s now possible to have firefox and thunderbird use the system ca certificates instead of their own ones. You need to replace mozilla-nss-certs with p11-kit-nss-trust to make use of that feature.

motif is readded – we have openmotif 2.4 under LGPL now

we have yast2 3.0 (which would be yast3 then :) converted to Ruby now

• KDE Workspaces, libs and apps 4.11 RC2
• GNOME desktop 3.9.4
• GTK3 3.9.8
• GeoIP 1.5.1
• hyper-v 4->5
• qemu 1.6.0rc1
• libreoffice 4.1.0.4
• mc 4.8.9
• ModemManager 1.0.0
• scons 2.3.0
• wine 1.6
• xscreensaver 5.20->5.22 (yes, 2 screensavers for the price of one)

And furthermore there were minor updates to the kernel (we’re waiting for the next major release), RPM, systemd, GStreamer, Apache2, mariadb, poppler, and more.

Go, test! openSUSE only features one beta version for testing (see the roadmap). Toolchain and Base system have already been frozen for bugfixes-only. Little by little and faster than you think, openSUSE will be ready to deliver the goods for those looking to test the most polished and stable Linux distribution to date.  The beta features will enter our freeze time and only major critical bug fixes will be allowed and the same freeze will be applied to translations. This means that now is the time for you to make your contributions. Hurry, because the beta process will not allow new features to be included.

We’re a community! As part of a global community effort, our distribution depends on the generous work of contributors who donate their time to code cool projects and include these into the distribution. It is important to note that for openSUSE there are essentially no requirements on the part of the contributors. openSUSE is one of the most welcoming distribution when it comes to contributions. This provides a strong basis and incentive for those looking to be part of our distribution effort. There are countless ways that as an individual you can contribute to the project. Allow us to show you just a few ideas.

Organize a “hackathon” meeting in your local community. Provide refreshments and a good environment in which you and your friends can get together to work on bugs, features and changes to the distribution. Once this process is done and you are ready to submit your changes, or the changes that your friends helped you create, follow the guidelines for this article in order to have our team review your changes and include them. Please note that the article referenced before is geared towards openSUSE 12.1. However, this process remains the same for all our releases, therefore you can be sure that the information about submitting your changes is accurate and valuable.

Even if you cannot program but would like to contribute in any way possible to make openSUSE great, you can participate too. There are still many opportunities that can involve you and make you part of a global Linux community. Our “How to Contribute” page has a few ideas that can guide into taking your first steps into participating with us. Surely, the more Linux enthusiasts willing to participate, the better and openSUSE welcomes them.

Source: openSUSE News

[openSUSE.fi]

GSoC 2013 – Half Way Through
19 August 2013, 3:30 pm



We have reached the half way stage of the Google Summer of Code 2013, and it has been an exciting journey so far. A lot of good work has been done this summer on a variety of projects. This year, we have co-participated with ownCloud, Balabit (syslog-ng) and Hedgewars under the openSUSE umbrella. Here follows a summary of the work that has been done so far, along with the experiences of the students.

AppArmor Profile Tool Kshitij Gupta is developing profile tools for AppArmor, which involves writing the perl tools and core modules in python. He is being mentored by Christian Boltz. The tools are expected to be completed on time, since they are built on the core modules. Kshitij labels working on the GSoC project as a ‘phenomenal’ time.



OBS Discussion System Shayon Mukherjee is building a discussion system for the Open Build Service, under the guidance of Henne and Adrian. The results have been pretty good so far. According to Shayon, they have built the functionality for the users to be able to post comments on projects, packages and requests in the Open Build Service. They are really excited and believe its a great functionality, and that users of the OBS will benefit greatly from it. Before GSoC ends, they plan to make it possible for users to edit/delete comments via Hermes, the openSUSE notification system. He adds that he has learned a lot in the last month about a complicated, full stack web app.

The initial result of the application can be found in action here.



OSEM Stella (differentreality) is working on Open Source Event Management Tool(OSEM), mentored by Theo Chatzimichos, and Matt Barringer. We saw her work in action at the openSUSE Conference and we’re all wondering how she managed to combine working on OSEM with organizing the event… On the other hand, the practical needs were driving OSEM development and this of course leads to a very good application and more fun.

User Management Application on ownCloud Raghu Nayyar is writing the User Management Application for ownCloud. He has written the front end on AngularJS and is currently working on syncing it with the backend. He will also be working on the front end of the files application, which forms a major part of ownCloud. He is being mentored by Jan Christoph Bochardt and Posselt Bernhard.



Music App for ownCloud Morris Jobke is working on the Music App for ownCloud, based on a RESTful API. Morris plans to add support for playlist management and the music filtering. He is being mentored by Jorn Friedrich Dreyer and Posselt Bernhard.

Syslog-ng MySQL destination: Gyula Petrovics is writing the MySQL Destination driver for syslog-ng. The idea is to insert syslog messages into a MySQL database. Gyula is being mentored by Victor Tusa.



Hedgewars Campaign Mission Periklis Ntanasis is creating a new Hedgewars Mission campaign. He is about halfway from the end, and is quite satisfied with the end result so far. He is being mentored by kyber (nemo) from Hedgewars

Other Projects: The other projects in action for Google Summer of Code are:

• Github Code Review for CLI, by Xystushi, under bamboo
• Automatic Resizing of LVM Volumes by Akif Khan, under Dinar Valeev
• IaaS Cloud Framework for software packaging and documentation by intijk, under Robert Schweikert
• syslog-ng redis destination by tichy, under Gergely Nagy

So far, it has been an awesome ride, with the coding work going at full swing. Now, the students must Geeko up to scrub code, write test cases and finish the documentation tasks. The Soft Pencils Down’ date is September 16, followed by the ‘Firm Pencils Down’ date on 23rd September.

