Busy time at the booth

openSUSE brought lots of fun to FOSDEM in Brussels, Belgium. We’re all exhausted now from selling beer, t-shirts, hats and giving demonstrations of openSUSE with GNOME Shell, KDE, Plasma Active, openSUSE-on-ARM (running XFCE) and countless other things. Yet we did want to tell you about FOSDEM before we go catch up on sleep!

Beer and Goodies

Like last year, the crew from the SUSE office in Nuremberg loaded up a bus with people, beer and anything/one else needed for FOSDEM. The bus was left during Friday night at the ULB where FOSDEM would happen. Despite the risk of somebody breaking in and stealing our awesome goodies, it was deemed more important to join the other FOSDEM go-ers in their attack on the tasty-beverage supply of Brussels! Besides, a night outside in the > -10C degrees from last weekend ensured the beer would be cold and ready to drink.

Cool hats to keep your head warm

The next morning, those smart enough not to drink too much (or (wo)manly enough to ignore the hangover and show up anyway) prepared the booth for the onslaught of visitors eager to learn the latest about openSUSE and buy the coolest beer at FOSDEM. Besides this great beverage we also had the usual assortment of stickers, openSUSE DVDs, t-shirts (in any size as long as your size is Large) and of course our demo systems showing off openSUSE. This year we had our big touch screens again, one with GNOME Shell, the other with the latest from KDE, as well as an assortment of smaller devices. Several of them ran ARM with either consoles or XFCE and there was a “WeTab” with Plasma Active on it as well.

Interestingly, our beer got “forked” by the Firefox crowd who bought a bunch of them (we threw in some t-shirts) and put a firefox sticker over the Old Toad badge. Yes, “Free as in Beer” and all that. Suffice to say the beer was not only popular (as some evil tongues claimed) because the K building had no other drinks available – everyone who tried it agreed it was actually a high quality lager. If you want to know more about the beer, see here. Sorry, we don’t ship it, but if you look us up at LinuxTag in May (Berlin) we will have some!

Two ARM devices with openSUSE

FOSDEM

If you have never been to FOSDEM there is little we can do to describe this event. Nevertheless I will attempt to paint you a picture as everyone deserves to know how awesome it is! For starters, as you might know, our beloved Pascal “Yaloki” Bleser is part of the FOSDEM organisation. There is no doubt that the event can do anything but rock! Of course, while Pascal might be as strong as many men, he’s just a part in the mighty wheels that keep FOSDEM running. That is to say: it is big. VERY big. The two days the event lasts (Saturday and Sunday) are packed with over 400 sessions, summing up to over 200 hours of content (yes, in two days), varying from BOF sessions to keynotes and presentations and the attendees litteraly number in the many thousands.

This year, almost all booths were moved to the new K building, which also hosted a number of so-called “devrooms” (project or topic specific rooms). As the old location was getting crowded (crowded as in standing nose to nose breaks) the change was great, both from a hygenic and comfort point of view. Especially since the weather made going outside far less appealing as it had been in previous years – one has to feel sorry for the nicotine addicted at FOSDEM.

The new K building booth area

FOSDEM has a number of buildings spread over the ULB university campus, each of them filled with a number of booths as well as many rooms where talks are held. There are some HUGE rooms but most of them have capacities of 80-150 people. These rooms are organized by a FOSS project or by topic: there were the cross-desktop and the cross-distro rooms but also spaces for LibreOffice, Mozilla, embedded operating systems, JBoss, Mono, Java, Legal issues, virtualization, cloud and more. In other words: you will feel the need for a decent cloning machine once you get an idea of how much interesting stuff goes on in those two days. But (un?)fortunately, that’s not all. The “hallway track”, as in, the area around the booths, is absolutely STUFFED with interesting people. Core developers from projects ranging from Python to Arch Linux and LibreOffice to the kernel can be found wandering around. As a matter of fact, many FOSDEM veterans are known to not visit more than one or two talks – and those often presented by themselves. There are just too many people to talk to. And getting in contact with people at FOSDEM is both easy and hard. Hard, as you will find it difficult to find a person you are looking for in the huge crowd. And easy because most people are incredibly easy to aproach and very much open for a chat.

