Join the Team

Many people are already helping with the organization in trello.com/osc13 – if you have not seen where we are yet, just follow the link and check it out! We want to organize our event as openly as possible, and Trello is a great way of doing that.

But there is more than preparation. We also need an ‘army on the ground’: the people who make it happen on the conference days! If you want to get more involved and help out during the conference days, you can apply to be a volunteer for oSC13 by filling out the form at http://bit.ly/10s5HDJ. We need you!

Training

One important thing to have in mind is that ALL Volunteers must attend the Volunteers Training, which means that you have to be at the venue on the 18th of July at noon. This year the training of the volunteers will be something you have never seen before. Beyond the regular volunteer training you will be able to get some basic knowledge on First Aid and how to react on-site in case of emergency or disaster (such as a fire or an earthquake). All the training will be conducted by professionals. Our purpose is for volunteers to acquire knowledge that can be used basically everywhere.

The Awesome Greeko’s at oSC12 in Prague

About oSC13

As a quick refresher of your memory, this year the openSUSE Conference takes place in the beautiful city of Thessaloniki, Greece. The to-be-awesome event is organized by our Greekos, an elite team of Greek contributors to openSUSE.

The event is shaping up to be a one-of-a-kind, bringing together the beautiful beaches with the incredible history of Greece in one inspiring place. And you can be a part of it!

Major updates

Some major updates below:

• GNOME 3.6 > 3.8.1
• apache2 2.2.22 > 2.4.3
• digikam 3.0.0 > 3.1.0
• giflib 4.1.6 > 5.0.3
• icecream 0.9.7 > 1.0.0
• kernel 3.7.10 > 3.9.0
• libreoffice 3.6.3.2.4 > 4.0.2.2.1
• ocaml 3.12.1 > 4.00.1
• qemu 1.3.0 > 1.4.0
• qt-creator 2.6.2 > 2.7.0
• ruby 1.9.3 > 2.0
• systemd 195 > 202
• wpa_supplicant 1.1 > 2.0
• xorg-x11-server 1.13.2 > 1.14.1

Most Annoying Bugs

The list of most annoying bugs is still short. We’re looking towards you to help us make that list bigger! We need to find out what’s wrong so we can fix it. You can report bugs with this link. The process of reporting bugs involves a couple of steps that you can take in order to contribute with the distribution. Reporting bugs and problems with the packages is essential for openSUSE to retain its stability. Please review our sections on how to contribute to factory, and submitting bug reports.

You’re more than welcome to organize some bug-finding-and-squashing sessions! Take a look at previous efforts in our last beta-pizza-party!

Planned Changes

Some time ago, the team posted a suggested list of changes for openSUSE 13.1. The idea behind this is to accept the changes provided by the community and at the same time meet specific team goals. Please keep in mind that this list is subject to change but it helps when understanding where the next release of openSUSE would like to go.

For the base system, planned changes include updating GCC to version 4.8 and working on the latest integrations for the Linux Kernel. On booting there was a discussion looking to completely move to SYSTEMD and dropping SYSVINIT. Replacing MKINITRD with Dracut.

On the KDE environment the planned list includes making PHONON support GSTREAMER 1.0 and replacing Kopete, largely unmaintained now, to KDE Telepathy. Gnome is also looking to change a few things in 13.1 starting by adding Gnome 3.10, cleaning out some outdated libraries and changing its default theme to a greener one.

On security the list is simple so far, AppArmor will be promoted further as a preferred security suite and updating SELinux.

Get involved!

This list of possible changes can also be altered by your participation. If you are a developer looking to learn and participate of the openSUSE project through coding, packaging or coordinating efforts to include certain software on the distribution, go to our factory page and learn more about how to contribute code. The process of working packages into the factory release is also documented in an article for the release of openSUSE 12.3. If you are interested in making contributions for packages, please go here and get packaging! Although the link is for 12.3, keep in mind that the packaging process done on 13.1 is the same. If your are familiar with branching projects through GIT, making contributions to the factory development should be easy for you. In simple words, you access the openSUSE repository, branch the specific part you would like to work on, make the appropriate updates and then you make requests to our team to include your changes.

However, the work on openSUSE is not only belonging or limited to packaging. There is far more that can be done here. Marketing, team coordination, translation, artwork, etc. These are simple examples of what more of you could be doing for the team. If you are willing to participate, take a look at this page and choose!

