Keen to give back to the FOSS community, but don’t know where to start? Mike McCallister shows you one way to do a good deed.

Have you ever seen a nifty program in Linux Format, but couldn’t find it in your favourite distro? If you were running a proprietary OS, you think that you’d have to ask the programmer to produce a version for you, but with FOSS that isn’t how things work.

One of the wonders of the FOSS world is that you may not have to wait to run that program. Truth is that anyone can take any open source program and build a package from the source code. You can choose to run it on your machine. If it works well on your box, you can then submit your package to be included in the distribution of your choice.

If that sounds cool, if a little terrifying, here’s a tool to make packaging easier: the Open Build Service (OBS). OBS enables anyone create a repository of source files on a cloud server (or their own server) and build software packages for a variety of distros in popular formats: RPM, DEB, Flatpak and AppImage.

You don’t really have to know much about code to make packages with OBS. If you have some experience installing and working with packages, or helped others with issues on a mailing list or forum, you might just be the type to be an OBS packager. Bonus points if you (a) have a Github (or similar) account, and (b) the command line doesn’t make you queasy.

In these pages, we’ll walk you through the OBS process. You may discover a new way of giving back to the FOSS community for all the fabulous software you use.

The OpenSUSE community created the Open Build Service to expand the pool of packagers contributing to OpenSUSE. They also wanted folks to make multiple packages from a single source. Today OBS hosts more than 80,000 developers maintaining nearly 750,000 packages in 150,000 repositories (see System Status report 3/25/2022 at https://build. opensuse.org). Pretty successful project.

OBS makes it possible to import source code from another project into its repository. From there you give OBS the information it needs to build a package. In turn, you can install your newly created package on your system.

When you try this, follow these steps:

→Create an OBS account at build. opensuse.organd create your Project.

→Install the essential tools for packaging software and the osc shell client on your system and connect it to the OBS server.

→Fork and clone the source code of the project you want to package, and then connect to OBS.

→Configure your packages (perhaps the hardest part).