Utah Open Source Planet

A lot of Linux/openSUSE users aren’t aware that there are more to file system permissions than the obvious Owner, Group, Other / Read, Write, Execute setup.

All major Linux file systems (ext3, reiserfs, etc) support access control lists (ACL) and its very easy to use them.

To see if a file or directory has an ACL set on it, you can use ls:

inspidell:~ # ls -ld /home/sontek

You’ll get output similar to this:

drwxr-xr-x+ 55 sontek users 4096 Jul  4 13:42 /home/sontek

The + at the end of the permissions means that we are using extended permissions (ACL’s). To get the list of ACL’s on the file/directory, run the getfacl <file> command.

inspidell:~ # getfacl /home/sontek
getfacl: Removing leading '/' from absolute path names
# file: home/sontek
# owner: sontek
# group: users
user::rwx
group::r-x
other::r-x
default:user::rwx
default:group:users:---
default:mask::r-x
default:other::r-x

This shows both the ACL’s and the basic Linux permissions.

To modify or set ACL’s you use the setfacl command. Here are a few examples of how to use it:

Grant a single user read access to a directory in your home directory.
setfacl -m u:mom:r /home/sontek/photos

Remove all access from a group on a file
setfacl -x g:developers payroll.xml

You can also copy a set of permissions from one file to another
getfacl file1 | setfacl --set-file=- file2

Remove all ACL’s
setfacl -k /home/sontek

For those of you who are not console jockey’s, you’ll realize quickly that the default nautilus setup doesn’t have a way to view, modify, or add any ACL’s, to get this support you’ll need to install two packages, with opensuse you do this with zypper:

inspidell:~ # zypper in eiciel nautilus-eiciel

Before the ACL permissions show up in nautilus, you’ll have to restart it:

inspidell:~ # pkill nautilus

After this, you’ll be greeted with a very easy to use dialog for modifying ACL’s:

another great nautilus permissions tip I learned from Christer Edwards is to enable advanced permissions in nautilus, this is a much better UI for managing permissions and should probably be the default.

gconftool-2 --type bool --set /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_advanced_permissions True

A screenshot of this in action:

I hope this helps you better secure and manage your computer with the more advanced features your Linux file systems both from console and inside GNOME.

Ever run system updates in Linux (i.e openSUSE) and get a package that doesn’t seem to be changed and wonder why the update was pushed? Or just interested in following the latest changes to some of your favorite Linux packages?

With rpm you can view all the latest changes in an easily to read format. To get the changelog of a package with rpm you do the following:

$ rpm -q --changelog <package> | less

replace <package> with whatever ever package you would like to see the changelog for (i.e rpm -q –changelog banshee-1 | less)

This is for rpm based Linux distributions (i.e openSUSE, Redhat)

When you are working with the source of a new package on openSUSE and aren’t familiar with all of its dependencies, it gets quite annoying running the normal Linux autconf commands–./autogen.sh, install missing dependency, rinse, wash, and repeat–until you finally have everything you need installed.

zypper makes this easy for us with the following command:

$ sudo zypper si -d <package>

You replace <package> with whatever package’s build dependencies you need.

I’ve been having a lot of stability issues with openSUSE 11.0 lately and the majority of them boiled down to audio.

Here is a list of a few:

1. VLC required root to have audio, wtf?
2. Sound would crash after listening to any audio for an extended period of time (music, video, flash).
3. If my audio crashed, Firefox could not start up until I did rcalsasound restart
4. Some videos were slow/choppy.

So, you are probably asking, how did I fix all these issues?

zypper rm alsa-plugins-pulse
zypper addlock alsa-plugins-pulse

This removes the alsa plugin for pulse and locks it so it will never install again. Without the alsa plugin installed, the apps go back to using alsa directly. This has fixed every issue I’ve had with openSUSE 11.0 so far.

Great news! The official openSUSE forums are finally here, combining the awesome communities from suseforums.net, suselinuxsupport.de and the openSUSE support forums at forums.novell.com.

