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The following hosts will be affected:

• static.opensuse.org
• api.opensuse.org
• build.opensuse.org
• connect.opensuse.org
• features.opensuse.org
• hermes.opensuse.org
• login.opensuse.org
• notify.opensuse.org
• svn.opensuse.org
• ci.opensuse.org

We do not expect any service interruptions, but some users run with strict certificate checks.

This article is contributed by Kamila Součkova

Introduction

As the btrfs wiki says: “Btrfs is a new copy on write filesystem for Linux aimed at implementing advanced features while focusing on fault tolerance, repair and easy administration.” Although under heavy development, it has become stable enough for personal use, and there are plenty of reasons to try it. What distinguishes it from earlier filesystems is that it has been designed with scalability and robustness in mind: it can handle huge files (up to 16EiB — a lot!), it can pack lots of files and directories efficiently, has built-in error detection methods (checksums of data and metadata), support for transparent compression, integrated multiple devices support (RAID-0, RAID-1 and RAID-10 so far) and more — see here for a more complete list.

In this how-to I will focus on one particularly neat feature: snapshots. Btrfs allows you to make read-only or writable snapshots of the state of your filesystem without wasting space with redundant data. Together with YaST’s Snapper module, this makes tracking FS changes and undoing undesired modifications a breeze.

Some Background

So how does btrfs do all that snapshot awesomeness? The answer is, it uses subvolumes. Subvolumes are something like separate filesystems within one partition: you can have several filesystem roots in the same container. With copy-on-write (COW) this means that “almost-separate filesystems” can share duplicate data and therefore save space. (Note: Subvolumes do not have a fixed size, they grow and shrink with the data they contain.)

With snapshots, one creates a copy of the whole filesystem within a new subvolume on the partition. As data is actually duplicated only once it is changed, making snapshots is both time- and space-efficient.

Time to Test It

Preparations

You will need the btrfs tools (package btrfsprogs). The Snapper YaST module provides a nice interface for btrfs’s snapshot functionality. You may create a new btrfs partition just for experimenting, or convert an existing ext3/ext4 filesystem. As for conversion, this is done using btrfs-convert; the good thing is that it can preserve the original ext FS and one can easily go back to it (see the wiki page for more info). Alternatively, openSUSE offers btrfs as an option during installation since 11.3.

Listing Snapshots

Once you have a partition, you can look at its snapshots with
snapper list
or view plain btrfs submodules/snapshots with
btrfs subvolume list

Note that in the snapper listing snapshot #0 is always the current system. Also note that for btrfs snapshots and submodules are the same thing.

Snapper Configs

Snapper keeps configs for your partitions; you can view them with
snapper list-configs

Configs allow you to specify when to make snapshots, how many of each tipe should be kept etc. They are stored in /etc/snapper/configs; config templates are in /etc/snapper/config-templates.

In case your root filesystem is btrfs, Snapper will have created a config that makes a “pre” and “post” snapshot pair whenever you use YaST or zypper in addition to the “timeline” snapshots.

You can create your own configs (e.g. for /home or whatever) with snapper create-config:
snapper -c create-config [-t template]
You need a config whenever you want a path other than the default /. (Always specify it with -c.)

Making Snapshots

To make snapshots manually use either
snapper [-c config-name] create --description "something that tells you what this is"
(and see snapper –help for more options); or the vanilla

btrfs subvolume snapshot /[subvolume-name]

A snapshot made with the former command will show in snapper list; one made with the latter will appear as a directory named in. Side note: Snapper actually stores its snapshots in/.snapshots/.

Viewing Differences

To see the differences between snapshots you may either mount the snapshots somewhere (with snapper mount , or simply browse to the snapshot location) and see for yourself, or use the very convenient snapper diff:
snapper diff
will give you the list of files changed between the two given snapshots;
snapper diff
will show you the files’ diff.

Restoring Previous Snapshots

To restore a snapshot made with snapper use
snapper undochange []...
You can also specify ranges, as in snapper undochange 42..47.

To do the same with vanilla btrfs use
btrfs subvolume set-default
where can be found out with btrfs subvolume list and then unmount and remount.

Snapper GUI

Snapper also provides a YaST GUI for comparing and restoring snapshots or individual files.

