A couple of weeks ago the 11th edition of SUSE’s hackweek took place. This year I decided to spend this time to look into the different orchestration and service discovery tools build around Docker. In the beginning I looked into the kubernetes project. I found it really promising but AFAIK not yet ready to be used. It’s still in its early days and it’s in constant evolution. I will surely keep looking into it.
I’m pleased to announce Marcus Schäfer has just made possible to build docker images with KIWI. For those who never heard about it, KIWI is a tool which creates Linux systems for both physical and virtual machines. It can create openSUSE, SUSE and other types of Linux distributions. Update: I changed the required version of kiwi and the openSUSE 13.1 template. Kiwi just received some improvements which do no longer force the image to include the lxc package.
I have some good news about Docker and openSUSE. First of all the Docker package has been moved from my personal OBS project to the more official Virtualization one. The next step is to get the Docker package into Factory :) I’m going to drop the docker package from home:flavio_castelli:docker, so make sure to subscribe to the Virtualization repository to get latest versions of Docker. I have also submitted some openSUSE related documentation to the official Docker project.
I don’t know if you are aware of that, but Docker 0.7.0 has been released a couple of days ago. You can read the full announcement here, but let me talk about the biggest change introduced by this release: storage drivers! Docker has always used AUFS, a “unionfs-like” file system, to power its containers. Unfortunately AUFS is neither part of the official kernel nor of the openSUSE/SLE one. In the past I had to build a custom patched kernel to run Docker on openSUSE.
SUSE’s Hackweek #9 is over. It has been an awesome week during which I worked hard to make docker a first class citizen on openSUSE. I also spent some time working on an openSUSE container that could be used by docker’s users. The project has been tracked on this page of hackweek’s wiki, this is a detailed report of what I achieved. Installing docker on openSUSE 12.3 Docker has been packaged inside of this OBS project.
Just a quick information, QJson 0.8.1 has been released. This release ensure API and ABI compatibility with version 0.7.1. The previous 0.8.0 release broke ABI compatibility without changing the SOVERSION. Toward QJson 1.0.0 I’m not entirely happy with some parts of QJson’s API. I addressed these issues inside of the 1_0_0 branch. I would appreciate to hear your opinion before merging this branch into master and releasing QJson 1.0.0.
Almost three years passed since latest release of QJson. A lot of stuff happened in my life and QJson definitely paid for that. I have to admit I’m a bit ashamed. So here we go, QJson 0.8.0 is out! What changed A lot of bugs has been smashed during this time, this new release will fix issues like this one and this in a nicer way. QJson’s API is still backward compatible, while the ABI changed.
SUSE Studio is an awesome tool, with a couple of clicks you can create an openSUSE/SUSE based system and deploy to your hard drive, an usb flash, a live dvd, a VMware/VirtualBox/Xen server and even Amazon EC2 cloud. Suppose you want to create a tailored SUSE Studio appliance to run a Ruby on Rails app, this is a list of things you have to take care of: install all the gems required by the app (this can be a long list).
[](http://flavio.castelli.name/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/van-halen- jump.jpeg)Let me introduce a small project I’ve been working on with a friend of mine, Giuseppe Capizzi. The project is called jump and allows you to quickly change directories in the bash shell using bookmarks. Thanks to Jump, you won’t have to type those long paths anymore. You can find jump’s source code, detailed documentation and installation instructions here. SUSE packages can be found here.
Just a quick note, I released a new version of the fastuserswitch plasmoid. This new release implements all the improvements suggested by the users plus some minor fixes. Code can be downloaded from here. openSUSE packages are already available on the build service. These are some screenshots illustrating fastuserswitch’s new features. {% img /images/fast_user_switch/fastuserswitch011.png %} {% img /images/fast_user_switch/fastuserswitch021.png %} {% img /images/fast_user_switch/fastuserswitch03.png %}