Source: openSUSE News

[openSUSE.fi]

Upcoming openSUSE 13.1 will be kept Evergreen
26 August 2013, 12:45 pm



The openSUSE Evergreen has just announced that the upcoming openSUSE 13.1 will be the next Evergreen release. This means that the Evergreen team will continue to provide openSUSE 13.1 with with security updates and important bugfixes after the usual 18 month maintenance cycle until it has had a total life time of at least three years.

What is Evergreen The openSUSE Evergreen team was started to keep openSUSE releases alive by issuing security- and stability fixes after the normal 18 month lifespan of openSUSE releases. The team has kept selected releases maintained for an additional 18 to 30 months. The first Evergreen release was openSUSE 11.1. Current releases in the Evergreen maintenance program are openSUSE 11.2 to be maintained until November 2013 (a total of 4 years) and 11.4 to be maintained until July 2014 (reaching almost three-and-a-half).

You can find more information about Evergreen and how to keep your openSUSE release alive on the Evergreen wiki page.

Have a lot of fun!

Source: openSUSE News

[openSUSE.fi]

Help Wanted: openSUSE Review Team
28 August 2013, 12:59 pm



The openSUSE Review Team is interested in adding 1 to 2 new members to the team.  This person will review submissions to opnSUSE Factory that will improve the quality of the product and add great new functionality to the already awesome openSUSE distribution.  Details of the tasks performed by the members of the Review Team can be seen on the openSUSE Review Team wiki page and the associated openSUSE Factory Submissions portal.

Ideally we want to add a non-SUSE employee from the community, but all qualified candidates will be considered.  (Dominique “Dimstar” Leuenberger would really appreciate some more non-SUSE folks on the team.  Who can blame him?!)

A qualified candidate would display the following characteristics:

a) works well with the Review Team and the openSUSE (and greater Linux) community

b) considerable expertise with RPM packaging

c) considerable expertise with openSUSE packaging methods and standards

d) reasonable awareness of Linux security concerns

e) an appreciation for quality controls and the value of solid, quality software

f) an availability to routinely perform these tasks for the community.  Typically a few hours per week divided over several days during the week.

g) willing to apply the rules to everybody; primary goal is to safeguard quality, not friendship :)    You’re even allowed to decline coolo’s request!

Applications will be considered until 9 September 2013.

If you’re interested, please send email to the Review Team via review@opensuse.org.  In your email, tell a little about yourself, particularly about the “a” through “g” qualifications listed above.

Oh, and don’t forget to have fun.

Source: openSUSE News

[openSUSE.fi]

Winter is Coming, Get Your Code Inside!
5 September 2013, 3:00 pm

• It is already September! Haven’t you noticed? Bad weather is coming, it will be freezing soon!

According to the roadmap, Full Feature Freeze will be upon openSUSE Factory on September the 19th. On that day, openSUSE 13.1 Beta will see the harsh light of day.

But already, the Toolchain and Base System are deeply frozen and only leaf packages have time left to scurry in. Two weeks, to be exact, 14 days and it will be Winter in Factory. Time to get your package updates in before they freeze in the cold! Read on to learn how to make it happen.

About Factory Factory is a repository on openSUSE’s Open Build Service. The almost 6K packages make it the largest OBS project and core to what we do. Factory is maintained by the openSUSE Release team. Packages flow into Factory from developers via the Devel Projects.





Devel projects The Factory Development Model describes package development happening in the devel projects. A devel project, as the name suggests, is a project where development happens for a specific group of packages, like multimedia, GNOME, KDE or Kernel.

Each devel project has its own set of processes, rules and communication channels that fits them best. Usually you can find information about that on the project home page. Otherwise, asking on IRC or the Factory mailinglist will do fine. The current devel projects feeding into factory can be found in the drop-down menu on top of this page. A list of all public projects in the Open Build Service can be found here.

The openSUSE team has recently finished documenting the entire development process in more detail, if you’re interested you can start on this page but keep in mind: the rabbit hole goes deep!

BURPing! Say a package in a devel project feeding into Factory is outdated or broken. You might need this package and want to fix it. Now you easily can branch them in OBS and get yourself a fixed package. But why not contribute the fix back to Factory? That way – you don’t have to maintain it. Merging changes is very easy thanks to the collaborative feature of OBS. Once you branched and fixed the package, create a submit request and you’re done. The maintainer from the devel project will pick it up and merge the change. This process is called Branching, Updating and Requesting a Package (BURPing). See the image below or read more on this page for command line steps.



Getting new packages in What do you need? Not much. You don’t need to be ‘approved’ or have any special skills, other than of course the ability to build a package. And that’s not too hard, especially with so many developers around who are happy to help you! A tip: copy an existing package and rework it into what you need.

As said, packages for Factory have to go through Devel projects. The reasons for that are quite simple: together, a team of maintainers can do a better job than alone. A devel project provides you with some feedback on your work and helping hands where needed. And of course it gets your software in the hands of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of users! You can try to find the appropriate devel project in the drop-down on this page or, if that doesn’t enlighten much, ask on the factory mailing list.

So once you have found the appropriate devel project (see the drop-down on this page) it’s time to contact the team and tell them you want to have a package in. The easiest way of doing that is simply submitting it! Create a submit request, enter the devel project details (see the BURP picture above for an example) and send it in. If you can’t find a decent devel project, you can either use the catchall project devel:openSUSE:Factory or even start a new devel project. Starting a new devel project means asking on the factory mailing list, you’ll get some input on your package(s) and the need for a separate devel project there.

After you have found a devel project you can submit-request your package to openSUSE:Factory. The submit-request must contain a note with information about the package. Preferably you introduce the package to the opensuse-factory list and point to that introduction in your Submit Request. A good introduction contains information on the state of the upstream project and how maintainable it is and what the purpose of having it in the distribution will be.

All the above can be done either from the nice web interface of OBS or following the command line instructions on this page.

Conclusion So getting updates or completely new packages in openSUSE 13.1 is not hard. Being a Factory maintainer might sound like a heavy responsibility and to some extent it is. But it’s more than likely being a maintainer in a Devel project actually doesn’t involve more work than what you currently do to keep your own packages building in your own home project. You will even get some help now and then. And you’ll get the satisfaction of making a difference and being part of an awesome team!

