It’s that time of the year again – FLISOL, the “Festival Latinoamericano de Instalación de Software Libre” (Latin American free software install fest) will start in about 6 weeks! If you live in Latin America, you can join one of the hundreds of install fests happening all over the continent on April 28th. And if there is nothing close by, there is no reason you can’t organize it yourself… (more…)
Author Archive
openSUSE at FOSDEM
February 8th, 2012 by Jos Poortvliet
Busy time at the booth
openSUSE brought lots of fun to FOSDEM in Brussels, Belgium. We’re all exhausted now from selling beer, t-shirts, hats and giving demonstrations of openSUSE with GNOME Shell, KDE, Plasma Active, openSUSE-on-ARM (running XFCE) and countless other things. Yet we did want to tell you about FOSDEM before we go catch up on sleep! (more…)
openSUSE and ownCloud
December 20th, 2011 by Jos Poortvliet
openSUSE 12.1 has been released a few weeks ago. A major new technology we introduce in this release is ownCloud, which we ship in a separate repository. ownCloud is a web application which lets you set up your own cloud – a place for you data where you can share it with others or use it over multiple devices. As YOU will own the data, it’s great from a privacy and security point of view.
However, setting up ownCloud, while not particularly complicated, is still vastly more difficult than navigating to a website which offers you convenient ways of giving them your personal data. If the convenience offered by companies like Dropbox, Canonical or Facebook is so much greater than what is offered by technologies which protect your freedom, you don’t really have a choice as common user.
openSUSE 12.1 offers a solution: mirall. While this tool has not yet solved all problems in the world, it makes deploying your ownCloud as easy as a few clicks and makes your files available for you off-line (a feature ownCloud itself lacks). Read on to learn what mirall has in store for openSUSE users!
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openSUSE 12.1: All Green!
November 16th, 2011 by Jos Poortvliet
It is November 16, 2011 and our mirrors have synced. Time to present to you: openSUSE 12.1! This release represents more than eight months of work by our international community and brings you the best Free Software has to offer. Awesome improvements include the latest GNOME 3.2 desktop as well as the newest from KDE, XFCE and LXDE; your ownCloud made easy with mirall; Snapper-shots of your file system; and much, much more.
Desktops
openSUSE 12.1 comes with the new GNOME Shell 3.2. We presented you with a taste of GNOME Shell on openSUSE 11.4. Since then, many bugs have been squashed and numerous small improvements have made life on the Shell more comfortable. Notifications are much nicer, you can now configure your online accounts in one place and Shell handles multiple-screen setups better.
Among the features is color management, something GNOME shares with KDE where openSUSE is the first to integrate the Oyranos color management system. Also new from KDE is Apper, an easier-to-use PackageKit front end.
Cloud things
It is 2011, and most of us use ‘cloud’ technology like having our files on Dropbox, friends on Facebook and music on Spotify. But these technologies are arguably dangerous from a security and privacy point of view. While not solving all problems yet, ownCloud aims to bring these services back under your control.
openSUSE is the first Linux distribution to support ownCloud with its own unique mirall desktop integration. For end users, mirall makes the difference between thinking that ownCloud is interesting and being able to actually use it. Read about mirall and ownCloud in our documentation to find out why!
For more demanding use cases in the small business area, our Virtualization and Cloud repository offers the latest versions of Eucalyptus, OpenNebula and OpenStack for openSUSE 12.1. And we support all the virtualization technologies including Xen 4.1, KVM and VirtualBox which can be managed with the latest virt-manager and open-vm-tools.
SUSE Studio users can already build unique versions of openSUSE 12.1, with custom package selections, artwork, scripts, etc. that can be deployed directly to Amazon EC2 or onto a variety of other cloud platforms.
Under the hood
openSUSE 12.1 includes Snapper, a new and unique tool that employs the snapshot functionality in btrfs to allow you to view older versions of files and revert changes. The integration of Snapper into the zypper package manager allows roll back of system updates and configuration changes.
openSUSE is also the first major distribution to ship the Go programming language, Google’s new open development language. Go is a fast, easy-to-use language that helps programmers handle multi-core, networked machines with the convenience of garbage collection and run-time reflection.
Keep tumblin’ and rollin’!
openSUSE 12.1 can of course also move to Tumbleweed, our cutting-edge rolling release repo which contains the latest stable versions of all software. Tumbleweed lessens the significance and change impact of major releases by updating systems continuously. Existing Tumbleweed users will have to make a small change to their repositories to stay current. For future releases of openSUSE this won’t be needed anymore.
Go and have a lot of fun!
“While the big updates include Snapper, systemd and ownCloud, there are also many smaller enhancements like the improvements to YaST or the work on zypper. And that is only what our own community did,”
said Bryen Yunahsko, member of the openSUSE Board.
