Signed with security@suse.de key:
pub   2048R/3D25D3D9 1999-03-06
uid                  SuSE 

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The following hosts will be affected:

• static.opensuse.org
• api.opensuse.org
• build.opensuse.org
• connect.opensuse.org
• features.opensuse.org
• hermes.opensuse.org
• login.opensuse.org
• notify.opensuse.org
• svn.opensuse.org
• ci.opensuse.org

We do not expect any service interruptions, but some users run with strict certificate checks.

As Benjaman Brunner announced yesterday, openSUSE 11.3 has reached end of life.  As a quick refresher, openSUSE releases new versions every 8 months, and each version has a life cycle of 18 months.  As 11.3 was released in July of 2010, the time has come to embrace our newer versions, including the successful release of 12.1 in November of 2011.

As Brunner’s announcement indicates, we worked hard to maintain 11.3 while developing its subsequent two releases (11.4 and 12.1.) And of course, we’re already gearing up for 12.2, slated for release in July.  And the first milestone release is already just around the corner.  You’ll be able to try out Milestone 1 on February 9th.

The roadmap for openSUSE 12.2 is as follows:

As always, testers and contributors are welcome throughout the release development process.  Join the Factory Mailing List and have a lot of fun!

We are a community that provides free and easy access to Free and Open Source Software. We innovate, integrate, polish, document, distribute, maintain and support one of the world’s best Linux distributions. We are working together in an open, transparent and friendly manner as part of the worldwide Free and Open Source community. And in this community there is no room for copyright abuses. That however does not mean that the end justifies the means. We at openSUSE are opposed to the proposals because we depend on our users to not only be able to freely and openly contribute their code but also their opinion and other information. Why that is threatened by these proposals, you can read over at the EFF, or watch this video from Fight for the Future

We hope the decision to blackout openSUSE.org will educate people around the world about this issue that threatens the basics of the internet, will make some US based contributors, friends and users contact their representatives in congress and inspire others to join the strike.

We wish all developers, maintainers, users and friends a Happy New Year.

Let us make 2012 even better…

Announcement by Jigish Gohil

openSUSE Education team is proud to present another edition of openSUSE-Edu Li-f-e (Linux for Education) based on openSUSE 12.1. Li-f-e comes loaded with everything that students, parents, teachers and system admins of educational institutions may need.

Softwares for mathematics, chemistry, astronomy etc, servers like KIWI-LTSP, Fedena school ERP, Moodle course management etc., full multimedia, graphics, office suite, many popular programming languages including AMP stack, java, C, C++, python, ruby, latest stable Gnome and KDE desktop environments and lot more is packed in this release. More about softwares included here.

To know more about openSUSE Education project, file bugs, request enhancements, participate, or to get in touch with us visit Education Portal.

Create live USB stick or DVD with this image. About 15GB disk space and 1GB RAM is required for installation, more is better. Please note that we release 32bit image only, for users with RAM 4G or more install and use kernel-pae package.

Hosted at sourceforge.net

Direct Download | md5sum

Hosted at opensuse-education.org

Direct Download | new metalink | old metalink | md5sum | torrent

Use download manager or Metalink client such as aria2c for most efficient way to download.

You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
Happy holidays…

The new board members are Pascal Bleser, Will Stephenson and Andrew Wafaa.

We would like to congratulate all Board Members and wish them all the best. We would also like to thank all candidates for their time to run for openSUSE board. We’re really proud to have so many good candidates.

The votes are as follows:

Pascal Bleser (172 votes) – 79%

Will Stephenson (104 votes) – 48%

Andrew Wafaa (90 votes) – 41%

Pavol Rusnak (81 votes) – 37%

Manu Gupta (60 votes) – 28%

Richard Brown (43 votes) – 20%

Marcus Moeller (42 votes) – 19%

Chuck Payne (16 votes) – 7%

A total of 218 members participated in the poll. Voters had the option to vote for 3 candidates.

Thanks Bryen Yunashko, Rupert Horstkotter and Pavol Rusnak for the great time served in the Board.

The official results can be found at http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Board_election

Thank all voters for taking the time to vote. Thanks to the openSUSE Election Officials.

• Forums, wikis, and blogs have been moved from iChain to Novell Access Manager
• Wikis have been upgraded to MediaWiki 1.17
• Blogs have been upgraded to the latest version of WordPress
• Blog and wiki servers have been patched to the latest kernel, Apache, and PHP

Now for the details…

Novell Access Manager

Until a couple of weeks ago, the openSUSE blogs, wikis, and forums were running on a product called iChain.  iChain is an appliance that acts as an accelerating (caching) proxy that can perform SSO, authorization, and identity injection for applications.  While iChain does its job very well, it was discontinued a number of years ago, and it has become increasingly difficult to keep it in service.  Some of the major problems are that the hardware it is running on is aging, and it will not run on newer hardware.  It is also having trouble with the extensions and field formatting of newer certificates, and it also has a lot of trouble with clients attempting to use newer TLS protocols.  Those of you who tried logging in to openSUSE.org with an iOS5 device more than two weeks ago have probably noticed this.

