Short but sweet post here: Getting a few numbers on community growth for the openSUSE Day introduction at LinuxTag, I noticed that the openSUSE Forums have now passed 30,000 users!

That’s pretty amazing considering that we started the merged forums on June 10, 2008. In about one year’s time, we’ve seen more than 30,000 people sign up for the forums.

Congrats to everyone who works on the forums, and everyone in the community who has participated!

Once again, it’s LinuxTag time, and (of course) openSUSE is there. Today was day one of LinuxTag, and the openSUSE crew turned out to talk openSUSE, Build Service, and SUSE Studio.

The first day of LinuxTag was off to a bit of a slow start, with traffic a bit lighter than it was last year — but we still had quite a few people stopping by the booth and asking about openSUSE, playing with the netbooks and other demo systems, learning about SUSE Studio and the openSUSE Build Service, and generally having a good time.

If you’re in Berlin or nearby, be sure to visit LinuxTag this week! LinuxTag runs through Saturday, June 27th. Don’t forget, Saturday is openSUSE Day at LinuxTag! We have great talks in store for everybody at LinuxTag, including presentations on LTSP in openSUSE, Wine on openSUSE, AppArmor, and what’s new in openSUSE 11.2.

Here’s a sneak peek of the openSUSE booth for those of you who haven’t made it to LinuxTag just yet:

See the other shots from day one on Flickr. (Note, shots taken with a camera phone – better quality shots to come tomorrow!)

    Issue #77 of openSUSE Weekly News is now out!

In this week’s issue:

• openSUSE Factory is now open
• GSoC Status Reports
• Lubos Lunak: OpenOffice.Org KDE4 Integration
• openSUSE 11.2 Launch Planning
• Linux.com/Rocky: The Plasma desktop shell of KDE 4

For a list of available translations see this page:
http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Weekly_News/77/Translations

openSUSE development is now even more open than before. Factory development is changing, and we’re making it easier for contributors to take responsibility for packages and to contribute directly to openSUSE. This means contributors will be able to be directly responsible for packages, without having to go through a Novell employee to make changes.

Factory development is being split into devel projects organized by topic areas, such as KDE, GNOME, Education, Java, and so on. Devel projects are responsible for sets of packages and will be able to organize themselves rather than following a top-down model of management.

The idea is to allow teams to be self-organizing and for all contributors to have equal footing in terms of being able to contribute to openSUSE Factory.

To get started, the current Novell and openSUSE package maintainers will be working with each other to define responsibility within the devel projects and how the team will work together. As time goes on, they will integrate new maintainers into the teams and commit privileges will be based on merit and not whether a person is employed by Novell.

How to Get Started

If you’re new to working with Factory and the openSUSE Build Service, you can start with the Factory Packaging page on the openSUSE Wiki. This explains the Factory workflow, how to check out packages and submit changes, how to create new devel projects, and so on.

Have questions or need help getting started? There are plenty of openSUSE Factory contributors who’d be happy to answer questions and help you get started. To learn more, join the opensuse-factory mailing list, or get real-time help in the #opensuse-factory IRC channel on Freenode.

The policy changes that have been made with Factory are another step in making openSUSE a more independent project, and allowing all contributors to take equal responsibility. As Factory development and devel teams evolve, we hope to see more contributors taking a lead role in leading openSUSE development and shaping the openSUSE distro. Factory is open!

Roadmap

Roadmap

Meeting page

Meeting page

Homepage

The next openSUSE Project meeting will take place Wednesday June 17th at 12:00 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_2009-06-17

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.