image installation with openSUSE 11.1

With openSUSE 11.1 (not SLES11) you can use pre configured images for the software installation with AutoYaST. It's just a simple boolean that indicates to use or don't use images:

  <deploy_image>
      <image_installation config:type="boolean">true</image_installation>
  </deploy_image>

Those images are in the "/images" directory on the installation media.
YaST will calculate on it's own which images to use to fulfill the requirements in your <software> section. At the end, a system which was installed via RPMs only and a system that was installed by using images + some RPMS will look exactly the same.
I did a test with the following in my autoyast profile:

  <deploy_image>
      <image_installation config:type="boolean">false</image_installation>
  </deploy_image>
  <software>
    <patterns config:type="list">
       <pattern>base</pattern>
       <pattern>enhanced_base</pattern>
       <pattern>sw_management</pattern>
       <pattern>games</pattern>
       <pattern>imaging</pattern>
       <pattern>kde4</pattern>
       <pattern>kde4_basis</pattern>
       <pattern>multimedia</pattern>
       <pattern>x11</pattern>
       <pattern>xgl</pattern>
    </patterns>
  </software>

the installation took about 25 minutes via network and 738 RPMs were installed - no images of course because the boolean was set to "false". The system was about 1,9GB in size.
Then I changed image_installation to "true" and did the installation again. This time it took about 13 minutes and besides the images, 114 additional RPMs (638MB) were installed. Those RPMs were not covered by the images and so they needed to be installed as RPM.

Take a look at image installation on your own with openSUSE beta5. Maybe you can speed up your autoinstallations.

Autoyast-ing at home by Bubli

Bubli did a really nice article about using AutoYaST in a running system. To be honest, I always wanted to write such an articel too but was way too lazy busy in the last few weeks :)

initrd broken on openSUSE 11.1 beta1

openSUSE beta1 has a broken initrd. A signing key is missing.
I have uploaded fixed initrd files for openSUSE beta1 for i586 and x86_64 to the download section of my busines homepage.
Thanx for testing AutoYaST on openSUSE.

remote files during autoinstallation

With AutoYaST you could always store complete files in the XML profile to save them somewhere into the installed system later. With openSUSE 11.1 and SLES11 you can specify the location of those file to a remote source like an HTTP server for example, so there is no need to store the files directly in the XML profile anymore.

  <files config:type="list">
    <file>
      <file_path>/bla</file_path>
      <file_location>http://10.10.0.162/file_test.txt</file_location>
    </file>
  </files>

The section is evaluated after the network configuration is done so start_immediately should be set to true for the needed network interface, which is the default anyway if it's not specified. Protocols are the same like for the AutoYaST profile (http(s), ftp, nfs, tftp, ...)
Here you can read more about the files section in AutoYaST.

post-patterns in AutoYaST

with openSUSE 11.1 and SLES 11 you can install patterns in stage 2 and not only in stage 1. For packages that was already possible since quite a while via
<post-packages config:type="list">
and now this configuration option got a sibling called ... surprise surprise ...
<post-patterns config:type="list">
here is the documentation.

YaUIc in AutoYaST 11.1/SLES11

"Yet another UI change" in the AutoYaST UI. After using the last UI change for a few hours, we came to the conclusion that there is some room for improvement and so we did a redesign again and now it looks a bit like the Mac OS Finder tableview which is another step forward for the usability of the AutoYaST UI.
I'm quite confident that we'll keep it that way this time ;-)

some AutoYaST UI changes

in openSUSE 11.1 and SLES11, there are some changes in the AutoYaST UI. First of all, the tree on the left was dropped to be more YaST control center like and all summaries of one section are collected on one page now. That means you save at least one click when jumping between modules ;)
The usage of the UI has changed a bit by this, like some buttons were replaced by Combobox Widgets.
Thanx to Martin Schmidkunz for the suggestion on how the UI should look like from a usability point of view and thanx to Sven Schober (a student in my team) for implementing it.



Another important change has happened in the validation dialog which shows the name of the section in the AutoYaST profile that has failed the validation now.
With jing installed you were always able to see which part of the profile is broken but now even with only xmllint installed you can at least see wich section failed.
Thanx to Sven Schober again for implementing this.

EVMS support dropped in SLES11

I'm back from my vacation in france and while checking my TODOs, I read that EVMS support was dropped for SLES11. That means today I dropped EVMS support from AutoYaST as well. AutoYaST will no longer be able to deal with EVMS during cloning or installing in SLES11. For SLES10 and the service packs of SLES10 it's still supported.
If you want to read more about EVMS in SLES11, look here.

online update after autoinstallation

openSUSE 11.1 will allow you to run an online update at the end of the installation. All you have to do is to set the boolean value do_online_update in the software section to true. That makes only sense if an online update repository is available and so you should configure the suse_register part in the profile too. suse_register will add an online repository automatically. If the online update source has been added via add-on section in your profile, then you don't need to do the online update because autoyast has installed the latest packages during stage 1 already.
If a kernel update gets installed during that online update, a reboot at the end of stage 2 is triggered too.
Here is the official documentation.

