TDF Community Blog

Tender to design and implement a profile safe mode for LibreOffice (#201604-01)

2016-04-05

The Document Foundation (TDF), the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free office suite LibreOffice, seeks for companies or individuals to

design and implement a profile safe mode for LibreOffice

to start work as soon as possible.

For bug reports and QA issues, users are from time to time required to use a fresh user profile, i.e. without settings different from the built-in defaults, with no document restore enabled and with all extensions disabled. Until now, the easiest route to achieve this is to delete or rename the existing user profile.

A feature should be implemented that enables the user to start LibreOffice in a temporary safe mode as outlined above, without having to manually delete their profile, and with the ability to return to the regular state afterwards.

In addition, the user should be able to choose which elements are to be put in safe mode, e.g. configuration, extension, documents, templates, and also be presented with an option to actually reset their profile permanently.

Besides an UI item from where the functionality can be triggered, the safe mode dialog should also pop up after a program crash to help the user identify and report the problem.

The scope of this task includes:

definition of elements to temporarily reset
implementation of menu item and dialog to trigger functionality
showing the dialog after the program has crashed (user-configurable)
define the program default state, factoring in pre-configuration by distributions or enterprise deployments
test and document the functionality

Required Skills

C++ Programming language for the LibreOffice client part

Other Skills

English (Conversationally fluent in order to coordinate and plan with members of TDF)

TDF welcomes applications from all suitably qualified persons regardless of their race, sex, disability, religion/belief, sexual orientation or age.

As always, TDF will give some preference to individuals who have previously shown a commitment to TDF, including but not limited to members of TDF. Not being a member, or never having contributed before, does not exclude any applicants from consideration.

The task offered is a project-based one-off, with no immediate plans to a mid- or long-term contractual relationship. It is offered on a freelance, project basis. Individuals and companies applying can be located anywhere in the world.

TDF is looking forward to receiving your applications, your financial expectations (name the final price for the turnkey project), and the earliest date of your availability, via e-mail to Florian Effenberger at floeff@documentfoundation.org no later than May 6, 2016. You can encrypt your message via PGP/GnuPG.

Applicants who have not received feedback by June 6, 2016 should consider that their application, after careful review, was not accepted.

Behind the scenes at TDF: infrastructure

2016-04-042016-04-04

The year 2015 brought some challenging and exciting developments regarding the ongoing restructuring of our infrastructure. At the beginning of the year, the migration of our existing virtual machines and bare metal machines was ongoing after an extensive test phase of the new virtualization platform.

This virtualization platform consists of three servers, each with 256GB RAM, 64 CPU cores and quite a lot of hard drive space. One of the machines is meant to be used exclusively by developers for crash testing. These machines are all hosted by manitu in St. Wendel, Germany, and are currently undergoing migration onto our own dedicated 42U rack – including the flexibility to set up a private network between these machines and others that we house there.

After some problems with the software previously chosen for our virtualization platform, much work went into setting up virtual machines where services run isolated from each other, based on plain KVM. This already led to the transition of the hosted blog to one of our own machines, which give us more control over installed plugins, and also provides more flexible control over the WordPress setup that we use.

During the Hackfest at the University of Gran Canaria, work went into making the used Salt States more easy to hack on by people who want to get involved in our infrastructure. This also resulted in a tutorial video on how to create a development environment for our infrastructure.

Monthly infra calls were also set up, taking place every last Wednesday of the month at 17:00 UTC. They resulted in the creation of a weekly maintenance window for server upgrades, reboots and major configuration changes, every Monday between 03:00 and 05:00 UTC.

Operating system upgrades

During the calls the community decided to upgrade the base operating system to Debian 8 over the next few months. This was already carried out on one of our virtualization hosts during the newly set up maintenance window, in order to check for any problems that may occur during the update. During the upgrade, some obstacles were identified and workarounds were set in place to allow smooth upgrades.

We have also invested in hardware from vendor Thomas Krenn which will allow us to set up two additional Windows buildbots with powerful dual CPUs and high speed SSDs, along with two more Linux buildbots with the same specs. These buildbots will also be housed in St. Wendel and connect to our growing intranet there. Two more servers will be used for backup space. We plan to connect all TDF-owned hardware with a VPN, forming a world-wide intranet.

In the second half of the year, more machines were migrated to Debian 8, including the two hypervisors still running Wheezy (Debian 7). Due to the huge success of the new build bots, two more were ordered and now extend the intranet, with a high performance cloud core router from Mikrotik becoming the central connection point of our intranet. The cloud core router also serves as a VPN provider for TDF members at areas with restricted internet access – such as the LibreOffice conference in Aarhus, Denmark in October.

As the number of new servers grew, we decided to migrate our monitoring platform to TKmon, running on a high-availability virtual machine that is separated from the rest of our infrastructure. TKmon integrates with the hardware vendor’s support and notifies them of hardware failures automatically. TKmon is open source software and uses tools such as icinga and pnp4nagios.

To be more flexible with the monitoring notifications, I wrote a tool called TMB that provides a bot for the Telegram chat service and sends notifications to admins. Development happened with PyCharm, a Python IDE.