If everyone could try to spend a half hour each day browsing the forums to help new users, it would benefit the whole community. openSUSE is growing fast and these forums fill a huge gap in our community for new users.

Without further adieu, http://forums.opensuse.org/

Coolo was nice enough to leak us the RC2 LiveCD’s for openSUSE 11.0 RC2, please download and do final testing to make sure we have the best openSUSE release. Get them here

Features to test can be found here and as always, check most annoying bugs.

Tonight we are having our first openSUSE User Group meeting, we’ll be discussing 11.0 Beta 2.

* Date/Time: Tuesday, May 6, 2008 @ 7:00pm.
* Location: Applebees, 105 E 12300 S, Draper, UT
* Google Maps: Click Here

You can get more information on the group here.

I, unfortunately, can’t live in an environment like openSUSE without my bluetooth mouse.  I struggled through for 5 days, but am now back on Fedora.

I really appreciate the opinions, comments and helpful guidance given and look forward to installing Ubuntu early next year and doing a similar, yet majorly biased, comparison to Fedora.

If nothing else, this project has taught me that openSUSE, with all of its faults, is quite a nice distribution.  Many features are very well done, others need some work, but in the end, its not the distribution for me.

I hope my experience has given at least some a view of nice features and improvements that have been made in openSUSE.  I look forward to testing openSUSE 11 when it comes out.

Cheers,

Herlo

In response to Herlo’s reviews of openSUSE here and here , I thought I’d give Fedora 8 a shot and give an openSUSE user’s perspective.

Lets start with the bad:
First, during the installation it detected my video resolution wrong (nvidia 6800gt) so I had to do my installation without being able to read most of the screen (didn’t see any easy way to switch to text mode, I was using PXE). I did not have this issue with Ubuntu or openSUSE 10.3 on the same computer but I tried a different computer with an Intel video card and couldn’t reproduce the error.

Second, for some reason the nspluginwrapper was installed by default and caused Firefox to be extremely unstable and crash on any website that had embedded audio or video, once I removed the package Firefox became much more stable. Having it installed by default really made no sense because the computer I was running was a 32-bit system and the point of nspluginwrapper is to allow PPC and AMD64 users to run 32-bit plug-ins.

Third, codecs (mp3, video) were not easily installable. I understand that Fedora can’t include these in the distribution but I would’ve loved an easy way to retrieve them. I had to add extra repositories manually (after googling and finding which ones I needed) and then install them. In openSUSE the community repositories are readily available in yast and all I have to do is enable them, there is also the 1-Click install so you do not have to locate/add any repositories. Codecbuddy is a noble attempt but I would like more options than Fluendo.

Fourth, Flash was not readily available (it comes by default in openSUSE 10.3) and I had to search around the Internet (again) for a repository that included it. Luckily Adobe does provide a Fedora specific repository but I think this repository should be included by default in Fedora (or easily enabled).

Fifth, By default Fedora has chosen the iwlwifi drives for my Intel wireless which is great because its a completely open source driver that does not require a service running. But there are some known bugs in this driver and required me to modify my home network so I could connect to it and I can’t connect to my work network at all. This decision would not bother me except that they do not provide the closed ipw3945 drivers in the repositories as an alternative (openSUSE 10.3 provides iwl as an alternative in the repos).

Sixth, I’ve eluded to this a few times already but openSUSE 10.3 provides many community repositories in yast ready to be enabled but it’s also easy to add and find new ones through webpin and the openSUSE build service and add them quickly through yast/zypper. With Fedora it is a little more complicated to locate and add repositories.

Seventh, Most of the system-config-* applications required a running X server, so I was not able to manage my computer remotely with the provided tools. (boot, date, network, packages, printer, selinux, services, time, and users). Not only did they not have a cli/ncurses based interface, some of them even crashed with python errors instead of letting me know I needed X or they gave me a notice that they are deprecated. Why would you want to enforce configuration tools to require X? These tools also did not provide a central “Dashboard” to use them, so a user has to “Just know” what tool to use for the job, they can’t just browse around an easy to use control panel.

