Fixing a Rock Candy Gamepad for the PS3 (or Linux). So easy, even an 8 year old can do it.

Actually, this journey begins in 2015. I attending Indonesia Linux Conference, that’s the first time I meet people from openSUSE Indonesia. Mr. Edwin Zakaria. I remember, he gave me Alex the Gecko T-Shirt from Babacucu.com. My first openSUSE T-shirt.

After attending the conference. I also invited to KPLI (Kelompok Pengguna Linux Indonesia: it’s like Indonesian Linux Users) meeting at Gucci, Tegal with my boss, Pak Vavai. It’s an honor for me. Because I remember, I was a kid who never knew about a community before.

I talk with strangers I’ve never met before. Also, a person who I only knew from the internet (facebook groups). In fact, they are so kind, they are free to ask and answer my question.

So, i decided to join the community. Trying to contribute more to the openSUSE Indonesia forum, cause I’m an openSUSE user. Until 2016 openSUSE Asia Summit 2016 was announced that will be held in Yogyakarta. I proposed to be a Volunteer. Cause i think if you only use Linux it’s not enough. You have to give back to Open Source Project. If i can’t give a code. At least i have to try to help openSUSE Indonesia to make this event have a lot of fun.

And until now, i still active in the community. This year, i got a responsibility being a local team in openSUSE Asia Summit 2019, Bali. This is my story about how i and the team (openSUSE Indonesia) manage the conference remotely. hope you enjoy to read!

One Year Preparation

After openSUSE Asia Summit 2018. Indonesia was chosen as a host for openSUSE Asia Summit 2019, Bali. It’s an honor to being a landlord for this event, again. So, we from openSUSE Asia and Indonesia did a meeting, online or offline.

For Local Teams, we usually talk online using Telegram Group and meet each other every month in Depok. But, near the event. We meet every week in Blok M Jakarta.

openSUSE Asia Summit 2019 Local team has a different location around the “Nusantara”.

And for Asian Team, we talk to each other using Slack monthly. We usually make an appointment on Tuesday night. We talk about the progress of sponsorship, CFP, Logo competition, and many others.

Excellent Proudly Become a Sponsor for openSUSE Asia Summit 2019

My Company that i working on (PT Excellent Infotama Kreasindo) also become a sponsor for this event. My boss is a former of openSUSE Indonesia Chairman (2007). Which is Mr. Masim Vavai Sugianto. Actually, he wants to come to the event, but suddenly, his mom passed away ahead of the summit.

It’s really sad. I have to go to a summit with some of the tears. Because i have a good relationship with my boss and his family.

My company quite often to sponsoring for Open Source events such as openSUSE Asia Summit 2016, LibreOffice Conference Indonesia in 2017. And this year, Excellent become a custom sponsor for openSUSE Asia Summit 2019.(https://events.opensuse.org/conferences/summitasia19).

Thanks for the help, boss!

If you want to know further about our company, feel free to visit: https://www.excellent.co.id.

D-day openSUSE Asia Summit 2019

I arrived in Bali on Wednesday, Oct 3th. D-3 at the conference. I meet the volunteer on Thursday, we introduce each other. But, they already know because came from the same organization at the University. Seriously, they are really nice and humble. And the best volunteer I’ve ever met.

I met Adji M Nur, he is the coordinator for the University

Before this event, we only talk to each other using Telegram Group, but they have a fast response and willingly to help us even we never meet face to face.

We have many uncompleted tasks, such as preparing for the venue, goody bag, gate, and many more. So, we have to maximize the time to make this event running well.

Seriously, this is the superb volunteer. They already have many experiences handling similar events. So, they know what to do. I just said, “i need this, can you provide?”. They always answer. “Sure, we can“.

And I also really appreciated the volunteer. Some of them want to attend Hindunese Ceremony. The name is “Tooth Filling”. It’s their friend’s ceremony. But they canceled that because they said they have a responsibility to make this event successful. It’s awesome!

I can remember all the names of Volunteers also the face. They have a big soul for helping people. Really, I’m grateful and very nice to meet them.

So, after preparing the venue. We are ready to rock on the summit…

Actually, i have a long story for this summit. I will write it soon. See you in the next article!

The post openSUSE Asia Summit 2019: Summit Preparation appeared first on dhenandi.com.

I met Edwin and Ary earlier this year at the openSUSE Conference in Nuremberg. They invited me to come to the openSUSE Asia Summit happening in Bali. I wasn't sure that I would be able to attend it. But then, around June I saw a tweet reminding about the deadline for the Call for Proposal for the openSUSE Asia Summit and I thought maybe I should give it a try.

