Continue reading »]]> This Monday I was the first time guest and speaker at (contrary to it’s name) local Czech conference Europen. It was interesting experience. And I would like to share a bit of what I experienced. What made it different from conferences I usually speak at was the audience. Not many Linux guys and quite some Windows guys. I was told that this conference is for various IT professionals and people from academia interested in Open Source.

I was asked to speak there about something techy, low-levelly, genericy, and not SUSE only stuff. I offered OBS and Studio introduction as these are crown jewels of openSUSE environment, but I was told that they would prefer something more generic and little bit more hardcore. So in the end I decided to speak about packaging as that is something I do that since a long time ago. And to make it nor a workshop nor SUSE specific talk, I put in two more packaging systems that I worked with apart from rpm – Portage (from Gentoo) and BitBake (from Open Embedded).

Whenever I visit open source event in Czech Republic, I always know quite some people there already. I know the most prominent people from Linux magazines, other distributions and some other people who are big open source enthusiasts. On this conference, I knew something like six attendees in total (and all of them were there to give a talk and not sure what to expect from audience). Almost everybody was running MS Windows with few MacOS exceptions. Really quite different world.

As I said, in the end I spoke about why do we do software packages in Linux and how do we do it. I spoke about rpm and spec files, about Portage and BitBake showing how nice it is to have inheritance. And in the end I put in part about how great OBS is anyway.

From the almost a day I was at the conference, most questions and feedback got LibUCW library, but Martin Mareš gave amazing presentation and he had a really interesting topic. LibUCW is cool. If I’ll find a free time, I’ll write something about it separately. Otherwise audience was quite calm and quiet. For my presentation, I got question about cross-compilation of rpms, so in the end after the talk I could recommend OBS once more

It was definitely interesting experience as these people were mostly out of our usual scope. If you are interested in browsing the slides, you can, sources are on my github, but they contain quite some pages of example recipes that I was commenting on the spot.

Continue reading »]]>

FOSDEM 2013

I started writing this post after FOSDEM, but never actually managed to finish it. But as I plan to blog about something again “soon”, I wanted to get this one out first. So let’s start with FOSDEM – it is awesome event and every open source hacker is there unless he has some really huge reasons why not to come (like being dead, in prison or locked down in psychiatric care). I was there together with bunch of openSUSE/SUSE folks. It was a lot of fun and we even managed to get some work done during the event. So how was it?

FOSDEM

We had a lot of fun on the way already. You know, every year, we rent a bus just for us and we go from Nuremberg to Brussels and back all together by bus. And we talk and drink and talk and drink some more…. So although it sounds crazy – 8 hours drive – it’s not as bad as it sounds.

etc-update

What the hack is etc-update and what does it have to do with me, openSUSE or FOSDEM? Isn’t it Gentoo tool? Yes, it is. It is Gentoo tool (actually part of portage, Gentoo package manager) that is used in Gentoo to merge updates to the configuration files. When you install package, portage is not going to overwrite your configuration files that you have spend days and nights tuning. It will create a new file with new upstream configuration and it is up to you to merge them. But you know, rpm does the same thing. In almost all cases rpm is not going to overwrite your configuration file, but will install the new one as config_file.rpmnew. And it is up to you to merge the changes. But it’s not fun. Searching for all files, compare them manually and choose what to merge and how. And here comes etc-update o the rescue

How does it work? Simple. You need to install it (will speak about that later) and run it. It’s command line tool and it doesn’t need any special parameters. All you need to do is to run etc-update as root (to be actually able to do something with these files). And the result?

# etc-update 
Scanning Configuration files...
The following is the list of files which need updating, each
configuration file is followed by a list of possible replacement files.
1) /etc/camsource.conf (1)
2) /etc/ntp.conf (1)
Please select a file to edit by entering the corresponding number.
              (don't use -3, -5, -7 or -9 if you're unsure what to do)
              (-1 to exit) (-3 to auto merge all files)
                           (-5 to auto-merge AND not use 'mv -i')
                           (-7 to discard all updates)
                           (-9 to discard all updates AND not use 'rm -i'):

What I usually do is that I select configuration files I do care about, review changes and merge them somehow and later just use -5 for everything else. It looks really simple, doesn’t it? And in fact it is!