“We’re standing on the shoulders of the gigantic open source community. I would not be surprised if openSUSE’s latest update has over 300,000 improvements that resulted from efforts in the open source community.”
For more details about the latest and greatest in openSUSE 12.1 visit opensuse.org/12.1 and read our extensive Product Highlights! If you want, go and download it right away from our mirrors.
Have a lot of fun!
Join or organize openSUSE 12.1 Launch parties!
November 15th, 2011 by Jos Poortvliet
Party time!
We’re almost there. In two days openSUSE once again releases a new, improved version of its distribution to the world. Reason to celebrate! And celebrate we will. Currently, about 11 parties have been registered but we know many more are being organized and we call out to you to add your party to the wiki page!
Parties
Currently there are parties scheduled and registered in:
- Bucharest, Romenia
- Provo, Utah, USA
- Göttingen, Germany
- Second Life, Global
- Sao Paulo, Brazil
- Rouen and Toulouse, France
- Guatemala city, Guatemala
- Alphen aan de Rijn, Netherlands
- Beramo, Italy
- Prague, Czech Republic
- No less than three parties in Greece!
Continuous Integration testing for openSUSE available!
November 10th, 2011 by Jos Poortvliet
The development process of the Open Build Service (OBS) code base as well as it’s accompanying tools is largely test-driven. Major parts of the OBS source code are covered by a comprehensive test-suite. Traditionally, after each new code submission, these tests have been run by a custom shell-script on a local machine that wasn’t publicly available for several reasons. Even though this setup served us well for a long time, but we needed more. We want to provide a more transparent solution that allows the community to participate and maybe take over some responsibilities. Thus, your hard-working OBS-team hereby kindly introduces ci.opensuse.org, our new public interface for continuous integration (CI) testing!
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Are you ready for RC2?
November 3rd, 2011 by Jos Poortvliet
Following the openSUSE 12.1 roadmap, RC2 has been released upon this innocent world. This is your final chance to test openSUSE 12.1 before we move to the final version! We need to know about all big problems NOW! Read on to find out how to help.
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Help us spread the word on openSUSE 12.1!
November 1st, 2011 by Jos Poortvliet
Heya all,
In less than 3 weeks, our little baby, openSUSE 12.1, will be released into the wild. Now as you know, babies need lots of attention! This is where we need YOU.
openSUSE 12.1 needs to be promoted everywhere! That is, on your blog; on twitter, facebook, Google plus; and much more! Read on for details and tips on how you can help us spread the word! (more…)
openSUSE 12.1 RC1 spotted in the wild
October 24th, 2011 by Jos Poortvliet
As was already blogged by Vincent Untz, a few weeks after our last milestone was released as beta 1, the first Release Candidate of openSUSE 12.1 is now floating over the web!
What’s new
The next release of openSUSE is expected to bring a large number of improvements and changes. Many of these are the ‘usual’ updates any Linux distribution offers. These include the latest Firefox, GNOME 3.2 and KDE’s Plasma Workspace 4.7. Under the hood, we have Linux kernel 3.1 and we expect to be the first to ship Google’s new programming language Go. We also overhauled our boot procedure introducing systemd and Grub2 (testing!) and of course we’ll ship the latest developer tools and libraries as well as all the sysadmin goodies openSUSE is known for!
But we also have some really unique treats. The coolest among those is Snapper, a btrfs-based tool which allows you to view the differences between current and previous versions of files on your system and lets you roll back the changes, bringing back lost files or undoing damaging overwrites.
Testing
The changes in underlying boot technology, the new tools like Snapper as well as the rest of the operating system need a good workout for the release! So now we need YOUR help! Go to the download page and grab your copy of openSUSE 12.1 RC1 and test it on your desktop, in a VM or on a laptop!
You can find information on testing on the openSUSE Testing wiki page which also includes a link to the most annoying 12.1 bugs. Help us shorten that list by re-testing the problematic areas or by fixing the bugs; or help us find new pressing issues!
Get openSUSE 12.1 RC1 from this page.
More information and other helping-out
The openSUSE 12.1 Portal page has been set up but still needs quite some work. There are screenshots to be taken, release notes to be written and Documentation to be composed. We also welcome help with translation!
openSUSE Announces First Public Release of openQA
October 11th, 2011 by Jos Poortvliet
The openSUSE Project announces the 1.0 release of the unique cross-distribution-capable, fully automated testing framework openQA. openQA is the only comprehensive testing tool which can run tests on every level of the OS, from core functionality like the bootloader and booting the kernel up to testing applications like Firefox and LibreOffice. It shows the results in a convenient web interface and allows testers to see screenshots and even videos of the issues found. openQA is used to run nightly tests of the ‘Factory’ development repository for the upcoming openSUSE 12.1 release. openQA is available under the GPL version 2 or later.
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