Meeting page

Issue #90 of openSUSE Weekly News is now out!

In this week’s issue:

• Joe Brockmeier: Hundreds converge on Nuremberg for openSUSE Conference
• openSUSE Conference 2009
• How To Build A Self-hosted Wordpress Blog For Free
• Andrew Wafaa: Goblin 1Click
• Sascha Manns: OOo4kids: Special Version for Kids

For a list of available translations see this page:
http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Weekly_News/90/Translations.

Meeting page

This year, the international Linux-Kongress (organised by the GUUG) takes place in Dresden from Oct 27 – 30. Although openSUSE is not present with its own booth, there are tutorials and speeches based on openSUSE:

• Tutorial: Building a high available virtualization cluster based on iSCSI storage and XEN on Oct  27th and 28th by Thomas Groß
• Speech:  LAX – a toolset for network administration on Oct 30th by Thomas Groß

See you in Dresden!

On Sunday the first openSUSE conference (osc09) finished in Nuernberg, Germany. Overall it was great success and brought people face to face together. Participants were motivated and enthusiastic and we’d like to just show some comments on twitter/blog:

• “Folks! I’m hoooome! #oSC09 was a blast! More details to come BryenY”

• “Back from the #opensuse conference #osc09, back to work. Had a great time”

• “Back from the _awesome_ openSUSE #osc09 conference. Learnt a lot. Huge kudos to @zonker !”

• “On the train back home from #osc09 was a great event, really nice to meet so many people from the #openSUSE community in person”

• “In the train back to Stuttgart after 4 great days at the openSUSE conference. Great progress on all fronts. #osc09″

• “great #osc09 event. I’ve decided to give #openSUSE the whole disk on my laptop! And i want to contribute, contribute, contribute!”

We had overall around 225 persons from all over the world attending. For those who couldn’t make it to the conference we’ll try to publish all presentations and videos if available. A lot of people from Novell’s Nuernberg and Prague offices showed up -  sometimes only for a few hours – which shows that Nuernberg was the  right location for this event.  Novell VPs and Directors that showed up include Carlos Montero-Luque, Ralf Flaxa, Gerald Pfeifer and Roland Haidl.

The whole four days we had two tracks of talks and two tracks of ad-hoc conference sessions on a variety of topics incl. moblin, appliances, desktop, quality, community, toolchain and system, and legal. Some sessions to point out where:

• team meetings of GNOME and KDE developers, incl. a common meeting

• the governance sessions (see below)

• Keynotes by Lenz Grimmer on “working in a virtual community” and Gianugo Rabellino on “Open Development in the trenches: a decade at the Apache Software Foundation”

• Stefan Werden announcing that he’s taking over the openSUSE retail Box business

Thursday evening we had a great party at the Novell offices and Friday and Saturday night a local cinema was presenting the “Creative Common Film night”.

We were impressed by the many discussions that formed and the ad-hoc conference sessions set up and the many groups gathered in the hall ways and pretty productively covered a certain topic. We’d like also point out a night time session on Friday night (until 3:30am) where more than 10 people triaged through GNOME bugs for openSUSE (incl. checking whether they are still valid) and hacked on GNOME features like Bacon (banshee UI for Moblin) and Zeitgeist (GNOME 3.0).

Governance
We had two sessions on how governance in the project does work today and what needs to be changed. Currently most of the decisions are done by experts in their area, the open question is what kind of process is needed in case area experts cannot make a decision. We have decided to move forward in the following way: A small group will now discuss this further together with the board, create a first proposal for public comments and once we have a good proposal, the openSUSE members will vote on this change.

RPM Summit
We had an RPM summit which Florian Festi (upstream RPM developer emplyoed by Red Hat) joined. Goal was to work on RPM itself to unify RPM usage between openSUSE and Fedora – the end goal is that a valid spec file for openSUSE or SLE is also valid for Fedora/Red Hat and vice versa.

Software Freedom
Saturday we had a track in German as part of the world wide Software Freedom day which was targeted to people new to Linux. We had pretty many interesting and supporting conversation with some participants that came just for this day. Most interesting to AJ was an incident at the rather big local farmer market in the morning where a person said “Today I go to Software Freedom day”. And AJ recognized this person later that day at the conference.

Journalists & Media

Ulrike Beringer made it happen that 11 journalists attended the conference and had several interviews at the conference with Joe Brockmeier, Michael Meeks and Andreas Jaeger.

Comment from our PR agency was: “The feedback of the journalists was very positive, as you can see in the report some of them even published several articles at once. Hence from our PR perspective the event was a big success!” RadioTux interviewed various participants for podcasts of more than 90 minutes.

Thanks to Ulrike for setting this up!

Photos
If you like to see some photos, check either of these two galleries:

• gallery.opensuse.org

• flickr osc09 group

Twitter
The flickr photos are also shown on the osc09 twitterwall that was created by gnokii.  #osc09 was the hashmark used for twittering about the conference.

