Fixing Steam on Linux OpenGL GLX warning

In some cases, Steam on Linux greets your with an error dialog stating: OpenGL GLX context is not using direct rendering, which may cause performance problems This is because Steam ships copies of several system libraries which may interfere with other libraries on your system that it doesn't replace. This can easily be fixed. Just …

Git with Synology DiskStation

When developing private software projects, you not always want to push it to Github right away if you've got the hopes to make some bits of money out of it, right? But just keeping your Git repository on your local disk isn't the best choice either. If you happen to have a server at home, …

BitTorrent Sync on openSUSE

Recently, I discovered BitTorrent Sync, which seems to satisfy most of my file syncing demands. It's encrypted client-side, cross-platform and works behind NATs and firewalls. While it is currently still proprietary (who cares, really), it is available for many devices. Besides the usual Windows / Mac binaries, you can find it on Android's Play Store. …

sudo authentication across sessions

Since I've been asked this recently, if you want to avoid typing your sudo password again after opening up another shell session (with konsole, gnome-terminal, screen or whatever), simply add the following to /etc/sudoers (use sudo visudo to modify the file): Read http://www.sudo.ws/sudoers.man.html for the details.

Dynamic iptables port-forwarding for NAT-ed libvirt networks

Libvirt is particularly awesome when it comes to managing virtual machines, their underlying storage and networks. However, if you happen to use NAT-ed networking and want to allow external access to services offered by your VMs, you've got to do some manual work. The simplest way to get access is to set up some  iptables …

openSUSE Board candidacy

Hello fellow geekos, Let's start with a little introduction for those that don't know me. I've been involved in the openSUSE project for more than 3 years by now while being among the top ten contributors to Factory for most of the time. I mainly develop the Python and Go stacks as well as OpenStack. …

OBS: Introducting the “refresh_patches” source service

As you know, RPM (and DEB and ...) package building is a repetitive process and you would want to automate it as much as possible. In the context of the Open Build Service(OBS), source services can help you with exactly that. Over the time, the OBS community has implemented a whole range of source services. …

Open source project licensing

Whenever you decide to publish some code somewhere in the internet, you have to think about the license. For many of us not being lawyers, this is a rather random choice. Given what we've been told is best, we usually just use any GPL flavor or Apache, MIT or BSD and don't spend much time …

Going to FOSDEM

This weekend I'm going to FOSDEM together with the awesome SUSE bunch and my fellow Cloud colleagues. On Saturday, I plan to visit some of the DevOps talks whereas I'll hang out  in the Cloud devroom for the whole Sunday. If you want to talk about OpenStack on openSUSE or SLES, look for some guy …

OBS 101: How to treat packages with multiple spec files

If you have an OBS package containing multiple spec files, you may have discovered that OBS only builds the spec file matching the OBS package name. If you want to have the other(s) spec file(s) built, you should use a link, don't use copypac! For example, devel:languages:python / python-nose is a OBS package containing four …