August 2012 - openSUSE Project - openSUSE Mailing Lists

[opensuse-project] [reminder] openSUSE Project Meeting tomorrow at 17:00 UTC
by openSUSE Meeting Reminder 21 Aug '12

21 Aug '12

Hello all, The biweekly project meeting will be held tomorrow at 17:00 UTC in #opensuse-project on freenode. Everybody is invited to join and participate! Find out what time the meeting will be in your timezone: http://timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?day=22&month=8&year=2012&h… Agenda of the meeting: http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Project_meeting#Agenda_for_the_next_meeting If you cannot participate and want a specific question to be answered during the meeting, please add your question to: http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Project_meeting#Questions_Section Minutes and logs of previous meetings can be found at: http://community.opensuse.org/meetings/opensuse-project/ Thanks, -- openSUSE Meeting Reminder -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

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[opensuse-project] UEFI Secure Boot
by Andreas Jaeger 21 Aug '12

21 Aug '12

Olaf Kirch and Vojtech Pavlik, two SUSE colleagues of mine that are also kernel developers, have been looking with others at the UEFI situation and wrote up their findings and a proposal on what to do for openSUSE. We'll share here whatever they write, I guess they do a post a day for the next few days. First post is at: http://www.suse.com/blogs/uefi-secure-boot-overview/ I'm copied the text: In case you don’t know what this blog is talking about: UEFI is the “Unified Extensible Firmware Interface”, and “Secure Boot” is one of its more recent features that is generating a bit of a stir in the Open Source world. At SUSE, we have been looking at UEFI Secure Boot long and hard. On one hand, we agree that closing down some of the loopholes in the boot process is a worthwhile goal. For decades, we have accepted that this process has been one of the soft spots that are essentially unfixable without a major change in the BIOS. Now that this change is coming, we are ready to embrace it. And we’re also happy to see a much bigger change happening as part of this, which is the establishment of UEFI as the standard firmware on all x86 platforms. On the other hand, as a Linux company, we are seeing a number of issues that have been causing us quite some headaches, which we wanted to resolve before we publicly state our plans in this regard. In order to explain our concerns, let’s take a brief look at what Secure Boot really does, in a nutshell. In the world of UEFI, securing the bootstrapping process means establishing a chain of trust. The “platform” is the root of this chain of trust; I tend to think of it as the motherboard and the on-board firmware ROM. Or, put slightly differently, it’s the hardware vendor, and the chain of trust flows from that hardware vendor to the component manufacturers, the OS vendors, etc. On the legal side, this trust is established by a lot of contracts and other legal paperwork. On the level of bits and bytes, this trust is expressed via public key cryptography. The vendor puts a so-called Platform Key into the ROM, representing the root of trust. The trust relationships with operating system vendors and others is documented by signing their keys with the Platform Key. Finally, security is established by requiring that no code will be executed by the firmware unless it has been signed by one of these “trusted” keys – be it an OS boot loader, some driver located in the ROM of some PCI Express card, or be it an update of the firmware itself. Of course, one could make this a very long chain of trust, by requiring that everything that ever gets run on that machine be signed: the OS itself, the modules it loads, the binaries and shared libraries it loads, all the scripts executed by any random interpreter, and even the commands you type into a shell session. So obviously, that has to stop somewhere; and in the UEFI specification, that point is reached when the firmware hands control to the operating system. Essentially, if you want to use Secure Boot, you need to have your OS loader signed with a key trusted by the firmware, and you need the OS loader to verify that the kernel it loads can be trusted. Admittedly, this is glossing over quite some details – but that is of no real importance for this discussion. The crux of the matter is that this conflicts with the way the Open Source community has been developing code for several decades now. The Open Source movement began as an act of emancipation from the operating system vendors of that time. Open Source was and is about Freedom, not in a dogmatic, but really in some very practical sense. The Linux community is where it is today because people could just start their own distribution, build their own boot loader and kernel, and grow a community. It is thriving the way it is thriving today because there are thousands of people around the globe who rebuild their kernel ten times a day to fix bugs, to add enhancements, or to run their test harness on the latest set of changes. And it will only continue to thrive in this way if we keep it that way. From this point of view, Secure Boot is very much at odds with the Linux development model. Just for the record, I do not think this is a conspiracy, or a sinister attempt to kill Linux. That’s not going to happen. But while Secure Boot can be a significant improvement for many, it definitely creates obstacles for the Linux community. Granted, the Windows 8 Logo certification requires that BIOS vendors should allow users to turn off Secure Boot on x86 platforms, and we have hope that all BIOS vendors will actually implement this in a way that works well for Linux developers. But ideally, Linux developers should not be required to switch off a security feature in order to run their operating system. Thus, over the past months, our guiding questions when dealing with Secure Boot have been, how can we make it work for our customers, and how can we reconcile the requirements of Secure Boot with the needs of the Linux community. We plan to continue this series of blog postings soon with an overview of how we intend to support Secure Boot in SUSE Linux Enterprise, and what solutions we propose to the openSUSE community. -- Andreas Jaeger aj(a){suse.com,opensuse.org} Twitter/Identica: jaegerandi SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany GF: Jeff Hawn,Jennifer Guild,Felix Imendörffer,HRB16746 (AG Nürnberg) GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F FED1 389A 563C C272 A126 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

