Does it happen to you, too, that there are moments where you ask yourself why others want something from you that is there already since a while? Exactly this happened with https://keyserver.opensuse.org/: the original machine was set up a long time ago to make it easier for people attending the openSUSE GPG key-signing parties, but it looks like nobody officially announced this “new service” for our users…
…and so here we are: the openSUSE Heroes team is pleased to announce that keyserver.opensuse.org is up and running as public GPG keyserver. We are of course also part of the official keyserver pool, which means that some people might already noticed us, as they got redirected to our server with their requests. (And for those who are interested to setup their own SKS keyserver: we have also written a nice monitoring plugin that helps you keeping an eye on the pool status of your machine and the ones of your peers.)
The server may be accessed either via it’s Web interface (please ping the Heroes if you want to improve it) or via the openPGP HTTP keyserver protocol (HKP), which is normally used by GPG clients.
Try it out by calling something like:
After a long, but exciting first day, we even managed to get some sleep before we started again and discussed the whole morning about our policies and other stuff that is now updated in the openSUSE wiki. After that, we went out for a nice lunch…
openSUSE Heroes out for lunch.
…before we started the discussion about some other topics on our list.
Some of the openSUSE Heroes decided during the last openSUSE Conference that it’s time for more face to face meetings to “get things done” and “work together”…
Picture from the meeting with some openSUSE Heroes discussing
So starting today, some openSUSE Heroes started to spend the first December weekend in the SUSE Headquarter in Nuremberg. And they really have a lot to do, as you might imagine! That might be the reason why some of them started at 02:00 in the night to arrive at 07:00 in Nuremberg…
Avid Linux users can reap the benefits of four 10.1” Linux tablets offered by MJ Techology. The specifications of the four tablets vary in power and cost, but all come with the power of Linux and openSUSE at the core.
“MJ Technology, a leader in affordable cutting edge tech, is pleased to introduce the MJ Technology Warrior series tablets powered by openSUSE,” said Mark Jun, CEO for MJ Technology.
The preinstalled image on the Warrior Tablet Series is GNOME on openSUSE Leap, but users are welcome to change/reinstall/use Tumbleweed/etc. Any hardware support will be upstream via the Open Build Service and will not impede different usage patterns, so there is no lock-in, which gives the user choice.
The tablets offer dual boot for Windows 10 or use openSUSE Leap as a sole operating system for personal use. System administrators needing to manage multiple servers remotely can fulfill needs with the World’s First actual Made-for-Linux x86/x64 Tablet.
Four Tumbleweed snapshots were released since the last article and the snapshot of the week, 20160816, brought users a new version of gtk3 (3.20.8). Updated in the repositories for this snapshot was an updated version of yast2-auth-client (3.3.10). Cairo graphics fixed several bugs and Apache2 removed the omc xml config because the change log states it is “useless nowdays.”
Snapshot 20160817 has several updates for the scalable storage platform ceph, which added an ability to reduce the constraints on resources required to build ceph and ceph-test packages. Git updated to version 2.9.3 and glib2 had several subpackages updated as did gnome-desktop. This snapshot caused quite a bit of chatter on the openSUSE Factory mailing list and serves as a reminder for people using openSUSE Tumbleweed to subscribed to the mailing list so they are aware of the updates.
Snapshot 20160803 made a small update to the repositories for Mozilla Thunderbird and k3b. The snapshot updated libzypp to version 16.2.1, gnome-online-accounts to 3.20.3 and obs-service-source_validator. In 20160803, virt-viewer had the most changes.
Snapshot 20160805 brought more package changes and one major uninstall. LXDM was dropped from openSUSE Tumbleweed and uninstalled in this snapshot. LightDM is being used in the environment instead and is auto-installed with a change configuration for those who are using LXDM. This snapshot provided several repository updates, and NetworkManager-gnome, Libreoffice 5.2.0.4 and WireShark 2.0.5 were a few of the many changes found is 20160805.
The most recent snapshot, 20160806, updated Inkscape, which provides more extensions. Wayland-protocols updated to a new upstream release of 1.5 and btrfsprogs has new options to run in the background with version 4.7.
