Please don’t forget the biggest Linux event in Germany, just a few weeks away! For the second time it will be in Berlin, from 28-31.05.2008. The location is slightly different, still at Messehalle Funkturm, but this time it’s hall 7 (south instead of east like last year).

Again we try to have an interesting program for you, let me be little bit more verbose …

- booth: meet the openSUSE community, talk with developers and see the latest openSUSE 11.0 beta/RC running. We will have decent hardware and big screens to show openSUSE in all it’s glory. We are happy that we have again a community project at our booth, this time it’s Linux-Club.de, a big German Linux forum. If you are interested in the Novell Enterprise products, we will have also a counter with SLE. You can also meet Zonker for the first time in Germany!

- openSUSE day: one day, packed with talks, this time on Saturday! Look at the schedule for more information, we think that there is something for everybody in it.

There are of course a lot of other interesting open-source projects at the LinuxTag, so if you are in Germany/Berlin, don’t miss it!

Some links:
Program schedule: http://www.linuxtag.org/2008/en/conf/events/vp-samstag.html
openSUSE page: http://en.opensuse.org/LinuxTag

Today we are officially launching a new website: lizards.opensuse.org!

This site offers blog hosting for openSUSE members. The blogs should be focused on the openSUSE project, e.g. on the distribution, packages, build service, events, etc. Please contact the site administrators if you want to have your blog created.

The new site is an additional offering and should not replace any existing blogging platforms. We recognize that many people in the openSUSE community blog on various blogging platforms and encourage everybody to get their blog aggregated on Planet SUSE where lizards.opensuse.org will be aggregated as well.

In order to optimize the YaST partitioner module for openSUSE users the user experience team decided to conduct a small survey to figure out how you deal with hard disk configuration. The survey contains some basic questions and its results will directly influence the redesign for the partitioner module.

You can access the survey here.

The survey will be online until 28th May 2008 and the results will be published on openSUSE.org as soon as possible.

Answering the questions will take less than five minutes.

Thank you for your participation and have a lot of fun!

The openSUSE team is proud to announce the second Beta release of openSUSE 11.0! New changes include countless bug fixes, as well as the import of the new openSUSE 11.0 artwork for login, splash screens and more. The live installation should work, but there are several known quirks, so be sure to check the most annoying bugs list before proceeding.

See Screenshots/openSUSE_11.0_Beta2 for more screenshots.

Information and Download

Remember that this is a beta. It may not be safe to run for production systems, and should be used by users interested in testing the next release of openSUSE for bugs.

Most Annoying Bugs

Live CD:

• Automatic Configuration after boot into installed system behaves weird (Bug #385563, Bug #385558)
• Installation leaves traces of Live system (Bug #385829)

General:

• GNOME Main Menu is slow to respond (Bug #375701) Workaround: Click on volume control in the panel, Configure local sound server then check “Enable network access to local sound devices”
• GNOME is extremly slow (Bug #383336) (logging in takes >1 minute etc) Workaround: Add your hostname to /etc/hosts (See bug)

See the Bugs:Most_Annoying_Bugs_11.0_dev page on the wiki for an up-to-date list.

Call for Testing

If you want to help testing our standard test-cases, just take a look at openSUSE.org/Testing, and in particular the Testing:Features_11.0 sub-page which includes a definitive list of the features added into openSUSE 11.0. You can also coordinate with others and subscribe to the opensuse-testing@opensuse.org (subscribe) mailing list to help with our organized testing.

Media and Download

openSUSE 11.0 Beta 2 for i386, x86-64 and PPC comes as different media sets, all of which can be downloaded from http://software.opensuse.org/developer. Deltas from Beta 1 are also provided. Note that you will need the latest deltarpm from Factory, or for openSUSE 10.3 you can use the home:coolo repository to grab it.

Comments, Feedback and Helping

openSUSE 11.0 Beta 2 is a great time to start testing-out openSUSE 11.0 before it is officially released. You can directly help and contribute to the openSUSE distribution by filing bug reports and giving feedback to the developers.

• Reporting bugs: Please report all bugs you find on in our Bugzilla as explained on bugs.openSUSE.org.
• Discussion and feedback is very welcome as well; the most appropriate place is the opensuse-factory@opensuse.org (subscribe) mailing list. Or in the #opensuse-factory IRC channel.

For other queries and ways to communicate with the openSUSE community take a look at the Communicate wiki page.

The next planned release is openSUSE 11.0 Beta 3 on May 13.

As SUSE Linux 10.0 has reached its end of life in November last year, the Packman team will be removing all SUSE Linux 10.0 packages from its repository end of this week. If you want to keep them aside, make sure to download a copy before.

And as for good news, the Packman team has started to build its packages for openSUSE 11.0 (against Beta 1) since a few days. You can enable it by going to YaST -> Software Management. From there select Repositories -> Manage Repositories in the menu. Then select Add -> Community Repositories, and from here select the “Packman Repository”.

The codecs one-click-install for 11.0 should be updated and available next week.

