» Speaking of Packman mirrors...

Speaking of Packman mirrors... we're in a pretty sorry state regarding that so if you're aware of sites that do mirror Packman but never told us (I'm aware of the one at yandex.ru, have to get it on that mirror list), or if you can get in touch with some mirror sites near you or even on your continent to ask them to mirror Packman, please do.

They can then simply contact us on our mailing-list (that's packman followed by an "at" sign followed by "links2linux" and a dot and "de" -- grrr to spammers) and we'll get back to them with the details for rsync.

» packman.inode.at mirror is down

The Packman mirror at packman.inode.at is down. We don't know yet what happened nor whether it will be back up soon (or not).

In the mean time, please use another mirror in the mean time.

Here's a quick copy'n'paste one-liner you can put in a shell (konsole, gnome-terminal, xterm, urxvt, ...) as root to switch:

perl -p -i.old -e \
's,^(baseurl=).*(/suse/.+)$,${1}http://ftp.halifax.rwth-aachen.de/packman${2}, if /^baseurl=.*packman\.inode\.at.*/' \
/etc/zypp/repos.d/*packman*.repo

» Packman haz buttcrackerz

Bugtracker! I meant to say "bugtracker", I swear!

So, the oh so popular and useful Packman project finally has a proper bugtracker, how awesome is that? Yes, truckloads of awesome. More seriously, it was about time and I finally just decided to do it.

From now on, please use our bugtracker to submit bugs, package requests, etc..., rather than using the mailing-list, although the latter is still fine for discussions and such, obviously.

Using a bugtracker will make it a lot easier for everyone to keep up with what needs to be done, for the packagers to pick things to do when they're bored (hah! right... I had to look up that word in the dictionary), and to make it clear once more that we definitely need more packagers to join and help out.

One needs to create a user account to be able to file a bug/request, but that's quick and doesn't involve any pain. We cannot use openSUSE accounts (as on .opensuse.org), sadly.

In case you didn't notice from the links above, the URL of the Packman bugtracker is https://bugs.links2linux.org.

» Collectd on openSUSE

collectd is a very nice metrics collection daemon for Linux, *BSD and a few other Unix variants. Essentially, what it does is run in the background, record a lot of metrics about the system and store them into RRD, from which you can then visualize time graphs.

There are around 100 plugins, going from low level things such as CPU load, memory usage to application level metrics like MySQL slow queries, Apache access log, memcached, etc..., as well as the ability of writing your own plugins in many languages using a nice, well documented and stable API.

I'm maintaining the latest version of collect for openSUSE in the server:monitoring repository.

Finally finished to upgrade to the latest, 5.0.3 -- please test and report any issues either directly to me by email, or using our bug tracker.

» openSUSE election platform 2011

Yep, I'm running for the privilege of being on the openSUSE board again. Lots of fine candidates this time, which is pretty cool in its own right.

I finally managed to fill out the remaining bits of my election platform page, so if you're interested, please have a read -- yes, I know, it's long ;)

The short summary:

• I care about the contributors, their environment, it must be a fun place where people feel comfortable, with friends
• I care a lot about the people aspects of the project, probably even more so than for the technical bits
• I believe that I have a few ideas on concrete things we (and specifically, but not only, the board) should get involved in

All that "I, I, I" comes quite tedious, to be honest, and I'm under the impression that I'm bragging around, which is something my inner beast is spanking me for, endlessly. But well, the whole purpose is specifically to explain what each candidate proposes so I guess it's fine.

So if you adhere to what I wrote there and/or if you trust me to do the right things, do vote for me -- don't think that oh well, I'll be elected anyway, if everybody thinks like that, I won't ;D

» FOSDEM 2012: announcing the devrooms

Just sent out the ack/nack emails for the developer rooms at FOSDEM 2012, the latter part always being pretty tough, but we have to make choices.

On the good side: here is the list of the devrooms for FOSDEM 2012.

Mind you, that list does not include the Distribution Miniconf, which will take place in two rooms during both days and will gather sessions, talks, ideas from many (mostly Linux) distribution projects.

» gpodder 2 vs 3 in Packman

The gpodder project introduced its new major release 3.0.0 today and, unfortunately, it seems like I didn't pay attention to the complete change announcement, as I just bumped the gpodder package in Packman to 3.0.0 (from 2.18).

