zypper is magic

A number of experiments suggest that it may be feasible to run zypper from an openSUSE 'live' media against a 'foreign' RPM based OS installation (eg. CentOS) and then 'zypper dup' to openSUSE

Occasionally, new versions of openQA break things. How do you stop that? MORE TESTING! Testing openQA by using openQA to ensure the new versions don't break should be a good example of how openQA can test everything and anything, even itself.

My home server, and my other box hosting https://sysrich.co.uk are both in need of a bit of a refresh While I could be nice and conservative and pick an openSUSE regular release, I'm actually considering using openSUSE Tumbleweed, and fully embracing the 'Servers as Cattle' concept

Given that Leap is now available, as installation media, we are going to dedicate some time to release ready to use 'Just enough Operating

openQA has a well earned reputation as a 'full system' testing tool, able to test a system end-to-end from the operating system to it's applications on a number of different platforms and architectures, including VM's & Bare Metal. But one area of weakness is it's usefulness as a testing tool for developers or packagers. openQA can easily test a package once it's INSIDE a distribution, but how do you test that package BEFORE submitting it to the distribution?

The Kubic Project currently produces a "CaaSP-like" Tumbleweed OS, focused on Kubernetes clusters However many of the attributes of Kubic (read-only filesystem, transactional updates, containerised services) could be an interesting platform for another use A Chromebook-like Linux Desktop

SLE Engineering have a large flatscreen in the shared space just outside of Thorsten Kukuk and Stefan Behlert's office It runs Windows

The incredible Neal Gompa has packaged Open Shift Origin (RH's core Docker + Kubernetes stack) for openSUSE Links:

Video Recording of openSUSE Conference session which introduced the project

Core Project

openSUSE now has a lot of black magic around building distributions for :Factory and :Leap This includes all of the 000* packages and opensuse-release-tools doing very useful stuff like pkglistgen automatically managing the package lists for .kiwi files so release managers don't need to manually update which packages are going on which media