During the maintenance window this Thursday (2020-02-06) we will move the IPv4 and IPv6 address of build.opensuse.org. The new addresses are:

• 195.135.221.162

• 2001:67c:2178:8::162

People using this Open Build Service instance should normally not notice - but if you were crazy enough to add the old IP addresses to some firewall rules or configuration files, please make sure that you update your configuration accordingly.

Please note that this affects also the following CNAME (alias) entries:

• api.opensuse.org

• obs-analyze.opensuse.org

• obs-grafana.opensuse.org

• obs-measure.opensuse.org

• rabbit.opensuse.org

• registry.opensuse.org

Last week, we introduced Tilix and started exploring its basics, let’s now familiarize ourselves with the advanced features of Tilix, namely:

• Management of bookmarks, local or remote;

• Personalized links (clickable links based on regular expressions);

• Automatic profile switching depending on location (local or remote (SSH));

• Password management;

• Launch of internal actions.

Bookmark management

Tilix allows you to save and manage a list of “bookmarks”, that is to say local or remote locations. Just open the Preferences and define some folder or remote servers to connect to, then open this list, select the desired bookmark and go immediately to the folder or open the SSH session to a remote host.

Note: the bookmarks are saved in $HOME/.config/tilix/bookmarks.json We recommend that you create this file by hand beforehand if you notice that your bookmarks are not saved correctly after leaving Tilix.

Create a bookmark folder

Tilix allows you to organize your bookmarks by creating a simple folder in which you can create them, so that they are well organized. This is useful for, for example, grouping SSH connections to the same group of machines:

Click on the folder then on the + to add bookmarks.

Local bookmarks

To add bookmarks, open Tilix preferences, then go to the Bookmarks section to click on the +”.

Here we will add a bookmark to the local copy of a project on the Open Build Service.

Remote bookmarks

The procedure is the same, but choose Remote then enter the bookmark parameters:

• Name: the reference of your bookmark;

• Protocol: choice: SSH, SFTP, TELNET, FTP;

• Host: the host name of the target followed by the port number;

• User: the user of the connection;

• Settings: SSH options for example;

• Command: if it is an SSH connection, the command to launch on the remote host.

Commands

Same procedure as the others, but here we simply enter a command to launch. The bookmark is therefore here a simple alias.

My order to update the local copy of my OBS repository.

Use bookmarks

You can access your bookmarks via “Ctrl + Shift + B”, you just have to select it and the corresponding command is launched:

Personalized links

Tilix allows you to define a list of links (URI to a web page or a local or remote file:// location) that will be made clickable based on a regular expression or a simple word. To do this, open the Preferences then the Advanced section. For the example, we will add a link to the Open Build Service with the key work obs;

The regular expression has become clickable, either by “Ctrl + click”, or by a right-click.

Automatic profile change

We arrive there in a functionality of Tilix, which is particularly useful and must care to avoid to make severe mistake by typing a command in the bad directory or in a remote connection: the automatic change of profile. Tilix, like many modern terminal emulators, allows you to create several profiles (colors, shell used, font etc …) but in addition, it allows to automatically switch from one to the other, depending from the active location: either a local folder or, more interesting, but also requiring a little more manipulation, an SSH connection.

Local

For the example, we will create a profile called “Root” that will be activated automatically when we explore one of the following folders:

<code class="hljs">/etc
/usr
/root
</code>

Now, in the “Advanced” tab of the profile, we will define the condition necessary for its activation.

As specified, the values ​​must be in the format “host:folder” or “host:” or “: folder”, the “:”. These are mandatory, so “host” or “folder” alone are not allowed.

And now if we go to /etc:

The changeover was done automatically and as soon as we leave /etc, Tilix will use the default profile again.