Now, gpodder 3.0.0 does introduce a lot of changes, notably in the UI but also regarding its database format and requires migrating the database from 2 to 3. It doesn't seem to have all of the features of 2.20 either. So what happens is that when you just upgrade the gpodder package, you end up with something you don't necessarily want to use. At least as of now.

Upstream will still maintain the 2.x branch for quite a while, and gradually port features from 2 to 3 and, hence, it actually makes sense to do it differently. What I have done now is to revert the gpodder package at Packman to the 2.xx branch (and upgrade to 2.20 at the same time).

If you want to use gpodder 3.0.0, then just install the package gpodder3 instead: zypper or YaST2 will tell you to remove gpodder in order to do so, as you cannot have both installed at the same time (they have file conflicts).

Now, if, in between those changes, you already did the upgrade, do one of the following:

• if you want to keep using 3.x: then run rpm -e gpodder && zypper install gpodder3 (as root)
• if you want to go back to 2.x: then run rpm -e gpodder && zypper install gpodder (as root)

On a side note, please wait a couple of hours (after this blog post) before doing so, as our main repository server is only synced to some mirrors after 4 hours (after 1 hour for most though).

Sorry for the inconvenience.

» Installing Perl Module RPMs on openSUSE

The additional repository devel:languages:perl has quite a slew of Perl module packages in it (over 2000 at the time of writing).

Hence, if you are often using and requiring Perl modules, it makes a lot of sense to add it to your list of repositories, which you can do with the following command (as root):

zypper addrepo http://r.opensu.se/devel:languages:perl.repo

(if you wonder what r.opensu.se is, read up on it here: r.opensu.se).

A little known fact is that when building RPM packages, there is a post-build script that analyzes the files that are part of the resulting package in order to scan for Perl modules. For each of those Perl modules, it adds a Provides with the Perl name of that Perl module, with a specific notation which is like this: perl(Name::of::the::Perl::package).

As an example, if you need the Perl module Net::SMTP::SSL, you just need to do this:

zypper install 'perl(Net::SMTP::SSL)'

Note that you should indeed put that parameter to the zypper install command into quotes, as if you don't, bash will attempt to interpret the braces and give a syntax error.

Now, in this case, it is fairly simple, as the Perl module Net::SMTP::SSL is provided by the RPM package perl-Net-SMTP-SSL (at least on openSUSE/SLE), so you might have been able to derive the name of the RPM package from the name of the missing Perl module on your own. But that Perl module could very well be part of a package with a different name: for example, the Perl module Class::MOP is not in the RPM package perl-Class-MOP but in the RPM package perl-Moose (because it's part of the Moose CPAN module).

And a last little trick: if you only want to find out which RPM package(s) provides specific Perl modules, you may also use this:

zypper what-provides 'perl(Class::MOP)'

(Note that this one only works on repositories that you have in your list of active repositories, which you can see with zypper repos or zypper lr.)

» Loop mount iso files without being root

There is a rather convenient way to mount ISO files (CD/DVD images) onto a directory on Linux, which goes as follows:
mount -o loop,ro /path/to/image.iso /path/to/mountpoint
(where the mountpoint is a directory).

This method works very well, but has one essential drawback: you must be root in order to do that. So how do I get to do so as a regular user ?

A barely known alternative lies in fuseiso, which uses the FUSE filesystem in user-space layer to accomplish that.

In order to use it, you must install the package fuseiso, which is available with the openSUSE distribution, and from the release repository (e.g. for 11.4) as well as from the filesystems repository and OBS project:
zypper install fuseiso

Once that has been done (as root ;)), you can simply mount ISO files like this, without being root:
fuseiso /path/to/image.iso /path/to/mountpoint

Note that as an additional benefit, fuseiso also supports images in NRG, BIN, MDF and IMG (dd) format, as well as zisofs.

In order to unmount, simply use fusermount -u, e.g. like this:
fusermount -u /path/to/mountpoint

» openSUSE 12.1 Beta testing

So it's openSUSE 12.1 Beta 1 testing time !

Before filing new bugs, make sure you search for existing bugs first.

If you're as annoyed by Bugzilla's search interface as I am, you can use this page to search for 12.1 Beta 1 bugs: just type in keywords and done.

The page also has an opensearch descriptor in order to add 12.1 Beta bug search to the list of search engines in your favorite browser.

» FOSDEM 2012: call for devrooms

So here we go again, FOSDEM, the largest and coolest open source contributor event in Europe is prepping up for its 2012 edition.

I've just opened the Call for Developer Rooms, the deadline for submissions is 2011-10-27.

