Long time no see. I got new Sony Xperia Z Tablet (WiFi, not LTE one) to play with and I thought that it would be nice device to run our openSUSE with my Enlightenment on that to combine cool hardware and cool software.

It seems that there is not much project targeted on running full blown Linux distribution on Android devices. You can meet Replicant (which is great anyway), you can meet Ubuntu Touch but that is almost all. So I decided to revive my old blog and write here my notes.

I played in past with HTC Desire Z with the same desire, but as I had very little time in the end, I didn't progressed significantly beyond interesting Hackweek project. I hope that this time it will do better and at least it is not my only mobile I'd wreck :)

I started with rooting the device, which was very simple thanks to the article on unlockr and the work of DooMLoRD. I prepared then openSUSE chroot on microSD card, automated chrooting process and installed some basic tools (gcc, git, mosh + ssh) and E17. To see I have working installation I used Android's native XWindow implementation.

To boot openSUSE I'd need to boot kernel with something like

root=/dev/block/mmcblk1p4

(where my openSUSE partition is) or even provide my initramfs which will take care of mounting and other needed stuff. To be able to boot without bricking I need to find way how to provide kernel to bootloader without changing contents of flash.

fastboot

should do the job (at least it did with my HTC Desire Z attempts).

It seems that I can't influence kernel parameters for now so let's build own kernel with root device settings hardcoded. Sony provides repository with kernel source on github. Kernel configuration was not present so I took the one from Cyanogenmod project.

Let's have a look on internal flash to find some more information:

# fdisk -l /dev/block/mmcblk0
WARNING: fdisk GPT support is currently new, and therefore in an experimental phase. Use at your own discretion.

Disk /dev/block/mmcblk0: 15.8 GB, 15758000128 bytes, 30777344 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk label type: gpt


#         Start          End    Size  Type            Name
 1          256         4351      2M  unknown         TA
 2         4352         4607    128K  unknown         sbl1
 3         4608         5119    256K  unknown         sbl2
 4         5120         5631    256K  unknown         s1sbl2
 5         5632         6655    512K  unknown         sbl3
 6         6656         7679    512K  unknown         aboot
 7         7680         8703    512K  unknown         tz
 8         8704         8959    128K  unknown         alt_sbl1
 9         8960         9471    256K  unknown         alt_sbl2
10         9472         9983    256K  unknown         alt_s1sbl2
11         9984        11007    512K  unknown         alt_sbl3
12        11008        12031    512K  unknown         alt_aboot
13        12032        13055    512K  unknown         alt_tz
14        13056        14079    512K  unknown         rpm
15        14080        15103    512K  unknown         alt_rpm
16        16384        49151     16M  Linux filesyste LTALabel
17        49152        90111     20M  unknown         boot
18        90112        91671    780K  unknown         modemst1
19        94208        95767    780K  unknown         modemst2
20        98304        99863    780K  unknown         fsg
21        99864       110103      5M  unknown         ramdump
22       110104       126487      8M  Linux filesyste apps_log
23       126488       159255     16M  unknown         FOTAKernel
24       159744      4354047      2G  Linux filesyste system
25      4354048      5480447    550M  Linux filesyste cache
26      5480448      6266879    384M  Linux filesyste B2B
27      6266880     30535646   11.6G  Linux filesyste userdata

And some basic identification of the partitions:

# file -s /dev/block/mmcblk0p{1..27}
/dev/block/mmcblk0p1:  data
/dev/block/mmcblk0p2:  data
/dev/block/mmcblk0p3:  data
/dev/block/mmcblk0p4:  data
/dev/block/mmcblk0p5:  data
/dev/block/mmcblk0p6:  Hitachi SH big-endian COFF object, not stripped
/dev/block/mmcblk0p7:  data
/dev/block/mmcblk0p8:  data
/dev/block/mmcblk0p9:  data
/dev/block/mmcblk0p10: data
/dev/block/mmcblk0p11: data
/dev/block/mmcblk0p12: Hitachi SH big-endian COFF object, not stripped
/dev/block/mmcblk0p13: data
/dev/block/mmcblk0p14: data
/dev/block/mmcblk0p15: data
/dev/block/mmcblk0p16: Linux rev 1.0 ext4 filesystem data, UUID=57f8f4bc-abf4-655f-bf67-946fc0f9f25b (extents) (large files)
/dev/block/mmcblk0p17: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, ARM, version 1, statically linked, stripped
/dev/block/mmcblk0p18: data
/dev/block/mmcblk0p19: data
/dev/block/mmcblk0p20: data
/dev/block/mmcblk0p21: data
/dev/block/mmcblk0p22: Linux rev 1.0 ext4 filesystem data, UUID=57f8f4bc-abf4-655f-bf67-946fc0f9f25b (needs journal recovery) (extents) (large files)
/dev/block/mmcblk0p23: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, ARM, version 1, statically linked, stripped
/dev/block/mmcblk0p24: Linux rev 1.0 ext4 filesystem data, UUID=57f8f4bc-abf4-655f-bf67-946fc0f9f25b (extents) (large files)
/dev/block/mmcblk0p25: Linux rev 1.0 ext4 filesystem data, UUID=57f8f4bc-abf4-655f-bf67-946fc0f9f25b (needs journal recovery) (extents) (large files)
/dev/block/mmcblk0p26: Linux rev 1.0 ext4 filesystem data, UUID=57f8f4bc-abf4-655f-bf67-946fc0f9f25b (extents) (large files)
/dev/block/mmcblk0p27: Linux rev 1.0 ext4 filesystem data, UUID=57f8f4bc-abf4-655f-bf67-946fc0f9f25b (needs journal recovery) (extents) (large files)

I have read somewhere that there is different format used than boot.img. I also found that there is already tool for extracting this format. Unfortunately it didn't work for me.

Fortunately the format was ELF executable used as container and we have tools for analyzing or manipulating that. So, it seems that FOTAKernel is kernel and initramfs in single ELF executable in mmcblk0p23.

# readelf -a mmcblk0p23-FOTAKernel
ELF Header:
  Magic:   7f 45 4c 46 01 01 01 61 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
  Class:                             ELF32
  Data:                              2's complement, little endian
  Version:                           1 (current)
  OS/ABI:                            ARM
  ABI Version:                       0
  Type:                              EXEC (Executable file)
  Machine:                           ARM
  Version:                           0x1
  Entry point address:               0x80208000
  Start of program headers:          52 (bytes into file)
  Start of section headers:          7720040 (bytes into file)
  Flags:                             0x0
  Size of this header:               52 (bytes)
  Size of program headers:           32 (bytes)
  Number of program headers:         2
  Size of section headers:           40 (bytes)
  Number of section headers:         1
  Section header string table index: 0

Section Header:
  [Nr] Name              Type            Addr     Off    Size   ES Flg Lk Inf Al
  [ 0]          LOUSER+53494e   00000000 75bc68 001000 00      0   0  0
Key to Flags:
  W (write), A (alloc), X (execute), M (merge), S (strings)
  I (info), L (link order), G (group), T (TLS), E (exclude), x (unknown)
  O (extra OS processing required) o (OS specific), p (processor specific)

There are no section groups in this file.

Program Headers:
  Type           Offset   VirtAddr   PhysAddr   FileSiz MemSiz  Flg Align
  LOAD           0x000074 0x80208000 0x80208000 0x581698 0x581698     0
  LOAD           0x58170c 0x82200000 0x82200000 0x1da55c 0x1da55c     0

There is no dynamic section in this file.

There are no relocations in this file.

No version information found in this file.

You can see two program headers, offsets and filesizes. First entry is kernel's. To extract kernel you can simply use dd:

$ dd if=/dev/block/mmcblk0p23 of=vmlinuz skip=$((0x74)) count=$((0x581698)) bs=1

To get to contents of initramfs you have to do some more steps:

$ dd if=/dev/block/mmcblk0p23 skip=$((0x58170c)) count=$((0x1da55c)) bs=1 | zcat | cpio -id

So, now I have original initramfs I can modify to boot from microSD card after all that HW specific black magic, I have kernel to use, so experiments with boot can start next time.

republished to get to planet.opensuse.org page

It is not news that openSUSE, through to the effort of the openSUSE community KDE team, offers several third-party repositories for those who want the latest software from KDE. Since a while, stable releases were offered in the KDE:Release:4x repositories, created with every major release of KDE software. These were meant to offer the latest and greatest to the users without having them to track KDE:Distro:Factory, which is instead used to track packaging for the next openSUSE release and is more in a state of flux.

Then there are repositories which offer additional applications outside the main openSUSE KDE desktop packages, KDE:Extra (for stable releases) and KDE:Unstable:Extra (for development snapshots). In this case, they complement the already existing KDE repositories.