Eighth, By default NetworkManager was not on, I can’t think of any reason not to enable NetworkManager by default on a desktop distribution, especially when a wireless network card is available.

Most of the issues aren’t that big of a problem to solve for relatively experienced Linux users but I think they would be show stoppers and scare regular users away from Linux, there are also some issues with Fedora that are more personal preference than bugs:

First, I think clearlooks is a much better theme than the default Fedora one.
Second, I prefer the SLAB menu from openSUSE. Novell did a lot of usability research that I don’t think should be overlooked and even if Fedora doesn’t want to provide it by default, it should at least be in the repositories or an option in the installation. I found it very difficult to find the things I needed, one example was I wanted to modify SELinux to be permissive instead of enforcing, so I went to System->Administration and it wasn’t there, I had to go Applications->System Tools->SELinux Management. What is the difference between Applications->System Tools and System->Administration and why doesn’t SELinux fit in the latter?

Now that we’ve hit the bad and ugly, lets end on a good note?

First, I really love yum over yast’s package management module/zypper. The console output is a lot more detailed and the GTK interface isn’t as invasive as yast’s (yast’s GTK interface takes focus as it runs updates, so its nearly impossible to use the computer while using it). Also, zypper/yast is unbearably slow, I turn auto-refresh off and only update when I know I have time to wait. Yum on the other hand is lightning fast and I wasn’t afraid to use it.

Second, Bluetooth support was enabled by default, although the default configuration didn’t allow me to connect to my phone, its nice to actually have devices detected and ready to be configured out of the box.

So, overall my personal preference is for openSUSE, I think the advantages out weigh the downfalls but at the same time I believe both distros could learn from each other.

Wow, I’m excited by the response, and while I still believe that openSUSE is not the distro for me, it definitely has grown on me. I believe on my last review, I might have been a bit hasty in stating that just about everything was useless. And while I do have a few more complaints about this distribution, getting settled in might have been all it takes to shake of the pure hatred I recently expressed.

Much of my response has been in fact aimed at my personal opinions of certain features, and while a few of the failures I noted were indeed things that bugged me, they were personal preference and thus, I will be revising my scoring system a little. In fact, how I will award points will not so much be based upon personal preference unless its completely unbearable to me. And to that end, I’ll make a new PREFERENCES section, which will not receive scores, but will have things I personally like or dislike.

In addition, I so appreciate all of the comments I’ve received, many were very helpful in pointing out errors in my representation of openSUSE. Others were part of the reason I decided to change the scoring a bit. And even others I’d like to take the time to reply:

First, to my friend Heartsbane, thanks for the smartass reply. I should’ve known it was coming!

Sontek pointed out that there were bugs in the iwlwifi driver when 10.3 was released. While I agree with not releasing something before its ready, I find it interesting that 2 months after its release openSUSE doesn’t have iwlwifi drivers available in their updates. Why is this? Did I miss them somewhere? My problems with the ipw3945 are more to the fact that it never seems to work with the WPA PSK setup I have at home/work. The iwlwifi driver has less issues with this specific problem.

apokryphos had several comments, and I will address a few of them.

1. The 1-click-install feature is to help reduce much of the repo setup and installation that used to be a long drawn out process has been reduced to 1 click. While I agree that this is a major improvement, it is such a misnomer to call it a 1-click-install when it clearly isn’t. I only suggest we rename the process as someone coming from another world to Linux who find openSUSE may be disappointed when a 1-click-install indeed requires more like 7 clicks.
2. zypper shows what will be installed was another response I received contrary to what I saw. He asked me for an example, and in return I would suggest that indeed it does tell you what will be installed, but only after you agree to install the extra dependencies. Please provide me a command/option that shows me the dependencies prior to my agreement to install the package(s).
3. The root prompt was another failure on my end, however. Mostly, I have it ingrained in my head to look for the “root” part in the prompt. The entire prompt indeed turns red as suggested, this is something I just have to get used to, or change to my preference I guess. I do still think the prompt is ugly, but its growing on me. Others mentioned this as well, thanks for pointing out this to me.

