Archive for the 'OpenSUSE' Category
Tuesday, January 30th, 2007
OpenSUSE Build System
Nice writeup by Miguel. There was an announcement that the Build Service is now itself open source. I think this is an outstanding move by OpenSUSE and should help Novell in the long run if more ISVs start using this in house. I’m not yet sure this provides the long term complement to the LSB ABI work but it certainly seems to be a step in that direction.
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Jan-26.htmlÂ
Thursday, December 14th, 2006
Linux Contributors Mark Year-End with Major Serviceability Improvements
Actually a cool press release to read. If you haven’t heard of or used kdump or SystemTap, they are very powerful tools to add to your arsenal. With the new features, we have a consistent, reliable dump facility and even greater performance analysis tools.
The list of contributors (think of them as investors) is impressive as well: Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Intel, NEC, Novell, NTT, Red Hat, and VA Linux.
http://www.osdl.org/newsroom/press_releases/2006/2006_dec_13_beaverton.html
The kdump enhancements are expected to improve the ability to reliably and quickly create crash dumps that can be analyzed offline, while new SystemTap features will improve debugging and performance analysis of production systems. These tool enhancements will decrease system down time, boosting efficiency in IT departments.
”Improvements likes these really are a result of the kernel development community’s focus and commitment,” said Andrew Morton, Linux kernel maintainer. ”kdump is especially significant since it represents the first crash dump tool accepted into the mainline kernel and we expect it to be really valuable for the kernel development team, permitting us to gather detailed information regarding kernel bugs from our worldwide testing team.”
Although system crashes are rare in large production systems, when one occurs it is critical that a crash dump is created reliably and that it can be debugged after the fact. The new Linux kernel kdump enhancements provide administrators with much higher reliability than previous crash dump tools by using a different methodology (which has been endorsed by kernel maintainers) than previous crash dump tools.
The SystemTap improvements give IT managers, system administrators and developers the ability to debug a running system in a real-time environment. With the latest improvements, SystemTap’s features have surpassed similar tools by adding the capability to debug production systems without performance degradation or recompiling. Other new features include easy to understand rich scripting language, safety built in for production systems, and system level performance analysis and debugging.
The improvements are the result of a community effort facilitated by OSDL with contributions from Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Intel, NEC, Novell, NTT, Red Hat, and VA Linux.
”By continuing to drive technology innovation into the Linux kernel, the open community is making it the world’s fastest growing operating system,” said Kathy Bennett, director of IBM’s Linux Technology Center, home to some 600 IBM engineers working in 40 locations worldwide, of whom more than 300 work full-time making Linux better. ”With today’s improvements to Kdump and System Tap, Linux customers can look forward to enjoying enterprise level serviceability, world class performance and greater efficiency than ever before.”
”The inclusion of kdump and systemtap in SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 further enhances the capability to deliver support for mission-critical data center environments,” said Holger Dyroff, Novell vice president of Linux product management. ”Thanks to the community for this work.”
”NTT considers Kdump to be a major milestone in Linux serviceability, which by fulfilling the growing demand for a reliable kernel crash dumping mechanism will further boost the presence of Linux in the enterprise,” said Masayuki Hatanaka, General Manager of the NTT Open Source Software Center. ”Being an active member of Kdump’s development community through NTT Data and NTT Data Intellilink has been a very rewarding experience that will only reinforce our commitment to open source in general and Linux in particular.”
”The Linux and open source market is evolving at a rapid pace but one thing will never change – the power of collaboration and community to constantly improve technology,” said Ron Pettit, initiative manager at OSDL. ”Because of the efforts of many individuals and companies from the Linux development community, users will gain important improvements to serviceability tools as they enter a new year.”
Wednesday, November 8th, 2006
Novell Q&A v2.0
A Must Read for those interested:
http://www.novell.com/linux/microsoft/faq_opensource.htmlÂ
Friday, November 3rd, 2006
Microsoft – Novell: The Beginning
I unfortunately feel uncomfortable giving my own views in detail due to where/what I work on and my level of insight relative to the public at large. With that background, here are my few comments that I admit have little detail, but try to frame a view. The reality is it’s all grey area; nothing’s black and white; and in the end the extreme views/conclusions never happen (unless you’re in law school and get ‘that one example case of the extreme‘ that after further thought wasn’t so extreme really).
Cons:
First, this will take a long time to fully understand. I think most in the community have a (founded) distrust of Microsoft. If you follow closely the proceedings with ODF (very closely), you can see the foundation for that distrust in action live today. If you recall the Sun-Microsoft partnership – besides for some good press articles recounting McNealy’s jabs – there was never any real, tangible output. Have you noticed anything that’s better b/c of it? Will we ever notice something to come of this announcement? I’m highly skeptical.
