Because not everybody was aware of the contest and wondered a little bit about the reminder mail, we extended the deadline for the YaST mascot contest. The new deadline for the submissions is November 09, 12:00 UTC. Participate, show us your vision of the mascot! We are not only searching for a sketch/picture of the mascot, also for a name. The winners will get all the fame and a stuffed Geeko! So get your pencils/mice/brains ready

More information with the rules in the wiki page.

A quick status update on openSUSE 11.1 beta 3. The DVD installation ISOs were not complete by Friday night, and only the x86 live CDs have built correctly — the x86_64 images are too large to fit on CD-R media. Building the distro was not finished until end of business (EOB) Nuremberg time.

The team will try another test build Monday morning and see what the state of the build is. If those work well, we should be able to push out a release Tuesday. Otherwise beta 4 will be delayed further and we will provide further updates.

We’re sorry for the delays, but we are more interested in pushing out a usable beta 3 release than rushing something out the door that isn’t suitable for widespread testing.

    Issue #42 of openSUSE Weekly News is now out!
In this week’s issue:

• Power Outage of most openSUSE servers
• Retiring from the openSUSE Board
• Status openSUSE distribution
• Pascal Bleser: Packman: removing openSUSE 10.0 and 10.1 packages
• Bernhard Walle: Automatic reboot with kexec

New: The openSUSE Weekly News is not only translated to German, but now also available in Russian and Japanese language.
Big thanks to all translators – let’s spread the news around the world !

After a long summer holiday season ‘People of openSUSE’ is back!

This week we caught up one of the many people responsible for the success of the openSUSE project maintaining mailing lists, IRC channels, and openSUSE project meetings, as also doing some packaging in the well-known Packman repository. Today you have the opportunity to meet the current openSUSE Board Candidate Henne Vogelsang!

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Today we started an openSUSE Build Service Webclient online survey. We want to get more informations about the openSUSE Build Service Webclient users, the used hard and software and (potential) use cases.

If you use, used or want to use the OBS, please participate on the survey and help us to make a solid Webclient 2.

The survey is available via this link.

Thanks for your participation!

openSUSE 11.1 beta 3 will be delayed by several days. We originally scheduled the release for today (October 16) but the power outage last Friday left us unable to check in packages temporarily, and pushed the schedule back by several days.

We had a first build this morning and have checked in more than 20 packages to fix the most serious problems. We expect to release the third beta on Monday (October 20), or later, depending on the status of the builds on Friday.

We’ll give an update Friday as to the status of the next beta release. Thanks for your patience, and we look forward to your help in testing and working on openSUSE 11.1 when we release beta 3!

Due to the unforeseen circumstances of last week the Board Election Committee have agreed that for fairness and transparency the Election deadline will be extended. The new closing date for polls will now be 1200UTC Saturday 25th October.

As it stands now, over 57% of votes have been cast. Hopefully the extension will enable all voters the chance to have their voice heard. Remember, this is the community’s chance to influence the governance of the openSUSE project. If you don’t vote your chance to influence the project will be reduced. If you have questions about the candidates, ask them. They won’t bite, but they may be able to give you the answers to enable you to vote with a clearer consience.

The patches we did for the Intel e1000e network card for Beta2 protect the chip so that the NVRAM could not get corrupted anymore and we indeed did not receive any new bug reports and could not reproduce the bug anymore on our systems.

Further investigation by Intel has found the root cause of the problem as Steven Rostedt wrote on the linux kernel mailing list : The dynamic ftrace code contained some fragile code that could write to ioremap-ed memory and thus corrupt the NVRAM.  The issue could happen “when the init functions of a module are freed and the nvram is vmapped there as well”.  The full story can be found on LKML.

Since 24th of September, we have disabled for our kernel of the day the dynamic ftrace code due for all flavors except the debug and vanilla kernels (on x86 and x86-64 – it was not enabled on other architectures).  We have also added the NVRAM protection patches to all kernel flavors.  Therefore Beta2 already contains – by pure luck – not only the NVRAM protection but also not anymore the broken code.

Beta3 will contain the same fixes – and the kernel of the day has just been updated with dynamic ftrace code disabled also for the debug and vanilla kernels (with the update to 2.6.27.1).

So, if you’re running a debug or vanilla kernel, I advice – to be on the safe side – to update to the 2.6.27.1 kernel of the day.  For everybody else: The Beta2 and Beta3 kernels should not corrupt your Intel e1000e NVRAM.

I’d like to thank all that were involved in debugging and fixing the issues around this, including our kernel developers Karsten Keil and Jiri Kosina who debugged and worked on a solution, testers that fried their machine and helped debugging like Stephan Binner and Vladimir Botka, and the team at Intel for developing protection code and finding and fixing the root cause.

Update 2008-10-21: Beta3 will contain 2.6.271.1

Fixing Erased e1000e NICs

Karsten Keil has developed a way to fix broken e1000e eproms.  Please contact him at kkeil@suse.de in case you need to recover from this bug.

After very careful deliberation, we’ve chosen the winners from Hack Week III. The categories were: Best Cross-Pollination Team, First Penguin Awards, and the Best Overall Projects.

The Best Cross-Pollination Team: Awards the project that connects different teams, and raises awareness of each other’s work.

First Penguin Award: Awards the project that goes out on a limb to try something difficult and risky… and probably fails.  Named in honor of the first penguin to jump into the water when there may be predators swimming below.

Best Overall Projects: Goes to the projects that the panelists thought were “best” for one reason or other. Surprisingly enough, we had a tie for first place on this one!

And the winners are:

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Meeting page