Selling Free Software for a Living

My openSUSE 12 Journal - 5: Desktop Bits & Bytes

2011-12-10T21:00:00.000+08:00

This is week 3 of using 12.1 and still lovin' it. This journal entry covers a few disparate topics, from wifi to graphics cards, as I go about my daily routine in the office (stuff I actually get paid doing) with openSUSE 12.1 on my Lenovo Thinkpad.

Can't locate your hidden Wifi access point?
Here is a neat command (as root) that you can execute to help NetworkManager connect to a hidden wireless access point OR when NetworkManager is unable to detect your desired wireless point fast enough in a wifi-saturated environment.

iwlist wlan0 scanning essid MyWifi

where wlan0 is usually your default wifi device, if you are unsure, execute ip add to verify.
MyWifi is the name of your desired/hidden wireless access point. For ease of use, you could wrap this into a nice little script.
Read more »

My openSUSE 12 Journal - 4: Minor Frustrations

2011-12-03T21:00:00.000+08:00

This is my fourth journal entry for openSUSE 12.1 and it has been two weeks of operational use on both my Thinkpad and home PC. Here are some additional minor frustrations and some workarounds... and yes, I have posted on the openSUSE forums (just in case you'd ask).

Boot 12.1 using the old System V init
In my first journal entry, I complained the lack of "chattiness" during boot since the adoption of Systemd. You can easily switch to the old System V init on boot. At the grub boot loader screen (usual 8 seconds delay) and before you hit Enter to boot, press the F5 button to switch from default to System V. Now, press Enter to boot and press the Esc key during the splash screen to see the familiar System V init messages.

[Update on 6 Dec 2011]: Tired of pressing F5 every time on boot? Append the following to the end of the line:
init=/sbin/sysvinit
For example, in /boot/grub/menu.lst, at the end of the line starting with "kernel /boot/vmlinuz-3.1.0-1.2-desktop...", append the line above and save the file. On the next boot, you can verify the change in the Boot Options field. Press Enter and you will boot up 12.1 under the old System V init.
Read more »

Air Video Server on openSUSE 12.1

2011-12-02T23:00:00.000+08:00

In short, Air Video is a client-server product that streams, via live conversion, videos of many formats to any iOS device (eg iPhone, iPad etc). The server software is free-of-charge but only runs on Mac OSX and Windows. The client is also free-of-charge for iOS devices but "crippled". If you like the solution, you pay for the client.

Since the Air Video Server is written in Java and uses a customized version of FFMPEG, it would be possible to run it on Linux. The folks behind Air Video though supportive but are NOT offering official support for Linux.

I have been successful in making Air Video Server (AVS) work on openSUSE 11.3, 11.4 and 12.1. Here are the steps:

Read more »

On the road again: MYGOSSCON 2011

2011-11-26T23:00:00.000+08:00

Going on the road again... after a year of life's transitions and pursuing other interests, I am privileged to have the opportunity to speak at MYGOSSCON 2011 next week.

The title of my paper is "Key Trends: Challenges, Opportunities and Leverage for Linux/OSS Ecosystem". I look forward to the discussions it will generate. :)

Personally, I am looking forward to this with excitement as I have been granted the latitude in content creation. I will be approaching the topic from another angle and with, what I hope to be, a fresh perspective.

My openSUSE 12 Journal - 3: Lotus Notes 8.5.3

2011-11-25T20:00:00.000+08:00

Lotus Notes is what I use at work and the latest v8.5.3 works well on openSUSE 11.4. Although it installed without a hitch on 12.1, things goes awry when I start using it. Here are my observations and how I managed to get it working again. :)

For starters, Lotus Notes 8.5.3 only managed to render about half of its interface. For example, I could see my inbox but email preview pane is blank. Integrated SameTime worked but workspaces and replication tabs were blank too. I suspect it could be some incompatibility or confusion with the GTK libs and I was right... Google is my friend and I discovered a brilliant soul who had the same challenge, created a bug report against openSUSE and even created a workaround/fix.

[Update on 27 Nov 2011]: Oops, it occurred to me that Lotus Notes 8.5.3 is actually 32-bit running on 64-bit openSUSE 12.1. That means the RPM created by Stefan Lijewski should have worked. I cannot recall why I came to the previous conclusion. I have just tried the 32-bit RPM and it worked for me. Therefore, I am correcting my entry below.

~~Unfortunately for me, I could not use his nicely packaged RPM and online repository because I am using 64-bit openSUSE 12.1.~~

The easy way is to use a 1-click install via Stefan Lijewski's online repository.

The easy but manual way is to download the RPM before you manually execute a zypper in lotus-notes-gnome3-1-1.1.i586.rpm

In both cases, you will need to verify that your Lotus Notes launch icon has been updated to use the new notes-wrapper script instead of the original notes script in /opt/ibm/lotus/notes/ directory.

Finally, the hard way (if you're so inclined to experience compiling your own code) is the original method I used below.

~~Below is how I got Lotus Notes 8.5.3 working on openSUSE 12.1 (64-bit).~~

1. Download the workaround fix from https://github.com/sgh/lotus-notes_gtk2.23.3/downloads

2. Un-tar the fix, tar zxvf sgh-lotus-notes_gtk2.23.3-2028e8e.tar.gz

3. You will need to install additional packages before you can compile the fix. As root, zypper in make gcc gtk2-devel glibc-devel-32bit gcc-32bit

4. In the sgh-lotus-notes_gtk2.23.3-2028e8e subdirectory, compile the fix with make

5. If make completed with success, you should have a new file libnotesgtkfix.so in the directory. Copy it and notes-wrapper to installed Lotus Notes directory /opt/ibm/lotus/notes/.

6. Last and final step, edit your Lotus Notes icons (kmenuedit if using KDE4) and change the default launch script to execute notes-wrapper instead.

That's it. Lotus Notes 8.5.3 should function normally... and its all good for the last 3 days for me.

I hear this would not be a challenge with the newer Lotus Notes 8.5.4 (yet to be officially released). We shall see when we get there. :)

openSUSE 12.1 gets positive review on LAS

2011-11-24T20:00:00.000+08:00

Nice and positive review of openSUSE 12.1 on the Linux Action Show on 20th Nov 2011. The YouTube video is embedded below... you may fast-forward to 30:10 where they finally got down to the review of openSUSE 12.1.

Most interesting (the best) comment on that YouTube page was from Jos Poortvliet (our openSUSE Community Manager), "VERY nice review guys! Fun to see how opinions on openSUSE have changed in the last year - from 'meh, yeah, is that distro still alive?' to the awesomeness now :D

If you ever wanna talk about it with me - I'd be happy to be on the show..."

As with most things in life, its all about perception and goodwill. openSUSE 12.1 is polished and enjoyable but a number of the great features mentioned, including SUSE Studio and openSUSE Build Service, have been around for a while... anyway, I'm just happy & enjoying the goodwill towards openSUSE. :)

My openSUSE 12 Journal - 2

2011-11-20T23:00:00.000+08:00

Installed openSUSE 12.1 (64-bit) on both my home PC and my Thinkpad W520. The best part was I did not have to burn any installation DVDs and speed of installation was at Gigabit speed on my home local network.

