• The openSUSE Project-talk (Kostas Koudaras)
• Yast-talk (Kostas Koudaras-Stathis Agrapidis)
• openSUSE Medical-talk (Stathis Iosifidis)
• OwnCloud-talk (Stathis Iosifidis but originally registered from Chris Loukas)
• OBS-workshop (Stathis Agrapidis)
• Gnome Extensions-talk (Stathis Iosifidis)
• Animal Shelter Manager-talk (Stathis Iosifidis)

Preparation

, printing materials etc. Most of us rent cars and together we stayed into my Family’s house 30 km out of Serres. It was not very comfortable but it was sure a lot of fun. Collaboration was the key word to this years event. Unfortunately a few days before the event our friend and community member Chris Loukas had an accident so it was impossible for him to be present, so, Stathis Iosifidis was there instead of him, but due to the nature of Chris’s accident, no information from his side was available in time, so it’s worth saying that Stathis prepaired the whole new ownCloud presentation in less that 48 hours while we were traveling-preparing etc.

The MeetingThe Welcome Party
The night before the meeting the organizing committee had a welcome party for all the attendants. We were there and many nice feelings were born seeing people we had not met for a year, since last Fosscomm. Fun, beers, beautiful people and many interesting talks were talking place in a relaxing environment. Without a doubt, Cloud Computing, Mobility and Collaboration Tools were this year’s main talks of the people there. Everything was showing that this year’s Fosscomm would be at least interesting for all of us. We left the party a bit later than we should, but who leaves a party early?

We arrived at the Technological Institute of Serres (the place were Fosscomm was taking place) early in the morning in order to register and start setting up our booth. People were already there and they were really excited, the atmosphere was electrified and many people were still a bit drunk or hangovered from last night’s party. Booth staff was there, ambassadors were there and visitors were all around getting information about openSUSE, ownCloud, the upcoming openSUSE Collaboration Summer Camp and the coming of openSUSE conference 2013 in Greece, as well as the oSC12 in Prague.

The first day was great, we had many people interested in openSUSE, our talks went smooth and as we’ve learned from the organizing committee there were more than 350 attendants. After that we continued with this beautiful atmosphere at my place were we had a lot of food, alcohol and nice company.
The second day was a bit more relaxing since we had less things to do and there were not so many people there. Unfortunately one of our people was sick so I had to stay back with him at my place and take care of him, but the rest of the crew was there in time.

Leaving this year’s Fosscomm behind
We left this years Fosscomm with many great things to remember. Before getting back to Thessaloniki many of us had a coffee at Kerkini lake for a relaxing debriefing of this year’s meeting.There were some unavoidable difficultiesbut everything went fine at the end. We went, we attended, we rocked, one more time.

The following openSUSE services might be effected:

• all openSUSE wiki instances, e.g. en.opensuse.org
• the wordpress instances like news.opensuse.org and lizards.opensuse.org
• the forums at forums.opensuse.org

• Update coordination: One or more maintenance groups can decide if and when to start or release an update. This includes also the tracking of new, running and processed updates.
• QA and Review integration: The current state of an update is always visible and trackable. Review processes can be integrated.
• Release Management: Isolated build and tested updates can be released or revoked via OBS mechanism.
• Multiple code stream support: An issue can be handled for multiple code streams.
• Documentation support: The documentation of an update for the end-user is integrated

This functionality is already used for doing the maintenance updates for the openSUSE distributions. The features can be used all together or in parts for own products.

In addition OBS 2.3 provides

• A greatly improved web interface, including user management, syntax highlighted source editor and improved source diff review views
• Improved Cross Build Support via Qemu
• Functionality to hide entire projects
• Issue tracking support, tracking documented fixes in external bugzilla, fate and CVE instances in packages.

It is recommended to read the Release Notes before updating an instance. OBS packages can be found in the openSUSE Tools project or as an appliance which can be used on hardware or in VM.

Your Open Build Service team

About Open Build Service

The Open Build Service (OBS) is an open and complete distribution development platform. It provides the infrastructure to easily create, release and maintain software for openSUSE and other Linux distributions on different hardware architectures. It is developed under the umbrella of the openSUSE project, but is licensed under GPL and used by other open source projects like MeeGo or Tizen. It is also used by universities, ISVs and companies like Intel, Dell, and SGI.