Motivational poster...

Results

So what did we take away from FOSDEM? First of all – about 6-700 euro from the sales of the t-shirts and beer. This money has been donated to the FOSDEM organisation in the hopes they will use it for something good (like giving themselves a well deserved evening of relaxation, food and drinks).

Second of all, openSUSE is clearly popular and getting more so. Our efforts are recognized and appreciated by our users and that’s a great thing! Many people where very happy to donate a bit for a t-shirt, a hat, some stickers, DVDs and more and we surely convinced quite a few to give openSUSE 12.1 a test drive. There was of course the usual slew of users thanking us for our efforts – as well as those coming with the issues they faced. Interestingly enough, stability was not often a big problem but there are still things “out there” which are not packaged. Hard to believe with the almost 170.000 packages on OBS! But yes, we don’t have the perfect Linux distribution yet, so keep up the good work!
There was quite a number of “geeko talks”, as usual. Of course a number of enthusiastic LibreOffice developers consider themselves Green but there were of course talks by openSUSE contributors in the cross-distribution, X-org, and cross-desktop rooms as well as in many other places. Highlights include talks on openQA, OBS, openSUSE-on-ARM, Snapper, a round table discussion around ambassadors with other distribution projects, and much more.

We had many hugs and catch-up moments as we don’t see each other all that often – it was truly great to meet so many friends again. With visitors from around Europe (and quite a few from other continents too) it was great seeing old and making new friends.

There were interesting discussions with fellow FOSS projects, e.g. with the Ubuntu LoCo team from Belgium that had a stand right next to us.

Last but not least, Richard and Tom deserve big hugs for their organizing work. And obviously, so does everyone else who was there. It was awesome because we were all there!

View more FOSDEM pictures here and here and all around the web…

Here’s a summary of the answers with some things pointed out. For the full results, download this  spreadsheet.

1) Based on this years conference experience are you expecting to participate in the next openSUSE conference?

They(we) will come back :D (96% yes)

2) Want to be updated about the next openSUSE conference? Give your mail address! We won’t spam you…

Most of people don’t want to be spamed :D (a third left their email address)

3) What other openSUSE confs did you attend?

The participation is increasing every year. Almost doubled from 2010 to 2011.

4) Are you a…

We missed “not related to openSUSE or SUSE” question. Most are users of openSUSE and more than half of the participants were contributors to openSUSE.

5) What’s most important for you at the openSUSE Conference?

Primary priority – interaction – talking with others and getting to know the openSUSE community

Second – education – attending workshops, hearing about new technology and learning

In the end it was all about meet others!

6) What did you like at this years conference? What should we do again?

Almost 1/3 skipped the question!

Location/Venue positive thoughts

BOF positive thoughts

Organization positive thoughts

7) What should we do different next year? Where can we improve?

Schedule improvement – highlights, better description, separated tracks from SUSE, Low level/beginners talk needed, Labs improve the quality, Better preparation/presentation by the talker, Talks from SUSE Management

Acoustic – main hall noisy

Name tags / IRC Nicks on badges

Invite local universities

better toilets

better snacks/soda options

8) How would you rate the overall offering of the sessions?

Most of Answer options considered Good

9) How did you like the length of the conference (4 days)?

Just right – 76,2 % (122 answers)

10) Please tell us about your experience with the openSUSE community with saying whether you dis/agree with the following statements:

Most of people agree or fully agree with “It was a great opportunity to meet new people” and “I felt very welcome”. However the comment “The community is a clique” has many agreeing with it! Maybe the option/question wasn’t very clear.

11) Do you think it was beneficial to openSUSE to have the SUSE Labs conference at the same time/place?

Yes – 89% (118 answers)

12) Did you get an opportunity to meet some of the SUSE Labs hackers?

Yes – 72% (118 answers)

13) Would you have liked a more formal opportunity to meet SUSE Labs?