Final Words
Btrfs does not have an error-correcting fsck yet, so just now it is not ready for systems that require high reliability. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it ­— it merely means that you should keep backups, which you should do anyway. So go ahead and give it a try! Its snapshots feature (together with all the other awesomeness) makes it a really worthy filesystem for both personal use and servers, and with Snapper managing snapshots is really convenient.
Note: Kernel 3.1
Fixes from kernel 3.2 have not been backported into 3.1 yet, so you may want to use the 3.2 kernel. See e.g. https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=733843 in case you get crashes with 3.1.

References and Further Reading

BTRFS wiki

Linux.com Tuturial

openSUSE Snapper Portal

As Benjaman Brunner announced yesterday, openSUSE 11.3 has reached end of life.  As a quick refresher, openSUSE releases new versions every 8 months, and each version has a life cycle of 18 months.  As 11.3 was released in July of 2010, the time has come to embrace our newer versions, including the successful release of 12.1 in November of 2011.

As Brunner’s announcement indicates, we worked hard to maintain 11.3 while developing its subsequent two releases (11.4 and 12.1.) And of course, we’re already gearing up for 12.2, slated for release in July.  And the first milestone release is already just around the corner.  You’ll be able to try out Milestone 1 on February 9th.

The roadmap for openSUSE 12.2 is as follows:

As always, testers and contributors are welcome throughout the release development process.  Join the Factory Mailing List and have a lot of fun!

We are a community that provides free and easy access to Free and Open Source Software. We innovate, integrate, polish, document, distribute, maintain and support one of the world’s best Linux distributions. We are working together in an open, transparent and friendly manner as part of the worldwide Free and Open Source community. And in this community there is no room for copyright abuses. That however does not mean that the end justifies the means. We at openSUSE are opposed to the proposals because we depend on our users to not only be able to freely and openly contribute their code but also their opinion and other information. Why that is threatened by these proposals, you can read over at the EFF, or watch this video from Fight for the Future

We hope the decision to blackout openSUSE.org will educate people around the world about this issue that threatens the basics of the internet, will make some US based contributors, friends and users contact their representatives in congress and inspire others to join the strike.

The SAN array of the backend server server lost 3 hard disks over the weekend.

That means the array with the built RPMs was broken. We checked and replaced a lot of files from backups – but since not all binary parts of the projects are in backup we need to rebuild some of them (31 from 24,194) afterwards.

The good news: sources and project configurations were affected by this.

So, enjoy! ;-)

Please introduce yourself!

My name is Frédéric Crozat, I’m 36 and I live in Paris (France). I’m working for SUSE for a little more than a year, with focus on various topics such as SUSE MeeGo, GNOME 3 live image, LXC (Linux Containers) and more recently, systemd.. Before that, I worked for 10 years at MandrakeSoft/Mandriva, taking care of GNOME. From 2002 to 2011, I was part of GNOME Release Team, making sure GNOME was released on time and with all those nice features.

Tell us about the background to your computer use.

I’ve been interested in computer since I was a kid (first computer was a MSX Canon V20).. First „big program“ (on a PC 8086 with 10MB hard disk IIRC) I wrote was a billing program for my mom (she owns a bookstore), when I was in 7th grade (first in Quick Basic), then I rewrote it in Turbo Pascal when I learned Pascal in 2nd grade and later, I even rewrote it in Object Oriented Pascal (because I bought Borland Pascal 6 or 7, shipped with huge printed user manual, included OO stuff) when I was in collegue. And my mom used this program (on the same computer) until she closed her shop, 7 years ago ;)

Then, I went to a Computer Science Engineering school where I learned a lot about computers science (even if I was already a geek ;), including C, C++, Java and many strange languages.

I also learned Unix there and discovered Linux because our C teacher told us „you’ll get a free C compiler you’ll be able to use at home“ and then, I became hooked (it was in 1996)

When and why did you start using openSUSE/SUSE Linux?

I started to use openSUSE when I joined Novell (now SUSE) in August 2010. I was already monitoring openSUSE (and SUSE) before, when I was working at MandrakeSoft/Mandriva.

When did you join the openSUSE community and what made you do that?

I joined the community when I started to use openSUSE and more precisely, after openSUSE conference in October 2010 (where I met a lot of interesting people)

In what way do you participate in the openSUSE project?