Have fun hacking!

Source: openSUSE News

[openSUSE.fi]

OBS Stopped Building, Will be Back Tomorrow
5 September 2013, 8:13 pm

We’ve got some bad news: OBS has decided to stop building images. Our Geekos are hard at work to fix it but they don’t expect to have it all back up and running until tomorrow morning.



The lights are (mostly) out…

Source: openSUSE News

[openSUSE.fi]

openSUSE ARM Gets new Raspberry Pi Images
9 September 2013, 12:10 pm

Sadly, the sticker doesn’t fit… Over the weekend, Bernhard Wiedemann has been working on new armv6 based images for the Raspberry Pi. It is built using a set of alternative build scripts aiming to make the building of the image easier. He’s put the scripts as well as an image online, you can get it from oSC or here (image) and here (scripts). If you’re playing around with Raspberry Pi and want to create images for your device(s), this is for you!

The Image and Building It As Bernhard explains on his blog, the image he created is only 82mb compressed, so it is pretty minimalistic. The image also contains the scripts he created for building under /home/abuild/rpmbuild/SOURCES/.

If you’re interested in playing with the building itself, creating custom images, the following commands will get you going:

osc co devel:ARM:Factory:Contrib:RaspberryPi altimagebuild

cd devel:ARM:Factory:Contrib:RaspberryPi/altimagebuild

bash -x main.sh

He notes: If you have 6GB RAM, you can speed things up with export OSC_BUILD_ROOT=/dev/shm/arm before you do.

This package doesn’t build in OBS or with just the osc command as it requires root permissions for some steps. That is why you have to run it by hand and let it do its magic. The under-250-lines of script will go through the following steps:

• First, osc build is used to pull in required packages and setup the armv6 rootfs.
• Second, mkrootfs.sh modifies a copy of the rootfs under .root to contain all required configs
• And finally, mkimage.sh takes the .root dir and creates a .img from it that can be booted

Bernhard claims that: “this can build an image from scatch in three minutes. And my Raspberry Pi booted successfully with it within 55 seconds.”

Todo and Open Issues He also points out some remaining open issues:

• the repo key is initially untrusted
• still uses old 3.1 kernel
• build scripts have no error handling

Compared to the old image, this one has some advantages:

• It is easier to resize as the root partition is the last one
• Compressed image is much smaller
• Reproducible image build, so easy to customize
• It is armv6 with floating point support, so could be faster
• We have 5200 successfully built packages from openSUSE:Factory:ARM

If you wanted to play with building images for the Raspberry Pi, this might well be the easiest way doing so! And as always, merge requests are very much welcome.

Have a lot of fun

Source: openSUSE News

[openSUSE.fi]

Beta, Pizza and Hackaton
16 September 2013, 5:00 pm



Almost time for the release of openSUSE 13.1 Beta.

Many openSUSE contributors, upon hearing that, will feel their bellies rumbling: Pizza! The tradition of Beta, Pizza and Party stands solid in openSUSE. And like last year, the openSUSE team is planning to have a bugfixing hackathon, a hacking sprint to bring some serious stability to openSUSE Factory. This time, however, other SUSE offices and lots of people will join and the openSUSE team has prepared a list of bugs to be fixed. Also, there will be prizes to win!

Read on to find out about Piza Testing and Bugfixing Hackatons.

The BetaPizza Party Concept Turned Hackaton Usually, the BetaPizza is as much about testing as about party. This time, we don’t skimp on the pizza but add in the fixing of bugs as well! The SUSE engineers will be joining us for a day to get rid of these nasty animals. The BetaPizza hackaton will take place on Friday the 27th of September, from office time in Taipei to Provo!

The plan is for the various offices to have a BetaPizza Master taking care of both the food and the bug fixing frenzy that precedes it. Ludwig Nussel from the openSUSE Team will be Global BetaPizza Master, keeping an eye on all this. And all offices will be open for openSUSE community members to join the fun!

An article will be published shorty before the start of the hackaton (kicking off on the 27th) with more details but some things we’ve already planned.

An old toad

Communication and collaboration To do a decent job at this we have to communicate together and make sure we’re not duplicating work. To facilitate this, we have:

• a bug list prepared, ready to be picked off one by one.
• a Google hangout set up
• a cool IRC channel for everybody to join: #openSUSE-pizza-hackaton on Freenode

Prizes In the coming weeks, the openSUSE team will work with the bugs reported by everybody testing Beta, tagging them with Gold, Silver and Bronze tags. We will prepare some bugzilla queries which will help you find the bugs and hack on them during the hackaton.

Depending on the gold/silver/bronze tags, points are awarded for bugs. You earn the points by triaging (checking and verifying) and fixing the bugs, and for the top bugfixers we have some prizes prepared! Based on the points and an investigation into the work done, a committee of Old, Wise Toads will decide the winners.

Joining the Bugfixing Hackathon in SUSE Offices In most locations, times and rooms are being picked still and we’ll update you on details. But in general, think about 9:00 to 19:00 opening time for most local offices, with pizza around 18:00 and perhaps more party after 19:00. See the info on the beta pizza party/hackaton wiki.

Beta Testing To give Beta a good work-out and prepare some bugs for the hackers to fix, we also hope you all will find time to organize some pizza-loaded testing events before the 27th! This means installing it and submitting bug reports when you bump into trouble. You can download the openSUSE 13.1 Beta (available soon) from the openSUSE website. It might make sense to download it and put it on an USB stick or a DVD so people can get to work right away!

Bugs should be reported and can be tracked via Bugzilla. Find a how-to on reporting bugs on the wiki.

Discussions about openSUSE development takes place on the factory mailing list. openSUSE Factory is the development release of openSUSE. If you want to help out, please see the wiki page on contributing to Factory. Contributing is easy and very welcome! We happen to have this awesome tool called the Open Build Service. Think of it as a Github for packagers: Branch, Update and create a submit Request for a Package. In openSUSE terms you’ve just BURPed and we’ll be proud of you ;-)

OBS has a command line but also a easy browser interface – you can even fix and build packages from a mobile phone or a Windows desktop!