Other call-for-stuffs will open very soon (lightning talks, stands, main tracks).

» http://counter.opensuse.org/link/

Since quite a while, we're having those nifty countdown images for openSUSE, which we've used for releases as well as for the countdown to the openSUSE Conference.

One issue with it is that it does not ship a link to point to when clicked upon, obviously, as it is just a plain image (and no javascript nor flash). Well, if you have put that picture on your blog/site/pants, please consider surrounding it with a link that points to http://counter.opensuse.org/link/, and we will adapt that link (which is a plain HTTP redirect) accordingly over time (e.g. now it points to the openSUSE conference page, then it will point to the 12.1 release page, etc...).

To do that, if your HTML-foo isn't that high, just use this:

<a href="http://counter.opensuse.org/link/"><img src="http://counter.opensuse.org/small/"/></a>

» opensu.se maintenance

Marcus "darix" Rueckert, Detlef Reichelt and I are currently moving servers for all the domains that are hosted on opensu.se (including opensuse-community.org).

There might be a few hiccups during the transition phase (which is almost done ;)).

» Oracle related packages for openSUSE

Petr Vanek and I are maintaining some packages for openSUSE (and SLE) that build against the Oracle Instant Client libraries (I mean Oracle the database). Now, those libraries are not open source in any way, but are available from the Oracle TechNet website.

There are a few open source projects that are of interest, at least for people who have to work with the Oracle database, and we do package a few of them and Petr makes them available in his repository.

As of now, they're all built against version 10.2 of Oracle Instant Client, for openSUSE 11.3, openSUSE 11.4, Factory (snapshot) and SLE 11.

Packages include ocilib, perl-DBD-Oracle (the Oracle database driver for Perl), php5-pecl-oci8 (the Oracle database driver for PHP5), python-cx_Oracle (a Python module to access Oracle databases), ruby-oci8 (the... you got he picture, this time for Ruby), as well as tora and tora-svn.

Why would we package that stuff, as it is not open source ? Well, actually, the software that we package is open source, it's just that the shared libraries and C headers they require are not. Oh, and we do not redistribute the Oracle Instant Client library RPMs there. That is something you must get from Oracle by yourself.

» On communication, cultural differences, and the openSUSE Conference

Disclaimer: the next paragraphs may sound presumptuous, but they're not. I swear.

It has occurred to me, time and time again, that some people consider others as semi-gods. People who are highly active e.g. in open source projects, and are sometimes even regarded for their work. Well, it sucks.

I know that this has happened to me a few times (being seen as a semi-god, that is), and I hate it. Not only does it not have any ground for being, we're just folks like everyone else, and while hard and good work should be appreciated, and while a simple "thank you" is way too rare and rewarding, taking it to that level is a very-bad-thing (tm)

The main reason for it to be bad is that it breaks communication, it puts artificial barriers between people. Now, I can only speak for myself, but I want people to talk to me, to come to me, say hi, and have a chat about virtually anything, be it on the matter of the openSUSE project or not.

I like hearing about cultural differences, about experiences people make in their life, about funny and not-so-funny moments. I love spending time talking to people, especially "broken" people, who have gone through hard times (haven't we all ?), because they're full of life, full of content, even if it's sorrow. But hey, I like having a good time with happy people too ;).

But culture is often in the way of common sense and the ability to communicate across those artificial differences, specifically when we're talking about the differences in behavior and, well, yes, communication, precisely.

Generalization is always wrong (got it?), but there are a few traits that nevertheless apply in a very fuzzy way. Germans usually don't like physical contact, getting too much in their protective circle. They don't really like people who talk much either, or who behave in an extroverted way. Latins (French, Spaniards, Greeks, Italians, ...) often appear as sloppy, too relaxed, they don't take appointments seriously, they're always late, they're always talking, and loud, etc... Well hell yes. Asian cultures (in the broad geographic sense) are even more mind-boggling (to us Europeans, that is). North Americans are said to be quite vocal and easy to get in touch with, but don't appreciate digging a little deeper. Germans say things pretty straight as they are ("this sucks" is often perfectly acceptable). All those differences, all those barriers to understanding what we say to each other, and how we mean it.