Here is what I did in a nutshell:

Download openSUSE 12.1 64-bit ISO and verified integrity with md5sum
Configured my Thinkpad, running openSUSE 11.4, as the network installation server.
Boot up my home PC in PXE-boot mode and installed openSUSE 12.1 from my Thinkpad.
Once my PC is installed and running openSUSE 12.1, I configured it as the network installation server and boot up my Thinkpad in PXE-boot mode and installed openSUSE 12.1 onto it.

Simple and sweet!

For more details, please refer to my older posts:

Network Installation of openSUSE [Link]
Using Apache2 to deploy and maintain SUSE [Link]
Install and configure TFTP server for PXE boot environment [Link]
Install and configure DHCP Server [Link]

Happy to report the steps I documented in the posts above worked for openSUSE 12.1. There were some minor differences, mainly to do with Systemd and how it changes the console output a little. The previously observed SuSEFirewall bug for TFTP server is still present, so remember to add port 69 to UDP as previously documented.

My openSUSE 12 Journal - 1

2011-11-20T20:00:00.000+08:00

openSUSE 12.1 was released earlier this week. Although I had to wait more than 24 hours before I got my hands on the the ISO binaries (4.4Gb of both 32-bit and 64-bit), it was well worth it. The lesson learnt was to use more than one download method concurrently in the event something fails. More importantly, its imperative to verify (ie md5sum) the downloaded binaries or risks having to abort an installation when the integrity of the packages are in question.

For this release of openSUSE, everything has been incredibly smooth from installation to productive use of my home system. In fact, I have just completed another installation on my Thinkpad W520. I am sure there are some who have encountered challenges (no software is perfect); however, at least for me, this has been the smoothest experience ever since the days of SLES 8!

To all involved with openSUSE 12.1, please accept my congratulations on a job well done!

One little quirk, minor annoyance
From a usage scenario, I have to report something that made me panic on the first-boot of openSUSE 12.1, to the extent that I voluntarily hit the physical reset button on my PC.

The cause, as it turns out, is the new Systemd that replaces the old System-V init. Whenever I boot up a newly installed Linux for the first time, I always hit the ESC key on boot to see the boot messages. This helps me identify any problems early and gives me an indication of how quickly and smoothly Linux boots up. When I did the same with openSUSE 12.1 on first-boot, I observed some initial messages but suddenly everything seems to just stop. I panicked after 20 seconds and hit the physical reset button (thinking I may have messed up).

Apparently, the new Systemd is not very "chatty". I only had to wait 40 seconds more and the entire system booted up and I am automatically logged into KDE4.

If anyone could share how one might re-enable the same level of "chattiness" when the system boots up, appreciate if you could use the comments section below.

Gnome 3.2

Post-installation, I used YaST - Software Management and installed both the "Gnome Base System" and the "Gnome Desktop Environment" patterns. Finally, I got to try out Gnome 3 for the first time ever.

I have been a Gnome 2.x user for quite a number of years until I switched over to KDE4 when it became the default in openSUSE 11.2. KDE4 is great but I do miss the simplicity of Gnome 2.x from time to time.

Happy to report I'm using Gnome 3.2 rather productively on my home PC. However, I am not fully convinced it would be my default environment just yet. Gnome 3.2 is major re-design and it's as different to Gnome 2.32 as KDE4 is to KDE3. Here are some of my thoughts at this time:

I liked the idea of integrating my online identity (Google & Twitter only at this time) into my desktop; but, this means I have to use Evolution... not something I liked due to past experiences (3 years ago).
I really liked the concept of workspace on demand. I can drag an app & move it to the next available workspace & a new empty one is created. I am ready to move on from the 4-sided (or n-sided) cube paradigm.
The font size and window title-bars takes up too much screen estate. It seems to run contrary to my initial impression that Gnome Shell gives me lots of screen estate since there is only one bar at the top.
A good buddy of mine explained that its design was geared towards mobile devices (ie tablets with touchscreens) and I start to appreciate it more; however, I think this approach seems a tad too early at best? Given how mobile devices are dominated by Apple, Android & others, I don't see any hardware vendor officially supporting (hard-bundling) Gnome as the de-facto GUI. Feels more like a spill over from Meego & netbook UI era (only 2-3 years ago).

I will be blogging more on my experiences with openSUSE 12.1 ... looking back at my blog posts, I realized it was 3 years ago that I started a similar series of posts on my experiences with openSUSE 11... how time flies...

Every-Packet's Changing... my Keane Parody

2011-11-10T17:00:00.003+08:00

This is for all my friends, colleagues & fellow human-beings who ended up working in IT... and loving it.

Every-Packet's Changing (sung to the tune of Everybody's Changing by Keane)

You say you wonder your own LAN

When I think about it, I don't see how you can

You route add, you netstat

And I can't see the Ping that you tried

Says Every-Packet's changing and I don't know why

So little time, try to understand that I...

Try to log a call just to stay in the game, I

Try to stay awake and remember my frame-rate
Every-Packet's changing and I start to go insane

You're gone from here, soon you will disappear
Fading into tri-colored light
Cause Every-Packet's changing and I don't feel right

So little time, try to understand that I...

Try to log a call just to stay in the game, I

Try to stay awake and remember my frame-rate
Every-Packet's changing and I start to go insane

So little time, try to understand that I...

Try to make a patch just to stay in the game, I

Try to stay awake and not go init zero
Every-Packet's changing and I don't feel the same

Ooooh, Every-Packet's changing and I report abends...

Network Installation of openSUSE

2011-11-07T23:45:00.002+08:00

This will be my main blog entry discussing the best practices (mine anyway) on setting up a network installation server.

What is the Motivation for this setup?

1) Local Area Networks (LANs) are ubiquitous... even in homes where, chances are, you have a modem to the Internet and next to it is a wireless/ethernet router for multiple wifi and ethernet capable devices (PCs, Laptops, Smartphones, Tablets etc) to connect and surf the web.

2) If you are a Linux/OSS enthusiast, you would be constantly downloading the latest ISOs from the web, burning them onto a DVDs and installing them on physical/virtual machines. This is time/resource intensive... time to download, time to burn a DVD, time/money spent on blank DVDs etc. Of course, if you install openSUSE on virtual machines, you avoid the DVD part of the process but you would still have lots of ISOs on your filesystem... if you have a classroom of 20 machines... well, you get the idea.

3) Almost all PCs and Laptops these days have an ethernet port and are capable of booting up from the network (ie PXE-boot). This means you physically power them on, tell it to go into PXE-boot mode and it will go onto the network and seek out an installation server to download and install the openSUSE binaries.

4) This is an efficient way to install openSUSE onto both physical and virtual machines in a LAN environment where there is only one central place for your software binaries.

Pre-requisites:

i) You have a LAN environment connecting a few machines via the network cable. Although booting from wifi is possible but it is out of the scope of this discussion.

ii) You have a physical machine (preferably*) with openSUSE installed and this will be the designated network installation server.
*It is possible to set this up on a virtual machine but you need to ensure it is connected to the physical LAN in a Bridge networking mode and not the usual NAT networking mode for typical virtual machines.

