May 2010 - openSUSE Features - openSUSE Mailing Lists

[openFATE 306905] Create simple fallback output when using live CD
by fate_noreply＠suse.de 15 Nov '10

15 Nov '10

Feature added by: Piotrek Juzwiak (BenderBendingRodriguez) Feature #306905, revision 1 Title: Create simple fallback output when using live CD openSUSE-11.2: Unconfirmed Priority Requester: Mandatory Requested by: Piotrek Juzwiak (benderbendingrodriguez) Description: We all know that a live CD is best to test out the distro. We also know that not every piece of hardware will be discovered correctly (mainly graphic card). I was thinking about including a simple output with text like "if the X server failed to start and you see just a black screen then try sax2 -r 0=vesa" on the TTY1 just after initializing the X server. Many people get discouraged by such simple thing or sometimes they don't even know what to do in such cases. This should be very simple to implement and will help A LOT to users new to linux. -- openSUSE Feature: https://features.opensuse.org/306905

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[openFATE 306418] Bluetooth configuration via YaST
by fate_noreply＠suse.de 15 Nov '10

15 Nov '10

Feature added by: Joop Boonen (worldcitizen) Feature #306418, revision 1, last change by Title: Bluetooth configuration via YaST openSUSE-11.2: Unconfirmed Priority Requester: Important openSUSE-11.3: Unconfirmed Priority Requester: Important Requested by: Joop Boonen (worldcitizen) Description: Corrently is rather complex for a newbee to configue for instance a gps receiver that is connected via bluetooth. Configure /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf rfcomm bind rfcomm0 start gpsd /dev/rfcomm0 It would be helpful is bleutooth and bluetooth devices could be configured via YaST. -- openSUSE Feature: https://features.opensuse.org/306418

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[openFATE 306634] Grey out services in Yast not installed
by fate_noreply＠suse.de 15 Nov '10

15 Nov '10

Feature added by: Drew Kwashnak (dragonbite) Feature #306634, revision 1 Title: Grey out services in Yast not installed Buildservice: Unconfirmed Priority Requester: Desirable openSUSE-11.2: Unconfirmed Priority Requester: Desirable openSUSE-11.3: Unconfirmed Priority Requester: Desirable Package Wishlist: Unconfirmed Priority Requester: Desirable Requested by: Drew Kwashnak (dragonbite) Description: Yast lists a lot of configuration options, such as in the Network services section, which users may not necessarily use or knows what it does. This is most likely with newer users to Linux and/or those who are not as involved with system/network administration. I am suggesting that if the related service is not installed (like Samba Server for example) then the configuration option in Yast should be greyed out. It gives a visual indicator of what you don't need to worry about configuring while lets you know what is installed and can be configured. Perhaps users clicking on the greyed-out icons can be greeted with a message giving a brief description of what the service does and offers a chance to install it at that point if they are interested. At that point it could drop them into the software manage screen with the required and recommended services filtered in the package list and the required ones to be already checked off so all the user has to do is click to Accept/Install them. Ultimately when I was trying to configure my openSUSE for the network, for which I am still very new to even though I've learned a lot so far, I was confused by all of the choices and ended up making a bigger mess than accomplishing what I was trying to do. PS: This is my frist openFATE entry. If I am going about this incorrectly please let me know. -- openSUSE Feature: https://features.opensuse.org/306634

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[openFATE 306667] Include Ramlog application
by fate_noreply＠suse.de 15 Nov '10

15 Nov '10

Feature added by: Glenn Doig (doiggl) Feature #306667, revision 1 Title: Include Ramlog application openSUSE-11.3: Unconfirmed Priority Requester: Desirable Requested by: Glenn Doig (doiggl) Description: See article Improve system performance by moving your log files to RAM http://www.linux.com/feature/141231 (http://www.linux.com/feature/141231) http://tofu3.szm.sk/ramlog/ (http://tofu3.szm.sk/ramlog/) (Some info) The Ramlog project lets you keep your system logs in RAM while your machine is running and copies them to disk when you shut down. If you are running a laptop or mobile device with syslog enabled, Ramlog might help you increase your battery life or the life of the flash drive on your mobile device. As a side effect of using Ramlog, you will be less likely to be caught out by a daemon that suddenly starts sending a message to syslog every 30 seconds and saps your battery keeping the hard disk spinning. Rpm: http://tofu3.szm.sk/ramlog/1.1.0/rpm/ramlog-1.1.0-1.noarch.rpm (http://tofu3.szm.sk/ramlog/1.1.0/rpm/ramlog-1.1.0-1.noarch.rpm) Thankyou -- openSUSE Feature: https://features.opensuse.org/306667

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[openFATE 306655] zypper: new command needed
by fate_noreply＠suse.de 15 Nov '10

