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.

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!

Hey ho, we have a few new mailing lists available.

To discuss openSUSE usage on the different virtualization products like Qemu/KVM, XEN or VirtualBox subscribe to opensuse-virtual. If you are one of our many users from the Czech Republic (nazdar lidi!) you should subscribe to opensuse-cz and discuss openSUSE with other users there. A little while ago we created opensuse-features that broadcasts every change related to openSUSE in the feature database, opensuse-nl for users from the Netherlands and some new translation lists: German, Spanish, Russian, Slovakian and Hungarian. For more information on how to use these lists or what other mailing lists we have head over to the Mailinglist page on our wiki.

In order to provide a better service to the existing openSUSE Community and to our new users, we’re pleased to announce that suseforums.net, suselinuxsupport.de and the openSUSE support forums at forums.novell.com (the three largest English speaking dedicated SUSE forums) are joining forces to merge into the new official openSUSE Forums at forums.opensuse.org.

Behind the scenes, a project team consisting of Novell employees, openSUSE Community members, and existing forums’ staff have been working on this project since the beginning of 2008. The new infrastructure will be hosted by Novell to ensure the highest possible quality of service.
Current plans are to migrate the existing active members of suseforums.net and suselinuxsupport.de into the official openSUSE Forums, simultaneously implementing Single Sign On for the whole openSUSE Community. We hope to make the transition as seamless as possible, and will go live Spring 2008. More information will be posted as available.

All in all, a big gain for the whole openSUSE Community!

I’d like to give a warm welcome to Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier who joins the openSUSE project as “openSUSE community manager”. You can reach him directly at zonker@opensuse.org. He has his own openSUSE blog at http://zonker.opensuse.org, I advise to go over and see what he has to say himself!

He is a long time Linux user and does a lot of writing about Linux and open source for several publications and conributed to books as well. Prior to his new role as community manager for openSUSE he served Linux Magazine as Editor-in-Chief. His personal webpage is http://www.dissociatedpress.net.

The openSUSE community manager will act as community advocate and ombudsman thus relaying openSUSE community and users needs back to Novell. Therefore you will find Zonker on many community events. He will also drive marketing programs around openSUSE to make the project more successful and attract more developers and users.

Zonker will be travelling the next weeks and you can meet him and other openSUSE members at these two venues:

• at SCALE from 8th to 10th February
• at FOSDEM from 23th to 24th February

For those that wonder what happened with the “openSUSE Chief evangelist” position that was opened in October: this is exactly the position, we just found it more suitable to change the title of Joe.

I have talked a lot with Zonker through the last weeks and look forward to working with him - and look forward meeting him soon in person here in Nürnberg!

Andreas

Last week we had a small problem at lists.opensuse.org which unsubscribed a couple of mailing list members by accident. We’re really sorry about this and hope that everybody subscribes again manually.

Henne our mailadmin wrote the following email and tried to send it out to everybody that might be affected:

there was a lists.opensuse.org maintenance process hanging (undetected) for a very long time. This process continued a couple of minutes ago.
Unfortunately because of the long delay some calculations went wrong (bounce times). This had the effect that the list software may have you
unsubscribed.

Please check your subscriptions. To do so you can simply subscribe again by sending a mail to <listname>+subscribe@opensuse.org. In case your are still subscribed the system will tell you about it. In case you are not anymore subscription is exactly what you want

Sorry for the inconvenience. The underlying problem has been fixed.

I noticed on the mailing lists that some people did not get Henne’s text above and therefore decided to publish it here again. So, if you miss traffic in your inbox for some mailing lists, please follow the instructions above.

Thanks - and sorry again for this,

Andreas

We proudly announce shop.openSUSE.org. This is the place to find official openSUSE gear: T-shirts, mugs, caps, bags and more are available.

As many times requested by the community the shop will fulfill the need to offer openSUSE branded gear to a large audience at a reasonable price. The shop itself is driven by an external shop provider who offers us a broad variety of different products to sell. We are bound to his selection. If you wanna see more or other products out there or just want to give us feedback please contact us at shop@opensuse.org

Have a lot of fun!

We’d like to take this opportunity to wish all openSUSE users and contributors a very merry Christmas and an enjoyable holiday! Thank you all for the great work you’ve done this year and the achievements accomplished.

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As you know for sure ;), the openSUSE Build Service (OBS) shall connect the complete different worlds of End-Users and developers/packager. This does of course already worked to that degree that everybody can download software, which got packaged in the OBS. Also the packager do already got feedback via download numbers, tags or rating within the packager web interface.

Andreas Bauer added lately the next functionality in this context. All search results in the End User interface do offer now a link to the packager web interface from now on. Every user, with a standard openSUSE account can now do the ratings and taging there directly. This will help the to improve the search results for other users later on.

Also new is the bugreport link, this means end users can create bugreports for projects or packages hosted in OBS. Such a bugreport will get assigned to the person, who is defined as bugowner. Atm only a few projects have this defined, so this is a call to all project or package owners to add yourself. This can be done easily in the web gui, simply add yourself again to the project, but switch to the “bugowner” role.

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281 contributors from the openSUSE community participated in a survey last month. The survey was part of a research project on the topic of firm-sponsored open source communities, hosted by the University of Oslo. Topics in the survey include:

• level of contribution
• reasons for participating
• attitude towards Novell

The results are now ready and can be found here:

• Commented version
• Simple presentation

The commented version includes some analysis of the results and statistical measures of correlation between questions in the survey. The simple version only shows the distribution of frequencies in percent, but also includes the answers to the open text fields in the survey.