digitalflow

Klaas wrote a nice summary of our hackweek’s work on ownCloud:

http://kfreitag.tumblr.com/post/10848737554/where-do-you-put-your-data

After 8 months of work openSUSE 11.4 has been released last week!
This has been celebrated with release parties all around the world.
As usual, the new release comes with the latest kernel,
LibreOffice, Gnome and KDE packages.

In Nuremberg, we celebrated the release with a party at the Artefakt bar, and had the fabulous Ukulele Insanity playing live.

Althogh the release is considered a very good one by many press and user reviews, I had some small problems after upgrading to it and want to share with you how I solved those:

Networkmanager:

After suspending and waking up my notebook, the kde networkmanager always deactivated the network. From /var/log/NetworkManager:

NetworkManager[2960]: (wlan0): deactivating device (reason: 2).
NetworkManager[2960]: (wlan0): supplicant interface state: starting -> ready
NetworkManager[2960]: (wlan0): device state change: 2 -> 3 (reason 42)<>

I found out, that for KDE 4.5 or later it is recommended to switch from using KNetworkManager to using the Networkmanagement Plasmoid instead. This is done by:

zypper in plasmoid-networkmanagement and allowing the removal of NetworkManager-kde4

Crypto partitions:

I am using a crypted home partition since a long time, and this was configured in /etc/cryptotab and enabled during boot in /etc/init.d/boot.crypto until the upgrade.

With the recent release this changed to /etc/crypttab and gets enabled in /etc/init.d/boot.crypto-early. To convert it, I changed my old cryptotab entry:

/dev/loop  /dev/sda6  /home/tom  ext4  twofish256 noatime,acl,user_xattr

to

cr_sda6  /dev/sda6  none  cipher=twofish-cbc-plain,size=256,hash=sha512

in /etc/crypttab and added to /etc/fstab:

/dev/mapper/cr_sda6  /home/tom  ext4  noatime,acl,user_xattr

Beeping X:

I think it’s highly annoying that X makes a load beep sound when killing it by ctrl+alt+delete. To turn this off, just add a file named /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-disable-beep.conf with this content:

Section "ServerFlags"
Option "ZapWarning" "off"
EndSection

Iscan – udev rules change

The package iscan (Image Scan) from epson uses a deprecated syntax for it’s udev rules so that the
startup log gets spammed with lots of warnings. To fix it just run:

sudo sed -i -e “s:SYSFS:ATTRS:g” /etc/udev/rules.d/60_iscan.rules

Screen resolution:

Somehow it seems the screen of my T60p gets detected incorrectly:

xdpyinfo | grep resolution returns a resolution of 96×96 dots per inch, but for my taste everything gets rendered too small. So I helped myself by running:

xrandr --dpi 120
systemsettings - application appearance - fonts - force 120 dpi

on startup. Although I’m quite sure this is not the elegant way of solving this

My Kde4 Snoopy comic plasmoid is broken since some days… Because the address of the daily comic strip changed. So what should I do? Fix it!
To repair it on your system, follow these steps in a console:

> cd ~/.kde4/share/apps/plasma/comics/
> unzip -u 92041-snoopy.comic -d snoopy
> cd snoopy
> wget -O contents/code/main.es http://tinyurl.com/snoopy-plasmoid
> zip -r ../92041-snoopy.comic *

Restart your plasmoid and have fun

*Update 5.3.2011*
I contacted the author, and the comic is fixed now also when installing/updating
in the plasmoid settings.

Visiting Berlin for Linuxtag 2010 was nice
I did a talk about Ruby on Rails in the openSUSE.org infrastructure (german) (slides) which showed how we use rails and which experiences we have with rails and related tools in the openSUSE.org infrastructure.

On our booth we released the Build Service 2.0 last friday, and did a workshop helping people to install their own buildservice instance. I prepared an appliance in SUSE Studio for that, that reduces the effort of running your own buildservice instance to booting a live cd or a vmware image.