Schedule

Master Coolo published a simple road map. The next milestone is expected for 6 of June, 2013. the next milestones come with about a month in between, Beta 1 is planned for the 19th of September, RC one will be on October 10 and RC2 on October 31st.

The openSUSE Conference – Greece!

The moment is drawing close for you to attend the openSUSE Conference 2013. This time we will meet at the fantastic city of Thessaloniki, Greece. Our Greek ambassadors have worked long and hard to provide all the necessary commodities for the attendees. We will be housed as a conference in the Olympic Museum, and there could not have been a better place to be. It evokes much of the spirit of what our community is, a team of people striving for a common goal.

Remember that accommodations are set by yourself, although the project does provide places where you can stay for a possible reduced price. Please read further to find the recommended lodging locations in Thessaloniki. The travel support program made news last week announcing the availability of financial support, up to 80%, for those attending the conference from far away. As always, there is a criteria to be met in order to receive the funding, but it is available and our Travel Team is ready for you!

Promotion

Please help us spread the word about the conference. The more others know what is happening around them, the more likely they are to attend. This event is also a great promotion for the team as a whole. Given our recent release, openSUSE 12.3, the media have covered our progress on the distribution widely. Adding to that media presence, our conference is also another focus of promotion for the project. If you own a blog, Facebook, Twitter or Google Plus account, or any social media, you can download these promotional conference banners, flyers, posters at https://conference.opensuse.org/#promote

A new video is up on YouTube available here!

Put the badges and news on your favorite social media and spread the word about the openSUSE Conference!

Conference information

Some important links:

• Hotels
• Paper Submissions
• Venue

Two sites where you can book cheap flight to Greece are Petas.gr and airtickets.com

Our Amazing Greeks

Get moving!

While it might seem only May, it is already May! You’ll have to make sure your paper submission is sent and your hotel and flight are booked! Even if you are unable to attend the conference, please spread the news about the conference. To raise awareness about our openSUSE team is an effort in which we all take part.

Those attending the conference should be ready to actively participate in the proceedings. Please beware that a team effort involves everyone and when you are at the conference, likely, you will be asked to participate in organizing different things that you may not have planned for. We expect your enthusiasm and willingness to participate!

Now is also the time to plan for those who may have been undecided about attending the conference. Invite friends, colleagues and anyone that shows an interest in the world of openSUSE. A conference like this is a great opportunity to make friends, and long lasting contacts for projects of your own in which openSUSE and its infrastructure can help you succeed.

1. How do we as a project ensure we’re listening to and addressing the needs of our contributor base?
2. How do we ensure openSUSE is represented and visible at important FLOSS events around the world? How do we ensure we have a good show at these events?
3. How do we try and attract new users, and ideally new contributors to help the project and our products grow and improve?

The Ambassador Program

openSUSE addressed the issues mentioned before through the Ambassador program. The program has proven excellent at spreading the word about openSUSE. However, it has not been equally effective at tackling all these goals, some of which are better described as ‘co-ordination’ rather than promotion. There is room for improvement in the current program:

• We never did a good job of defining what the Ambassador program is meant to achieve. This led to some people believing the Ambassador program was a way to start contributing to the Project rather than a role better suited for existing contributors who have knowledge about the inner workings of the project.
• There were no defined duties or expectations, therefore our Ambassadors didn’t know what was expected of them.
• Conflicting entry requirements: to become an ambassador the ambassador team did look for prior involvement at events. Yet it seemed that to help out at a booth, one had to be an ambassador

We also have a problem with the list of Ambassadors. The current Ambassador List includes a large number of individuals who are no longer active in the project. Absence hurts when users and fellow ambassadors try to contact them and find out the list is out of date.

It is a testament to the hard work of the ambassadors world wide, attending hundreds (!!) of events each year, that the program was so successful despite these issues. But we’re always looking for improvements!

And Now, as the Song Goes…

The times are a-changing. The current Ambassador Team have spent over a year thinking, planning, and discussing these issues with ambassadors, the board and others. Finally we can announce some action!

