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Change in openSUSE Membership handling

July 12th, 2010 by

Anyone can become openSUSE member after showing continued and substantial contribution to the project of any kind (bugs, support in forums, wiki edits, code contribution etc.). For those who don’t know what openSUSE Membership is or how to become a member I suggest to read this wiki article or older blogpost by Andreas.

Some time ago openSUSE Board decided to delegate the membership handling process to so-called Membership officials. They review applications and give -1, 0, +1 points depending on user’s contributions to the project. Once user receives +4 resp. -4 points, the application is accepted resp. rejected. The length of this process depends on how much you write about yourself in the application. If you make your contributions vivid in this description, it’s very easy to verify them and you can become openSUSE member in a few days.

In both cases, an email is sent automatically to the user informing about the result. If the membership is approved, additionaly admins are informed, so email/cloak/lizards account can be set up and Weekly News team can present the new members in the separate section in OWN. The officials team currently consists of 16 very active community members, who can be reached on email address membership-officials@opensuse.org and their list is in the mentioned wiki page.

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Posted in Project | 10 Comments »

openSUSE.org Scheduled Outage

July 9th, 2010 by

On Saturday, July 10th from 09:00 AM CET to 03:00 PM CET, our infrastructure vendor will be shutting down services in the Nuremberg (Germany) data center to allow for a scheduled maintenance of the main power supply. As result, general network connectivity from and to the location will not be available.

Due to a separate maintenance activity the openSUSE Build Service will only be available again by 07:00 PM CET.

As result, the following services will not be available:

* http://build.opensuse.org
* http://software.opensuse.org

* http://svn.opensuse.org
* http://community.opensuse.org
* http://education.opensuse.org
* http://powerpc.opensuse.org
* http://boosters.opensuse.org
* http://board.opensuse.org
* http://users.opensuse.org
* http://hermes.opensuse.org
* http://notify.opensuse.org
* http://retro.opensuse.org
* http://connect.opensuse.org
* http://crashdb.opensuse.org
* http://gallery.opensuse.org
* http://shop.opensuse.org
* http://help.opensuse.org
* http://i18n.opensuse.org
* http://apparmor.opensuse.org
* http://count(er|down).opensuse.org
* http://gcc.opensuse.org
* http://license.opensuse.org
* http://xgl.opensuse.org
* http://pluginfinder.opensuse.org

The staging version of these sites will be similarly affected.

Please spread the news about this, so that we can keep user disruption to a minimum.

Posted in Events, Infrastructure | Comments Off

Maintenance for openSUSE 11.0 extended

July 5th, 2010 by
openSUSE 11.0 was released on 19th of June 2008 and was planned to be under security maintenance for two years. Upon multiple requests from the community, the SUSE Security and Maintenance Team has decided to extend the maintenance period of openSUSE 11.0 until openSUSE 11.3 release, which is scheduled for July 15th 2010.
We will stop handling new requests at that day and plan to finish with the last update on July 21st 2010 to assure that openSUSE 11.0 users have a smooth upgrade path to openSUSE 11.3. Special thanks to Dirk Mueller who innitiated this.

Posted in Distribution | 10 Comments »

openSUSE Forums – vBulletin Upgrade Complete

July 1st, 2010 by

The vBulletin software that is the ‘Nuts and Bolts’ behind the openSUSE Forum has just undergone a major upgrade from v3 to v4. This resulted in some considerable down time on 30 June 2010. However, the results are impressive and openSUSE Forums now has a completely new look. It’s more than that though, the upgrade adds a much improved look and feel. The Forum Team expect some teething problems, as well as much discussion and opinion about the change. As far as changes go, I’d put this on a par with the kde move from 3 to 4. The dust will settle soon enough. Be assured the Forum Staff will be ready and willing to offer advice and assistance relating to this and of course normal help/advice with openSUSE.

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Posted in Infrastructure | 4 Comments »

Plan your openSUSE 11.3 release party now!

June 18th, 2010 by

As openSUSE 11.3 is around the corner and will be released on July 15, it’s now the right time to prepare your Launch Paty in our city or region. Gnokii just posted on the openSUSE marketing mailing list the following which should help orgainizing such an event and will help to avoid mistakes made already by others.

What’s a Launch Party?

Launch Party means an event around the fresh released openSUSE version. What kind of event is up to the organizator. Its usually an event to spread the word around openSUSE, share knowledge with others and get people on the openSUSE train. (more…)

Posted in Distribution, Events, Project | 12 Comments »

openSUSE approaching destination – please fasten your seat belts – openSUSE 11.3 RC1 is available

June 17th, 2010 by

Geeko at work

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Please fasten your seat belts, the touch down area is in sight we do have clear view and smooth weather conditions. So we expect a smooth landing for the release of openSUSE 11.3 on July 15, 2010. Let’s polish and fine-tune openSUSE 11.3 now. Get the RC1 from our software portal right now!