Support Offerings for Open Build Service

After receiving a new disk array, and restoring backups onto it, download.opensuse.org is back up.  The openSUSE Build Service is currently syncing all its repos to it, and then a full mirror rescan will be carried out so that the latest software is on all the mirrors that download redirects to. The temporary redirection has been removed.  The outage is to be discussed at today’s openSUSE Project Meeting.

–

It’s going to be a quiet May 1 for openSUSE users and contributors, due to a rare two-disk failure on download.opensuse.org, the central site for accessing openSUSE distribution releases and packages.  To work-around the failure, temporarily change your repository URLs using YaST Software Repositories or zypper (or edit the files in /etc/zypp/repos.d) to a nearby mirror.  Normally, requests to download.opensuse.org are redirected automatically to a mirror by the Mirrorbrain software running there.  On Monday, the disk hardware on download failed beyond the level its redundancy is designed to handle.  We are working to restore the system as soon as possible, and will post updates as soon as we have more information.

51 proposals, 12 students accepted

Big thanks to every student who dedicated their time thinking up and writing awesome proposals: we received a total of 51 proposals! This year Google allocated 12 students slots to openSUSE. This means we had a very hard time deciding! What projects will benefit openSUSE most, what will teach the student most? Do we mentor new students or give people already familiar with openSUSE a chance to dedicate some real time? There are practical considerations too. We don’t have mentors for all projects, or multiple students per mentor. Some mentors can only mentor in the evening, others only during the day – we have to watch time zones too.

But we’ve managed to extract 12 proposals out of the brilliance thrown at us and these students now will have to geeko up for their awesome summer job!

Selected projects

• Adding an Ambassador/Event plugin to openSUSE Connect -  Athanasios-Ilias Rousinopoulos will be adding event calendering to openSUSE connect, to make it easier to plan openSUSE events.
• Writing a better looking 1-Click Install client -  Saurabh Sood will be working on replacing the existing YAST-based 1-click installer with something much nicer looking.
•  Completing AppStream/Software-Center support for openSUSE -  Matthias Klumpp will be working on Appstream
• Improving the MongoDB destination driver for syslog-ng -  Eun Kyung will be enhancing syslog-ng’s Mongo support.
• Fixing/implementing automated kernel/glibc tests -  Marios Makris will be improving Linux Test Project coverage.
• openSUSE Karma plugin for openSUSE Connect -Priyanka Menghani will add a “karma” plugin to openSUSE Connect, similar to the “reputation” score on StackExchange.
• Further work on the osc2 client -  Marcus Hüwe is going to continue his existing work on the next-generation osc client for the Open Build Service.
• Popularity contest for RPM (popcorn) - Akshit Khurana will be working on popcorn, which will be optionally installed on openSUSE systems and provide us with statistics about which packages are popular.
• Redesigning fdisk to be more extensible and implement GPT support -Davidlohr Bueso will be cleaning up and refactoring everyone’s favorite disk utility, fdisk.
• Scanny, a security scanner for Ruby code - Piotr Niełacny will be be working on scanny, a tool designed to alert developers to security errors in their Ruby code.
• An upstream/downstream tracker -  N.B.Prashanth will write an “upstream/downstream” tracker tool that will track the differences between upstream versions and distro packages.
• Writable snapshot support for ext4 snapshots -  Yongqiang Yang will extend ext4 to support writeable snapshots.

The next steps

Now it is time to get in touch with your community, start speaking to people around you, discuss your ideas, read documentation, code and have loads of fun!

The Boosters Team

The openSUSE Boosters, widely known as the Ecstatic Eleven, is a team of people helping contributors to take off in our project. No matter if an ambassador needs help with organizing an event, an admin needs assistance with implementing a new service, or a developer needs guidance to bring his code into our distribution: the Boosters are here to work with all contributors to reach their goals and to enable them to bring this project forward. But the Boosters are not a bunch of lone fighters; the team always works together, in an agile fashion, on its milestones and every member is equally important and responsible for the success – and of course for celebrating it. It is a team of young, clever, spirited people from different backgrounds, countries and talents that want to collaborate. A team that wants to make a difference in this world by helping each other and our project to become even more awesome.

+ You

As you can imagine the Boosters goal requires people who are willing to explore the vast possibilities a FOSS project like ours offers. Boosters are as comfortable in front of an huge audience on a conference as behind an editor in a GIT repository. As the possibilities to contribute to openSUSE are endless a Booster must be agile, open minded and willing to take on tasks that require to learn completely new things. Be it a programming language, an application framework, how to give an interview to the press or what questions to ask in a questionnaire survey. Boosters are not afraid of anything and there is nothing they are not willing to do to attract and nurture contributors.