3 Simple^ Steps to Success:
^Simple - it will become more simple as you do this more frequently.

Step 1: Install and configure Apache2 webserver to host and distribute openSUSE binaries.
Please refer to my other blog entry on this subject - Using Apache2 to deploy & maintain SUSE

Step 2: Install and configure tftpboot server to enable initial boot of target machines over the network.
Please refer to my other blog entry on this subject - Install and configure TFTP server for PXE boot environment

Step 3: Install and configure dhcpd server to provide an IP address for target machines and redirect them to the tftpboot server.
Please refer to my other blog entry on this subject - Install and configure DHCP server

Step 4: On the target physical machines, on boot and depending on the BIOS, activate the boot from LAN option and watch it get an IP address from the Installation Server (via Step 3), followed by connecting to the TFTP server and presenting an installation menu (via Step 2). Enter the choice of OS to install and your installation will commence over the LAN (via Step 1).

Additional points of note:

a) Everything discussed here applies to SLES, SLED and openSUSE. The steps documented are based on openSUSE 11.x and should work on older versions and even the enterprise editions of SUSE.

b) Software installation (apache2, tftpboot, syslinux, dhcpd etc) assumes your SLE or openSUSE server have access to their respective binaries, either in DVD (also ISO) or software repository on the web.

References:

openSUSE.org - SDB:PXE boot installation

Novell Cool Solutions - Setting Up a SUSE PXE Installation Server in an Existing NetWare Environment

Novell Article - Setting up a PXE Boot Server

Enjoy!

Install and configure TFTP server for PXE boot environment

2011-11-07T23:20:00.002+08:00

This blog entry describes how you would install and configure the TFTP (Trivial File Transfer Protocol) server for the purpose of building a PXE boot environment. The tftp server would transfer the syslinux binaries to boot up your physical machine. It will also present a text-based menu for the user to select what operating system to install.

Link to main entry on Network Installation of openSUSE.

1) Install SysLinux (Bootloader for Linux)

Command-line (as root): zypper in syslinux

2) Install tftp

Command-line (as root): zypper in tftp yast2-tftp-server

3) Enable tftp

Command-line (as root): yast2 tftp-server

In TFTP Server Configuration dialog, check to Enable the service. Ensure the Boot Image Directory is set to /srv/tftpboot. Finally, check the Open Port in Firewall and click Ok.

Note: Its been observed that the SUSE Firewall may still block incoming traffic to the TFTP boot server despite the Open Port in Firewall setting.

To ensure the Firewall is not blocking incoming TFTP traffic, open the Firewall setting via YaST (or command-line yast2 firewall). Navigate to the Allow Services section (left-hand pane) and click on Advanced button. Ensure that port 69 is listed in the UDP section and click OK to accept. Click Next and complete the settings change.

Next, create the sub-directory /srv/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg via the command-line: mkdir -p /srv/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg

4) Populating the /srv/tftpboot directory

Copy pxelinux.0 file (part of syslinux package installed earlier) to the /srv/tftpboot directory. Command-line: cp /usr/share/syslinux/pxelinux.0 /srv/tftpboot/

Copy the relevant Linux kernel and initrd boot files to /srv/tftpboot and provide meaning names (to avoid confusion later). This is best described by way of an example. Let's say I want to enable my installation server to provide an option to install both the 32-bit and 64-bit of openSUSE 11.4. Therefore, I would do the following:

a) Mount both 32-bit and 64-bit of openSUSE 11.4 ISO on the filesystem:

mount -t iso9660 -o ro,loop /directory/to/openSUSE-32-bit.iso /mnt/openSUSE-11.4-i586

mount -t iso9660 -o ro,loop /directory/to/openSUSE-64-bit.iso /mnt/openSUSE-11.4-x86_64/

b) Copy the relevant Linux kernel and initrd files to /srv/tftpboot and rename them with more meaning names:

cp /mnt/openSUSE-11.4-i586/boot/i386/loader/linux /srv/tftpboot/openSUSE-114-32bit.krnl

cp /mnt/openSUSE-11.4-i586/boot/i386/loader/initrd /srv/tftpboot/openSUSE-114-32bit.initrd

cp /mnt/openSUSE-11.4-x86_64/boot/x86_64/loader/linux /srv/tftpboot/openSUSE-114-64bit.krnl

cp /mnt/openSUSE-11.4-x86_64/boot/x86_64/loader/initrd /srv/tftpboot/openSUSE-114-64bit.initrd

c) Copy the message file from any openSUSE ISO to /srv/tftpboot:

cp /mnt/openSUSE-11.4-x86_64/boot/x86_64/loader/message /srv/tftpboot/

*You may unmount the ISOs as these copy are a one-time operation.

5) Prepare the text-based menu

[Update on 3 Dec 2011: added the directory where the file default should reside below]

Create a text-file (via your favourite editor as root), named default in the /srv/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg directory with the following contents:

default harddisk
display message
prompt 1
timeout 600

# Install openSUSE 11.4 (32-bit)
label openSUSE-114-32
kernel openSUSE-114-32bit.krnl
append initrd=openSUSE-114-32bit.initrd splash=silent vga=0x314 showopts install=http://IP_ADDRESS_OF_SERVER/software/openSUSE-11.4-i586/
# Install openSUSE 11.4 (64-bit)
label openSUSE-114-64
kernel openSUSE-114-64bit.krnl
append initrd=openSUSE-114-64bit.initrd splash=silent vga=0x314 showopts install=http://IP_ADDRESS_OF_SERVER/software/openSUSE-11.4-x86_64/

Everything is self-explanatory above except for the install=http://IP_ADDRESS_OF_SERVER portion. Please refer to my other blog entry on using Apache2 webserver to host and serve up software binaries.

Finally, edit the message file in step 4c earlier to correspond with the example default file entries.

Welcome to openSUSE!

To start the installation, type one of the options below and press .

Available boot options:
openSUSE-114-32 - Installation of 11.4 32bit
openSUSE-114-64 - Installation of 11.4 64bit

Have a lot of fun...

Done.

Install and configure DHCP server

2011-11-07T23:00:00.005+08:00

This blog entry describes how you would install and configure the dhcpd (DHCP) server for the purpose of assigning an IP address to machines booting up via the network and pointing these machines to the PXE boot environment.

The PXE boot environment (TFTP server) is documented in another blog entry Install and configure tftp server for PXE boot environment and the main entry discussion on Network Installation of openSUSE.

1) Install DHCP Server (dhcpd)

Command-line (as root): zypper in dhcp-server yast2-dhcp-server

2) Configure DHCP

Make a backup of the dhcpd.conf file to start afresh: mv /etc/dhcpd.conf /etc/dhcpd.org.conf

Create a new dhcpd.conf file, using your favourite text editor as root, from scratch with the following content:

option rfc3442-classless-static-routes code 121 = array of unsigned integer 8;
option domain-name "example.org";
option routers 192.168.11.1;
max-lease-time 7200;

ddns-updates off;

ddns-update-style none;

log-facility local7;
default-lease-time 600;

# define rules to identify DHCP Requests from PXE and Etherboot clients.
class "pxe" {
match if substring (option vendor-class-identifier, 0, 9) = "PXEClient";
}
class "etherboot" {
match if substring (option vendor-class-identifier, 0, 9) = "Etherboot";
}

subnet 192.168.11.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
range 192.168.11.51 192.168.11.60;
default-lease-time 14400;
max-lease-time 172800;
server-name "192.168.11.200";
next-server 192.168.11.200;
filename "pxelinux.0";
# allow members of "pxe";
}

Using the sample dhcpd.conf above, you can see that

My router IP is 192.168.11.1

DHCP daemon is giving out IP address starting from 192.168.11.51 to 192.168.11.60. You can adjust this setting to provide more IP addresses. The important part is to assign IP addresses outside the range of any other existing DHCP server (either in the router or in another environment where you do not have access to the official DHCP server).

server-name and next-server points to the IP address of the network installation server (ie pointing back to the openSUSE server that is running DHCP server, TFTP server, Apache2 server with binaries)

Alternatively, if you would like a GUI interface, you may try yast2 dhcp-server. Below are screenshots of the 4 step wizard.

