openSUSE 11.2 is scheduled to be officially released in about a week (give or take a few hours…) and, as usual, we’re gearing up to press a bunch of media for shows and the ambassadors.

Typically Novell has created the artwork for the openSUSE DVDs, but this time around we had some really interesting and creative input from openSUSE contributors. Want to help choose the cover? Check out the entries and vote on your favorite!

Behind the scenes, the Wiki and Booster Teams are currently working hard to improve the Usability of the openSUSE Wiki to the openSUSE Community. The process started in early October 2009 and after some lively discussions at the opensuse-wiki mailinglist, we successfully passed our first Team-Meeting discussing the Usability Concept and assigning responsibilities for specific tasks we need to achieve. I herewith like to encourage interested people to join the efforts and to contribute by participating in the discussions at the opensuse-wiki mailinglist and/or the #opensuse-wiki IRC channel on Freenode. Every helping hands is very welcome!

To get an idea about the current state of the Project we’re working on, I’d like to raise your attention on the Meeting Minutes of our first Team-Meeting. To subscribe to the opensuse-wiki mailinglist, please click here.

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.

This is it folks! We’re almost there for openSUSE 11.2. Time to grab the final 11.2 release candidate and shake out any remaining bugs to get the lizard ready for release. This release includes an updated kernel, Samba, Firefox, and more.

This release should be almost ready for the gold master stamp, but there’s still time to shake out remaining bugs. This release should not be deployed on production systems, but should be ready for early adopters and contributors who want to help with testing and development of 11.2.

Changes Since openSUSE 11.2 RC 1

Release Candidate 2 includes a few new packages, and several of the “most annoying bugs” in RC 1 have been fixed for this release. New packages include:

• Linux kernel 2.6.31.5
• SeaMonkey 2.0
• Firefox 3.5.4
• Samba 3.4.2
• xorg-x11-server 1.6.5

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 release candidate, we’re still shaking the release out for major bugs. However, at this point in the cycle, we’re almost ready to call 11.2 RC 2 production ready. We do know of one bug worth noting, however: The Net ISO images will call the factory repository. The URL for repositories needs to be changed from /factory/repo/oss to /factory-snapshot/repo/oss manually.

You can find more on adding repositories on the openSUSE wiki.

If any major new bugs do crop up, they will be listed on the openSUSE wiki.

Testing! Testing! Testing!

As you can see, 11.2 RC2 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 Release Candidate 2 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 final release for 11.2 is scheduled to be released on November 12, 2009. See the detailed roadmap on the on the wiki.

We’re at the home stretch. A big thanks to all the contributors who have participated in the 11.2 cycle. Without you, we’d have no openSUSE.

The openSUSE Wiki Team Meeting will take place on Friday, the 30th of October 2009 at 17.00 UTC. See all time zones on the Fixed Time World Clock. The meeting will be held in IRC on the #opensuse-wiki channel on Freenode.

We’ll discuss the new usability concept for the openSUSE wiki. Everyone interested is welcome to join us. The agenda (working draft) is available here.

Not familiar with IRC? A good overview can be found at irchelp.org. This site is not affiliated with openSUSE.

The time has come again for openSUSE Members to vote for new members to the Board.

Stephen Shaw (decriptor) and Bryen Yunashko (suseROCKS) have completed their tenure on the Board, and their seats are up for election.  There is also a new seat available to be occupied by a non-Novell member.  Henne Vogelsang (henne) and Pascal Bleser (yaloki) have another year to complete and will remain, Michael Löffler (michl) as chairman will remain as well.  This means that as of this year’s election the openSUSE Board will be made up of equal numbers of Novell and non-Novell employees, 2 seats+Chairperson and 3 seats respectively.  Candidates for this election will be voted in for a two (2) year term, ensuring that there is continuity within the Board.

The election is broken into three phases similar to last year:

October 26th, 2009 (Phase 0)

• Start of 4 week period for non-members to apply for an openSUSE membership (in order to vote).
• Start of 4 week phase for members to stand for a position in the openSUSE Board.

November 23rd, 2009 (End of Phase 0)

• Notification of intent to run, and application for an openSUSE membership close .

November 24th, 2009 (Phase 1)

• Start of 2 week campaign for the Board Candidates before the ballots open.  Candidates may campaign until the final bell when ballots close, should they wish.

December 8th, 2009 (Phase 2)

• Ballots open

December 22nd, 2009 (End of Phase 1 & 2)

• Ballots close

Should anyone have any questions, you can contact the Election Committee by emailing election-officials@opensuse.org or speaking to one of the members on IRC.  It is best to always email the committee even if you speak to someone on IRC.  Full details of the election can be found on the wiki here.  Prospective candidates are highly encouraged to read this lwn.net article on some of the tasks required of Board members.

The next openSUSE Project meeting will take place Wednesday, October 21st, at 16:00 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_2009-10-21

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. We also take live questions, of course.

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.

We’re well on the way to openSUSE 11.2! Today we’re happy to announce the first release candidate for openSUSE 11.2. This release includes quite a few bugfixes and several updates, including GNOME 2.28 final, Linux 2.6.31.3, and many others.

As the first release candidate for openSUSE 11.2, it should be almost ready for final release. However, there still are a few remaining known issues and the purpose of the release candidate is to discover any major issues before 11.2 final. It may not be suitable for production systems, but is ready for contributors who want to help with testing and development for 11.2.

What’s new in openSUSE 11.2?