There is plenty of help available on the Development page on the openSUSE wiki and you are more than welcome to ask for help on the openSUSE factory mailing list or on the openSUSE IRC channels!

btrfs Of some special interest for this release is btrfs. A discussion has been going on about making this future-oriented file system the default on the next openSUSE. That is (most likely) not going to happen but btrfs is still a prominent option during installation so any relevant testing and bugfixing will benefit many openSUSE 13.1 users. And, more importantly, chances are big that it will be the default in the release following 13.1!

To enable this testing, the release team has decided to include a “want to test btrfs?” pop-up during installation of Beta 1. Of course, this won’t be in the final releases (nor the RC’s) but it will hopefully help remind people that btrfs can use some testing.

btrfs in openSUSE By default, only the ‘safe’ features of btrfs are enabled in openSUSE, including the snapshot and metadata and data integrity feature. These both offer protection against data loss. The snapshots do this by making it easy to revert files to earlier states, even bringing back removed files where needed! The (meta)data integrity feature uses error checking codes on your data to ensure your spinning rust or deep fried sand gives you back the data you stored on it the way you intended.

However, who installs btrfs now will be able to instantly benefit from the many features under development as soon as they are marked stable. Some of these include transparent compression of data, de-duplication of files and data, multi-volume drives and hot add/remove of drives part of it and various performance improvements.

The coolest thing is that you can already test those features by adding the ‘allow_unsupported=1′ option to the btrfs module either on the kernel command line or in /etc/modprobe.d!



Beta Pizza Party As said before, the Beta Pizza Party is a great openSUSE tradition. Parties are simple: you only need people, the rest will follow. Geeko’s are fun at heart although many of them require some beer and food to really loosen up. If you have your event at a pizza place, it doesn’t get easier! Of course you can do it at home, in an office, a pub, or wherever else you want. Most important thing: Just Do it! Don’t worry that only 5 people show up. 5 Geeko’s already make a huge party and there’s lots of testing you can do with a handful of geeko’s!

So, how to do it? Just three steps:

• Get out there and find a nice Geeko pizza place!
• Let your Geeko friends know about it and make sure they tell their friends about it. Tell them to bring laptops or desktops for testing!
• Make sure there is pizza and some USB sticks with openSUSE Beta 1

That way you can gather all your local community for this nice Pizza Party. Need more help organizing it? Check out the articles below!

• how to do a betapizza party
• read the launch party HOWTO
• add yourself to the Beta Pizza party list

Of course, if you want to go all out and make your own pizza, you can Find a Geeko-ified recipe here!

Ready for Pizza? As a reminder, until Beta is out, you can still get features in. Once it is out, there will be Beta Pizza Parties and some serious hacking during the Beta Pizza Hackaton. Hungry? Ready for it? We are in for a lot of fun!

Source: openSUSE News

[openSUSE.fi]

openSUSE 13.1 Beta Is Out!
19 September 2013, 12:40 pm



“Still … in this world only winter is certain.”

― George R.R. Martin

“And thus, Factory is now Frozen.”

― Stephan “coolo” Kulow

Starting today, you can scurry over to software.opensuse.org, grab that beta by its tail and give it a spin. And report your findings, because we want to squash those smelly little bugs out of it during our hackaton. So, shove a pizza in that oven, settle with your laptop next to a roaring fire and a big glas of mead and start testing!

Read on to find out what’s new in this beta, what we’d like you to test and of course what is up with that Party and that Hackaton.



Latest features that made it in With Factory feature frozen now, you might wonder what did make the cut! These are the latest new features that made it in before the freeze:

• kernel 3.11.1
• llvm/clang 3.3
• Mesa 9.2.0
• systemd 207
• php5 5.4.19
• tcl 8.6
• bluez 5
• wine 1.7
• samba 4.1
• KDE SC 4.11.1 and GNOME 3.9.91
• apache2 2.4.6
• texlive 2013
• vim 7.4
• Amarok 2.8

Also, Coolo has included the Greek language on the DVD.

Testing, Beta Pizza Party and Hackaton As you have read just two days ago, we plan a hackaton to fix bugs in this beta. And the more bugs you find, the more we can fix during that hackaton! A good reason to organize a decent Beta Pizza Party…

Some testing hints Testing means installing the beta, playing around with it and submitting bug reports when you bump into trouble. For a party it might make sense to download the beta and put it on an USB stick or a DVD so people can get to work right away.

Bugs should be reported and can be tracked via Bugzilla. Find a how-to on reporting bugs on the wiki. There’s a quick overview of the most annoying bugs in 13.1 Beta, check it out before you submit duplicate bug reports.

Discussions about openSUSE development takes place on the factory mailing list. openSUSE Factory is the development release of openSUSE.



There is plenty of help available on the Development page on the openSUSE wiki and you are more than welcome to ask for help on the openSUSE factory mailing list or on the openSUSE IRC channels!

btrfs Of some special interest for this release is btrfs. A discussion has been going on about making this future-oriented file system the default on the next openSUSE. That won’t be but btrfs is still a prominent option during installation so any relevant testing and bugfixing will benefit many openSUSE 13.1 users. And, more importantly, we aim for having it default in the future.

To enable this testing, the release team has decided to include a “want to test btrfs?” pop-up during installation of Beta 1. Of course, this won’t be in the final releases (nor the RC’s) but it will hopefully help remind people that btrfs can use some testing.

btrfs in openSUSE By default, only the ‘safe’ features of btrfs are enabled in openSUSE, including the snapshot and metadata and data integrity feature. These both offer protection against data loss. The snapshots do this by making it easy to revert files to earlier states, even bringing back removed files where needed! The (meta)data integrity feature uses error checking codes on your data to ensure your spinning rust or deep fried sand gives you back the data you stored on it the way you intended.