3) Starting and Stopping the DHCP Server

Its best to manually start and stop the DHCP Server as required... as most LANs already have some DHCP service running... doubly so if your machine is portable (ie Laptop), you wouldn't want your Laptop to start dishing out IP addresses on boot.

To start the DHCP server, command-line (as root): rcdhcpd start

To stop the DHCP server, command-line (as root): rcdhcpd stop

12.1 RC1 installfest at SLUGS on 1st Nov 2011

2011-11-06T16:50:00.002+08:00

The SUSE Linux User Group Singapore (SLUGS) had an informal installfest of openSUSE 12.1 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) just this week...

although, at the time of writing this entry, RC2 has just been released and it looks like 12.1 will be available on time as indicated by the countdown graphic on the right of this blog page.

Special Thanks to Mike Veltman for the VMWare ESXi environment across his Lab for us to play with 12.1 RC1.

During the installfest, I opted to use VirtualBox on Windows 7 to simultaneously install both openSUSE 11.4 and 12.1 RC1. I wanted to see the differences (if any) between the current stable openSUSE and the new major version change (11 to 12).

Here are the side-by-side installation screenshots between 11.4 and 12.1 RC1:

On boot, you'll see a general darker green versus lighter green theme between 11.4 & 12.1.

By default, KDE is the preferred graphical desktop environment for both 11.4 and 12.1 RC1. I also wanted to give the new Gnome 3.x a try/shot/go. However, I only added the Gnome post-installation. It was described in the list of annoying bugs that the installer would hang if we go into the Software Selection and made some changes. Perhaps, the installer could offer one more option of installing both KDE4 and Gnome3 upfront at this stage (allowing multi-selection)?

Minor change here at partition setup. The 11.x design seems to indicate users have to choose between a partition based or LVM based partitioning scheme. The 12.1 design doesn't give that "choose-between-the-camps" feeling and still provide the partition based scheme by default with also additional options of having a separate partition for user home.

Most notable, of course, is the ability to use Btrfs (pronounced "butter-f-s") as the default filesystem. I have heard alot about it but have yet to fully tried it out. I am sure it will be covered in a much later blog entry.

openSUSE 11.4 and 12.1 RC1 installed, booted up into the default KDE4 graphical desktop environment.

One more minor thing, I bring up YaST-Software Management, select the Patterns view and chose to install both "GNOME Desktop Environment" and "GNOME Base System" pattern (as seen in screenshot above). Click Accept and you will have the opportunity to explore the GNOME 3, in addition to the default KDE4 desktop environment.

To switch between the two, simply log off and at the login screen, choose either GNOME or KDE4 (via the little green stripped button) before providing your user password to login.

Below is a few screenshots of the GNOME3 desktop environment.

Personally, I have not decided which will be my "production" desktop environment. I've been using GNOME for quite a while before switching to KDE4 when 11.x came around and preferred it. With the new major version of GNOME, I am willing to give it a try and decide which is my preferred desktop environment. For now, on my 11.4 systems, my choice is KDE4.

A good reminder on Motivation

2011-08-16T13:57:00.000+08:00

SUSE Linux Enterprise Wins Readers' Choice Award 2010

2010-12-29T14:05:00.003+08:00

Apologies for this late report, we won this back in October 2010... better late than never! :)

On 15th October 2010, Novell was presented a Readers' Choice Award from ComputerWorld Singapore for winning in the Open Source Platforms/Operating Systems category. It was a very proud moment for us in Novell Singapore and I'm sure it will pleased all SUSE supporters everywhere.

Unfortunately for me, I was called away to be in Malaysia for a business trip and was unable to attend the ceremony. After hearing it from my friends, made me wish there was a way for me to return to Singapore for that evening's presentation.

Above is a photo of the trophy presented and its now sitting in a prominent place in the Novell Singapore office. :)

My last day with Novell; My Blog continues

2010-12-27T17:00:00.011+08:00

Christmas Eve 2010 was my last day with Novell. I left the office with mixed feelings... Light-hearted because its Christmas and I look ahead to a new professional chapter in a different technology sector... Reluctance because I'm parting ways with a great bunch of friends & colleagues (both here in Singapore, the rest of Asia Pacific and around the world).

This is NOT an end to my involvement with SUSE, Linux and OSS. It is merely a transition. While I no longer sell Free (as in Freedom) software for a living, I am still an avid user and advocate of all things SUSE, OSS and Open Standards. Thus, this blog will continue as I journal and share my experiences.

Its important to say that my desire and plans to pursue a different path in my professional career was already in motion before the recent developments at Novell. As a matter of fact, my manager is interviewing candidates to backfill my position, its business as usual here. Given how a good part of the WWW seem to thrive on negativity and conspiracy theories to gain viewership, its my hope that this blog entry NOT be improperly quoted out of context and used as "ammunition" in all these negative media brouhaha.

Thank you Novell, and all my friends, for the 3 wonderful years selling SUSE for a living. Its been a good living. :)

Focus stealing settings in KDE and Gnome on SUSE

2010-11-02T08:10:00.000+08:00

This is an update from my previous post "Focus! User is King". Thanks to comments posted by 13thSlayer and JosP pointing me in the right direction, I found what I was looking for and I'd like to share it in this entry.

Specifically, I've tried this with KDE/openSUSE 11.3 and Gnome/SLES 11 SP1. I'm fairly certain that this should apply to other variants like Gnome/openSUSE and KDE/SLED.

KDE

If you are using KDE, start Configure Desktop and select Window Behavior. Next, select Window Behavior in the panel on the left and find the Focus Stealing prevention level field. The default is Low. I changed it to Medium. You may choose to go more aggressive with High or Extreme.

Gnome

If you are using Gnome, you will need to bring up gconf-editor from the Terminal. With the Gnome Configuration Editor window opened, from the left-hand panel, navigate / -> apps -> metacity -> general. In the right-hand panel, scroll to look for the variable focus_new_window.

The default value for focus_new_window is smart. You only have the option to change this to strict.

To wrap up, in typical YMMV fashion, changing these settings may or may not suit you personally but at least you now have an option to experiment. I have found the Medium setting in KDE worked for me compared to the default Low setting. I have not fully tested this for Gnome just yet.

Enjoy!

PS: I'm going on vacation for a week and will not be monitoring/moderating the comments (if any).

Focus! User is King

2010-10-28T20:15:00.002+08:00

As mentioned briefly in my previous post, I noted an interesting yet subtle HCI feature in Mac OS X and wondering how to have this in openSUSE? If not possible, is someone out there looking at this?

