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.

Klaas wrote an article about the openSUSE Build Service that got published in the german edition of Linux Magazin. Everyone able to read german go here.

It covers general introduction into openSUSE’s Build Service, tutorials how to build a simple package, touches upon OSC and web client and gives an overview over the underlying technology.

The survey is designed to pinpoint areas of user need in order to focus development efforts and accelerate the global adoption of Linux desktops and clients. It will be conducted till November 30, 2007. Survey results will be made publicly available shortly after it concludes. The survey is available here.

Have a lot of fun!

As the first reviews start to roll in, TuxMachines have just released one of the first comprehensive reviews of openSUSE 10.3, concluding that it is a mature, stable, free Linux distribution:

“Underneath its new green artwork, version 10.3’s improvements over previous versions include cutting down the time it takes to reach the graphical login screen; speeding up and streamlining its package management utility; and making it easier for users to install software using a new “one-click install” process.”

openSUSE 10.3 has been declared Gold and will now be uploaded to the mirrors and available for download on October 4th – the boxed version can be pre-ordered for delivery shortly after. tuxmachines.org has a late report on openSUSE 10.3 RC 1 with lots of new screenshots. Francis has created statistics about the openSUSE 10.3 bug reporters – half of the bug reports were done by non-Novell community members. Novell is now putting more resources into the Linux Driver Project which offers to write drivers for companies, for free.

Stephan Kulow has announced Live-CD builds (GNOME, KDE ISOs) based on the openSUSE 10.3 Beta3plus packages. tuxmachines.org published their report on and screenshots of openSUSE 10.3 Beta 3. The openSUSE-Community site got a facelift and offers 1-click-install definitions for 10.3 packages. KDE 4.0 Beta 2 has been released and as usual unsupported packages are available as well as a new “KDE Four Live” CD which was created with Kiwi.

tuxmachines.org provides again a report about the latest openSUSE Beta releases – more screenshot galleries are linked on the “In the Press” wiki page. Rune has announced an own translation statistics page where you can watch the localization teams struggling for the top positions. A detailed list of new AppArmor features and changes in openSUSE 10.3 has been posted to the opensuse-packaging mailing list. The openSUSE-Education project has been featured in this ZDNet.com blog. The Brazilian Portuguese IRC channel #suse-br has been merged into the general Portuguese IRC channel #opensuse-pt.

Some interesting data on the dektop usage of Linux. What’s striking is that popularity of openSUSE almost doubled form roughly 10% in 2006 to close to 20% in 2007 survey.

Again time to sum up news that didn’t make it to an own story here: At LinuxWorld San Francisco it was announced that SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, which is based on the openSUSE distribution, will be preloaded on systems of Dell and Lenovo. DistroWatch.com has interviewed Stephan Kulow about his new role as openSUSE project manager. Tomer wrote in to inform us about the chameleon.org.il portal he founded which offers forums, articles, chat and you can even test-drive openSUSE via NX. openSUSE artwork is now developed in a new SVN repository. Last but not least, a court ruled against SCO, stating that Novell is the owner of the UNIX copyrights.

Susan from tuxmachines.org has been one of the most constant testers of openSUSE releases for quite some time and for openSUSE 10.3 Alpha 7 she wrote again a detailed report with her observations and put up a screenshot gallery showing the new artwork. The wiki internationalization effort continues, with the Finnish Wiki joining the existing 16 international wikis. Daniel informed us that he recently launched suseforum.se, a web forum with the intention of being a gathering point for the openSUSE community in Sweden.