Given the rapid pace of development from KDE, which switched to 4 month based releases, this setup has shown some limits: the KDE:Extra and KDE:Unstable:Extra repositories would need to be built against each of the KDE:Release:4x ones, draining a lot of the build power available to the Open Build Service, and also maintenance was problematic, due to the number of repositories involved and the limited manpower at disposal of the openSUSE community KDE team.

This is why we’re announcing a change today: effective with the 4.12.4 release from KDE, the KDE:Release:4x repositories will be retired, replaced by a single resource which tracks the latest stable release from KDE, KDE:Current. This approach will greatly reduce the number of repositories to track and ease maintenance a great deal. KDE:Extra and KDE:Unstable:Extra will also be adjusted to offer KDE:Latest as build targets (and removing KR4x as well), with the net effect of saving a lot of OBS build power.

Of course, KDE:Current will include 4.13 packages once the official release is out.

Therefore, if you are a user of KDE:Release:4x, be aware that from tomorrow (at the same time as the 4.12.4 release)the repository will _cease to exist _and you should move to KDE:Current.

For questions and suggestions, feel free to drop by the #opensuse-kde channel on Freenode, or use the openSUSE KDE mailing list.

This post was brought to you by the bright (?) minds of the openSUSE community KDE team, with particular thanks to Raymond “tittiatcoke” Wooninck, who did most of the work

P.S.: No, this is not an April Fools’ joke. ;)

… on Wednesday April 2nd. Their talk will begin 18:30 o’clock local time in the New Paulinum of the University of Leipzig.

Magic Lantern was started in 2009 by Trammel Hudson to bring professional video recording and advanced photographic features to Canon EOS DSLR cameras.

The project expanded and its feature set. Custom video overlays, raw video recording, time lapsed video, manual audio control and more belong to it. With these tools Magic Lantern greatly improved useability in many areas upon bare Canon firmware and is now daily used by many professional photographers, journalists and movie makers.

Es gibt gelegentlich die Frage, ob man  Einführungs- und Abschlußtexte für Dokumente vorbelegen kann. Das heisst, wenn eine neue Rechnung erstellt wird, soll diese gleich einen vom Benutzer einmal festgelegten und vorbereiteten Standardtext voreingestellt bekommen. Das geht mit Kraft natürlich, nur ist das zugegebenerweise etwas versteckt.

Hier also die Schritt-für-Schritt Anleitung:

Die Standardtexte werden für jeden Dokumenttyp eingestellt, dh. eine Rechnung erhält einen anderen Standardtext als ein Angebot. Um die Vorlagetexte zu editieren, muss ein vorhandenes (oder neu erstelltes) Dokument geöffnet werden. Dann, um einen Einführungstext für den Dokumentkopf zu erstellen, muss auf den Kopfbereich gewechselt werden. Dann wird per Schaltfläche „Vorlangen Anzeigen“ in den Vorlagen-Auswahlmodus gestellt.

Auf dem Beispielbild gibt es noch garkeine Textvorlage, also auch keinen Standardtext für den Dokumenttyp „Angebot“. Daher wird die Information in dem roten Feld angezeigt.

Ein Klick auf den Knopf mit dem Pluszeichen (Pfeil im Bild) öffnet einen Editor, mit dem ein neuer Text eingegeben werden kann.

Wichtig ist nun der Name dieses Textes, der in dem Editor im oberen Textfeld eingegeben werden kann. Als voreingestellter Text für neue Dokumente wird von Kraft der Text mit dem Namen „Standard“ verwendet.

Um also einen Standardtext für diesen Dokumenttext anzulegen, muss nur ein Vorlagetext mit dem Namen „Standard“ erzeugt werden. Das kann für jeden Dokumenttyp gemacht werden, und dieser Text wird dann bei neu angelegten Dokumenten des Types ausgewählt.

Natürlich können pro Dokumenttyp auch noch andere Vorlagetexte mit anderen Namen angelegt werden, die bei Bedarf ausgewählt werden können. Dazu wird der Name in der Liste ausgewählt und ein Klick auf den Pfeil übernimmt den Text in das bearbeitete Dokument.

 

 

This Monday 24.03, I will make a Release Party in Austria (Klagenfurt am Wörthersee) [1] , in collaboration with the local IEEE Student
Branch. Here you can find all the relevant information [2], [3],[4]  and also download the poster of the event [5].

If you are in Austria or close to Klagenfurt , feel free to pass by the Party!

Have fun!

Ilias R.

Hello, dear students!