When I boot up and log onto a system (Mac OS X or any SUSE), my typical first move is to quickly launch all the applications that I need to start my day. This means clicking and launching a few web browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Opera/Safari), chat apps Adium/Pidgin/Kopete, mail clients etc.

The system will get severely loaded due to multiple, concurrent startup of applications vying for resources. That's acceptable and normal. However, here's the subtle feature/difference of Mac OS X:

Whichever application that appears first, being the impatient user, I will start interacting with it. If one of my web browsers appears first, I will start surfing and typing away. Mac OS X seems to know this and when other applications starts, they DO NOT steal focus away but instead will be rendered behind the current browser. Further, to inform me that my other applications has started and awaiting my attention, a hyperactive jumping icon of those apps will be dancing away on the dock.

On all variants of SUSE, the behaviour is different in that the next application that starts and is ready for user input will steal focus away from the first application. Using the same example above, as I'm surfing and typing away in Firefox, and the next application that starts is my mail client. It will appear on top of Firefox and asks for my password, thus focus is given to the mail client. While entering my password for the mail client, more often than not, the next (third) application starts and it steals focus away from my mail client while I'm still typing my password. As you can imagine, or even have experienced this yourselves, this can be rather frustrating... not to mention half of your password now appears as plaintext in another application.

Would appreciate anyone out there reading this point me in the right direction and some answers. Thank you.

My Mac-SUSE Journey - Part 2

2010-10-27T21:00:00.003+08:00

This is Part 2 of how I got openSUSE 11.3 (64-bit) working fully on a MacBook Pro 13" (2010 model). Here is the link to Part 1.

First, here are some shots of booting up MacBook Pro into openSUSE 11.3, taken from my old Nokia phone camera (and transferred via bluetooth to my MacSUSE) :

With openSUSE 11.3 installed and booted up, here are the configuration steps to get the most out of your MacBook Pro:

Wireless Driver

All that's required is the right Broadcom wifi driver. Start YaST, click on Software followed by Software Repositories.

Click on the Add button and select Specify URL... and click Next. Enter "Packman" in the Repository Name field and this link in the URL field: http://packman.unixheads.com/suse/11.3/ and click Next to complete. Verify that Packman is now listed as a repository and click Ok to exit.

Click on Software Management, , enter "Broadcom" in the Search field and click Search. Select and click to install broadcom-wl and broadcom-wl-kmp-desktop followed by the Accept button.

Reboot and you'll have Wifi up and running.

3D Desktop Effects with nVidia driver

This is optional since the default noveau driver works. However, if you want to turn on the fancy 3D Desktop Effects, you will need to install the proprietary nVidia driver.

With reference to steps above, in Software Repositories, you will need to add another software repository named nVidia and URL is ftp://download.nvidia.com/opensuse/11.3/

Next, in Software Management, search for "nvidia" and select and install nvidia-gfxG02-kmp-desktop package.

Either reboot or log out of your current session to start the newly installed nVidia drivers. To enable 3D Desktop Effects, start Configure Desktop and, under Look & Feel section, click Desktop and check the "Enable desktop effects". Don't forget to click the Apply button.

Configuring Audio

Audio is essential and all there is to make this work is to make 2 small configuration changes.

First, in YaST, select Hardware section followed by Sound. In Sound Configuration, select the default device (0, nVidia Corporation) and click Edit. In Sound Card Advanced Options, edit and add the value "mbp55" for the model. Click Next and Ok to complete.

Second and final step is to click on the Volume icon and click Mixer. In Mixer window, from menu bar, click Settings followed by Configure Channels... Select and drag the Front Speaker channels from the left (Available channels) to the right (Visible channels). Click Ok.

To test, start Firefox and surf to Youtube or any website with audio. You can use the Fn + F11 & Fn + F12 keys for volume control.

Keyboard Hotkeys

Fortunately, someone has written code to enable the MacBook Pro keyboard Hotkeys. This project is called pommed by Julien Blache. Even better than that, Alin Marin Elena has modified & compiled the latest version 1.34 (that supports this MacBook Pro model) specifically for openSUSE 11.3.

All that's required is to add another Software Repository called "Alin Marin Elena" and URL is http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/ealin:/apple/openSUSE_11.3/

In Software Management, search for pommed and install pommed and gpommed. Ensure the pommed service is automatically started on boot, execute chkconfig -s pommed on as root at the Terminal.

To start pommed manually, execute /etc/init.d/pommed start as root and you should be able to control the Screen Brightness (Fn+F1 & Fn+F2) and Keyboard Backlight (Fn+F5 & Fn+ F6).

Reboot properly

Unfortunately, while you can shutdown properly, you will hang the system if you choose to reboot in openSUSE. With Thanks to Alin again, he showed how to make openSUSE reboot the machine correctly.

In short, you need to edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file and add the flag reboot=pci to the kernel. Further, to prevent this flag from being removed when you upgrade your kernel, you will need to add this flag to the relevant variables in the /etc/sysconfig/bootloader file.

Thoughts & Conclusions

I have a working openSUSE 11.3 system running smoothly (well, you still can't beat Mac OS X since its tuned for this hardware) enough. The base openSUSE 11.3 took up 3.5-4.0Gb of disk space so I have plenty left over. Plus I can plug in a secondary USB/FireWire drive so its good.

I am using KVM to virtualize SLES and Windows. I refer to my other blog entry on getting started with KVM as a reference.

Finally, on the MacBook Pro, I use the Mac OS X more than openSUSE 11.3 because it meets most of my needs... except when I really need openSUSE. Besides, its always fun to see the look on them faces when they see openSUSE/KDE4 running on a MacBook Pro.

PS: Embedding this annoying clip introduced to me by Issac, my nephew.

My Mac-SUSE Journey - Part 1

2010-10-27T00:15:00.001+08:00

After many months of consideration and research, I bought a brand new MacBook Pro 13" in early October. I needed a handy appliance where I can do Photos, Movies, Music, browse the web... iPhone is too small, iPad is nice but not computationally powerful or mature/proven. After spending close to 4 weeks on my Macbook Pro (version 7,1), I'm a very happy customer.

It wasn't long before, 2 days post-acquisition really, I started wondering about putting SUSE on it. Sure, I've discovered Terminal & X11 in Mac OS X and it works great. I use VirtualBox to virtualize SLES & openSUSE. But I still wanna have SUSE run natively to do KVM, maybe Xen and just because I can...

I am not the first, nor the last, to do this so I will acknowledge the wealth of information & helpful folks out there on the Web (see reference section further below).

Before we begin, please indulge my trip down memory lane... my very first computer was the Apple PC-IIe and it looks like the picture below... and who could forget the timeless Karateka... filling my little mind with boundless fluid moves... that does very little in real life... well... it did get me into trouble a few times... only a few.

My next brush with Apple was during my undergraduate days where I spent many hours doing tutorials and projects in the Mathematics/Statistics/Simulation labs filled with rows of Macintoshes (see pic below)... good times.

I graduated just as the technicolor iMac G3 invaded the campus.