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[opensuse-project] Scanny: week report
by Piotr Niełacny 20 Aug '12

20 Aug '12

Hi guys, this is my first report about scanny for #1 week: http://ruby-blog.pl/GSoC/2012/05/28/scanny-week-1/ -- Piotr Niełacny -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

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[opensuse-project] Leaving the board.
by Peter Linnell 20 Aug '12

20 Aug '12

Hi, Some of you know, I have recently taken a position at SUSE here in Silicon Valley. I've joined the Sales Engineer/ SUSE Linux Technical Specialist team. It has been a bit more than a month and I can say it has been a really great experience. As I am now on the "inside", I can see that SUSE has never been better positioned to succeed in a long time. I've not had the chance to engage the business side of SUSE before in the same way I have with the engineering and openSUSE team side of things. That said, I've never had the kind of welcome joining a company like I have at SUSE. It's been extraordinary. Because of this, I must resign from the board. I've thoroughly enjoyed working with my fellow board members and I now consider them friends. It does not matter if they are SUSE employees or not. They all care a lot about the community. All my dealings with them have been very forthright and correct. As for me, I will not disappear from the community. Far from it. Now that I am here in North America, I am one more voice inside the company who will be actively evangelizing on the community's behalf. As I have reached out to my new colleagues, there is definitely an openness to listen, learn about and engage the community. I could go on longer, but I do want to thank publicly Alan Clark for helping me get on board. We as a community are really lucky to have him as a board member and chair. Alan has done a terrific job on behalf of the community, though often times it is quite invisible and not recognized publicly. I've learned he has enormous respect inside SUSE and he is a great ambassador for the community. Thanks for listening. Peter Linnell -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

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[opensuse-project] REMINDER - August 20th is the last day to apply for openSUSE Conference Travel Support
by Izabel Valverde 19 Aug '12

19 Aug '12

Hello all, August 20th is the last day to apply for sponsorship support to attend openSUSE Conference. Please read http://news.opensuse.org/2012/08/10/opensuse-conference-is-coming-sponsorsh… How to apply http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Travel_Support_Program Best regards, -- Izabel Valverde openSUSE Travel Support Program http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Travel_Support_Program http://news.opensuse.org/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

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[opensuse-project] fdisk project - GSoC weekly report 13
by Davidlohr Bueso 19 Aug '12

19 Aug '12

Hi, This week, with help from Petr, and I have been going over the GPT implementation for fdisk. Mostly dealing with newly found bugs and test cases. So far everything looks to be going well and will probably be sent for upstream revision in a couple of days. This final week I plan to continue testing and, once satisfied, write some automatic regression testing based on the scsi_debug kernel module. Thanks, Davidlohr -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

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[opensuse-project] 12.2 Public Release tasks: call for coordinators (3/3)
by Agustin Benito Bethencourt 19 Aug '12

19 Aug '12

Hi, This is the last mail of this series. A. Introduction In order to get the biggest possible impact for our Release some tasks needs to be accomplish.We in SUSE will take care of some of them and your input will be needed in order for other to happen. Since we do not have much time, coordination play a key role at this point. So we would like to propose the following. B. Proposal In the 12.2 Public Release Action Plan wiki page[1] you can see some tasks that we'll need your input in order to happen. In the process of getting input for the Release Process Document, some other might arise. We believe the best way to coordinate efforts will be to have one coordinator for each task/group of people that put effort in each task. At SUSE we have done the same, as you can see in the Organization Chart. This way we make sure the communication is efficient and each group can organize as they wish. Mailing lists, works in general, but for tight deadlines and having so many people involved in this process, we think a person acting as point of contact is a good improvement. C. Example For example: If three people contribute doing artwork, it would be great if one of them works as contact for this release process, making sure the communication among the artwork contributors and other teams involved, from SUSE and the community, works. D. Coordination Ludwig Nussel will add the contact data of that person in the wiki and will make sure that we all are aware of the tasks that need to be done and the deadlines/constrains we have. He will be our "Schedule Master" (he hates this role :-) ). E. Final Note We do not expect to be perfect this first time, but there is room for improvements during following releases. We take this as a learning process. [1] 12.2 Release Action Plan: http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Public_Release_Action_Plan saludos -- Agustin Benito Bethencourt openSUSE Team Lead at SUSE abebe(a)suse.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

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[opensuse-project] 12.2 Road Map - Public Release Schedule (2/3)
by Agustin Benito Bethencourt 17 Aug '12