I submitted a workshop proposal on MicroOS and a lightning talk proposal to the openSUSE Asia CFP team. Both were accepted and I couldn't be happier. It gave me the chance to meet friends from the openSUSE community again, learn and share more.

We do not have direct flights to Indonesia. I traveled through Air Mauritius to Kuala Lumpur and then Malaysia Arlines to Denpasar, Bali. I spent almost 24 hours traveling before reaching my hotel in Jimbaran. I was totally knackered when I arrived but the enthusiasm of being there for the summit was stronger than anything.

I booked a taxi through Traveloka ahead of my arrival in Bali. It was recommended by Edwin. When I compared other taxi fares I felt glad I booked it online. I also bought a SIM card on my way to the hotel with a 6GB data package. I knew we'd all communicate mostly on Telegram, just as we did for oSC 2019. My hotel WiFi connection wasn't great but I was impressed by the 4G coverage of my mobile Internet provider, XL Axiata. Mobile connectivity was extremely helpful as I would rely on GoJek car-hailing for the next few days.

Food?

The only thing bugging me was about finding vegetarian food. McDonald's, Pizza Hut and KFC were just a few minutes walk from my hotel and along the way there were a few restaurants as well. But those were Seafood restaurants and I felt weird to go there and ask for veggies.

Unlike in Mauritius and Germany, McDonald's and KFC do not offer the vegetarian or vegan burger. I only found two vegetarian pizza options at Pizza Hut, the Veggie Garden and Cheese Deluxe. There might have been some veggie options in the Chinese restaurants but I didn't venture. I visited a supermarket and found that they were selling stuffed croissant. However, there was no clear indication whether they contain tuna, chicken or simply cheese.

Finally, I was saved from the food dilemma by the folks from the openSUSE Asia community. Estu & Ary made sure that there was a vegetarian option during the summit or whenever we went out along with the speakers. I got to eat things other than pizza :) like tofu, tempe, vegetable chop suoy etc.

The summit kicked-off on Saturday 5 October at the Information Technology Department, Faculty of Engineering, Udayana University. There were around 40 or so students who volunteered to help run the summit. Some of the volunteers were from other institutions.

Two students hosted the event with information provided in Indonesian and English. They greeted the attendees and requested everyone to stand for a prayer. Then there was a traditional Balinese dance performance.

After the dance performance attendees were once again requested to stand up and this time for the Indonesian national anthem.

Om Swastiastu

A representative of the university read the keynote speech. He greeted the room by saying "Om Swasti Astu" and then greeted in Arabic, followed by his speech in English.

Indonesia is a Muslim majority country with the Bali province being the only exception whereby Hindus are majority. However, there reigns a peaceful harmony between the two, as far as I could see. There is a mutual respect towards each others rituals and practices.

After the keynote speech, openSUSE Board member Axel Braun did a presentation on the project stats and updates. He then invited the new openSUSE Board Chairman, Gerald Pfeifer on stage.

Gerald impressed the room with his down to earth style as he stressed on the importance of good communication. He also played a video message of the SUSE CEO, Melissa Di Donato who re-affirmed SUSE's commitment to the openSUSE Project.

Then, openSUSE Board member Simon Lees spoke about the future legal structure of the project and the motivation behind. He mentioned the current proposal of registering the project as a foundation and the project name change vote that should run from 10 - 31 Oct 2019.

We had a group photo and then the tea/coffee/snacks break.

Outside the room there were sponsors stands and the conference information desk. But most people gathered to take pictures at the openSUSE backdrop. I took a picture with the Geeko & Gerald.

The organizers conducted some interviews which they showed in a video compilation at the end of the day. Presentations and workshops were happening simultaneously and one could easily find the room numbers from events.o.o and then follow instructions provided by the summit volunteers.

I attended the Kubic presentation by Max Huang in the main hall. In fact, I got the chance to comment on the difference between Tumbleweed & Kubic during the Q&A session.

I even attended some presentations that were in Indonesian, like the Aksara Hanacaraka Bali and Ceph presentations.

Day 1 Highlight

openSUSE MicroOS Workshop

My workshop on Managing Pods & Containers was scheduled for the second day of the summit in the afternoon. I spoke about containers obviously but unlike the usual workshops teaching how to spin containers we peeked inside of containers instead to see what they are made of. The aim of the workshop was to educate attendees on Linux namespaces and how they create the isolated environment that enable us to have a distinct Linux instance within another. Then we could delve further into the topic of containers and understand how resources are shared within a pod. That would help a newbie to containers fast-track into the world of Kubernetes. The latter can be intimidating to people new to the idea of containerization with abstractions such as pod, service and deployment.

