Issue #69 of openSUSE Weekly News is now out!

In this week’s issue:

• openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 1 Released
• People of openSUSE: Jan Engelhardt
• Michal Vyskocil : How to track changes in packages: osc vc
• Joe Brockmeier: The argument for free fonts
• openSUSE Forums: Newbie KDE Questions

For a list of available translations see this page:
http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Weekly_News/69/Translations

Meeting page

Lizard lovers, get ready to start your engines! The first milestone release for openSUSE 11.2 is now ready for your testing pleasure.

Please note: This is a milestone release. It’s for openSUSE contributors who want to use the release for testing and development (or want a sneak preview of the 11.2 release), but it is not for production use.

What’s New in 11.2 Milestone 1

The 11.2 milestone 1 includes a number of new packages and improvements to the base system that are in development:

• Linux kernel 2.6.29
• KDE 4.2.2
• GNOME 2.26
• Mono 2.4
• OpenOffice.org 3.1 beta 4
• Xfce 4.6
• Alsa 2.6.29
• Samba 3.2.8

In addition, the live CDs now use LZMA compression and have German, French, Italian, Polish, and Russian translations. YaST’s Qt package manager now has a configurable view layout, and Zypp’s mirror handling should be more robust in this release. Ext4 is supported in this release, but not yet enabled for installation.

Additional Features Completed for 11.2 milestone 1

• 302485: sync GPT and MBR on MacBook (mactel)
• 302923: handle redirection to mirrors robustly
• 304429: package cache handling in YaST
• 305561: Install Debuginfo Package by build-id
• 305561: access table contents in YaST in more ways than just by push buttons
• 305803: improve command_not_found_helper speed
• 306230: Auto-Reset the screen settings in gnome-display-properties

You can track all features for 11.2 in openFate.

See more on Factory progress on the Factory Page on the openSUSE wiki. Screenshots are available (and can be uploaded to) Screenshots/11.2_Alpha_0.

Getting Milestone 1

The latest development versions are available from http://software.opensuse.org/developer/. You can choose x86 or x86-64 DVDs or KDE and GNOME Live CDs.

Testing

We all want openSUSE 11.2 to be the best release yet, and we need your help to get there. Please run the release through your usual routine, and let us know about any bugs or other issues that you find. Remember that this is a milestone release, and is not suitable for use on production systems.

Though many openSUSE users can and do use the Factory distribution and/or testing releases for day-to-day work we want to stress that it’s entirely possible that you will encounter serious bugs. See openSUSE.org/Testing for more information on Testing. To follow the testing and development process, we suggest that you subscribe to the openSUSE-Factory mailing list, and join the #openSUSE-Factory channel on Freenode to discuss openSUSE development.

Jan is one of silent community mebers that is active in kernel packaging and development area. Thanks to him openSUSE users have had chance to try stable real time kernel (RT kernel). He doesn’t take time to chat very often, but if you have problem and it is kernel related there is a great chance that you will have his attention, specially if you post your question to opensuse-kernel mail list.

His development home is suser-jengelh/, or recently added http://jftp.medozas.de/. The Build Service repo j-engel belongs to another person – Johannes Engel.

Jan mentioned that openSUSE 11.1 users don’t have RT kernel due to difficulties with 2.6.27 that prevented it to be ready by release date, but he provided alternatives 2.6.25-RT and 2.6.29-RT that can be found in either of his repositories.

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Want to contribute to the openSUSE Project, but not sure where to start? Join us for the openSUSE Community Week May 11 through 17th. Want to help lead the project and mentor new community contributors? Step up and join in!

The idea behind Community Week is to show users in the openSUSE community how they can become contributors, and to help existing contributors become more effective.

The community week is being organized in several topic areas, so you can attend the sessions that cover your area or areas of interest. The topics include:

• KDE
• GNOME
• openFate and Triaging Features
• Packaging
• Testing and Quality Assurance(QA)
• Translation
• Wiki and Web site improvements

See the Community Week page for more information on each topic. The openSUSE Board will also be posting session times to meet with the board members online and suggest improvements for the project.

