Following my last blog post on “how to name the distribution release“, I’ve opened up a public survey and look forward to your votes. There is also a good discussion going on on the opensuse-project mailing list.

This is the first iteration. Coolo and myself discussed to use a second survey with the group of winners on connect.opensuse.org.

We are planning a community release party this coming Thursday, March 17, 2011 to celebrate the 11.4 release.  We are planning on having some media and usb thumb drives for anyone that would like to install 11.4.

This time we are changing the location a little.  We are still having the party on Novell’s Provo campus, but in one of the executive briefing rooms building H which is the tall south most building.

Everyone is welcome.  If you are planning on coming please let us know by sending me an email sshaw ]at[ decriptor ]dot[ com.  We are hoping to have food and swag to give away.

Details:

March 17, 2011

6:30 to 8:00 pm

Executive Briefing Center, Building H

Novell Provo Campus

 

Here is the poster we threw together.  The artwork was provided by someone in the community and the poster was put together by my awesome wife.

 

I will just add closure to this story. After the upgrade botched up, I reluctantly tried to reinstall my server leaving the home volume untouched. That turned out to be a pleasant surprise because of a few things:

1. 'import setup' of partitioning. Love that! Allowed me to copy over my old partition settings. Saves a whole lot of pain.

2. Seamless update after that X worked and everything else worked 'out of the box'.

The only draw back probably is to reinstall a few of the application I have running on the box that is not in the stock install. I am going to put back a few of the points I took away the day before when the upgrade fuched up.

So if you are upgrading from 11.3 to 11.4 you might want to use the reinstall path. It might turned out to be better and smoother.

On the upfront, openSuSE's upgrade has always impressed me with it's smoothness. While others falter, openSuSE's upgrade process just chugs along and everything is up and running at the end of it. I did the online upgrade with one of my boxes while the other used the DVD method with 11.3 and both went without a hitch.

Along came 11.4 and I did not hesitate based on my past experiences, but boy was I wrong. Right after the upgrade my box booted up to no Xdisplay, no sax2 (wtf ! I know I should have read the release notes, but then no alternatives ?!). The no display I can deal with but the next bit really took me for a doozer. The network did not start up even though it was in runlevel 5. Initially I thought it was because my network card was left un configured but configuration and 6 reboots later did not solve the problem. I resigned myself to a putting 'rcnetwork start' to /etc/rc.d/boot.local.

I did not find other people with the same problem querying uncle google, but for the life of me I can't get it to work. It would just boot up and say that it has reached runlevel 3 or 5 but then I have to manually start up networking using 'rcnetwork start'. These problems really surprised me as openSuSE prior to this has always good to me and upgrades works right from version 10.3 to 11.3 without problems. I guess I got to stop boasting to people how good openSuSE is ... :(

Another week, another release.




This week has been a busy week : GNOME people worked really hard on 2.91.91 release and openSUSE people worked really hard on release openSUSE 11.4.

So, let's please everybody with this week GNOME 3 Live image 0.1.0 : it features GNOME 2.91.91 on top of the brand new openSUSE 11.4.

If you tested previous live image, you'll notice a lot of changes, so don't be surprised :
- image is no longer persistent when installed on USB stick : it was slowly first boot a lot (and we don't want to give people testing the image it is slowww) and sometime, if shutdown wasn't done properly, the persistent partition could become corrupted and you had to either remove it completely or redump the key
- language / keyboard / timezone selection at startup is gone : again, it was slowing the boot and the experience was completely different from GNOME3 experience. But you can still choose the language (as well as keyboard / timezone) : either in the boot menu at startup or later, in GNOME Control Center (in GNOME Shell, top right menu then System Settings and Regions / Language)
- no more password for demo user (named 'tux' ) nor root user : again, simplicity prevaled. If you get asked a password at any time, just press enter.
- virtualbox guest support is not available (temporary issue for this image and we still don't support GNOME Shell in virtualbox)
- a lot of translations have been added
- many GNOME packages have been ported to GNOME 3 platform and are preinstalled in the image
- since we rebased the image on openSUSE 11.4, we will try to stick to kernel and X11 drivers shipped with it.

As always, you'll find the image at http://gnome3.org/tryit.html


Enjoy.

(Yes, I know above photo isn't a gecko but I only had iguane in my photo albums :)

We had this week a discussion on IRC on how to name the next release and I took the action item to do a poll on connect.opensuse.org now to help us solve the naming of openSUSE distribution releases. I’ve started earlier today a discussion on the opensuse-project list and already incorporated some comments I received in this text.

openSUSE does not have a major and minor numbering, even if it seems so. There is right now no difference in any way between what we would do for openSUSE 11.4 or 12.0 – and no sense to speak about openSUSE 11 or openSUSE 11 family. We also have no process on how to name the next release (when to increase which parts of the number).

Here are some options, if I miss some, please tell me and I will then soon setup a poll. I’m listening the next version we would use as well as how the following would be called as an example. Remember we have releases every 8 months, so the next releases will be in:
November 2011, July 2012, March 2013, November 2013, July 2014, March 2015.