No – 54,5%

Yes – 45,5%

Seemed averaged (112 answers)

14) If you’re part of SUSE Labs: Do you think it was beneficial for the SUSE Labs to have the conference together with the openSUSE Conference?

Yes – 61,3% (31 answers)

Most general comment – SUSE Labs people didn’t organize themselves properly

15) Is there anything else you would like to tell us?

2 calls about SUSE Linux Enterprise presentations

Better advertise mentioned twice

The rest: thanks/great conference/hope for 2012oSC

Thanks to Izabel Valverde for analyzing the results. The full results with all answers are available as spreadsheet.

If you’re interested let your intention be known on the distributions@lists.fosdem.org mailinglist, with the following information and we will factor in your contribution.

• Your name
• A short bio, to be put on the website along with your name
• optionally a picture of yourself
• The title of your session
• A (short) abstract describing the session in further detail.
• The desired approximate duration for the session.

Sessions can be talks, round tables, BoFs, or any number of other things that could generally benefit from an audience of distributions developers.

The deadline for submissions is December 22nd!

Use this opportunity to bounce ideas, projects and plans off your peers in the Linux distributor community.

Party time!

We’re almost there. In two days openSUSE once again releases a new, improved version of its distribution to the world. Reason to celebrate! And celebrate we will. Currently, about 11 parties have been registered but we know many more are being organized and we call out to you to add your party to the wiki page!

Parties

Currently there are parties scheduled and registered in:

• Bucharest, Romenia
• Provo, Utah, USA
• Göttingen, Germany
• Second Life, Global
• Sao Paulo, Brazil
• Rouen and Toulouse, France
• Guatemala city, Guatemala
• Alphen aan de Rijn, Netherlands
• Beramo, Italy
• Prague, Czech Republic
• No less than three parties in Greece!

Give a presentation!

Find the date, time and locations on this page and again, if you have not added your party yet – you know who you are – do so quickly!

Organize your own

It is definitely not too late to organize your own release party – just find a nice cafe or an office and invite people! You can invite them below, add you party to the wiki, ask some friends & family and tweet & facebook it on the openSUSE pages! It’ll be fun, we guarantee.

Giving a presentation

Note that we have presentations ready to go for you! You can find more information and downloads on this page.

Getting cool stuff™

It’s always nice to have some things to give away at a release party. The openSUSE marketing team has plenty of cool stuff like stickers, flyers, DVD’s and t-shirts we can send to you! You could do a little lottery or give away some things to long-time local openSUSE contributors and the DVD’s and flyers you can give to people to hand out to their friends and family. If you’re looking for some more tips on how to organize a party, check the party how-to!

Get Geeko Goodies!

If you want to organize a release party and get stuff, add your party to the wiki page and order the materials via this website. Note clearly in the description that you want stuff for a release party so we prioritize your request!!!

Count on at least 2 weeks shipping and handling time in Europe and the USA, 3-4 weeks in the rest of the world.

Have a lot of fun!

We’ve said it before and we’ll keep saying it: the most important thing is to have a lot of fun!

We are doing awesome stuff, and we should celebrate that sometimes!

A little over two weeks left for openSUSE 12.1 to be released on November, 16th 2011. And there is no better way to enjoy the new release than with your fellow openSUSE peers. So, attend or organize a Launch Party! These events around the openSUSE release can be anything – from a party in a pub to a series of presentations at an office. But there is a common theme: cool people sharing some fun and talks around the latest openSUSE release!

Read more on how to find out if there is a release party in your neighborhood or how to organize one!

Any party around?

You can of course wait until the 16th and look around for fireworks and party-ing people but it might be better to prepare a bit… So check out the Launch party wiki page.

No?

No party close enough? Poor you… But there is a way out! How would you feel in organizing one?

It’s not hard, everyone can do it! You can see at our Launch Party HOWTO page that there are many ways to have a party – you don’t have to have fireworks, a nice picknick is just as cool, if not more! Use you imagination and do something creative!