Somebody asked a question on how to merge updates of configuration files while visiting our openSUSE booth at FOSDEM. When I learned that from Richard, we talked a little bit about how easy it is to do something like that and later during one of the less interesting talks, I took this Gentoo tool, patched it to work on rpm distributions, packaged it and now it is in Factory and it will be part of openSUSE 13.1 If you want to try it, you can get it either from my home project – home:-miska-:arm (even for x86 ) or from utilities repository.

Hope you will like it and that it will make many sysadmins happy

Continue reading »]]> Jak jsem sliboval minulý týden, jelikož se party blíží, je načase oznámit trochu více detailů včetně času, kdy to všechno začne. A i poodhalit trochu o programu. Začneme už ve čtyři odpoledne. Já vím, je to brzo, ale začneme něčím lehce jiným než je openSUSE Release party. Do té plynule přejdeme počítám mezi pátou šestou.

Hackweek meeting

Pokud sledujete dění kolem openSUSE a SUSE, tak jste už asi zaslechli pojem Hackweek. Je to týden, kdy vývojáři ze SUSE mají volno od svých běžných pracovních povinností a mohou si dělat skoro cokoliv je napadne. Stačí aby to bylo opensource. Firma poskytne přístřeší, jídlo, prostředky a vývojáři hrajte si. A občas z těchto projektů vzejde něco opravdu zajímavého pro openSUSE

No a jeden takový Hackweek se nám blíží a v SUSE jsme plánovali meeting, kde bychom pokecali o projektech, které plánujeme, zkusili kolegy naverbovat na své projekty nebo se vzájemně inspirovali. Hackweek ale není jen pro zaměstnance a kdokoliv z komunity se k Hackweeku může připojit a s vývojáři na projektu spolupracovat a po dohodě může i do firmy docházet. Jelikož je Hackweek cool, rozhodli jsme se tento náš úvodní meeting spojit s release party, ať víte na čem se vývojáři chystají pracovat a pokud budete mít zájem, můžete přiložit ruku k dílu.

12.3

K dispozici budou openSUSE 12.3 DVD (stále ještě nedorazily, ale minulý týden je z Norimberka posílali, tak snad dorazí včas…) a obvyklý velký touchscreen běžící na 12.3. Budete si moci tak přímo na místě osahat, jak se nové openSUSE chová. Můžeme se také společně podívat na pár zajímavých novinek a obecně si přátelsky popovídat jak jsme spokojeni a jak se zapojit, pokud ještě nevíte jak.

Klíče a občanky sebou

Když už se tak sejdeme pospolu, byla by škoda tu příležitost promarnit, tak kdo ještě nemáte podepsané GPG klíče nebo kdo chcete nějaké body do CACertu, přineste si i občanky a papírky s klíči, uděláme si malou key signing party

Obecně, tato release party bude kombinací mnoha různých věcí, takže co se plánu týče, nerad bych vypisoval spousty podrobností které nakonec stejně nevyjdou (minimálně časově). Bude to spíš taková velká improvizace. Ale pokud máte rádi open source obecně a openSUSE obzvlášť, přijďte a určitě zde naleznete mnoho podobných nadšenců. A pro ty co nemůžou dorazit se pokusím zajistit i přímý přenos pomocí Google Hangout, pokud se mi to povede…

Continue reading »]]> Ve středu vyšlo nové openSUSE 12.3 a to je důvod k oslavě. Budeme proto jednu pořádat ve čtvrtek 28. března v Pražské poboččce SUSE. Pokud jste na naší release party už někdy byli, tak už jistě více, co očekávat. Pokud ne, nechte se překvapit

Sejdeme se na adrese Lihovarská 1060/12, Praha 9 a popovídáme si o naší oblíbené distribuci. K dispozici bude na ozkoušení počítač běžící na 12.3 a po zkušenostech z Norimberku i tuto párty budeme streamovat do světa přes Google Hangout [link missing]. Ale i přesto doražte osobně. Budeme mít openSUSE 12.3 DVD, která se v součastnosti lisují, dostaví se i vývojáři ze SUSE a kdo ještě neviděl, bude mít možnost uvidět a s trochou štěstí i ochutnat openSUSE pivo.

Podrobnosti co se programu týče budou upřesněny později, ale už teď si začněte dělat na čtvrtek 28. března volno. Začátek bude někdy mezi čtvrtou a šestou, aktuálně závisí od programu na kterém se intenzivně pracuje… Ale o tom později. Aktuálně to nejduležitější je, abyste dorazili v hojném počtu, kdy přesně upřesním později

Continue reading »]]> Everybody probably already knows, that openSUSE 12.3 is going to be released this Wednesday. I’m currently in SUSE offices in Nuremberg, helping to polish last bits and pieces for the upcoming release. But more importantly, as every release, we need to celebrate it! And this time, due to the lucky circumstances, I’ll be here for Nuremberg release party!