During a remote connection

Tilix allows us to do the same during an SSH connection. But this requires a bit of configuration on the remote host:

Copy of the script on the remote host:

You must push the script /usr/share/tilix/scripts/tilix_int.sh in the $HOME of the remote user (or to any other folder from where it can be sourced like /usr/local/bin):

<code class="hljs elixir">scp /usr/share/tilix/scripts/tilix_int.sh user<span class="hljs-variable">@hostname</span><span class="hljs-symbol">:/home/user</span>
</code>

Then connect to it beforehand to add the launch of the script to the connection, via its .bashrc for example:

<code class="hljs elixir">[geeko<span class="hljs-variable">@host</span> ~]<span class="hljs-variable">$ </span>cat .bashrc
<span class="hljs-comment"># .bashrc</span>
<span class="hljs-comment"># User specific aliases and functions</span>
. ./tilix_int.sh
</code>

Then, there too, define the profile switch condition as above but by specifying the host (the one provided by the hostname command on which Tilix itself is bases) this time. Then connect. The profile will change as soon as the SSH connection is established. It will switch back to the default profile as soon as we log out.

Password management

Tilix also allows you to store passwords in memory. To do this, click on the menu of the active terminal and choose “Passwords …”:

And fill it in:

Tilix keeps the passwords saved in the GNOME keyring.

This is a very interesting function coupled with the previous ones:

• using bookmarks, you launch a remote connection;

• thanks to the saved passwords you unlock your SSH key for example;

• then Tilix immediately switches you to the profile of your choice if necessary.

Launch of internal actions

Within a current Tilix session, it allows you to launch internal actions that can be useful, for example, to split the window in two and then open an X program in the created tile:

<code class="hljs stylus">tilix -<span class="hljs-selector-tag">a</span> session-add-<span class="hljs-attribute">right</span> -e htop
</code>

This functionality is very useful when coupled with an alias or chained, allowing you to build your session layout and start your apps.

In conclusion

Tilix has been ​​actively developed and is now considered mature. We hope that this review of its advanced features will have convinced you, or at least made you want to try it.

See you soon, enjoy!

The openSUSE Board election 2019-2020 reached an end on the night of 31 January 23h59 CET after running for about two weeks.

Four candidates ran in this election and the result is as follows:

• Simon Lees 161
• Sarah Julia Kriesch 138
• Vinzenz Vietzke 130
• Alessandro de Oliveira Faria 95

Simon is re-elected and gets to serve for another term while Sarah replaces outgoing board member Gertjan Lettink.

281 out of 500 eligible members voted in this election.

The universe is full of captivating, compelling and exquisite things. The internet, the most complete representation of humanity, is no different in that regard. Both are vast, seemingly endless and full of places you should know about. Let me share content that has moved me, in some way, in the last month. January is packed with sustainable open source, management stuff, too many tools and a bunch of awesome talks from 36c3. Go explore!

Open source licenses: 2019 year in review a post by Luis Villa

Luis, the co-founder of tidelift, wrote a nice rundown of all the Free Software license developments of the last 12 months. From pushing worker solidarity (996.ICU) over the ethical source movement and the hippocratic license to the rough time the OSI and the FSF have to respond to these new ideas. In 2019 the question that is currently dividing so many people on this planet has arrived (again) in Free Software. What is more important: Safety or Privilege?

XS:CODE a company.

While we are on the topic of licensing. I came across XS:CODE, the third player (I know of) in the realm of subscription based open source. Tidelift and Lizense Zero are the other two. This is still a bit too much gig-economy for me personally, but for sure a nice alternative to producing Free Software as a byproduct of the next big closed source SAAS app. I keep wondering, if something like this would have existed in my (hacker) youth, what would I have done? Probably stayed away from hacking because of choice fatigue…

Building a First Team Mindset a post by Jason Wong

This one hit close to home. As someone who grew out of the world of Free Software into the world of people/project management I'm often amazed on how anti-collaboration this field is. Most managers care a great deal about the team they lead and give a flying fuck about the managers they serve with. All this clan mentality, self-absorption and bickering about resources. Jason proposed to adopt a different approach to this.

A First Team mindset is the idea that leaders prioritize supporting their fellow leaders over supporting their direct reports

Amen Jason!

