Our previous sprint report was full of promises. We stated we were working to improve the Cockpit support for (open)SUSE and finishing some other interesting stuff. We also mentioned we had delivered a YaST presentation in the openSUSE + LibreOffice Virtual Conference. Time has come to pay our debts. The current report offers more news about all that.

Make Cockpit Great… for (open)SUSE

In the Cockpit area, we found out the official module for network configuration is completely coupled to Network Manager. Its (lack of) internal architecture makes very hard to adapt it to work with wicked, the framework used by (open)SUSE to configure the network, specially on servers. So we are writing a new Cockpit module to configure the system network through wicked. It’s pretty functional already, including:

We don’t have a clear release date for this new module yet, since we have to coordinate with the team that will take care of packaging Cockpit for (open)SUSE and we still want to improve validation and error handling. That includes deciding how to inform the user if something goes wrong, since there is no unified way to do that across the different Cockpit modules. And we also want to improve the DNS settings and to extend the support for wireless technologies. Meanwhile, if you are hungry for screenshots you can check the links to the pull requests in the list of features above.

We have also being working in a Cockpit module to manage transactional updates. But that one is still in research phase and we have very little to show at this point.

Storage improvements

Of course, YaST keeps being our main target and lately we have concentrated a rather significant amount of development firepower into the area of storage management. First of all, we have finally submitted to openSUSE Tumbleweed the long anticipated overhaul of the Partitioner user interface. Check the description of this pull request for a visual summary of everything that have changed.

On top of that new interface, we have started make Btrfs subvolumes more prominent, adding more possibilities to handle them. Check the corresponding pull request for more details and screenshots.

And last but not least (regarding storage management), we have improved the installer proposal for creating a /boot/efi partition when needed. That change was also submitted to openSUSE Tumbleweed and will be available as well in the upcoming Leap 15.3 and SLE-15-SP3.

Informing more and better

We also put some effort during this sprint in improving YaST’s user friendliness. On one hand by explaining better the bootloader configuration in some corner cases and allowing to easily tweak that configuration. On the other hand, offering a much more informative message when there is an error parsing some configuration file.

Look Ma! That’s me on TV!

We also found out the recording of our talk presenting the “Top 25 New Features in (Auto)YaST” at the openSUSE + LibreOffice Virtual Conference is finally available at the openSUSE TV channel.

Enjoy and spread the word!

That’s all folks

Since we had very diverse things to share with you, this post has turned out to be a bit longer than expected. But don’t worry, we plan to come back to more concise reports in the upcoming blog entry. That will be in two weeks from now. Meanwhile, watch the video, check the links and have a lot of fun!