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Vs: Announcing openSUSE on ARM Release Candidate 1
« Vastaus #20 : 17.12.2012 - klo:05:53 »
Candidates Talk Frankly at Debate
7 December 2012, 6:26 pm

On 6 December, 2012, the 8 candidates standing for election of the 2013 openSUSE Board joined members of the community in an open Q&A Debate session on IRC.   The complete log of that event can be found here.

Candidates participating included:  Matt Barringer, Richard Brown, Carl Fletcher, Manu Gupta, chuck Payne, Robert Schweikert, Stefan Seyfried, and Raymond Wooninck.   The event was moderated by the openSUSE Election

Below is a summarization of the questions asked and answers given by various candidates.  Each answer represents an aggregate of the candidate’s total answers during a specific quesstion session.  To read in full flow context, we urge you to read the full log here.

How do you propose to improve communication within the community? Barringer:  Work reports from the board sent out regularly to the appropriate lists would be a first start IMO.   After all, if people don’t want to talk to each other, they won’t talk to each other :-)  I don’t think the board can force anyone (or any team) to do anything.  Encourage co-operation between teams, sure, but at a certain point it’s all volunteers.

Gupta: The second thing I believe is encourage the community to ask questions to the Board..  between different teams or the same… if it is different teams, the teams should move forward and seek help when necessary.. like the news team will need the marketing team and the gnome team needs artwork for their wallpapers and themes.. somebody will have to step up.

Fletcher:  from my point of view if the candidate is well involved in the community already and has a good understanding of user needs, this will help.  In my dealings with the board as a forum admin, I have found them to be quite in touch with the community and they certainly worked well with us in the forum team to establish some good ground rules in the forum.  all of us here are well involved but a huge number of users that are new to the LinuxLand, not necessarilly opensuse members, just don’t really know about the communication we have (irc, ML), I meet many who don’t even know what irc is and couldn’t even set it up. Maybe we need a better news front, that could include a news letter from the board and it’s doings..

Payne:  I think we should should social media as a means to get the message out. With google translate, there should not be any excuse to translate any reports, messages so that everyone gets what the board is doing. I also believe board should have an open door when it comes to the community so that the community feel we are here for them.  We aren’t using a lot tools that could get our messages out to all the members, I like to see openSUSE News come back like when Mann ran it with PDF a coloum from the boards one what we are working on.  I have seen in the past the board seem to be a bit distant from the community that a lot stuff was only community in the irc channel. We need to be able to take what is spoke here and it out to the community.

Brown: We have some teams in the project who are doing a great job at communicating, both among themselves and between each other – the growing amount of chatter between the GNOME and KDE teams in particular.  I’d like to see more of that kind of open, collaborative communication, and that also means from the board – I like suggestions like Matt’s, people need to know what the board is upto, just as other contributors need to know what is going on in their parts of the project.  I think it should be within the capabilities of the board to encourage and hopefully foster better communication within teams. We’ve got good examples like the desktop teams, it might be the place of the board to nudge teams to follow similar practices if teams are struggling to have the same degree of communication

Seyfried:  I don’t have that proposal on my list :-) but as an opensuse-factory reader/writer, I’m participating in communication with a vital part of the community: the developers.

Schweikert:  This has many aspects, thus we need to have multiple solutions. There is no general answer. – The board needs to communicate better, we need to figure out how to improve cross linking of teams, i.e. developers/packagers with marketing/art-work with forums….. The communication issue probably needs to be an explicit topic for board/project meetings for a while and then we need to divide and conquer the various aspects. This is a very braod topic.  I think the board can suggest a path of communication, i.e. one spokesperson for each of the various teams, this spokes person send announcements/progress/work reports to the announce list for example

Wooninck:  I believe that it is not only the communication to and from the board itself. It is also the communication within the community and with SUSE itself. One improvement could be Newsletters from the Board about topics discussed,  I believe that the board can facilitate communication on team level. Most of the things that disrupts communication is that one team doesn’t know what the other team is doing. By providing a communication platform (Maybe even Social Media, openSUSE News, etc), this could be improved. I have seen this between Gnome and KDE teams. Once you identify common goals, communication will follow.