Novell Access Manager is the successor to iChain. While it is slightly more buggy, it has a lot of additional features, and is an actively developed and supported product. Recent builds have also been much more stable and issue-free. It works on a different principle than iChain in that it is based on a federation model. This makes SSO across domains and organizations much easier. For example, openSUSE.org is now single sign-on with www.novell.com and www.suse.com. We can also do SAML 2 federation with other sites, if that ever becomes necessary.

While we are working on moving the rest of the Novell related sites to Access Manager, we are running in what we call “migration mode”. In this setup, iChain continues to handle the authentication for itself and Novell Access Manager. This allows us to retain single sign-on between the two systems as we migrate. As some of you have noticed, a side effect of this is that the openSUSE sites now log in via a Novell-branded login page. When the rest of the sites have been moved off of iChain, we will be able to change back to an openSUSE branded login. This will probably take some time, but we will get there.

Since the openSUSE blogs, wikis, and forums were running on a single iChain server that is out of warranty and irreplaceable, they were among the first sites to be moved to Access Manager. While this provides some benefits, it has also led to a couple of problems that come with being the guinea pig.  The first is that we are having a few problems with the IPv6 tunnel that was set up for these sites, and the IDP domain (login.novell.com) does not have an IPv6 address yet.  I have reached out to the networking team to get this resolved, hopefully this week.  The second is that the default Access Manager timeout is very short compared to what the openSUSE contributors are used to.  I changed the timeout to 4 hours last night, so this should no longer be an issue.  I know the change has been frustrating for a few of you, but I hope that you can agree that it’s better to work out the kinks now, rather than waiting for the old system to break down.

Wiki Upgrade

While MediaWiki 1.17 comes with a lot of improvements, many of you have also noticed that it came with a lot of heartburns.  The biggest one was the UTF8 corruption that happened on most of the wikis.  This seems to have come from a combination of an outdated collation on the “older” wikis and the way that the update script handled the schema changes.  This highlighted a problem that I was not aware of before, which is that there are some major collation differences between the “new” (i.e. English and German) wikis, and the “older” wikis that were not recently rebuilt.  After many hours, I found a way to fix the UTF8 corruption, and  I also worked with our DBA to get the collation of the other wikis to match the new wikis as best as we could.  This should minimize the chance of future upgrade issues.

We also had a couple of smaller issues, mostly an Apache rewrite rule interfering with the new resource loader that came with 1.17.  Those issues were also resolved last week.  Despite these problems, the new MW software is working very well.  I have noticed a major improvement in performance, mostly due to the new resource loader optimizing the javascript and stylesheet load times.

Blog Upgrade

The WordPress upgrades are usually much easier than the MediaWiki upgrades, and this was no exception.  Except for a minor glitch in the theme for logged in users, there are no known issues with the new software.

System Patches

Similarly to the WordPress upgrades, this was a pretty uneventful change.  This update fixes a lot of vulnerabilities, including the “Apache killer” DoS attack discovered over the summer.

The openSUSE board election just started! Please go to:
https://connect.opensuse.org/pg/polls/read/digitaltomm/15228/opensuse-board-election-2011 and cast your vote for this election. All openSUSE members[1] are eligible to vote.

The board consists of 6 members and one chairperson. As the election period of Bryen Yunashko, Pavol Rusnak and Rupert Horstkotter ends, this election will appoint 3 new board members.

The election period ends at December the 16th.
All candidates have put their agenda on the wiki[2], linked as “Platform” after the candidates’ name.

If you have any questions, please contact the election officials (election-officials@opensuse.org).

Greetings

[1] http://en.opensuse.org/Members
[2] http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Board_election_2011

On completion of a task students get points and can earn prizes like t-shirts, cash and certificates of completion. The ten participants with the highest points earned by the end of the competition receive a grand prize trip to Google headquarters!

Doing your bit

For a successful Code In participation we all must do our bit. You can do two things:

0. Suggest tasks on our wiki page
If you can think of a fun and challenging tasks for a pre-university student just go to the opensuse Code In wiki page and press the “Add task” button in the appropriate category. It’s as easy as checkers :-) If we find a someone willing to mentor the task it will be part of Code In.

1. Become a mentor on google melange and help students complete their tasks.
If you want to help mentoring the students for the tasks they choose you have to sign up as mentor on google melange and tell me (Manu Gupta) about it so I can add you to our organization in that tool. Once you are a mentor you can pick/add the tasks you want to mentor.

Both bits are easy to do but have great impact on our own project and FOSS in general. Great benefit for low cost. Please think hard about joining our efforts!

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!