The Mac hardware and software has come a long way and I'm very impressed and pleased with my purchase. Despite my previous encounters with the Mac, about the only thing familiar was the good old Finder and that static menu bar at the top. As I use Mac OS X "Snow Leopard", I find good things/ideas that should be implemented in openSUSE/KDE... but I will blog about this in more detail another time.

Enough rambling, here are the steps to installing openSUSE 11.3 (64-bit) onto a Macbook Pro 13" (2010 edition) running Mac OS X 10.6.4:

Disk Partitioning

My hard disk was upgraded from 250Gb to 320Gb. I decided to take 25Gb away for openSUSE 11.3. I did not use the Boot Camp Assistant utility on Mac OS X but instead used the Disk Utility.

As shown in screenshot above, I shrunk my Mac OS X partition from 320Gb to 295Gb. Next, I split the remaining free space into 21Gb for my root partition and 4Gb for swap partition. You can format them as DOS/FAT and let openSUSE reformat them at installation.

Dual-boot Setup

Now that some disk space has been carved up for openSUSE 11.3, its time to make the MacBook Pro dual-boot. Unfortunately, the usual Grub bootloader doesn't work here. To spare you (and myself) the details, the way to dual-boot a MacBook Pro is to use rEFIt (pronounced Refit).

Download the freely available rEFIt, version 0.14 at the time, and install it. I followed the documentation and installed it via the "Automatic Installation with the Installer Package" section at http://refit.sourceforge.net/doc/c1s1_install.html

To verify you've installed this correctly, reboot your MacBook Pro and you should see a boot menu on startup where you use the arrow and Enter keys to select which OS to boot. You should only see one option at this time since you have not installed a second OS on the MacBook Pro yet.

Installation

Pop in the openSUSE 11.3 (64-bit) installation DVD into the drive and shutdown Mac OS X. Power-on the MacBook Pro and press and hold the "c" button so that it will boot from the DVD drive. I usually press and hold the "c" button till I hear the DVD drive spinning up the media before I let go.

You should see the usual stuff when installing openSUSE, the kernel and initrd will load, nice fancy splash screen shows up and you select Installation to start the process. Pretty straightforward.

The most important part of the installation is disk partitioning because you really do NOT want to install openSUSE over Mac OS X. Thanks to the simple partitioning scheme where rEFIt has the first partition and Mac OS X has the second partition of 295Gb, that's easy to spot. When you reach that part of the installation where openSUSE installer proposes a disk layout, do NOT accept the defaults but instead choose to do Custom Partitioning and ensure that you do NOT touch that first and second partition. Select the 21Gb partition, format it with your favourite filesystem (ext3 for me) and mount it as root /. Next select the 4Gb partition, format it as Swap.

The next equally important part of the installation is the Grub Boot Loader. Since we are relying on rEFIt to dual-boot, we need to ensure that Grub does not intrude and writes itself in the Master Boot Record (MBR). Instead, ensure that Grub is only installed to the Root partition (/dev/sda3 and NOT to MBR). Further, ensure the "Write generic Boot Code to MBR" is UNChecked so nothing gets written to the MBR.

The rest of the installation is a non-event.

Cannot boot up openSUSE without the DVD loaded?

There is a chance, post-installation, that you realized that you can boot into Mac OS X but when you select to boot into Linux, your openSUSE 11.3 does not boot up and some vague error message like no operating system found. However, you are able to boot from the openSUSE 11.3 installation DVD and choosing to boot from hard disk instead, you can successfully boot up the installed openSUSE 11.3.

If this is the case, its highly likely the GPT/MBR may be out of sync. To resolve this, boot into openSUSE 11.3 and first use fdisk -l to check that only the openSUSE partition is set to boot (see first screenshot below). Next, use parted to check that the boot flag only applies to the first partition (rEFIt) and nothing else (see second screenshot below).

Finally, double-check the Grub Boot Loader setup via YaST -> System -> Boot Loader and verify the settings are correct (compared to the screenshots in previous section above).

Conclusions (to be continued)

The vanilla openSUSE 11.3, will be 85-90% functional. Some important items that works out of the box:

Graphics card is detected and proper resolution rendered
Keyboard works (in general but you can specify Apple Macbook keyboard in the Control Panel to improve mappings)
Touchpad works (but I do find it a tad sensitive so you can adjust it under Control Panel) or plug in your favourite USB mouse
Disk and DVD drive works
iSight webcam works with Kopete
Ethernet (LAN port)
FireWire and USB ports
External display port
SD Card Reader

The following is a list of things that does not work right away but will require addition work (like installing additional software packages) to get going:

Wireless does not work as its a Broadcom chip. You will require a LAN cable (hey, at least networking works!) to retrieve and install the appropriate broadcom drivers.
Default open source nouveau driver works for the nVidia GeForce 320M graphics card but if you want 3D desktop effects, you will need to download and install the proprietary nVidia driver
Audio does not work but its more a configuration issue than driver issue
You cannot adjust the screen brightness or keyboard backlight. You will need to install additional drivers for this to work

I will be addressing these in Part 2 of my blog. Stay tuned.

On a Side Note

I'd like to share why I did not install SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) 11 SP1 or earlier version of openSUSE 11.2. I did attempt it and both SLED 11 SP1 and openSUSE 11.2 DVD boots up but fails to recognized the DVD drive after the installation kernel/initrd loads. It kinda hangs at loading udev. I'm too lazy to figure out which module I have to load by hand and since openSUSE 11.3 works, its good enough for me.

Links/References to other related pages

General Guide & starting point - http://old-en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_on_a_Mac

Alin Marin Elena's entry specific to my MacBook Pro (7,1) model and openSUSE 11.3 - http://alin.elenaworld.net/?p=921

Howto based on openSUSE 11.2 & older 2009 MacBook Pro model - http://forums.opensuse.org/english/information-new-users/unreviewed-how-faq/426413-how-install-opensuse-11-2-mid-2009-macbook-pro.html

Forum post on Grub & Booting issues - http://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-help-here/install-boot-login/430718-macbook-pro-grub-2.html#post2113355

openSUSE Forum is a great source of information and discussions - http://forums.opensuse.org/

Using Apache2 to deploy & maintain SUSE

2010-10-25T19:15:00.005+08:00

This entry is a little different because its open ended compared to my previous posts. The solution I'm about to share may or may not work for you and that's the nature of the enterprise IT environment. Nevertheless, I hope it will be a good reference for you.

Automation is an important aspect in enterprise IT. In this specific scenario, we are talking about the ability to scale deployment and maintenance of multiple SLES instances (or SLED or openSUSE). Unlike installing a single SLES instance for evaluation, the DVD media (or even USB sticks) is not going to cut it if you have 3, 5, 50 or 100s of SLES deployed in a data center. This also applies to setting up an IT training classroom of 25 machines.

To make things more interesting, if you have Blade servers, you'll noticed that each Blade server chasis/enclosure have only one shared physical DVD drive. Sure, its read-only and can be shared amongst all the blades but what if you need to install another software (requiring another DVD) on the first blade and the rest are still reading from your SLES DVD media? Oops.

The idea is to share the SLES binaries over the network and there are various mechanism like HTTP, FTP, NFS and even Samba (oh-boy). My preferred choice is HTTP via Apache2 webserver for 2 simple reasons. First, it works quite well from experience and as importantly, its really easy to setup (ie quick & painless setup).

