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…

So, enjoy! ;-)

Please introduce yourself!

My name is Frédéric Crozat, I’m 36 and I live in Paris (France). I’m working for SUSE for a little more than a year, with focus on various topics such as SUSE MeeGo, GNOME 3 live image, LXC (Linux Containers) and more recently, systemd.. Before that, I worked for 10 years at MandrakeSoft/Mandriva, taking care of GNOME. From 2002 to 2011, I was part of GNOME Release Team, making sure GNOME was released on time and with all those nice features.

Tell us about the background to your computer use.

I’ve been interested in computer since I was a kid (first computer was a MSX Canon V20).. First „big program“ (on a PC 8086 with 10MB hard disk IIRC) I wrote was a billing program for my mom (she owns a bookstore), when I was in 7th grade (first in Quick Basic), then I rewrote it in Turbo Pascal when I learned Pascal in 2nd grade and later, I even rewrote it in Object Oriented Pascal (because I bought Borland Pascal 6 or 7, shipped with huge printed user manual, included OO stuff) when I was in collegue. And my mom used this program (on the same computer) until she closed her shop, 7 years ago ;)

Then, I went to a Computer Science Engineering school where I learned a lot about computers science (even if I was already a geek ;), including C, C++, Java and many strange languages.

I also learned Unix there and discovered Linux because our C teacher told us „you’ll get a free C compiler you’ll be able to use at home“ and then, I became hooked (it was in 1996)

When and why did you start using openSUSE/SUSE Linux?

I started to use openSUSE when I joined Novell (now SUSE) in August 2010. I was already monitoring openSUSE (and SUSE) before, when I was working at MandrakeSoft/Mandriva.

When did you join the openSUSE community and what made you do that?

I joined the community when I started to use openSUSE and more precisely, after openSUSE conference in October 2010 (where I met a lot of interesting people)

In what way do you participate in the openSUSE project?

Initially, I helped on GNOME (and a bit on MeeGo, when it was still alive). I took care of GNOME 3 live image (used by GNOME Foundation, and based on openSUSE). More recently, I’ve been handling the switch to systemd for openSUSE 12.1

What especially motivates you to participate in the openSUSE project?

I want openSUSE to be the best Linux distribution in the ecosystem, best in the „easy to use“ sense, but also best in its interaction with upstream projects.

What do you think was your most important contribution to the openSUSE project/community or what is the contribution that you’re most proud of?

Probably, GNOME 3 live image : I started as a way to learn SUSE Studio and then kiwi, and it morphed into a 3 months projects, which helped a lot on GNOME 3.0 launch and Novell/SUSE sponsored 10000 promo DVD based on this work which were handed over to GNOME Foundation.

When do you usually spend time on the openSUSE project?

Usually, during the day, in parallel to my work at SUSE (when it is not openSUSE related)

Three words to describe openSUSE? Or make up a proper slogan!

Green ; Easy ; Powerful

What do you think is missing or underrated in the distribution or the project?

Underrated : OBS . We have a unique technology, simplifing software package (and availability).

What do you think the future holds for the openSUSE project?

Great things :) . OpenSUSE as a project is pretty young, compared to other projects I’ve participated in the past, and I want to be sure we’ll be able to use other project experience to go even further (and avoid possible mistakes other did)

A person asks you why he/she should choose openSUSE instead of other distribution/OS. What would be your arguments to convince him/her to pick up openSUSE?

Because we give people choice and freedom. And we also make sure to have great relations with other communities (either upstream projects or even other distributions)

Which members of the openSUSE community have you met in person?

I can’t list all of them (attending conferences makes the list very long), but in my short list, I’d say Vincent Untz, DimStar, FunkyPenguin, Michael Meeks and many many other people

How many icons are currently on your desktop?

None, since GNOME 3 doesn’t have icons on the desktop anymore ;)

What is the application you can’t live without? And why?

I’d say Firefox, empathy, evolution and git ;)

Which application or feature should be invented as soon as possible?

Easy (ie transparent) backup, and getting my data synchronized and available everywhere ( I know both those ideas are being addressed, but not yet fully and in a „easy for my mom to use“ form)

Which is your preferred text editor? And why?

Vim. I’ve been using both Emacs and vi for a long time and some years ago, I switched to vim exclusively, because it was just so fast to start (I tend to detect a lot of different files not always at the same time) and I thought I would be better to focus on just one editor and better learn to use it at its full potential (I don’t consider myself a vim guru at all)

Which famous person would you want to join the openSUSE community?

None, all the best are there already (kidding ;)

Which computer related skills would you like to have?

Understand assembly language and this kind of low level stuff. I learned it at school, but it was never my „thing“

The Internet crashes for a whole week — how would you feel, what would you do?