Issue #89 of openSUSE Weekly News is now out!

In this week’s issue:

• openSUSE Conference
• Bryen Yunashko: Upcoming Board Elections
• Andreas Jaeger: Build Service Intro
• openSUSE Forums: Switching ext3 to ext4?
• LWN.net/Nathan Willis: Toward a long-term SUSE-based distribution

For a list of available translations see this page:
http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Weekly_News/89/Translations.

This Thursday 16:45 – 17:30 will be a GPG-Keysigning Party and a CaCert Assurance Event at the openSUSE Conference Unconference track in Nürnberg. So even if the deadline for the GPG key submission is already over, it might be a good idea to visit the Event and become a CaCert member (please create your CaCert Account first)!

So just jump into your favorite vehicle and visit us at the openSUSE-Conference!

The openSUSE Project is happy to announce that the openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 7 (M7) is available for download. This release includes GNOME 2.28 beta 2, KDE 4.3.1, RPM 4.7.1, and much more.

This is a Milestone Release, one of several that lead up to the 11.2 final release in November. It may not be suitable for production systems, but is ready for contributors who want to help with testing and development for 11.2. This release is of “beta” quality, and would have been labeled a beta in past openSUSE development cycles.

Changes Since openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 6

Milestone 7 includes an initial version of the YaST2 installer theme, new KDE theming, is built with RPM 4.7.1, and adds the “–download-only” option for several Zypper commands. And, of course, it includes many updated packages:

• Linux kernel 2.6.31-rc9
• Valgrind 3.5
• Samba 3.4.0
• Evolution 2.27.91
• OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 RC 1
• Gwibber 1.2

A more complete list can be found on the wiki and an updated list of Factory packages can be found on DistroWatch.

11.2 is looking fantastic. Want screenshots? We’ve got ‘em! Check out the shots here, and/or add your own.

Most Annoying Bugs

As this is a milestone release, 11.2 M7 does contain a few bugs that we know about, but should not stand between courageous contributors and release testing. The big bugs in 11.2 M7 are:

• grub and bootsplash still use 11.1 artwork
• Bug 537343: GNOME live system asks for root password to mount
• Bug 537470: GNOME YaST Control Center cannot be started

You can track the Most Annoying Bugs on the wiki along with 11.2 development.

Testing! Testing! Testing!

As you can see, 11.2 M7 does have a few bugs that we know about — but there may be more lurking somewhere in the release that haven’t been found yet. If you want to make sure 11.2 final is free of Most Annoying Bugs, we’ll need your help finding, reporting, and fixing those hidden bugs.

To learn more about testing openSUSE, visit the Testing pages on the openSUSE wiki. 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.

Get Milestone 7 Today!

What are you waiting for? Grab the milestone release today! Downloads are available at software.opensuse.org/developer/ now.

Note, if you need to try the live CD on a machine with no CD-ROM drive, you can copy it to a USB key with the following command:

dd if=image.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M

Replace “image.iso” with the name of the ISO image that you have downloaded, and replace “sdX” with the actual device name of your USB drive. Be careful! This will erase the target device, so make sure you have the correct device name and have any vital data backed up!

The next milestone is scheduled to be released on October 1, 2009. A reminder: only one more milestone release is planned for 11.2, followed by two release candidate (RC) releases. See the detailed roadmap on the on the wiki.

Issue #88 of openSUSE Weekly News is now out!

In this week’s issue:

• openSUSE Conference: Social Events
• Make Tech Easier/Joshua Price: 8 Useful and Interesting Bash Prompts
• Update to VirtualBox-3.0.6-OSE
• Holger Sickenberg: openSUSE Core Test Team Established
• KDE.NEWS/Sebastian Kügler: Third Plasma Summit Lifts KDE Desktop To Higher Grounds

For a list of available translations see this page:
http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Weekly_News/88/Translations

@ Translators: Because the Downtime from the Mailinglist i can’t send an special Email. But you can start with your Translations.

From Sep 12 to Sep 13 we will have a power outage in the Nuernberg office.

Downtime is planned from 2009-09-11 20:00 CEST (18:00 UTC) until 2009-09-14 10:00 CEST (08:00 UTC). So it might become a long weekend especially for developers – but we plan to avoid restrictions for endusers during this downtime.

So far, the following services are affected by this downtime:

• Build Service
• Mailing lists
• …and more

Please have a look at the “downtime” wiki page to see the full list of affected hosts.

Not affected:

• news.opensuse.org
• <lang>.opensuse.org (all opensuse wikis)
• forums.opensuse.org
• irc.freenode.net/opensuse* channels
• bugzilla.novell.com
• download.opensuse.org (replacement host)
• software.opensuse.org (search will not work as the buildservice is down)

With kind regards,
Lars (on behalf of the openSUSE-Admins)