On Sunday the first openSUSE conference (osc09) finished in Nuernberg, Germany. Overall it was great success and brought people face to face together. Participants were motivated and enthusiastic and we’d like to just show some comments on twitter/blog:

• “Folks! I’m hoooome! #oSC09 was a blast! More details to come BryenY”

• “Back from the #opensuse conference #osc09, back to work. Had a great time”

• “Back from the _awesome_ openSUSE #osc09 conference. Learnt a lot. Huge kudos to @zonker !”

• “On the train back home from #osc09 was a great event, really nice to meet so many people from the #openSUSE community in person”

• “In the train back to Stuttgart after 4 great days at the openSUSE conference. Great progress on all fronts. #osc09″

• “great #osc09 event. I’ve decided to give #openSUSE the whole disk on my laptop! And i want to contribute, contribute, contribute!”

We had overall around 225 persons from all over the world attending. For those who couldn’t make it to the conference we’ll try to publish all presentations and videos if available. A lot of people from Novell’s Nuernberg and Prague offices showed up -  sometimes only for a few hours – which shows that Nuernberg was the  right location for this event.  Novell VPs and Directors that showed up include Carlos Montero-Luque, Ralf Flaxa, Gerald Pfeifer and Roland Haidl.

The whole four days we had two tracks of talks and two tracks of ad-hoc conference sessions on a variety of topics incl. moblin, appliances, desktop, quality, community, toolchain and system, and legal. Some sessions to point out where:

• team meetings of GNOME and KDE developers, incl. a common meeting

• the governance sessions (see below)

• Keynotes by Lenz Grimmer on “working in a virtual community” and Gianugo Rabellino on “Open Development in the trenches: a decade at the Apache Software Foundation”

• Stefan Werden announcing that he’s taking over the openSUSE retail Box business

Thursday evening we had a great party at the Novell offices and Friday and Saturday night a local cinema was presenting the “Creative Common Film night”.

We were impressed by the many discussions that formed and the ad-hoc conference sessions set up and the many groups gathered in the hall ways and pretty productively covered a certain topic. We’d like also point out a night time session on Friday night (until 3:30am) where more than 10 people triaged through GNOME bugs for openSUSE (incl. checking whether they are still valid) and hacked on GNOME features like Bacon (banshee UI for Moblin) and Zeitgeist (GNOME 3.0).

Governance
We had two sessions on how governance in the project does work today and what needs to be changed. Currently most of the decisions are done by experts in their area, the open question is what kind of process is needed in case area experts cannot make a decision. We have decided to move forward in the following way: A small group will now discuss this further together with the board, create a first proposal for public comments and once we have a good proposal, the openSUSE members will vote on this change.

RPM Summit
We had an RPM summit which Florian Festi (upstream RPM developer emplyoed by Red Hat) joined. Goal was to work on RPM itself to unify RPM usage between openSUSE and Fedora – the end goal is that a valid spec file for openSUSE or SLE is also valid for Fedora/Red Hat and vice versa.

Software Freedom
Saturday we had a track in German as part of the world wide Software Freedom day which was targeted to people new to Linux. We had pretty many interesting and supporting conversation with some participants that came just for this day. Most interesting to AJ was an incident at the rather big local farmer market in the morning where a person said “Today I go to Software Freedom day”. And AJ recognized this person later that day at the conference.

Journalists & Media

Ulrike Beringer made it happen that 11 journalists attended the conference and had several interviews at the conference with Joe Brockmeier, Michael Meeks and Andreas Jaeger.

Comment from our PR agency was: “The feedback of the journalists was very positive, as you can see in the report some of them even published several articles at once. Hence from our PR perspective the event was a big success!” RadioTux interviewed various participants for podcasts of more than 90 minutes.

Thanks to Ulrike for setting this up!

Photos
If you like to see some photos, check either of these two galleries:

• gallery.opensuse.org

• flickr osc09 group

Twitter
The flickr photos are also shown on the osc09 twitterwall that was created by gnokii.  #osc09 was the hashmark used for twittering about the conference.

