We’ve edited and uploaded another video from our conference in Tirana, in which Italo Vignoli gives an overview of the project and community. (Use headphones for the best audio.)
Please confirm that you want to play a YouTube video. By accepting, you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party.
If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh.
LibreOffice 6.2 is currently being developed by our worldwide community, and is due to be released in early February 2019 – see the release notes describing the new features here. We’re still early in the development cycle, so more features are still to come!
In order to find, report and triage bugs, the LibreOffice QA team is organizing the first Bug Hunting Session for LibreOffice 6.2 on Monday October 22, 2018. Tests will be performed on the first Alpha version, which will be available on the pre-releases server a few days before the event. Builds will be available for Linux (DEB and RPM), macOS and Windows, and can be installed and run in parallel along with the production version.
Mentors will be available from 07:00 UTC to 19:00 UTC for questions or help in the IRC channel #libreoffice-qa and the Telegram QA Channel. Of course, hunting bugs will be possible also on other days, as the builds of this particular Alpha release (LibreOffice 6.2.0 Alpha 1) will be available until mid-November.
During the day there will be a dedicated session to test the new KDE 5 integration available in LibreOffice 6.2 from 14:00 to 16:00 UTC.
All details of the first bug hunting session are available on the wiki. Come join us, and help to make LibreOffice 6.2 the best release yet!
Today we talk to Ahmad Haris, who helps out with LibreOffice events in Asia, and has recently joined The Document Foundation’s Membership Committee. (Click here to learn more about the benefits of membership.) Here’s what he had to say…
Where do you live, how can people find you on the web, and what are your interests outside of LibreOffice?
I live in Bogor, West Java, Indonesia. However, I was born in East Java (the opposite side). I’m active on Facebook, Twitter, and sometimes Google+ and IRC (last one only for meetings with GNOME Foundation Members).
When I’m not working on LibreOffice, I play the guitar, or ride my motorcycle 🙂
What have you been doing in the LibreOffice community?
I helped to organize the Indonesia LibreOffice Conference 2018 in March this year. (See the full report here.) That’s my biggest contribution so far. Before that, I just using and testing the software.
How did you get involved?
In 2008, I was migrating a city (Central Aceh – Aceh Province) and a province (Yogyakarta Province) here in Indonesia to use Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). At that time I used OpenOffice.org. I was helping the government to use it for two years, based on my job. Then time flied… LibreOffice arrived, so I moved to it.
What does LibreOffice need most right now?
In my opinion, LibreOffice needs a growing community, especially in developing countries in South East Asia or Africa. And we need to do more research, for instance on how people in those locations use office suites, what kind of templates they need, and so forth. In Indonesia, many users ask about page borders (a feature in other office software).
What tools do you use?
My main tools in all of my laptops (I have more than one, for travelling, for work and for playing/recording music) are LibreOffice, Visual Studio for code editing, Inkscape for vector graphics, Gimp for bitmap graphics, and Audacity for editing audio.
Anything else you want to mention?
To increase technical contributions to LibreOffice, I’d like to see more how-to guides for beginners, such as for contributing code for the first time, and organising workshops. Also, we should highlight success stories about implementations of and migrations to LibreOffice (I can help here, in terms of Indonesia).
A big thanks to Haris (as he likes to be known!) for his support and contributions to our worldwide community. And to everyone reading this, wherever you are on the planet, you too can make a difference and help to spread the word about LibreOffice. See here to get started!
The LibreOffice community organises regular Hackfests, where developers and community members meet up, work on new features, fix bugs and enjoy good food! Later this month, we’ll meet in Munich, in the south of Germany. Munich is situated just north of the Alps, and is known for its cosy old town, churches and beer halls.
Interested in joining? Click here for the full details – and add your name to the list if you plan to attend!
We’ve started to edit and upload videos from the LibreOffice Conference 2018 which was held in Tirana in September. Here’s the first batch – more presentations to come. (Tip: use headphones for the best audio.)
First, the opening session, including a special welcome from the mayor of Tirana:
Please confirm that you want to play a YouTube video. By accepting, you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party.
If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh.
Then a presentation from Collabora, one of the conference’s sponsors:
Please confirm that you want to play a YouTube video. By accepting, you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party.
If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh.
And CIB, another sponsor:
Please confirm that you want to play a YouTube video. By accepting, you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party.
If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh.