Another, which I received from Ani and lejocelyn (as well as apokryphos), was in regard to my complaint about the Windows-like look and feel. First off, its not a cop-out and secondly, it does look like Windows. Where is the multiple-workspaces? Isn’t that a big plus, I had to add them and enable the panel object. What about this “control center”, feels a lot like Windows “control panel” to me. There is much more I think, and it also might be somewhat because I’m a GNOME user. But like I said, if I wanted it to look like Windows, I would just run Windows.

Ani also pointed out that some of my complaints about the lack of horizontal bars were because of the wasted space, especially with the new widescreen displays coming out. In retrospect, I agree that its useful to only have one bar on widescreen displays or because it takes up so much space. The “one glance” aspect I get from my status bars sure helps me, however, so I’ll define this as just a preference.

benji.weber@gmail.com pointed out his installation time was much shorter than mine. I’m not sure how he got this, but I installed from DVD offline so maybe its a bit related. He also mentioned that there are many more users testing KDE over GNOME. I suppose this might be the case for openSUSE, but overall, I think that number is pretty evenly split between the two major desktops.

Thank you all for your wonderful comments, I really appreciate the contrasting views and look forward to the next round of comments.

As I didn’t use openSUSE as much yesterday and today, so I have a little less to report:

GOOD

• YaST is growing on me, but I’m still adjusting to living in this world. Its still not my favorite tool (0)
• Suspend works like a charm. Although this also works in Fedora. (+1)

Positive Score: +1

BAD

• The YaST printer tool does not deliver reliable results when setting up printers. YaST discovered my printer, but failed to deliver the correct IP address (-1)
• My bluetooth mouse is still not working, even after following several good tutorials I found online. As per this tutorial from Andrew Jorgensen, I already have the bluez-gnome and bluez-utils from the GNOME Community repository installed. Not sure why, but it looks this one will have to wait for an update, whenever that occurs. (0)
• Enabling the fingerprint reader only asks me for files. I thought that was odd, clicking on the help indicates that providing files from another installation that uses the fingerprint reader will set it up. I didn’t see a way to set this up from scratch with openSUSE in YaST, however. (-1)

Negative Score: -2

Total Score for the last two days: -1 (not bad for day two, you never know, I might actually give a positive score by the end…)

Overall score: -6

PREFERENCES

• I still prefer the system-config-* tools from Fedora over YaST. I don’t like its interface and it still seems to be unfriendly. I do think that its much improved over the original YaST I used back in SUSE 10.0

I don’t know if I can last an entire week with openSUSE 10.3. I can’t believe I even thought it possible. I am jonesing for Fedora right now, even though any other distro would probably do…

What’s wrong with SUSE you ask? Just about EVERYTHING! I’m not comfortable at all in this rancid environment. It sucks the life right out of you. I hope some SUSE people come running to save me from this turmoil I feel as I currently hate using this distro. Here’s my first impressions: (beware, the list is rather long)

GOOD

The items below are positives and the openSUSE team deserves credit for all of their hard work in these areas.

• Wireless works (+1)
  • My Intel wireless card from my T60p is recognized and associates with my access points
• The nautilus-open-terminal package is enabled by default (+2)
  • This is the right-click on desktop –> Terminal option, (something severely lacking in fedora and not easily installed in a kickstart)
  • Having this feature, its very simple to get started with the terminal which is definitely needed for the power user in me
• Install allowed me to choose not to use their grub (0) [while this is nice, if I had installed their grub, it would have wiped out my fedora grub components]
• zypper is much improved over the previous rug (10.1) tool (+1)
  • still needs work though
  • easy to add repos compared with fedora
    • packagekit can solve much of the incontinuity in fedora
    • though its nice to have a simple gui to add repos, knowing which repos is still a bit of an exercise in futility.

Positive Score: +4

BAD

Whle there is some good in openSUSE, its apparent to me that there is much to be improved.  As noted below, many more things are in need of improvement, to put it nicely.

