Continue reading »]]> If you are following news regarding openSUSE and MySQL, you probably already know, that we have both MySQL and MariaDB in openSUSE to allow users to choose what they want to use. And if these two options are not enough, we’ve got server:database repository with newest and greatest development versions of both and MySQL Cluster on to of that. I think all this is great and awesome, that we have all of that.

Now to the not so great part. Unfortunately I’m bare human, I have to eat, sleep and I have some work, some bugs that takes a lot more time that I expected, some school duties to take care of and of course openSUSE Conference to organize! So as a result of all that, I can’t polish MySQL and MariaDB as much I would love to. And on top of that, I’m not expert in MySQL configuration. Part of that is that it just works and I never had any server where MySQL was slowing things down. But there is plenty of skilled MySQL administrators out there in community! So I’m calling out for help. You skilled MySQL admins probably have a lot of interesting tweaks you are applying to default configuration file. So take a look at them and think what could be useful for everybody, not just in your specific use-case. And either send me snippet with short explanation in the comments, or create .cnf file add it to the flavor directory and send me pull request on github! I’ll keep credits and your explanation of the snippet inside, so people will know, who came with this cool option and what does it do

Oh, and don’t get discouraged if I don’t include it right away, it may take me some time to get to it, but I’ll appreciate every suggestion

Continue reading »]]> If you follow MySQL community at least as much as I do (browsing trough the planet from time to time), you know that some exciting milestones were reached both in Oracles MySQL and in MariaDB. And as I love bleeding edge software, you can try all these exciting things prepackaged in openSUSE

Oracles MySQL

Let’s start with news from guys at Oracle. Recently they released new MySQL Cluster 7.2. Yes 7.2 is GA now. And you can find a lot of exiting info online about how fast it is! If you don’t believe benchmarks done by others, try it by yourself! We have it in server:database repository for all supported openSUSE versions, SLE and few other rpm based distributions. Just add the repository and install package mysql-cluster_72. Pretty easy, isn’t it? So if you have MySQL cluster and want to take advantage of the latest improvements, give it a try

MariaDB

Now a some information regarding MariaDB. Folks at Monty Program were not sleeping either. They released release candidate of MariaDB 5.3, progressing towards GA and yesterday they released first alpha of MariaDB 5.5.20 – merge between their 5.3 and MySQL 5.5. Everything is packaged and ready for you to try in server:database But let’s speak a little bit more about MariaDB…

MariaDB 5.3 series

MariaDB 5.3 is currently in version 5.3.4 and is considered release candidate. It is around for quite some time already. It contains many improvements and people are doing benchmarks and are excited about changes. And it’s getting closer and closer towards GA. I asked on #mariadb channel and was told that GA is probably just a few weeks away. So here comes what I plan to do. openSUSE already contains MariaDB and we have MySQL Community Server as default. Therefore I’ll put MariaDB 5.3 into openSUSE 12.2 (next planned release). I’m running it for quite some time on this server and I haven’t lost any data. Looks quite stable and if somebody think that is still too new and untested, he can always use MySQL Community Server. If you have any objections, comments are lower on this page

MariaDB 5.5

Other think I would like to speak about a little bit is MariaDB 5.5.20. First alpha was released yesterday. What is so interesting about this release? It is merge of MySQL 5.5 and MariaDB 5.3 so it should contain goodies from both words! Ok, some things from MySQL 5.6 are still missing, but anyway, sounds promising. Although I have really low traffic website I switched today in the morning to this version, just to test that everything works fine and to encounter possible troubles sooner. If you want to try it, just add server:database repository and install package mariadb_55. That’s all and you can start testing new version and reporting bugs (preferably directly upstream )

Continue reading »]]> Last week on Friday we had a KDE 4.8 release party in Prague. It took us some time to organize everything, but in the end everything went well. For those of you who missed the party, little overview (and some photos, sorry, no cake left).