Install Apache2

a) Command-line option: zypper in apache2

OR

b) GUI option: YaST -> Software Management -> Search for the apache2 package and click Accept & continue for automatic changes with associated packages for installation.

Configure Apache2

1) Edit the following configuration file at /etc/apache2/default-server.conf with your favourite text editor.

2) Under the Directory section (see screenshot), look for the line Options None and replace it with Options Indexes FollowSymLinks as shown in screenshot below. This allows apache2 webserver to list directories and also follow symbolic links.

Mounting ISOs under Apache2

1) The Document root for Apache2 is /srv/www/htdocs/ so I would suggest the following directory structure:

/srv/www/htdocs/software/SLES-11-SP1/i586
/srv/www/htdocs/software/SLES-11-SP1/x86_64
/srv/www/htdocs/software/SLES-11-SP1/s390x

By way of example above, you can see that I created a software sub-directory followed by directories for the product & version and, in turn, followed by the architecture.

2) Assuming you have the DVD ISO file somewhere on your filesystem (I usually put them in /media), you can mount them via:

mount -t iso9660 -o ro,loop /media/SLES-11-SP1-x86_64.iso /srv/www/htdocs/software/SLES-11-SP1/x86_64/

Starting Apache2

a) rcapache2 start

b) To make apache2 auto-start on boot, chkconfig -s apache2 on

Configure target SLES instances

1) On your target SLES instances, you can add a new repository via YaST.

For SLES 10: YaST -> Installation Source
For SLES 11: YaST -> Software Repositories

There is an equivalent zypper command but I find the GUI much more productive in this case.

2) Click Add to add another source for YaST to query and retrieve software. Choose Specify URL... and enter the URL to the Apache2 server you've just setup.

As an example, assuming your target is SLES 11 SP1 & as shown in screenshots below, you enter http://[IP address to Apache2]/software/SLES-11-SP1/x86_64

Once this is setup, you may disable or remove other sources (like the one that points to your DVD media).

Conclusions

1) It works well and scales nicely to quite a degree.

2) You don't waste DVDs (or the time in creating them).

3) You get to keep all your ISO binaries in one place which is great from admin standpoint. Plus, you do not waste disk space storing duplicate ISOs spread all over your servers or SAN.

4) If you have virtualized SLES instances, this works just as well since its all network based. As long as your servers (physical or virtual) has a network path to your Apache2, its good. Heck, you can even virtualize this Apache2 server if you like.

What's not documented in this blog entry is how to setup a PXE-boot server (tftp & dhcpd) environment in SLES in addition to Apache2 (mentioned above) so you can provision new servers that are capable of booting up over the network and kick-start the installation process with Auto-YaST.

If you are interested, let me know in the comments section and I'll look into writing it... in the meantime, I can refer you to these helpful resources:

http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:PXE_boot_installation
http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/17719.html

Getting Started with KVM on SLES 11 SP1

2010-10-23T16:00:00.000+08:00

This blog post is long overdued and I apologized to those who had encouraged me to do so earlier and I procrastinated.

With SLES 11 SP1, officially available earlier in June 2010, KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is officially supported in addition to the more mature Xen virtualization (since 2006). You can install both hypervisors on the same installation of SLES 11 SP1 but you can only choose to use one or the other and not both at the same time (reboot required to switch).

Pre-requisites:

This is an important and usually overlooked step, I'm guilty of this... twice (Ouch!), but KVM requires x86 CPUs that supports hardware level virtualization. For Intel chips, the Intel-VT feature and for AMD chips, the equivalent AMD-V feature must be available.

Question: How do I know my CPU supports hardware level virtualization?
Answer 1: If you have your CPU model number, you can google or just visit the support pages at Intel or AMD.
Answer 2: If you already have SLES 11 SP1 installed, execute this command as root via the Terminal: cat /proc/cpuinfo and your CPU Model name will show up.

More importantly, this feature must be turned ON. I've noticed that they (Intel-VT and AMD-V) are usually disabled by default. To turn them on, you'll need to go into the BIOS and, under some CPU configuration, toggle it ON.

Question: How do I know if Intel-VT or AMD-V is available with SLES 11 SP1 already booted up?
Answer: Execute egrep "vmx|svm" /proc/cpuinfo and if this command returns empty, you're out of luck. For Intel-VT, vmx is present under the CPU flag. For AMD-V, svm is present.

The consequence of not checking, while not catastrophic, does cause disappointments especially when that particular CPU does not support this feature and you'll have to find other means to virtualize. On such a machine and if you're only virtualizing SLES 10 or 11, you can install Xen and it will work since Xen supports para-virtualization. However, if you intend to virtualize other Linux and Windows, you'll need to look at VMWare (eg VMWare Server coz its free) and/or any other hypervisor that provides full hardware emulation for virtualization.

Installation:

SLES 11 SP1 does not install Xen or KVM by default (if you keep clicking Next and do not modify the Software Selection during installation). Fortunately, SUSE Engineering made it real easy to install either Xen or KVM (or both) via YaST.

In YaST, under the Virtualization section, click on Install Hypervisor and Tools. You will be presented with a simple dialog with 2 checkboxes. You may checked both boxes to install both Xen and KVM or just the checkbox for KVM.

Click Accept and YaST will take care of installing all the required packages (including management tools) for KVM and/or Xen.

Its important that you know that, virt-manager, the GUI to manage virtual machines and configurations can be used to administer both Xen and KVM in SLES 11 SP1. This is a great feature because users who are already familiar with Xen on SLES can start using KVM quickly. Another great example of engineering thought put into releasing a quality Linux distribution for the enterprise.

Once installation is complete, you are ready to use KVM (without rebooting). Just to be sure that KVM is ready for action, you can execute (as root) lsmod | grep kvm and see if the kvm module has been loaded. You can find the KVM release notes/support statements under the /usr/share/doc/packages/kvm directory.

Using KVM for the first time:

Bring up the Virtual Machine Manager (aka virt-manager) either via YaST -> Virtualization -> Virtual Machine Manager OR the command (as root) virt-manager.

For the Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) GUI screenshot above, you should have an empty list of virtual machines under localhost(QEMU) since you're using KVM for the first time.

At this point, before you create your first virtual machine, I would advise you define the virtual network settings. By default, there is a "default" virtual network (it may not be activated however) that is configured to NAT (Network Address Translation). This means that your virtual machine will pick up, via DHCP, an IP address that is local to your machine but capable of accessing the Internet via your host network card (or WiFi). If this setting works for you, great. Otherwise, you have the option of creating other virtual network (host-only or bridged) via the VMM GUI.

To administer these virtual networks, double-click on localhost (QEMU) in the VMM. Alternatively, you can click on Edit -> Host Details on the VMM menubar. Click on the Virtual Networks Tab when another window appears. I won't bother going into details here because the GUI is rather straight-forward. Only thing that is worth pointing out is NOT to forget clicking on the "play" button to start your virtual network.

Good, you are all set to create your first virtual machine with KVM. If you are familiar with the virtual machine creation wizard for Xen since SLES 10 SP2, it will be plain sailing for you since SLES re-use the same GUI interfaces. For those who are not familiar, well, its really not that tough clicking Next, modifying preferences and clicking Finish to create a virtual machine and start it up.

