It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's a shiny stable-yet-bleeding-edge KDE Plasma distro!

Since Calamares has to run all over the place, and is used in derivatives of all of the "Big Five" Linux distributions, I regularly switch distro's as a development platform. Also because I inevitably blow up the VM while running Calamares, or because an update renders the system useless. At FOSDEM I had the pleasure of chatting with the folks from the SUSE stand about OpenQA and OBS.

(Note, when I originally wrote this I was going to just fiddle around a bit and then return to my Manjaro dev VM; instead it's turned into a week and Krypton is likely to stay lodged on my VMs and spare machines for the foreseeable future.)

Last week I spent the day with openSUSE Krypton, which is a almost-bleeding-edge KDE Plasma desktop (today's version has Plasma 5.11.5) on top of openSUSE's rolling-release, Tumbleweed. Most of my Linux systems (e.g. the kids gaming boxes) run openSUSE of some sort, as did all my work systems at my previous job, but I have not yet used it as a development platform for Calamares. Here's some usage notes.

Day 1 First day with a distro is usually roughly the same: install it, copy some stuff over, install tools, checkout and build Calamares. With Krypton, it's no different.

  1. Installation looks a little wonky here and there. The installer could use a careful go-over by a designer to smooth out lines, reduce drawing glitches, etc. It may have been an artifact of installing in an 800x600 VirtualBox window, but it didn't seem very polished, even if the installer procedure was.
  2. Install basic development tools: zypper in git cmake make gcc gcc-c++. Huh, kdevelop is already installed, that's a good sign (except it seems like it's broken, and can't find the plugin KDevWelcomePage, but see below). Shame Linux systems are otherwise so poorly prepared for being development systems.
  3. Run deploycala.py on the installed system (there's big fat warnings saying never to do that, but I'm the developer and this is a fresh VM, so nyah nyah). Fall over backwards when it turns out that apt-get exists on this system (and invokes zypper via aptitude) so that the deploy script thinks it's on Debian and is going to do all of the wrong things. Debug the script. Figure out dependency names (e.g. it's gcc-c++ on openSUSE, g++ on Debian and just gcc on Arch).
  4. Find there's no PythonQt packaged; while this is a strictly optional dependency, I would like to find a distro that actually ships something usable for PythonQt (seems Arch does, and KaOS).
  5. Build Calamares.
  6. Profit!

So where does that last, profit, step come in? Well, openSUSE has Secure Boot support, while distro's using Calamares generally don't -- for the simple reason that Calamares doesn't support it yet. So I'll be peeking at what, and how, openSUSE does it and massaging that into Calamares.

Day 2 Ran an update, hoping that KDevelop would be fixed by now. That's a nice thing about rolling- and bleeding-edge distro's, stuff gets fixed and/or broken on a daily basis. With Krypton, the underlying rolling base is touted as stable while the KDE bits are bleeding-edge. It wasn't, but a quick question in the right IRC channel (#opensuse-kde for Krypton) got me sorted and a fix scheduled for the next build. Well done, Kryptonites.

Spent the day hacking on Calamares, mostly fiddling with other bits-and-pieces rather than doing what I intended to do, which was examine secure boot.

Day 3 Still stable. Today's bleeding-edge update is 112MB, as KDE Plasma is updated to 5.12. I decide to do some ARM development today as well. This is obviously not ideal, since I'm then cross-compiling to aarch64 in a Linux VM running on FreeBSD, but hey. After installing cross-aarch64-gcc7 and adjusting some build instructions that assume Debian naming (e.g. CROSS_COMPILE=aarch64-suse-linux- instead of CROSS_COMPILE=aarch64-linux-gnu-), spent a thoroughly frustrating morning building U-Boot and watching it panic. That's the downside to using very new hardware which isn't supported by anything yet except the OEM's binary-blob package.

Day 4 (after the weekend) A total of 733 package updates today, 810MB to download. They're not kidding about bleeding-edge and up-to-date. In the meantime I've learned that my deploycala script could be much simplified by using the package-manager. Since Calamares is packaged for openSUSE, I could have done zypper mr --enable repo-source ; zypper source-install -d calamares to get the build dependencies for it.

Anyway, after a week I've I have not yet broken the system, it's fast and up-to-date. I'll be keeping this one around. (And if I was looking for something between Krypton and Leap, I'd probably go for GeckoLinux, which uses Calamares -- a bit of dogfooding, as it were).