Goodies and support

Launch Parties are probably the coolest way to introduce people to FOSS and to introduce FOSS people to openSUSE. You don’t have to be an ambassador or something to organize one and you can ask for promo material for your party!

Launch Party area at Second Life

Yes, we plan to get some cool stuff™ to you if you organize a party. We are working hard to have the openSUSE 12.1 DVD’s ready as soon as possible and will send them, together with some flyers, posters, stickers and other goodies to the registered release parties. We unfortunately don’t have the DVD’s ready before the release date and shipping and handling also takes time so you’d have to organize a party 2-4 weeks after the release to get the stuff in time. See the Launch party wiki page for more information.

More help

If you want to organize a party but you have some questions please contact the Marketing Team on the Marketing Mailing list or the IRC channel. You should also try and involve the openSUSE ambassadors in your area. We’d all be happy to help you have a smashing party!

So, what have we done right this year? It was basically wiring internet ourselves to the location and setting up the wifi controllers sponsored by Aeroaccess.

We were lucky that SUSE’s internet provider M-Net had a fibre channel cable in the cellar of the building and negotiated a special short-term package with 100 MBit/s for the conference.

We set up a router in the main hall – running openSUSE 11.4 for NAT that also ran a DHCP server for IPv4 and SLAAC for IPv6. From there we ran cables to the seminar rooms and installed in each of the four seminar rooms a gigabit switch. In each seminar room and the main hall we had two wireless access points that were connected to the switch. We controlled the wireless access points from the main router and configured them such that each had the same wireless login and password and in such a way that roaming between them worked effectively. So, you could walk from one room to the other and your wireless client, e.g. smartphone or laptop, was switching from one access point to the other but kept the same IP address.

The hardest job was for our “cabling team”. Max Maher and Max Maier  had to find ways to connect the seminar rooms with the main hall and weren’t allowed to drill holes. So, they threw a couple of cables out of some windows and wired them to the next destination. They had to use several 30 and 50m cables for that.

Some data on our internet usage: Peak throughput was 67 MBit/s and we had 13.2 % IPv6 and 86.8 % IPv4 data.

I talked with Bernd Hillmeister from Aeroaccess at the conference and he told me that the company’s expertise is consulting, planning, implementation, management  and support of Enterprise Wireless Networks. So our installation was a small example of what they do. Aeroaccess’ focus is Mobile Infrastructure only with all related challenges like high availability demands, bandwidth requirements and related RF issues indoor as well as outdoor.

Aeroaccess sponsored osc11 with sending us access points  with power-over-ethernet adaptors for them. They were so kind to pre-configure the access points so that we could plug them in and they worked directly.

Last Friday Dirk Müller send an email to openSUSE-Factory about the status of the openSUSE ARM port. SUSE employees Adrian, Alexander, Dirk and Reinhard had spend their Hackweek revitalizing the initial work by Jan-Simon and Martin by getting openSUSE Factory on ARM to build and work. The current build status on OBS shows that almost 2500 packages are working successfully and the team invites anyone interested to come and help increase that number!

Hackweek and ARM

The openSUSE ARM efforts were announced by Andrew Wafaa after the openSUSE Conference in Nuremberg. The openSUSE ARM mailing list as well as the #openSUSE-arm IRC channel are buzzing with activity. The Hackweek bootstrapped openSUSE on ARM.

Hackweek is a SUSE tradition where there is one week per year during which any engineer can work on whatever Free Software project he or she wishes. This week, called Hackweek is in it’s 7th incarnation now and over the years has resulted in many exciting contributions to new or existing Free Software projects. This year, a team of four SUSE employees worked with the openSUSE community to get openSUSE ARM in the air.

Status

Currently, openSUSE Factory for ARM is build for armv5tel (soft floating point with thumbs) and for armv7l (hard floating point with aapcs-linux ABI). These are widely used architectures and seem to be becoming a cross-distribution standard as well. Right now, almost 2500 packages are building successfully and tests on real hardware have shown these to work. As low-level dependencies are being fixed many more packages are expected to come in over the next couple of days.