Our server fleet

The current state of the infrastructure consists of three rented hypervisors, each with four CPUs, 256 GB RAM, eight HDDs and partially SSDs. Additional rented servers include one backup server and one website stand-in host that was needed after the virtualization problems occurred at the beginning of the year, and that will be decommissioned soon. Nine housed servers with Intel SSDs and powerful dual CPUs are only reachable in the intranet, with access to them being controlled by the core router.

On the hypervisors, there are currently 31 VMs, providing services such as AskBot, WordPress, Gerrit, Bugzilla, Jenkins, MozTrap and much more. At Hetzner there are currently four servers: one that contains the Wiki, MirrorBrain and our public mailing lists, one that is for internal services, and two backup hosts – including one that provides storage capacity of over 17TB and is currently being set up.

Much of our documentation and many of our Salt States are published now at https://github.com/tdf/salt-states-base, while the compiled documentation can be found at http://salt-states-base.readthedocs.org/en/latest/. The Salt States are now tested with Travis and the build results are at https://travis-ci.org/tdf/salt-states-base. It is therefore now very easy to contribute to development and improve the documentation. Just fork the repository and create a pull request – then the results will automatically be tested in Travis. If you want to contribute to the infrastructure of our projects, you are invited to join our monthly infra calls, the next taking place on … or introduce yourself to the infra team in #tdf-infra on Freenode.

First LibreOffice 5.2 BugHunting Session

2016-03-31

LibreOffice is approaching the 5.2 release season with the first bug hunting session, on Friday, April 22, 2016. Tests will be performed on the Alpha version of LibreOffice 5.2, which will be available on the pre-releases servers a few days before the event. Builds will be available for Linux (DEB and RPM), MacOS and Windows, and will run in parallel with the actual installation.

Mentors will be available on April 22, 2016, from 8AM UTC to 10PM UTC. Of course, hunting bugs will be possible also on other days, as the builds of this particular Alpha release (LibreOffice 5.2.0 Alpha) will be available until the end of May.

During the day there will be two dedicated sessions: the first to chase bugs on the four main LibreOffice modules – Writer, Calc, Impress and Draw – between 3PM UTC and 5PM UTC, and the second to test the top 10 features between 5PM UTC and 7PM UTC. The list of the top 10 features will be decided during the week before the session, and will be added to the wiki page.

During the dedicated sessions, we will concentrate all efforts to chase and reproduce the bugs, in order to confirm and file them in a more comprehensive way. Of course, the more comprehensive will be the bug report, the easier will be for the developers to solve the bugs in time for the final release.

As usual, there is a page on the wiki with all the details about the bug hunting session. You should visit the page before April 22, 2016, as further details will be added while getting closer to the date of the event.

Designing with LibreOffice

2016-03-29

Bruce Byfield, a journalist who specializes in writing about free and open source software, has recently released Designing with LibreOffice, a book about our beloved free office suite, which is not the usual death march through the menu and standard tasks. Instead, the book takes two fresh approaches to the world’s most popular free office suite.

First, it explains the importance of using styles and templates in order to use LibreOffice with the most convenience and the least effort. Second, it explains the basics of modern design and how to apply them in LibreOffice, expanding on the open secret that LibreOffice is as much a desktop publishing application as an office suite.

The result of these approaches is a unique overview of using LibreOffice. If you are a new user, the book will help you get up to speed with LibreOffice. If you have already used LibreOffice, then this book will leave you with a clearer overview of the program and its capabilities.

Designing with LibreOffice has been published by Friends of OpenDocument under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Readers do not need to ask for permission to copy, share, or re-use the contents of Designing with LibreOffice. However, the publisher would appreciate hearing how and where the material has been re-used.

Designing with LibreOffice has a website, with additional information about the book and the author. Of course, the book can be downloaded from the website, and purchased as a traditional paper book from the the Friends of OpenDocument store on Lulu.

LibreOffice at CeBIT 2016: wrapping up

2016-03-212016-03-21

Last week LibreOffice was present at CeBIT, and it was a good opportunity to meet users, listen to their suggestions, and talk about the future of the project. Our stand in hall 3 was well-staffed by The Document Foundation team and members of the German LibreOffice community.

CeBIT focuses primarily on IT in business, so we had a lot of inquiries about large-scale migrations to LibreOffice and what can be done to make them as smooth as possible. Our flyers about LibreOffice in the enterprise helped here, but it was also good to speak face-to-face with IT managers who are considering LibreOffice, pointing them to the many successful migrations that have taken place in recent years.

But it wasn’t all about big business. Our stand received lots of visits from people who use LibreOffice at home or in other places such as churches and mailing rooms. It’s fascinating to see how the software is being used in so many different scenarios. Many visitors to our stand simply wanted to say thank you for working on LibreOffice – but of course, we were just a tiny sample of the wider LibreOffice community, so we’d like to pass on those thanks to everyone who has contributed to the suite!

And, of course, we had lots of merchandise to give away. Our sweets and stickers were especially popular, with some visitors asking for handfuls of the latter to adorn every computer and gadget they own. Thanks to everyone who visited us!