OpenSUSE: Board, Etherpad, Tumbleweed

You already know what a fantastic platform openSUSE is for doing just about anything with Linux. So what’s behind that easy-to-use and super powerful distribution that we know and love, and have come to rely on. In many minds there is a perception that its simply SUSE with the proprietary code stripped out. It’s true that a lot of the development work does flow down from SUSE but there is also an active community of dedicated volunteers who drive and make the project work, adding the goodies we have come to take for granted for the myriad of uses we have come to rely on it for.

It’s election time at openSUSE and the election board asked an existing board member Gertjan who has agreed to step up again and run for re-election of what it is like to be on the board. Below is a transcript of an offline interview between fellow election committee member Edwin and Gertjan highlighting what it’s like to be on the board of openSUSE.

Edwin: Would you like to tell us about your daily schedule and how does being an openSUSE Board member impacts on that?

Gertjan: To be fair, my daily schedule varies a lot, depending on what is on my table. Most of the time this leaves me with enough spare time to do board related things. But before I was on board, I spent that time in openSUSE too, i.e. forums, IRC etc., so the main impact on my daily schedule were the bi-weekly video conference calls. For the rest I just spread the spare time a bit differently. It does take a couple of hours though, on an average week.

Edwin: Do you still remember what motivated you to step up for Board candidacy the first time? And then why a second time?

As you might have noticed on our status page, our etherpad instance at https://etherpad.opensuse.org/ was updated to the latest version 3 days ago.

But this time,we did not only upgrade the package (which lives, btw, in our openSUSE:infrastructure project), we also migrated the underlying database.

As often, the initial deployment was done with a "just for testing" mindset by someone, who afterward left his little project. And - also as often - these kind of deployments suddenly became productive. This means - in turn - that our openSUSE heroes team suddenly gets tickets for services we originally did neither set up, nor maintain.

Operating System | openSUSE Tumbleweed

There really wasn’t any other choice. I need long term reliability and I am not interested in reinstalling the operating system. I know, through personal experience, that Tumbleweed works well with server applications, is very tolerant to delayed updates and will just keep chugging away.

[...]

This was an area that took me several months of research and reading. My criteria was that I had to have Storage Array BTRFS Raid 10. This afforded me a lot of redundancy but also a lot of flexibility. This will allow me to slowly upgrade my dries capacity as they begin to fail.

When deciding the file system, I did a lot of research into my options. I talked to a lot of people. ZFS lost consideration due to the lack of support in Linux. I am perfectly aware that the development is done primarily within Linux now but it is not part of the mainline kernel and I do not want to risk the module breaking when the kernel updates. So, that was a non-starter.

[...]

Although this computer has only been up and running for about two months, I am slowly adding more services and functions to it. For now, it is pretty light, but in a few short months, that will most certainly start growing. I am very happy happy with the sub-$700 build for a computer system that has met or exceeded my expectations. It was a fun first complete, from ground up, scrap-together assembly that really was a gamble. I am pleased with how well openSUSE Tumbleweed runs on it and that I have had no disturbances with any operating system updates.

Often, after a project, you will review it, have an “After Action Review” and ask yourself, “What would I do differently if I were doing this again.” I can honestly say, there is nothing I would change. I like everything about this machine. I would, perhaps, like more storage space as I have already gobbled up 2.5 TiB of my 5.5 TiB of storage space. Reviewing what I spent and the additional cost of the larger storage, I would have still made the same decision. So, back to would I change anything? No, I think I made the right decision. I do have upgrades planned for the future but that is a project for the fall. This machine truly fits my needs, even if much of the hardware is yester-years retired bits.