english version below

Wir möchten alle in und um Nürnberg dazu einladen openSUSE auf der “Langen Nacht der Wissenschaft” zu besuchen. Diese findet am Samstag 24. Otkober von 18 bis 1 Uhr statt und ist auf 130 Einrichtungen in Nürnberg, Fürth und Erlangen verteilt (unter anderem nehmen alle 5 Hochschulen, das Max-Planck-Institut, die beiden Fraunhofer-Institute daran teil). Die Veranstaltung setzt sich zum Ziel das Interesse insbesondere von jungen Menschen zu wecken und den Zugang zu Forschungsgebieten zu eröffnen.

Das openSUSE Projekt präsentiert sich in der Georg-Simon-Ohm Hochschule, Keßlerplatz 12 (Raum A 332) und wir werden dort openSUSE und das Projekt vorstellen. Wir zeigen natürlich openSUSE 11.2, Lars ist mit openSUSE Education vor Ort und Andreas wird Spiele unter Linux zeigen. Natürlich haben wir für Entwickler – oder alle die Entwickler werden wollen – auch was dabei: den openSUSE Build Server und Kollegen, die viel zum Thema Entwickeln im Linux Umfeld erzählen können.

Für 10 €, ermäßigt 7€ bekommt man Eintritt zu allen Veranstaltungen und das Ticket gilt sowohl für den öffentlichen Nahverkehr und natürlich für die extra eingerichteten Buslinien auf den verschiedenen Touren zwischen den Veranstaltungsorten.

english version below

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Following its announcement in August, the dedicated openSUSE Boosters team held its inaugural meeting in Germany last week to plan its activities to promote the growth of openSUSE and its community.

The openSUSE Boosters team is a hand-picked group of fifteen Novell employees with skills ranging all across the distribution, and who are dedicated to openSUSE development and working with the community. Since the team members are spread all over Europe and as far away as Mexico, we came together for a few days after the openSUSE Conference to get to know each other better and make plans.

Who They Are

So who are the openSUSE Boosters Team? Starting at the top we have Klaas Freitag, the team leader and one of the architects of the distinctive tools that make openSUSE, such as our feature tracker, FATE, and Hermes, the notification system of the Build Service. Stephan Kulow needs no introduction due to his role as openSUSE release manager. Rumour has it that his photo has been circulated to all the bus drivers in Nuremberg and Fürth so they take extra care not to run him over, such is his importance to the distribution. Henne Vogelsang, known for his no-nonsense attitude to organizing the community, keeps the plates spinning on the larger openSUSE project as project manager.

A trio of expert packagers from the Prague office, Michal Hrušecký, Pavol Rusnak, and Petr Uzel bring their skills to the team. With responsibility for hundreds of packages each and the knowhow to tackle upgrades and maintenance on some of the most complex packages smoothly, their experience will help the team solve problems facing the broad base of openSUSE contributors and make joining in on openSUSE at any level a rewarding experience.

For many openSUSE users, the graphical user interface is paramount. Egbert Eich joins us from the X.org developers’ team and will help us make sure that openSUSE keeps improving in performance and efficiency. As a member of the X.org Board of Directors, he has a wealth of experience in governing free software projects. The KDE desktop is represented by Luboš Luňák and Will Stephenson, while Vincent Untz and Federico Mena-Quintero look out for GNOME. Long term contributors to their projects, they have a close relationship with their users and appreciation of the issues faced daily by Linux users.

Peter Poeml, Marcus Rueckert, Robert Lihm and Thomas Schmidt will be making sure that getting hold of openSUSE is faster and easier than ever. As kingpin of the download system, a key distribution maintainer, graphic designer and developer of the Build Service frontend respectively, their skills cover all the important infrastructure to get openSUSE where it needs to be.

We spent a few days away in the countryside near the Novell office in Nuremberg, Germany, hatching our plans, deciding how to work on them, breaking the ice and enjoying the last of the sunshine. Staying on an organic farm, we had lots of country air and great food to nourish our creativity.

Plan of Action

Having introduced ourselves, what will we be doing? With a sturdy shield to repel SLE product managers, all of our time will be spent on openSUSE. As well as caring for our specialisms, we will also be working in three groups on various projects to improve openSUSE overall.

The first batch of three projects are firstly, to reorganise and improve contributor documentation on the openSUSE wiki, so it’s always easy to find out how to turn your time and skills into a part of openSUSE. Secondly, to bring all openSUSE’s infrastructure – the Build Service, the wikis, Hermes, Bugzilla, openFATE and so on under one umbrella page, so there is a clear portal each area. Thirdly, to develop a new factory.opensuse.org site that allows Factory developers and testers to get a view of the status of the cutting edge of openSUSE and become aware of problems. We’ll be working on these concurrently and blogging about our progress regularly, so expect lots of developments!

Call for Participation

All of these efforts are being developed out in the open, and anyone who wants to is welcome to contribute. We have a opensuse-boosters mailing list as well as the wiki pages listing us and our projects. As well as the first three projects, we have a long list of other technological, social and organizational improvements that we want to make to the project, which happen a lot quicker with the community’s involvement.

~ By Will Stephenson

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.

From Sep 12 to Sep 13 we will have a power outage in the Nuernberg office.

Downtime is planned from 2009-09-11 20:00 CEST (18:00 UTC) until 2009-09-14 10:00 CEST (08:00 UTC). So it might become a long weekend especially for developers – but we plan to avoid restrictions for endusers during this downtime.

