Ramblings of a Geek, mostly about Linux, openSUSE, SUSE, and openQA.
How to use combustion to reproducibly configure MicroOS - openSUSE MicroOS is one of openSUSE’s most exciting projects, and for me has replaced openSUSE Leap as my go-to server operating system of choice. I currently have 3 MicroOS installations, all running as podman with openSUSE containers . The machines are as follows: A nice fanless Zotac x86-64 NUC running at home as my Nextcloud and…
Why I No Longer Use openSUSE Leap - For those who don’t already know, openSUSE is a Linux Distribution Project with two Linux distributions, Tumbleweed and Leap. Tumbleweed is what is known as a Rolling Release , in that the distribution is constantly updating. Unlike Operating Systems with specific versions (e.g.. Windows 7, Windows 10, iOS 13, etc..) there is just ‘openSUSE Tumbleweed’ and…
Dear Community, After six years on the openSUSE Board and five as its Chairperson, I have decided to step down as Chair of the openSUSE Board effective today, August 19. This has been a very difficult decision for me to make, with reasons that are diverse, interlinked, and personal. Some of the key factors that led me to make this step include the time required to do the job properly, and the…
openSUSE’s YaST installer creates a detailed btrfs root filesystem configuration that has been designed to be flexible and secure while still efficient when used with tools like Snapper . One of the overriding requirements is to provide a clearly defined ‘root filesystem’ containing everything we care about for ‘full system rollback’ (facilitated by snapper), while using subvolumes to exclude…
The Birth of the Kubic Desktop - Well it’s over, SUSE’s 16th hackweek . Here’s a quick post to sum up how my Hackweek went compared to my plans . Small Bits and Pieces I had a few small things on my list to look at. I didn’t get around to look at WeKan , but I understand other colleagues did and got it working on openSUSE . I plan to learn from them about whether or not the tool has much potential…
All Good Plans... - It’s here again, SUSE’s 16th Hackweek . A week where all of SUSE Engineering is given time away from their regular grind to work on whatever they want. And of course as this is SUSE we’re talking about, a lot of Hackweek involves the openSUSE Community also. My Plans for Hackweek 0x10 This Hackweek I have a few small things I hope to spend a little bit of time on, and one huge…
with a little help from SaltStack - I’ve been running my personal blog on rootco.de for a few months now. The server is a minimal install of openSUSE Leap 42.1 running on a nice physical machine hosted at the awesome Hetzner , who offer openSUSE Leap as an OS on all of their Physical and Virtual server hosting. I use the standard Apache available in Leap, with Jekyll to generate this blog. You can…
Contributing to our Project - The openSUSE Project is awesome. We’re doing facinating stuff that is treading new ground in the world of Free and Open Source Software. If you’re interested in how and why we’re doing this stuff, if you’d like to get involved, then this blog post is for you . After reading you should have an idea of how we work and how to get started working with us. “How does the…
People often ask me why they should use openSUSE Tumbleweed and how it compares to other distributions like Fedora or Ubuntu. The fact is Tumbleweed is actually rather hard, if not impossible to compare to Linux distributions like Fedora or Ubuntu. Both are ‘traditional’, released-based distributions. They build it carefully over a few months, they ship it, and they then cautiously patch things…
18th-20th March Present: Richard Brown - Chair Michal Hrušecký Kostas Koudaras Tomas Chvatal Gertjan Lettink Bryan Lunduke - Extra special thanks goes to Bryan for attending via video conference at ridiculous hours in his local timezone after urgent personal matters kept him from attending the meeting in person. As this years Board Meeting Minutes are so long, they are split into 3 sections…
18th-20th March Present: Richard Brown - Chair Michal Hrušecký Kostas Koudaras Tomas Chvatal Gertjan Lettink Bryan Lunduke - Extra special thanks goes to Bryan for attending via video conference at ridiculous hours in his local timezone after urgent personal matters kept him from attending the meeting in person. As this years Board Meeting Minutes are so long, they are split into 3 sections…
18th-20th March Present: Richard Brown - Chair Michal Hrušecký Kostas Koudaras Tomas Chvatal Gertjan Lettink Bryan Lunduke - Extra special thanks goes to Bryan for attending via video conference at ridiculous hours in his local timezone after urgent personal matters kept him from attending the meeting in person. As this years Board Meeting Minutes are so long, they are split into 3 sections…
I’ve had to move my old blog from http://sysrich.co.uk to this new server on http://rootco.de Most of my favourite blog posts have made the transition and have migrated from the ‘old fashioned’ Wordpress to the new and shiny Jekyll It’s an excuse for me to learn a bit of Ruby, practice my markdown, and keep exercising my git skills I plan to get back to blogging more often about the goings on in…
The recording of my presentation from openSUSE conference 2015 is live. During the session I talk about the success of Tumbleweed and how its the best choice for anyone who wants their Linux with the latest and greatest software I then go on to talk about our openSUSE Regular Release, where I propose using the recently released SUSE Linux Enterprise sources as an opportunity to build a Stable…
Last week was SUSE's Hackweek 12. Hackweeks are special weeks at SUSE where all of SUSE Engineering get to work on whatever they'd like, to try cool things and learn new stuff. This Hackweek was my first at SUSE's Nuremberg office, and it was quite an experience. The whole place had a 'buzz' about it all week. Every day the company sponsored Lunch or Breakfast, which got everyone together and…
As this is hosted on my personal blog, this should probably go without saying, but given the topics covered in this post I wish to state for absolute clarity that the content of this post does not necessarily reflect the official opinion of the openSUSE Project or my employer, SUSE Linux GmbH. This is my personal opinion and should be treated as such One thing I get asked, time and time again, is…
In the past I've posted several articles on various tweaks to improve Power Management on Intel Sandy/Ivybridge hardware, based on my experiments with my Lenovo X220 With more recent releases of openSUSE, I've been experimenting with my old tweaks, and found that they NO LONGER help with power management - In fact, they seem to increase it So, my advice at the moment - if you want a Linux OS that…
I've been working a lot with openQA lately, openSUSE's great operating system testing tool, and I think some of what I've been getting up is kind of interesting. This is likely to be the first of a series of blog posts about my crazy adventures with this awesome tool. What is openQA? openQA is a fully featured operating system testing tool. It takes an operating system ISO or Disk Image, and using…
I recently received some bittersweet news, my good friend Vincent Untz is stepping down as Chairman of the openSUSE Board as a result of a happy personal event that I'm sure is going to keep him busy in the months and years ahead. In addition the formal thanks as part of the official announcements , I'd like to add my own personal thanks to Vincent. I owe much to Vincent's help and support…
This is a copy of my openSUSE Election Platform, that I'm putting here with the shameless intention of doing my best to ensure as many people read my thoughts as possible. The original can be found on our official wiki Introduction and Biography Hi! I'm Richard Brown, 31 years old, and since last month living in Nürnberg in Germany. Originally from London, England, I used to joke that I had been…