Hello avid gamers and game developers!

We decided to restructure and cleanup the games projects in the openSUSE Build Service. Before the change we had 8 projects for each game genre (action, adventure, arcade, board, puzzle, roleplay, strategy/realtime, strategy/turn-base) and one separate project for game libraries (so you can play games even on older distributions with obsoleted libraries).

This situation was causing more harm than good, so now we will only have one “games” repository with all game genres together. If you have already added old game repositories, please remove them and add the brand new one located at download.opensuse.org/repositories/games/ and then the directory of your distribution. The old URLs for the individual games repositories will no longer work.

If your favorite game is not yet packaged you can add it to the Games Wishlist at openSUSE wiki. Or even better, you can try to package it by yourself and when you are finished contact Pavol Rusnak and we will add the game to the repository. You can also ask on the opensuse-packaging@opensuse.org (subscribe) mailing list you have any troubles with the packaging.

Game On!

Michal Vyskocil has requested a new mailing list around Java topics. You can subscribe to it or browse the newly created archive. This nicely fits our other Java changes, which can be discussed on the mailing list:

• Debian and Ubuntu based Java buildings: It was not possible so far to build Java based packages for Debian or Ubuntu, because Java lives there in non-free or Multiverse repositories. We have imported these as Debian:Etch:NonFree or Ubuntu:*:Multiverse projects to offer java builds in future. We would like to thank Carsten Höger from Open-Xchange for his help and the needed java preinit package. A nice example for using Java on deb based distributions is the server:OX:snapshot project.
• openSUSE:Factory is using open source Java from openJDK6 now. We switched to openJDK6 as default Java to be able to deliver a complete open source Factory distribution including Java. This is currently not a final decision, just a test approach to evaluate the situation. This affects also everybody who builds a Java package for Factory using the generic “BuildRequires: java-devel”, openJDK6 will be used in this case as a Java environment. A drawback is the increased bootstrap time for Java in Factory atm, increasing the time for a complete Factory rebuild to several days. We are working hard to avoid this again in future.

As SUSE Linux 10.0 has reached its end of life in November last year, the Packman team will be removing all SUSE Linux 10.0 packages from its repository end of this week. If you want to keep them aside, make sure to download a copy before.

And as for good news, the Packman team has started to build its packages for openSUSE 11.0 (against Beta 1) since a few days. You can enable it by going to YaST -> Software Management. From there select Repositories -> Manage Repositories in the menu. Then select Add -> Community Repositories, and from here select the “Packman Repository”.

The codecs one-click-install for 11.0 should be updated and available next week.

Zürich, Switzerland

openSUSE counter on the Novell booth, showing latest beta of openSUSE 11.

More information: English, German

Thanks to the Switzerland Novell colleagues openSUSE is again on the biggest computer event in Switzerland. I will be there on a openSUSE demopoint at the Novell booth, showing the latest beta version. If you don’t belive that the package management is superfast now or want to see the new pretty installation without testing it yourself, here you have the chance …

If you are in Zürich, don’t miss it!

More information on the webpage: German, English

Meeting page

This week ‘People of openSUSE’ scope out openSUSE Product Manager Michael Löffler known for his great work in helping setting up the openSUSE Project, bridge between Novell and community, openSUSE Shop, and so much more..!

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Homepage

Google have announced the openSUSE projects and students taking part in this year’s Google Summer of Code. The projects include:

• LTSP GUI Management for openSUSE
  by Jan Weber, mentored by Jigish Gohil

• Interactive Crash Analysis
  by Nikolay Derkach, mentored by Jan Blunck

• Face Based Authentication
  by Rohan Anil, mentored by Alex Lau Chun Yin

• Grub4ext4: enable ext4 file system as boot partition
  by PengTao, mentored by Coly Li

• New approach for (RPM) packages creation
  By Andrei Oprisan, mentored by Stanislav Brabec

• Libzypp Download Failover
  by Gerard Farràs i Ballabriga, mentored by Peter Poeml

• GNOME Build service client for OpenSUSE
  by Mario Đanić, mentored by Rodrigo Moya

• Integration of OpenID Consumer to Build Service
  by Hameedullah Khan, mentored by Cornelius Schumacher

• Migration asistent reloaded
  by Peter Libič, mentored by Pavol Rusnak

• Build Service <-> Eclipse Integration
  by longhong, mentored by Michal Marek

Only 10 applications from the 67 could be chosen. Special thanks to everybody that has been involved so far: the volunteering mentors, those driving the application process, and of course — all of the students. Congratulations to all the selected students!

Issue #19 of openSUSE Weekly News is now out!

In this week’s issue:

• OpenOffice_org 2.4 available
• 11.0 feature by feature: All you ever wanted to know!
• Tips and Tricks: fdupes & freedup
• Building KDE on openSUSE was never easier
• Lukas Ocilka: Image-based Installation