Three things are certain: Microsoft does not generate revenue on Linux, Linux/ODF are clearly counter to Microsoft’s core Windows/Office strategy, and Microsoft has been for years planning/executing a strategy to counter Linux and open source. Microsoft considers open source in its non-commercial form a strategic threat rather than ‘embrace and profit’ from it as say Red Hat. This announcement seemed an attempt by Ballmer to make it Linux commercial – but it’s not; it’s hybrid. Now, if people think this announcement is Microsoft turning over a new leaf … it’s not April 1 and therefore not your day to shine.
Novell: TBD. There are so many details to understand.
Pros:
Linux Market: If Microsoft supporting/endorsing Linux doesn’t get people excited about where this market is heading, I don’t know what would. In that view, ignore the terms/details of this announcement, step back, and enjoy the glow of knowing a community cause a giant to change its course. I have a strong gut feel this will have a huge growth impact on the linux server AND DESKTOP market as we go forward. (I didn’t say this particular announcement is positive or negative but rather said I think it will cause ‘growth’).
As people weed through the details, bloggers dream up conspiracies, companies do their diligence, we’ll all know more. Throughout all the churn though, developers will develop, and code will be created and the community will innovate. It was a relief to watch the SystemTap dev mailing list yesterday. All this flurry of activity was going on around them, yet they were discussing architecture, patches, fixes, and how to make the code better. I IM’d a friend at the world’s largest search engine working on next gen storage architectures (and Linux/Python, etc) and he IM’d back “what announcement?”
I feel confident the open source development community will go on unphased. Open source started and has always been something different – and it will continue that way. So while the analysts, press, and IT voices all ponder, analyze, speculate, comment, and ‘throw up’, I’m optimistic, the developers will keep adding new features for me to use in Compiz, XGL, and Gnome.
Outlook:
I’m optimistic for the growth of Linux b/c of this move. There are certainly many angles and lenses to view this situation through. I’m sure we’ll end up with views from many extremes; hopefully a cautious, conservative, and experienced voice of the community wins out.
I started off planning a small, short entry that would say nothing… guess I failed.
Burning Question / Jab:
One last question though… does this mean we won’t see ‘Get the Facts’ ads anymore? The advertising industry may lose millions… maybe someone should analyze that impact.
Wednesday, September 20th, 2006
Digg this: Desktop Migration from Windows to Linux
http://digg.com/linux_unix/Free_376_page_book_on_migrating_to_Linux
Digg it, then download it :)
Fun stuff…
Wednesday, August 30th, 2006
Most Popular Linux Desktop…. Ubuntu (there’s a non-official stat now)
Just saw SVN (not subversion… Steven Vaughan-Nichols) wrote up a short article on the results of the 2006 Desktop Linux Survey. The winner is officially Ubuntu which unless you’ve been hiding out in Redmond, you probably knew already. Ease of use, out of the box functionality (including wireless) and very few headaches (recent X explosion excepted), Ubuntu is clearly a “polished” distribution despite all the different interpretations of what “polished” means :) It was nice to see OpenSUSE up there with SLED which when combined beat out Debian for 2nd place. Debian plus Ubuntu, however, did account for over 40% of users… that’s quite substantial.
This survey is also interesting b/c they ran a similar one in 2004. That survey had 3,800 voters – this years had over 15,000. That’s quite an increase… is the user base growing?
I have to completely disagree with SVN’s interpretation of Gentoo. Yes, it took 4th place and kudos to the Gentoo squad. However, being described as a platform “almost no one who uses it as their first choice for day-to-day work” is like picking something to say just to say something – and it’s a very poor description. I would agree it is a “Linux experts Linux” but I’d also say for those curious that Gentoo now has a GUI installer and has made great strides to be more accessible to beginners. And besides, the Gentoo forums are quite possibly the greatest helpdesk you will ever find compared to corporate enterprise helpdesks… and it’s no different from other distributions for day-to-day usage… what gives?
Anyway, without further ramblings, here is the article I referenced.
And here is the actual page with the survey’s results.
Saturday, August 12th, 2006
SLED 10 packages compared to SLES 10
Disruptive has posted the packages that are included in SLED 10 that are not in SLES 10.
Friday, August 11th, 2006
I’m currently a SLED 10 user – and I’m unusually impressed.
Yep, I switched from Ubuntu to SLED 10 this week in my neverending tour of distros. The first thing that jumps out is Novell really made this a desktop distro (aka, not just slap a “Desktop” label on a server platform).
SLED 10 is by far the easiest to get XGL up and running. First, just open the menu, go to “Install Software” then install either your ATI or nVidia driver. Then open up the menu, go to “Control Panel” and under Look and Feel you will see “Desktop Effects” which is basically an XGL utility. Click “Enable Desktop Effects” and you’re all set. Novell even logs you out and restarts everything necessary to use XGL right away – no reboots. In that XGL utility you can also modify settings for XGL including setting it up to have 100 faces on the cube – what you’d want that for I don’t know, but you can set it to whatever you want.