At the openSUSE Conference or wherever we may meet, or even through electronic media, drop those differences, don't bother, say things straight up as they are, but be relaxed, have a good time, be vocal, talk, say what's on your mind. Don't be afraid to hurt feelings, you won't, because we're all a big happy (and sometimes grumpy) bunch of friends. Feel at home, this is your community. I am your friend. Poke me with a stick, give me a hug, talk to me out of the blue, whatever, slice me into pieces and put salt on it (that's a special for Alberto), I don't care. But don't remain silent, intimidated, blocked by your cultural background and, at the same time, be inclusive and accept those differences, to a certain extent (full circle or chicken/egg ?).

See you there, or anywhere else, and give me a hug, or at least a high five ;).

» My talks at the openSUSE Conference 2011

Big mistake, big mistake. At the call for papers deadline, we ended up with not having any sessions about packaging at all except one by Jan Engelhardt.

Now, that would have been quite a ludicrous situation, as our core activity is precisely to build packages, without which it wouldn't be a distribution in the first place.

So I picked up an early email from Lars Vogdt who proposed a few sessions on the topic of packaging. Unfortunately, it was really early in the call for papers phase and we weren't quite organized yet, which caused his proposal to remain unanswered for a few weeks. I tried to contact him by email a few times, but he didn't reply (until now, that is), and I nevertheless took it up on myself to do a few packaging related sessions at the conference.

Introduction to Packaging

One thing that some people in the project have been bugging (me) about on a regular basis is an introductory presentation about packaging for openSUSE. Having been doing that for around 10 years on an almost daily basis, I can indeed understand that it appears as a daunting task and somewhat of a black art (which it is).
So here we go: Introduction to Packaging (Sunday 11 Sept in Brendl, at 11:45). The key here is that I am not assuming any prior knowledge at all. If you're already versed into packaging, this isn't for you. But if you always wanted to know about the main activity of our project, at least in technical terms, you totally have to be there.

Mind you, after that presentation, you will not be able to write your first package, but it will give you an understanding of what packages actually are, the terms, the ecosystem, the process, the toolchains and... well... what the hell it actually takes to create an RPM package for openSUSE. It does sound boring, and too technical, but it isn't. Trust me, we'll have a good time. I'm looking forward to seeing a lot of folks there with an appetite for finding out, and a lot of questions I'll more than happily be able to answer.

Workshops

Obviously, we're not going to stop there. For those who will have attended the above mentioned presentation, as well as for the folks who have a fuzzy idea of how to build packages, but have never actually tried to do so (or did but failed), there is something for you as well: Packaging, hands-on: on Monday, in the BR-Room, at 14:00, I will guide you for two hours through your first steps at accomplishing what is next to witchcraft: building your first package, on your own, on your notebook.

The purpose here is to take every fear away at barriers to enter the secret cult of RPM wizardry. So bring along your notebook, a shell, vim or whatever editor you prefer, an openSUSE Build Service account (go to this mind-boggling URL to create an openSUSE account if you don't have one already -- if you have an openSUSE account, you have everything you need), and we'll do it step by step, slowly, to bring you to the overwhelming feeling of joy once you will have your first (and hopefully not last) RPM package for openSUSE on your harddisk.

Upping the ante

Can we do even better than that? Sure, we can. On Tuesday, there will be a second workshop session: Advanced Packaging, at 14:00 in the BR-Room. That one will be a bit more improvised, but we'll take on more complex scenarios, depending on what we will not have covered in the previous workshop. Things like subpackages, -devel packages, distribution integration, shared library packages (and the openSUSE packaging guidelines that apply to them), packaging Perl modules, Python modules, etc...

And the rest...

There are quite a few additional sessions that have my name on it, but I won't be able to organize those as well. So I'm looking for people to take them on.

Oh, and please bug me at the conference. I'm tall, and look evil, and can be evil at times, I have a creepy looking G+ profile photo (on purpose, I like it), but I don't bite, I don't pose, I'm a rather nice guy. As I'm not German, I don't mind hugs either, much like our all around nice guy from the flat of the land.

I've been in this project for a very long time, been involved in various bits of it, and have quite some experience in several technical (and not so technical) areas. I hope we'll be able to un-organize some small sessions on various matters you'd like to know more about, I'm sure I can help, and I totally want to spread my experience around. This conference is YOUR conference, so make the most of it (want to stress that so much that I even adhere to the bad practice of using <b/> tags in HTML). Drop your cultural habits for a few days, don't be shy, let's talk, have some beers (or water), get to know each other and, most importantly, have a lot of fun.

So, hopefully, see you there!

