Time flies and more than a month has passed since the announcement of Agama 12. Fortunately the YaST Team has not been idle and we have a new version of Agama to present. Say hello to Agama 13, including some additions to the web interface and many improvements for unattended installations.
Agama development goes on at good pace and, approximately one month after our latest blog post, we have more news for you. Not only a new version of Agama with a completely refreshed user interface and other significant changes, but also some information about the future.
The first beta versions of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 16 are almost around the corner and openSUSE Leap 16 is already at alpha phase. So the YaST Team (or should we already say the Agama Team?) has focused during the last couple of weeks on providing a better installation experience for both families of distributions. Agama 11 is the result, so let's see what's new on this release.
As you can see we have a new place for our Agama blog! So let's start with announcing the Agama version 10 release at this new place! 馃帀
Agama 8 was a massive release. It took almost five months of work and, as a result, Agama got a new HTTP API and a more powerful user interface for setting up storage devices. Not that bad, uh?
The YaST Team is back with more news about Agama. On our previous post we exposed the first two steps of our roadmap for 2024: a more powerful user interface for the storage setup and a new Cockpit-free architecture with a better API for external callers. Now we are proud to announce Agama 8, delivering initial versions of both features.
At the end of 2023 we announced Agama 7 stating that version is the first prototype we could consider to be (quoting ourselves) "functional enough", covering areas such as localization, network configuration, storage setup, authentication basis and some software selection. Now it's time to go deeper into every area... and we have a plan for that.
It's vacation season in Europe and most of the YaST development team will be busy for a couple of weeks singing Chistmas songs, celebrating the arrival of a new year and opening presents from the Three Wise Men. But we didn't want to leave the openSUSE fans idle for so long. So we decided to release another prototype of Agama, so you can have fun testing it and giving us feedback.
We are aware that the time between Agama releases is usually too long. Recently, we committed to increase the frequency, although it means having smaller releases. You know, "release early, release often".
After publishing Agama 3 a month ago, it is time for a new release. Among other things, this new version fixes several issues in the startup process, allows the use of a network proxy, adds (partial) support for IPv6, includes a few improvements in the web UI and features a new tool to extract Agama-related logs.
After almost five months without blogging we are back to confirm the YaST Team is still alive and kicking! Among many other things, we have been working lately on several internal aspects of Agama, the project previously known as D-Installer. And since SUSE is publishing an early preview of the first ALP-based product that will be released next year, we decided it was time to put a new version of Agama out, so you can use it to take a look to ALP Dolomite from a different angle.
Six weeks ago we announced D-Installer 0.7 and a lot has happened since then. The most important news is that we just released a new prototype with version 0.8, integrating several exciting new features we will go through in this post. But this prototype is not only important because of those features, but also because it will be the last D-Installer release! Fear not, we are not abandoning the project... quite the opposite.
AutoYaST is a crucial tool for our users, including customers and partners. So it was clear from the beginning that D-Installer should be able to install a system in an unattended manner.
This article describes the status of this feature and gives some hints about our plans. But we want to emphasize that nothing is set in stone (yet), so constructive comments and suggestions are more than welcome.
For D-Installer we already have a Ruby CLI that was created as a proof of concept. Then as part of of the hackweek we created another one in Rust to learn a bit about Rust and get our hands dirty. Now that we are familiar with both, we want to measure the overhead of calling D-Bus methods in Rust and Ruby, to make sure that if we continue with Rust, we won't be surprised by its speed. speed (hint: we do not expect it, but expectations and facts may be different).
As D-Installer consists of several components like D-Bus backend, CLI or web frontend, we see a need to test in CI that each component can start and communicate properly with each other. For this we use a test framework and more importantly GitHub CI where we need a systemd container which is not documented at all. In the following paragraphs we would like to share with you how we did it so that so that each of you can be inspired by it or use it for your own project.
Although we have been actively working on YaST and D-Installer, we have been silent since the beginning of December. We are sorry for that! Today we are resuming our blogging activity announcing the availability of D-Installer 0.7. Let's look at what it is new and what you can expect from the upcoming releases.
Now that the headline got your attention, let's start with the good news - D-Installer development is progressing just fine. What's the matter then? To answer that question is important to make a difference between D-Installer itself and the live ISO image we provide for everyone to test it.
It is our pleasure to announce the availability of the first installation image based on D-Installer. Since our initial announcement in January, we have been working on going from a non-working proof-of-concept to something that you can actually use.
As you may know, YaST is not only a control center for (open)SUSE Linux distributions, but it is also the installer. And, in that regard, we think it is a competent installer. However, time goes by, and YaST shows its age in a few aspects.