 How can the community evaluate if the board objectives are met Barringer:  My objectives, like probably everyone elses, would be to a) Push forward a mentorship program and b) Open better communication channels.  The metrics would be: a) Did the mentorship program get off the ground? [Y/N] b) Are people happier with the communication from the board? [Y/N]

Seyfried:  obviously: someone has to define the objectives, and the board needs to report on the fulfillment.   The question is, if being a board member is something that’s attractive in such an environment.  The answer to the question is: the board needs to report on the fulfillment of the objectives. The judgement if they are met or not is onto the reader of that report.

Gupta:  My Objectives : Report quarterly, that should become a norm ; and transparency in cash dealings or a set up where we can work on cashes with SUSE / other sponsors so

Schweikert:  One objective is to establish objectives ;) From my point of view there are none today. Even in a volunteer “organization” I believe in accountability, from everyone not just the board. The board needs to agree on what is needed, then make it a priority, publicize it and work on it to conclusion. May this be a mentor program financial transparency or other topic.  The board needs to be more than a “reportor/monitor”. It is important to keep the hands on the pulse of the community, no question. But some things just need to be initiated by the board and then set free. Board needs to actively call for volunteers for certain intiatives.

Fletcher:  it’s a community, the objectives are driven by the community, the board needs to be listening and have good coms to best understand and interpret such

Payne:  I want to see the Foundation get set up finial it been talked about 4 years. I think once we do that then we can work setting up education programs for new users. Setting up better ambassador project.   Listening to the community on what works, that that feed back improve on it and share it.  we have SUSE Studio, OSB, and Google Summer of Code. All of which we have worked hard one.  I like to see getting more things out.

Brown:  one thing I’d like to bring to the community is the idea of defining a ‘Goal’ for the Project, possibly defining a target audience/use case for the distribution. the metrics for that would be, does the community agree with the need for a goal, and if so, does it select one?

Wooninck:  As the other candidates already indicate it that the main objectives are driven by the community. However the board elections provides already some objectives where the community can indicate whether or not they are important. Each candidate has it’s own goals/objectives of what he wants to establish when he would be elected. Based on the voting we should have quite a good picture of which goals/objectives are important for the community itself. The board should confirm them and report on them

Any proposal to improve the ambassadors program? Schweikert:  There was a talk at osc12 concerning the revamped program, is this not sufficient?  The ambassador program is very important, I think everyone will agree with that and will certainly get the support from the board and any newly elected member. However, suggesting improvements to a new program (2.0) that has not really seen much light of day yet is a bit pre-mature.

Barringer:  I don’t know enough about the program to answer

Brown:  Certainly, warlordfff and others (including myself) have already been working on the Ambassador programme 2.0 – there was a good presentation about it at the openSUSE conference.  I’m not sure I understand the question then. There’s already a community effort to improve the ambassador program, it’s underway, I don’t see why it would need the involvement of the board at this stage, unless theres some problems I’m not aware of?  if there are any problems that crop up implementing ambassadors 2.0, heck yeah I plan to help out and get that programme running, but I’ll be doing that whether or not I’m elected to the board ;-)

 

Seyfried:  I’ll be honest: I don’t know much about the ambassador program, so I don’t have an opinion on it.

Gupta:  I believe Richard, Kostas, and Izabel to give their best. Also, recently Agustin seriously indicated a revamped ambassador program,  So yes there will be improvements :)  I believe is this programme should start off as soon as possible.. We can always shape the imperfections.

Payne:  I have a very special place for the ambassador program. I love us to give the tools they need. Right, I am sad to see we haven’t announce any new ambassador as we have in the past. I like to see the ambassador 2.0 place out so that everyone can read it and give feed back on it.  I like to see us create more pdf like how to install openSUSE, that the ambassador can print out and give to people a long with the DVD that they pass out. I like to see the ambassador become or like teachers so that when they go out they can educate everyone on all the products we have to offer, how to get more people to get into community.  I think if we have our own pdf magazine that would be a big plus for everyone.  The ambassadors our salemen for the community and the more tools and support we give them, the better we look

Plans about creating a foundation Barringer:  It would be really great to have a foundation, but I didn’t mention it in my platform because I don’t know enough about the problems that have been encountered so far in setting one up.  for finances, i can see it being useful.  Not having to rely on a company to handle the bookkeeping and legal aspect would be a huge positive

Brown:  a lot has changed in the last few years, SUSE’s status as a company, SUSE’s relationship with the project. A few years ago there were a lot of frictions which led me to believing we needed a Foundation to exert the independance I felt we were lacking at the time but time has moved on, things have changed, I think SUSE do a much better job of being a sponsor while giving us the room to be our own, independent, Project. If the community still wants one, I’ll support it, but I personally would prefer tackling just any ‘pain points’ which remain such as the concerns about money, receiving donations, etc – all of which I believe could have solutions that do not require a full foundation.  I’m not convinced we couldn’t do that anyway. I would rather investigate options like the Software Freedom Conservancy, rather than push for a full foundation which would have significantly higher administrative burden

Seyfried:  is there a consensus that a foundation is wanted / needed? I have skimmed some of the discussions over the last years, but I don’t seem to remember that there was an outcome?