A large free and open source software project like LibreOffice requires a lot of infrastructure, to support our users, developers and worldwide community. Today we speak to Guilhem Moulin, who is in charge of TDF’s infrastructure and services, about new developments and how others can get involved…
To start, please give us a quick overview of TDF’s public infrastructure.
The public infrastructure is powered by about 50 Kernel-based Virtual Machines (KVM) spread across 4 hypervisors plugged to an internal 10Gbps switch and hosted at Manitu in St. Wendel (Germany), and managed with libvirt and its KVM/QEMU driver. The virtual disk images are typically stored in GlusterFS volumes — distributed across the hypervisors — except for some transient disks (such as cache) where the IOPS need is higher and the redundancy less important.
All our public VMs run Debian GNU/Linux (currently a mix of Jessie — which are to be upgraded — and Stretch), each typically hosting a single service for better isolation. The rest of the stack is fairly usual: systemd as PID 1 & service manager, a mix of MySQL and PostgreSQL as RDMS, and nginx as SSL/TLS endpoint & reverse HTTP proxy. All of this is orchestrated and managed using saltstack.
About half of our Virtual Machines host public-facing websites; the other half are used for test instances, various production backends and internal services, as well as for tinderboxes and other hacking VMs. Some of these websites are mostly useful for developers, such our Bugzilla or gerrit instances — an overview of the development-focused sites can be found at https://devcentral.libreoffice.org. The remaining sites include the main LibreOffice website, the download page, the Wiki, Askbot, and of course the blog.
Beside these VMs, we also operate a handful of other machines for backups, monitoring, and mail systems, which are hosted offsite for obvious reasons.
What have been the most significant infra developments in the last six months?
Single Sign On (SSO) is probably what’s been the most visible to the community. Traditionally each frontend (Wiki, Bugzilla, Askbot, etc.) has its own private authentication backend, so once someone sign in to multiple services, they would have to remember multiple sets of credentials, which is cumbersome and makes password & email rotation difficult.
We now have a central authentication system (which uses an LDAP DIT as backend), but aren’t pointing individual services to it, as it would 1/ expose the shared credentials to all services hence increase the attack surface; and 2/ doesn’t solve the fact that users would have to enter their password to each service individually. Instead we’re deploying a solution using the SAML 2.0 protocol: unauthenticated users are redirected to an authentication portal against which they can authenticate, and they are redirected to the protected page afterwards.
Not all services have been migrated to SSO yet. An issue is that we have to unify accounts (people use different usernames in different services); and while we want a “critical mass” of active user accounts in LDAP before migrating a service, it’s been rather difficult to reach out to people — even among TDF officials! — and convince them to create an account in the new system. Fortunately since we migrated the authentication system of our wiki, more and more people (among whom a lot of dormant accounts, probably spammers unfortunately) started using the new system.
While it’s only visible to infra team members, we also replaced our Graphite (+ Carbon + Icinga2) based monitoring system with Prometheus (+ data exporters + alert manager). Furthermore, still on the monitoring front but public this time, we just deployed a new service, CachetHQ, to show a quick overview of TDF’s infra status:
https://status.documentfoundation.org.
Last but not least, earlier this spring we were fairly busy with GDPR compliance.
What are you working on at the moment, and what are your plans for the next six months?
Aside from daily maintenance and occasional emergencies (system crashes, hardware hiccups, performances issues, etc.), infra team members still spends quite a lot of time on the above, as this is not completely finished yet. Projects for next year include working on a better backup solution, in particular regarding database snapshots. The data collection system for download metrics needs some improvement, too.
Finally, what cool things can new volunteer admins do to get involved and help the project?
We have a wide variety of systems, ranging for highly sensitive (election, internal mail, LDAP DIT, whitebox monitoring) to pretty much fully public beside the access logs (bitergia dashboard, blackbox monitoring). We can’t give upfront access to the sensitive side of the spectrum to everyone, but there are things to help with on the other side too (developer-focused services are typically less sensitive, since development is open anyway).
Sometimes we also start fresh and replace a service with something equivalent on a brand new box; in that case there is no sensitive data at stake, and it’s a great way for new volunteer admins to gain trust. I mentioned the monitoring migration earlier; we could also imagine replacing our ageing MirrorBrain deployment with a more modern solution like Mirrorbits, for instance.
Thanks to Guilhem for his time and help. If you’re interested in joining our infra community and gaining valuable experience in a large FOSS project, see here to get started!