Nuremberg release party will take place the same day as release at Artefakt, in Nuremberg’s city centre from 19:00 (local time, of course). It’s an open event so everybody is welcomed.

You can meet plenty of fellow Geekos there and there will be some food and also openSUSE beer available (some charges may apply). Most of the openSUSE Team at SUSE (former Boosters and Jos) will be there and we hope to meet every openSUSE enthusiastic, supporter or user from Nuremberg.

There will be demo computer running 12.3 and hopefully even public Google Hangout for people who wants to join us remotely – follow +openSUSE G+ page to see it if we will manage it

So see you in great numbers on Wednesday in Artefakt!

PS: If you expected announcement for Prague release party from me, don’t worry, I haven’t forgot about it, we are planning it, expect announcement soon and party in few weeks

Continue reading »]]> openSUSE 12.3 is getting closer and closer and probably one of the last changes I pushed for MySQL was switching the default MySQL implementation. So in openSUSE 12.3 we will have MariaDB as a default.

If you are following what is going on in openSUSE in regards to MySQL, you probably already know, that we started shipping MariaDB together with openSUSE starting with version 11.3 back in 2010. It is now almost three years since we started providing it. There were some little issues on the way to resolve all conflicts and to make everything work nicely together. But I believe we polished everything and smoothed all rough edges. And now everything is working nice and fine, so it’s time to change something, isn’t it? So let’s take a look of the change I made…

MariaDB as default, what does it mean?

First of all, for those who don’t know, MariaDB is MySQL fork – drop-in replacement for MySQL. Still same API, still same protocol, even same utilities. And mostly the same datafiles. So unless you have some deep optimizations depending on your current version, you should see no difference. And what will switch mean?

Actually, switching default doesn’t mean much in openSUSE. Do you remember the time when we set KDE as a default? And we still provide great Gnome experience with Gnome Shell. In openSUSE we believe in freedom of choice so even now, you can install either MySQL or MariaDB quite simply. And if you are interested, you can try testing beta versions of both – we have MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 10.0 in server:database repo. So where is the change of default?

Actually, the only thing that changed is that everything now links against MariaDB and uses MariaDB libraries – no change from users point of view. And if you will try to update from system that used to have just one package called ‘mysql’, you’ll end up with MariaDB. And it will be default in LAMP pattern. But generally, you can still easily replace MariaDB with MySQL, if you like Oracle Yes, it is hard to make a splash with a default change if you are supporting both sides well…

What happens to MySQL?

Oracles MySQL will not go away! I’ll keep packaging their version and it will be available in the openSUSE. It’s just not going to be a default, but nothing prevents you from installing it. And if you had it in past and you are going to do just a plain upgrade, you’ll stick to it – we are not going to tell you what to use if you know what you want.

Why?

As mentioned before, being default doesn’t have many consequences. So why the switch? Wouldn’t it break stuff? Is that MariDB safe enough? Well, I’m personally using MariaDB since 2010 with few switches to MySQL and back, so it is better tested from my point of view. I originally switched for the kicks of living on the edge, but in the end I found MariaDB boringly stable (even though I run their latest alpha). I never had any serious issue with it. It also has some interesting goodies that it can offer to it’s user over MySQL. Even Wikipedia decided to switch. And our friends at Fedora are considering it too, but AFAIK they don’t have MariaDB yet in their distribution….

Don’t take it as a complain about MySQL guys and girls at Oracle, I know that they are doing a great job that even MariaDB is based on as they do periodical merges to get newest MySQL and they “just” add some more tweaks, engines and stuff.

So, as I like MariaDB and I think it’s time to move, I, as a maintainer of both, proposed to change the default. There were no strong objections, so we are doing it!

Overview

So overall, yes, we are changing default MySQL provider, but you probably wouldn’t even notice

Continue reading »]]> Last Thursday we had GPG Key & CAcert Signing party at SUSE office inviting anybody who wants to get his key signed. I would say, that it went quite well, we had about 20 people showing up, we had some fun, and we now trust each other some more!