My friend @IshSookun give workshop about @openSUSE MicroOS in #oSAS19 pic.twitter.com/VAQdhHh49J

— medwinz (@medwinz) October 6, 2019

openSUSE MicroOS is perfect to start experimenting with containers and pods, then exporting those pods to Kubic (the Kubernetes distribution of openSUSE).

On the second day of the summit I also attended several other presentations, like the talk on the future of the desktop by Neil McGovern, Executive Director of the GNOME foundation, the auto-deployment of Ceph with Rook on Kubic by Saputro Aryulianto and openSUSE deployment on Linode using Terraform by Muhammad Dhenandi Putra.

The last item on day 2 was lightning talks. I had five minutes max to talk about the subject that I had submitted. I wanted to explain the election process within the openSUSE community, like the software used, planning by the Election Committee etc. Then, I also highlighted that for one to be able to vote in any openSUSE election or run as candidate for the board, the person needs to be an openSUSE member.

@IshSookun talks about the three steps someone needs to take to become an @openSUSE member. Just click on it - https://t.co/YQqJFISd4N pic.twitter.com/pYHw6TMUjw

— openSUSE Linux (@openSUSE) October 6, 2019

Becoming an openSUSE member requires a few steps, three to be precise. That's it, I completed the talk within the five minutes and invited the forty or so summit volunteers to apply for openSUSE membership.

Venue for openSUSE Asia Summit 2020?

openSUSE Asia Summit 2020 will be held at the Manav Rachna Institute of Research & Studies, Faridabab, Haryana, India. I'm looking forward to that and hopefully if all is good perhaps I will attend with more friends from Mauritius.

Day 2 Highlight

After the summit, the next day, the organizers planned a Bali tour which was awesome. I will blog about the places we visited in separate posts.

FOSSCOMM (Free and Open Source Software Communities Meeting) is a Greek conference aiming at free-software and open-source enthusiasts, developers, and communities. This year was held at Lamia from October 11 to October 13.

It is a tradition for me to attend this conference. Usually, I have presentations and of course, booths to inform the attendees about the projects I represent.

This year the structure of the conference was kind of different. Usually, the conference starts on Friday with a "beer event". Now it started with registration and a presentation. Personally, I made my plan to leave Thessaloniki by bus. It took me about 4 hours on the road. So when I arrived, I went to my hotel and then waited for Pantelis to go to University and set up our booths.

ALERT: Long projects presentation...

Our goal was to put the stickers and leaflets on the right area. This year we had plenty of projects at our booths. We met a lot of friends at Nextcloud conference and we asked them for brochures and stickers. So this year our basic projects were Nextcloud and openSUSE (we had table cloths). We had stickers from GNOME (I had couple of T-Shirts from GUADEC just in case someone wanted to buy one). Since openSUSE sponsorts GNU Health, I was there to inform students about it (it was great opportunity since the department organizing was Bioinformatics department). We had brochures, stickers, chocolate and pencils from ONLYOFFICE, also we had promo material from our friends Turris. We are happy that Free Software Foundation Europe gave us brochures when we were in Berlin, and we were able to inform attendees about the campaigns and the work they are doing for us. We met Collabora guys also and we asked them if they want to promote them, since Collabora and Nextcloud are working together. Finally, our friends from DAVx⁵, gave us their promo material since the program works with Nextcloud so well.

I warned you!!! Well, the first day we met the organizers and the volunteers. I was surprised by the number of volunteers and they're willing to help us (even with setting up the booths). The first day ended with going out to eat something. Thank you, Olga, for introduce us to FRESCO. I used to eat at FRESCO when I was in Barcelona. I guess they're not franchise :-)

Well, Saturday started with registration. We put more swag on the booth (we saw that last night they took almost everything). Personally, I went to meet other projects. I was glad that my friend Julita applied to present what she's doing at the university (Linux on Supercomputers). I was kind of surprised but happy for her that her talk upgraded to Keynote. Glad I met her at GUADEC. Glad also that she had Fedora booth and gave some different aura to the conference. Check out her blogpost about her FOSSCOMM experience .

Glad I met Boris from Tirana. He did a presentation about Nextcloud as a service with Cloud68. Never met before, although I can say that I know many people from Albania and Open Labs.