Payne:  One, I haven’t seen or heard were we stand on Foundation. So I like to work with SUSE and see if can push to get started. I really think if we have the foundation it would help community over all.  I think that now SUSE is back as it own. That we will have the support and can move forward, but we need to see what work as been done. Pick up and move forward.  Ilmehtar, if we had the foundation we could help the project by getting funds to help the many different teams. That was talk that the foundation would be great for that.  maybe I am wrong, but if we had a foundation we could get money from the sell of things to help fund us.  without it, the money would go to SUSE like the money from Google Summer of Code, but I could be wrong.  anyway foundation would be a plus for transparency in my opinion.

Wooninck:  I agree with seife that the bigger question is if a foundation is still wanted / needed.

Fletcher:  *too many balls in the air?… whatever the community drives for must have a solid objective and reason, don’t just do it for doing it sake *or just do it because we like the sound of it..

Schweikert:  The idea of a foundation was born at a completely different time of the openSUSE project. Since the idea was born many changes have occurred at SUSE. I think the idea of a foundation is stuck in peoples head and while it was needed at the time the idea was born I am not certain this is still the case today. Further I am not certain that anyone, or collectively, we have taken stock an re-evaluated whether or not the foundation.  I also think many in the community are a bit naive about what it means to be a foundation. We are not going to get sponsors beating down our doors just because we are a foundation, to name just one example. Fund raising is hard work and requires dedicated people.  There are areas where things need to be improved, I do not see a Foundation as a silver bullet.

Gupta:  To really answer these questions I feel we need to ask ourselves a few questions.. What are the tasks related to it? Like Finances, More transparency, More paper work, More independence, More sponsors.. The second question is are we ready to have a foundation? I believe no, If you ask why  +1

Dec 06 09:46:43     Then my answer would be we never took the trouble to get independent while SUSE was with us.. so now I believe we should work on the smaller bits and maybe in the next 6 months or so we will be ready smaller bits includes reporting and maintaining small amounts of case. etc.. That would be my answer.  I say.. Foundation can be a consequence once we handle the more important issues at hand

Will board participation impact your participation in other openSUSE activities, time-wise?

Seyfried:  yes, it will, obviously: time spent on board matters will not be spent on packaging / bugfixing.  everything else would be just ignoring the fact that a day has only 24 hours and that there is a life beyond openSUSE :-).

Fletcher:  likely yes, but I have a pretty flexible day, everyday and my admin and mod team all give great support in the forum.  We are all volunteers (mostly) and it’s amazing the support we all give if you ask me

Brown:  I think it’s going to have some impact, but as I’m re-arranging stuff in my life to improve the amount of time I have to contribute, I hoping the teams I’m most involved in will probably still see a net increase in my activity.  even if I wasn’t shuffling stuff about – yes, there are people already ‘backing me up’ with my contributions in artwork, and of course the great group of gallant gnomers

Gupta:  So far.. Last year my only contribution was GSoC organizing and due to my sudden movement to Korea, I was not able to help a lot in GCI ; But I believe that was a transition period for me and I will continue to do this.. Furthermore, I am already talikng to last year’s GSoC admins regarding this so that if I am busy / unavailable, there is someone to take care of it.  I would limit myself to doing 2 or 3 things successfully rather than try everywhere

Schweikert:  Yes, I suspect there will be an impact on my other openSUSE contributions. However, when I see this impact occur I plan to ask for help. At this point there is no “backup” person.

Wooninck:  The board will indeed be taking a lot of time and this will reduce the time that I can spend on package maintenance. However I believe that the KDE team is able to compensate and I was only allowed to be a candidate if I promised to still spend some of the time on packaging

Payne:  I am only doing Ambassador work there are may of us. Plus, my work on the SELF board.  I wasn’t active last year because the birth of my daugter and change jobs, but I am getting more time to work again. I been do a bit of writing and I am will have time.

