Já algum tempo recebi venho analisando os avanços do OpenSUsE, mas agora resolvi instalar e usar essa grande distro, e começarei a relatar numa série de artigos minha experiência na migração do Fedora para ela.

Incialmente devo dizer que odeio esse modelo de atualização adotado pela distro em que ele baixa e instala cada pacote. Na maioria das outras distros, primeiro baixa-se todos os pacotes para depois instalá-los. Os riscos de gerar uma incosistência no sistema são bem menores dessa forma. Porém há uma maneira simples de solucionar esse problema:

Como root, edite o arquivo /etc/zypp/zypp.conf

Pesquise pela linha com o valor "commit.downloadMode"
Remova o comentário e altere seu valor para "DownloadInAdvance" , sendo que a linha deve ficar assim:

commit.downloadMode = DownloadInAdvance


Dessa forma, durante a atualização ou instalação de pacotes, primeiro é feito o download de todos os arquivos para depois iniciar a instalação dos mesmos.

Por hoje, fico por aqui, em breve mais relatos.

openSUSE conference is over. It was an amazing and exhausting time. And the most important thing I learned was: The openSUSE project is a commuity. Of cause I meet many community members employed by Novell. But also many contributors NOT payed by that sponsor. The project is moving more and more into the direction of independence (e.g. with it's community based new strategy).
I was suspisious myself when I choose my distro some time ago. Shall I really try openSUSE, with all the deals the main sponsor is doing? From now on I am sure that these prejudices were wrong.


I had many inspiring conversations with many intresting people. One I want to mention here. There were three impressive guys from Austria. They created Linux for schools (desktop4education) based on openSUSE. The desktop is installed with 4 question, the server only needs 2 questions to be answered. More information at: http://d4e.at/ (DE-only)
I meet these heros end of November again and I hope we are going to improve the cooperation between their project, the KDE edu team and openSUSE-li-f-e (edu-project from openSUSE).
Greetings to Austria. You rock!

With established ARM support in OBS the as well as emulated MIPS and PowerPC is getting more mature, the last big embedded architecture not working in OBS with QEMU user mode was SH4. QEMU developers community had done a lot of work in improving QEMU user mode during the last months, so I can proudly present with currently only a few patches to QEMU git master OBS builds working with the SH4 port of Debian Sid. The new QEMU 0.13 released recently is a big milestone for this.

Another news is that I had fixed the bugs in Virtual Machine builds (build script) when using them with some architectures like PowerPC 32bit and SH4. So now also the combination of using for example KVM (XEN should also work) in a worker together with ARM, MIPS, PowerPC and SH4 is working. The appropriate fixes are in one of the next build script releases (if not even released already now with OBS 2.1, I have to check that). You can select architecture “sh4” with OBS 2.1 and also start a scheduler with “sh4”.

With the use of the QEMU User Mode, you can build also accelerated native cross toolchains for your host architecture so time critical parts like the compiler can run without the emulator. This works with .deb as well as with .rpm based backages. The MeeGo Project as well as the openSUSE Port to ARM uses this technique to provide an optimum between compatibility and performance. It means you can mix natively build packages and use cross toolchains on it. The “CBinstall:” feature helps you to use native or cross builds automatically depending on if your build host is a native machine or a x86 machine with cross build. In summary, we have the current classics of linux embedded archs together now in OBS: ARM, x86, MIPS 32, PowerPC 32 and SH4.

I have uploaded the fixed QEMU package to the OBS project openSUSE:Tools:Unstable inside the package “qemu-devel” after some more testing. I have of course also a OBS meta prjconf file working with Debian Sid. The SH4 port of Debian Sid you can find at Debian Ports Site.

And last but not least I would like to thank Riku Voipio of the Debian Project, QEMU project and MeeGo project and other major contributors during the QEMU 0.13 development cycle for the restless work on QEMU user mode improvements. In case of KVM, QEMU is used even twice, with QEMU-KVM as well as QEMU User Mode. I am sure I had forgotten other important people, so thanks to them also.

Before and during the openSUSE conference, some nice people (Jens-Daniel, Jürgen, Darix) created the following site for you:

http://rtfm.opensuse.org http://doc.opensuse.org

Thank you guys! I like the thrilling name.

It’s a static page (at the moment?) and collects the current documentation from several products and projects. Probably you will see more to come in the next weeks.

Have fun!