Finally, for the more hardcore users reading this blog, here are the directories that will be of interests to you:

VM disk images - /var/lib/kvm/images/
VM meta-data - /etc/kvm/vm/
Logs - /var/log/kvm/ and /var/log/libvirt/
Configurations - /etc/libvirt/ and /etc/libvirt/qemu/networks/

Enjoy!

The winding road to a straight-forward solution

2010-10-15T23:30:00.003+08:00

Update(26 Oct 2010): Please read comments section for this entry for more useful information. My gratitude & Thanks to all who contributed. Cheers!

This is a rant... and I will admit to not thoroughly investigating this topic... but really, why does it have to be this hard to install SUSE on a Laptop? Curious? Read on...

First, the scenario, I was on the road 3 weeks ago and needed to install SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 SP1 onto a Thinkpad X61. This model does not have a DVD drive and while there's a docking station somewhere that has a DVD drive, that docking station cannot be found, Oops. Not a big deal, next idea was to do a network install where I setup my machine with DHCP & HTTP server to provision the X61 via PXE-boot. Unfortunately, I do not have sufficient time and the network setup at that place was new to me so I thought the risk is rather high.

Next idea was to use my 8GB USB thumbdrive and make it into a SUSE install stick. Yes, this might work (it did eventually) and I recall seeing some documentation on opensuse.org before. I backed up the existing data on my thumbdrive and ensured that I've installed syslinux onto my system so as to make the USB stick bootable... that's all that I can recall off hand.

Now comes my rant:

I cannot find that document on how to make a USB stick into a bootable SUSE installer. First, opensuse.org has gone through a facelife (and its a truly nice visual upgrade). While the structure of the site has improved in terms of content organization, that particular document did not survive the website upgrade. After spending more time with Google, I realize that the older opensuse.org site is still accessible by prepending "old-" to the URL = http://old-en.opensuse.org

Eventually, I found the documentation/article at http://old-en.opensuse.org/SuSE_install_from_USB_drive

Finally, the steps are pretty straightforward except for the little bump in the road where I have to download a script called mksusebootdisk from here. Murphy's law kicked into high gear and I had trouble downloading this little file. Aargh!

From the documentation, it states that the mkbootdisk script that ships with SUSE does not really work in this scenario as it doesn't work with FAT32 on USB stick (and you can't use Fat16 as SUSE DVD image is greater than 2GB). Therefore, you'll need the modified version mentioned above. Great!

This document has been around for about 2 years and in that time, this little script is still not shipped with the latest SUSE. I'm sure there is a good engineering reason to this but I was too upset to even consider it. LOL! :)

Anyway, after clicking on the link one last time (hoping the same action will yield a different result), I was able to download that mksusebootdisk script. Ha! Everything was smooth sailing thereafter and I installed SLED 11 SP1 on the Thinkpad X61 from my 8GB USB Stick.

Onwards and upwards... keeping on carrying on... :)

Mummy dearest and my SLED 11 SP1

2010-09-16T12:00:00.000+08:00

My 62 year old and Chinese educated mother used my Thinkpad T61p running SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 SP1 the other day. Her trusty (ie old) PC running Windows & MS Office opted for early retirement while she was half-way through creating a powerpoint presentation for her Chinese Poetry Club.

Desperate to complete her presentation, she asked if she could use the computers at my place... I told her I do not have Windows but if she was open, she could still get her presentation done on a slightly different program and interface.

I powered up SLED 11 SP1, plugged in her USB thumbdrive and opened up her Chinese poetry presentation in OpenOffice v3.2.1. Next, I showed her how to use SCIM for Chinese character input (toggle via Ctrl-Space & HanYu PinYin input). Left her to it for an hour and she successfully completed her assignment, saved it in PPT format and went home. I did warn her that her presentation may not be 100% WYSIWYG when opened on a Windows PC at her club meeting. *fingers crossed*

My mum came back the next evening to add a few more slides and told me (not surprisingly) that the slides did not turn out 100% as planned but she was resourceful enough to copy-n-paste (what a wonderful invention) the characters from the PPT created in OpenOffice and merge it with a PPT created in MS Office. She even managed to get me off my lazy bum and help create transparency effect (using GIMP) for one of her mid-autumn backgrounds used in the presentation.

Wishing her all the best for that final presentation this evening. I'm so proud of her because:

She only picked up basic English and basic Windows & MS Office usage a few years ago at around 50+ years of age.
She is fearless... there are many people half her age who wouldn't even touch a keyboard with a non-Windows screen in front of them.
She is adaptable... man, how many people can use cut-n-paste effectively?

Maybe... just maybe... there is still a glimmer of hope for that elusive "Year of the Linux Desktop"... nah!

Windows Virus/Trojan busting with SUSE and ClamAV

2010-08-10T16:25:00.001+08:00

Not once but on two separate occasions over the course of last week, I was called upon to help do some virus & trojan busting on badly infected laptops. It was so bad that traditional anti-virus software just could not seem to completely eradicate them. It would appear that these viruses and trojans could hide and re-create/spawn instances upon shutdown and reboot of Windows XP.

Honestly, I'm "new" to this as this is not my day job or something I do on a regular basis. Since using the installed anti-virus program route did not work, I opted to physically remove the infected 2.5" hard disk drive from these laptops and put them in my secondary hard disk bay of my Thinkpad running SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 SP1 (SLED 11 SP1 for short).

Tip: If you do not have nor want to spend money on a secondary hard disk bay for your laptop, there are many more affordable adapters in the market where you can connect a SATA or IDE 2.5" hard disk drive and connect them to your laptop via USB. SUSE Linux Enterprise (Desktop/Server) and openSUSE will automatically mount them under the /media directory.

My idea/solution was simple, boot up my Thinkpad with SLED 11 SP1 with the infected hard disk mounted as a secondary drive (ie no programs are executed on boot). Further, its unlikely these nasty viruses/trojans will execute since I'm using a different operating system. Next, use ClamAV (anti-virus scanner that comes with SLED 11 SP1) to scan for known Windows viruses & trojans on the mounted secondary drive (which is the Windows hard disk from the infected laptops).

Note, if you are using clamscan for the first time, ensure that your virus database is up-to-date or it will not work. To do that, ensure you've got Internet access and execute freshclam. Thereafter, you can execute clamscan -ri . The "r" flag means recursively through the directories and "i" flag is to only print infected files detected to the screen. In my case, I mounted the infected disk via mount -t ntfs /dev/sdb1 /mnt/temp and so I executed clamscan -ri /mnt/temp/ for my virus/trojan busting.

Its IMPORTANT to note that clamscan does not have virus/trojan quarantine or disinfecting capabilities. To remove the virus, it would delete the infected file. Hence, I did not specify the --remove=yes parameter as I wanted clamscan to detect the infected files first and leave it to me to decide if these files should be removed permanently.

Using this method, I managed to detect and selectively remove infected files (some of them made to look like Windows system files). The first instance, I detected and removed over 25 trojans. In the second instance, I detected and removed 2 trojans.

Finally, I believe (please correct me if I'm mistaken) the original intent of packaging ClamAV with SUSE Linux Enterprise is to have the ClamAV daemon work with email server software in scanning emails that may contain Windows viruses and actively block or remove them before it reaches end user machines running Windows.