Linux

Introduction

Let’s start by clarifying what we mean by cross-building and cross-packaging. Cross-compilation is the process of compiling source code on one platform, called the host, in order to generate an executable binary for a different target platform. The emphasis here is on the word “different”. The target platform may have a different CPU architecture, such as when we work on an x86 computer and want to build software for a Raspberry Pi board with an ARM CPU. But even if the target platform has the same CPU architecture as the host, there may be several other possible differences. For example, the host may be running Debian Sid, while the target may be running openSUSE Leap. Different Linux distributions may have different compilers, linkers, and run-time libraries. Even when using the same distribution as the host for the target, they may be different releases, such as openSUSE Tumbleweed and Leap. In short, nothing guarantees that the target system will have the same shared libraries as the host system.

As start let’s sort it out what is dependency and what is reverse dependency.

Dependencies and reverse dependencies in Linux distributions are important concepts to understand. A package dependency means that another package relies on it in order to function. For example, if package B requires package A to be installed in order to work, then package B is dependent on package A and is considered a reverse dependency of package A.

From time to time we should ask ourselves how are we doing. Are we successful, are we on the right track, are we heading to the right direction, are we fast enough, are we accelerating or slowing down?

This time I am talking about the openSUSE Linux Distribution and about the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

And here I quickly would like to note an important disclaimer with a short story.

I have heard way to often the question from Linux and specially SUSE Linux users that “How can I check the changelog of a package or new version of a package available on the repository, but not yet installed”.

There was no easy answer for that question, so I have decided to make a little tool for that.

How it is done

All the enabled repositories have a bunch of configuration files in a well structured directory tree under the /var/cache/zypp/raw/.

It all started when…

Few weeks ago we have decided to create a dashboard where we can monitor the status of the SUSE Linux Enterprise maintenance update queue. Naturally there are tons of cool open source solutions to build this type of monitoring. Two decades ago I probably would have written a Perl or Python based monitoring script for the monitoring part and use the good old gnuplot (http://www.gnuplot.info/) to visualize the data and create an active page written in some silly web UI framework. Let’s just say that luckily those times has passed.

The idea came from Tina Müller who was giving and awesome demo of the Vosk library. I quickly checked out the Alphacephei pages.

I fundamentally like when a cool library has Python APIs.

Vosk is an offline open source speech recognition toolkit. It enables speech recognition for lots of languages. The vosk models are small (50 Mb) but still provide continuous large vocabulary transcription, zero-latency response with streaming API.

Installing vosk library on my openSUSE Tumbleweed goes like

Motivation

I got lucky with my original hackweek project and I have managed to set up my Leap 15.3 based NAS and private cloud running on NextCloud earlier than planned.

So I though that as an extra project I will set up a proper system monitoring service. The monit service is very handy (thanks for the idea to Paolo Stivanin) but by default it wants to send emails when something goes wrong. Instead of emails I would prefer a real instant message. I am using mostly Telegram for personal purposes. Sure I am using Signal, Matrix, Slack and Rocket.Chat too and technically I have WhatsApp account too. But I decided to start with Telegram.