• The install takes much longer than necessary (-3)
  • Still uses ugly YAST text user interface
    • YAST didn’t recognize my video driver, but could have just used the VESA driver for the gui install
  • Asks too many questions about details that could easily be simpler
  • Did not work well with other OSes (GRUB)
    • YAST installer wanted to overwrite my fedora GRUB configuration, shouldn’t Linux play well with each other in this sense?
• One-click install is more like 10-click (-1)
  • From opensuse.org, you can do what is called a “one-click install”, and about 8-10 clicks later its installed. If its one-click, its should be one (maybe two) clicks total.
• The initial GNOME config of openSUSE is too Windows-like (-1)
  • If I wanted my Linux desktop to look like Windows, I’d use KDE (or even run Windows)
  • It has only one bar, and at the bottom, not enough room for status apps
  • I had to add workspaces as only one was provided by default, that seems limiting
• bluez-gnome doesn’t have hidd or any sort of recognition for my bluetooth mouse (or anyone’s bluetooth mouse, for that matter) (-2)
  • dbus fails to recognize bluetooth mouse
  • There’s even a bug on it blaming others, yet it works in Fedora - https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=330461
• The bash prompt is ugly - (0)
  • This one is a personal preference, but its hard to tell when I am the root user and when I am not. As such, I will modify my .bashrc and fix the PS1 value
• The wireless driver for my T60p is not the new iwl3945, but the ipw3945 proprietary from intel - (-1)
  • The open driver has been out for quite some time
• Proprietary codecs were not easy to find, nor install (0)
  • Fedora doesn’t make this simple either really.  Yet, when I found them in Fedora they worked first try, gstreamer failed miserably several times in openSUSE
  • an attempt at a codec buddy like tool was made, but doesn’t work…
• zypper does not inform you of the dependencies needed to install even though it reports how much it will download (-1)
  • I want to know what packages I’ll be installing before I install them

Negative Score: -9

Total score for day 1:  -5 OOPS - that’s not good!

To be honest, I think I’m being very generous in some of the points I’m giving.  OpenSUSE makes it very difficult for my lifestyle so far.  I’m not sure what they can do with 10.3 to make it better, but I’d like to hear comments and suggestions on ways to help.

I’m sure hoping that day two will be better.  I’m already starting my list and will be testing such things as; video, development, lvm, raid, kvm/xen virtualization and much, much more.  As I continue to suffer through this bluetoothless mouse world openSUSE has created for me.

Cheers until tomorrow,

Herlo

Its been a little couple weeks since I posted anything useful in my Program of the Week (POW) series. And while I still plan to keep that up in the near future, I am going to be doing a new series, Distro Comparisons, with Flare!

My plan is to install the other two major distros of Linux (OpenSUSE and Ubuntu) and compare them with Fedora, my favorite distribution. I’ll be comparing them on installation, features, tools and any other thing that I regularly use in my day-to-day life. Once the distros are all installed (in a triple-boot, no less), I’ll be keeping each one for a week at a time over the next few months.

Over each week, I’ll write down things that are awesome, good, bearable, or just plain bug me, and each will get a score. To be fair, I’ll make sure to rank them with a maximum of +5 and a minimum of -5. Its possible that a negative score can happen, but I expect that this will not be the case for any of the distros.

Anyway, wish me luck on my triple-boot installs and my future blogging with these comparisons. I also hope this will enlighten others about the options available in each of the distros and encourage the developers to continue to improve the usability and functionality of their particular distribution.

Tonight, I’ll be installing and setting up OpenSUSE 10.3 and running it for the next week. During the holidays, I’ll be taking a bit of a break, so blogging might be a bit slower. In early January, I’ll install Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10) as well. See you all on the flip side.

Cheers,

Herlo

Another reminder for the Multi-Distro Release Party being held this coming Saturday. Ubuntu (Gutsy Gibbon), Fedora (Werewolf) and OpenSUSE (10.3) will be available via network install.

Map: http://tinyurl.com/yprnqr
When: Saturday, November 10, 2007 1pm-5pm MDT
What: Installfest, pizza, drinks and more.

Cheers,

Clint Savage
The Utah Open Source Foundation, Open Source for Utah, and the world!

