Thursday, September 16, 2010

openSUSE Conference 2010

This year the openSUSE conference takes place 20-23 October in Nürnberg, Germany. See more details and the schedule here. I'll have a presentation and a workshop there. I don't have the final plan yet ready so here I'd like to ask for your opinions in advance. If you have any idea or if you are interested in a specific topic for the presentation or the workshop let me know via comments below.


WebYaST - Presentation

My plan is to do a similar presentation as I had at LinuxTag event this year. But because here I'll have more time (+15 minutes) I'll show more details and I'll show how to install it in openSUSE-11.3.

Developing RoR Application in NetBeans - Workshop

Because I'm developing WebYaST using Netbeans IDE I'd like to share some nice tips and tricks how to make developing of Rails apps better. I used VIM for editing (and I still use it for non-Rails work) but I wanted something better. Of course, there is a rails plugin for VIM but that didn't help me much. Then I tried NetBeans and I was pleased by the features it has.

So this workshop will be rather an introduction to possibilities of NetBeans and if you are using a plain text editor for Rails development you should definitely come and see it.

I'm still thinking about the content - what application should we use for this session? We could use WebYaST but we could also start from scratch generating a very simple Rails app... I guess I'll leave it on the attendees to decide what they want to hack on, I'll prepare both possibilities... And of course, if you already have your own app you could use it.

Monday, June 14, 2010

WebYaST at Linuxtag 2010

LinuxTag - June 9-12, 2010




Gentoo, CentOS, Mandriva...

This year I took part of the LinuxTag event in Berlin. It is the biggest Linux and Open Source event in Germany and probably in Europe. See more details here.

Booths


There were many booths at the event, every major distribution like openSUSE, Gentoo, Ubuntu... had a booth were users could try the latest version and talk with the developers.



... and of course openSUSE!


And you could also meet people from interesting projects like KDE, FFmpeg, XBMC and so on. I found interesting the demos which showed Linux in embedded devices or there were even robots running Linux.

Presentations

I hadn't much time to visit the presentations but I visited a presentation about Communtu, which is a web server where you can build your customized DVD Ubuntu image. You can add a software bundle which is not included in Ubuntu by default. So you don't have to search for additional repositories and install packages from them.


Embedded Linux: here you could
see Linux running in various
devices


It's somewhat similar to SUSE Studio, but with less features and targeted to Ubuntu users.

WebYaST

I had a talk about WebYaST which a new web based remote management for Linux.
It's a an open source project and it's a successor of YaST.

The main difference between YaST and WebYaST is that WebYaST is a web application in contrast to YaST which is a standard desktop application. WebYaST is accessed via a web browser.

Another difference is that WebYaST supports access control, so you don't have to use the root account for managing the remote machine, you can use any regular user provided the he/she has the access right granted via PolicyKit.

In WebYaST we try reusing the existing code from YaST if possible, but we want to have the YaST dependency as small as possible so for example installing patches is done via PackageKit.

You can find more details in the slides which I made available online using slideshare.net service or at the main WebYaST wikipage.


I thought that there could have been more attendees in my talk, but the hall was really big and even relatively big group of people seemed small there. Anyway, the presentation was successful in my opinion and I hope I spread a word about WebYaST...

If you visited my presentation and have a comment about it please write it below. Thank you for any feedback!