As you know for sure ;), the openSUSE Build Service (OBS) shall connect the complete different worlds of End-Users and developers/packager. This does of course already worked to that degree that everybody can download software, which got packaged in the OBS. Also the packager do already got feedback via download numbers, tags or rating within the packager web interface.

Andreas Bauer added lately the next functionality in this context. All search results in the End User interface do offer now a link to the packager web interface from now on. Every user, with a standard openSUSE account can now do the ratings and taging there directly. This will help the to improve the search results for other users later on.

Also new is the bugreport link, this means end users can create bugreports for projects or packages hosted in OBS. Such a bugreport will get assigned to the person, who is defined as bugowner. Atm only a few projects have this defined, so this is a call to all project or package owners to add yourself. This can be done easily in the web gui, simply add yourself again to the project, but switch to the “bugowner” role.

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The Planet SUSE sysadmin, James Ogley, was interviewed by us. Apart from managing the biggest openSUSE blog aggregator, he is also part of the openSUSE GNOME team packaging lots of GNOME/GTK applications.

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Klaas wrote an article about the openSUSE Build Service that got published in the german edition of Linux Magazin. Everyone able to read german go here.

It covers general introduction into openSUSE’s Build Service, tutorials how to build a simple package, touches upon OSC and web client and gives an overview over the underlying technology.

Homepage

http://en.opensuse.org/Meetings/GNOME_Meeting_2007-12-13

The third issue of openSUSE Weekly News is out! You can read it in: English, German. In this issue:

• openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 0
• KDE Four Live 0.8, KDE 4.0 RC2 Packages, and Koffice Alpha6 Packages
• Indonesian openSUSE Community Annual Meeting a Huge Success
• Results from the openSUSE Contributor Survey
• In Tips and Tricks: How to Change to the GNOME or KDE-style YaST, Calculations in Kickoff (KDE Menu), Fonts: Subpixel Hinting

281 contributors from the openSUSE community participated in a survey last month. The survey was part of a research project on the topic of firm-sponsored open source communities, hosted by the University of Oslo. Topics in the survey include:

• level of contribution
• reasons for participating
• attitude towards Novell

The results are now ready and can be found here:

• Commented version
• Simple presentation

The commented version includes some analysis of the results and statistical measures of correlation between questions in the survey. The simple version only shows the distribution of frequencies in percent, but also includes the answers to the open text fields in the survey.

Here goes another ‘People of openSUSE’ interview, this time with a Canadian Novell employee and GNOME hacker - JP Rosevear. Besides his GNOME code contribution, he is the desktop development manager at Novell.

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For the last issue of their openSUSE release series, Novell Open Audio has talked to Marcus Meißner, team lead of the SUSE security team, to learn about the processes triggered by a security incidence, proactive source code audits, teaching developers how to write more secure software and AppArmor.

We’d like to kick start the development of openSUSE 11.0 by releasing the current state of Factory as an Alpha0 release. Since the release of 10.3, we checked in 2187 packages including fundamental package updates such as:

• gcc 4.3.0
• kernel 2.6.24-rc4
• X.org 7.3
• KDE 3.5.8
• KDE 4.0 RC1
• CUPS 1.3.4
• gdb 6.7.1
• Alsa 1.0.15
• Gimp 2.4
• Yast2 2.16

The change between 10.3 and Alpha0 is quite big, but it still works pretty nicely. So please join the openSUSE 11.0 development in downloading, testing and using Alpha0 or daily updated Factory distribution.

The most annoying bugs are as usual listed on Bugs:Most_Annoying_Bugs_11.0_dev

So far there are some glitches in the installation process, that are mostly harmless. But the new kernel in particular can cause some regressions we would love to hear about through bugzilla, as described on bugs.openSUSE.org.

You can get it from http://en.opensuse.org/Development_Version#Downloads

Greetings, Stephan