Here is the interview with Martin Schlander, also known as ‘cb400f’, from Denmark. Have fun reading it!

(more…)

Meeting page

Petr Mladek has announced three openSUSE Build Service projects for SUSE Linux 10.1 to openSUSE 10.3 and SLED 10 which obsolete the older OpenOffice.org project: OpenOffice.org:STABLE from now on provides the latest stable version (currently 2.2.1); OpenOffice.org:UNSTABLE provides packages of the latest preview of OpenOffice 2.3 built from the same sources as Factory; OpenOffice.org:EXTRAS provides some extras like dictionaries and templates to be used with both other repositories. He is also looking for co-maintainers to keep the stuff up to date and to improve it.

Andrew Morton has spoken at different occasions about testing of the Linux kernel and asked users to test the current development version and report their findings.  For our openSUSE releases we have in general a frozen version and add only fixes for bugs that are encountered during testing - but stay with the same version for the lifetime of a release.

With our openSUSE Build Service we build a daily kernel, where we take the current upstream development kernel without any patches (besides those we need for building a RPM).  We do call this the vanilla kernel. It can be downloaded from:
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Kernel:/Vanilla/SUSE_Factory/

Btw. if you test the vanilla kernel, report any problems to the Linux kernel mailing list (for details check the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/) and not to the openSUSE bugzilla.

Again time to sum up news that didn’t make it to an own story here: At LinuxWorld San Francisco it was announced that SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, which is based on the openSUSE distribution, will be preloaded on systems of Dell and Lenovo. DistroWatch.com has interviewed Stephan Kulow about his new role as openSUSE project manager. Tomer wrote in to inform us about the chameleon.org.il portal he founded which offers forums, articles, chat and you can even test-drive openSUSE via NX. openSUSE artwork is now developed in a new SVN repository. Last but not least, a court ruled against SCO, stating that Novell is the owner of the UNIX copyrights.

The Bug Slashing Weekend has come to an end, and we are happy to report that it was a huge success! Countless old bugs were slashed, updated, and looked over, though for the majority of the time it was more of a Bug hunting weekend in that we were trying to discover and file all openSUSE 10.3 Beta 1 bugs.

Among other things, the weekend consisted of up to 50 people in #opensuse-bugs around the peak period, 2200 posts being made on the IRC channel (excluding bugbot comments), 108 bugs being filed against openSUSE 10.3 on the weekend alone, and 107 bugs being marked as “resolved”. Thanks to everyone for making it a great Bug Weekend!

Discussion on the upcoming openSUSE 10.3 is still encouraged in the #opensuse-factory IRC channel; the Bug Slashing wiki page will also contain up-to-date information on ways in which you can help test the openSUSE distribution.

Stephan Kulow has created and uploaded Live CDs of the 1-CD installations for your pleasure: GNOME Live ISO, KDE Live ISO. He writes: “Please put ‘live CD’ into the summary of bug reports, so we don’t confuse them with the installation CDs. The Live CDs are still very early in development, but we would like to hear your feedback in general.” The password for both the root and the ‘linux’ user is ‘linux’.

openSUSE 10.3 is going to be filled with new improvements and exciting technologies. To allow you to discover exactly what the developers have been working hard on behind the scenes over the last few months, we bring you a little series: Sneak Peeks at openSUSE 10.3. Today we are looking at the great new improvements to boot time in openSUSE.

openSUSE 10.3 will include some great improvements to the init boot scripts which will dramatically decrease the time your computer takes to boot up. These come as the result of many different tests and research (documented here, and here); the first round of improvements have already been submitted and will make it into the final release.

(more…)

Here is another ‘People of openSUSE’ interview: this time you can read Francis Giannaros’ answers!

(more…)

So openSUSE 10.3 Beta 1 has now been released and it’s looking great. A long-discussed topic on the opensuse-project@opensuse.org (subscribe) mailing list was the suggestion of having a “Bug Slashing” day or weekend. Now we can finally go ahead with that idea.

The aim of the weekend is to try to help developers and packagers by trying to clear up the Bugzilla, finding out which bugs need to be addressed, seeing if particular bugs can be reproduced and how, and where necessary seeing which open 10.2 bugs still apply to current Factory (10.3 Beta1). It’s also the place to ask about a particular bug, or ask any other queries about whether you have found a bug. These days have run very successfully within other projects, so it is certainly time for us to give it a go too!

(more…)