Using AutoFS you can have all your network shares automatically mounted (CIFS, SMB, NFS, NIS) rather than defining every share in your /etc/fstab. To do this you just need to setup your /etc/auto.master (this is where it is on SUSE, it can be in a different file on other distros, check /etc/sysconfig/autofs for MASTER_MAP_NAME if its not there) with these lines:

 +auto.master
/net -hosts
/cifs /etc/auto.smb

the /net -hosts part says “mount all NFS shares on the network inside the /net folder”, -hosts is built into AutoFS and will scan your network for NFS shares.  The /cifs /etc/auto.smb says “mount all CIFS shares on the network in /cifs”, auto.smb is an external file AutoFS will read to figure out how to mount the CIFS shares.

So with this configuration you will now have the ability to just change into an nfs/cifs share as if it is already mount, like cd /net/fileserver/music or even list files in the share with ls /cifs/fileserver2/ebooks and it will auto mount the shares as you need them.  If you don’t use the shares for a certain amount of time (you can check /etc/sysconfig/autofs for DEFAULT_TIMEOUT to get the exact time), which allows you to roam network to network aimlessly always getting the shares on that network.

For more information check out the man pages for autofs, automount, and auto.master.

Just a quick reminder that Saturday, November 10, from 1-5pm will be the Multi-Distro Release Party at the Open Source Technology Center at Novell. Ubuntu (GutsyGibbon), Fedora (Werewolf) and OpenSUSE (10.3) will be available via network install. Also, we’ll have a few short presentations about the three released distributions, food and a network install server for the Installfest.We hope to see you all there!

Map: http://tinyurl.com/yprnqr
When: Saturday, November 10, 2007 1pm-5pm MDT
What: Installfest, pizza, drinks and more.

Cheers,

Clint Savage
The Utah Open Source Foundation, helping Open Source grow in Utah

Aaron Toponce has posted up a poll on his blog here and I wanted to cover some of the hypocrisies in the post and express my own feelings.

I think Novell has done nothing but good things for the open source community by employing some of the best and brightest developers around the world to help develop some of the most innovative applications on the Linux desktop (Tomboy, Banshee, F-Spot, Open Office, Evolution, Compiz, AppArmor, and GNOME) and have even more great products coming down the line like Giver and Banter. They also provide us with a great distribution in openSUSE with features that no other distribution has, such as the SLAB menu, openSUSE build service, 1-Click Install and the codecs installer.

They also employ the kernel hacker Greg Kroah-Hartman (the maintainer of PCI, USB, I²C, driver core and the sysfs kernel) and are allowing him to improve hardware compatibility in Linux by running the Linux Driver Project.

So, to cast my vote, It would be a dream come true to work for such a great company like Novell.

And in response to his poll:

1. Novell has made a reputation for itself by laying off employees at a whim, with the AppArmor devs being the most recent example.
   1. Sun does the same thing, its part of owning a large corporation. And there are many reasons for layoffs, it doesn’t make anyone evil.
2. Sun has opened up nearly all of it’s Solaris operating system. Coming from a Solaris background in the early days, this is cool.
   1. How is “nearly” open source better than being completely open source like Novell is with SUSE?
3. Even though Novell apologized to the community for its agreement with Microsoft, knowing that they could be swallowed up any day now by the Redmond giant makes me nervous.
   1. Sun made a deal with Microsoft years ago:
      http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/features/sun_microsoft.html
      http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2004/apr04/04-02SunAgreementPR.mspx
4. Sun seems to have a promising future, where Novell seems to be riding the razors edge. I guess time will only tell there, however.
   1. This is just FUD/speculation, but I would have to disagree, openSUSE is looking better than ever and same goes with the rest of the products developed at Novell, I think nothing but great things are to come from them.
5. Sun has said, that if Microsoft goes on a patent litigation rampage, Sun will pull out it’s portfolio protecting Linux users.
   1. Novell has a policy for this http://www.novell.com/company/policies/patent/ and since a majority of their business is invested in Linux and Open Source, why should we doubt them? Especially when they haven’t done anything to make us doubt them.

