- Alp-community-wg

zypper Updates
by Rubens Carlos 05 Sep '23

05 Sep '23

Hello team I have this problem when applying zypper update http://en.opensuse.org/Zypper/Troubleshooting Unexpected exception. Receive: script died unexpectedly History: - [11-Resource temporarily unavailable] I tried this below it didn't work /usr/sbin/registercloudguest --force-new sudo SUSEConnect -list-extensions zypper refresh --force zypper clean --all zipper ref

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zypper Updates
by Rubens Carlos 05 Sep '23

05 Sep '23

Hello, Team. when i try to run zypper updates i get the following message on screen http://en.opensuse.org/Zypper/Troubleshooting Unexpected exception. Receive: script died unexpectedly History: - [11-Resource temporarily unavailable] I tried this below it didn't work /usr/sbin/registercloudguest --force-new sudo SUSEConnect -list-extensions zypper refresh --force zypper clean --all zipper ref

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Proposal: Creating a Leap replacement based on ALP.
by Simon Lees 03 Feb '23

03 Feb '23

This hackweek a group of us have been looking at using the ALP binaries provided by SUSE to create a functional successor to openSUSE Leap. **Goals:** * Creating and maintaining it should be manageable by a small number of community volunteer maintainers, but at the same time should be scalable to grow with additional contributors. * It should be possible for community members to easily contribute additions in their preferred form whether rpm, container or something else. * Use ALP Sources wherever possible (In some cases this may require building them in a different format). * Make it possible to support smaller desktops including supporting X11, Wayland and xwayland. * Support upgrading systems from Leap 15.5 in most cases. This will likely mean alongside supporting transactional updates so that SUSE:ALP -> openSUSE:ALP is possible, it also needs to be possible to still support traditional RW filesystems with zypper up and dup. * Support running ALP containerised workloads but aim to avoid using containers in core operating system components. * Provide a lightweight environment for embedded usecases including Raspberry Pi's. To test that these goals are realistic, our main goal for this hackweek was to get Xfce running on a combination of ALP and backports packages. It seemed like a good choice as the package set is small enough to be handled by a couple of people and it's popular in the openSUSE community. We have made good progress and have achieved a lot, but more on that later. **Design:** The basic concept is to follow what we have done with Leap and create a "Backports" repository containing community packages from Tumbleweed to fill the gaps, one of the differences here is SUSE's repos for SLE contain around 10,000 packages while ALP contains around 2,000, despite this, we only had to add around another 350 packages to reach our initial goals. This includes yast and many gnome build dependencies that hopefully we will be able to take from ALP Sources once they are there. But even at this number it is probably manageable for a small team especially while the packages are present in Tumbleweed. Once we had the packages we needed, we could use our existing tooling such as kiwi to create images for testing including livecds. The biggest benefit to SUSE's Factory first policy is with the right packages everything that works in Tumbleweed also works here. Hopefully once we know how SUSE plans to build their container images, we will also be able to use the same approach partnered with the backports repo to build openSUSE community images if people are interested in maintaining them. We didn't investigate that this hackweek though. Lubos also spent a significant portion of his hackweek working with d-installer to see if it is currently suitable for working with the additional features that we require. **Design Limitations:** While it is possible to work around many of ALP's restrictions via simply building images differently, some other design decisions are hard to avoid due to the fact ALP binaries are built without certain features such as AppArmor and NIS. **Results:** Firstly we have a backports repository here[1] containing all the additional packages we required so far, we also have a wiki page documenting why many of these packages are required [2]. Secondly we built several KVM Images available for downloading and testing [3], that include Xfce, Enlightenment and a generic console environment. These are very limited images - really only designed as a proof of concept, so beyond very basic functionalities and basic desktop options, don't expect too much. Third we built live cds also for testing and available to download [4]. Initially we worked on Xfce and Enlightenment due to my personal interest but at that point Valentin discovered that we were only about 30 packages away from a usable Gnome system and decided to give it a shot. However, what Gnome ends up looking like in the future will depend a fair