The new version includes latest versions of all kind of software and delivers:

• Live version upgrade. No need to stop working while upgrading from openSUSE 11.1 to openSUSE 11.2
• Support for several social networks like Facebook, Twitter and identi.ca
• Running openSUSE from an USB stick (especially for that we ask you for testing)
• For more new stuff check this wiki page

Changes Since openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 8

Release Candidate 1 includes a few new packages, and several of the “most annoying bugs” in milestone 8 have been fixed for this release. New packages include:

• Linux kernel 2.6.31.3
• GNOME 2.28
• PulseAudio 0.9.19
• Evolution 2.28
• Qt 4.5.3
• SeaMonkey 2.0 RC 1

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 release candidate, 11.2 RC1 does contain a few bugs that we know about, but should not stand between courageous contributors and release testing. The most annoying known bugs in 11.2 RC 1 are:

• Bug 545753: GNOME icon is only partially visible during Desktop selection on DVD installer.
• Bug 544079: sonar: gdm panel contains GtkComboBox that is unreadable.
• Bug 546359: Messages “not a regular file or has tail and normal blocks” on console during boot caused by preload bug.
• Bug 546838: “soft” lockup on shutdown in qemu
• Bug 540482: Restart fails to restart computer
• Bug 543468: all repos are lost on update

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

Testing! Testing! Testing!

As you can see, 11.2 RC1 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 Release Candidate 1 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 and final release candidate is scheduled to be released on October 29, 2009. See the detailed roadmap on the on the wiki.

The next openSUSE Project meeting will take place tomorrow (Wednesday October 10th) 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_2009-10-07

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. We also take live questions, of course.

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.

Following its announcement in August, the dedicated openSUSE Boosters team held its inaugural meeting in Germany last week to plan its activities to promote the growth of openSUSE and its community.

The openSUSE Boosters team is a hand-picked group of fifteen Novell employees with skills ranging all across the distribution, and who are dedicated to openSUSE development and working with the community. Since the team members are spread all over Europe and as far away as Mexico, we came together for a few days after the openSUSE Conference to get to know each other better and make plans.

Who They Are

So who are the openSUSE Boosters Team? Starting at the top we have Klaas Freitag, the team leader and one of the architects of the distinctive tools that make openSUSE, such as our feature tracker, FATE, and Hermes, the notification system of the Build Service. Stephan Kulow needs no introduction due to his role as openSUSE release manager. Rumour has it that his photo has been circulated to all the bus drivers in Nuremberg and Fürth so they take extra care not to run him over, such is his importance to the distribution. Henne Vogelsang, known for his no-nonsense attitude to organizing the community, keeps the plates spinning on the larger openSUSE project as project manager.

A trio of expert packagers from the Prague office, Michal Hrušecký, Pavol Rusnak, and Petr Uzel bring their skills to the team. With responsibility for hundreds of packages each and the knowhow to tackle upgrades and maintenance on some of the most complex packages smoothly, their experience will help the team solve problems facing the broad base of openSUSE contributors and make joining in on openSUSE at any level a rewarding experience.

For many openSUSE users, the graphical user interface is paramount. Egbert Eich joins us from the X.org developers’ team and will help us make sure that openSUSE keeps improving in performance and efficiency. As a member of the X.org Board of Directors, he has a wealth of experience in governing free software projects. The KDE desktop is represented by Luboš Luňák and Will Stephenson, while Vincent Untz and Federico Mena-Quintero look out for GNOME. Long term contributors to their projects, they have a close relationship with their users and appreciation of the issues faced daily by Linux users.

Peter Poeml, Marcus Rueckert, Robert Lihm and Thomas Schmidt will be making sure that getting hold of openSUSE is faster and easier than ever. As kingpin of the download system, a key distribution maintainer, graphic designer and developer of the Build Service frontend respectively, their skills cover all the important infrastructure to get openSUSE where it needs to be.

We spent a few days away in the countryside near the Novell office in Nuremberg, Germany, hatching our plans, deciding how to work on them, breaking the ice and enjoying the last of the sunshine. Staying on an organic farm, we had lots of country air and great food to nourish our creativity.

Plan of Action

Having introduced ourselves, what will we be doing? With a sturdy shield to repel SLE product managers, all of our time will be spent on openSUSE. As well as caring for our specialisms, we will also be working in three groups on various projects to improve openSUSE overall.

The first batch of three projects are firstly, to reorganise and improve contributor documentation on the openSUSE wiki, so it’s always easy to find out how to turn your time and skills into a part of openSUSE. Secondly, to bring all openSUSE’s infrastructure – the Build Service, the wikis, Hermes, Bugzilla, openFATE and so on under one umbrella page, so there is a clear portal each area. Thirdly, to develop a new factory.opensuse.org site that allows Factory developers and testers to get a view of the status of the cutting edge of openSUSE and become aware of problems. We’ll be working on these concurrently and blogging about our progress regularly, so expect lots of developments!

Call for Participation

All of these efforts are being developed out in the open, and anyone who wants to is welcome to contribute. We have a opensuse-boosters mailing list as well as the wiki pages listing us and our projects. As well as the first three projects, we have a long list of other technological, social and organizational improvements that we want to make to the project, which happen a lot quicker with the community’s involvement.

~ By Will Stephenson

The openSUSE Project is happy to announce that the last openSUSE 11.2 Milestone  8 (M8) is available for download. Test now and give feedback via our bugzilla since this is the last milestone before the first release candidate.

(more…)