My only real suggestion thus far in the user process is for Novell to get some agreement with ATI and nVidia to install the drivers during setup… not sure why they didn’t especially when you can access their repositories during install….
Beagle integration is very cool. However, I’ve noticed the scope of Beagle is only for searching files you have rights to – i.e. normal users can’t find ifconfig. Kindof annoying if you want that “one place to search” euphoria, but I understand clearly the security issues.
The new menu under “Computer” at first gives you the reaction of “oh no… they didn’t” and you get a sick feeling and pictures of Windows float through your head. Then you see… no, this is actually logical – this is more like Mac OS X.
Here’s my bold statement about SLED 10: This is the FIRST challenger to Windows. I feel qualified to say this b/c within the last 5 months I’ve used Fedora 5, OpenSUSE 10, Ubuntu 6.0.6.0, Gentoo 2006.0, SLES 9, Kororaa, Xandros, and RHEL 4 WS.
I’ve always been reluctant to suggest switching normal users from Windows to Linux – that’s changed. I’ve long felt engineers and “techies” should be using Linux – it’s easy for them to learn. However, there is undoubtedly a segment of everyday users perfectly ready for something like SLED 10. Novell’s right – “Your Linux is Ready”.
The time is now for desktop Linux to get started – I can feel it. SLED 10 may one day be called “the shot heard round the world”.
My sister asked me to find her a laptop before she goes to college – I think I’ll try an experiment – load SLES 10 and see what happens :)
Wednesday, August 9th, 2006
SLES and SLED 10 Roadshow
Novell’s Suse 10 Roadshow is coming to a metropolis near you – the SLED 10 work is very impressive if you haven’t taken a look – I have a DVD iso itching to be burned. I had used the beta and was blown away by the “polish” (ok, so Mark Shuttleworth would like everyone to avoid the word, but I use polish in the “complete package, stable, all cleaned up” sense)
http://www.novell.com/linux/yourlinuxtour/
09.13.06Â Â Atlanta GA
09.21.06Â Â Bethesda MD
09.14.06Â Â Boston MA
09.13.06Â Â Calgary AB
09.20.06Â Â Charlotte NC
09.12.06Â Â Chicago IL
09.12.06Â Â Cincinnati OH
09.13.06Â Â Dallas TX
09.21.06Â Â Denver CO
09.19.06Â Â Detroit MI
09.26.06Â Â Houston TX
09.12.06Â Â Irvine CA
09.13.06Â Â Kansas City MO
09.12.06Â Â Memphis TN
09.14.06Â Â Miami FL
09.20.06Â Â Minneapolis MN
09.14.06Â Â Montreal QC
09.12.06Â Â New York NY
09.19.06Â Â Philadelphia PA
09.19.06Â Â Portland OR
09.14.06Â Â San Jose CA
09.14.06Â Â St. Louis MO
09.27.06Â Â Toronto ON
Saturday, August 5th, 2006
Open Source Billion Dollar Debate
It seems InfoWorld created a raging debate with the number of messages I’m seeing on this topic/article asking when open source companies will hit a billion in sales revenue. Interesting question, but in my mind it raised other interesting questions such as at what point did IBM and other vendors’ products built on open standard , open source projects save a billion in development costs by joining an open community? When will customers, governments, and taxpayers realize a billion dollars in cost savings by standardizing on an open document file format standard? When will customers save a billion in licensing costs on their development machines running the unsupported versions of Debian, Fedora, and OpenSuse?
Obviously I can see InfoWorld was taking a different angle – but there are other “billion dollar” questions that may foreshadow the billion dollar sales point.
Just noticed everyone’s pointing readers to Stephen’s post on this topic – haven’t had time to read it yet, but it looks interesting.
Tuesday, July 11th, 2006
Very thorough SLED 10 Review
Madpenguin has a very in depth review of Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10. Gave it a 10/10… not that there’s any bias built into that :)
Still images don’t do it justice – so mp made movies to help you experience the magic. It’s very easy to see Novell has put quite a bit of effort into cleaning up and simplifying the Linux desktop interface. SLED 10 reminds me of OS X 10.0.1 for those who were daring enough to try it when it launched. And we all know the OS X interface has only grown better and better with age. I can only hope the same for SLED/Gnome/KDE/Ubuntu etc as the real Linux/ODF vs Windows/Office battle seems to be only in the early stages of infancy. The Linux server was probably just round 1 in the open source and open standard revolution.