bit on what SUSE does with it for their ALP products. We also have a D-Installer image availiable as a proof of concept for installation. **Unanswered Questions:** * Desktop apps - SUSE's ALP will likely use Flatpaks, if these are built on OBS, it may be possible to build rpm versions from the same source. It is also likely that some openSUSE contributors will prefer to ship their applications as rpms. So Ideally we want to support both. * Maintenance / Release schedule - Ideally during the year at scheduled periods, we will bundle up changes from SUSE's ALP and the community and bundle them into some form of point release. I.e. it seems likely that SUSE will release the python3.11 stack at a point when the python3.10 stack is still supported so it would be ideal to pick one point to do regular migrations rather then them happening at random times. Currently we still don't have enough detail in this area to really assess what will be possible though. * There is a chance that SUSE will use less repositories than in the past and we may need to add repository- based filtering to zypper / yast so that they only show still supported packages for install. But again we are very much waiting for more detail here. **What Next:** We now know that this concept A works and B would be maintainable, so if there is broad community interest in this concept, the next step would be probably after the Leap 15.5 release, creating a backports package repo similar to the way the Leap ones have existed with bots etc. Then getting maintainers to contribute any other packages they wish to maintain. At the same time, setting up image building and openqa tests. In the meantime the packages in the backports repo under my namespace are mostly linked from Factory (i'll fix the rest) so i'll keep an eye on them and check they stay building. If you maintain a package and are interested in the list of dependencies, you'd also need to maintain to get it working, let me know and I can link it in from Factory. However, be aware that significant parts of the perl, python and ruby language stacks etc aren't packaged yet. Also in the spirit of lighter desktops i'd like to get sway packaged as well as it will give a good indication of whats needed for the other smaller wayland desktops. The name is something else to consider, should we just use Leap for the open source builds of SUSEs ALP products, should we do something else entirely? Given that SUSE is using names of alps as release code names I chose to do something similar but different, This project is meant to be less extreme then a trip up into the alps, more like a relaxing picnic or stroll through the hills so this prototypes codename is Grassy Knoll because it sounds cool and maybe I've been playing too much dwarf fortress. Either way, it may not be the best name for the project long term. **FAQ:** * Why didn't we look at KDE? - KDE has a much larger packet set, Also part of my initial goal was to create something small enough that if I needed to maintain it with a couple of people mostly for our own personal usecases we'd be able to. KDE doesn't fit within that scope, however from the testing we have done this week if someone wanted to maintain KDE, it shouldn't require too many changes from the packages in Tumbleweed and may provide a good way to do KDE going forward with ALP but i'll leave that decision with the KDE Maintainers Finally a massive thanks to the other members of this hackweek team: Maurizio Galli, Lubos Kocman and Valentin Lefebvre. They took a concept I had in my head and helped transform it into a functioning prototype. Also a big thanks to Fabian Vogt for answering all my "why won't kiwi build this"-questions. If you have questions thoughts or suggestions feel free to reach out to us via email or in the openSUSE-ALP channels on Discord / IRC / Matrix. we will also work on getting this information into the wiki. 1. https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/home:simotek:GrassyKnoll:Backports 2. https://en.opensuse.org/User:Simotek:GrassyKnoll 3. https://mirrorcache-au.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/simotek:/GrassyKnoll… 4. https://mirrorcache-au.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/simotek:/GrassyKnoll… -- Simon Lees (Simotek) http://simotek.net Emergency Update Team keybase.io/simotek SUSE Linux Adelaide Australia, UTC+10:30 GPG Fingerprint: 5B87 DB9D 88DC F606 E489 CEC5 0922 C246 02F0 014B

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GUI Package Manager Unable To Install Opensuse Micro OS packages
by Mason Mullins 06 Aug '22

06 Aug '22

If this has already been addressed, I apologize as I didn't find it. When attempting to install Micro OS packages such as Virtualbox or VLC from the GUI Package Manager it fails with the error: can't create transaction lock on /usr/lib/sysimage/rpm/.rpm.lock (Read-only file system) I installed the VLC flatpack from the GUI no problem. As there is no flatpack for Virtualbox I then tried to install Virtualbox via cli transactional-update and it installed.

