These last few weeks have been very intensive days in the YaST team. Significant changes are coming to the SUSE and openSUSE worlds. Have you heard about SUSE ALP (Adaptable Linux Platform)? We are quite active in some discussions, research and workgroups about that topic. But, of course, we are continuing to work hard on YaST and on our D-Installer side project. So, let’s go with a summary of the most interesting features and fixes.

One-click Migration

Since openSUSE Leap 15.3, binary RPMs are shared between SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 and openSUSE Leap. Closing the gap between openSUSE and SUSE makes feasible the migration from openSUSE Leap to SLE without reinstalling the system completely. Migrating the system takes some steps, and sometimes manual intervention is required when the process goes wrong. Now, YaST offers a new client that simplifies the migration from openSUSE Leap to SLE, allowing to rollback the system in case that something fails.

Systemd and YaST Services

YaST provides three systemd services: YaST2-Firstboot.service, YaST2-Second-Stage.service and autoyast-initscripts.service. Some adjustments in the dependencies of those services were needed to make them to work correctly, see for example this and this. Adapting systemd dependencies is not a trivial task. There are always edge scenarios to consider, and we plan to continue working in this area.

Download and Installation Progress

While installing packages, YaST showed a dialog with quite some information about the steps being performed. For example, the dialog provided information about the downloading progress of each package, what package is being installed, etc. But the new version of libyzpp deployed in SLE 15 SP4 is able to perform operations in parallel such as downloading, installing or verifying packages. Keeping that rich progress dialog while performing operations in parallel was very challenging. After evaluating different options, finally it was decided to significantly simplify the progress dialog, making it compatible with parallel operations. Now, the dialog only contains a progress bar with the information about the total amount of packages pending to install and the download progress. The dialog also shows a secondary progress bar in a popup for some theoretically quick tasks taking longer than they should.

Other Interesting Improvements

• Making AutoYaST more robust when setting the owner of files for the autoinst_files step.

• Improvements in the way YaST imports users from other systems.

• Packages yast2-nis-server and yast2-nis-clients were dropped from openSUSE Tumbleweed, although they are still maintained for openSUSE Leap and SUSE SLE.

• YaST was adapted to call external commands in a more robust way. Research and more details can be found here.

• AutoYaST does not export the resume kernel parameter anymore, and it only imports such a parameter if the indicated device exists. The AutoYaST documentation was extended to explain this new behavior.

• Fixed missing help texts in the YaST Expert Partitioner.

• Generating translations from XML files is correctly done now.

• YaST does not fail anymore when using the installation media as part of the target system. This implies changes in different parts of YaST, like this, this or this.

• The cockpit-wicked module was adapted to the latest changes in wicked for managing wireless network configurations.

D-Installer

Little by little we are able to invest more resources into our D-Installer side project. We are closer to finish the first iteration of our roadmap. Here is a summary of the main features developed since the first public release:

• Add reboot button.
• Ask for confirmation before installing.
• D-Bus API to ask questions to clients.
• Unmount target disk after installing.
• Fix language selector.
• Convert D-Installer into a real Cockpit module.
• Add support for yaml file configuration.
• Add support for remote installation.

Our beloved ruby-dbus gem also keeps evolving, supporting all the new features we demand for D-Installer. If you are interested in what is new in this great library, please have a look at its latest pull requests. And of course, we encourage you to give D-Installer a try. You can easily test it thanks to the D-Installer live image. We would like to know your opinion.

Please, remember that D-Installer is an experimental installer and it is still under development. We recommend to use a virtual machine to prevent any possible data loss.

Keep in Touch

As commented, we are very busy lately and our blogging cadence has been affected. We will do our best for blogging as frequently as possible with all the news from the YaST land. Meanwhile, do not hesitate to reach us in the usual channels: yast-devel and factory mailing lists at openSUSE, and at the #yast channel at libera IRC. Or even directly commenting on GitHub, whichever suits you better. See you soon and have a lot of fun!