Relationship to open-slx Brown:  I’d argue whether or not we’ve lost a ‘lot of members’ to open-slx – all of their websites community links point back to openSUSE community pages.  I think it’s nice that we make such a good distribution that they chose to make a derivative of it, and I’m pretty sure most of their contributors are still, directly and indirectly, contributing to ‘our’ project.  we’re an open source project – as long as they’re not breaching GPL or other licenses, isn’t that ‘take our stuff and make it better’ actually something we quite like? Heck, SUSE have Studio which makes thousands upon thousands of openSUSE derivatives.  the open-slx forums have 58 registered users, I’m sure one or two of them is bound to have contributed something back to openSUSE at some point, and if that hunch is correct that’s actually a pretty good rate of return.

Schweikert:   Loosing contributors/members is not a good thing, but also inevitable, people move on to other things for whatever reason. I was not aware that there was a particular problem with open-slx.  Taking openSUSE and building a product on top of it is a great compliment to our work, we should be happy about that. There will always be people that leave the project and move on.   Stephan used to work for SUSE, so have others. Some choose to stay involved in openSUSE, other choose not to. I am not certain there is much we can do as a board. Now if there is a “mass exodus” we have to look at the situation but having a handful of people leave is not what I would consider a “mass exodus”.

Barringer:  anyway, people should choose the distro that best fits them, and if open-slx is better for someone, more power to them.  The first distro I worked for recompiled RedHat packages.  SUSE started out similarly.  I can’t complain at all about open-slx.

Wooninck:  The KDE area didn’t loose any members to open-slx, but the loss was more due to the reorganization of the boosters team.  However we should have a look how this impacts the divers teams within the openSUSE project. It could be that if all of them were working in a particular area, that could create issues in that area. But in general you can not prevent people from switching distro nor community.

Payne:  well from what I heard, open-slx is taking the work of openSUSE and selling their box edition base on it..  we lost S. Mann to them, our new editor for years.  We have lost a few others. I know at one point Novell was were that they were trying to set up a new SUSE..   I been wiry about open-slx, I hate us to lose good people. I hate to see the work being taking with out them giving something back to us.  I haven’t seen open-slx give anything back, maybe I am wrong.  I know people are going to copy left, but it would be great to see them give back. Even it is just a little here and there.   I know the board can’t control it.  I remember how before there was a SUSE that the guys were helping out Slackware, because of the work they did, knew they could do a better job and created SUSE. BUt for a while you can see them giving back to Slackware.

 

 

 

 

 

Source: openSUSE News


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Vs: Announcing openSUSE on ARM Release Candidate 1
« Vastaus #21 : 17.12.2012 - klo:05:53 »
openSUSE Conference 2013 in Thessaloniki, Greece. OPA!
10 December 2012, 4:02 pm

 We are very happy to inform you that next year’s openSUSE Conference (oSC13), the yearly get together of our community, will happen in July in the beautiful city of Thessaloniki, Greece. oSC13 will bring together a wide variety of Free and Open Source (FOSS) contributors to collaborate on one of the major Linux distribution projects. In exciting talks, workshops and social events our community will bring alive our motto “Have a lot of fun”.

We are entering the organization phase right now and have not yet settled on an exact date and location but we will let you know, right here on news.opensuse.org, once we have that info. In the meantime how about you help us organize oSC13?

We need you at the kick off meeting! To make this the most awesome conference ever, we are looking for people who are willing to help out. We need you! There is a lot of organizing to be done, logos to be drawn, websites to be designed, schedules to be made, hotels to be booked, sponsors to be found and a million of other things you can help with. So to kick off the organization team and to get everyone on the same page we are going to meet this Thursday, December 13th on IRC to discuss what we need to do and how we are going to do it. If you’re looking for a chance to give back to the openSUSE community this is it!

When: 2012-12-13 at 15:00 UTC

Where: #opensuse-project on the freenode network

Who: Everybody who want’s to make oSC13 great

If you, for whatever reason, can’t participate but still want to help you should subscribe to our conference mailinglist:

opensuse-conference@opensuse.org

we are going to post meeting minutes there and will use this list to further organize oSC13.

Let’s get going and make oSC13 in Thessaloniki the best conference ever!

