Sneak Preview of oSC14 Sessions

At the openSUSE Conference 2014 in Dubrovnik hundreds of Geekos are expected to meet, discuss and attend the talks and workshops. The openSUSE Conference Paper Committee is hard at work selecting the best proposals from the submissions. There must be something for everybody: beginners and professionals, technical or more socially oriented. The three simultaneous sessions during three days give over 80 slots. What kind of content can you expect? This article gives you a sneak preview by going over a number of proposals which have already been accepted.

Themes

We shared with you last week that Michael Meeks would be keynote speaker, today we go into the presentations and workshops. The sessions are organized around this year’s theme, which is “The Strength to Change“. With all that’s going on in Free Software, change is a constant for us.

As explained in the CfP announcement, we have four main tracks this year:

• End user track (Geeko Enthusiast)

• Business track (Geeko for suits)

• Community and Project (Geekos around the world)

• Technology & Development (Geeko tech)

End user track

For end users, the openSUSE Conference features a series of interesting talks. For starters, ownCloud fans will enjoy the talk by Jos Poortvliet about ownCloud at home and the cloud features in more talks with sessions on databases (MySQL) and groupware tools. Desktop users will appreciate an update on what is going on in and to be expected from the KDE community (also Jos Poortvliet), the Jolla phone by Michal Hrušecký and more is coming.

Business track

The business track has only one talk confirmed: OpenStack, by Vincent Untz. We’re looking for more sessions interesting for businesses! If you have an interesting subject, send in a proposal.

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Community and Project

In the community sessions you will find talks about the openSUSE community, like a scientific analysis of our collaboration patterns in OBS and bugzilla by Ilias R., information about the openSUSE Travel Support Program from Izabel Valverde and the presentation of our conference location for 2015 by the board. A second subject are sessions around communities in general, with talks about giving presentations and running booths at events by Jos.

Technology & Development

openSUSE development is a central subject for oSC14. Release manager Stephan Kulow will talk about the introduction of staging projects, rings and openQA following the new workflow proposal from last year. Alberto Planas will be giving a long talk on the subject of writing plugins for osc, the Open Build Service command line client.

openQA, the automated operating system testing tool of openSUSE, is poised to be given a greater role in development. At the openSUSE conference you will find a workshop for creating openQA tests as well as a short talk on becoming a contributor to openQA development, both done by Alberto. In other testing news and improvements news, the tools rpmlint and speccleaner will get their share of attention by respectively Ludwig Nussel and Michal Hrušecký.

Not only openSUSE development tools are build - we do more than package. Several talks on openSUSE infrastructure, including our Travel Support Program tool and login infrastructure (Ancor Gonzales Sosa, are in the plan.

Several openSUSE tools for end users will be presented as well. The development of YaST modules will be subject of a workshop and a lightning talk by Josef Reidinger and from Arvin Schnell you can learn how LVM, next-gen filesystem btrfs and file-system snapshot tool snapper fit together. Kernel hacker Oliver Neukum will give a less openSUSE-specific talk about Bcache, a kernel feature to create a transparent SSD based cache for spinning rust. For developers a workshop Ruby for Beginners by Camila Ayresis confirmed and several other programming related sessions are being discussed.

More and more

Above are the sessions currently confirmed - more are submitted and the CfP committee is going over them and making decisions. There is still time to get your session in. But you will have to be quick: sessions come in and are confirmed every day and we’ll run out of slots soon!

If you’re not sure about the subject, how to bring it or your own skills, consider reading our speaker guidelines article as it has plenty of tips on giving presentations and workshops. Also, community manager Jos Poortvliet will give a session about presenting at the first day of the conference.

Last but not least - if you plan on visiting oSC, go and register yourself! If travel costs are an issue, consider applying for travel support.

We want you there!