Initially, I helped on GNOME (and a bit on MeeGo, when it was still alive). I took care of GNOME 3 live image (used by GNOME Foundation, and based on openSUSE). More recently, I’ve been handling the switch to systemd for openSUSE 12.1

What especially motivates you to participate in the openSUSE project?

I want openSUSE to be the best Linux distribution in the ecosystem, best in the „easy to use“ sense, but also best in its interaction with upstream projects.

What do you think was your most important contribution to the openSUSE project/community or what is the contribution that you’re most proud of?

Probably, GNOME 3 live image : I started as a way to learn SUSE Studio and then kiwi, and it morphed into a 3 months projects, which helped a lot on GNOME 3.0 launch and Novell/SUSE sponsored 10000 promo DVD based on this work which were handed over to GNOME Foundation.

When do you usually spend time on the openSUSE project?

Usually, during the day, in parallel to my work at SUSE (when it is not openSUSE related)

Three words to describe openSUSE? Or make up a proper slogan!

Green ; Easy ; Powerful

What do you think is missing or underrated in the distribution or the project?

Underrated : OBS . We have a unique technology, simplifing software package (and availability).

What do you think the future holds for the openSUSE project?

Great things :) . OpenSUSE as a project is pretty young, compared to other projects I’ve participated in the past, and I want to be sure we’ll be able to use other project experience to go even further (and avoid possible mistakes other did)

A person asks you why he/she should choose openSUSE instead of other distribution/OS. What would be your arguments to convince him/her to pick up openSUSE?

Because we give people choice and freedom. And we also make sure to have great relations with other communities (either upstream projects or even other distributions)

Which members of the openSUSE community have you met in person?

I can’t list all of them (attending conferences makes the list very long), but in my short list, I’d say Vincent Untz, DimStar, FunkyPenguin, Michael Meeks and many many other people

How many icons are currently on your desktop?

None, since GNOME 3 doesn’t have icons on the desktop anymore ;)

What is the application you can’t live without? And why?

I’d say Firefox, empathy, evolution and git ;)

Which application or feature should be invented as soon as possible?

Easy (ie transparent) backup, and getting my data synchronized and available everywhere ( I know both those ideas are being addressed, but not yet fully and in a „easy for my mom to use“ form)

Which is your preferred text editor? And why?

Vim. I’ve been using both Emacs and vi for a long time and some years ago, I switched to vim exclusively, because it was just so fast to start (I tend to detect a lot of different files not always at the same time) and I thought I would be better to focus on just one editor and better learn to use it at its full potential (I don’t consider myself a vim guru at all)

Which famous person would you want to join the openSUSE community?

None, all the best are there already (kidding ;)

Which computer related skills would you like to have?

Understand assembly language and this kind of low level stuff. I learned it at school, but it was never my „thing“

The Internet crashes for a whole week — how would you feel, what would you do?

This is exactly what I’m experiencing right now (moving between flats). So, I’m using a 3G Internet access at home… More seriously, in the past, when I was travelling for my holidays, I always make sure to „unplug“ myself for one or two weeks and everything went fine.

Which is your favorite movie scene?

None in particular

Star Trek or Star Wars?

Star Trek (but I like both)

What is your favorite food and drink?

Food : truffade (regional dish from countryside, cheese and potatoes : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truffade

No favorite drink, I like a lot of them ;)

Favorite game or console (in your childhood and nowadays)?

Heavy Rain / ICO. When I was younger, the various „Commander Keen“ from Apogee Software

Which city would you like to visit?

The list is pretty long, but right now, I’d list Amsterdam and New-York.

What is your preferred way to spend your vacation?

Travelling with my wife and use my DSLR to take a glimpse of the landscapes encountered.

Someone gives you $1.000.000 — what would you do with the money?

No idea. Call me when the bank order is done on my account and we’ll talk ;)

If traveling through time was possible — when would we be most likely to meet you?

Nowadays is a nice time, not sure I would move permanently to another time (but maybe I use it to visit various times ;)

There’s a thunderstorm outside — do you turn off your computer?

I used to (because I lived for a long time in rural environment). I don’t anymore.

Have your ever missed an appointment because you forgot about it while sitting at your computer?

One or two times, mostly because I forgot to set the alarm in my calendar for the appointment ;)

Show us a picture of something, you have always wanted to share!