There are some issues under investigation, including a miscompile problem with GCC 4.6 and armv5tel which results in RPM database corruption but a workaround (building with GCC 4.4) is in place. There are also some threading issues because the builds are being done in usermode QEMU wich does not have great thread emulation. System QEMU however is quite slow so the team is looking at possibilities to acquire real hardware. Both suggestions and hardware donations are very welcome!

Help out!

Help is more than welcome. The team is especially looking for people to help out finding and fixing build errors, with merge requests containing fixes preferably submitted directly to openSUSE Factory.

Building packages locally to test is not difficult thanks to QEMU but the team recommends to use the openSUSE:Tools:Unstable repository for QEMU as some recent fixes are required for proper building.

The current status, as well as information on how to get involved and what needs doing can be found on the openSUSE Wiki.

If you want to get involved or are just curious about the status, check out openSUSE’s new ARMs!

The new openSUSE 12.1 Release is approaching very soon and all you Geekos should not miss the opportunity of becoming a double GPM!

Party time starts this weekend and lasts until November 2011 in all Geeko-towns and Geeko-homes. Gather all your fellow Geekos to the best local pizzeria and let the party begin!

HowTo

So, the first GPM: Geeko Party Maker. As you might have seen, you’ve all been invited to organize a pizzabeta party. The beta has been delayed a bit but party can still be had – the release will be this weekend. Of course, instead, you can organize a launch party for 12.1 once it is out – which is currently planned the third week of November.

Parties are simple: you only need people, the rest will follow. Geeko’s are fun at heart although many of them require some beer and food to really loosen up. If you have your event at a pizza place, it doesn’t get easier! Of course you can do it at home, in an office, a pub, or wherever else you want. Most important thing: Just Do it! Don’t worry that only 5 people show up. 5 Geeko’s already make a huge party, you’d be surprised! So, how to do it? Just two steps:

• Get out there and find a nice Geeko pizza place!
• Let your Geeko friends know about it and make sure they tell their friends about it.

That way you can gather all your local community for this nice Pizza Party. Need more help organizing it? Check out the wiki articles!

• how to do a betapizza party
• read the launch party HOWTO
• add yourself to the Launch party list
• use one of the pre-made 12.1 presentations if you want to have a talk

Your own Pizza

You can do it! You can cook it!

Wanna jump right in? Surprise your friends with a cool and fun idea: cook for (or with!) them the best Geeko Pizza ever and become a double GPM: not only a Geeko Party Maker but also a Geeko Pizza Maker!

This is your challenge – you will love every bit of it (especially the eating part).

Recipe

Get your bread maker ready and let’s get started!

You will need the following ingredients for the dough:

• water 220 ml
• flour – ½ kg
• yeast – 8 gr
• a little oil, salt and butter

Instead of making your own dough you can get a pre-made pizza base from a supermarket…

And now what…?

1. You put all the above ingredients in your bread maker (feel free to check the instructions of your bread maker too). As soon as the dough is ready, take it out and put it on a floured surface. Roll it out in a very thin layer.
2. You put butter on a tray and put the dough on top.

   (Alternatively: If you don’t have a rolling pin you can just push the dough with a spoon so that it covers the whole tray)

3. You bake it in the oven at 180 degrees for 15 minutes. The surface of the dough should *not* get dark and it should be firm to the touch.
4. You take it out of the oven (remember to keep the oven on) and let the fun begin!
5. You then need to evenly spread tomato sauce on top of the dough, add sliced or shredded cheese, ham, mushrooms and any other of your favorite ingredients.
6. Final touch: you slice green pepper into pieces and arrange them in the form of a geeko on the top of the pizza.

   Alternative way for the geeko design: Use avocado sauce which you can easily make by beating up an avocado (after you have peeled it off) using a fork or your multi-mixer. You should add a little salt and oil to make it more tasty and if you want you can even add some smashed tomato or tomato juice – just a little bit, because we don’t want to lose the nice green color now, do we?