Source: openSUSE News


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Vs: Announcing openSUSE on ARM Release Candidate 1
« Vastaus #22 : 17.12.2012 - klo:19:00 »
openSUSE’s 2013 New Board Members are…
17 December 2012, 3:56 pm

As of 23:00 UTC on 16 December, 2012, the openSUSE Project’s members completed the Fifth election of the openSUSE Board.  At stake were two seats of the five electable seats.  With 8 candidates, the community definitely had a broad choice of qualified candidates to choose from.

In the end, the two top vote-getters were Raymond Wooninck (tittiacoke) and Robert

Robert SchweikertRobert Schweikert Schweikert, (robjo) respectively.  They will join the openSUSE Board on January 9th during the transitional meeting of the regularly scheduled Project meeting heldon the Freenode IRC Channel at 17:00 UTC.

The Election Officials would like to congratulate all of thecandidates for a great campaign season.  These candidates included Matt Barringer, Richard Brown, Carl Fletcher, Manu Gupta, Chuck Payne and Stefan Seyfried.  All of these candidates demonstrated a commitment to the Project and exemplified the Guiding Principles which the Project, as a whole, is founded upon.

We join the rest of the community in looking forward to an exciting year to come as

Raymond WooninckRaymond Wooninck the new Board embarks on new initiatives and directions.  And we thank the community for giving us the opportunity to serve as members of the election committee.

Sincerely, The openSUSE Election Committee
  • Izabel Valverde
  • Thomas Schmidt
  • Bryen M Yunashko

Source: openSUSE News


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Vs: Announcing openSUSE on ARM Release Candidate 1
« Vastaus #23 : 18.12.2012 - klo:19:00 »
openSUSE 12.3 Milestone 2 released
18 December 2012, 6:39 pm

A month’s work since Milestone 1 shows that the new Release Team are hitting their stride, as they have reviewed and checked in more than 470 updated packages, far more than early milestones in previous releases.

Desktops and apps The biggest update is in LibreOffice, which jumps from 3.5.4 to 3.6.3. This new version of the office suite fixes a lot of annoying bugs and improves DOCX compatibility. Also this release includes a lot of new functionality, like adding the Lanczos image algorithm for resizing, which reduces aliasing in resized images. In Calc, there are several new functions, like support for color scales and data bars in XLSX and ODS document formats. Please check the release notes for a full description of the main fixes and new features.

In a change to policy, KDE 4.10 Beta 2 has been added to Factory already. Usually only finished KDE releases are added, but since more KDE team developers are working on Factory, it made sense to perform early integration and testing in Factory now. So, if everything goes as planned, the final version of openSUSE will arrive in March including KDE 4.10.0 or 4.10.1 (expected in the first week of March). This new version of KDE increases the Qt Quick usage in Plasma Workspaces. In 4.10, additional desktop components are implemented using this declarative technology instead of C++ for greater stability and easier theming. Okular now uses less memory when zooming in on big PDFs, and a new indexer replaces the last Strigi components, allows faster and more reliable indexing of documents. You can expect much more functionality and bug fixing in the final release of KDE 4.10.

Other KDE changes include kwebkitpart 1.3, which adds Access Key support, automatic scrolling and manual spell checking support for forms, as well as on demand plugin loading; and appmenu-qt joins the standard installation, allowing application menus to be shown at the top of the screen or in a menu button on the window border.

After a period of stabilization work, GNOME 3.6.3 found its way into this milestone. The GNOME interface for PackageKit is at version 3.6.1, which fixes a segfault error when a distribution upgrade is available. This GNOME version is better integrated with systemd, and has a new “Airplane Mode”, that switches off all radios, including Bluetooth.

Claws Mail has been updated to 3.9. This little GTK email client and news reader is known for being fast, extensible and easy to configure. It adds IMAP server side search, has several speed-ups and optimizations, a better GnuPG integration and more than thirty bug fixes.

Platform The GNU C library was updated. glibc 2.17 improves ARM and multi-arch subsystems, and adds fixes for crypto bugs. DBUS 1.6.8 includes new service ownership rule possibilities, and many security, bugs, and performance fixes.

Another updated package is QEMU, which goes from 1.2.0 to 1.3.0. With QEMU we can easily create and run virtual machines. This new version improves  live migrations of virtual machines. That means that we can now stop a virtual machine and continue the execution in another place without noticeable problems. QEMU 1.3.0 adds many newly virtualized devices and chipsets.