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GRUB2 Configuration
by Mason Mullins 05 Aug '22

05 Aug '22

Decided to install the Micro OS Desktop Gnome. First thing I notice is that during the installation GRUB fails to detect and configure for other operating systems, in this case Windows 10 (yeah, I know but I need it for certain tasks), so there is no GRUB boot menu item for the other OS. I ran the installation twice just to be sure I didn't miss anything. Fortunately, I can still boot that by entering my BIOS boot menu, but that's an unnecessary additional step IMHO.

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Meeting minutes from discussion with ALP Lifecycle WG and Product
by Lubos Kocman 04 Aug '22

04 Aug '22

All meeting minutes can be found here: https://etherpad.opensuse.org/p/ReleaseEngineering-meeting Meeting is hosted here https://meet.opensuse.org/ReleaseEngineeringMeeting ## Attendees lkocman, coolo, sbehlert Topics: Simon Lees's email after the frist Lifecycle WG meeting: Some of the lifecycle changes being proposed here have some pretty significant impacts on the future of openSUSE's stable distro. The current plan being discussed seems to be only offering the "fasttrack" option for the community. Which would make it basically a copy of centos-stream which as we know didn't go down well in that community and I don't think it would go down well in ours. Lubos to invite Stefan Kulow to the next regular Community WG meeting (done, let's see if he accepts). Stephan pointed me to PM Stefan B. Understanding of ALP lifecycles Stefan B.: No lifecycle is being pushed by SUSE on the community, and since ALP will be built in public, we're free to select what works for the community the best with available resources (specifically also maintenance team), etc. Stefan B. : The mentioned FastTrack - when there is a new version, think about Leap as we have it nowadays. Stefan B.: think about the decoupling of the lifecycle per "component". Unlike in current Leap / SLES some of the components will be delivered as flatpaks and containers, and these can have various lifecycles. lkocman: That also depends on where we consume individual blocks, e.g., the desktop. If it's flathub, then the lifecycle is given by whoever maintains the flathub application. On the other side, we would have a bit more flexibility if it's an OBS "flatpak" repo. lkocman: In the context of base-os, we'd probably have to follow the "basic" lifecycle of SLES. Similar to Leap nowadays with small overlap (1/2 of the release cadence e.g., 12+6 months or 6+3 months as in SLE Micro, that's to be discussed. lkocman: mentioned that original proposals were offering Leap

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Micro OS, a short first impression
by Mathias Homann 02 Aug '22

02 Aug '22

I just tried Micro OS as a desktop for ... i admit, not long, maybe an hour, because I just found it to be *unusable* as a desktop for anyone who does not know all the differences between a transactional OS and a traditional Linux OS. To be frank and outright: While I believe that there definitely is a place for such a thing as transactional OS updates and package installations, that place is not on a desktop. At least not unless the user is actually *told about it* at first login. I installed µOS as "Plasma Desktop" in a VM, and was greeted after login with a plain Plasma Desktop with almost no apps, and no YaST either. And after finding discover I found that every installation process after the first failed without telling me why. Yes, I know, transactional, yadda yaddda - but the user needs to KNOW that each install needs a REBOOT (hello, windows 98) to be able to install another application - and the easiest way to be sure that the user knows that is what? Guess? Yep, telling them. which µOS does not, as of 20220718. So - begone for now. I'll have another look in a while(or maybe use it for the kind of stuff where it makes sense, like kubernetes workers or something like that). If this comes across as a bit harsh: what can I say, that was a bit disappointing after 25 years of (almost) nothing but positive experiences with SuSE and later openSUSE products. Cheers MH

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My 2 cents on MicroOS
by Promet 25 Jul '22