So far, the following services are affected by this downtime:

• Build Service
• Mailing lists
• …and more

Please have a look at the “downtime” wiki page to see the full list of affected hosts.

Not affected:

• news.opensuse.org
• <lang>.opensuse.org (all opensuse wikis)
• forums.opensuse.org
• irc.freenode.net/opensuse* channels
• bugzilla.novell.com
• download.opensuse.org (replacement host in place)
• static.opensuse.org (replacement host in place)
• software.opensuse.org (search will not work as the buildservice is down)

We plan no replacement for the other services as the downtime is not too large.

We will try to reduce/disable building on build.opensuse.org on Thursday, so all mirrors should have “up-to date” packages over the weekend.

With kind regards,
Lars (on behalf of the openSUSE-Admins)

From Sep 12 to Sep 13 we will have a power outage in the Nuernberg office.

Downtime is planned from 2009-09-11 20:00 CEST (18:00 UTC) until 2009-09-14 10:00 CEST (08:00 UTC). So it might become a long weekend especially for developers – but we plan to avoid restrictions for endusers during this downtime.

So far, the following services are affected by this downtime:

• Build Service
• Mailing lists
• …and more

Please have a look at the “downtime” wiki page to see the full list of affected hosts.

Not affected:

• <lang>.opensuse.org (all opensuse wikis)
• forums.opensuse.org
• irc.freenode.net/opensuse* channels
• bugzilla.novell.com

The discussion to host at least download.opensuse.org and static.opensuse.org somewhere else is work in progress. We plan no replacement for the other services as the downtime is not too large.

We will try to reduce/disable building on build.opensuse.org on Thursday, so all mirrors should have “up-to date” packages over the weekend.

With kind regards,
Lars (on behalf of the openSUSE-Admins)

After a long time, the next openSUSE-Education meeting will take place at the official #opensuse-edu IRC channel on freenode (irc://irc.freenode.net/opensuse-edu) on Tuesday

Wednesday 2009-08-26 14:30 (UTC/GMT)
(click on the time to convert UTC/GMT to your time zone)

This meeting is meant to discuss the latest developments in and around openSUSE-Education. Please add your topics to the meeting wiki page at:

http://en.opensuse.org/Education/Meetings/Education_Meeting_2009-08-26

Also, if you cannot attend the meeting, but have questions you want to see discussed, please add them to the meeting wiki page as well.

For general info about our IRC meetings read:

• http://en.opensuse.org/Meetings/About
• http://en.opensuse.org/Education/Meetings

For a general technical introduction to IRC (Internet Relay Chat) see http://www.irchelp.org/ ;(not affiliated with openSUSE) or enter “IRC help” into your preferred search engine.

The network we use is freenode – for more information on this, including how to find a server, visit http://freenode.net/ ;(not affiliated with openSUSE either).

Have a lot of fun …

Lars (on behalf of the openSUSE-Education Team)

From openFATE’s launch in January ‘09 the addition of a new feature was limited to openSUSE members. Due and thanks to several requests out of the openSUSE community we changed this and are happy to announce today that openFATE now allows feature requests for non-members as well. This will lower the bar again to participate directly in the project and in the development of openSUSE, openSUSE Build Service and openFATE itself.
We’re looking forward to receive more qualified feature requests to make our openSUSE distribution and the project itself fit your needs better from day to day. To use openFATE please check first here

Have a lot of fun!

The next openSUSE Project meeting will take place Wednesday June 17th at 12:00 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_2009-06-17

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.

Want to help spread the word about the openSUSE Project and encourage more people to become part of the openSUSE Community? Are you ready to roll up your sleeves and spread the word about the openSUSE Project? Do you want to teach new users about Linux, speak about openSUSE at local events, help distribute openSUSE media, and mentor new contributors to the openSUSE Project? Then you’re ready to become an openSUSE Ambassador!

What do Ambassadors Do?

Since this is a new program for openSUSE, the Ambassadors will help define the role over time. But the general scope is clear: openSUSE Ambassadors help introduce openSUSE (the distribution and the project) to new users and contributors.

Ambassadors act as evangelists for the openSUSE Project and free and open source software. They help to mentor new users and contributors by answering questions on the mailing lists and in forums, by assisting users at installfests, or by helping new contributors get started with the openSUSE project.

openSUSE Ambassadors help to spread openSUSE DVDs at events, to local Linux User Groups, schools, universities, and businesses that might benefit from using openSUSE. Ambassadors staff booths at Linux events and answer questions about openSUSE, and explain the benefits of the project and how to get started with openSUSE.

Ambassadors promote the project and spread openSUSE by speaking at events, LUG meetings, computer user groups, or any group that might be interested in learning about the openSUSE Linux distribution and openSUSE Project. Ambassadors help bring new contributors to the project and help them become productive within the project.

In general, openSUSE Ambassadors are friendly openSUSE enthusiasts who help introduce openSUSE to new users and contributors. Ambassadors make “first contact” with new Linux users and help them get started and excited about openSUSE and Linux. They spread excitement about the project and (of course) have a lot of fun.

Signing Up

If you’d like to sign up for the openSUSE Ambassador Program, see the “How do I Join?” section on the openSUSE wiki. If you have questions about the Ambassador’s program not answered on the wiki, feel free to bring them up on the openSUSE Marketing mailing list.

You don’t need approval to get started. Just follow the steps on the openSUSE wiki and have a lot of fun!

The next openSUSE Project meeting will take place Wednesday April 22nd at 13:00 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_2009-04-22

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.