Hemmingway an app by Adam & Ben Long

Adam and his brother Ben Long have created the Hemingway App to fight the awful prose on the internet. Kind of like... my prose. I have the dreadful habbit to write super long, riddled with subordinate clauses, and superfluous complicated sentences. There, you see? I've been using the app more and more, especially while writing for a broader audience. Like job descriptions, commit messages and blog posts. It's a form of accessibility, the peepz from a list apart agree and 24a11y agree.

Face of Open Source: New Faces added in 2019 portraits by Peter Adams

Free Software moves me most, if it mixes with other art forms. Be it design, music, performance or like in this case: photography.

Faces of Open Source / Peter Adams CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Look at those beautiful people and check out their contributions.

Culture is the Behavior You Reward and Punish a post by Jocelyn Goldfein

The story of how Jocelyn learned that culture needs to be defended. I really liked the question: "What makes people successful here?" as a tool to understand the lived (not stated) values of an organization.

In the last couple of years lots of projects (especially events) in the software community have been working on defining and defending their cultural standards. Out if this emerged the contributor covenant as defacto standard. It clearly emphasizes the need for enforcement.

A code of conduct that isn’t (or can’t be) enforced is worse than no code of conduct at all: it sends the message that the values in the code of conduct aren’t actually important or respected in your community. — Ada Initiative

At work we are undergoing a phase of similar culture turmoil right now. Not sure all people have understood yet what they got in to.

Our Data Our Selves a project by the tactical tech NGO.

A very deep look at the increasing role data plays in our lives. As means to activism, force in politics and integral part of yourself.

How to Estimate Feature Development Time: Maybe Don't a post by Amanda Beiner of thoughtbot

A very profound argument of the benefits but especially the consequences of (time) estimations in software development. At work we hopped the #noestimates train a long time ago, never really looked back. I personally also begin to dread the same consequences (explicit deadlines) for the sprint SCRUM event. I dream of trying to adopt our iteration cycle to the deliverable, not the other way around.

Tools I found interesting

• remark.js · A markdown linter
• brow.sh · A modern text-based browser
• bandwhich · A terminal bandwidth utilization tool
• autocrypt · Convenient End-to-End Encryption for E-Mail
• suse.ai · An Open Source personal assistant / chat bot
• ffsend · A command line Firefox Send client
• db · A database snapshot tool

Talks I enjoyed

• NGI Zero: A treasure trove of IT innovation by Michiel Leenaars
• Reducing Carbon in the Digital Realm by Chris Adams
• Let’s play Infokrieg by Arne Vogelgesang
• Ubuntu Touch & Co by Jan Sprinz
• Digesting MRI by Studying Alternative Ruby Implementations by Christian Bruckmayer

That was a lot of awesome stuff! Hope some of it makes you think/act as it has me.

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

I have the feeling this year is moving a bit faster than me. Not sure why. But Tumbleweed is keeping up with the fast pace and we have seen five full snapshots released during the week 2020/05 (0123, 0124, 0125, 0127 and 0128).

Those snapshots brought you those major changes:

• Libvirt 6.0.0
• SQLite 3.30.1
• Mozilla Firefox 72.0.2
• Shadow 4.8
• Linux kernel 5.4.14
• PostgreSQL 12
• gettext 0.20.1

Some of the big topics from last week are still held up in stagings. Seems are progressing, but more help is appreciated. Things currently being worked on:

• Qt 5.14.1 (Snapshot 0130+)
• Python 3.8
• Removal of python 2
• libcap 2.30: breaks fakeroot and drpm
• GNU make 4.3: has some major incompatibilities. Observe fallouts at in Staging:O.
• KDE Plasma 5.18 (currently beta being tested)
• Linux kernel 5.5
• netcfg moves a few files from /etc to /usr/etc (services,. protocols): currently, AppArmor is blocking access to those files, so we need some changes there (Snapshot 0130 and later)
• RPM: Change of the database format from bdb to ndb
• Initial work is being done for GCC10

Software wird ein immer wichtigerer Teil unserer Welt. Sie ist kein Luxus mehr, an dem man bewusst teilnehmen oder dem man sich entziehen kann. Vielmehr ist Software mehr und mehr das Rückgrat unserer modernen Gesellschaft.