Update (AJ since Thomas is ill) 2010-10-27: Based on the feedback received, we’re going to  change now rtfm.opensuse.org to docs.opensuse.org. So, you can reach the fine side under http://docs.opensuse.org and http://doc.opensuse.org.

I couldn't resist snapping as many KDE folk at the openSUSE conference as I could, and editing them together into: a short video.

If anyone can tell me how to embed in kdedevelopers.org or enable the download of the OGG version from blip.tv, let me know!

Yet another foto stream from the openSUSE conference. You see the desktop leads from KDE and Gnome (Cornelius Schumacher and Vincent Untz) giving a talk about the past and future of the free desktop, Stephan Kulow about the future of the distribution, Bernhard Wiedemann about QA testing and so on.

Most important may be the presentation of the openSUSE board (mainly by Pascal Bleser) how they plan to found an independent foundation for openSUSE as non-profit organization. An important rule of that foundation is that it is independent of any company (no majority of Novell here) but can handle sponsoring, partnering and trademark questions.

We had also very filled rooms during the OBS talks, but I was unable to take pictures at that point of time unfortunately

I just published the source code of Cydin in github. Cydin is an add-in repository for applications based on Mono.Addins. The latest version is currently running the MonoDevelop add-in repo. I have many ideas to keep improving Cydin. Here are a few:

We are going to switch from the OpenOffice.org to the LibreOffice code base on openSUSE.

I’m happy to announce LibreOffice 3.3 beta2 packages for openSUSE. They are available in the Build Service LibreOffice:Unstable project. They are based on the libreoffice-3.2.99.2 release. Please, look for more details about the openSUSE LibreOffice build on the wiki page.

The packages are beta versions and might include even serious bugs. Therefore they are not intended for data-critical usage. A good practice is to archive any important data before an use, …

As usual, we kindly ask any interested beta testers to try the package and report bugs.

Known bugs

• only the LibreOffice branding package is available; you need to replace OpenOffice_org-branding-openSUSE with libreoffice-branding-upstream
• shell wrappers are still ooffice, oowriter, …; we need to discuss the new wrapper names with other distros first
• application stops immediately when you start it for the first time; just start it once again
• extensions are not registered after the update from OpenOffice_org-* packages; a workaround is to reinstall the packages once again; We plan to remove the registration during installation; it will allow users to disable the extensions by themselves
• some packages were not renamed, .e.g. OpenOffice_org-thesaurus, …; they are not built from the main LO sources; we will do it later
• user configuration is stored into ~/.libreoffice/3-suse; we might try to share the directory ~/.libreoffice/3 after we fix the incompatible BerkleyDB; Well, we are not sure if it is enough and it is a good idea, so it will need some more testing
• packages can’t be installed in parallel with the generic LibreOffice linux packages; the problem is that both builds use the libreoffice-ure package name; it will be solved in beta3; a workaround is to install the package using “rpm -i” instead of “rpm -U”
• GNOME quickstarter is started by default; you might disable it in Tools/Options/OpenOffice.org/Memory/Enable systray Quickstarter
• SLED10 build is not available; need more love

More known bugs

• Free Desktop bugzilla
• Novell bugzilla
• OOo issuezilla

Other information and plans:

These are the first packages with new name. Please, be patient if they are not perfect. Please report unknown bugs.

The new packages automatically remove the obsolete openSUSE OpenOffice_org packages. It still will be possible to intall the plain OpenOffice.org packages in parallel, though.

Next week is openSUSE Conference week! I'm using both my openSUSE and KDE blogs to remind everyone that we're having a pre-conference meetup at 6pm for the KDE team before the real conference begins at Barfüßer in the Nuernberg old town. Remember a morning of keynotes is only fun if you have a thumping hangover from microbrewed beer (and if you're a keynote speaker, from local schapps too)! If you are attending the conference or if you are just a friend of KDE in the area, please join in.

If you add your name to the wiki I'll have an idea how big a table we need, I've provisionally got space for 20.

Will

Hi folks,

this post is just request for all obs-packagers. Please, don’t forget write some documentation about your projects (which you maintain or develop). I mean, documentation for developers. This make more easy to understand logic of program, connection between some modules inside or interfaces between widget/applet and “system/hardware part”. For sure, comments in source code (or in changelog) help, but some times they give not so much clarity.

This is not so complicated to write one-two pages about project, which you hack. This also can save time of new developers. They will not ask you about architecture of project, and that will save your time too

I don’t know how will be better to do it: use wiki (create a new page) or add just text-file in source project. Anyway it’s not so important where will be this documentation, main things that this documentation will be exist