As usual the most annoying bugs are listed here. But at least till release time coolo couldn’t find more then one bug in this category. Good sign towards a great release in July.

Have a lot of fun!

Posted in Announcements, Distribution | 84 Comments »

openSUSE @ LinuxTag 2010 – We want to meet you!

June 1st, 2010 by

openSUSE -  as usual – will be at LinuxTag. We have booth #203 in hall 7.2a and will show there the openSUSE Build Service 2.0 release which is scheduled for June 11 and how you can benefit from it and of course the last milestone of openSUSE 11.3. We’d like to see you there and have a chat. If you want to help us at the booth please add your name and the date you want to be there at the bottom of our LinuxTag page

The amazing openSUSE Boosters will give hack sessions for contributors, or people who want to become one. In these up and close hack sessions, with a small number of participants, a Booster will teach you all about a way to contribute to openSUSE and/or open source in general. Here’s the program:

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Please visit our LinuxTag page to get all details and notice changes and edits.

We do have 20 4-days visitor tickets currently on stock. We’ll spread them to anyone who wants to come to LinuxTag on a first come first serve base. Please request one if you’re really going to LinuxTag at marketing at opensuse.org and avoid dispatching tickets which never get used.

http://wiki.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Boosters_team

Posted in Events | 3 Comments »

openSUSE Forums Poised to Support the next Release, 11.3.

June 1st, 2010 by

With a good selection of Forum users already working with openSUSE’s development version of the next openSUSE release 11.3 – The forums will be a great place to stop for support post install of the official release.
Members are currently working hard testing and bug reporting on 11.3 Milestone 7 – This can only make for a better final release. Going by the performance of 11.3 so far, it’s going to be a super release. Most of the Forum Team are already well involved with testing and helping members troubleshoot issues. This will make for a well prepared body of helpers for when the release is final.

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Posted in Weekly News | 10 Comments »

openSUSE Conference 2010 Call for Papers

May 31st, 2010 by

openSUSE Conference 2010The openSUSE Project Team is happy to announce that the 2nd international openSUSE Conference will take place in Nuremberg, Germany between 20-23 October 2010.

After the great success of the first conference last year we will again meet in Nuremberg to discuss, learn, plan and work on the openSUSE project with all its sub-projects as well as on general free software topics.

Specifically this year we’re explicitly inviting members of upstream projects and other community distributions to discuss comprehensive topics of free software and projects to move forward with free technology across borders, which is also the motto of the openSUSE Conference 2010:

Collaboration Across Borders

Call for Papers

The Conference Program Committee is currently seeking submissions from attendees for all kind of contributions to the conference such as talks, tutorials, hands-on-sessions and such. Suggested topics are around the motto of Collaboration Across Borders, but it is not a limitation. The Call for Papers gives some guidance and concrete examples.

The deadline for this year’s Call for Papers is July, 31st 2010. Acceptance will be issued by August, 20th.

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Posted in Announcements, Conference | Comments Off

Boosters: Umbrella Sprint Summary

May 31st, 2010 by

For the last few months some of the Boosters were working on “Umbrella” infrastructure concept for openSUSE. Various web tools grew over time and unfortunately they became almost independant and disconnected from each other. We decided to improve the situation by making openSUSE websites more integrated and easier accesible in order to help people to find the stuff they are looking for.

During the openSUSE Conference 2009 Klaas gave a talk about the current state of tools and our improvement plans. Robert created a brand new Bento theme which allowed Pavol to create a simple global menu to put on top of each website. These menus group all links to other websites into four categories: Downloads, Support, Community and Development. These more-or-less correspond to groups of users openSUSE has, which makes navigation easy and fun!

The Bento theme was later ported to MediaWiki engine by Michal, so we could use it in our new wiki instance, which is being filled in with content at the moment by other Boosters in cooperation with Wiki team.

We were more than happy to accept help from Pascal Bleser who completely remixed Planet openSUSE to visually match the rest of the sites, while delivering lots of other improvements (like keyboard navigation for example).

One of the things that also witnessed the design change was software.opensuse.org, our portal for downloading the last stable and development releases also containing a package search. It now contains a link to openSUSE Derivatives.

Coolo and Tom continued their Build Service efforts from their previous “Factory Page” sprint, which lead to massive web user interface overhaul. You can read about it in the previous separate post by Andreas.

Here are the screenshots of described applications, but remember that it is better to see the pages in action by yourself! :-)

What was left out of the sprint were the WordPress theme and vBulletin forums theme. The first one is more-or-less ready but is not yet tested. You welcome to help us with these to make the theme transition complete. Robert also created a style guide which is available from our wiki and should help you with using and applying the Bento theme. While it is quite short at the moment, it will be enhanced with nice “How To” documents soon.

This concludes our long but important “Umbrella” sprint and Boosters are already looking forward to other exciting challenges.

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Posted in Infrastructure | 4 Comments »

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