First of all, we’re renaming the Ambassador program. Instead of “openSUSE Ambassador”, anyone spreading the word about openSUSE can now call themselves an “openSUSE Advocate”. We think this new name does a better job of describing the role in promoting openSUSE.
We’re also opening up the Advocate program so there is no longer a formal enrollment process. Do you like openSUSE? Do you tell other people what’s great about our Project? Then you can call yourself an openSUSE Advocate and join in the great work all our Advocates are doing. Join the mailing list (currently still opensuse-ambassadors@opensuse.org) and get to work! You can add your details to the Advocates List (https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Advocates_list) if you wish, but this is no longer a requirement.
Finally, we’re introducing two new programs: the “Local Coordinator” role and the new “Merchandising and Event program.”

The Local Coordinator

The “Local Coordinator” is meant for established community members who are prepared to help coordinate openSUSE’s presence in their community. These volunteers will need to be aware of how the openSUSE project works, so they can help guide people who need to find their way around the project.
They will be expected to promote and advertise the openSUSE activities in their local area, through various methods like blogs, social networking, or writing articles for news.opensuse.org.
These new Local Coordinators will also be responsible for ensuring that events in their local area have an openSUSE presence, either by attending themselves or helping organize other openSUSE Advocates to attend. They will also be responsible for helping keep the openSUSE Event List up to date, which will have a much greater importance for reasons that will become clear below. If you’re interested in becoming an openSUSE Local Coordinator, please read the wiki page to learn more.

The Merchandising and Event Program

Alongside the Local Coordinator Program, the openSUSE Team at SUSE has been investigating how to improve our presence at events with the materials they send.

Sending DVD’s now

Right now, the openSUSE team processes event materials requests which come in via a website. We find out if the request is legitimate and if it is worth sending materials. We then send DVDs and more depending on stock. Unfortunately, sending 100 DVDs, for example, to South America can cost 1000 Euro (that is 10.000 times the value of the DVD’s, yes!) and while it is not always as expensive, we spend far more on shipping than creating good materials -and note that just DVD’s doesn’t make for such a great booth!

Quality Over Quantity

The openSUSE team created a proposal to the board to focus on “Quality over Quantity.” Smaller but better packages will be sent. Not just DVDs but a full set of booth materials! It will include things like table cloths, banners, posters, flyers and name tags but also booth basics like tape, scissors and markers. Of course, there will be including DVDs but also other cool give-aways.

As each package will be more expensive we need to make sure of its usefulness for the event. The team made a list of events based on the places openSUSE Ambassadors visited the last year. The events considered bigger and more relevant will receive a box -smaller events for now will not receive a box.

For smaller events our Travel Support Program will provide funds to reimburse local Advocates to create the needed materials. The openSUSE team will assist in creating sources like PDF files for posters to help with this. Much you can already find in our github repository and we’ll work on improving that. The plan is also for the boxes to contain materials which can be re-used at other, smaller events.

Starting Up

For this year, the openSUSE team will thus send boxes to the major events. Work still has to be done on communicating what events will get what, and once the plan is public, we urge you to provide feedback on it! Next year, the planning of the events as well as decisions about the content of the boxes will be handed over gradually to the openSUSE Board, which will work with the Local Coordinators and Advocates to get the right things to the right place.

What Now?

As you might have noticed, we are in a transition now. At the moment, we no longer ship openSUSE DVDs and the website for ordering them is down. The materials needed for our big boxes is not ready yet- materials still have to be created.

Meanwhile, we have only just begun talking to potential Local Coordinators and this, too, is still very much a work in progress. What we do here is the typical ‘release early, release often’: the new plans are thought out but the implementation is barely Alpha! We do need help with this. If you know a local Ambassador who would make an excellent Local Coordinator, please contact us (link…). And keep an eye on the ambassador- and marketing mailing lists for information about the merchandising.

Get it from here:Direct Download | Torrents | Metalinks | md5sum

Since this edition is based on openSUSE 12.3, all the official 12.3 updates, repositories from build service and Packman can be used to install additional software and keep it udpated.

Minimum hardware requirement are 1GB of RAM and 15GB free disk space. Installation from a USB stick will take about 40 minutes to complete depending on hardware capabilities. From a DVD it takes much longer. Check this howto for creating live USB stick on vfat partition or other GUI and terminal ways.

Here is the sample of some of the software available on the iso. A complete list of packages with version numbers is listed here.