Even though it was a Prague release party, we spoke quite a lot in English as well. Why? Well most of our speakers don’t speak Czech (yet). Theo was one organizing the talks and inviting speakers and doing all important stuff around the party and he managed to get here Cornelius Schumacher and Jos Poortvliet to come. Both of them has a long history with KDE, so they were giving great talks. For example Jos spoke about 15 new KDE features in 5 minutes and Cornelius about how KDE evolved over the time from small project done by few people to the current state where many people from all over the world works on it. Talk by Jos was also important from other reaseon. People could bet how long will it take and three closest to the actual time have won plush geekos! In the end five minutes talk lasted eight minutes. Apart from famous foreign visitors, we had talks by Tomáš Chvátal about translations and LibreOffice KDE integration and Theo also had a talk which I unfortunatelly missed because I was fetching party attendees in the reception and getting them up through the lift.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

After the talks, Cornelius started cutting the cake and serving it to all attendees and we talked and enjoyed the KDE cake and openSUSE beer and talked… I would say, party was great and even though I’m not a KDE user, I enjoyed it! Many thanks to everybody who participated and I’m looking forward to next open source event which happens to be this weekend

PS: If you like to get your hands on KDE 4.8 Live media, you can find some in SUSE Studio or wait for official Gentoo Live media that will be released later this week.

Continue reading »]]> You all probably heard about Ubuntu for Android, right? Ubuntu is very good in the marketing and they can do a lot of locomotion around everything. So what if you have Android, want to use Linux distribution and Ubuntu isn’t your cup of tee? You can use openSUSE of course! Let me show you how…

Requirements

What do you need? Obviously some device with Android. And as our main focus in openSUSE is on newer devices, you’ll need armv7 one. How do you know whether your device is new enough? For start, my old Nexus One is armv7. So if you have something newer (not counting cheap no-names), you are probably good to go. If you want to know for sure, open up the terminal on your android device and run cat /proc/cpuinfo. If it shows Processor : ARMv7, you are good to go!
Now a little bit of requirements on Android system itself. You’ll need root on your device and you’ll need decent enough busybox. Both of that is usually part of unofficial ROMs. There might be some differences and some troubles, but let’s deal with them when times come.

Separate partition installation

I would say that best way to install openSUSE is to repartition your SD card. If your are not wiling to do so, I’ll describe how to run it from file some other time… Or you can start from my previous post, replace the older script with the new one and adjust it
So let’s start repartitioning. I would suggest to take your card out of your device, put it into card reader and repartition it in your computer, where you can use nice tools like gparted. Create one ext4 partition that will hold your root. I would recommend to create it as your second partition. Some programs (like recovery programs) expects first partition to be FAT, so you’ll into some troubles otherwise. Create your partition as big as you want, but my recommendation would be at least 1G. Depending on what do you plan on doing, it can be more.
So I hope that you created partition successfully by yourselves, now it’s time to get openSUSE for your device. Where do you get that? On our download servers! Yes, we’ve got images and tarballs prepared for some devices. What you want to get is file starting with LimeJeOS-openSUSE-Factory-ARM-rootfs.armv7l and ending with -tbz.tar.bz2. Why not put whole link and make it easier for you? These images gets rebuild automatically, so the part that I left out changes over the time as you get newer and newer versions But don’t worry, you can use zypper to upgrade too
Lets put it on the card. Tarball you just downloaded actually contains another tarball and checksum. I know, not fun, but no big deal either. So get to the inner tarball, mount second partition of of your sdcard and unpack the inner tarball to it. Unpack it as a root! This can be important as as ordinary user you might not have the rights to create some files and some rights might get dropped in the process. This may result in not working system. So do the unpacking as a root. Just a hint how to do it in command line (might need some paths adjustements according to your system):

tar -C /mnt/sdcard-ext2 -xjf /home/user/download/Lime*.tbz

In the end, you should see some directories like bin and etc directly on this partition. If you do so, you are almost ready!
Now the hard part, take this script and adjust it! Don’t worry, I don’t want you to learn shell scripting, so adjusting will be pretty easy. There are only two or three lines for users to fiddle with. For partition setup, you need to change just one of them. The following one:

DEVICE="/dev/block/mmcblk1p2"

This line says where your openSUSE partition is. How to check whether it is set correctly? If you followed my advice, it will be last partition you’ve got on your device. So try running ls -1 /dev/block/mmcblk* | tail -n 1. If your busybox can’t handle that, use ls -1 /dev/block/mmcblk* and look for the last device in alphabetical order. Once you make sure the device is set correctly, you are ready to go and you can run the script in the terminal. It will put you inside openSUSE basic chroot. You can look around, there is not much of software in the beginning, but you can use zypper to install everything you need
I hope you’ll enjoy openSUSE on your mobile phone, if you want to just take a look at the script, feel free to do so. As always, if you have no idea what are you doing, you can damage your device and I take no responsibility for any damage. But if you run into some troubles, drop by on our IRC channel #opensuse-arm on Freenode and there are people willing to help. You can find me there as well, my nick is |miska|. Oh, and one last think, root and user password is linux

Continue reading »]]> As you may already know, there are initiatives in openSUSE community to get our great openSUSE running even on non-mainstream architectures. I’m particularly interested into openSUSE on ARM but I’m rooting for our colleagues who are working on getting PPC support in openSUSE. Of course we are using OBS to do that and there is one minor think that you might not noticed yet. Anybody can build for these architectures!!! It is still slow, so don’t enable it just for every repo you have, but if you want to help us and contribute to our porting initiatives, this can help you, save you some time and can make it easier for you to contribute!

How to do it? It’s not as easy as enabling Factory or Tumbleweed builds, but it still pretty easy. The easiest way for tutorial and my preferred way would be using osc tool in commandline. You can just call osc meta prj -e and add following code (leave out  architectures you don’t want to play with):

<repository name="openSUSE_Factory_ARM">
  <path repository="standard" project="openSUSE:Factory:ARM"/>
  <arch>armv7l</arch>
</repository>
<repository name="openSUSE_Factory_ppc">
  <path repository="standard" project="openSUSE:Factory:PowerPC"/>
  <arch>ppc</arch>
  <arch>ppc64</arch>
</repository>

You can of course get the same results using webUI, but that is a little bit more difficult to describe and I’m sure you’ll find it by yourselves. So if you want to help us with all these non-mainstream architectures it’s really easy to do so!

Continue reading »]]> As every year, FOSDEM was great! I spend some time at our stand talking to the people, telling them how great openSUSE is. I visited several interesting talks and met a lot of people, quite some of them I no longer remember (sorry), but I took some business cards and notes from some interesting talks. Some talks I haven’t got enough space to sit and type, some were too interesting to take a notes
If I try to summarize most interesting stuff, there is a lot of going on toward standardized ARM platform, things are slowly settling down and drivers are slowly getting where we need them. And many people are interested in ARMs. Hurray! Oh, and btw. I had a talk there about openSUSE on ARM
I also learned a little bit about TCP MultiPath. Sounded quite interesting. Providing classic socket API and using classic TCP streams to make sure everything works on already existing applications/infrastructure and creating new awesome features at the same time. Great lightning talk.
And there was also talk and some discussion how to get average people more interested and involved. Sounded like a good plan and let’s see what will happen in few months.
Overall, I had a great time on FOSDEM and missed most of it in previous paragraph. But as after every FOSDEM, I’m full of ideas and I feel really great to be part of the open source world!