Anyway, I can’t wait to run Notes 7 on SLED 10 sometime soon…
Monday, June 19th, 2006
Mind Map of Linux Distros
I actually have a printout of this in my office – wasn’t sure where I found it. Now I know - it’s here.
Friday, May 19th, 2006
AppArmor Video Presentation from FOSDEM2006
An intro video for Novell’s AppArmor. Cool stuff – and easier to use than SELinux roles. I’m really warming up to Suse… not sure what happened to me. I haven’t built a package from source in over a week and it’s having an odd effect …
Friday, May 19th, 2006
Changing the top image on an XGL “cube”
Ok, so you’ve gotten over the initial shock that you can twist turn and rotate your XGL desktop. Now you notice that grey, glah image at the top of the cube and wonder… “can I change that?” Of course you can.
First, copy your image as a .png over to /usr/share/compiz/ as root. Let’s say its image.png
Fire up gconf-editor and first go to key “apps -> compiz -> plugins -> cube -> screen0 -> options” and edit the “images” key and add an entry for “image.png” in the order you want for priority. If you twist your cube to reveal the top you should see your image now.
Next try this – go to “apps -> compiz -> plugins -> rotate -> screen0 -> options” and turn on (check) the snap-top key. This allows you to turn the cube so you’re looking at the top and the top will then snap into place to cover your screen as if it were another workspace.
Snaps into place to show:
Gentoo logo on an OpenSUSE Desktop cube…
Next up – skydome – the background around the cube… you can even animate it.
Thanks Moosy – you pointed me to the right places.
Friday, May 19th, 2006
OpenSUSE 10.1 = XGL Nirvana
I just setup XGL on OpenSUSE 10.1 using this guide. I’ll point out 1 error though. Where it says to add to the gnome-session-properties startup tab “compiz -replace” you actually need to add “compiz –replace gconf” (add second dash and gconf at the end).
Something either new to XGL that I never found on Gentoo or new to OpenSUSE is the “Desktop->Control Center->Desktop Effects Setting” plugin for XGL. This new configuration utility let’s you configure XGL from a nice GUI. You can configure just about anything – heck you can modify XGL to support a 10 sided “cube” (yes doesn’t make sense.. should be called a decagon, 10 sided polygon or something).
Anyway, if you’re running OpenSUSE, check it out. Also… I noticed Novell did some targeted ad placement… how’d they do that?
Wednesday, May 17th, 2006
OpenSUSE 10.1 3rd Party Repositories
Just thought I’d post this for any new OpenSUSE users (this is all basically the same for SLES too). I come from a Gentoo background where just about anything/everything I could imagine was available in the public portage tree (or that … other rumored… tree). With OpenSUSE, things are a bit different. My fairly educated guess is that there are legal reasons certain packages such as win32codecs are not included… so, how do we get these packages without compiling them individually? OpenSUSE relies upon YaST for just about everything. One piece is that YaST stores the location of the installation source.
Open YaST. Then under the Software menu option, you will see “installation sources”, and in the windows that appears, you will see a dropdown for “Add..” Here you can add a new install source location.
Now on this OpenSUSE webpage you will see a list of external package repositories. Just add one to your installation sources and now when you search for a package (e.g. win32codecs) you will be able to pull it down from an external repository.
Monday, May 15th, 2006
OpenSUSE 10.1 Notes and Impressions
Impressives
- SaX2 is unreal – never seen anything so professional on any Linux desktop. Very well done and shows the investment Novell has made in client Linux. Just wish OpenSUSE could find a way to remerge nVidia’s drivers… (see prior rant)
- Network manager is the best implementation I’ve seen. I can easily switch between wired and wireless networks and it even shows signal strength
- Alps touchpad support built in – with vertical edge scrolling!
- Strong mono integration – say what you will about mono, but I like it….
- No charge for online updates with YOU
Uglies
- There is very lackluster ndiswrapper support. In order to implement:
- Install ndiswrapper
- ndiswrapper -i driver.inf
- modprobe ndiswrapper
- /etc/YaST2 go to Network Devices, Add…, then choose Wireless, module name set to ndiswrapper, then enter any wireless network settings like ESSID.
- nVidia Drivers don’t work with XEN kernel, but with non-XEN kernel do the following:
- Download the latest nVidia drivers and logout of Gnome/KDE
- From GDM/KDM login screen, press Alt+F1
- Login as root and type “init 3″
- Install driver with “sh NVIDIA_version.run -q”
- Follow the instructions as the installer builds the kernel module
- When back at root prompt type Sax2 and get a working setup
- When you exit Sax2, type “init 5″ to get back to GDM/KDM
Tips and Tricks
- apache2 default html directory is in /srv/www/htdocs which can be accessed at http://localhost
- apache2 user html directory is in /home/userdir which can be accessed at http://localhost/~username
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