LLVM is one of those cool projects that everyone knows, but few can exactly say what it is. Fascinate Xmas parties with the knowledge that LLVM is a set of libraries that allow aggressive optimizations of a intermediate ad-hoc language (known as LLVM IR) and the compilation of this language to a specific architecture and processor. Clang is a C / C++ / Objective-C compiler that translate the high level language to this IR language, and is a really fast compiler. If this description interests you, then you’ll be pleased to know that M2 updates LLVM/Clang to 3.2rc2. This version of LLVM improves the Clang diagnostics, this means that we will have better error messages that explain more clearly what mistakes we are making. LLDB is the new command line debugger for LLVM/Clang. It uses the Clang parser for the C++ debugger. And there is a lot of new functionality in the optimizer, like a new high-level loop optimizer and the automatic parallelizer.

Mono 3 now has a complete C# 5.0 compiler, with all the async functionality enabled, and adds interesting optimizations in the garbage collector (mainly for SMP systems) and in the runtime library. This is a big version change, so may cause breakage with Mono 2.10 code.

This milestone comes with a 3.6 kernel, but don’t despair, packages for 3.7 are already cooking.

Distribution libzypp 12.5 includes new package management transaction logging features.

As part of the SuSEconfig removal work, permissions now applies changes following installation or upgrade, to ensure new permissions are effective regardless of package installation order.

 

Source: openSUSE News


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Vs: Announcing openSUSE on ARM Release Candidate 1
« Vastaus #24 : 02.02.2013 - klo:00:33 »
Opening the Can: initial support for openSUSE on the ARM Chromebook
8 January 2013, 10:33 pm

    • Amazon’s top selling laptop doesn’t run Windows or Mac OS, it runs Linux
buff.ly/11ahUlK#Linux#Chrome

    • by @
sjvn— sjvn (@sjvn) January 8, 2013


According to ZDnet, “Amazon’s top selling laptop doesn’t run Windows or Mac OS, it runs Linux”. And that top selling device is the Samsung Series 3 Chromebook. Billed as an ideal second computer just aiming to make it simple to access online services, without the hassle and risk of running another full Windows machine. These devices drop all of the cruft that has accompanied regular laptops on their journey from the swamps, and have just enough local storage to boot a Linux kernel and a stripped down OS based around Google’s Chrome browser, making them thin, light and affordable. And now, we’ve done something cool with it…

Samsung_Chromebook_backview_webres

The Samsung Series 3 Chromebook… Several different Chromebooks are currently available, a few based on the Intel architecture, and the Samsung 3-series Chromebook, which is an ARM machine based around a Samsung Exynos 5 SoC. This relatively powerful dual core ARM A15 processor is clocked at 1.7 GHz and integrates the ARM Mali T604 graphics core and 2GB of RAM. Only 16GB of local storage is provided by an internal SD card for the operating system, indicating that these machines are intended to be natives of the Cloud. If you think of a Raspberry Pi, BeagleBoard, PandaBoard, ShivaPlug or other small hardware hacker board when someone says Linux on ARM, prepare to be amazed when you see what the ARM Chromebook can do. Phoronix, Anandtech and other sites have posted impressive initial benchmarks showing the performance advantage the Exynos 5 enjoys over most hacker boards. This processor offers around 40-60% better performance compared to previous Intel Atom based Chromebooks in the CPU area and easily 10-20x the graphics power.

Aside from the nice SoC, the laptop features two USB ports (a 2.0 and a 3.0 port, although the latter didn’t perform well in tests), a HDMI output, a SD card reader and 2.4GHz and 5GHz 802.11n wifi. It comes with a 11.6 inch big 1366×768 pixels screen, a quite good keyboard and a no-button click-trackpad offering two-finger scrolling support. Last but not least, it should offer around 6 hours of battery life on the build in 30Wh battery.

… and openSUSE! Not content to let all the Cloud glory go to server-side products like SUSE Cloud, a small team of SUSE engineers and openSUSE community members have been working on supporting the ARM Chromebook with openSUSE, and can now report their first success: a ‘mostly working’ openSUSE 12.2 image that you can boot from (using a USB stick so the stock image is left untouched). This image already includes a usable XFCE desktop. There is also a Chromebook version of openSUSE 12.3 Milestone 2 available here for the more adventurous. Since getting the main distribution to build for generic ARM architectures in November, the work has focused on adaptations to get openSUSE to run properly on this specific hardware. This includes creating a boot loader to boot the openSUSE kernel. ChromeOS uses a two-stage bootloader, but this cannot be configured to boot another operating system. Instead, the stock ROM-based first stage bootloader can be made to start a custom bootloader when the Chromebook is in developer mode. This is contained in our disk image.