On our booth and all around the hall the openSUSE balloon clown was in action and created nice geekos for the audience!

If you found a problem in your openSUSE system, and know how to fix it, it is very easy now to contribute the fix back to the project.

For example a user had a problem with a boot script erroneously overwriting a file at each system boot. As he already found out how to fix it, I can demonstrate how easy it is to contribute this fix back to the project, so that every openSUSE user can benefit from it.

At first I had to find out which package to fix. This can be done by asking the package management system which package owns the buggy file:

> rpm -qf /etc/init.d/boot.clock

aaa_base-11.2-43.45.1.i586

Now we create a branch of the package in the openSUSE buildservice:

> osc branch openSUSE:Factory aaa_base

Note: Please login to build.opensuse.org first to create your home project. The osc tool can be installed for openSUSE 11.2, 11.1.

The server created a copy of the package in your home project now.
You need to check it out to your local machine to do the changes:

osc co home:digitaltomm:branches:Base:System/aaa_base

You now have a directory ‘home:digitaltomm:branches:Base:System/aaa_base’ containing the package source files.

You can now either directly change the sources of the package or create a patch file that gets included from the .spec file. Creating a patch file is preferred for source changes, so that the patch can easily be removed when the upstream project has included the fix. Changes to the .spec file can be done directly.

Let’s create a patch. This can be done manually with the patch command, or with the help of the quilt program.

I have to extract the source tarball, create a copy where I fix the code, and create the patch file by using diff to compare the original and the patched sources:

> cd home\:digitaltomm\:branches\:Base\:System/aaa_base
> tar -xf aaa_base.tar.bz2
> cp -r aaa_base aaa_base.orig
> vim aaa_base/etc/init.d/boot.clock
> diff -uNr aaa_base.orig aaa_base > adjtime.patch

Now the patch file needs to be referenced from the .spec file. This is done by adding a reference like this:

Source: aaa_base.tar.bz2
Patch0: adjtime.patch
...
%prep
%setup -n aaa_base
%patch0 -p1

To make sure the patch is applied correctly, and the package builds on openSUSE Factory, I start a local build:

> osc build --no-verify

When everything went fine, I can commit the changes to my branch, add a changelog entry and afterwards submit a request to get the changes included in the openSUSE Factory project:

> osc commit -m "Added adjtime fix from bnc#570245."
> osc vc
> osc submitreq -m 'Added adjtime fix from bnc#570245'
created request id 29474

The request is now pending and waiting to get reviewed by the project maintainers of openSUSE Factory. It’s state can be viewed with:

> osc request show 29474

or in the webinterface.

In my case the request got declined because Rudi was faster in fixing it, and I forgot to add a correct changelog entry first.

The openSUSE Buildservice will be released with version 1.7 soon next year. We are already building beta packages in the openSUSE:Tools:Unstable project.

I started to build appliances for the OBS with SUSE Studio now:

• openSUSE Buildservice + Desktop (1.7 beta1):
  Contains the obs backend server, worker, the API, the webui, an IceWM desktop and OSC and firefox to directly use it.

  Virtualbox + VMWare image (1.4 GB),

  Live CD image (292 MB),

  Disk image (USB) (1.2 GB)

• openSUSE Buildservice Server (1.7 beta1):
  Contains the obs backend server, worker, and API and webui.

  Virtualbox + VMWare image (1.1 GB),

  Live CD image (181 MB),

  Disk image (USB) (808 MB)

• openSUSE Buildservice Worker (1.7 beta1):
  Only contains the obs worker that will try to connect to a backend discovered by slp.

  Virtualbox + VMWare image (872 MB),

  Live DVD image (137 MB),

  Disk image (USB) (555 MB)

 

Known issues:

- firefox does not start automatically in the desktop appliance

Please report issues with the beta packages / appliances to opensuse-buildservice@opensuse.org.