I would also recommend reading this article which describes the SuSE take over by Novell and how they have helped the open source community.

The openSUSE 10.3 torrents can be found here:

http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/10.3/iso/torrent/

and if you can’t use bittorent wherever you are, you can use the metalinks here: http://download.packages.ro/metalink/opensuse/

to get more information on metalinks go here: http://en.opensuse.org/Metalinks

I’m very excited about the openSUSE 10.3 release, there have been a lot of great changes and we are going to celebrate all the hardwork that went into it by having a launch party on Novell’s Provo campus in Building A (the open source technology center) at 6:00 pm on October 4th. We would love to have any contributors that will be in Provo on Thursday to come and tell us about about the features they helped get into 10.3. We will also be providing release DVDs and NFS network shares for anyone who is interested in using 10.3 and can help new users get it up and running on their machines.

You can read the release notes here

The party will be at:

1800 Novell Pl, Provo, UT
Building A (Open Source Technology Center)

So come help us celebrate the 10.3 release with pizza and soda!

Only once in a great while will we see an event like this one. Only once will there be so many shiny new distributions to choose from. Only once will OpenSUSE, Ubuntu and Fedora be released within one month of each other.

Because of this The Utah Open Source Foundation is announcing the first and probably only Multi-Distro Release Party in Utah. The release party will involve all three major distros, plus anyone is welcome to bring their own distro to hand out.

The party will be held on Saturday, November 10, from 1-5pm at the Open Source Technology Center at Novell. We’ll have a few short presentations about the three released distributions, food and a large network install server for the Installfest.

We hope to see you all there!

Map: http://tinyurl.com/yprnqr
When: Saturday, November 10, 2007 1pm-5pm MDT
What: Installfest, pizza, drinks and more.

Cheers,

Clint Savage
The Utah Open Source Foundation, Making Open Source better in Utah!

To install postgresql you just need to use the SUSE package manager, either from yast or from zypper:

zypper in postgresql-server
or
yast -i postgresql-server

By default Postgresql on SUSE is setup in ‘ident’ mode, which matches your SQL user with your unix user, so only the unix user ’sontek’ can login to the database with the username ’sontek’. This is great security but is confusing the first time you are setting up the server because you wont be able to login with your user or root.

What you have to do is switch your user to postgres :
su - postgres

and then you will be able to setup your own user account: 
createuser ’sontek’ 

and now your user will be able to login to the postgresql server with your account.

The other issue with ident is now only unix users will be able to connect to your database server, so if you are a programmer and need to write an application that connects to the database you will need to setup a non-ident user. To do this you first need to create a user with a password:

createuser ‘appuser’ –pwprompt -E

This will create a user named ‘appuser’ and will prompt you for a password that will be encrypted.

and then add this line to your /var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_hba.conf file:

host   all        appuser         127.0.0.1/32          md5

This will setup your server to  allow ‘appuser’ to be authenticated via an md5 password. After you modify the pg_hba.conf file you will need to restart postgresql and then you are all set to start working with postgresql on SUSE!

/etc/init.d/postgresql restart

To install SUSE without a CD-ROM all you need is a USB Drive and the ISO. Grab the ISO and mount it:

mount -o loop /data/operatingsystems/openSUSE\ 10.3\ i386.iso /mnt/temp

now mount your thumb drive, If you don’t know what device your thumb drive is you can run:

dmesg

You’ll see something like:

usb-storage: device found at 5
usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
scsi 3:0:0:0: Direct-Access Kingston DataTraveler 2.0 1.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] 1994752 512-byte hardware sectors (1021 MB)

So, my thumb drive is /dev/sdb:

mount /dev/sdb /mnt/thumbdrive

and then copy the files from boot/<arch>/loader to your USB Drive. Then move isolinux.cfg to syslinux.cfg

cp /mnt/temp/boot/i386/loader/ * /mnt/thumbdrive
mv /mnt/thumbdrive/isolinux.cfg /mnt/thumbdrive/syslinux.cfg

and then unmount your USB drive and run syslinux on it.

umount /mnt/thumbdrive
syslinux /dev/sdb

and then you will be able to boot off of your thumb drive and launch the SUSE installer and install from NFS, FTP, CIFS, or your local harddrive. One caveat of this method is that it will now try to install grub onto your thumb drive, so after it boots up the base system into memory, unplug your drive.