However, who installs btrfs now will be able to instantly benefit from the many features under development as soon as they are marked stable. Some of these include transparent compression of data, de-duplication of files and data, multi-volume drives and hot add/remove of drives part of it and various performance improvements. Currently, these features are there but can not be used. However, you can already test them by adding the ‘allow_unsupported=1′ option to the btrfs module either on the kernel command line or in /etc/modprobe.d.

Get testing! …. and have a lot of fun…

Source: openSUSE News

[openSUSE.fi]

openSUSE Summit 2013: Registration Opened!
25 September 2013, 2:04 am



It has already been a year since the first iteration of the openSUSE Summit held in Orlando Florida. Our guests and organizers agreed that tying this community event at the end of SUSEcon is a very good idea and it was set to be repeated in 2013 as well. If you live in the Northern part of the U.S.A. then you know that November can be very cold, therefore, our organizers decided to go back to Florida this year and have everyone warm up to the never-ending summer in the peach state. Our event website is up and running and registrations are open!

Website up, Registration Open, Sessions Requests Started The openSUSE Summit 2013 conference website is up on summit.opensuse.org and we’re looking forward almost as much to your visit there as a real life appearance at the event. Registration is open and so is our call for papers: you can shoot in your sessions proposals! Once you are part of the summit roaster your talks and presentation will be added to our tracking system in order to generate a schedule.

Please be aware that the schedule is set by our organizers and if your presentation is scheduled for a time when it is not convenient to you, email the organization and we will be sure to rearrange the time. Registration for sessions and sessions will end October 4th, 2013.

Access and Summit Sessions Getting access to the conference and sessions costs $50.00 for Professional and $200.00 for Company Supporters. Tickets will be available soon. There are SUSE-branded backpacks as gifts for those in attendance.

Our sessions can be split into three main categories. First we have long talks or presentations lasting about 50 minutes, short talks running for about 30 minutes and then workshops lasting between 2-4 hours, depending on how lengthy the subject covered is.

Finding an appropriate subject for a session at the summit can be difficult. However, there are a few things that can get you thinking in what is important to share. For example, you may have recently participated in the organization of a Linux conference and would like to share what you learned from that experience. You could also be more technical and share the latest changes in coding for Ruby’s new version, etc. There are many subjects you can share on and it can very from very technical to something as simple as showing how to reach out and form a community around openSUSE. See our conference speaker guidelines for some more tips and information.



A great base to build upon Last year’s conference was a huge success. Our organization team worked hard and produced more than a few hits with the rest of our community. There was Hawaiian dancing, pool dives, food and lots of sessions discussing the world of openSUSE. Sessions varied from musical software to workshops explaining how to contribute code to the openSUSE distribution. Most presenters were already active in our community, but we’re an open bunch (hence the name!) and if you are not formally part of the Geekos you can still contribute to the project. If you want to get involved check out this page!



openSUSE Summit in 2013 The openSUSE community has already started working with the organization of SUSECon to make the openSUSE Summit happen. The Summit team recently held a meeting in which assignments and many other important considerations were discussed. One of them is getting people involved with the summit. Our team would like to invite those interested in showing what they know and like about openSUSE and Linux in general to participate in our sessions.

The openSUSE summit is flexible and, at the same time, focused on the important subjects that surround our community. Our themes for sessions can easily expand from openSUSE-centric subjects to others that include the rest of the Linux world. We are looking for sessions covering openSUSE technology, the openSUSE community, as well as sessions covering FOSS projects that may not immediately be related to openSUSE.

Travel Support Program Our travel support program is also ready to take in requests from our team members. It is important to note that although there are resources to help our members travel to the summit, these are not unlimited. They require that travel support program users keep receipts for later reimbursements. Additionally, the Travel Support Team will have 2 calls for support requests. Keep them in your calendar. The dates are

First call, from September 27 through October 3. Results will be available on October 8.

Second call, From October 11 through October 17. Results will be available on October 22.

There will also be a waiting list in case your request did not make it to one of the 2 calls. 

Participation Welcome! Remember that those who collaborate with sessions for our summit are considered awesomely cool. Your badge will thus say that you are a presenter and your entry into the summit will be waived. You will additionally be hugged by more than one member of our community and might become green! Moreover, joining the organization team for the summit is also very much appreciated. Please check out our website and find out the many ways to participate. You could even sponsor our conference since there are various opportunities available. All that does not mean we don’t love and hug our visitors: every single one of you is risking having an incredibly good time!

See you in Florida!

Source: openSUSE News

[openSUSE.fi]

Beta Pizza Hackaton Starting Friday!
25 September 2013, 8:00 pm



Friday is the day: the Beta Pizza Hackaton is here.

Have you already been testing the Beta? Reported bugs? Great! This Friday we’ll begin to triage and fix them! There will be a concerted bugfixing frenzy, coordinated over IRC and Google hangouts, with (open)SUSE developers all over the world going through the bugs and fixing them. There are points awarded both for fixing and for triaging bugs and the top contributors can count on a prize!

Read on for details.

The BetaPizza Party Concept Turned Hackaton Usually, the BetaPizza is as much about testing as about party. This time, we don’t skimp on the pizza but add in the fixing of bugs as well! The SUSE engineers will be joining us for a day to get rid of these nasty animals. The BetaPizza hackaton will take place on Friday the 27th of September, from office time in Taipei to Provo!

The plan is for the various offices to have a BetaPizza Master taking care of both the food and the bug fixing frenzy that precedes it. Ludwig Nussel from the openSUSE Team will be Global BetaPizza Master, keeping an eye on all this. And all offices will be open for openSUSE community members to join the fun!