» Back from FrOSCon

Back from the FrOSCon conference (the only one that has even weirder capitalization than openSUSE ;D).
Mixed feelings. While it was a bit boring during the day as there was pretty much no one passing by the stands (not just ours), I'm not really convinced it's that useful to have a stand there... Of course, the great weather didn't help, as most non-contributor-people who would might have come to the conference out of curiosity will most definitely have preferred making good use of the sunny weather that weekend. Understandable :)

Mind you, I definitely had a good time, as the organization is very well done, the catering is nice (at least for speakers and booth personnel, didn't try the other options), the barbecue with DJ on Saturday evening was excellent, and, of course, I got to see quite a lot of people I know through openSUSE and FOSDEM (quite a lot of people wearing the ultimate street cred t-shirt of FOSDEM supporters, btw ;)), and a few I didn't. Got to chat a lot with core Mageia contributors as well, which was definitely fun and interesting. Hence, lots of great FOSS people around, awesome.
Was obviously also great in the evening/night, chatting around beers (even if it was Kölsch (yellow water with a tiny bit of alcohol and some bitter)) with fellow contributors across different projects. Also got to meet Jan Krings for the first time (as well as Marcus Möller, Jan Krings and Jan Weber, which I've met IRL before).

If you've never been at such events (even more striking at FOSDEM methinks, because there's a huge crowd, with lots and lots of projects there, and a lot of discussions and cross-pollination going around), and are mostly on the "user" side of things, then just stop the hate. Forget about distrowars, competition, and all that. That's just totally not how it works for almost all the people who actively contribute to their projects. Even between BSD and Linux. We may have our differences and preferences, but we all respect the work, brains, excellence, and love everyone is putting into their respective undertakings.

But in terms of audience, I wonder whether FrOSCon shouldn't have a sharper focus. At least, the focus wasn't all that clear to me, it seems like the target is "everything". There are stands of distribution projects, which are typically for the non-Linux/BSD-users-yet to grab some DVDs and play with it. There are stands of vendors, who pay for their stand, and whom are either selling books, or showcasing their services and solutions to potential customers, or hunting for highly qualified hackers. That's a pretty different audience already, at least when compared to the more entry-level distribution showcase stands. Then there are tracks and "devrooms" (yes, they really call them the same as at FOSDEM :)), which is .. dunno.. depends, some did sound more advanced, for developers, and some were a lot more entry level (e.g., paraphrasing, "openoffice.org is open source, what does that mean for me, user ?").

Just my 2 cents, but I'm under the impression that it could serve a better purpose to be less general purpose and have a slightly sharper focus in terms of target audience. But hey, maybe it was just the weather (heard from others, e.g. from fellow openSUSEr Jan Weber) that there were clearly a lot more people the years before), and maybe the organizers are just fine with the amount and type of audience that was there.

» i.opensu.se YMP Generator

Bernhard Wiedemann approached me a few days ago to host his YMP generator CGI script on opensu.se.

I wrote it from scratch (it's just a few lines of Perl code really ;)), and it's now up and running on i.opensu.se (follow that link for details and explanation).

In a similar fashion to r.opensu.se, it is meant to be helpful to give support to users, as it is much simpler to hand them a short URL like http://i.opensu.se/utilities/atool than going through the hassle of guiding them through YaST2.

It is especially well suited for twitter, IRC, etc...

The source code is in my git repo at gitorious.

» Countdown for openSUSE Conference 2011

Hacked up some quick artwork for a countdown image for the openSUSE Conference 2011.

If you want to use it on your blog, website, whatever, use the following links to the image:

• Large (400x400 pixels): http://counter.opensuse.org/conf/2011/large
• Medium (256x256 pixels): http://counter.opensuse.org/conf/2011/medium
• Small (130x130 pixels): http://counter.opensuse.org/conf/2011/small

If you don't like the artwork, patches are welcome ;)

Obviously, the number of remaining days is updated every day and, hence, that countdown is always up-to-date (it is relative to the CEST timezone though, where the event takes place).

» Off to Croatia!

I'll be enjoying the nice seaside of Dalmatia (Croatia) for the next 3 weeks and, hence, won't be updating packages or be otherwise reachable to fix stuff.

That being said, I really haven't been very active (to say the least) the last few weeks. Lost the moment(um), somehow. Dunno. Maybe the motivation problem will have fixed itself after my holidays. I sure hope so.

For really urgent matters, a few people in the openSUSE and FOSDEM projects have my phone number, just poke the right people ;), e.g. Andreas Jaeger.

I most probably won't be checking my email, but I should be tweeting, so that's an option to poke me as well.