Monthly Archives: July 2020

openSUSE Ad-hoc Board Election 2020

Back in February 2020 Christian Boltz resigned from the openSUSE Board explaining the reasons behind his decision on the project mailing list. His resignation came about two weeks after Sarah Julia Kriesch's resignation from the Board.

The openSUSE Board was left with two vacant seats to be filled. Sarah had been a board member for just about a few weeks after the 2019-2020 board elections. After her resignation, the openSUSE Board decided to appoint Vinzenz Vietzke on the board based on the results of the 2019-2020 board elections. Following that, only one seat remained vacant on the board. However, before the Election Committee could start discussions for an election to fill that vacant seat, about two weeks after Vinzenz's appointment, openSUSE member Pierre Böckmann called for a No-Confidence vote against the current board. It was unprecedented in the community and that put things on halt for a while.

The board election rules state that:

If 20 per cent or more of the openSUSE members require a new board, an election will be held for the complete elected Board seats.

The Election Committee was tasked to find out whether 20% of the community is indeed calling for a re-election. At this point I should disclose that I am an election official in the openSUSE Election Committee and the task given to us was not easy. After much consultation, we finally came up with a way to "measure" this 20% requirement of the election rule. We set up an electronic petition using the voting platform that is used for openSUSE Board elections.

A few days ago the petition ended and the result showed that only 11.6% of the community was in favour of a re-election. That does not satisfy the requirement for a forced re-election and thus an ad-hoc election will be carried to fill the one vacant seat only.

Ariez Vachha announced the ad-hoc board election schedule on the project mailing list and details are also available on the openSUSE wiki.

Starting now and until the 2nd of August openSUSE members wishing to run for this election or nominate someone from the community can do so by sending an email to [email protected]. I wish to remind that only openSUSE members can run for board candidacy and vote in this election.

The Election Committee is composed of Ariez Vachha, Edwin Zakaria and myself.

Podman – unable to pull image

Today, while pulling the latest Nextcloud container image from the docker.io repository I noticed that it is failing. Looking at the read: connection reset by peer error I assume it could be primarily due to network failure; maybe poor quality of the connection.

Note that Mauritius is far from "everywhere" else and connectivity issues are nothing new.

ish@coffee-bar:~> podman pull docker.io/library/nextcloud
Trying to pull docker.io/library/nextcloud...
Getting image source signatures
Copying blob e0276193a084 done  
Copying blob eb2d00c10344 done  
Copying blob 3a60f364b0c5 done  
Copying blob e0d3d1244592 done  
Copying blob f54006e0dc29 done  
Copying blob 8559a31e96f4 done  
Copying blob b22875b95a2a done  
Copying blob f65316e96b10 done  
Copying blob 3e309988c00b done  
Copying blob 0c78caf16ec3 [======================================] 13.1MiB / 13.2MiB
Copying blob 4fc30aae7ee5 done  
Copying blob 37b016cacdc6 done  
Copying blob fd56bf3cc539 done  
Copying blob e3cd35f544b5 done  
Copying blob 467fea8f6f80 done  
Copying blob 0dc7444f9282 done  
Copying blob 547ae6684264 done  
Copying blob 3139b6de5be7 done  
Copying blob 00e77223b529 done  
Copying blob 2b37e3b3a856 done  
  read tcp 192.168.100.6:33536->104.18.124.25:443: read: connection reset by peer
Error: error pulling image "docker.io/library/nextcloud": unable to pull docker.io/library/nextcloud: unable to pull image: Error writing blob: error storing blob to file "/var/tmp/storage720474498/10": read tcp 192.168.100.6:33536->104.18.124.25:443: read: connection reset by peer

Podman does not retry to copy the image in case of failures.

A few days ago there was a suggestion to implement a similar feature in Podman that is present in Buildah, which provides the image copy retry functionality.

For the curious, the implementation can be seen here.

