Testing and adding GNU/Linux distributions on Uyuni by juliogonzalezgil

Join the Gitter channel! https://gitter.im/uyuni-project/hackweek

Uyuni is a configuration and infrastructure management tool that saves you time and headaches when you have to manage and update tens, hundreds or even thousands of machines. It also manages configuration, can run audits, build image containers, monitor and much more!

Currently there are a few distributions that are completely untested on Uyuni or SUSE Manager (AFAIK) or just not tested since a long time, and could be interesting knowing how hard would be working with them and, if possible, fix whatever is broken.

For newcomers, the easiest distributions are those based on DEB or RPM packages. Distributions with other package formats are doable, but will require adapting the Python and Java code to be able to sync and analyze such packages (and if salt does not support those packages, it will need changes as well). So if you want a distribution with other packages, make sure you are comfortable handling such changes.

No developer experience? No worries! We had non-developers contributors in the past, and we are ready to help as long as you are willing to learn. If you don't want to code at all, you can also help us preparing the documentation after someone else has the initial code ready, or you could also help with testing :-)

The idea is testing Salt and Salt-ssh clients, but NOT traditional clients, which are deprecated.

To consider that a distribution has basic support, we should cover at least (points 3-6 are to be tested for both salt minions and salt ssh minions):

1. Reposync (this will require using spacewalk-common-channels and adding channels to the .ini file)
2. Onboarding (salt minion from UI, salt minion from bootstrap scritp, and salt-ssh minion) (this will probably require adding OS to the bootstrap repository creator)
3. Package management (install, remove, update...)
4. Patching
5. Applying any basic salt state (including a formula)
6. Salt remote commands
7. Bonus point: Java part for product identification, and monitoring enablement
8. Bonus point: sumaform enablement (https://github.com/uyuni-project/sumaform)
9. Bonus point: Documentation (https://github.com/uyuni-project/uyuni-docs)
10. Bonus point: testsuite enablement (https://github.com/uyuni-project/uyuni/tree/master/testsuite)

If something is breaking: we can try to fix it, but the main idea is research how supported it is right now. Beyond that it's up to each project member how much to hack :-)

• If you don't have knowledge about some of the steps: ask the team
• If you still don't know what to do: switch to another distribution and keep testing.

This card is for EVERYONE, not just developers. Seriously! We had people from other teams helping that were not developers, and added support for Debian and new SUSE Linux Enterprise and openSUSE Leap versions :-)

Pending

FUSS

FUSS is a complete GNU/Linux solution (server, client and desktop/standalone) based on Debian for managing an educational network.

https://fuss.bz.it/

Seems to be a Debian 12 derivative, so adding it could be quite easy.

• [W] Reposync (this will require using spacewalk-common-channels and adding channels to the .ini file)
• [W] Onboarding (salt minion from UI, salt minion from bootstrap script, and salt-ssh minion) (this will probably require adding OS to the bootstrap repository creator) --> Working for all 3 options (salt minion UI, salt minion bootstrap script and salt-ssh minion from the UI).
• [W] Package management (install, remove, update...) --> Installing a new package works, needs to test the rest.
• [I] Patching (if patch information is available, could require writing some code to parse it, but IIRC we have support for Ubuntu already). No patches detected. Do we support patches for Debian at all?
• [W] Applying any basic salt state (including a formula)
• [W] Salt remote commands
• [ ] Bonus point: Java part for product identification, and monitoring enablement

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SUSE AI Meets the Game Board by moio

Use tabletopgames.ai’s open source TAG and PyTAG frameworks to apply Statistical Forward Planning and Deep Reinforcement Learning to two board games of our own design. On an all-green, all-open source, all-AWS stack!

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Results: Infrastructure Achievements

We successfully built and automated a containerized stack to support our AI experiments. This included:

• a Fully-Automated, One-Command, GPU-accelerated Kubernetes setup: we created an OpenTofu based script, tofu-tag, to deploy SUSE's RKE2 Kubernetes running on CUDA-enabled nodes in AWS, powered by openSUSE with GPU drivers and gpu-operator
• Containerization of the TAG and PyTAG frameworks: TAG (Tabletop AI Games) and PyTAG were patched for seamless deployment in containerized environments. We automated the container image creation process with GitHub Actions. Our forks (PRs upstream upcoming):
  • https://github.com/moio/TabletopGames/tree/hackweek24
  • https://github.com/moio/PyTAG/tree/hackweek24

./deploy.sh and voilà - Kubernetes running PyTAG (k9s, above) with GPU acceleration (nvtop, below)

Results: Game Design Insights

Our project focused on modeling and analyzing two card games of our own design within the TAG framework:

• Game Modeling: We implemented models for Dario's "Bamboo" and Silvio's "Totoro" and "R3" games, enabling AI agents to play thousands of games ...in minutes!
• AI-driven optimization: By analyzing statistical data on moves, strategies, and outcomes, we iteratively tweaked the game mechanics and rules to achieve better balance and player engagement.
• Advanced analytics: Leveraging AI agents with Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) and random action selection, we compared performance metrics to identify optimal strategies and uncover opportunities for game refinement .
  • more about Bamboo on Dario's site
  • more about R3 on Silvio's site (italian, translation coming)
  • more about Totoro on Silvio's site

A family picture of our card games in progress. From the top: Bamboo, Totoro, R3

Results: Learning, Collaboration, and Innovation

Beyond technical accomplishments, the project showcased innovative approaches to coding, learning, and teamwork:

• "Trio programming" with AI assistance: Our "trio programming" approach—two developers and GitHub Copilot—was a standout success, especially in handling slightly-repetitive but not-quite-exactly-copypaste tasks. Java as a language tends to be verbose and we found it to be fitting particularly well.
• AI tools for reporting and documentation: We extensively used AI chatbots to streamline writing and reporting. (Including writing this report! ...but this note was added manually during edit!)
• GPU compute expertise: Overcoming challenges with CUDA drivers and cloud infrastructure deepened our understanding of GPU-accelerated workloads in the open-source ecosystem.
• Game design as a learning platform: By blending AI techniques with creative game design, we learned not only about AI strategies but also about making games fun, engaging, and balanced.