My presentation was the last one on Saturday, so I had plenty of time to be at the booth and inform anyone about all the above projects. Also, I had the opportunity to attend some talks I wanted to see. Well, my talk was about communities. I described my personal example. I started a little bit about what is a contribution to open source projects. I focused on my example, meaning on end-users that they like the software, they want to contribute but they don't have a clue about programming languages. Personally, I translate and promote (articles, conferences, etc). I met a lot of people (Greece and abroad) that I consider friends. Those friends maybe can help find a job (especially you are an IT). The best part though is when we meet AFK and we have fun.
You can see my presentation file here https://tinyurl.com/fosscomm2019.


After my presentation, there was a party (not because I finished it but because it was on schedule ;-) ). We had pizza and wine. Also, there was music. We left kind of early (I guess) with some FOSS friends and some volunteers. We had a beer at the center.

On Sunday I left Lamia by car with a friendly couple from Thessaloniki. Well, she had a presentation as well (before mine) about "Building digital competency in European small and medium-sized businesses with Free and Open Source Software: Results of the FOSS4SMEs project". I suppose to have another, more interesting talk for the Bioinformatics department (subject: "GNU HEALTH: The fight for our rights to universality and excellence in the Public Health System"), but due to my departure, it was canceled. I asked the organizers the day that the schedule was out to change my talk to Saturday but never got an answer.

Well, I took some videos and I'll upload it on youtube soon. Some volunteers took some pictures and I guess we'll have them soon. When I'll have them all, I'll edit this post.

Finally, I would like to thank Nextcloud for sponsoring my trip to Lamia.

EDIT: Here is the video.

There are many flavors of Linux, we call them distributions but in a way, I think “flavor” is a good word for it as some some are a sweet and delightful experience while with others a lingering, foul taste remains. Manjaro has not left a foul taste in any way. In full disclosure, I am … Continue reading Manjaro | Review from an openSUSE User →

The openSUSE.Asia Summit is one of the big events for the openSUSE community (i.e. both contributors and users) in Asia. Those who normally communicate online can meet from all over the world, talk in person and have fun. Members of the community share their current knowledge, experience and learn FLOSS technologies around openSUSE. The openSUSE.Asia Summit 2019 took place from October 5 to October 6, 2019 at the Information Technology Department, Faculty of Engineering, Udayana University, Bali.

Highlight-Videos Day 1 and 2

Further videos with lectures and workshops are available on YouTube.

My 6th noodling might be my longest noodling yet. It started out a bit light but then after reading I just got a bit too excited. If you want to skip to the end where I do a little self-deprecation and ignore the meat of it, that is very understandable. The 6th Noodling can be … Continue reading Noodlings 6 | Symphony, Power Tools and Storage →

This laptop of mine that I purchased just over two years ago has the ability to have 3 storage devices. I have previously described what I’ve done in it with an mSATA and the 2.5″ SSD. Between the two, I have 995 GiB of storage, 101 GiB for root using the mSATA and 894 GiB … Continue reading Three Drives on my Dell Latitude E6440 | Cuz Two Isn’t Enough →

A fundamental concept of all openSUSE packages as well as any image offered for download is a fully transparent, reproducible and automatic build and development process based on sources.

In openSUSE developers do not perform manual builds on some specially crafted machine in their basement and then upload the result somewhere. Instead all sources are stored in a version control system inside the open build service (OBS) instance at build.opensuse.org. OBS then automatically builds the sources including all dependencies according to defined build instructions (eg spec files for rpms). OBS also automatically adds cryptographic signatures to files that support it to make sure nobody can tamper with those files.

The WSL appx files are basically zip files that contain a tarball of a Linux system (like a container) and a Windows exe file, the so called launcher. Building a container is something OBS can already do fully automatic by means of Kiwi. The launcher as well as the final appx however is typically built on a Windows machine using Visual Studio by the developer.

Since the goal of the openSUSE WSL offering is to have the appx files officially and automatically be produced along with other images such as the DVD installer, Live images or containers, the appx files have to be built from sources in OBS.

Fortunately there’s already a MinGW cross toolchain packaged as rpms OBS and a tool to generate appx files on Linux.

Combining that all together OBS can actually build the WSL appx from sources. The current state of development can be found in the Virtualization:WSL project in OBS. The generated appx files are published on download.opensuse.org.
The current images for Leap 15.2 Alpha and Tumbleweed there are good enough for some testing already so please go ahead and do so, feedback welcome!
Note that since the appx files are signed by OBS rather than Microsoft, there are a few steps required to install them.

Going forward there is still quite some work needed to polish this up. Kiwi for example can’t build the appx directly itself but rather the fb-util-for-appx is called by a spec file. That requires some hacks with the OBS project config to work. On Linux side there’s currently no password set for the root user, so we need a better “first boot” solution. More details on that in a later article. Meanwhile, remember to have a lot of fun…

Introduction

Now that you had a chance to look at our post about Advanced Encryption Options (especially if you are an s390 user), it is time to check what happened during the last YaST development sprint, which finished last Monday.