GPG Key Signing

We started with GPG key signing. You know, the ussual stuff. Two rows moving against each other, people exchanging paper slips…

Signing keys

For actually signing keys at home, we recommended people to use signing-party package and caff in particular. It’s easy to use tool as long as you can send mails from command line (there are some options to set up against SMTP directly, but I run into some issues). All you need to do is to call

caff HASH

and it will download the key, show you identities and fingerprint, sign it for you and send each signed identity to the owner by itself vie e-mail. And all that with nice wizard. It can’t be simpler than that.

Importing signatures

When my signed keys started coming back, I was wondering how do I process them. It was simply too many emails. I searched a little bit, but I get too lazy quite soon, so as I have all my mails stored locally in Maildir by offlineimap, I just wrote a following one liner to import them all.

   grep -Rl 'Your signed' INBOX | while read i; do 
        gpg -d "$i" | gpg --import -a;
   done

Maybe somebody will find it useful as well, maybe somebody more experienced will tell me in comments how to do it correctly

CAcert

One friend of mine – Theo – really wanted to be able to issue CAcert certificates, so we added CAcert assurance to the program. For those who doesn’t know, CAcert is nonprofit certification authority based on web of trust. You’ll get verified by volunteers and when enough of them trusts you enough, you are trusted by authority itself. When people are verifying you, they give you some points based on how they are trusted and how do they trust you. Once you get 50 points, you are trusted enough to get your certificate signed and once you have 100, you are trusted enough to start verifying other people (after a little quiz to make sure you know what are you doing).

I knew that my colleague Michal čihař is able and willing to issue some points but as he was starting with issuing 10 and I with 15, I also asked few nearby living assurers from CAcert website. Unfortunately I got no reply, but we were organizing everything quite quickly. But we had another colleague – Martin Vidner – showing up and being able to issue some points. I assured another 11 people on the party and now I can give out 25 points. As well as Michal and I guess Martin is now somewhere around 20 as well. So it means that if you need to be able to issue CAcert certificates, visiting just SUSE office in Prague is enough! But still, contact us beforehand, sometimes we do have a vacation

Continue reading »]]> Last week I posted a survey about openSUSE Connect. Although some answers are still coming and you are still welcome to provide more feedback, let’s take a look at some results. Some numbers first. openSUSE Connect is not really busy website, it gets about 80 different visitors per day. Not much, but not a total wasteland. Related to this number is another one. More than half of the people responding in the survey have never ever heard about openSUSE Connect. So it sounds like we should speak about it more…

Now something regarding the feedback. Most people think that it is a good idea and that it either is already useful or it can become quite useful. But even though feedback was positive, lot of people made various suggestions how to improve it. So what can be done to make it better? Most of the feedback was centred around following two topics.

Social aspects

One frequently mentioned topic was social aspect of the Connect. It is social network, where you can’t post status messages and where it is not easy to follow what are people up to. So it’s kinda antisocial social network. There were people asking for adding ability to share what are they going – add status messages, chat and stuff they know from Facebook of Google+. On the other hand there were people who complained that they don’t want to have another social network to maintain. And the third opinion which I think is something between was to provide some easier integration with already existing social networks like Facebook, Twitter or Google+. That I would say sounds the most reasonable solution.

More polishing

This was mentioned with most of the sites aspects. openSUSE Connect is a good thing, it contains many great ideas, but somehow they are not polished enough. As connect itself. People complained that UI could be nicer and more user-friendly. That widgets miss some finishing touches. So what is needed in this aspect? Probably some designers to step in and fix UI But apart from that, some widgets could use even some coding touches. So if you don’t like how is something done, feel free to submit patch

Conclusion?

People didn’t know about openSUSE Connect and there are things to be polished. We had some good ideas and we implemented them when we started with Connect. But there is still quite some work left before Connect will be perfect. Work that can be picked up by anybody as openSUSE Connect is open source, written in PHP and we even have a documentation mentioning among other things how to work on it. We can off course just let it live as it is and use it for membership and elections for which it works well. But looks like my survey got people at least a little bit interested and for example victorhck submitted logo proposal for openSUSE Connect! So maybe we will get some other contributors as well And let’s see how will I spend my next Hackweek

Continue reading »]]> You might remember that in our team (openSUSE Boosters), we created openSUSE Connect some time ago. It was meant as replacement for users.opensuse.org that nobody knew about and nobody used. We hoped that it will attract more users and that it will be more user friendly way, how to manage personal data. Apart from that, we wanted to include more interesting widgets so it can become your landing page for all your efforts in openSUSE project. With that regards we created bugzilla widget, fate widget, build status widget and some more. We hoped that it would make difference and help people and that they will enjoy using the new site. During this summer my GSoC student created amazing Karma widget as well to make it more fun. And as Connect has been some time already in function, it’s now time to collect some feedback. Did it work? Do you like it? Or did it become just a wasteland? Do you think such a site make sense?