Google have announced the openSUSE projects and students taking part in this year’s Google Summer of Code. The projects include:

• LTSP GUI Management for openSUSE
  by Jan Weber, mentored by Jigish Gohil

• Interactive Crash Analysis
  by Nikolay Derkach, mentored by Jan Blunck

• Face Based Authentication
  by Rohan Anil, mentored by Alex Lau Chun Yin

• Grub4ext4: enable ext4 file system as boot partition
  by PengTao, mentored by Coly Li

• New approach for (RPM) packages creation
  By Andrei Oprisan, mentored by Stanislav Brabec

• Libzypp Download Failover
  by Gerard Farràs i Ballabriga, mentored by Peter Poeml

• GNOME Build service client for OpenSUSE
  by Mario Đanić, mentored by Rodrigo Moya

• Integration of OpenID Consumer to Build Service
  by Hameedullah Khan, mentored by Cornelius Schumacher

• Migration asistent reloaded
  by Peter Libič, mentored by Pavol Rusnak

• Build Service <-> Eclipse Integration
  by longhong, mentored by Michal Marek

Only 10 applications from the 67 could be chosen. Special thanks to everybody that has been involved so far: the volunteering mentors, those driving the application process, and of course — all of the students. Congratulations to all the selected students!

The openSUSE Project is going Bug Smashing on April 25, and we want you to join us! We’re looking for openSUSE users and contributors who have some time to help triage YaST bugs and clean up Bugzilla.

Join us on #openSUSE-Factory from 09:00 to 18:00 CEST. We’ll be going through the Bugzilla and reviewing YaST bugs to see which bugs are still valid, gathering information about existing bugs, and generally paring down the bug count to help developers focus on the most crucial problems.

Anyone can participate — you don’t have to be a developer or power user to join in, just point your browser at the openSUSE Bugzilla, log in (be sure to create an account if you don’t have one already) and start searching for bugs against YaST. Help verify bugs that are in Bugzilla, and help close bugs that have already been fixed.

Our goal for Friday is to get the YaST bug count in Bugzilla down and clear the field for YaST developers to concentrate on real bugs that need to be smashed for the openSUSE 11.0 release. You can see the current open bugs here.

Why do we do Bug Smashing days? We want to do a couple of things. First, we want to help to train new contributors who haven’t done bug reporting and triage before. By holding a Bug Smashing Day we can be ready to answer questions and provide support for new bug smashers in real time.

Second, we want to focus our attention on a specific application or feature. In this case, we want to focus on YaST and help clean up the bug database so the YaST team can concentrate on the real problems.

What do you need to participate? Just a Bugzilla account, a system with a relevant release of openSUSE, and be signed in to #openSUSE-Factory.

Can’t participate in the Bug Smashing days? No problem. We encourage Bugzilla cleanup all year round! See the page on submitting bug reports, and join us on #opensuse-factory on Freenode.

Have questions about Bug Smashing? See the Bug Reporting FAQ. If your question still isn’t answered, send a note to Christoph Thiel or Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier.

The openSUSE team is proud to announce the first Beta release of openSUSE 11.0! There are many exciting enhancements and features in the new release. Among these is the incredibly fast package management (libzypp), KDE 3.5.9 and 4.0.3, GNOME 2.22.1, a beautiful new installer, live CDs and much more.

What’s New

The openSUSE 11.0 beta 1 includes quite a few changes and new features that users will find interesting, including:

KDE 4 and KDE 3.5: The openSUSE 11.0 beta 1 includes KDE 4.0.3, which includes a number of new features, fixes, and optimizations. See the KDE4 page for more info on the KDE4 branch. To help test, see the wiki for info on reporting bugs in KDE. Not quite ready to move to KDE4? No worries, the beta includes an installation option for KDE 3.5 in addition to KDE4.

GNOME 2.22: Beta 1 includes GNOME 2.22.1 with plenty of new features and packages. Interested in helping with testing for GNOME in openSUSE 11.0? See the wiki for all the info you need.

YaST ported to Qt4: openSUSE’s administration and installation tool, YaST, has been ported to Qt4, providing beautiful styling for the installer, and an improved look for areas such as package management.

Screenshots!

Here’s a quick look at openSUSE 11.0 beta 1:

For some more screenshots head over to Screenshots/openSUSE_11.0_Beta1 on the wiki.

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You can help spread the word for openSUSE 11.0 before it’s released! The openSUSE project now has countdown banners that display the number of days before the next openSUSE release.

You can display the banner on your site, and the rendering is done via the openSUSE server. You can find the code and the right language for your site on http://en.opensuse.org/Countdown. You can link the banner to http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_11.0 which has information about the 11.0 release and information on testing prior to the final 11.0 release.

The banners were inspired by a post by Pavol Rusnak, and we received fantastic code and graphics contributions from several members of the openSUSE community, including Pascal Bleser, Jakub ‘jimmac’ Steiner, Pavol Rusnak, Marek Stopka, Kevin Dupuy, and Billy Juliani. Thanks to everyone who contributed!

So, grab a banner and show your openSUSE pride. With less than 63 days until the 11.0 release date, there’s no time to lose!

The openSUSE team is proud to announce another major release of the openSUSE Build Service (OBS). This release brings a new level to OBS scalability by adding the ability for OBS instances to interact.

The 0.9 release will help grow a world-wide network of build service instances. OBS instances can automatically interact with each other and reuse projects residing on other OBS instances. New installations of OBS are automatically configured to work with the main openSUSE Build Service, which makes it easy to set up new instances and minimize network traffic while keeping data in sync automatically.

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