This does still change the boot order in which grub detects its drives from. So (hd0,0) is actually going to be your thumb drive, not your first disk. So on your first boot you will have to modify /boot/grub/menu.lst and point it to the right disk.

OpenSUSE just announced the other day their new news site news.opensuse.org. Its nice to see that a news site was created. The only one up til now seems to have been planetsuse.org, which I still enjoy visiting.

This is a really cool idea that Nat came up with. The idea is that all the Linux engineers in the company stop what they are doing for a week and get to work on whatever they want. Kind of like a google thing but for a whole week. Unfortunately, there a some big things that have to get taken care of otherwise I would be joining them this week even though I don’t have those mad elite hacking skillz. Hopefully the next time around I’ll be able to participate. In the announcement there is the link to the website which has pictures and videos already. Hopefully some really cool stuff comes out of this. You can also add your ideas and contribute from your own desk from the website.

Here is the announcement for the event from Nat on the openSuSE announce list:

Hi everyone,

At Novell we’ve been planning a special internal event that will run
this week, from June 25th to 29th. We’re calling it Hack Week.

During Hack Week, our entire Linux engineering team — hundreds of
people — will be working on whatever Linux or open source projects
interest them. Everyone will work alone or in teams, on existing open
source projects or new ideas of their own. No one will tell them what
or what not to do — it’s a free week for free hacking, driven by
individual passion.

To make it easier for our hackers to find and publicize their projects,
we’ve created an Idea Pool web site where we’ve all spent the last
couple of weeks sharing ideas and finding collaborators. This web site
is open to the public here:

http://idea.opensuse.org/

Although this is a Novell event, we’re running it with full
transparency. You’ll be able to follow our progress and projects on the
Idea Pool web site, either with the blog on the front page where we’ll
post videos from our seven main engineering sites[1], or by watching
individual project pages.

We invite you to participate where you can. If you’d like to help with
a project, feel free to add a comment to the discussion section of the
page and volunteer your support.

We hope that you’ll at least enjoy watching Hack Week progress. If it
is successful, we hope to run it again sometime soon, with even more
participation from the community.

If you’re interested in following along, you might check the following
sites first:

-Hack Week Overview: http://idea.opensuse.org/content/hackweek

-Tags: http://idea.opensuse.org/content/blog/welcome-to-the-idea-pool

-Idea Pool code of conduct: http://idea.opensuse.org/content/etiquette

-Flickr pool: http://www.flickr.com/groups/hackweek/pool/

During the week, we’ll use the channel #opensuse-hackweek on
irc.freenode.net for general discussion (project-specific discussion
will find its own venue). Hope to see you there!

Happy hacking,
Nat

[1] Beijing, Bangalore, Prague, Nuernberg, Boston, Provo, Portland are
the main sites

At the end of last week we had a meeting that everyone from a couple groups had to attend. The main purpose of this meeting was to meet some of the upper management that is traveling from building to building within the company throughout the world. Didn’t expect it, but Andreas Jaeger is part of that upper management, not that he shouldn’t be. After the meeting, I decided that I had to go up and at least say hi(that and for the bragging rights ). So, I went up and was able to meet and shake hands with him for a couple minutes. For those of you that do not know who Andreas is, he is the head guy over the openSuSE distribution. His is one of the blogs that I follow on and off (http://andreasjaeger.blogspot.com/). You can always catch him in the openSuSE irc meetings and on the openSuSE mailing lists. From the few times that I’ve read the meeting transcripts and his blog, he seems like a really cool and down to earth kind of guy. I was also impressed when talking to him in person. Thinking about it, I’m just some peon intern and he didn’t really have to take a couple minutes to talk to me. None the less he did.