Daher wird auch in der öffentlichen Verwaltung viel Steuergeld für Software ausgegeben. Steuergeld sollte aber für Leistungen ausgegeben werden, die dauerhaft der Allgemeinheit zur Verfügung steht und nützt.

Genau das hat in der Vergangenheit in Zusammenhang mit Software immer wieder nicht funktioniert, da nicht sichergestellt werden konnte, dass die Software verwendbar bleibt, wenn die Firma dahinter erlischt oder sich vom Projekt zurückzieht. Das entspricht einer Verschwendung von Steuergeld.

Open Source Software kann diese Situation deutlich verbessern.

Dass der Code dabei jederzeit verfügbar bleibt, ist nur ein, wenn auch sehr positiver Aspekt. Ein weiterer ist, dass der Entwicklungsprozess von open Source Software üblicherweise so präzise, standardisiert und modern ist, dass es einfacher möglich ist, sie weiterzuführen, indem damit ein anderer Dienstleister beauftragt wird. Ausserdem ergibt sich durch offene Lizensierung, dass niemand den anderen übervorteilen kann, so dass gemeinsame Entwicklung risikoloser ist. All das kommt der Allgemeinheit zugute.

Konsequent gedacht führt das zu der Forderung, dass öffentliche Gelder nur für open Source Software ausgegeben werden sollte, denn sie steht der Öffentlichkeit sicher dauerhaft zur Verfügung.

Genau dafür setzt sich die Kampagne Public Money for Public Code der Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) ein.

Auf ihrer Webseite werden Argumente zusammengefasst und umfassende Informationen gegeben. Es gibt die Möglichkeit, Abgeordneten einen offenen Brief zu senden, um politischen Druck aufzubauen.

On my machines I run openSUSE Leap (download), a stable distribution that follows the SUSE Linux Enterprise service packs. But frequently my task is to reproduce or fix a bug in openSUSE Tumbleweed (download), the hottest rolling distribution.

In the past, I would take an ISO image of the installation DVD and install a virtual machine from scratch. (To say nothing about burning a CD, copying a boot floppy, and reinstalling a physical machine. I've been doing this for too long.)

Fortunately, things got easier with ready-made disk images for containers (Docker/Podman) and virtual machines (Vagrant).

With Docker

Get the latest Tumbleweed image from the Docker hub:

$ docker pull opensuse/tumbleweed

Run it:

$ docker run -it opensuse/tumbleweed bash
8484d09e2380:/ # grep VERSION_ID /etc/os-release
VERSION_ID="20200118"
8484d09e2380:/ # ...
...
8484d09e2380:/ # exit

Clean up, removing the container or even the Tumbleweed image:

$ docker ps -a
CONTAINER ID   IMAGE               COMMAND  CREATED          STATUS                     PORTS NAMES
8484d09e2380   opensuse/tumbleweed "bash"   58 minutes ago   Exited (127) 9 seconds ago       hungry_northcutt
$ docker rm 8484d09e2380
8484d09e2380
$ docker rmi opensuse/tumbleweed:latest 

With Vagrant

Vagrant virtual machines work with a context directory and a config file, so let's create them:

$ mkdir vagrant-tw-test; cd $_
$ vagrant init opensuse/Tumbleweed.x86_64
A `Vagrantfile` has been placed in this directory. You are now
ready to `vagrant up` [...]

The up step downloads the base image ("box") that we declared previously, and brings up our VM instance. The ssh step connects there.

$ vagrant up
[...]
$ vagrant ssh
> grep VERSION_ID /etc/os-release 
VERSION_ID="20200114"
> ...
...
> exit

Clean up:

$ vagrant halt     # stop the VM
$ vagrant destroy  # remove its disk image
$ vagrant prune    # remove the box (base image)

See details in Meike Chabowski's article Vagrant Boxes with openSUSE Tumbleweed.

A total of five openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots have been releases since last week for the rolling release users.

The Libvirt 6.0 package came earlier in the week.

LibreOffice, Firefox, PHP and FFmpeg were amongst the most notable packages to update this week.