This is exactly what I’m experiencing right now (moving between flats). So, I’m using a 3G Internet access at home… More seriously, in the past, when I was travelling for my holidays, I always make sure to „unplug“ myself for one or two weeks and everything went fine.

Which is your favorite movie scene?

None in particular

Star Trek or Star Wars?

Star Trek (but I like both)

What is your favorite food and drink?

Food : truffade (regional dish from countryside, cheese and potatoes : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truffade

No favorite drink, I like a lot of them ;)

Favorite game or console (in your childhood and nowadays)?

Heavy Rain / ICO. When I was younger, the various „Commander Keen“ from Apogee Software

Which city would you like to visit?

The list is pretty long, but right now, I’d list Amsterdam and New-York.

What is your preferred way to spend your vacation?

Travelling with my wife and use my DSLR to take a glimpse of the landscapes encountered.

Someone gives you $1.000.000 — what would you do with the money?

No idea. Call me when the bank order is done on my account and we’ll talk ;)

If traveling through time was possible — when would we be most likely to meet you?

Nowadays is a nice time, not sure I would move permanently to another time (but maybe I use it to visit various times ;)

There’s a thunderstorm outside — do you turn off your computer?

I used to (because I lived for a long time in rural environment). I don’t anymore.

Have your ever missed an appointment because you forgot about it while sitting at your computer?

One or two times, mostly because I forgot to set the alarm in my calendar for the appointment ;)

Show us a picture of something, you have always wanted to share!

This is what some collegues did in our office in Paris : everybody should do the same : http://www.flickr.com/photos/fcrozat/6055381155/in/photostream (and I’m now the guardian of this geeko ;)

You couldn’t live without…

My wife

Which question was the hardest to answer?

Movie scene / what to do with one million $.

What other question would you like to answer? And what would you answer?

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.

We wish all developers, maintainers, users and friends a Happy New Year.

Let us make 2012 even better…

The new board members are Pascal Bleser, Will Stephenson and Andrew Wafaa.

We would like to congratulate all Board Members and wish them all the best. We would also like to thank all candidates for their time to run for openSUSE board. We’re really proud to have so many good candidates.

The votes are as follows:

Pascal Bleser (172 votes) – 79%

Will Stephenson (104 votes) – 48%

Andrew Wafaa (90 votes) – 41%

Pavol Rusnak (81 votes) – 37%

Manu Gupta (60 votes) – 28%

Richard Brown (43 votes) – 20%

Marcus Moeller (42 votes) – 19%

Chuck Payne (16 votes) – 7%

A total of 218 members participated in the poll. Voters had the option to vote for 3 candidates.

Thanks Bryen Yunashko, Rupert Horstkotter and Pavol Rusnak for the great time served in the Board.

The official results can be found at http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Board_election

Thank all voters for taking the time to vote. Thanks to the openSUSE Election Officials.

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.

The openSUSE board election just started! Please go to:
https://connect.opensuse.org/pg/polls/read/digitaltomm/15228/opensuse-board-election-2011 and cast your vote for this election. All openSUSE members[1] are eligible to vote.

The board consists of 6 members and one chairperson. As the election period of Bryen Yunashko, Pavol Rusnak and Rupert Horstkotter ends, this election will appoint 3 new board members.

The election period ends at December the 16th.
All candidates have put their agenda on the wiki[2], linked as “Platform” after the candidates’ name.

If you have any questions, please contact the election officials (election-officials@opensuse.org).

Greetings

[1] http://en.opensuse.org/Members
[2] http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Board_election_2011

On completion of a task students get points and can earn prizes like t-shirts, cash and certificates of completion. The ten participants with the highest points earned by the end of the competition receive a grand prize trip to Google headquarters!

Doing your bit

For a successful Code In participation we all must do our bit. You can do two things:

0. Suggest tasks on our wiki page
If you can think of a fun and challenging tasks for a pre-university student just go to the opensuse Code In wiki page and press the “Add task” button in the appropriate category. It’s as easy as checkers :-) If we find a someone willing to mentor the task it will be part of Code In.

1. Become a mentor on google melange and help students complete their tasks.
If you want to help mentoring the students for the tasks they choose you have to sign up as mentor on google melange and tell me (Manu Gupta) about it so I can add you to our organization in that tool. Once you are a mentor you can pick/add the tasks you want to mentor.

Both bits are easy to do but have great impact on our own project and FOSS in general. Great benefit for low cost. Please think hard about joining our efforts!

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!

Also, if you like to get involved promoting openSUSE on social media and networks, please talk with the openSUSE marketing team.

I’d like to thank Roger Luedecke for taking care of the new openSUSE Google + page and invite everybody to share contents on it, promote it and follow what we do!