This little blog is to remind you that in a bit more then 24 hours, the student applications for the 10^th edition of Google Summer of Code will be closed. It is always better to submit an imperfect proposal before the deadline then to miss the deadline by 5 minutes with perfect proposal. So, check our Ideas page and hurry up with applying.

Finally there is some news regarding our public cloud presence and openSUSE 13.1. We now have openSUSE 13.1 images published in Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine, and Windows Azure.

Well, that’s the announcement, but would make for a rather short blog. Thus, let me talk a bit about how this all works and speculate a bit why we’ve not been all that good with getting stuff out into the public cloud.

Let me start with the speculation part, i.e. hindrances in getting openSUSE images published. In general to get anything into a public cloud one has to have an account. This implies that you hand over your credit card number to the cloud provider and they charge you for the resources you use. Resources in the public cloud are anything and everything that has something to do with data. Compute resources, i.e. the size of an instance w.r.t. memory and number of CPUs are priced differently. Sending data across the network to and from your instances incurs network charges and of course storing stuff in the cloud is not free either. Thus, while anyone can put an image into the cloud and publish it, this service costs the person money, granted not necessarily a lot, but it is a monthly recurring out of pocket expense.

Then there always appears to be the “official” apprehension, meaning if person X publishes an openSUSE image from her/his account what makes it “official”. Well first we have the problem that the “official” stamp is really just an imaginary hurdle. An image that gets published by me is no more or less “official” than any other images. I am after all not the release manager or have any of my fingers in the openSUSE release in any way. I do have access to the SUSE accounts and can publish from there and I guess that makes the images “official”. But please do not get any ideas about “official” images, they do not exist.

Last but not least there is a technical hurdle. Building images in OBS is not necessarily for the faint of heart. Additionally there is a bunch of other stuff that goes along with cloud images. Once you have one it still has to get into the cloud of choice, which requires tools etc.

That’s enough speculation as to why or why not it may have taken us a bit longer than others, and just for the record we did have openSUSE 12.1 and openSUSE 12.2 images in Amazon. With that lets talk about what is going on.

We have a project in OBS now, actually it has been there for a while, Cloud:Images that is intended to be used to build openSUSE cloud images. The GCE image that is public and the Amazon image that is public both came from this project. The Azure image that is currently public is one built with SUSE Studio but will at some point also stem from the Cloud:Images OBS project.

Each cloud framework has it’s own set of tools. The tools are separated into two categories, initialization tools and command line tools. The initialization tools are tools that reside inside the image and these are generally services that interact with the cloud framework. For example cloud-init is such an initialization tool and it is used in OpenStack images, Amazon images, and Windows Azure images. The command line tools let you interact with the cloud framework to start and stop instances for example. All these tools get built in the Cloud:Tools project in OBS. From there you can install the command line tools into your system and interact with the cloud framework they support. I am also trying to get all these tools into openSUSE:Factory to make things a bit easier for image building and cloud interaction come 13.2.

With this lets take a brief closer look at each framework, in alphabetical order no favoritism here.

Amazon EC2

An openSUSE 13.1 image is available in all regions, the AMI (Amazon Machine Image) IDs are as follows:

sa-east-1 => ami-2101a23c
ap-northeast-1 => ami-bde999bc
ap-southeast-2 => ami-b165fc8b
ap-southeast-1 => ami-e2e7b6b0
eu-west-1 => ami-7110ec06
us-west-1 => ami-44ae9101
us-west-2 => ami-f0402ec0
us-east-1 => ami-ff0e0696

These images use cloud-init as opposed to the “suse-ami-tools” that has been used previously and is no longer available in OBS. The cloud-init package is developed in launchpad and was started by the Canonical folks. Unfortunately to contribute you have to sign the Canonical Contributor Agreement (CCA). If you do not want to sign it or cannot sign it for company reasons you can still send stuff to the package and I’ll try and get the stuff integrated upstream. For the interaction with Amazon we have the aws-cli package. The “aws” command line client supersedes all the ec2-*-tools and is an integrated package that can interact with all Amazon services, not just EC2. It is well documented fully open source and hosted on github. The aws-cli package replaces the previously maintained ec2-api-tools package which I have removed from OBS.