The 1.4 version of kdeconnect-kde was updated in the most recent 20200127 snapshot. The version offers a new “KDE Connect” desktop app to control the phone from the PC and SMS app that can read and write SMS texts. The newer version also offers compatibility with Xfce’s file manager Thunar. The third release candidate for LibreOffice requires java 1.8 or newer with the libreoffice 6.4.0.3 package. Some core and curl bugs were fixed with php7 7.4.2, which included an Exif fix, and a handful of rubygem packages had minor version bumps. The snapshot is currently trending at a stable rating of 99, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.

Snapshot, 20200125 had a half dozen packages updated. GNU’s Utilities tool package for multi-lingual messaging, gettext-runtime 0.20.1, removed dynamic linker ldconfig and script builder autoreconf. GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library has a new C++ function in the gmp 6.2.0 update and the new version provides better assembly code and greater speed for AMD Ryzen, Power9 and ARM 64-bit CPUs. An updated to the authentication-related tool shadow 4.8 synced password field descriptions in man pages and migrated to ITS Tool for translations. The snapshot is currently trending at a stable rating of 99.

The largest snapshot of the week came in 20200124. Mozilla Firefox 72.0.2 had a fix for a web compatibility issue with CSS Shadow Parts that was introduced in version 72 and made various stability fixes. FFmpeg 4.2.2 alo made some stability fixes mostly for the codecs and formats. Portugueses Brazilian translations were made for libstorage-ng, which bumped the version to 4.2.57. Multi-purpose desktop calculator qalculate 3.7.0 provided a few new functions added support for complex numbers in the exponential integral, Logarithmic integral function, Trigonometric integral and a few more integral functions. WebKit rendering engine webkit2gtk3 2.26.3 had a fix for playing a video on NextCloud and had a fix for a web process crash when displaying a KaTeX formula; the new version also addressed three Common Vulnerabilities and Exposers. YaST had many packages updated including the yast2 4.2.59 version, which added an option to enable the online search in the package. The snapshot is currently trending at a stable rating of 98.

ImageMagick 7.0.9.17 was updated in snapshot 20200123. The image editing vector suite allows for a larger negative interline spacing and support Jzazbz colorspace. Logging package audit 2.8.5 updated lookup tables and fixed the segfault on the shutdown. Ethtool 5.4 fixed a compiler warning with the new GNU Compiler Collection. The major release of libvirt 6.0.0 removed support for python2 and added some new features like introducing a new PCI hostdev address type ‘unassigned’, which gives the user a new option to manage the binding of PCI devices via Libvirt, declaring PCI hostdevs in the domain XML but allowing just a subset of them to be assigned to the guest. The 6.0.0 version of python-libvirt-python was also released.

The sqlite3 3.30.1 package fixed regression found when running python-Django and provided a fix when running the testsuite on Btrfs and XFS. The snapshot is currently trending at a stable rating of 97.

Snapshot 20200122 recorded a stable rating of 93, which had less than a handful of packag updates. The Linux Kernel updated to 5.4.13 and had a fair amount of fixes for s390. Email client mutt 1.13.3 fixed a crash when polling a closed Secure Sockets Layer connection and updated translations in Catalan, Czech,Danish, German, Russian and Ukrainian.

I originally wrote this as a reply to a Reddit post but as I saved it, comments were blocked.

Give yourself little tasks and projects to do. Think of it as being like model kit building. You start with the easy kits like a plane with just a few pieces and as you get better you pick up new things like painting, sanding, and eventually making bigger better kits.

So, start with small things. For example, write a small program with a for-loop and get to know what all if the commands are really doing. This is your basic kit. Add in some variables. Add in user input, and keep going trying new things. Eventually, challenge yourself by learning how to work with a GUI. Sometimes your program will break. This isn’t a bad thing. It teaches you how to debug. What’s important is to take your time and experiment.

The same goes for aspiring system engineers. Learn how to create a virtual machine and install Linux in it. Then learn how to create a web server and then how to get PHP and MySQL working, etc.

A computer course can teach you how to write good code or what all of the system services do that you need but what’s most important is that you don’t give up and never lose your curiosity.