17 Aug '12

Hi, last week the openSUSE Team at SUSE had a meeting to discuss the proposal for openSUSE 12.2 Release schedule made by the Release Manager. This proposal was supported past Tuesday in a coordination meeting where managers from SUSE involved in the process participated. Please check the Road Map[1] wiki page to get the confirmed dates: Basically are: * Technical contributions freeze: August 24th 13:00 UTC * Gold Master Declaration: August 30th * Release date: September 5th 12:00 UTC Please spread the word about the dates so our contributors now them. [1] Road Map: http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Roadmap saludos -- Agustin Benito Bethencourt openSUSE Team Lead at SUSE abebe(a)suse.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

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[opensuse-project] Release Process Action Plan (1/3)
by Agustin Benito Bethencourt 17 Aug '12

17 Aug '12

Hi, this is the first of three e-mails related with 12.2 Release. It deals with the diagram done about the Release process. A. Background We have invest some effort in talking internally to the people from different departments involved in openSUSE Release process to define the actions that each one of them take to make each release happen. We have concentrate in those that are currently happening or will need to take place the following weeks. We having consider most of those that take place during the Candidate release process or before that. We also haven't consider promotion activities that we do after each release. But above all, we haven't consider yet most of the work you guys do. Our team is willing to receive you input, so we can analyze together how to approach the next release trying to be even more efficient and engage even more people. >From SUSE side, we have detected already some points of improvements and more will arise the following weeks. We area specially interested in those actions that we currently we do internally and can be opened and those that already are, but for several reasons, the community cannot help us on. This process is part of the strategy of empowering more and more, little by little, the community in key aspects for the project. B. The documents We have used a simple tool (planner) to make a simple Gantt diagram with the tasks. The goal at this point is just to have a picture of what needs to be done and who is responsible for doing it. We will go further in following releases, adding time lines (start and finish dates) and effort (manpower involved) where is possible. We are already using this document internally for managing the tasks that we are currently doing. C. Why we think your input is needed This document must be accurate to be effective. Right now it only contains SUSE vision, which is partial, of what our release process is. We want to include those tasks you do or you participate on so it becomes useful also for others. We believe it can become a key element in the release process coordination in the near future. It is also an opportunity of defining the tasks we will be doing the following weeks to make openSUSE 12.2 happen. Please check the openSUSE 12.2 Release Process[1] wiki page for details. D. How to contribute We have identified some groups of people that work on the Release in an organized way and some other less organized. Some examples could be: * Editors * Translators * Technical contributors (organized around opensuse-packaging(a)opensuse.com) * Ambassadors * This contributors organized around the marketing mailing list * Artwork team There are probably several others we are missing. Since we are in the middle of the Release process, it would be great is those groups name a coordinator or one person from each group steps up and give us some input about the tasks they do during the release. Please feel free to edit directly the wiki page and add to the table the tasks. Ludwig Nussel[2], one of the new engineers on the openSUSE Team at SUSE will process and include you input in the document. If you contribute but are not organized in a group or simply prefer to use mail instead of editing the wiki, post what you do during the release process in this mailing list. We will discuss and include your input in the document. It doesn't matter if you work on the technical side, marketing, artwork, promotion.... all counts. It is extremely important that you include as soon as possible those tasks directly related with the Public Release phase in the 12.2 Public Release Action Plan table[3], since we want to make sure we don't skip them for 12.2 Release. [1] Release Process wiki page: http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Release_process [2] Ludwig Nussel http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Release_process#Organization_chart [3] 12.2 Public Release Action Plan: http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Public_Release_Action_Plan Saludos -- Agustin Benito Bethencourt openSUSE Team Lead at SUSE abebe(a)suse.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

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[opensuse-project] A simple report of preparation for COSCUP
by Max Lin 16 Aug '12

16 Aug '12

Hi All, You might known we've got COSCUP at 8/18 - 8/19 - and the complete official program list already announced, you can found it at http://coscup.org/2012/en/program/. This mail just want to let you know what is the current state of preparation for COSCUP. COSCUP, the largest FLOSS conference organized by local communities in Taiwan, and it keeps grow up. According to statistics from the registration website, this year, COSCUP will over 1200 participants! Collaboration KDE and openSUSE will collaboratively organize a full two-day track at the COSCUP this year. This time we bring a lot of exciting content, Will Stephenson and Aaron Seigo will be cooperation in the keynote talk; Yin-Yyun Qiao who work on Qt at Nokia will talk about new features of Qt5; Michal Chang will introduce what changes from openSUSE 12.1 to 12.2; others topics are cover KLyDE(lightweight KDE pattern), OBS, Akonadi, maintenance model, etc. It sounds nice, isn't it? openSUSE Team & Community COSCUP 2012 is the first conference that openSUSE Team supported since rename from Boosters Team. Will Stephenson and mine to participate COSCUP this year, local community and us would host a booth and brings talk, the important one is we will host a BoF at first night, chatting with local community and obtain the feedback. About booth, we prepared some cool stuff, ex. T-Shirt[1], flyers, stickers, Geeko doll, etc. If the entire venue can see Green Geeko, that will be very cool! Above is what we preparation for COSCUP, I will send a simple summary report after end of COSCUP(with pictures :). See you there and sorry for my poor English! Cheers, Max [1] http://goo.gl/Hj8id - Thanks Ben who are t-shirt' model. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

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