Issues with the bnx2 network device driver

on SLES10 SP2 the bnx2 driver has the problem, that it takes ages (up to 60s) for it to raise up the network device. Until then, no network is available. That can disturb the automatic installation. First of all, if your installation source is on a network device, YaST can not connect that installation source. That issue was fixed for SP2 (see bugzilla).
Still there are problems when you have init-scripts with a <location> that requires network (like HTTP, FTP,...) because after configuring the network device by autoyast, it takes another 60 seconds to raise the device and the <location> is evaluated after the network configuration. As a workaround you have to add an inline post-script that waits for 60 seconds:

<scripts>
<post-scripts config:type="list">
  <script>
      <network_needed config:type="boolean">false</network_needed>
      <filename>wait.sh</filename>
      <interpreter>shell</interpreter>
      <source><![CDATA[
sleep 60
]]>
      </source>
    </script>
</post-scripts>
<init-scripts config:type="list">
    <script>
      <location>http://.....</location>
      ...
    </script>
</init-scripts>
</scripts>

that script will wait 60 seconds and then network should be available and the remote init-scripts can be fetched.

If you need network in your init-script too, then you have to wait again for 60 seconds or so in your init-script.

I know, that sucks but the driver is broken and the description above is just a workaround for a broken network device driver.

Proposallist with openSUSE 11.1

with openSUSE 11.1 you can configure the proposal screen that is shown when you set the confirm option to true or you pass y2confirm on the linuxrc commandline. So you can hide all proposal except for the language selection and the software selection for example.

  <general>
    <mode>
      <confirm config:type="boolean">true</confirm>
    </mode>
    ...
    <proposals config:type="list">
      <proposal>country_simple_proposal</proposal>
      <proposal>software_proposal</proposal>
    </proposals>
  </general>

post-packages broken in openSUSE 11.0

the <post-packages config:type="list"> section got broken on openSUSE 11.0.
The reason is a client that was deactivated because since the second stage was dropped from the manual installation, that client was not needed anymore - for the manual installation but AutoYaST has been overlooked and there it's still needed.
Fortuantely there are workarounds. You can install the packages via script (post-script with "network_needed=true should do the job or even an init-script) or you can change the control.xml file on the root of the installation source (that's not your autoyast XML profile. It's really a file called control.xml on the installation source of openSUSE 11.0).
Around line 1059 there is a line like this:
<name>rpmcopy_secondstage</name>
change that line to
<name>rpmcopy</name>

configure the running system

With the AutoYaST UI of 11.1 you can write the settings of the profile you are working on to the currently running system. Of course only second stage configuration can be written so partitioning for example can't be done.
You can write the config of each single module (like only the sysconfig module for example) with the new "write to system" button or ...
... you can apply the complete profile to the running system with the "Apply profile to this system" option in the file menu.

if you want to do that on command line instead of using the UI, you can use the ayast_setup client.

<files ...> section broken in 11.0?

if you are wondering why the <files config:type="list">.... section of your profile does not work anymore with openSUSE 11.0, check if you have the package autoyast2 installed. During the massive slimming of the base system, the autoyast2 package might not be installed anymore automatically.

I'll fix the documentation and maybe add a little hook into autoyast itself. Sorry for that little glitch.

what's new in 11.1 so far ...

you can find a brief overview on what is new on my work related homepage. Here I want to go a little bit more into detail.

the cloning phase can take ages with a lot of patterns installed - fixed (bnc#391770)
While people were downloading the ISO of openSUSE 11.0, I had to release the first bugfix for AutoYaST. Providing updates for AutoYaST is not as easy as for other components of the system because when AY has a bug in the installation system, you can not fix that with an RPM - the bug hits way before you can install any RPMs. Anyway. in this case it was fixable via online update because it was not the installation that was affected but the cloning phase which is used to create a so called reference profile of the current system. You can use the reference profile to install the machine later again with AutoYaST. On 11.0 this cloning phase could take hours. The reason was a change in the underlying package resolver who provided a list of installed patterns in the past but does not anymore now. AutoYaST now figures out on it's own which patterns are installed (actually "fulfilled", because patterns are never "installed") and that new code had a bug which is fixed in version 2.16.19.

a missing partitioning section leads to the partitioning proposal that a manual installation would do
If you do a manual installation, YaST makes a partitioning proposal. AutoYaST can use that proposal too now if it can't find a partitioning scheme in the AutoYaST profile. That reduces the minimal profile for 11.1 to:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE profile>
<profile xmlns="http://www.suse.com/1.0/yast2ns" xmlns:config="http://www.suse.com/1.0/configns">
<users config:type="list">
  <user>
      <encrypted config:type="boolean">false</encrypted>
      <user_password>myrootpassword</user_password>
      <username>root</username>
  </user>
</users>
</profile>

In the past a missing partitioning section led to an error.
You can skip the root user configuration too without an error but you don't want that :)

'password mismatch' check in 'ask' fixed (bnc#401208)
With AutoYaST you can do hand free installations of course but you can ask the user questions during the installation too. This so called "ask" feature has multiple UI elements you can to create dialogs. One of these UI elements is a password entry field that hides the entered password and provides a "password confirmation" entry too. Then autoyast will check if the two entered passwords are the same. That check got broken in 11.0 and SLES10 SP2 in a way that AutoYaST complained about a password mismatch but continued then instead of asking for the password again. The password was not set then at all. That's fixed now for 11.1 and for SP2 with a driverupdate. I might provide a driverupdate for 11.0 too.

partitioning UI rewritten
Sven Schober, a student who works for Novell, did a rewrite of the partitioning UI for AutoYaST. From my point of view it's a lot better to use now. The weird table view was replaced by a tree for example and a lot of sanity checks were added. Thanx Sven.

I'm so Web 2.0 ...

I'm going to start a blog about work related stuff here. My personal blog can be found on my homepage.