Michal Hrušecký

It's been some time since I started working on openSUSE pastebin clone with Bento theme. I had some other duties so it took some time to find some final resting place for that. Some of you asked me for a better URL. I finally found it and since today SUSE Paste is running again on new address and it is ready to serve you I also wrote a simple script to make it easier to use it. So you can start using it, promoting openSUSE and if you encounter any problems, don't hesitate to report them. If you are interested in details behind this paste, continue reading, otherwise start pasting

About a week ago I was at LinuxTag spreading a word about openSUSE. It was great event and I really liked it. And I was on of the four lucky guys that won Googles Nexus One. Hurray! And now what I want to write today about... I was migrating all my stuff from my Palm Centro to Nexus One. And one of the things I was using my Centro for was tracking how much petrol does my car consume. I was writing in plain text file and I was thinking about writing some script around that... But never had the time to actually do that. But now with Nexus One, my log is synchronized with Google Docs. So I don't have to take care of the synchronization part. So I sat down and wrote a simple script to compute my cars consumption and I want to share it with you. Originaly I wanted to use googlecl, which is available in openSUSE Contrib, but it had some problems with Google Apps, so I decided to use curl instead.

First of all how do I structure my log. I've got currently two types of things I'm tracking - petrol and maintenance. As we are talking about consumption, we are interested only in petrol ones These lines looks like this:

PET:97644:20100430:12.53l:394.4Kč

As you see, it's in semicolon separated values format First field means that it's petrol entry. Second one is kilometer counter. Third one is the date %Y%m%d and the fourth one is the number of liters. Fourth one is the price, but it's not really important. My document is named "Auto" but if you want to use the same script, you can name it however you want and just change the $TITLE variable in the script. You'll need to change email and password anyway And you might be also interested in changing $RECENT variable, which states how many entries are used in computation.

Script

Do you also feel that Hackweek is nearby? So many people will be working together on so many interesting stuff. And when you are working in large groups around the world, sometimes you need to talk about code snippets. And then you use something like pastebin.com. But there are many similar services on the web. And I already encounter on openSUSE IRC people using for example fpaste.org. So why don't we have some paste thing to show that we are the openSUSE guys and girls? My guess is that nobody cared enough to create other one then opensuse.pastebin.com. But I was part of the Umbrella team, so I want to have everything nicely integrated... So here I come with openSUSE Paste.

It is basically Open Source software called Stikked. I just downloaded it, configured it and make it fit to our Bento theme. Currently it is hosted on my webserver only, but I'll try to get some nice opensuse.org name for it. I'll also publish source code adapted to Bento theme once I figure out how to create a repository on gitorious.org

Just one nice tip at the end. If you want to use it frequently, add following to your .profile

SUSEPASTE='curl -v -F "code=<-" -F "name=`whoami`" '
SUSEPASTE="$SUSEPASTE -F \"submit=submit\" -F \"lang=text\" "
SUSEPASTE="$SUSEPASTE http://paste.michal.hrusecky.net "
SUSEPASTE="$SUSEPASTE 2>&1 | grep Location "
alias susepaste="$SUSEPASTE"

Then you can use it like this:

$ dmesg | susepaste
< Location: http://paste.michal.hrusecky.net/index.php/view/33355419

So try it, play with it, and any comments are welcome (and once I publish the code, contributions too)

openSUSE Paste

UPDATE: Public git repository with sources available on http://gitorious.org/opensuse/paste

Original title was 'MySQL dropped from openSUSE!!!'. I wanted to have some shocking title, but I changed it as I don't really want to scare you so much But it is partially true, there is no mysql package in openSUSE anymore. But of course we DID NOT really dropped MySQL. In fact, we now have more MySQL in openSUSE then we ever had! Do I got your attention? Read on

What and why?

What really happened is that I renamed original MySQL package. Now it is called mysql-community-server. If you take a look at SUN/Oracle web, they call it like this for a long time, so it makes a little sense... As a result, there is no real package called mysql in openSUSE anymore. But mysql-community-server provides mysql so even if you try to install mysql, it will work. This change also have one funny consequence. Do you remember package mysql-client? Now it's called mysql-community-server-client

Why such a change? I haven't done something like this just because such a little difference in the naming of packages. No, I had some other plans as well. Reason to rename original MySQL package was to provide some space for other possible mysql providers. And we have them in 11.3! These other providers are MariaDB and MySQL Cluster. So now you can choose which MySQL do you want And as all of them provides the same symbol, namely mysql, you can use whichever you want to satisfy dependencies. But the default one is still mysql-community-server. So if you don't need anything special, nearly nothing changed for you.

Alternatives

So let's take a brief look at what MySQL Community Server alternatives do we now have in openSUSE...

MariaDB

MariaDB is a backward compatible, drop-in replacement branch of the MySQL Database Server. That means that differences in the user interface are minimal. You probably wouldn't even notice on the first sight if they get replaced. So what are the differences? The best way is to read official page about differences:

http://askmonty.org/wiki/MariaDB_versus_MySQL

Basically MariaDB incorporates many community provided patches out there and some more bleeding edge storage engines. If you want to try it, you can simply type

zypper in mariadb

And zypper will take care of conflicts and replace your MySQL with Maria. If you want to get back to MySQL, it's similarly simple, just use

zypper in mysql-community-server

MySQL Cluster

Other MySQL alternative is MySQL Cluster. This should provide real clustering support for MySQL. And it is also distributed and maintained by Oracle. If you are interested in HA, you have many servers, you might be interested in this. For more information check official web (we included version 7.0 in 11.3):

http://www.mysql.com/products/database/cluster/

If you want to try it, you can simply type

zypper in mysql-cluster

And zypper will take care of conflicts and replace your ordinary MySQL with MySQL Cluster. If you want to get back to MySQL, it's similarly simple, just use

zypper in mysql-community-server

For those who didn't know, last week there was an event called LinuxExpo in Prague. And we off course went there with the Czech part of openSUSE Boosters team to talk about openSUSE. Other colleagues also helped with running openSUSE booth. And some of our community members we standing around talking to people as well.

We had our HP TouchSmart machine with us (same one as we had on FOSDEM), but this time we had only one of them. But to make things more attractive for visitors, we took steering wheel with pedals with us and we had Torcs preinstalled. So people wasn't only touching our desktop and playing with camera, but also racing.

We also had a presentation with Pavol about how people can use openSUSE Build Service and SUSE Studio in schools to prepare LiveCD for student to make it easy for them to run their school software at home. I used it in similar context already (I'll write something about that later).

So overall, it was nice being there, meeting many people working to make Linux better and get some feedback from our users. And at the end here are few photos that appeared on our hard drive during LinuxExpo.

As for the photos, just few people you might know... There are some people from SUSE Office in Prague. But you can also see non-SUSE people there. You can see Tomáš Matějíček - author of the Slax and even one of the Gentoo developers Other photos can be found on root.cz photo gallery and on Liberix photo gallery.