This time, we also have an openSUSE Edu Li-f-e 12.3 64bit version in SUSE Studio – if you want to give it a try, download the ISO image or log in and run the image via “Testdrive” in your local browser! (Please note that 64bit edition has not been through a rigorous QA.)

Test reports are always welcomed – if you encounter any problems, feel free to contact us via any way mentioned in our wiki or write a bug report.

Have a lot of fun!

Your openSUSE Education Team

Today the openSUSE Travel Support Team opened the Travel Support Request Submission tool for requests related to the openSUSE Conference 2013 in Thessaloniki. The goal is to help everybody in and around openSUSE to be able to come to the openSUSE Conference! You don’t have to be one of the top 10 packagers to apply – if you’re translating, building a local community or helping out at the forums, we might still be able to offer you support, so apply!

When and how

The application period will be a little over week, starting on May 2nd and closing on May 10th. For the very first time, all requests will be managed through our brand new application that is be available at connect.opensuse.org/travel-support.

You will need an openSUSE Connect account in order to log in the application and apply for sponsorship.

A few reminders

• Please, read the Travel Support wiki page carefully before you apply.
• We want everybody to be there! Even if you think you would not qualify for travel support, just submit a request! If you don’t ask we can’t help you!
• The Travel Committee can reimburse up to 80% of travel and lodging costs. That includes plane ticket, train and bus tickets (no taxi), even car gas on some occasions, and hotel or hostel costs. Food and all local expenses are on you!
• The Travel Team won’t be able to book or pay anything in advance, reimbursement comes after the event is over, based on receipts you keep of your expenses.
• Again: no receipts = no money – it’s the rules!
• Those sponsored by the Travel Team have to write a blog or report on the event and are expected to be available for helping with tasks at the event where needed!
• Sponsorship decisions are influenced by the openSUSE history of the requester. Your involvement with openSUSE is really relevant!
• Having an abstract submitted for presentation at the conference is relevant as well. Note that the CfP is extended so there is still time!
• If you got support before and complied with all the requirements, this gets you bonus points too.
• The amount requested must be detailed according to your request, like the airport you will be departing from, sharing hotel/hostel rooms, costs associated with your trip.
• Try to get the best fares for tickets and lodging. Remember if approved at least 20% (and sometimes more) will be paid by you.

Hurry up!

Our goal is to support as many people as possible. If you need support to make it to the event, PLEASE SEND IN A REQUEST! We will attempt to send the approvals before May 13th, 2013 so you can start booking. Book quickly, as we don’t cover anything over the previously agreed amount so higher prices are on you!

The conference is getting close and the deadline for travel support is tight so start searching for flights right now! Set up your openSUSE Connect account and send in a request as soon as possible!

We hope to see you there.

Your openSUSE Travel Support Team

Of course the Greek openSUSE Community couldn’t miss this chance for having fun, drink beers, meet new people and talk about the technologies that openSUSE 12.3 has and the magnificent openSUSE Conference at Thessaloniki.

We gathered all our promo dvds, posters, logos, badges, stickers and our good mood and arrived at Athens one day before the conference!

One day before the conference… Are they crazy?

No we aren’t. We arrived at Athens on Friday because we held a wonderful Release party at hackerspace.gr for our new release! Everyone was there! New people came to meet us and share their enthusiasm about the new release! Of course beers and our delicious must have cake where there too!

We had a lot of fun, met new openSUSE folk and people we invited to join us at our booth at the Conference! More photos here!

Time for some serious work to be done!

After the long night and a very successful release party the next morning we headed to the building where the conference was held. We arrived early in the morning and started preparing our booth! Everything was there, stickers, dvds, posters, badges, promo community and conference leaflets and a monitor connected with a Raspberry Pi “playing till death” the promo video for our conference! It’s true that we had the richest in material booth than any of the other communities where there.

Spreading the word on openSUSE 12.3 and the openSUSE technology!

Presentations started with “Developing E17 on openSUSE 12.3” by Stathis Iosifidis and Alex P. Natsios (aka Drakevr) which attracted lots of technical folk. After that it was time for “Why openSUSE 12.3” where Stathis Iosifidis presented our new release and all of its “under the hood” technologies. People where excited with so many questions about our new stuff that the presentation ran out of time! At that point, questions had to overflow in the direction of the “booth team”, which were of course ready for action! Most questions were answered, promodvds where gone like golden cookies and we hope to get their feedback by encouraging them to communicate with us by giving them our community leaflets!