Short but sweet post here: Getting a few numbers on community growth for the openSUSE Day introduction at LinuxTag, I noticed that the openSUSE Forums have now passed 30,000 users!

That’s pretty amazing considering that we started the merged forums on June 10, 2008. In about one year’s time, we’ve seen more than 30,000 people sign up for the forums.

Congrats to everyone who works on the forums, and everyone in the community who has participated!

The next openSUSE Project meeting will take place Wednesday May 6th at 17:00 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_2009-05-06

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.

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.

    Issue #68 of openSUSE Weekly News is now out!

In this week’s issue:

• Call for Participations: openSUSE Summit 2009
• openSUSE at LinuxFest Northwest
• People of openSUSE: Jean-Daniel Dodin
• Google Summer of Code Status Update
• Bryen Yunashko: Accessible Appreciation: The Sequel

For a list of available translations see this page:
http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Weekly_News/68/Translations

The next openSUSE Project meeting will be Wednesday, March 11th, at 17:00 UTC on Freenode. Again that’s:

2009-03-11 17:00 UTC

See all the timezones here: http://is.gd/lZgv.

This is going to be a fairly substantial meeting, so if you can attend please do so! We’ll be discussing the latest developments in and around openSUSE. Please add your topics to the meeting wiki page at:

http://en.opensuse.org/Meetings/Project_Meeting_2009-03-11

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.

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 http://www.irchelp.org/. This site is not affiliated with openSUSE. For more information on Freenode, see http://freenode.net/.

This year Juergen and me (tom) went to FOSDEM to do the video recordings of the talks in the openSUSE developer room. Last year we had some problems with the sound quality, so this year we brought some more equipment, amongst others 2 head mics for the speakers, one mic for the audience, an 8 channel mixer and speakers for the audience.

I think the result is quite good, both the sound experience in the room and on the recordings. I am sorry for the delay of the recordings, but amongst other distractions my system harddisk decided to die during the video renderings. The recently discovered tool of choice for doing the post-processing is kdenlive which in version 0.7.2 is the best video tool I’ve used on linux.

Talks Day 1:

• Welcome – openSUSE
• Who can you trust?
• openSUSE community
• openSUSE Build Service overview
• Collaboration in the openSUSE Build Service
• Putting Cross Development Support into OBS
• Create your own Linux Distribution
• Creating customized openSUSE versions with SUSE Studio
• Legal aspects of distribution development
• Apport – Automatic Application Crash Reporting for openSUSE

Talks Day 2:

• openSUSE education
• Zypper – openSUSE’s command line software manager
• Wine – the free Windows Emulator
• MirrorBrain – Free CDN for Free Software Projects
• openSUSE on Netbooks
• YaST2 – Future Roadmap
• openFATE – How to get your most wanted features into openSUSE
• Architecture of Collaboration
• Bits from your GNOME team (with build service fun inside!)
• Putting the ‘open’ in openSUSE : Community-driven KDE development

The slides are linked from the FOSDEM09 wiki page, and the recordings are available as .ogg and flash video .

Our admins and developers – in Nuernberg, Provo and from home offices – worked hard today to get all openSUSE services up and running again.  Thanks a lot to all of them!

Nearly all services are be up and running again.  The only exceptions are the services features and ideas, these will be restarted latest by Monday.

Just a quick note: We have a power outage in the part of the city of Nürnberg where the Novell office and the main server room is.  This means that many of our servers are right down, especially the download redirector, the mailing lists, the openSUSE build service and users.opensuse.org.

I will post a message once the power has been restored and all machines are running again.  Current estimate (11am Nuernberg time) is that it will take another 4 hours (until 3pm Nuernberg time which is 13:00 UTC) at least to restore power.

Note: the power companies do not know yet exactly where the problem is.

This server and the wiki are located in another data center and are therefore available.

Updates:

13:15 CEST: New rumor: Current estimate for power restoring is six more hours, they need to dig up the street.