Last but not least we had a lot of fun! ...and this was definitely not a chatbot generated line!

The Context: AI + Board Games

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Agama Expert Partitioner by joseivanlopez

Description

Agama is a new Linux installer that will be very likely used for SLES 16.

It offers an UI for configuring the target system (language, patterns, network, etc). One of the more complex sections is the storage configuration, which is going to be revamped. This project consists on exploring the possibility of having something similar to the YaST Expert Partitioner for Agama.

Goals

• Explore different approaches for the storage UI in Agama.

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obs-service-vendor_node_modules by cdimonaco

Description

When building a javascript package for obs, one option is to use https://github.com/openSUSE/obs-service-node_modules as source service to get the project npm dependencies available for package bulding.

obs-service-vendornodemodules aims to be a source service that vendors npm dependencies, installing them with npm install (optionally only production ones) and then creating a tar package of the installed dependencies.

The tar will be used as source in the package building definitions.

Goals

• Create an obs service package that vendors the npm dependencies as tar archive.
• Maybe add some macros to unpack the vendor package in the specfiles

Resources

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Editor mode at Agama web interface by ancorgs

Description

Agama is a new Linux installer that will be very likely used for SLES 16.

It takes a configuration (in JSON format) as input. And offers several interfaces to build that configuration in an easy and interactive way.

I was considering the possibility to add to the web interface a "text editor" mode similar to the XML editor available at virt-manager. That could be used to see how the changes in the UI translate into changes on the configuration.

Goals

• Refresh my knowledge about UI development for Agama, since there was a major overhaul recently (adopting TanStack Query) and I need to learn the new way to do things.
• Please hackers who always want to know how things work internally. :-)

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Try to render Agama in a TUI browser by ancorgs

Description

Agama is a new Linux installer that will be very likely used for SLES 16. It offers a modern and convenient web interface that can be executed both locally and remotely.

But of course some users will miss the old TUI (ncurses) interface of the YaST installer.

So I want to experiment whether would it be possible to render a simplified version of the web interface for TUI browsers. That's only doable and maintainable if we keep the current technology stack we use for rendering the full-blown page, simply replacing complicated UI elements with others that are easy to render. That means the browser would need to support Javascript.

Chawan seems to be almost there regarding support for Javascript, XHR and related technologies. But according to this conversation, the next missing piece would be to support recursive import of module script tags.

Unfortunately, Chawan is written in Nim and I'm pretty sure a week is not enough time for me to learn Nim, implement the feature at Chawan and then fix whatever is the next obstacle on the Agama side.

But if someone could take care of the Nim part, I would do the same with the Agama one. So this is basically a call for help to get this project even started.

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Agama installer on-line demo by lslezak

Description

The Agama installer provides a quite complex user interface. We have some screenshots on the web page but as it is basically a web application it would be nice to have some on-line demo where users could click and check it live.

The problem is that the Agama server directly accesses the hardware (storage probing) and loads installation repositories. We cannot easily mock this in the on-line demo so the easiest way is to have just a read-only demo. You could explore the configuration options but you could not change anything, all changes would be ignored.

The read-only demo would be a bit limited but I still think it would be useful for potential users get the feeling of the new Agama installer and get familiar with it before using in a real installation.

As a proof of concept I already created this on-line demo.

The implementation basically builds Agama in two modes - recording mode where it saves all REST API responses and replay mode where it for the REST API requests returns the previously recorded responses. Recording in the browser is inconvenient and error prone, there should be some scripting instead (see below).

Goals

• Create an Agama on-line demo which can be easily tested by users
• The Agama installer is still in alpha phase and in active development, the online demo needs to be easily rebuilt with the latest Agama version
• Ideally there should be some automation so the demo page is rebuilt automatically without any developer interactions (once a day or week?)

TODO

• Use OpenAPI to get all Agama REST API endpoints, write a script which queries all the endpoints automatically and saves the collected data to a file (see this related PR).
• Write a script for starting an Agama VM (use libvirt/qemu?), the script should ensure we always use the same virtual HW so if we need to dump the latest REST API state we get the same (or very similar data). This should ensure the demo page does not change much regarding the storage proposal etc...
• Fix changing the product, currently it gets stuck after clicking the "Select" button.
• Move the mocking data (the recorded REST API responses) outside the Agama sources, it's too big and will be probably often updated. To avoid messing the history keep it in a separate GitHub repository
• Allow changing the UI language
• Display some note (watermark) in the page so it is clear it is a read-only demo (probably with some version or build date to know how old it is)
• Automation for building new demo page from the latest sources. There should be some check which ensures the recorded data still matches the OpenAPI specification.

Changing the UI language

This will be quite tricky because selecting the proper translation file is done on the server side. We would probably need to completely re-implement the logic in the browser side and adapt the server for that.

Also some REST API responses contain translated texts (storage proposal, pattern names in software). We would need to query the respective endpoints in all supported languages and return the correct response in runtime according to the currently selected language.

Resources

• Agama sources
• Experimental proof of concept demo
• The respective source code change

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