Last but not least Angelos Tzotsos (aka kalxas) represented the openSUSE community successfully in a Communities Roundtable.

#osc13 @Thessaloniki

That was the promo title for the equivalent presentation! After the good work of George Bratsos coloring the building in green with #osc13 posters and every green team member there giving leaflets to everyone, Stathis Iosifidis and Stella Rouzi were up on the stage to rock! The presentation attracted a huge crowd, many of which were interested in helping us at Thessaloniki and while gearing up for the conference. We hope to see many of them as well as others at the conference this summer!

You can find more photos here.

Leaving this year’s Fosscomm behind

We left this years Fosscomm with many things to remember. We also have to thank the organizers for the perfect organization of the conference; we loved every minute at this years conference! We are lookng forward to see you at our openSUSE Conference @Thessaloniki to have a lot of fun!

Over at openbuildservice.org they have released the Open Build Service (OBS) version 2.4 which supports yet another package format (Arch’s PKGBUILD), secure boot signing, appstream metadata, introduces a new constraint system and makes everything a lot snappier. Go check out their release announcement to learn all the nitty gritty details of OBS 2.4.

On the OBS reference server, build.opensuse.org, which we use to build our most awesome GNU/Linux distribution we have followed the road to this release since early January and of course the final 2.4 release is already deployed there. We are very happy that the openSUSE community was able to help make this a rock solid OBS release with a lot of great features and we congratulate the OBS team on this new version.

„It is exciting to see the Open Build Service team move forward with such a great feature release. OBS forms the base of the collaborative model which makes openSUSE such a successful distribution and we are proud to work with them and their sweet technology.”

– said openSUSE Community Manager Jos Poortvliet.

New OBS Version, new OBS power

And by the way, last Tuesday the truck with the new compute rack came and we were able to move it into the openSUSE sever room in the SUSE offices. After our amazing admins set up power and network, which we had to expand for all these nodes, the OBS team deployed the shiny new appliance image based on openSUSE 12.3. The workers immediately started to build jobs and after some minor glitches with the bios and network time setup, all the workers are now in production mode.

We already configured some of the build hosts to have less workers on them so the individual workers have more RAM for bigger build jobs and we’re thinking about making some of them build only in RAM for smaller build jobs. More optimization might follow, but even without that you’ll notice building on OBS will once again be as quick as a bunny!

– check out more pictures of OBS hardware in the Google+ group

„The server monitor is telling the awful truth: now that we have the build power we have to work on the other hardware bottlenecks, like the server delivering binaries across the build hosts and to our mirrors pronto!”

– said openSUSE Release Manager Stephan “coolo” Kulow.

So don’t forget that you can make a difference with your support and sponsorship for the openSUSE and OBS communities. If you happen be able to, or know someone who can, donate serious I/O power to the Open Build Service reference server – it’s time to tell us!

Go Check It Out!

See all the awesomeness of this new release. Either download the appliance and run your own instance or head over to the reference server to get your taste of OBS 2.4. And don’t forget to let us know how it goes on twitter, G+, facebook or simply in the comment section below. We’re looking forward to hear from you!

Many of you must already have seen the news: openSUSE has made it to the list of 177 organizations participating in this years edition of the Google Summer of Code! Like in previous years, we have a few other projects join us, including ownCloud, Oyranos and Hedgewars. The four of us have loads of great ideas lined up and we’re looking forward to the proposals! Read on to find out about GSOC, the plans and how to be a part of it!

GSOC 2013

For those unfamiliar with GSOC, the Google Summer of Code is an annual program paying students to write code for open source projects. It gives a chance for college students to hack on really cool stuff and learn a lot in the process. You can read all about it on our wiki page.