An old toad Communication and collaboration To do a decent job at this we have to communicate together and make sure we’re not duplicating work. To facilitate this, we have:

• a bug list prepared, ready to be picked off one by one, in bugzilla (if you don’t know were to start, some relevant bugs will be labeled as GOLD, SILVER and BRONZE)
• a Google hangout set up
• a cool IRC channel for everybody to join: #openSUSE-pizza-hackaton on Freenode

Prizes A committee of Old, Wise Toads (with help from the openSUSE team at SUSE) is going over the bugs reported by everybody testing Beta, tagging them with Gold, Silver and Bronze tags. Depending on these tags, points will be awarded for bugs. You can earn the points by triaging (checking and verifying) and fixing the bugs. For the top bugfixers we have some prizes prepared! Based on the points and an investigation into the work done, the committee will decide the winners. Since not all important bugs have been tagged, the points will be used only as initial estimation: the good old wise toads will have the last word.

Keep in mind that the tagging of the bugs is a work in progress and will change over the time, so don’t hesitase to go through the whole list of bugs and pick any one you think is important.

What the prizes are will be is still a surprise ;-)

Joining the Bugfixing Hackathon in SUSE Offices For more information about locations, times and rooms, check the info in the beta pizza party/hackaton wiki. The main idea is the same everywhere: a whole day squashig, starting early in the morning and with pizza at lunch time. Since openSUSE folks are spread all over the world, that means a timeframe from Sept. 26th 22:00 UTC to Sept. 27th 22:00 UTC. Just contact your nearest BetaPizza Master and join!



About testing and fixing bugs The process of finding and fixing bugs is rather simple:

• Pick a bug from the list.
• Fix the bug.
• Close the bug.

See this page for some more detail and find here the workflow and osc commands for fixing bugs.

We’ll find out who closed what bug and award points accordingly. Note that closing a bug as duplicate or otherwise not by actually fixing something is called triaging and has a different number of points associated with it!



On the subject of triaging, this goes as follows:

• Pick a bug from the list.
• Check the bug report: is it complete enough?
• Try to reproduce the bug and add information about the encounter, if you can.
• Give a priority and set the status to ASSIGNED. Try to assign it, if you can.

The KDE team has an excellent page on bug screening, most of which is relevant all over openSUSE. Yes, triaging requires some special rights in bugzilla, during the day somebody on IRC can grant you these and even without, you can still add comments to the bugs which is equally helpful. Moreover, asking questions on IRC is totally OK!

Get ready… For Pizza, Hacking and Fun!

Source: openSUSE News

[openSUSE.fi]

Travel support applications to attend openSUSE Summit opened!
27 September 2013, 3:00 am

We are happy to announce the Travel Team is ready to receive applications for sponsorships to attend to openSUSE Summit 2013.



This year openSUSE Summit will be held in the beautiful Florida, November 15 to 17 and the Disney’s Coronado Springs Resort will welcome all Geekos to this year’s event.

The openSUSE Travel Support Program provides travel sponsorships to individuals that want to attend openSUSE Summit and need financial assistance.

For Summit this year the TSP will work a bit differently. The TSP will make 2 calls, for the first call the deadline is October 3, 2013 and you can start sending your applications now! The results will be given before October 8, 2013.

The second call will start on October 11, 2013 ending on October 17, 2013. The results before October 22, 2013. Important to say that the second call is for those who had applied on CfP and didn’t have answer before the first call ends. Of course, even applied and no answer yet you can send your application on the first call.

About the TSP you can see at https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Travel_Support_Program The instructions are detailed at https://connect.opensuse.org/travel-support/

 



Important

* A good application with good information will be processed faster.

* Always choose the most economical option whenever possible.  People who need travel sponsorship, should         look for the best price. If the Travel Committee finds a cheaper price, that will be the price in consideration.

 

 

In case of doubts just drop us an email travel-support@opensuse.org

Do not forget… The Call for Participation still opened so hurry up!

 

Your TSP Team

Source: openSUSE News

[openSUSE.fi]

SUSE Speeds up Building AArch64 Software in QEMU
1 October 2013, 2:00 pm



Following the announcement of much improved Raspberry Pi support, there is more news coming from the openSUSE ARM team! The SUSE team has been developing an AArch64 port of QEMU which is much faster building 64 bit ARM code in emulation and this code is aimed for upstream inclusion. Read on to find out what this is all about.

AArch64 Port Written and Released SUSE engineers have taken up QEMU and developed an AArch64 port. This allows building AArch64 software in emulation with a 10-20x speedup over Foundation model provided by ARM. The speed improvement is a result of the QEMU using user mode, also known as application mode, emulation and not full system mode emulation which is what the Foundation model uses. The code has been employed to advance the AArch64 porting work done in openSUSE, enabling AArch64 as build target in the openSUSE Build Service. SUSE has been able to open source the code and is working on inclusion in upstream QEMU. For those interested, the code is also publicly available on Github.



Bringing openSUSE to AArch64 The Open Build Service in action at openSUSE has recently received a pretty serious upgrade with an impressive Arndale ARM cluster. But before we received this fantastic hardware our x86 based systems were running QEMU Virtual Machines to build the ARMv7 packages under construction. Our engineers had spent effort on the ARMv7 support in QEMU and getting it all well integrated in OBS which improved reliability and support significantly.

Having all this set up in OBS was of course a big help when the team got started on AArch64 and did play a major role in openSUSE being the first generally available, fully built, general purpose Linux distribution for AArch64. We already delivered the experimental AArch64 images with the openSUSE 12.3 release in March 2013!

Build Performance Improvements with AArch64 for QEMU ARM’s Foundation Model, which is the reference emulation platform, was used to build the packages. It has been an invaluable tool to bring up the distribution but building took long and when there were problems, waiting two days for a rebuild to complete just because somebody made a typo was very frustrating. SUSE engineers thus proceeded to develop AArch64 emulation in QEMU. The AArch64 port for QEMU provides significantly shorter build times both on developer workstations as well as on the Open Build Service and allows development to proceed even more rapidly.

Compared to the already available state of openSUSE:Factory built for AArch64 in the Foundation Model, work has been put into rebuilding all of it with the newly published QEMU emulator, which allows us to follow changes in Factory much quicker than before. The build results are available same like before under openSUSE:Factory:ARM page just like before, however the results are now referring to a QEMU based build.