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OpenStack Logo

Last week I wrote a little bit about OpenStack, what it is good for and that I’ve been working on appliance that you can test. I mentioned appliance to make it easier for people to test OpenStack and play with that. Any feedback is of course appreciated. Since then appliance got updated, because something others have been working on. Although there was Xmass and most of us has other things to worry about enjoy, there has been some progress in other parts of our OpenStack Milestone.
While I was fighting to get OpenStack appliance working, Bernhard Wiedemann was working on other way how to make it more convenient for you to try OpenStack on openSUSE. He wrote a script, that makes the whole OpenStack demo setup much easier. So if you don’t want to use appliance and instead would prefer to just get OpenStack working on your existing setup, you can do it pretty easily. Everything is documented on the wiki. But as you are already reading this, I’ll make it even easier for you and will putt a quick how to here as well.
What do you need? You need some packages, right? First of all you need to add repository with the last stable release. This repository contains fixes, patterns and much more as you’ll see later. You can do it by typing:

zypper ar -f \
 obs://Virtualization:/Cloud:/OpenStack:/Diablo/openSUSE_12.1 \
 OpenStack

Now what about packages? Easy, we’ve got patterns for you. So you can do just

zypper in -t pattern openstack-controller openstack-compute-node

And you are ready to go. Almost. You need to configure it. That takes some time and can be pretty complicated. But hey, I said it is easy now, haven’t I? So it is. You just need to install one more package! So type in

openstack-quickstart

This will install few scripts that will help you create your demo setup. Now all you have to do is run yet another command. I know, it’s getting complicated, we are now at four commands, but all of them are quite easy, right? Bear with me, we are almost there… The last command you need is

openstack-quickstart-demosetup

This will take care of everything you need. Unless you have MySQL root password set, it will go ahead and configure everything and when it ends, you can just simply point your browser to http://127.0.0.1 and play with the dashboard using login admin and password openstack. That was easy, wasn’t it?

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Even though I prefer to use instant messaging and SMS, sometimes it’s easier to make a phone call. Especially my parents and grand parents prefer calls over IM (let’s say that SMS is a form of IM). So how do you call them? There are several ways. Some of them are obviously wrong like Skype. We all do hate Skype, right? Closed source binary doing who knows what, using proprietary closed obscured crypted protocol preventing you from using alternative clients and restrictive long license agreement. And of course long history of messy behavior on the network and being nightmare for network administrators. Luckily there is a great alternative – SIP. Well specified, standardized protocol, many different clients to choose from and well defined behavior. Your network administrator might even consider setting up QoS in your favor. So the SIP is the way to go, right? Even Google thinks so and one of the big additions to Android 2.3 was SIP.

There is still one little issue. Most of the SIP clients (including the Android one) requires you to register on some server. So there is still some central server you depend on? Ok, you can set it up on your own server, but still… Advantage of these servers is that they can provide you an easy gateway to the land/cell lines. So you can call via SIP to people that have dumb cell phone if server you are on supports it and you can pay for it somehow. I’m using it myself if I have to do some non-IP phone calls. But back to the VoIP and the most free use case. Let’s say that I want to make calls and I don’t want to depend on anybody. That’s where I started few years back. Luckily, with SIP, you don’t have to have some server between you and your friend. You can call each other IPs directly. Wait, but what about people that don’t have public IP? Really? IPv6 is around since 1995. That is 16 years? Common people, welcome to the world of yesterday! If your ISP is one of those many that still don’t provide it, get yourself a tunnel! There is plenty of options. You can use HE, SixXS or Virtio.cz to name just a few from many. It’s easy to get public IPv6 Everybody should have one or /64. And if you’ve got IPv6, you can use SIP and call your friends directly on their IPv6. Of course, it’s nice if they have some DNS, so you don’t have to remember their IP, but even if they don’t, you can always write it down to your phone application.

Now how to make a calls? I’m using LinPhone to do so. It works like a charm and it has clients even for less fortunate people stuck with MS Windows or MacOS. How to set it up? Easy, just start it, make sure, that you had IPv6 enabled in settings and no NAT set. It detects your IP and you can start calling people right away and they can call you. Just make sure, that you have specified ports opened on your firewall. You can call anybody directly using sip:user@[2001:db8::2]. And you cut out the middle man. It’s not hard to setup. No need to register anywhere and let you personal details all around the Internet. And you can discuss whatever you want. So please, whenever you run into somebody who thinks that VoIP = Skype, explain them that there are better, easy and free options!