16:45 CEST: Bad news: It will take longer until power gets restored.  The local power company just stated “22:00 to 23:00″.  We will try to get then the first machines up but might not get everything running during the night.  Btw. currently it seems that it’s only our office complex that is without power, the rest of the area has power again.

17:15 CEST: I just chatted with our admins, and they currently hope to have everything up Saturday around 13:00 CEST (11:00 UTC) if – and only if – there are no major problems like hardware failures.

18:05 CEST: The admins will start early tomorrow morning – there’s no sense waiting for the power company this night.  The estimate stays at 13:00 CEST (11:00 UTC).  We’ve never experienced such a long outage before, this is exceptionally bad.

19:02 CEST: Beineri has uploaded some photos from the construction site (thanks!).

20:04 CEST: Marko has uploaded some photos as well (thanks!).  Some notes: I’ve heard (no official confirmation) that our office building has two power lines and currently both are getting repaired, they started with the first one and now dig out the second one as well.  Our building seems to be the last one in the area to get power back since it’s the only one with a 20kV line.

1:30 CEST: Power is back in the office – later than estimated.

9:20 CEST: Our admins have brought the basic net infrastructure up and will work on the rest now.

9:45 CEST: The first servers coming up, download.opensuse.org is available again.

10:20 CEST: lists.opensuse.org is up again, I’ve send an announcement out to the mailing lists.  I just don’t know when it will go through since some other systems are not running and I guess the mail queue is rather long.

10:33 CEST: After I approved my announcement, it went through directly and was sent out – this means, the infrastructure is indeed up and runing

13:00 CEST: Most systems should be up, the only problems right now are login on users.opensuse.org and the build service.

15:00 CEST: Info from our admins:

It has turned out that the electric feeder cable outside the building was blown which had to be digged out and then repaired, so the first estimation  of the energy provider was a little bit optimistic. Connection was re-established Friday night at about 1AM (localtime) and reconstruction started this morning at 7AM and most important services were back at about 9AM.

15:08 CEST: We’re still working on users.o.o and the build service, everything else should be ok.

18:50 CEST: users.opensuse.org and build.opensuse.org are back online.  We should now be good enough for the weekend.  Currently still down are ideas.o.o, features.o.o and tracker.opensuse.org (for our torrents).  We will have these restored on monday.

20:18 CEST: tracker.opensuse.org (for torrents) is running again.

The openSUSE survey results are out now. The survey we made in July/August time frame attracted over 12,000 participants. Here is a short summary on changes compared to the last one we did approximately 1 1/2 year ago with the openSUSE 10.2 release. The summary is in the same order as the questions are.

meanwhile over 90% of our users have broadband access and 3/4 of them have a flat rate. Percentage of people having slow or no internet connection is below 5%. Anyway we should find a way getting our distro physically to emerging countries as we fear they didn’t even take part at the survey due to internet issues

KDE4 is already adopted by kind of 40% out of all KDE users, this is quite impressive to us as we’re mainly talking about KDE 4.0 which isn’t that mature as KDE 4.1 is today (yes, we know KDE 4.1 still needs some work to be perfect )

The things above are for us the most eye catching results. In general the results are pretty similar to the last survey. For comparison you find the old survey on the UX page. As you see those results – at least some times – open room for interpretation in one or the other direction. For feedback please use the opensuse-project mailing list.

We want to thank all people participated at the survey and some of them will receive soon an openSUSE t-shirt or cap.

Don’t miss to participate at this year’s openSUSE survey and tell us how you use openSUSE, what’s good or not so good about it or what you’d like to see in future releases. In seeing how you’re using your computer we can improve openSUSE to match better your needs. The results will be published shortly after the end of the survey here – the page of our usability experts where already some other surveys and information with regards of usability are displayed.

The survey will be online till Aug 31st and we raffle under all participants some openSUSE t-shirts and caps. So, don’t miss the survey and have a lot of fun!