Introductions

Several projects collaborate under the Green Umbrello. We have a large number of cool ideas around cloud, OBS, virtualization and more and we’d like to introduce you to the projects behind them!

ownCloud
We all live with our head in the Cloud these days. ownCloud is all about making sure YOU own that cloud! You don’t want to loose your head, don’t you? Originating from the KDE community, ownCloud these days has a company behind it to move development forward. Still very much true to its slogan “Your Cloud, Your Data, Your Way!”, the team recently released ownCloud 5.0. This awesome PHP server application is easy to deploy, yet you can entrust it with your files. It will make sure they are synchronized between all your devices, lets you share them with friends or access them via a web interface. It has fancy features like versioning and undeleting of files, support for external storage, galleries, calendaring and offers a great API to build your own apps in. That might very well be where you can come help out: building a ownCloud app isn’t as hard as you think it is! App developers would also benefit from API’s to use maps in their apps – so the API itself could use your efforts too. Go and check out the ideas for ownCloud to pick your poison!

Cross-distribution ideas
In real openSUSE tradition, we have a series of awesome cross-distribution ideas. Want to help us improve our (and others!) Github code review process? Also tired of the work it takes to build AppArmor profiles and agree there should be a tool? Want to help get the Fcitx input method in Wayland? If you’re more of a virtualized person, maybe you’re willing to help out get libvirt support for xenlight (libxl) up to musterd. There is plenty to do which will benefit not just the Geekos but all of Free Software and we’re happy to support that!

Open Build Service
Building everything, everywhere, the Open Build Service has grown to service over 30.000 packagers delivering 200K packages to users around the world. Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE – on OBS the lights are all Green, for everyone. OBS is a server, firing up Virtual Machines to build packages whenever it encounters work coming in via the web- or command line interfaces or due to changes in other packages. This web interface is looking for a facelift, while packagers would stand to benefit from the possibility of users providing feedback and comments to the work they do. The team is looking towards YOU to help make these and more possible, check out the OBS ideas section to find out what you can do!

syslog-ng
syslog-ng is a premier logging tool, able to collect, store and show details on what is going on many systems. You’re the type of person who wants to be in the know? Want to make sure syslog-ng can store its data in MySQL? Send it to XMPP services? Or you rather secure the logs by signing them? Take a look at the syslog-ng ideas for these and more suggestions!

Hedgewars
IT IS TIME FOR WAR! Assemble a crack team of pink hedgehogs and battle your way up from the depths of hell to the vastness of space! Hedgewars is FUN, a great match to the Geeko. Offering a turn based strategy, artillery, action and comedy game with attitude, the Hedgehogs are looking for help. No Piano strike is complete without some proper testing, there’s work to do on the intelligence of the enemy armies and conversions to 3D technologies like WebGL and OpenGL-ES. Check out the Hedgewars ideas on our wiki if you’d like to become part of the army!

Oyranos Color Management
Surely you figured out that colors are not that simple when you played with paint at school. There is this strange difference between mixing colors on a screen and in paint and all these weird ‘color spaces’ like CMYK which printers bother you with. If all this is not strange to you or you’d like to dive into it, Oyranos is your thing! This project delivers color management on the operating system level, matching input and output device colors across applications. In short, it makes sure that when you paint a pretty pink pony, it won’t be printed bloody red but exactly the gorgeous pink you intended! As we all love ponies, it is clear that this is a crucial part of a modern operating system and improvements are always welcome. The project looks for hackers to help GNOME users get their Pink Ponies and get support for ICC databases built. Check the Oyranos ideas to see how you can help!

openSUSE Projects
Of course, there are projects more unique for openSUSE-the-distribution. If your ownCloud seems too simple, how about playing with the Big Boys for a while? We’ve got excellent support for OpenStack but there is room for improvement in our CloudStack and Eucalyptus support! We are also looking for somebody who wants to dive into filesystems and help us get LVM volumes to resize automatically. There are plenty more ideas around, check out the wiki and come make a difference!

Let’s GOOOOOO!

If any of the ideas above or from the wiki or something you cooked up yourself seem like worth doing, start talking to mentors. We prefer to see something from you, both in terms of communication AND in terms of code, so don’t be afraid to submit a bugfix or start hacking. Even if we do not have enough GSOC slots, we will be more than happy to mentor you and help you find your way in the wonderful world of openSUSE. Keep an eye on the timeline to make sure you don’t miss any deadlines but most importantly: get crackin’!

The GSOC team:

• Matt Barringer
• Manu Gupta
• Saurabh Sood

They usually hang out on IRC at #opensuse-project on freenode where you can ask them or the other openSUSE folk all the questions you have.