Have a lot of fun building AArch64 packages!

Source: openSUSE News

[openSUSE.fi]

Help promote openSUSE 13.1!
7 October 2013, 7:50 pm



We’re not at the release, but the beta is out, according to the roadmap RC1 is coming Thursday and our artists have been hard at work preparing artwork. We’ve got badges, backgrounds, counters and banners for you to put on your social media or blog pages, on your desktop or even on your wall! Let’s make sure everybody knows what’s coming.

For you blog and social media accounts If you want to decorate your blog or website with a nice 13.1 banner, grab one of these four:

	468×60
	728×90
	120×90
	125×125

 

As we geekos like to share, we have all this in nice svg files that you can modify to your liking on github. The above are made by Anditosan, kudos to him!



Twitter, facebook, G+… For twitter, facebook and such, VictorHCK has been hacking away! Download the image of your choice here (images available for ‘release is out’ and ‘is coming soon’ as well as a nice plain background) and go through the following steps:

• Login in your account of Twitter
• Select Settings in the top panel
• In Design tab, select Change background image
• Select the image
• Click on Save changes

Victor has also created really cool Google+ banners which you can easily apply. Once our Facebook images are updated, you can get them here. Of course, feel free to lend us a hand!

Release Counter

The release counter currently still shows 12.3 but it will be updated to 13.1 soon! The URL won’t change so you can just follow the tips below and get it as soon as it is done!

You can add the openSUSE 13.1 release counter to your website in various sizes by including the following html code in your blog:




“medium” is the size of the counter; it can also be “small” or “large” and we also have “wide” for a banner.

See the Countdown page on the openSUSE Wiki for more countdown information, code and tips!

Going to print CD’s? And if you’re planning on printing CD’s, there’s some awesome artwork done by Andi for that in this github folder. Lookin’ real Green!



Release is coming… Some of you have asked about the ‘release is coming’ images… Yeah, we have them in higher quality and even some SVG goodness! Just click the image for the github repo…



If you have any trouble with the github links, there is a nice static mirror provided by Tigerfoot. And yes, organization of so much artwork is difficult and yes, github might not be the BEST tool for downloading, but we value collaboration. And we still have to find a tool which would do a better job at that…

Help spreading the fun!

Source: openSUSE News

[openSUSE.fi]

GSoC Students Rockin’ Ready!
8 October 2013, 2:24 pm

We reached the conclusion of yet another Google Summer of Code. Our students and mentors put in a lot of effort, writing and reviewing code, documenting it and in the process and sharing and learning a lot. We’d like to share with you some of the experiences of our students, mentors and of course the state of the projects!

Nine out of twelve Like previous years, we have our share of ups and downs, but in the end we completed nine of the twelve projects successfully. Following is a short summary of the work done over the summer, along with the experiences of the students and the mentors.

Project Git Review Xystushi created a Git review system. A lot of code has been refactored from ground up, important bugs fixed and new features have been added. In his words, GSoC was an amazing experience. The code is hosted on github.

Project AppArmor Profiling Kshitij worked on creating tools for AppArmor Profiling. The command line versions have been created for all the tools. There were some setbacks on the YaST based GUI front-end, but the overall project was successful. Kshitij plans to complete the GUI based tools in the coming weeks. The code is hosted at launchpad.



Project “Automatic Resize of LVM Volumes” Akif Khan wrote a standalone application that can perform automatic resizing of File System and Logical Volumes. This tool can be called by the package manager during installation on encountering low space exception. This tool can also perform automatic resizing if the free space required by a user for a particular volume decreases below a certain level. According to Akif, it was an incredible learning experience for him, and he got to know a lot about the openSUSE Community as a whole.

The code can be found on github.

Project “Music App for ownCloud” The music app for owCloud lets you scan, browse and listen to your music. The final release is scheduled for the next ownCloud release.  The student Morris Jobke noted that the project was very exciting and that he learned a lot in developing for a large project like ownCloud community.



Project Hedgewars Campaign Mission Periklis Natansis wrote a new campaign mission for Hedgewars, which is about a hedgehogs’ journey in the stars to save his home planet. The camaign is said to be great fun and will be included in the next Hedgewars release for all to enjoy!

Project Syslog-ng MySQL Destination Gyula Petrovics wrote a MySQL destination driver for syslog-ng. Victor Tusa, the mentor of the project writes that though the start of the project was slow, everything worked out well in the end, thanks to face to face meetings with the student. Gyula has successfully finished the project!

Project Syslog-ng Redis Destination Tihamér Petrovics created a Redis Destination for syslog-ng. The project can be found at github.



Source: openSUSE News

[openSUSE.fi]

openSUSE Conference 2015 (oSC15) Location Search
9 October 2013, 9:34 pm



We as a community are still abuzz from the success of the first community organized openSUSE conference in Thessaloniki this past July and many are already looking forward to the openSUSE Conference in Dubrovnik, Croatia next year (oSC14.) As we all know the wheels of time never stop turning and time flies when you’re having fun. Therefore, before we know it it will be time to announce the location for oSC15. However, before a new location can be announced it has to be found.

The openSUSE board invites you to consider organizing and hosting the openSUSE conference in 2015. The openSUSE Conference (oSC) is the primary yearly gathering of Geekos from around the world. The conference venue requirements can be found on the openSUSE wiki. This is your chance to show the world of Geekos the hospitality and culture of your country. One member of the organizing team will be invited to attend oSC14 at the end of April, 2014 in Dubrovnik and present the location of oSC15.

Please submit your proposals to either opensuse-project@opensuse.org or board@opensuse.org. We are happy to consider proposals from teams that would like to organize the event but are currently not actively involved with the openSUSE community. Proposals are accepted starting now until the end of the year (2013). The board will make a decision about the 2015 location early in 2014 with an announcement to be made at oSC14.

oSC15 should take place in the March-May time frame in 2015, roughly 1 year after oSC14. Your proposal should include a description of the location (city/town and venue) and provide information about your organization team and any experience you may have had organizing other events. Items to consider are cost of lodging around the venue, access to public transportation to and from the airport/train station and hotels to venue, and proximity to a venue for a party.

