YaST/Events/Workshop Prague 2007/Day 1

From openSUSE

What We Succeeded and Failed to Achieve Since Last Workshop

Presentation by Stanislav Visnovsky <visnov@suse.cz>

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Notes & Discussion

10.2 codebase went more or less completely to SLE10 SP1, which is a first; normally we would have remained on the SLE10 code base, but that one had so much problems, in particular with libzypp. 10.2 was much more stable.

Discussion about the future of ZLM which went into maintentance mode in India; it's unclear if and when any future version for Linux will arrive. Sales and product management would like to have some product for that. It might also be an Open Source project if ZLM doesn't come along.

Profit from ZLM did not meet expectations, but it's unclear how much it contributed to selling SLES/SLED. It makes money now, not only because of lower cost due to offshoring to India, but also because sales actually went up. It might make a lot more sense to think in longer terms so big customers get time to adopt products that are of strategic importance to them, too. Klaus said he talked to Roger Levy about exactly that, and Roger is aware of the problem.

SP1 migration: Many yes/no/yes/no decisions by product management added to the problem of making it meet customer expecations. Plus, of course, shortcomings of the initial package management / update stack.

Code 11 and Beyond

Discussion initiated and moderated by Klaus Kämpf <kkaempf@suse.de>

Notes & Discussion

Icons vs. NCurses: Why use NCurses in the first place? What's the requirement?

• Have some kind of text mode
• Installation: Similar to Zypper shell? Do we need NCurses for that?
• How to make graphics design? Community input?
• Installation workflow: Too many steps?
• Is NCurses a limiting factor for our dialogs?
• Is our approach to installation still valid?
  • Install a default system (dump an installation image)and carry on from there?

• Will Internet be everywhere in some years from now?
• Will broad band Internet be everywhere in some years from now?
• Use technologies like GPS?

• Use social networking (like Flickr groups / geotagging)?

CIM: Where do we fit in?

• Strength of YaST: The business logic
• CIM is just a data model
• High-level CIM tools have their own business logic and access to very low-level functions. YaST doesn't really fit in there.
• Use case (from Stano): YaST is good at one-to-one or one-to-few management; use YaST via CIM for troubleshooting when high-level CIM tools come across a problem they can't fix on their own.

Image and Perception of the YaST Team

• Proposal: Do internal presentations about new YaST features etc.?
  • Conclusion: Use news.opensuse.org

• Move #yast IRC to irc.freenode.org?

Y2-Qt Control Center

• Is it (still) the right approach?
• We know the number of modules we have is too high

Conclusion / Action Items

• Configurable look
  • Qt4 is pre-requirement for different themes
  • Blog to find out what's possible and ask specific questions
  • -> sh

• Control center
  • -> schubi

• Icons
  • -> sh / locilka

• Handle graphical and text mode separately
  • Ask people
  • Look into possibilities
  • Find out who is using y2-ncurses and why?
  • Is y2-ncurses the right approach to what people want?
  • Wiki page to collect the information
  • Even if we decide we want to keep y2-ncurses like it is now, the decision process is then documented.
  • -> jsuchome

• Need Designers

• Community Input
  • -> locilka

• Startup speed
  • -> mvidner / jsrain

• Our image
  • -> visnov

• Language bindings
  • -> dmacvicar

Powerful Features of Linuxrc

Presentation by Steffen Winterfeldt <snwint@suse.de>

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Notes & Discussion

• When linuxrc is running, there is always a shell on console 9.
• linuxrc options are normalized: lowercase, special chars ("-", "_") stripped

• Request: Exchange the "An error occured during the installation" message with something that points out that it's still possible at that point to access the shell running on console 2 to retrieve y2logs (call save_y2logs)

Debugging YaST

Presentation by Ladislav Slezak <lslezak@suse.cz> and Katarina Machalkova <kmachalkova@suse.cz>

Slides - PDF (121KB) Image:Debugging YaST.pdf

Notes & Discussion

• Widely unknown:
  • y2internal( -1, "My text" )
  • -> YCP backtrace in y2log
• Idea: Log backtrace by default with y2error() ?

• Custom inst-sys:
  • Inst-sys images in /boot/$arch/root, using squashfs
  • use unsquashfs to unpack
  • Use modified inst-sys with installation from NFS server or use linuxrc parameter on boot command line:
    • install=nfs://my.server.net?instsys=inst-sys
    • MD5SUM won't match any more, boot with
    • insecure=1

Creating Installation Images

Presentation by Jiri Suchomel <jsuchome@suse.cz>

Slides - PDF Image:YaSTWorkshop2007 ProductCreator.pdf

Notes & Discussion

(None)

Live Installation and Firstboot

Presentation by Jiri Srain <jsrain@suse.cz>

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Notes & Discussion

(None)

Next day: Workshop Prague 2007 Day 2