25 Jul '22

Just gave MicroOS a try. As a person who tried Silverblue & Kionite before, I must say the experience with MicroOS is, wow, much better! I am a traditional Chinese user (and know a bit Japanese) and I have struggled to get Chinese/Japanese input installed and utilized in these two. But CJK input in MicroOS works like a charm. Related packages are installed already once you selected your language during installation, all I need to do is add the input methods that I have always been using. Multimedia also works out of the box as I went to HTML5 video test page with Firefox and saw no problems with playing the video. I'm always a KDE supporter when using SUSE, coz I love how polish KDE is under SUSE. But GNOME looks gd as well. The only thing looks weird is it lacks YaST, I only noticed that when others pointed out. It's not SUSEish once there's no YaST, right? ;) But I guess YaST modules wouldn't be that useful in MicroOS as everything in the system is read-only? Software installation is the most confusing thing for me. I figure out there are 3 ways to install software under MicroOS: 1. transactional-update pkg install Pretty much like traditional zypper in but needs to reboot every time, it makes the concept of immutable OS irrelevant if you install everything this way 2. toolbox More like the traditional way than 1 actually. My understanding is that it installs software in a separate container? 3. flatpak No explanations needed I guess? I still have to think and choose from the above 3 ways when installing software. For example, I am a heavy user of the Telegram messenger. I wanted to get Telegram installed, and I have to think: Method 1? No, it's not a system software. 2? May be, let's give a try...only I've installed bunch of dependencies I realized that Telegram is a desktop software so Flatpak is obviously the best answer! It's a bit confusing tbh, if MicroOS is the new stable release in future, surely users need time to adapt. At this time I still haven't tried system-wide update as there are no new snapshots for TW, not sure if the GUI way works (I found on the net that GUI update seems waiting to be finished but the QA list does mention about the test of GUI update?) From my short experience I think MicroOS is an interesting concept, it's a funny project and I am looking forward to its development, but I think it has a long way to go to replace Leap.

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Re: ALP WG Meeting minutes - July 5th 2022
by Dan Čermák 24 Jul '22

24 Jul '22

Jiri Slaby <jslaby(a)suse.cz> writes: > On 05. 07. 22, 17:46, Dan Čermák wrote: >> we have mostly focused this week's meeting on how the ALP Desktop is >> going to look like and how we can dispel fears around flatpaks and >> containers when it comes to the ALP desktop. > > I have never looked into this container stuff in more detail. But one of > the concerns I was always afraid of was how this behaves WRT shared > libraries and their memory footprint? IOW, containers kill the purpose > of shlibs completely and one has to hold all of the versions (per each > container on the top of ones from the base system) in memory, right? > This sounds as if using static libraries. A small follow up on this one, more in the context of flatpaks though. The question has been raised, whether flatpaks sharing a runtime would benefit from memory deduplication of shared libraries in the common runtime. The short answer is: yes. The longer and much more elaborate answer can be found in this great reply from upstream: https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/4997#issuecomment-1192616912 So as long as we don't stop dynamically linking, there shouldn't be any huge memory penalties for flatpak applications. Cheers, Dan -- Dan Čermák <dcermak(a)suse.com> Software Engineer Development tools SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH Frankenstrasse 146 90461 Nürnberg Germany (HRB 36809, AG Nürnberg) Managing Director/Geschäftsführer: Ivo Totev, Andrew Myers, Andrew McDonald, Boudien Moerman

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New users for the MicroOS Desktop test for ALP documentation
by Syds Bearda 22 Jul '22

22 Jul '22

Hi, I'm looking forward to everyone test driving (and staying afterwards with) MicroOS, but please make sure you know what you are in for. MicroOS Desktop is not ready for a full release to the public. Gnome is currently RC and KDE is still Alpha. Both should be changed soon enough to a further state, but when installed today, these are the facts. Please refer to the official documentation for MicroOS to understand MicroOS overall [1] and MicroOS Desktop in particular [2]. Happy testing! /Syds [1] https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:MicroOS [2] https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:MicroOS/Desktop

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