Google Compute Engine

In GCE things work by name and the openSUSE 13.1 image is named opensuse131-20140227 and is available in all regions. Google images use a number of tools for initialization, google-daemon and google-startup-scripts. All the Google specific tools are in the Cloud:Tools project. Interaction with GCE is handled with two commands, gcutil and gsutil, both provided by the google-cloud-sdk package. As the name suggests google-cloud-sdk has the goal to unify the various Google tools, same basic idea as aws-cli, and Google is working on the unification. Unfortunately they have decided to do this on their own and there is no public project for google-cloud-sdk which makes contributing a bit difficult to say the least. The gsutil code is hosted on github, thus at least contributing to gsutil is straight forward. Both utilities, gsutil for storage and gcutil for interacting with GCE are well documented.

In GCE we also were able to stand up openSUSE mirrors. These have been integrated into our mirrorbrain infrastructure and are already being used quite heavily. The infrastructure team is taking care of the monitoring and maintenance and that deserves a big THANK YOU from my side. The nice thing about hosting the mirrors in GCE is that when you run an openSUSE instance in GCE you will not have to pay for network charges to pull your updated packages and things are really fast as the update server is located in the same data center as your instance.

Windows Azure

As mentioned previously the current image we have in Azure is based on a build from SUSE Studio. It does not yet contain cloud-init and only has WALinuxAgent integrated. This implies that processing of user data is not possible in the image. User data processing requires cloud-init and I just put the finishing touches on cloud-init this week. Anyway, the image in Azure works just fine, and I have no time line when we might replace it with an image that contains cloud-init in addition to WALinuxAgent.

Interacting with Azure is a bit more cumbersome than with the other cloud frameworks. Well, let me qualify this with, if you want packages. The Azure command line tools are implemented using nodejs and are integrated into the npm nodejs package system. Thus, you can use npm to install everything you need. The nodejs implementation provides a bit of a problem in that we hardly have a nodejs infrastructure in the project. I have started packaging the dependencies, but there is a large number and thus this will take a while. Who would ever implement….. but that’s a different topic.

That’s where we are today. There is plenty of work left to do. For example we should unify the “generic” OpenStack image in Cloud:Images with the HP specific one, the HP cloud is based on OpenStack, and also get an openSUSE image published in the HP cloud. There’s tons of packaging left to do for nodejs modules to support the azure-cli tool. It would be great if we could have openSUSE mirrors in EC2 and Azure to avoid network charges for those using openSUSE images in those clouds. This requires discussions with Amazon and Microsoft, basically we need to be able to run those services for free, which implies that both would become sponsors of our project just like Google has become a sponsor of our project by letting us run the openSUSE mirrors in GCE.

So if you are interested in cloud and public cloud stuff get involved, there is plenty of work and lots of opportunities. If you just want to use the images in the public cloud go ahead, that’s why they are there. If you want to build on the images we have in OBS and customize them in your own project feel free and use them as you see fit.

Last weekend Daniel, Arthur, Morris and me were in Chemnitz where the Chemnitzer Linuxtage 2014 took place. We drove a booth during the two days, the CLT host around 60 boothes of companies and FOSS projects. I like to go to the CLT because it is perfectly organized with great enthusiasm of everybody involved from the organisation team. Food, schedules, the venue, everything is perfect.

Even on saturday morning, short after opening of the event, somebody from the orga team was showing up on the booth with chocolate for the volunteers, saying hello and asking if everything is in place for a successful weekend. A small detail, which shows how much effort is put into organization of the event.

As a result, visitors come to visit the event. It’s mostly a community centric event: Exhibitors are mostly representing FOSS projects such as openstreetmap.org, distributions like Fedora or openSUSE or companies from the free software market. [caption id=“attachment_428” align=“alignright” width=“595”] Morris in action on the booth[/caption]The majority of visitors are mostly interested in private use of the software. But, no rule without exception, we also had a remarkable number of people from companies, either executives or people working in the IT departments, who were interested in ownCloud.

Speaking about ownCloud, I want to say that it’s amazing to represent our project. People know it, people like it, people use it. In private, but also in professional space people work with ownCloud already or are planing to start with ownCloud. ownCloud already is the accepted solution for the problems that became so practical with the NSA scandal last year.

My talk with title A private Cloud with ownCloud on Saturday morning was very well received and went smooth. The room was too small, lots of people had to stand or sit on the stairs. It was a very positive atmosphere.

Something that changed compared to last year and the year before: Most discussions were around how ownCloud can be installed, integrated and used and not any more about which features are still missing or maybe also bugs.

So it were two very exhausting days, but big fun! Thanks to Daniel, Arthur and Morris for the work and fun we had on the booth, and thanks to the CLT team for CLT.