I’m not promising anything right now, but it would be nice to know, what our users think about it and whether it could make sense to put some effort in it and how much and where to concentrate it So please, fill in this little survey and let me know your opinion. I’ll publish results later

Continue reading »]]> Almost two weeks ago, during the weekend, I was in Sankt Augustin to attend FrOSCon. Originally I didn’t planned to go as it is quite far from Prague and I was freshly back from vacation (and therefore quite without money). But I was asked by Sirko to give there a talk about Open Build Service and to participate in cross-distribution packaging workshop. Hard to refuse such an invitation. As the money was the only issue that was keeping me from participating, I decided to ask openSUSE Travel Support committee whether they would be willing to sponsor me. It was my first experience, but it turned out great and thanks to them, I was able to go to the event, speak about great things we have at openSUSE and have a lot of fun! My big thanks to them!

Now let’s get back to FrOSCon. It is annual event in Sankt Augustin, little bit to south from Collogne. I also spoke beforehand with Jan and since I was going there because of talk and workshop, my plan was to spend rest of my time during conference helping out with booth. So let’s start with booth. Jans brought computer with openSUSE 12.2 to show to people and plenty of DVDs, stickers and posters. I brought my plush Geeko, but unfortunately first day he decided that he will rather stay at hotel and while I was leaving my room to go to the bus station, he left my backpack and stayed at the hotel. He was found by friendly hotel stuff and awaited my return on reception desk. And I believe he regretted staying behind later as during the second day, he made a lot of friends on the conference as you can see on the photo.

How was the event? Did I managed to attend any talks? Thanks to other guys and girl we had at booth, I was able to attend the talk that I was the most interested in – talk about Vivaldi.

Vivaldi

What have I learned? Well, reasoning about Vivaldi was that there is no free and open source mobile platform. Although Google Androids is in fact open source, it is developed behind closed doors and when you get your cell, it is full of binary blobs. So Vivaldi is meant to be fully open source platform, developed in the free ecosystem with everything open source so you can mingle with it.

Part of the Vivaldi is of course KDE Plasma. I’m not a KDE user for quite some time and haven’t really paid much attention to what Plasma can actually do, but looked quite impressive. Especially Plasma quick. Example that was shown was that you can write application once and depending on whether it is run on desktop or on tablet, it’s interface will change. And you don’t have to do anything! One of the points of Vivaldi was actually to be able to seamlessly move between your devices without having to experience too different environments.

What else was there interesting regarding Vivaldi? Well, we heard about their troubles with Chinese HW vendor, who didn’t get what GPL means and was hard to get from him sources for kernel and after that fix all errors in them. And we heard that they are building on top of Mer which actually used/uses Open Build Service!

Rest of the event

In the afternoon I had a talk about obs. You can see my students on the picture. I spoke about obs, showed some advantages and showed them the interface. As usual, you can find slides from my talk on github, fork them and use them for your own presentation. Or if you want, you can just download the pdf. There were some questions and people were quite interested in such a small group. Usually on big events with big audience, quite some people show up, listen, but almost nobody really cares. These people had to go to the workshop room and they were interested and talked to me back. After obs talk, I invited them to the packaging workshop we had afterwards with colleague from Mageia and Fedora. There was smaller audience but as there were three of us and two of them actually spoke German, we divided quickly into small groups.

What else did we do? There was a social event, where we got some sausages and local beer. According to local customs, beer is served in tiny (0.2l) glasses. I also met there a Gentoo guy who was carrying Larry the cow!

Next day, I stayed almost all the time at our booth. But at some point I saw Michael “Monty” Widenius approaching Fedora guys so I joined the discussion as it looked interesting. I found out, that Fedora doesn’t ship MariaDB yet and that they had some small troubles getting it in. So I offered our .spec files as we were build MariaDB in obs for Fedora some time already. We talked about the solutions, what’s going on in MySQL word and it was a nice talk.

So overall, I had a great time on FrOSCon. Another thanks to Travel Support Program for supporting me and Sirko for inviting me. And the last note, when I got back home and got to bus, first thing that welcomed me in Prague was kernel panic message on the information panel in the bus. Just a nice ending of a great trip.