15 Nov '10

Feature added by: Sascha Manns (saigkill) Feature #306655, revision 1 Title: zypper: new command needed openSUSE-11.2: Unconfirmed Priority Requester: Important Requested by: Sascha Manns (saigkill) Description: Today my X-System crashed. So i become an Idea. It would be graeat, if we can implement an Function in zypper, who search the whole RPM-Database, and detects Errors with the installed Packages. And if he found Errors, that he connects to the Net and reinstalls the broken Packages. -- openSUSE Feature: https://features.opensuse.org/306655

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[openFATE 306324] Improvements to Failsafe mode
by fate_noreply＠suse.de 15 Nov '10

15 Nov '10

Feature added by: Rajko Matovic (rajko_m) Feature #306324, revision 1, last change by Title: Improvements to Failsafe mode openSUSE-11.3: Unconfirmed Priority Requester: Important Requested by: Rajko Matovic (rajko_m) Description: Currently when kernel fails to load, user can only give up on installing openSUSE. Failsafe mode can help sometimes, but load of kernel parameters can introduce problems later. Knoppix offers alternatives that may work on particular hardware without going trough process of discovery of proper kernel parameters, and it has help pages available right from the boot screen. Both combined make booting possible with very little to no experience in kernel issues. -- openSUSE Feature: https://features.opensuse.org/306324

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[openFATE 306902] Scripts by the users
by fate_noreply＠suse.de 15 Nov '10

15 Nov '10

Feature added by: Jan Gerrit Marker (JanGerritJose) Feature #306902, revision 1 Title: Scripts by the users openSUSE-11.3: Unconfirmed Priority Requester: Neutral Requested by: Jan Gerrit Marker (jangerritjose) Description: There some problems which could be solved easily by shell scripts (like deleting plasma-appletsrc if something is wrong with plasma). But nobody knows it and suddenly there are 10 questions about problems with Plasma in 10 forums which all could be fix by deleting plasma-appletsrc. There could be a webinterface where users could upload their scripts. There would be a description of the actions of the script and the problem, they try to fix. Users could use a YaST module to search for a script which fixes the problem, download it and execute it. There could be a voting system about the scripts: solved the problem fast, not so fast, did something wrong and so on. To ensure that the scripts don't destroy the system there could be two categories: "Tested", "Untested". Trustable openSUSE-Members could move the scripts from "Untestes" to "Tested". Or, if there are a lot of good votes for the script, the script would be moved automatically. -- openSUSE Feature: https://features.opensuse.org/306902

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[openFATE 307376] On-the-fly encrypting/decrypting filesystem
by fate_noreply＠suse.de 15 Nov '10

15 Nov '10

Feature added by: Patrick Weimer (smoovn) Feature #307376, revision 1 Title: On-the-fly encrypting/decrypting filesystem openSUSE-11.2: Unconfirmed Priority Requester: Desirable openSUSE-11.3: Unconfirmed Priority Requester: Desirable Requested by: Patrick Weimer (smoovn) Description: I'm searching for a on-the-fly encryption for my /home/ partition. Maybe its a good feature for OpenSuSE itself? -- openSUSE Feature: https://features.opensuse.org/307376

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[openFATE 306666] Complete remove-install-update with zypper
by fate_noreply＠suse.de 15 Nov '10