7. You now need to put the tray with the pizza back into the oven for at least another 10 minutes (make sure nothing burns!)
8. Take the pizza out of the oven and feed your geeko friends
9. Yeah you did it! And you cooked it! Congratulations, you are now a double GPM: Geeko Pizza/Party Maker!

And now you can enjoy your 12.1 Release Pizza Party with your self-made Geeko pizza!

Don’t forget to send us photos and comments :)

Some 150+ developers will have free reign to work on new applications or make improvements to other software projects. Hackweek also permits developers to push away from the grind of deadlines and “must fix” bug fixing (unless it’s a critical customer situation) which can be at times stressful and tedious.

So, how does this relate to the larger openSUSE community? First, some ideas come directly from openFATE, the openSUSE tracker for wish-list items and ways to help guide development of the distro: You can see the list of proposed Hackweek projects here, which will surely grow in the next few days.

Second, nothing blocks people outside the SUSE staff from participating. Most importanly, it shows that SUSE is an innovative distribution whose contributions make open source better for everyone.

And third, it follows openSUSE’s motto: Have a lot of fun ! Hackweek has it’s own motto: “No Motto, do what you want, but do it!”

We asked Jürgen Weigert and Pavol Rusnak, developers from SUSE, to explain how they participate

Q: How does someone from the openSUSE community participate Can they also have their own project?

Jürgen: Yes, they can work together with others (check openFATE for a list) or do their own project.

Pavol: But for doing their own project they don’t have to wait for Hackweek, right? :-)

Q: Can you give some examples of projects which were started from Hackweek ?

Pavol: SAT-solver used in zypper by Michael Schroeder, Fifth Leg font by Jakub Steiner, SUSE Paste by Michal Hrušecký and cnetworkmanager by Martin Vidner.

Jürgen: Polka by Cornelius Schumacher, YaSTroid by Stephen Shaw.

Q: What will you work on during this coming Hackweek ?

Jürgen: Make EyeFI sdcard work with Linux – see Fate#312811

Pavol: Rewrite spec-cleaner into Ruby – see Fate#312823

Q: What other projects are planned for this upcoming Hackweek ?

Pavol: Getting Enlightenment 17 into Factory, various openQA additions, Continuous YaST testing in Jenkins and much much more!

Jürgen: Also hackers need catering and thus we will have food provided in the common area – and the common meal is also a great chance to discuss Hackweek projects face to face. The camera team will go around and record videos and upload those to blip.tv and YouTube. Also, there’s a rumor about some nice surprise. :-)

Q: For developers what is the most satisfying part of Hackweek ?

Jürgen: Switching topics to something completely different and extend my comfort zone by looking at new areas. This year it’s wireless, an area I never touched before as developer.

Pavol: Yeah, I think working on something unknown, unexplored is always exciting and challenging

Q: How does the openSUSE and the larger open source community benefit ?

Jürgen: Quite often it’s scratching my own itches – and if something is successful, it might become a successful open source project. I’ve seen some people interested in projects like Bretzn or ARM support for openSUSE that will benefit openSUSE directly. Some people which are surprised by the late announcement of this Hackweek have said that they will just have a look into the upcoming beta of openSUSE 12.1 – getting familiar with new technologies like systemd, report bugs and improve the distribution.

Pavol: Lots of the projects that are started during Hackweek are directly integrated into the following openSUSE release. Also if they are usable by others they are adopted by other distributions as well or merged directly into upstream which is cool!

Q: Are there any awards or competitions during Hackweek ?

Pavol: Previous years we had a small group of judges that went through the finished Hackweek projects in openFATE and awarded three developers with nice gadgets. I expect it will be similar this year, but I am not sure.

Jürgen: Yes – for those that register their projects in FATE. Details will be announced later.

Q: Is there anything else the larger openSUSE community should know about ?

Jürgen: The infrastructure teams will also participate in Hackweek and thus not make major changes – and also might not review openSUSE:Factory submissions directly. Please let them know if you run into serious issues.