Here are the options I collected so far:

1. “Old school”: The same we do right now but let’s decide when tochange the right number: we count it always until 3.
   Next release is 12.0.
   Following releases: 12.1, 12.2, 12.3, 13.0
2. “Fedora style”: Just integers.
   Next release is: 12
   Following release: 13, 14, 15
3. “Mandriva style”: YYYY.counter (4 digit year, counter starts a 0)
   Next release is: 2011.1
   Following releases: 2012.0, 2013.0, 2013.1, 2014.0, 2015.1
4. “Old school /Mandriva variation”: YY.counter (2 digit year, counter starts at zero)
   Next release is: 11.5 (otherwise this won’t work)
   Following releases: 12.0, 13.0, 13.1, 14.0, 15.1
5. “Ubuntu style”: YY.MM (2 digit year, 2 digit month)
   Next release is: 11.11
   Following releases: 12.07, 13.03, 13.11, 14.07, 15.03
6. “Ubuntu style variation”: YYYY-MM (4 digit year, 2 digit month)
   Next release is: 2011-11
   Following releases are: 2012-07, 2013-03, 2013-11, 2014-07, 2015-03
7. “octal”: Coolo came up with calling the next release “o 12” and then proposed to go octal (so 012). We decided to start with 012 even if that 10 in decimal.
   Next release is: 012
   Following releases: 013, 014, 015, 016, 017, 020
8. “Seasons”: “Season YYYY” since March is in spring, July in summer, and November is in autumn.
   Next release is: Autumn 2011
   Following releases: Summer 2012, Spring 2013, Autumn 2013, Summer 2014

During the last rounds of discussions about the versioning scheme, the following wishes have been distilled:

• It must be clear which release is newer
• It must be clear how to the next release is called, we need an easy algorithm

Coolo suggested to do the poll in two rounds: first list all – even obscure – options that have been proposed and in the next round only include those that got
more than 80% of the winner.  Of course if there is only one, the second round can be removed. The first round you would be able to tick every option you like, the second one only tick your favorite.

I’m collecting proposals now until end of Monday, 14th of March.

The openSUSE forums also support the NNTP protocol (usually referred to as "news"). There are plenty of GUI news readers out there (thunderbird, knode, pan, ...), but as I'm using mutt to read my emails as well as irssi for IRC in screen sessions (in urxvt, I wanted a console based NNTP client for that as well. (No, I don't use lynx or w3m for web browsing, I'm not a masochist ;).)

Hence I installed trn.

Here is how to set it up to access the openSUSE forums with it:

1. Obviously, first install trn:
   zypper install trn
2. then run rtin once, which will give you an error message and exit, but that will create its configuration file tree in ~/.tin:
   rtin
3. next, edit the configuration file ~/.tin/newsrctable and add the following line:
   forums.opensuse.org /home/XXX/.tin/foo foo
   (where you replace /home/XXX with your actual home directory)
   If you are not fluent with text editors, you can also simply execute the following command from a shell (just copy/paste it):
   echo "forums.opensuse.org $HOME/.tin/foo foo" >> ~/.tin/newsrctable
4. now we can actually run rtin to connect to the openSUSE forums:
   rtin -a -g foo
   (note that the -a flag turns on color support, and -g foo tells rtin to connect to the server we configured as "foo" in ~/.tin/newsrctable)
5. you are now greeted with an (almost) empty screen: press the y key (yank in/out) to get a list of all the forums in order to subscribe to those that are of interest to you: simply use the arrow keys to scroll the list and press the s key (subscribe) to subscribe those you want to follow

Our group is now in HackWeek 6, quite a few weeks delayed after all other groups at SuSE. I will use the time to (finally!) continue work on RAnsrID - see also my initial blog entry. The project source is hosted on gitorious.

The basic redundancy routines are all working already, next is a usable test suite, then run-time configuration management (live adding and removing disks, live reconstruction w/o repair in the read error case).

I doubt I will reach a final version 1.0 I can recommend to use, but it will hopefully be close.

I previously enlightened people to entomologist and also showed an image or two of it running on Android. Well now’s the time to get your funk on and help test, file bugs and generally make it better. You can download entomologist from the Android Market, or if you don’t have access to the Market you can grab the .apk. When you launch it for the first time it checks to see if you have the required Qt libraries, if not it will ask you to install Ministro (if not already installed) from the Market (grab the.

I use an encrypted USB stick to carry credentials and data for production servers I look after when I’m on call. One requirement was portability between my work (Windows) and home (GNU/Linux) desktops, so TrueCrypt came to mind. I packaged it all up an applied some patches to fix compiler issues and warnings. The TrueCrypt license, however, is not OSI-approved, and as such the program cannot be built in the openSUSE build service (see blacklist, discussion).

I almost forgot about the whole thing until I upgraded the package for new dependencies in the upcoming release of openSUSE 11.4. I talked with people over at packman, a popular 3rd-party repository for software not included in openSUSE proper for one reason or another. We analysed the license a bit and concluded that if we shipped binaries built from non-pristine sources, the product would have to be re-branded as per the requirements of their license. I am usually pragmatic about these things as long as FLOSS and non-FLOSS licences can be adhered to, but didn’t want to go the route Debian took with Firefox et al.

We contacted the TrueCrypt developers on this issue, we’ll see what comes out of that. Until then, if someone wants to build this package, here is what you need:

truecrypt.spec
truecrypt.desktop
truecrypt-tc_token_err.patch
truecrypt-NULL_PTR-redefinition-warning.patch
truecrypt-undefined-operation-warning.patch