Tumbleweed users will likely get Plasma 5.72 in the next snapshot, which should be released soon.
openSUSE Leap
In two weeks is the submission deadline to get packages in the next version of openSUSE Leap 42.2. The Beta 1 is scheduled for release at the end of this month, according to the roadmap.
The current development version, Alpha 3, needs more people to test the version and file bugs. Download Alpha 3 and test it out at software.opensuse.org.
During the last weeks, the openSUSE board and others expressed their concern about the current state of some openSUSE infrastructure: especially the reaction times to change something in the setup were mentioned multiple times. Looks like we lost some administrators and/or contact points at SUSE who helped out in the past to eliminate problems or work together with the community.
As result, there was a meeting held during the openSUSE Conference 2016, including some SUSE employees and openSUSE community members to discuss the current situation and search for some possible solutions. The discussion was very fruitful and we’d like to share some of the results here to inform everyone and actively ask for help. If you want to join us, the openSUSE heroes, do not hesitate to contact us and join an incredible team!
If you first want to know more about the status, read on what the openSUSE Heroes discussed in their first meeting on 2016-06-26 (Participants: cboltz, orangecms,adalovelace, ganglia, wnereiz, mcaj, lrupp):
openQA workers that keep Tumbleweed tested and rolling have almost been replenished.
The new hardware can run more workers and is newer, bigger and faster, which increases the speed of openQA testing. One of two Intel E5-2630 v3 is partially running while the other has yet to be integrated into the openSUSE infrastructure. Each machine has 8 cores with 16 threads for a total of 16 cores of 32 threads when both machines become fully functional. The new hardware has each have 256GB of RAM and 400GB Intel NVMe SSDs.
SUSE’s infrastructure team was really helpful in getting the new machine working with openSUSE infrastructure and deserve a lot of credit for their efforts. Thank you SUSE.
The latest, full-testing went through in six hours as opposed to the normal 14 hour duration. That, plus the additional workers currently running greatly increase openQA’s speed.
Since the last update, which informed readers about openQA workers (hardware) that went down, openSUSE Tumbleweed has released three snapshots.
openSUSE’s rolling distribution Tumbleweed goes through automated tests before a snapshot is released and heavily relies on openQA for the process of Tumbleweed to create regular snapshots.
The last snapshot was 20160209, which produced new grub2, python, YaST and GTK3 packages.
The automated testing of openQA is currently running with only two workers left instead of the usual 10. The remaining workers are largely overloaded and can’t cope with the workload to produce new snapshots.
Various solutions are being evaluated to get new workers for openQA, which includes borrowing machines from other SUSE owned instances. Thank you SUSE!
The team has opted to hold back creating new snapshots until more workers for openQA become available. Once the team resumes with staging, testing and releasing, which is expected for a 20160217+ snapshot, Tumbleweed fans can expect updates to Firewalld, CMake 3.4.3, GStreamer 1.6.3 and Plasma 5.5.4.
The openSUSE build service becomes more and more a victim of his success: building constantly more than 300,000 packages for more than 43,000 developers needs really a lot of build power! And build power means not only CPU! It includes everything that you can expect from an IT infrastructure:
Old hard-drives from OBS-workers
CPU power
RAM (the more, the better)
Storage (temporary local, on the clients and also to store and distribute the results)
Network
electic power (and cooling, and maintenance, and manpower to maintain the hardware, …)
Thankfully our main sponsor SUSE allowed us now to buy some new hardware to replace some of the old machines that build software packages for over ten different distributions all day long.
Does it happen to you, too, that there are moments where you ask yourself why others want something from you that is there already since a while? Exactly this happened with https://keyserver.opensuse.org/: the original machine was set up a long time ago to make it easier for people attending the openSUSE GPG key-signing parties, but it looks like nobody officially announced this “new service” for our users…
It’s official; the Warrior Tablet made by 
openSUSE Tumbleweed
Since the release of 
During the last weeks, the openSUSE board and others expressed their concern about the current state of some openSUSE infrastructure: especially the reaction times to change something in the setup were mentioned multiple times. Looks like we lost some administrators and/or contact points at SUSE who helped out in the past to eliminate problems or work together with the community.