Pavol: If you see a project in openFATE which you like, tell us so in the comments or vote for the feature. Also if you have some nice idea, feel free to put it in openFATE, maybe some undecided developer will find it interesting and implement it.

Q: Thanks for the interview.

Both: Thank you and have a lot of fun!

So, stay tuned for the results of Hackweek where everyone has a lot of fun!

article submitted by Peter Linnell

Talks

Lots of talks and discussions ranging from development and low-level kernel tools to social and marketing sessions have taken place over the last four days, all focused on world domination of course. There was a large number of sessions around packaging, both focusing on teaching as well as improving current packaging quality and more steam lined maintenance of our repositories. Robert Schwelkert’s talk on “Where do we improve?” proposed a lot of changes like improved translations, documentation, separating the bugzilla and getting rid of Novell’s iChain.
The openSUSE Project Meeting discussed a number of interesting ideas and developments including the current status of the openSUSE Foundation and upcoming elections. The board said it was working on the foundation but it is a slow process. We want to have a long-term solution with buy-in from all parties. As Attachmate has just joined this process it has taken time to get them up to speed but there is progress now.

Keynotes were particularly very interesting. Vojtech and Jos kicked of the conference on Sunday with a keynote about making decisions in a community-friendly way, urging everyone to make the best of the time together. On Monday Greg KH discussed openSUSE deployments and Tumbleweed. Michael Miller keynoted about the relationship between SUSE and openSUSE, stressing that he wants openSUSE to find its own way and become a much stronger project. Linux for education was again a prominent topic. The hugely popular Desktop For Education and Server For Education projects from our Austrian community were particularly interesting. They have captured almost the entire Austrian school system with their openSUSE based solution! Commercialization of openSUSE came up, specifically for enterprise cloud services, virtualization, data centers and other services focused a lot on the business aspect of our distribution. Clearly openSUSE can be deployed anywhere and everywhere!

The openSUSE Planet has plenty of blogs reporting on the talks. Take for example the great series by the Greek Ambassadors who wrote an article each day, the latest being conference day 4. Kai-Uwe Behrmann covered his own talk on color calibrating and profiling monitors,

The conference area before the start

Have a lot of …

The spirit at the conference is great. Meeting old friends and making new ones is always fun and the talks provide plenty of subjects for conversation. Talking to people you would notice the huge diversity of interests and expertise. From low-level kernel and toolchain hackery to cross-culture communication and mentoring new contributors, the conference covers all topics.

The RWX theme has been put in practice with a large number of sessions covering relevant topics in an interactive way. From the Devel Projects to marketing, all kinds of subjects have been discussed and work has been done (or started) to resolve issues or improve the way we work. There’s lots of new and interesting stuff going on and the hallway track is well visited as well…

Fun!

Besides the talks, Sunday night featured some ‘community party’ where the participants organized their own barbeque and fun. Monday the conference team took care of the fun part: there were hamburgers with salad, cheese and pasta, a band and a bull riding contest. The cowboy hats and other trinkets complete the party. The awesome location surely adds to the fun, it is a very inspiring place and has been well decorated thanks to the combined effort of local and international volunteers last week. Aside from the cool decoration we have a RepRap, awesome lounge area and a very German beergarden outside. Last but not least, the biological microbrewery which provided beer for the previous openSUSE conference has brewn another excellent batch of beer which is consumed at maximum velocity.

Thanks!

We’re very happy with the conference here. Visitors from Greece to Brazil and India to Finland have shown up and many have given a helping hand in making this conference possible. So we’d like to thank everyone who has been involved – from preparing the sponsorship, carrying chairs and decorating the rooms to cleaning up beer bottles and barbequeing the sausages! It wouldn’t have been half the conference it is without the participation of all you!
We’d also like to thank our sponsors. Obviously, Platinum Sponsor SUSE has contributed both funds and resources, but the help from Gold sponsor NetWays is also greatly appreciated. Furthermore, without Bronze sponsors AeroAccess, B1 Systems or Qt/Nokia we would not have had network, great parties or travel sponsorship!