= Love?

Does that sound like it’s your thing? If yes, you will find a tight-knit team here that lives and breathes collaboration. A gang of FOSS aficionados that share your passion, hard workers and a wild bunch to have a lot of fun with. And equally important you’ll start with an employer that will bring your FOSS career forward: SUSE, which has been around for 20 years and is the original provider of the enterprise Linux distribution that powers thousands of organizations around the world across physical, virtual and cloud environments. A company that has been a leader and an active participant for years in tons of open source projects and open standards. Sounds great? It’s awesome, guaranteed!

So what are you waiting for? Head over to suse.com/company/careers, check out the position and apply. We’re looking forward to hear from you!

Introducing Heinlein

Heinlein Support has specialized in Linux servers and e-mail services for over 20 years. They share their knowledge and their experience at the Heinlein Academy, during personal consultations, through their hosting services, and through their appliance and software products.

Peer Heinlein said:

After working with SUSE technologies since 1994, we’re very happy to have a chance to contribute something back to the openSUSE Community. For our customers, the (open)SUSE-platform has always been a very reliable distribution for business and enterprise use cases.

Supporting openSUSE

We are happy to announce that Heinlein Support is sponsoring the openSUSE project by providing infrastructure to run the project.

Henne Vogelsang told us:

I believe Peer and his crew will help us to take our mail infrastructure to the next level and I’m happy that we have the opportunity to work together with them. I mean that guy wrote a book about postfix and has tons of hands-on experience with mail infrastructure, how awesome is that?

GoWhat

According to the description from the go-lang website:

Go is a programming language and environment that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software.

Go is an expressive, concurrent, garbage collected general/systems programming language that is type safe and memory safe. It has pointers but no pointer arithmetic. Go has fast builds, clean syntax, garbage collection, methods for any type, and run-time reflection. It feels like a dynamic language but has the speed and safety of a static language.

In a discussion on python vs go you’ll find that

Clearly Go is a superior weapon if the goal is to shoot everyone in the foot at the same time. The GIL in python forces you to shoot each person in the foot in sequence :).

(by Kyle Lemons)

In other words, go is optimized for concurrent programming – getting the most out of our modern multi-core systems.

GoGetting

To install go, one can use the new graphical interface at software.opensuse.org by going to software.opensuse.org/package/go. Get the documentation here (go-doc) and if you’re a VIM user, also get go-vim. From a commandline, Factory users can do a simple zypper in go go-doc go-vim. If you’re on openSUSE 12.1 or other versions you’ll need the devel:languages:go project. Lots of additional stuff there of course. Note that adding go via the software.opensuse.org route will add the devel:languages:go repository to your list, allowing you to pull in any of the extras easily.

GoSetup

You’ll have to know and set a few thingies now:

• Either source /etc/profile.d/go.sh or open a new terminal to import the Go env vars into your environment. Your $GOPATH will be set to $HOME/go so either override this in your profile or create the directory.
• Go libraries and packages installed from the openSUSE repo are installed to $GOROOT and the system bindir. Any extra packages or binaries you install using the “go” tool will be installed to $GOPATH and $GOBIN (if it’s set).
• Currently $GOBIN for non root users defaults to $GOPATH/bin, we currently don’t add that location to your $PATH so you will either have to add it in your profile or set another location for $GOBIN (such as $HOME/bin). See the golang documentation for more information.

GoGo

It’s time to get Going now. An excellent way to check if everything is setup OK is to install and run the Go Tour! If you have a viable Go environment the following two commands will execute without error.
go get code.google.com/p/go-tour/gotour
gotour
When you have a working environment, the following documentation is a great resource for first time Go hackers:

• Golang Documentation
• For experienced C, C++ and Java hackers I also recommend the Go FAQ.
• Go language community support: Mailing List and #go-nuts on freenode

GoFun

More information on the current Go setup in openSUSE can be found on this wiki page. Thanks to Graham Anderson for the information there and this article.

If you would like to just play with Go before installing it, there’s a pretty cool tour set up on the golang website: click here to start. You can edit the code and run it live on the site!

Funny images of the go mascotte courtesy of the golang.org website.

To download the openSUSE 12.2 Milestone 3, go directly to the download directory.

To download openSUSE 12.1, go directly to the 12.1 download directory.

For everything else, please wait until the server is fully up again.

Update 2012-04-12 19:37 UTC: Everything should be up again.