Source: openSUSE News

[openSUSE.fi]

Coming soon: openSUSE 13.1 with YaST in Ruby
10 October 2013, 3:00 pm



YaST during installation On July 31st the YaST team announced that the final Ruby conversion of YaST YCP code is over and YaST is now at version 3.0. It took about a week for the new YaST to enter Factory, which makes it a part of the upcoming openSUSE 13.1 release. In the following article we’ll answer the questions of why this change took place, what exactly happened, and where YaST is going. We spoke to two SUSE developers who had been involved with the port, Josef Reidinger and David Majda.

Why did you want to port YaST to Ruby?

YaST was developed in YCP — a custom, simple, inflexible language. For a long time, many YaST developers felt that it slowed them down. It didn’t  support many useful concepts like OOP or exception handling, code written in it was hard to test, there were some annoying features (like a  tendency to be “robust”, which really means hiding errors). However, original YCP developers moved on to other projects and there wasn’t anyone willing to step in and improve the language.

Josef and David hacking together

It was obvious that the only way out of this situation is to change the implementation to some other widely used language (most people were thinking about scripting languages, like Ruby or Python, which offer great flexibility and shorter code compared to e.g. C++ or Java). Such a change would mean we wouldn’t need to maintain our own custom language. It would also allow us to use many third-party libraries and make contributing to the project much easier for outsiders. People wouldn’t have to learn a whole new language just because of YaST.

Changing the implementation language of such a big codebase as YaST is a huge effort, so it’s no wonder that developers mostly only talked about it — for years. It required someone external to the team (David) to decide that’s talking isn’t enough and we should just do it :-)

You mentioned in the announcement that the port was done automatically. How did that work?

It was obvious that a manual rewrite is a no-go because of the sheer size of the code base. So we started to hack on a transpiler called Y2R, which would take the YCP code and translate it into Ruby. We worked on it for a week during an internal SUSE workshop. During that time we got into a state where we could translate a code that displayed a simple dialog from YCP to Ruby and run it.

YaST in GNOME

This early success prompted us to work on the project more. We were soon able to translate and run a complete YaST module. Then came the SUSE Hackweek 9, where we involved more people and translated many more modules. After that, the project really gained momentum and several people worked on it full-time for about 3 months, until it was finished.

Why did you pick Ruby?

We chose Ruby because most YaST developers know it well (e.g. from work on WebYaST) and SUSE uses it on several other projects such as SUSE Studio or SLMS. Technically it was on par with other languages we considered (mainly Python and JavaScript/CoffeeScript), so the internal knowledge and standardization was the decisive factor.

How were the results?

Good :-) We translated 96 YaST modules in total and currently there is no YCP code used in YaST except few obscure places like examples in the documentation (which need to be manually rewritten to reflect current best practices). YCP is also still used as a serialization format for some data files and for communicating between YaST components, but this does not affect development and we will probably get rid of that too over time.



I have to say that the final translation went pretty smoothly, mostly because we automated the whole process and did testing builds months in advance. That meant we had opportunity to catch many bugs in the conversion tools and other components early. We even did our custom builds of openSUSE 13. 1 Milestones 2 and 3 with pre-release versions of YaST in Ruby and announced them publically. As a result, openSUSE community had a preview of what would come and participated in testing and tracking down bugs.

YaST in KDE

The amount of converted code is quite impressive:

• 4.204 files
• 594.680 lines of YCP deleted
• 724.687 lines of Ruby added

Are there any differences noticeable, like performance?

So far, we did not focus on any optimizations. Even without them, the memory requirements during installation are only very slightly higher (still you can  install in graphical mode on 512M of RAM), the performance is very comparable, depending on the test (sometimes faster, sometimes slower). Even taking the worst results, the difference is hardly noticeable to users. And other than the usual adaptations to things like systemd, there have been no big visible changes in YaST.

What are your future plans?

While we don’t plan any further major changes based on the translation for openSUSE 13.1, we believe that this lowers the bar for getting contribution from the openSUSE community and that it in the future helps the YaST development. Hopefully it will speed up further improvements of individual YaST modules. For beyond 13.1, we plan to do further changes of the YaST architecture.

Tell us all about it!

For example, we have just settled on a new testing framework, RSpec. That will make YaST tests much more maintainable and approachable for Ruby developers. We have also decided to use YARD (a popular tool in the Ruby world) for code documentation. In the coming months we intend to gradually make YaST modules to look more like regular Ruby applications. Right now, while the code is in Ruby, there is still some YaST-specific tooling and code involved, and because of this diving into YaST is not that easy as it could (and should!) be. It also makes things harder maintenance-wise.

We are also in the process of improving YaST development documentation and opening up the whole development. For example, we discarded our internal YaST IRC channel and all discussions happen in public. We now also use a public CI server to run YaST tests.

The overall goal is to lower barries to entry for external contributors and put them to the same level as members of the internal SUSE YaST team.

YaST on the console Where to start to hack on YaST?

The entry point to YaST documentation for developers is the YaST portal on the openSUSE wiki with the developer info here. We are currently in the process of updating it to match the changes in code (as a part of hackweek). YaST developers can also be found on yast-devel@opensuse.org, where the port was discussed. And there is the #yast channel on freenode.

What are you looking for in new YaST hackers?

Technicall skills, passion for openSUSE and a desire to configure every bit of it ;-)

Even with the port to Ruby, YaST is big. Luckily the individual modules are not and we’d love to see somebody interested in hacking either on an existing one or create new ones. We would be very happy to answer any questions that will inevitably come as we know the code is under-documented – it would of course help us find out what to document first. Some of us have been hacking on YaST for 11 years, it gets hard to see what is wrong with it after that much time!

Thanks for the interview!

Our pleasure.

Source: openSUSE News