Just a final reminder: The Google Summer of Code applications are due for students tomorrow by 19:00 UTC.  Get those applications in now, folks! (That’s Friday, April 3.) We’ve posted about GSoC previously here and here.

Mentors: If you’re not signed up in the Google system yet, please do so. If you’ve signed up, please be sure to also subscribe to the gsoc-mentors@opensuse.org mailing list. (gsoc-mentors+subscribe@opensuse.org)

Have questions? Join #opensuse-project or #opensuse-gsoc for openSUSE-specific questions. Join #gsoc on Freenode for general questions about Summer of Code. If the question isn’t addressed in the Google FAQ, drop me an email.

Google is highly unlikely to extend the deadline, so get those apps in now or be prepared to wait until GSoC 2010.

If you’re still thinking about submitting an application for the openSUSE Project (or, actually, any project) for Google Summer of Code – the deadline is Friday, April 3rd at 19:00 UTC.

However, please don’t wait until the last minute! Leslie Hawthorn has sent out the following to the GSoC mentor’s list:

Right now, we have about 2x the students registered on the site as we
do number of proposals submitted. No doubt some of these student
registrations are “spam” from folks who won’t be submitting proposals.
However, I am also hearing things like “We have six applications
submitted to the GSoC 2009 site but we’re discussing another 20 or so
in our forums.”

I realize that many organizations are working with students to refine
their proposal ideas on their mailing lists, wikis, etc. However, a
proposal on a wiki, mailing list, etc. does not constitute an actual
application for the program; the proposal must be submitted to the
GSoC 2009 site. While doing review and refinement outside of
http://socghop.appspot.com is a useful exercise, it doesn’t allow us
to accurately gauge the number of student proposals we’re receiving
for GSoC 2009.

Please help us get an accurate sense of how many proposals will be
submitted for GSoC 2009 by asking your students to submit their
proposals to the GSoC 2009 site *now*. They are welcome to link to the
wiki page, mailing list thread, forum topic, etc. where their
proposals are under discussion and refinement as part of the proposal
submission process.[0]

In case folks are wondering, we want to get this data so we can decide
if it’s worthwhile to extend the student application deadline. We’re
pretty much set on “no, we won’t be extending the deadline,” but we
need better data so we can assess if a deadline extension would be a
good thing to do. We’re still anticipating the usual “near to deadline
application submission rush” that we see every year but we’d like to
get a more accurate proposal count sooner rather than later.

Questions? Ask on the opensuse-project mailing list or in #opensuse-project or #opensuse-gsoc on IRC (Freenode). If you have general GSoC questions, you can also ask in #gsoc on Freenode, where many of the Google folks hang out and are extremely responsive.

Quick reminder: The student application period starts today for the Google Summer of Code 2009.

(See the previous post on GSoC and openSUSE.)

If you’d like to work with openSUSE, be sure to sign up as soon as possible. The deadline is April 3rd.

Quick details:

• You must be 18 or older by April 20, 2009 to participate.
• You must be a student, which Google defines as:
  an individual enrolled in or accepted into an accredited institution including (but not necessarily limited to) colleges, universities, masters programs, PhD programs and undergraduate programs. Basically, you need to be enrolled in an accredited educational institution of some kind.
• You do not need to be a computer science student.
• You can be enrolled part-time.
• You can take part if you’re enrolled to start college as of April 20, 2009 – even if your term hasn’t started yet. (So, if you’re enrolled for the fall, you would be eligible.)
• You can participate again if you participated in SoC previously.
• Time: You should plan on spending a lot of time on your project. As Google says, “you should expect your project to be your primary focus this summer. If you have a great internship starting soon or you’re planning a month long backpacking trip, you likely won’t be a good candidate for the program.”

The rest is on the Google FAQ: please do read it through!

The deadline for student applications is April 3rd. There’s also a visual timeline created by Christian Moore.

Read all the FAQ and Google documentation, but still have questions? Ask on the opensuse-project list or drop me a note.

Stephan Binner reported on -announce that there’s a problem with the DNS for Planet SUSE at the moment. If you’re trying to reach Planet SUSE, you can still reach it at planet.opensu.se.

Once again, the openSUSE Project will be participating in Google’s Summer of Code program! openSUSE was one of the 150 mentoring organizations accepted this year, and we’re excited to have the chance to work with students on projects to improve the openSUSE distribution and its tools.

Mentoring

Now it’s time to start signing up Mentors for the openSUSE Project. Mentors review the student applications and score them, work with students during the Google Summer of Code, and evaluate students performance.

We’re looking for committed mentors who will work with students closely and provide guidance not only on the project they’re working on, but also help them integrate with the overall project and teach them how to work within an open source project.

If you’re interested in mentoring with the openSUSE Project, sign up before March 23rd.

You’ll need to create a site-wide user profile and send a request to become a mentor (or send me a note with your user ID).

Students

Working with the Google Summer of Code is a great way to earn cash over the summer while doing something rewarding and interesting, and contributing to the open source community. Students who complete the Summer of Code will earn $4,500 if they complete the program in good standing. (See the Google FAQ for the payment schedule.)

The student deadline for Google Summer of Code is Friday, April 3rd. See the FAQ for the full scoop.

We’re looking for students who can work on existing ideas or bring their own. If you have a great idea that fits within the openSUSE Project, please apply!

If your proposal is accepted, expect to do a great deal of work over the summer. The time commitment is substantial, and we’re aiming for 100% completion of projects this year.