What works The basics you need for using this device are working quite well. In developer mode, you can dual-boot from USB or an external SD card and then you’ve got:

  • The XFCE desktop
  • Wireless!
  • SD card reader
Limitations The device isn’t perfect yet. For example, boot is very slow due to the time it takes to load the initial ramdisk. The team thinks this is a bug in the way the USB subsystem is initialized on this hardware. Other issues include:

  • Accelerated graphics are not yet possible.
  • The image cannot yet be installed to the Chromebook’s internal storage, as parted can’t yet handle the partition table on the factory disk image
  • The ChromeOS security model might make dual-booting from the internal SD card a challenge.
Next steps Of course, we’re working on these things. The plan is as follows:

  • Create a bugzilla category for this project so you can tell us what breaks
  • Develop openSUSE 12.3 native support
  • Test and improve power management and battery lifecycle
  • package OpenGL ES and configure UIs to use it, giving accelerated graphics
Join in the fun Currently, Chromebooks are available directly from Google’s Play store, from Amazon and from other online retailers in the UK and the US. Retail availability is limited to a selection of Best Buy stores in the US. The ARM Chromebook costs USD$249 or GBP229 so it’s cheap and the hardware is decent. In Germany, the playstore shows it but it is not available yet – same in most other countries around the world. This will hopefully change soon…

If you’re lucky and have gotten your hands on a Series 3 Chromebook, visit this Wiki page and get some Green for your Chrome!

Source: openSUSE News


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Vs: Announcing openSUSE on ARM Release Candidate 1
« Vastaus #25 : 02.02.2013 - klo:00:33 »
The openSUSE 12.3 Beta is Out! Time for Pizza…
17 January 2013, 4:45 pm

Beta_pizza_party_istanbul poster

According to plan, today openSUSE 12.3 Beta sees the light. The beta comes with mostly smallish changes as we’re in serious testing waters now – we hope you’re out there to help us clear the way to the final release! The first RC is already coming on February 7 so this Beta needs a good workout. As is tradition in openSUSE, the Beta will be celebrated with a BetaPizzaParty at the Nuremberg headquarters on Wed 30th of Jan starting 16:00 CET! Read on to find out a bit more about the Parties and Pizzas and what’s new and about the awesome 12.3 Polish Hackaton which is being organized this weekend at the SUSE headquarters!

Hackaton Coolest things first: to make the release even better, we’ve organized a hackathon in Nuremberg! The goal of the meeting is to squash bugs, polish up some features, close the seams to make it all look and work well. We have a list of about 240 bugs to work on and hope to significantly reduce that number. Of course, there will be snacks, food and fun in between the hacking and anyone is welcome to join also remotely.

We will have a G+ Hangout, starting at 10:00 CET until about 12:00 CET, pause for lunch and continuing around 14:00 CET until an undetermined time.

If you’d like to be in the hangout, find the event here!

Prosciutto, anchovy and onion pizza.

BetaPizzaPartyTime! Secondly, it’s time to organize a BetaPizzaParty in the coming weeks! In Nürnberg we have the usual event (this time planned for Wednesday the 30th at 16:00) flooded with Pizza at the SUSE offices and we’re hoping other SUSE offices will join our fun. Be sure to check the wiki page! for locations. History tells us it would be extremely surprising if there would be nothing organized in Greece – anyone up for organizing one in Brazil? Taiwan? India?  But if there’s no party around, you can organize your own. Get the Pizza (and a place to eat it with room for testing laptops)! It’s not a big deal – do it in a local pizza place, at your home or in a room in your office… Just invite friends & colleagues and who knows, if you put your party on the wiki, a new friend will show up!

If you are unsure on how to do it, read this and this for some tips. In short, you don’t have to be too ambitious. It’s just about the fun.

Don’t forget the party part of a BetaPizzaParty! Make sure you’ll have some fun at some point. One way of doing that is of course to not just order pizzas but make your own following this awesome Geeko Pizza Party Recipe.