Container images that are pulled by Buildah are stored in the local repository which can also by accessed by Podman, so that's an advantage. I tried pulling the Nextcloud container image using Buildah and it completed successfully.

ish@coffee-bar:~> buildah pull nextcloud
Getting image source signatures
Copying blob e0d3d1244592 done  
Copying blob 8559a31e96f4 done  
Copying blob eb2d00c10344 done  
Copying blob 3a60f364b0c5 done  
Copying blob f54006e0dc29 done  
Copying blob e0276193a084 done  
Copying blob f65316e96b10 done  
Copying blob b22875b95a2a done  
Copying blob 3e309988c00b done  
Copying blob 0c78caf16ec3 done  
Copying blob 4fc30aae7ee5 done  
Copying blob 37b016cacdc6 done  
Copying blob e3cd35f544b5 done  
Copying blob fd56bf3cc539 done  
Copying blob 467fea8f6f80 done  
Copying blob 0dc7444f9282 done  
Copying blob 547ae6684264 done  
Copying blob 2b37e3b3a856 done  
Copying blob 00e77223b529 done  
Copying blob 3139b6de5be7 done  
Copying config 327476ebe3 done  
Writing manifest to image destination
Storing signatures
327476ebe3280c7b570d8463edd136956eab120959976b643cb7dbfaa73f98c1

Now, the downloaded container image is also accessible by Podman.

ish@coffee-bar:~> podman images
REPOSITORY                     TAG      IMAGE ID       CREATED        SIZE
docker.io/libreoffice/online   latest   0586fecfa3c1   28 hours ago   2.84 GB
docker.io/library/nextcloud    latest   327476ebe328   3 days ago     774 MB

To conclude, while we are waiting that a retryCopyImage function is available in Podman, we can use Buildah to pull container images that are troublesome due to network issues.

Running Flatpak on openSUSE Leap the first time

Flatpak comes pre-installed in openSUSE Leap 15.2. However, executing the flatpak command for the first time had a minor quirk in a freshly installed Leap 15.2 machine.

error: While opening repository /var/lib/flatpak/repo: opendir(objects): No such file or directory

I see other users commenting about this on Reddit. So, for now, just remove the repo file.

sudo rmdir /var/lib/flatpak/repo

Then, add the Flathub repository as its documentation describes.

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

Voilà! Now, you may search apps and install them with the flatpak command. For example, if you would search for Visual Studio Code, you would do:

flatpak search code

Find its Application Id from the result obtained with the above command and install it as follows:

flatpak install flathub com.visualstudio.code

The installation command arguments format is:

flatpak install repo_name application_id

In order to remove an application that you previously installed through Flatpak, just replace install by remove followed by the Application Id and it's done.

A quick intro to Podman by Estu Fardani

Estu Fardani is a helpful & jovial fellow whom I met at the openSUSE Asia Summit last year in Bali, Indonesia. Recently, for the openSUSE Virtual Summit, Estu did a short presentation on Podman. His presentation video is available on YouTube and slides deck available on Google Slides.

While I am not a fan of alias docker=podman I believe Estu added that part in his slide below to make the Podman transition a bit smoother for users already familiar with Docker commands.

Slide from Estu's presentation

Note that the latest release of openSUSE Leap, i.e version 15.2, comes with support for Podman through the libcontainers-common package.

Previously, if one needed to experiment with Podman and/or deploy in production then openSUSE Tumbleweed, Kubic or MicroOS were the supported choices. Now, one may deploy Podman containers on their existing Leap infrastructure (after upgrading to the latest version 15.2).

कुछ बातें openSUSE Leap 15.2 के बारे में जानें

२ जुलाई २०२० को openSUSE Leap 15.2 संस्करण उपलब्ध हुआ।

openSUSE Leap एक निशुल्क और लिनक्स-आधारित ऑपरेटिंग सिस्टम है जो आप अपने पीसी, लैपटॉप या सर्वर पर इस्तेमाल कर सकते है। Leap 15.2 और SUSE Linux Enterprise एक समान कोडबेस उपयोग करते है जिस से openSUSE Leap 15.2 की स्थिरता और ज्यादा मज़बूत होती है।

यह विशेष संस्करण कृत्रिम बुद्धिमत्ता, यानी आर्टिफिशियल इंटेलिजेंस, को अधिक आसानी से सुलभ बनाता है। निम्नलिखित पैकेज ऑफिशल रिपॉजिटरीज से प्राप्त किए जा सकते हैं।

इस संस्करण में अधिक कंटेनर टूलस् शामिल है, जैसे कि कुबनेटिस् (जो पहली बार के लिए Leap संस्करण में उपलब्ध हुआ है) हेल्म और सिल्यम