15 Nov '10

Feature added by: James Carter (jimc_uclamath) Feature #306666, revision 1 Title: Complete remove-install-update with zypper openSUSE-11.3: Unconfirmed Priority Requester: Important Requested by: James Carter (jimc_uclamath) Description: This is a feature request for zypper-1.0.9-0.1.1 in OpenSuSE 11.1. Obviously the improvements would go into a future SuSE release. In my use case, I have 0.5 FTE to spend on system administration of about 120 researchers' workstations and compute nodes running OpenSuSE. My goals involving zypp in order of frequency of occurrence are: apply security patches; install or remove software according to particular research groups' needs; deploy new machines that have no OS on the disc; and upgrade every 18 months to a new distro version. To accomplish these tasks I need to minimize hand labor in package management. What am I trying to accomplish in package management? Software which is not wanted on a machine should be removed if present, and software which is wanted should be installed if absent, plus dependencies, or upgraded to the latest patch version. I suspect that quite a lot of SuSE users, not just me, would like a package management program which could enforce a locally created pattern, automatically removing, adding and updating packages as needed. Back in SuSE 8.2, rug and zypper/libzypp being in the future, I wrote a perl script to make these goals happen. When zypper first came out I investigated it but found it lacking; the lack of a "dry run" (-D) switch precluded testing. But now with the 64bit x86_64 architecture, and with dependencies involving components and version relations, my script is not flexible enough. I again investigated zypper. With the features now present, specifically the -D (dry run) switch, zypper can now do part of my job if shepherded by a lot of supporting scripting. I would like to list features which would make it useful for the whole job. 1) In rare but important cases we need to blacklist or "hold back" updates. Debian has this feature, and even Microsoft Windows can do it. 2) Zypper should have a "negative removal" mode, that is, rather than listing all the packages you want to remove, you list all the packages you want to keep. Zypper will add all their dependencies, and the non-listed packages (including their exclusive dependencies) will be removed. (My new script uses kludge techniques with rpm, not zypper, to do this calculation, but it's hard and time-consuming, 0.125 second per installed package, to deal with dependencies.) 3) Zypper should have an option to be silent about packages already installed. In other words, you list all the packages you want on the machine, and it installs the missing ones, if any. My new script excludes installed packages from the list of wanted packages before feeding the remainder to zypper, but zypper internally could do this much more neatly. 4) I assume that if I take a back-version machine and trick zypper into orienting on a new distro version, it will recognize that a new version is available for every package and take action accordingly. The distro version (and architecture: changing i586 to x86_64) should be selectable on the command line. 5) The YaST installer downloads a package, then installs it, then repeats. (Or perhaps downloading and installation are smartly overlapped.) Zypper should do the same thing, not requiring disc space for every affected package at the same time. To check that all packages can be downloaded, it can do HEAD requests at the start. There should also be a command line option to not be anally retentive about missing packages: if a transient failure prevents downloading, always retry the package (and those requiring it) later, and if the failure is permanent, install as much as you can, don't die on the spot like zypper presently does. 6) Zypper should install packages in dependency order, so if a failure interrupts the process the machine has no missing dependencies, even if wanted packages are missing. I don't know if zypper already does this. The YaST installer, which I assume is based on libzypp, is seen to install aaa_base kind of in the middle of the set of packages, which leads me to bring up this point. 7) Zypper should have options to remove, install or replace packages itself like it does now, but it should also be able to emit a list or table of affected packages that can be postprocessed before installation or removal. For removal this would be package full names; for installation it would be URLs in the repositories (with an option for plain file names instead of file:/// URLs); for updates both items are needed. It would help in a lot of postprocessing situations if you could optionally ask for the package basenames to be prepended as another field; e.g. if the full name is "zypper-1.0.9-0.1.1" the basename is "zypper". Also helpful in setting up the list of wanted packages would be a separate table of dependency relations, e.g. when the output says "AA BB" it means that package AA is required by package BB. Machine readable format is important; you might make an option to pick tabular output or English texts. In my new script to get dependencies I do "rpm -e --test $pkg" and then parse the English output, which is a crock, takes a lot of time, and is unreliable if you ever "improve" the texts. 8) Wherever a list of thousands of packages or URLs can appear on the command line, zypper should also be able to read these from a file. If either kind of list turns up with zero packages, zypper should shut up and install each of them, same as if one or more packages are on the list. 9) Likely zypper already determines the product, version and architecture from /etc/SuSE-release, but there are so many variants of the first line that it's a crock to parse it. Presently you give "VERSION = 11.1" in the second line (with blanks); I would suggest also giving the PRODUCT and ARCH, and without blanks so in a shell script one can do eval `grep '=' /etc/SuSE-release` rather than dumbly using "tr" to make the blanks go away. 10) Likely it is possible to use the Python binding of libzypp to easily write a wrapper script that easily does all of the above requests. (I prefer Perl; can we have that language binding also?) However, I was not able to find documentation to even get started, i.e. to specify the repositories and a list of packages. So my new script reeks of kludges and fails to use zypper (libzypp) for the most important steps. My final request is for documentation on libzypp that I can use for projects of this kind. Related FATE tickets: * 300758 (../300758) : Show orphan packages (rejected in v11.1). Also 306627 (../306627) , a duplicate with a better use case description. * 302159 (../302159) : Only download packages (rejected in v11.1). Just give me the list of URLs; I'll download them on my home DSL connection, distribute on the home net, and then do rpm -F *.rpm. * 305634 (../305634) : Distro version upgrade from the command line using zypper. Hear, hear! My old script could do this. -- openSUSE Feature: https://features.opensuse.org/306666

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[New: openFATE 308466] kbasic
by fate_noreply＠suse.de 12 Nov '10

12 Nov '10

Feature added by: Lee Matheson (oldcpu) Feature #308466, revision 1 Title: kbasic openSUSE-11.3: Unconfirmed Priority Requester: Desirable Requested by: Lee Matheson (oldcpu) Description: KBasic is a programming language which is simply intuitive and easy to learn. It is a new programming language, a further BASIC dialect and is related to VB.NET™, Visual Basic®, Visual Basic for Application® and Java™. It combines many features of those tools and comes with built-in backward support for those tools and QBasic® as it is 100% syntax compatible to VB6, VBA and QBasic®. A big advantage is its reasonably similar look/feel will mean users migrating to openSUSE Linux from MS-Windows will be more at home with a programming language reasonably similar to what they are used to. -- openSUSE Feature: https://features.opensuse.org/308466

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