This is what some collegues did in our office in Paris : everybody should do the same : http://www.flickr.com/photos/fcrozat/6055381155/in/photostream (and I’m now the guardian of this geeko ;)

You couldn’t live without…

My wife

Which question was the hardest to answer?

Movie scene / what to do with one million $.

What other question would you like to answer? And what would you answer?

Here’s a summary of the answers with some things pointed out. For the full results, download this  spreadsheet.

1) Based on this years conference experience are you expecting to participate in the next openSUSE conference?

They(we) will come back :D (96% yes)

2) Want to be updated about the next openSUSE conference? Give your mail address! We won’t spam you…

Most of people don’t want to be spamed :D (a third left their email address)

3) What other openSUSE confs did you attend?

The participation is increasing every year. Almost doubled from 2010 to 2011.

4) Are you a…

We missed “not related to openSUSE or SUSE” question. Most are users of openSUSE and more than half of the participants were contributors to openSUSE.

5) What’s most important for you at the openSUSE Conference?

Primary priority – interaction – talking with others and getting to know the openSUSE community

Second – education – attending workshops, hearing about new technology and learning

In the end it was all about meet others!

6) What did you like at this years conference? What should we do again?

Almost 1/3 skipped the question!

Location/Venue positive thoughts

BOF positive thoughts

Organization positive thoughts

7) What should we do different next year? Where can we improve?

Schedule improvement – highlights, better description, separated tracks from SUSE, Low level/beginners talk needed, Labs improve the quality, Better preparation/presentation by the talker, Talks from SUSE Management

Acoustic – main hall noisy

Name tags / IRC Nicks on badges

Invite local universities

better toilets

better snacks/soda options

8) How would you rate the overall offering of the sessions?

Most of Answer options considered Good

9) How did you like the length of the conference (4 days)?

Just right – 76,2 % (122 answers)

10) Please tell us about your experience with the openSUSE community with saying whether you dis/agree with the following statements:

Most of people agree or fully agree with “It was a great opportunity to meet new people” and “I felt very welcome”. However the comment “The community is a clique” has many agreeing with it! Maybe the option/question wasn’t very clear.

11) Do you think it was beneficial to openSUSE to have the SUSE Labs conference at the same time/place?

Yes – 89% (118 answers)

12) Did you get an opportunity to meet some of the SUSE Labs hackers?

Yes – 72% (118 answers)

13) Would you have liked a more formal opportunity to meet SUSE Labs?

No – 54,5%

Yes – 45,5%

Seemed averaged (112 answers)

14) If you’re part of SUSE Labs: Do you think it was beneficial for the SUSE Labs to have the conference together with the openSUSE Conference?

Yes – 61,3% (31 answers)

Most general comment – SUSE Labs people didn’t organize themselves properly

15) Is there anything else you would like to tell us?

2 calls about SUSE Linux Enterprise presentations

Better advertise mentioned twice

The rest: thanks/great conference/hope for 2012oSC

Thanks to Izabel Valverde for analyzing the results. The full results with all answers are available as spreadsheet.

We wish all developers, maintainers, users and friends a Happy New Year.

Let us make 2012 even better…

Announcement by Jigish Gohil

openSUSE Education team is proud to present another edition of openSUSE-Edu Li-f-e (Linux for Education) based on openSUSE 12.1. Li-f-e comes loaded with everything that students, parents, teachers and system admins of educational institutions may need.

Softwares for mathematics, chemistry, astronomy etc, servers like KIWI-LTSP, Fedena school ERP, Moodle course management etc., full multimedia, graphics, office suite, many popular programming languages including AMP stack, java, C, C++, python, ruby, latest stable Gnome and KDE desktop environments and lot more is packed in this release. More about softwares included here.

To know more about openSUSE Education project, file bugs, request enhancements, participate, or to get in touch with us visit Education Portal.

Create live USB stick or DVD with this image. About 15GB disk space and 1GB RAM is required for installation, more is better. Please note that we release 32bit image only, for users with RAM 4G or more install and use kernel-pae package.

Hosted at sourceforge.net

Direct Download | md5sum

Hosted at opensuse-education.org

Direct Download | new metalink | old metalink | md5sum | torrent

Use download manager or Metalink client such as aria2c for most efficient way to download.

You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
Happy holidays…

This review is written by Terence Lam a student from Singapore sharing his experiences with openSUSE

In this review, I will install openSUSE 12.1, try out GNOME and KDE and also give a brief overview of advanced tools like YaST and have a look at ownCloud.