Continue reading »]]>

OpenStack Logo

Some of you might know, that the latest thing we Boosters were working on was promoting OpenStack on openSUSE. What is OpenStack? OpenStack is really cool, let’s write something more about it and then I’ll continue with what I wanted to report

OpenStack

Imagine you are running data center. You’ve got tenths or several hundreds of computers (thousands scares me, let’s end with few hundreds top). We geeks have this sort of dreams, right? Everybody wants to be a rock star, fly to the moon and have a private data center or two, right? Now let’s say, that you want to run some services in your data center. How do you decide where to put them? Where to keep your data? Here comes OpenStack to help you create your own virtualization cloud!!!
Let’s get to the boring exciting details! OpenStack consist from several components. All these components does just what they are supposed to. If you put them together, you will get your own virtualization cloud. But you can leave some of them out or even use just part of the cloud infrastructure. Let’s take a look at some of them.

Swift

I will start from the bottom and from the component that sounds most awesome to me. Data storage. Swift can store some data blob somewhere. Where? That is the right question. Swift is designed to provide high availability distributed data storage. How would you make sure that your data are safe no matter of what? Swift uses rings, zones and replicas. Ring is what describes mapping between virtual objects in cloud and their physical location. Data are stored on partitions which can be replicated using replicas. Devices in the ring can be also divided into zones. For example one zone can be my data center in the basement of my house, other zone might be data center at work and let’s say that I have a friend who will let me use data center in his basement as well. Now what is really cool about swift is, that you can specify, that there should be let’s say two replicas of each partition. And whenever there will be some data stored inside, Swift will ensure that these replicas are in different zones by itself! So if you will have an argument with your friend and blow up his house, your data will be still intact! When I grow up and will have some data centers, I will definitely need something like this!
A little side note. Although I was joking a little bit and speaking about data centers, it’s not that abstract concept, you can just replace a data center with a computer. And you will realize that you’ve got four computers at home, two at work and it sucks when one of them breaks up and you can get data out of it. And there is a wide variety of options in between where you can use Swift

Glance

Glance is a part of OpenStack that manages virtual disk images. Users can register new images, manage them, read something about them and actually use them. One feature is that it can use Swift as a backend for storing them. And the the cloud needs to access them somehow, right? So Glance is in the middle of two components, providing images for Nova while getting storage space from Swift But of course, it can be used independently of both.

Nova

Nova is, I would dare to say, main part of OpenStack. This part is responsible for actual management of the virtual machines, networks and stuff in the cloud. It can define projects, divide users into them and let them create actual virtual machines in the cloud. But it doesn’t do actual virtualization, rather it uses great tools already available in the system underneath, especially libvirt. As it needs to manage a lot of stuff, Nova itself is divided into multiple components that can be run on several servers and communicate with each other over the network. In the end, all functionality is exposed using HTTP based API. Nova can also provide Amazon EC2 compatible API if you already have some integration already done As Nova does a lot of things, I will not go into this any deeper details, but instead I will point you to the official page

Horizon

Horizon or OpenStack dashboard is a web interface that makes it easy to manage your cloud. And as one picture can be more powerful then thousands of words, I wouldn’t describe it much and instead I will point you to the video showing how it works Pretty awesome, isn’t it?

Our job

So as you now know what is OpenStack, what were we Boosters doing with it? My colleagues were cleaning up the packages and repositories and helping with packaging, trying to get dependencies to the Factory. What I have been working on? I was trying to get some parts of it running. As you just read, OpenStack can do many things. And setup is not that easy especially if you don’t know much about Python or Django. So in order to make it easier for the others, we decided to create an OpenStack appliance in SUSE Studio based on openSUSE. I was working on it for some time and I finally got dashboard running. It still needs a lot of testing and there might still be some errors, but if you want to try an early version, here you go Just a little warning, It wouldn’t work with 512M RAM and less, but if you want to play with virtualization, you’ll need more anyway…