As usual, we have been working in a wide range of topics which include:

• Improving support for multi-device file systems in the expert partitioner.
• Fixing networking, secure boot and kdump problems in AutoYaST.
• Stop waiting for chrony during initial boot when it does not make sense.
• Preparing to support the split of configuration files between /usr/etc and /etc.
• Using /etc/sysctl.d to write YaST related settings instead of the /etc/sysctl.conf main file.

Expert Partitioner and Multi-Device File Systems

So far, the Expert Partitioner was assuming that Btrfs was the only file system built on top multiple devices. But that is not completely true because some file systems are able to use an external journal to accomplish a better performance. For example, Ext3/4 and XFS can be configured to use separate devices for data and the journaling stuff.

We received a bug report caused by this misunderstanding about multi-device file systems. The Expert Partitioner was labeling as “Part of Btrfs” a device used as an external journal of an Ext4 file system. So we have improved this during the last sprint, and now external journal devices are correctly indicated in the Type column of the Expert Partitioner, as shown in the screenshot below.

Moreover, the file system information now indicates which device is being used for the external journal.

And finally, we have also limited the usage of such devices belonging to a multi-device Btrfs. Now, you will get an error message if you try to edit one of those devices. In the future, we will extend this feature to make possible to modify file systems using an external journal from the Expert Partitioner.

AutoYaST Getting Some Love

During this sprint, we have given AutoYaST some attention in different areas: networking, bootloader and kdump.

About the networking area, we have finished s390 support in the new network layer, fixing some old limitations in devices activation and udev handling. Apart from that, we have fixed several bugs and improved the documentation a lot, as we found it to be rather incomplete.

Another important change was adding support to disable secure boot for UEFI through AutoYaST. Of course, we updated the documentation too and, during the process, we added some elements that were missing and removed others that are not needed anymore.

Finally, we fixed a tricky problem when trying to get kdump to work on a minimal system. After some debugging, we found out that AutoYaST adds too late kdump to the list of packages to install. This issue has been fixed and now it should work like a charm.

As you may have seen, apart from writing code, we try to contribute to the documentation so our users have a good source of information. If you are curious, apart from the documents for released SUSE and openSUSE versions, you can check the latest builds (including the AutoYaST handbook). Kudos to our documentation team for such an awesome work!

Avoiding chrony-wait time out

Recently, some openSUSE users reported a really annoying issue in Tumbleweed. When time synchronization is enabled through YaST, the system might get stuck during the booting process if no network connection is available.

The problem is that, apart from the chrony service, YaST was enabling the chrony-wait service too. This service is used to ensure that the time is properly set before continuing with other services that can be affected by a time shift. But without a network connection, chrony-wait will wait for around 10 minutes. Unacceptable.

The discussion about the proper fix for this bug is still open, but for the time being, we have applied a workaround in YaST to enable chrony-wait only for those products that require precise time, like openSUSE Kubic. In the rest of cases, systems will boot faster even without network, although some service might be affected by a time shift.

Splitting Configuration Files between /etc and /usr/etc

As Linux users, we are all used to check for system-wide settings under /etc, which contains a mix of vendor and host-specific configuration values. This approach has worked rather well in the past, not without some hiccups, but when things like transactional updates come into play, the situation gets messy.

In order to solve those problems, the plan is to split configuration files between /etc and /usr/etc. The former would contain vendor settings while the latter would define host-specific values. Of course, such a move have a lot of implications.

So during this sprint we tried to identify potential problems for YaST and to propose solutions to tackle them in the future. If you are interested in the technical details, you can read our conclusions.

Writing Sysctl Changes to /etc/sysctl.d

In order to be able to cope with the /etc and /usr/etc split, YaST needs to stop writing to files like /etc/sysctl.conf and use an specific file under .d directories (like /etc/sysctl.d).

So as part of the aforementioned research, we adapted several modules (yast2-network, yast2-tune, yast2-security and yast2-vpn) to behave this way regarding /etc/sysctl.conf. From now on, YaST specific settings will be written to /etc/sysctl.d/30-yast.conf instead of /etc/sysctl.conf. Moreover, if YaST founds any of those settings in the general .conf file, it will move them to the new place.

What’s next?

Sprint 87 is already running. Apart from fixing some bugs that were introduced during the network refactoring, we plan to work on other storage-related stuff like resizing support for LUKS2 or some small snapper problems. We will give your more details in our next sprint report.

Stay tunned!