DVD Installer

The installer supports a large number of languages and had options that can be used both by beginners as well as advanced users. The YaST partitioner supports a large number of users. Keeping ext4 as the default filesystem, the installer also suggested using btrfs as the default filesystem for installation. One thing that caught my eye was the selection of the passwords, openSUSE recommends you to use strong passwords and by default it supports SHA256. The overview panel had a lot of options to customize my installation starting from my bootloader to software selection to networks. All in all, the installer maintains a healthy tradeoff between simplicity and flexibility.

KDE Desktop Environment

The KDE Desktop environment really enhanced my openSUSE experience. It contains many tools and features that could increase productivity. One of the most interesting features was the activity manager. It pushed multi-tasking to the next level by customising the desktop according to the tasks. Besides that, Dolphin , Amarok, KMail and KDE PIM provided a tight integration with the desktop. Visual settings could be easily customised. The softwares included with openSUSE by default was already sufficient for normal use. However, after firing up Apper, i was surprised by the numerous number of application choices. KDE can be a good place for anyone who needs a tightly integrated, feature rich environment. KDE is very much extensible with all its plasmoids and application plugins and a user can integrate his desktop with identica, twitter, facebook etc and other zillions of internet services. Localisation and Input methods were pretty annoying for me and I had to manually install IBus to solve it.

GNOME Desktop Environment

The GNOME desktop environment gave me a very simplistic feel. The interface was more application-oriented than task-oriented and it was not very easy multi-tasking. There are not many visual effects and the interface can only be minimally customised. I am sure that the GNOME desktop environment would definitely be appealing to users who seek simplicity. First time GNOME shell users may find the interface a little hard to use, but after getting used to the interface, it’s not hard at all. Apart from that, Gnome shell does not seem to be suited for netbooks as many of the windows sizes are quite and can hardly be scaled. Applications and online services integration with the desktop was not too bad, but I feel that i could have been better integrated with the panel. However, accessibility settings could be accessed directly from the top panel. I could not find any software centre, which is really a pity as openSUSE has a wide range of application choices. Setting localisation and input methods was as equally annoying as my experience with KDE. One thing I liked a lot was Gnome extensions, which brought out the real customisability power in gnome, it made minor but powerful tweaks to the interface. In all, I feel that Gnome’s simple interface coupled up with gnome extensions is really awesome and even advanced users would like it.

Snapper

Snapper is really one useful piece of software. Even though there were a few hiccups when using snapper, but it was relatively easy to use from both the GUI as well as the command line. It supports quite a number of features like comparing two snapshot,s mounting snapshots, etc… Problems that users face like accidentally deleting files, system crashing, etc… all can be solved by using snapper. Snapper is definitely a software that every openSUSE user should make use of and try.

Systemd

openSUSE introduced systemd as the new framework for booting up and managing your services. After reading up on it, I realised how good it is. At startup, only those important services like security would be started. Other services would only be started on demand later on is needed. This makes bootup much faster. Systemd has quite a bit of flexibility that system administrators can make use of like socket and dbus-activation. Systemd also make the operating system more stable by closely monitoring and controlling services. For example, if any important service is ended, systemd would try to re start is. The old system would just let it go undetected. The new “.service” files also provides more functionality and flexibility as compared to the old shell scripts. Even though developers are encouraged to port init scipts to systemd, but systemd is also backward compatible with the old init scripts. openSUSE users also have the option to fallback to the old SystemV init daemon if they prefer it. Even though it is more work to port the old init scripts to Sytemd, but the power brought upon by systemd is really something that should not be missed.

YaST

I could find almost every type of configuration available. From the boot loader to network services, all could be found in the YaST control panel. Configuring settings was not very hard either. It’s really a very valuable resource for both normal users and system administrators.

webYaST

webYaST was awesome. I was able to access almost all of the configurations available for my machine through my browser. I could even check out on system resoruces, or applying gupdates. I’m sure that system administrators would love this feature.

OwnCloud

OwnCloud was a really good feature. It’s the first time I see a tool that can help me set up a cloud service on a webserver of my choice. Configuring it with miralll was not hard at all. Not only does OwnCloud improve privacy, it also contains many useful features like calendar, contacts, etc…