Ideas

There’s still time to submit ideas on the openSUSE wiki. Preferably, these will be from students or mentors who will work on the ideas — but that’s not a requirement. If you have a great idea, feel free to put it up.

If you have questions about participating in the Google Summer of Code in general, check out the #gsoc channel on Freenode. If you have questions specific to the openSUSE Project, email zonker@opensuse.org or ask on the openSUSE Project (opensuse-project@opensuse.org) mailing list.

openSIS is proud to announce that we are beginning construction of a Linux server on an IBM iSeries computer using a SUSE LPAR.  This is a joint venture proof of concept with one of IBM’s premier hardware resellers,  Mainline Information Systems. The goal of this effort is to demonstrate that openSIS and many of the other packages offered  in the openSUSE-Education project will be viable solutions that run natively on the IBM iSeries.

The proof of concept is designed to demonstrate the viability of openSIS and openSUSE on the iSeries platform, which runs an older green screen SIS (TERMs) for approximately half of Florida’s school districts.  If the proof of concept is successful, OS4Ed and Mainline will be positioned to offer Florida districts an alternative SIS that is free and modern and will run natively on the same hardware they use today.  This will allow these school districts to migrate to a modern web-based SIS with no licensing costs, no proprietary software licensing costs and no hardware costs.  Best of all, school IT personnel will not have to be retrained to support the hardware platform as it will remain the same.  This is very important during a time where Pearson School Systems is ending SasiXP support in 2010 and state budget cuts in the billions are being made.

Please stay tuned as we will post follow announcements and updates as we move forward with this exciting proof of concept.

The openSUSE Project is looking for a few good mentors for the Google Summer of Code 2009! The openSUSE Project was a mentoring organization last year, and we’re hoping to participate again in 2009. Organization signup starts next week, and prospective mentors can sign up next week as well.

Signup starts March 9th at 19:00 UTC/12:00 PST and ends March 13th at 19:00 UTC/12:00 PST. Accepted organizations will be announced on March 18th, and there’s a week (March 18 through 23) for organizations and students to meet and discuss.

The student application period begins March 23rd, and ends April 3rd. All of the dates are on the Google SoC FAQ and we’ll be sending out announcements as each of the important dates approach.

Right now, we’re gathering ideas for the Summer of Code on the openSUSE wiki. (Thanks to Lukas Ocilka, Stanislav Visnovsky, and Jiri Srain for starting this!) Feel free to add your own ideas or help revise the existing ideas.

Also, if you’re interested in helping out, please add your name to the openSUSE GSoC ‘09 page.

In addition to mentors (and students…) we’ll need help finding mentors, reviewing GSoC applications, facilitating communication during GSoC, and so forth. (Again, see the wiki!)

If you have questions about openSUSE and GSoC, ask on the opensuse-project list.

Who is this guy named notlocalhorst, FunkyPenguin or cb400f? Well, without people of openSUSE it’s quite hard to tell if you didn’t met them in person. So it’s a great overview to see what the people are doing, how the look and how the tick. Of course this will not replace the joy of meeting some of them in person, like on FOSDEM

Anyway, Carlos the previous maintainer of the series can’t do it anymore because of time reasons. It would be a shame if we let it die … If someone from the community is willing to do that job? It could be even a small team, there is no strict schedule when to release an interview, and everybody will love you

If you want to do it, just head over to the openSUSE-marketing list, there will be a tread called “people of opensuse soon” …

Carlos: thank you for doing it for quite a long time!

In December, HP announced that it would release a new desktop offering along with Novell targeted at education customers. Part of the announcement is a repository of education applications “including math, art and word games, to improve student learning,” which were based on work by the openSUSE Education project.

Novell and HP would like to formally acknowledge the community’s contribution to HP’s education repository and thank the openSUSE Education community for the work they have done to package and make available additional programs for open source education efforts.

The openSUSE Education project provides an add-on CD for openSUSE so that schools will have the benefit of educational packages not shipped by default with openSUSE. The fact that HP has sought to include work from the Education project is testament to the outstanding quality of their work and the demand for open source education solutions.

The additional repository was created for HP to provide a subset of the packages of those offered by the openSUSE Education project. HP and Novell chose to do this to limit any maintenance issues for the subset of packages offered commercially.

We’d like to thank the Education project for its patience with Novell and HP while we establish a way to work on community repositories with commercial partners. As a first-time effort, there have been a few bumps and we’ve found a few areas where we can improve communication with openSUSE projects like the Education Project.

This cooperation is particularly important as we all continue to push Linux and open source on the desktop and into “consumer” solutions. We need to work together as effectively as possible to offer well-polished open source applications that will appeal to end users who are new to Linux.

Going forward, HP and Novell will work to collaborate more closely with the openSUSE Education project and support their efforts to deliver solutions for schools and provide the best experience for educational use.

We’d also like to thank HP for offering open source to its educational customers. This is another small step towards world domination for Linux.

Thanks again to the openSUSE Education Project for their hard work and patience!

Have you ever wanted to join Build Service development, but you had no idea what to implement? Would you like a real opportunity to learn Ruby on Rails? This is a great time to start!

The OBS developers have collected smaller projects on this wiki page. These projects are ideal for anyone new to OBS development. All you need is a local copy of the Web Client, which can easily be deployed on your development system.

Most of the jobs will enable functionality which is already implemented, but not available in the web client. The web client is great for browsing the content and the status of the projects. These improvements will help developers to get a better overview about their builds and sources.

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