The basic challenge of distributing Free Software is compiling that awesome open source code into machine code for different Linux distributions so it's easily consumable for users. Sounds simple, but it isn't. If you look at the dependencies of a typical Free Software project you will find thousands of other projects in the stack. They build on top of each other, have functional dependencies, sometimes they are interdependent, they conflict with each other and what not. In short: Building Free Software is like herding cats. And rightfully users of the software expect a steady, well behaved, streamlined herd of cats! The Open Build Service (OBS) is the tool which makes this possible, it helps Free Software distributors to automatically and consistently build binary packages from free and open source code.

It goes like this: Engineers upload source code and build instructions to the OBS and the system compiles that into binary packages for different distribution versions and different CPU architectures. The build instructions say how to compile the source code into machine code, defines the dependencies and the conflicting capabilities the software has in relation to other software, itemizes which files are needed to run it, and a whole lot of other meta data. The job of the OBS is to interpret all this information, to provide a build environment matching the requirements, the execution of the build, and of course the reporting of the outcome.

The end result are multiple binary packages out of one single source. The twist is: If other software depends on the package in some way, the OBS will trigger a rebuild of the depending package afterward. This ensures that changes propagate through the whole stack and that the user gets a consistent product to install.

Updates: Nobody is perfect.

Sadly, software is sometimes defective and people make mistakes. Nobody is perfect. That's why the second basic service a Free Software distributor delivers to its users is the art of exchanging pieces without breaking the whole: Updates. Your distributor does not want to interrupt you in going about your business, and to be able to do this he needs to reproduce the software builds at any given time in the long lifetime of the software.

The OBS helps distributors to achieve this by tracking who has made changes, when changes are made, and what has changed. The OBS also helps by utilizing a clean, virtualized build environment. This is how it goes: When an engineer triggers a build in the OBS by changing the software in it, the system saves the current state, gathers all the dependencies and kicks off a virtualized environment to execute the build. As the information on how to assemble the build environment is contained in the software and as all dependent software gets rebuilt too it makes every build reproducible.

And if something is reproducible it is predictable and that is what distributors aim for. If you can predict how all of the software projects in your stack influence each other, you can make sure that a change to a single piece can be managed through all of its dependencies, ensuring that the whole system of software continues to work after a change. This is how the OBS helps you as a user because updates from the OBS don't get in the way of your business.

Collaboration: Unity is strength

Some rights reserved by opensourceway

Now the software isn't the only herd of cats that needs taming. Each of the thousands of software projects is maintained by one or more developers that collaborate with each other, that's a whole bunch of awesome people! And this is the third basic challenge a Free Software distributor solves for its users. It brings together people who collaborate on the integration of free and open source software.

The OBS formalizes this collaboration into work flows that all engineers utilize. Everybody is using the same way to submit new software, to update existing software to a new version, to submit bug fixes and features. Everyone is using the same means to branch, study, change, and improve the software.

OBS simply helps Free Software engineers to harness the power of the open source development model. And this also helps the users because they get a tightly integrated software solution.

There is more...

This is how Free Software distributors utilizes the Open Build Service for the benefit of the users: Build binary packages for a wide range of distributions and architectures from source code in an automatic, consistent, reproducible and collaborative way.

But there is more: OBS itself is free software. You can run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve it. The source code and the developers are on github. As Free Software, it is able to keep up with the ever-evolving ecosystem, which constantly produces new distributions, new package formats, new architectures, software, standards and tools. At the current time, OBS supports more than 20 different distributions, half a dozen architectures and three different package formats. It can cryptographically sign your software and products, different instances of OBS can connect to each other and OBS can be used in conjunction with source code revision systems like git/github in continuous integration work flows.

Do. Or do not. There is no try.

Some rights reserved by Dov Harrington

Enough talk, let's get practical! You have Free Software that you want to make available? Here is a nice video tutorial on how you can utilize the Open Build Service reference server which is freely available for developers to build packages for the most popular Linux distributions including openSUSE, Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise.

That's how you can build and distribute binary packages for a wide range of distributions and architectures with the Open Build Service. Enjoy!

Want to learn the more about software packaging? The Linux distributions have great introductions to the RPM, DEB and PKGBUILD formats that you should review. The tutorial github repository also contains build instructions for all kinds of different distributions.

{% youtube fUuIoxsm9p8 [560] [315] %}

Thanks Roy Dean !!! Great martial artist, great teacher and great inspiration. I would like to have the opportunity to train with you.