Howdy,

the openSUSE on ARM team was quite busy the last few weeks with getting openSUSE 12.3 for AArch64 (ARM64, also called ARMv8) ready. At the time of this post, we have finished around 4100 packages (out of ~ 6000) of openSUSE 12.3 built for AArch64, the ARM 64bit platform. With those successfully built packages, we’re also able to build a regular openSUSE image for you to try and run in the ARMv8 System emulator (ARMv8 Foundation Model).

This is a huge achievement and milestone for us, thanks to lots of helpful hands within openSUSE. Just to put this into perspective: This is not a minimal system with a couple of toolchain packages. It is also not an embedded variant of a Linux environment. No, this is the full featured, standard openSUSE distribution as you’re used to, ported to AArch64, up and running. We have built it based on (slightly newer versions of) standard openSUSE 12.3 packages, and the changes are mostly already merged back into openSUSE Factory. For all we know it’s also more successful package builds than any other Linux distribution has on AArch64! If you’d like to see the status yourself, please check out the OBS repository we created for this.

As an open distribution, it is important to make contributions easy and we worked hard to enable others to participate in our effort. We extended OBS to automatically spawn a Foundation Model virtual machine when you want to build for aarch64. This works remotely on the OBS server as well as locally using osc build. More information on this is available on the respective wiki page.

So, dive right into it:  Get the image and start with openSUSE on AArch64 by following our wiki page: https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:ARM/AArch64.

public class Space {    public void AddPostStepCallBack (Action action, Body body);}

public class Space {
    delegate void PostStepFunc (IntPtr space, IntPtr obj, IntPtr data); 

    [MonoTouch.MonoPInvokeCallback (typeof (PostStepFunc))]
    static void PostStepForBody (IntPtr space, IntPtr obj, IntPtr data)
    {
        var handle = GCHandle.FromIntPtr (data);
        var action = (Action)handle.Target;
        handle.Free ();
        action (obj == IntPtr.Zero ? null :  new Body (obj));
    } 

    [DllImport ("__Internal")]
    extern static void cpSpaceAddPostStepCallback (IntPtr space, PostStepFunc func, IntPtr key, IntPtr data);  

    public void AddPostStepCallback (Action action, Body obj)
    {
        var data = GCHandle.ToIntPtr(GCHandle.Alloc (action));
        cpSpaceAddPostStepCallback (Handle.Handle, PostStepForBody, obj.Handle.Handle, data);
    }
}

Event

From 31st of January to 10th of February I participated in openSUSE 12.3 Marketing Hackathon.   The Hackathon took place in SUSE Headquarters [Nuremberg,Germany] from 4/02 to 10/02. Before that we participated in FOSDEM by promoting to the crowd the openSUSE Project and the oSC13 as well. Our participation in FOSDEM was really successful cause people asked a lot of questions around the upcoming release of openSUSE and expressed their interest for this year’s openSUSE Conference.  Thanks to Carlos we spread out and informed a lot of people about the oSC13.

Apart from that this year I spent more time in joining presentations. I admit that I liked more FOSDEM 2013 than FOSDEM 2012 because I found the presentations (Developer rooms especially) more interesting.

After FOSDEM we travelled to Nuremberg for the Marketing Hackathon . On the way back to Nuremberg I was impressed by the fact that openSUSE development continued even on the bus  with various hackers (SUSE Employees)  sitting behind their laptops, building packages. Apart from software development we drunk a lot of  openSUSE beers. 

Arriving to Nuremberg , after FOSDEM , we begun to work in the 12.3 RC1 release. SUSE Employees helped us by providing all the necessary equiqment [ok , coffee , meeting rooms etc]  since we worked in the SUSE offices. Interacting with people from the company was really interesting , and i admit that during a release there is a lot of work to be done (bug fixing , artwork, ,writing , promotion , etc) .

Apart from the release we enjoyed a presentation by the SUSE Documentation team  , where we tested  a demo of the new ActiveDoc tool.ActiveDoc is used for the documentation of openSUSE and SUSE as well. Furthermore we had visits from company management , from Ralf Flaxa, VP of engineering, and Roland Haidl. During these meetings we discussed about issues  around openSUSE Project , and how the project can be improved. Ralf Flaxa and Roland Haidl thanked us for our work and they confirmed their willing to help the openSUSE Project as much as they can.

As the KDE 4.10 released during the Marketing Hackathon we all joined the KDE 4.10 release party (in Wednesday). KDE president Cornelius Schumacher and Klaas Freitag, (ownCloud Senior Developer) joined us to the party. We had really interesting discussions about various aspects (KDE , ownCloud ,oSC13 etc).

Work

Here i give a brief summary of my work

– 12.3 Screenshots (Screenshots and related wiki page) [although my laptop was broken for a while]

– 12.3 Package list and Feature (the last days)

–  12.3 Social Media messages for RC1 (and the final release as well)

– 12.3 “We are Hispanohablantes”  , a new project begun , willing to centralize the Spanish speaking communities in openSUSE. Here you can find the English [1] and Spanish [2] version of the wiki page. [if you come from a Spanish spoken country , you can add stuff in the “Information Table”.]

Conclusion

I could blog about this experience for years , but i prefered to write a resume of what i have in my mind
.  Obviously i would like to thank the following people (participants and SUSE Employees) :

Participants :

Kostas , Bruno (tigerfoot – “Champignon”) , Carlos (victorck), Carlos (CarlosRibeiro), Izabel (IzabelleValverde), Marcel (tux93 or “Silent Power”), Richard (ilmehtar), Michal (|miska|).

SUSE Employees:

Jos, Henne , Ralf, Roland,  James, Jan, Ludwig, Cornelius, Suzanne Augustin, Will, Christopher, Adrian, , Jurgen, Kenneth, Cassio, Alberto,
(if I forget someone ,please let me know )

And yes we all love Vietnam

You can find the photos of the event here and here as well.

And don’t forget!!

See you in oSC13 [18-22 July , Thessaloniki , Greece]  . As the Cfp is open don’t forget to register yourself and why not submit your presentation [or workshop]!!

A lot of Geekings to everybody,

“Power to the Geeko”

[1] https://en.opensuse.org/We_are_Hispanohablantes

[2] https://es.opensuse.org/Somos_hispanohablantes

Next week a part of the ownCloud team will meet in Nürnberg for a creative time and we thought a little meetup would be cool. Join us for a relaxed evening where we will give short talks about current state of ownCloud, new features and the near future.

Let’s meet Wednesday, February 27th, 6:00 PM at the Nuremberg Coworking Space.

Talks (short, don’t be afraid!):

• ownCloud overview by Holger Dyroff
• The updated ownCloud 5 User Interface by Jan-Christoph Borchardt
• Next steps for the ownCloud Desktop Clients by Daniel Molkentin

The evening closes with a get-together, your chance to meet the team and discuss in a relaxed atmosphere.

Everybody is welcome!