Are we missing any topics? Feel free to take ownership of a topic and post it on the wiki. Topic owners are responsible for preparing presentations and materials that will be posted on the wiki for future reference, and leading sessions online.

Most importantly, help us spread the news — we’re looking to reach as many new contributors as possible. You can find the counter on the openSUSE site and instructions on using different sized banners on Pascal Bleser’s site.

Want to contribute to the openSUSE Project, but not sure where to start? Join us for the openSUSE Community Week May 11 through 17th. Want to help lead the project and mentor new community contributors? Step up and join in!

The idea behind Community Week is to show users in the openSUSE community how they can become contributors, and to help existing contributors become more effective.

The community week is being organized in several topic areas, so you can attend the sessions that cover your area or areas of interest. The topics include:

• KDE
• GNOME
• openFate and Triaging Features
• Packaging
• Testing and Quality Assurance(QA)
• Translation
• Wiki and Web site improvements

See the Community Week page for more information on each topic. The openSUSE Board will also be posting session times to meet with the board members online and suggest improvements for the project.

Are we missing any topics? Feel free to take ownership of a topic and post it on the wiki. Topic owners are responsible for preparing presentations and materials that will be posted on the wiki for future reference, and leading sessions online.

Most importantly, help us spread the news — we’re looking to reach as many new contributors as possible. You can find the counter on the openSUSE site and instructions on using different sized banners on Pascal Bleser’s site.

On Monday, Google announced the accepted projects for all of the Google Summer of Code organizations. The openSUSE Project has nine projects that were accepted for the Summer of Code 2009.

The following students have had projects accepted:

• Eryu Guan: Porting openSUSE to MIPS platform
• Marcus Huewe: Integrating oauth into the openSUSE Build Service
• Peter Libic: Prototype git backend for OpenSUSE Build Service
• Kusum Madarasu: openSIS-MySQL
• Jan-Simon Möller: Porting openSUSE to ARM platform
• Udit Sajjanhar: OpenID Support for openSUSE Build Service
• Jeffrey Shantz: YaST Education Module
• Peter Somlo: Synchronization with Mobile Devices
• Mohit Verma: NLP+Voice UI system for the openSUSE desktop

Of course, we received more than nine excellent proposals. While we couldn’t accept every proposal that we’d have liked, we’d like to thank all of the students who submitted proposals.

Also, a big thanks to all of the mentors who have volunteered to mentor, worked with students to answer questions about proposals, and provide guidance so far.

The next step is the Community Bonding Period to help students get acclimated with the project and learn how to work within the openSUSE Project. Some of our students are already long-standing members of the community, but please give all of them a warm welcome and any assistance they need in getting started.

Coding starts officially on May 23rd. Let’s get ready to have a great summer!

    Issue #68 of openSUSE Weekly News is now out!

In this week’s issue:

• Call for Participations: openSUSE Summit 2009
• openSUSE at LinuxFest Northwest
• People of openSUSE: Jean-Daniel Dodin
• Google Summer of Code Status Update
• Bryen Yunashko: Accessible Appreciation: The Sequel

For a list of available translations see this page:
http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Weekly_News/68/Translations

Meeting page

The next openSUSE Project meeting will take place Wednesday April 22nd at 13:00 UTC. See all time zones on the Fixed Time World Clock. As always, the meeting will be held in IRC on the #opensuse-project channel on Freenode.

Please add your topics to the meeting wiki page at:

http://en.opensuse.org/Meetings/Project_Meeting_2009-04-22

Please add topics as soon as possible. Also, if you have questions for the meeting, but can’t attend (we know that the meeting times can’t work for everyone) please add them to the agenda as well.

For more on IRC meetings, see: http://en.opensuse.org/Meetings/About.

As always, we meet in #opensuse-project on Freenode. Fire up your favorite IRC client and head over to #opensuse-project.

Not familiar with IRC? A good overview can be found at irchelp.org. This site is not affiliated with openSUSE. For more information on Freenode, see http://freenode.net/.

Wondering what meeting times are? Check the openSUSE Meetings page. All project meetings and team meetings should be listed there.