Testing and even helping out! Of course the focus of the BetaPizza Party is on openSUSE 12.3 Beta. This means installing it and submitting bug reports when you bump into trouble. You can download the openSUSE 12.3 Beta from the openSUSE download site. It might make sense to download it and put it on an USB stick or a DVD so people can get to work right away!

Pizza that makes you wanna cry!

Bugs should be reported and can be tracked via Bugzilla. Find a how-to on reporting bugs on the wiki.

Discussions about openSUSE development takes place on the factory mailing list. openSUSE Factory is the development release of openSUSE. If you want to help out, please see the wiki page on contributing to Factory. Contributing is easy and very welcome! We happen to have this awesome tool called the Open Build Service. Think of it as a Github for packagers: Branch, Update and create a submit Request for a Package. In openSUSE terms you’ve just BURPed and we’ll be proud of you ;-)

OBS has a commandline but also a easy browser interface – you can even fix and build packages from a mobile phone or a Windows desktop!

There is plenty of help available on the Development page on the openSUSE wiki and you are more than welcome to ask for help on the openSUSE factory mailing list or on the openSUSE IRC channels!

Features And now for an overview of what this new Beta brings.

Desktops and apps KDE and openSUSE

The Beta comes with 4.10 RC2 of KDE’s workspaces and applications. KDE has announced a third RC due to some late changes and this version is part of a testing sprint organized by the KDE Quality team. openSUSE KDE packagers have build a special live Image to test this release but we urge you to get the Beta packages from software.opensuse.org as they are of course newer.

File manager Thunar (well known to XFCE users as it is the default file manager there) introduces tab support, improved bookmark handling (including easily adding remote bookmarks), improved UI and a check for free space before copying starts. There have also been extensive performance improvements.

Another filemanager part of this release is PCMan, part of the LXDE lightweight desktop. The 1.1 release brings some UI improvements like disabling items which cannot act (like ‘copy’ on selected items) in the menu and toolbar, the option to ‘treat backup files as hidden’, the ability to change the colums in the Detailed List View and search engine support. Underlying improvements were made to stability and performance, as well as bringing new support for unmounting removable media without ejecting them and some other small changes.

hackweek10

In the browser area, the latest Firefox 18 is part of this release as well, bringing better performance and scaling of web content to openSUSE 12.3.

Platform This version brings us up to kernel 3.7.1, bringing a bunch of fixes and new features over the 3.4 release in openSUSE 12.2. New and improved features include:

  • support for metadata checksums and improved quota support in Ext4
  • I/O failure statistics, subvolume quotas, quota groups, snapshot diffs, faster fsync and the ability to disable copy-on-write on a per-file base in btrfs
  • userspace probes for performance profiling with tools like Systemtap or perf and a new “perf trace” tool modeled after strace.
  • Many improvements to networking. The TCP protocol performance work with support for the TCP “Fast Open” mode for both clients and servers and TCP Early Retransmit (RFC 5827) as well as inclusion of the a “TCP small queues” feature and a new network queue management algorithm designed to fight bufferbloat. Other low-level protocol enhancements include support for checkpointing and restoring TCP connections and a new tunneling protocol that allows to transfer Layer 2 Ethernet packets over UDP. New is experimental SMBv2 protocol support as well as stable NFS 4.1 and parallel NFS support and the ability to have safe swapping over NFS/NBD.
  • The kernel now allows for Android-style opportunistic suspend and has support for suspending to disk and memory at the same time which prevents these “yup, ran out of battery so now you lost data” annoyances with suspend-to-ram.
  • In the security area we see added support for signed kernel modules, the Intel “supervisor mode access prevention” (SMAP) security feature, VFIO, which allows safe access from guest drivers to bare-metal host devices and a sandboxing mechanism that allows to filters syscalls.
  • Other improvements include the ability to do SCSI over Firewire and USB, support for the PCIe D3cold power state; and the usual huge number of new and improved drivers.
LLVM, which was extensively described for Milestone 2, is updated to the final 3.2 release.

Other larger changes in this version unclude an update of gdb to 7.5 and postgresql got updated to version 9.2.

LibreOffice 3.6.x will be what ships with openSUSE 12.3 as we’d like to ensure availability of a dependable and a stable set of office tools for everyone, but 4.0 packages will be available and openSUSE 12.3 contains all the required dependencies for users to build 4.0 themselves if they like.

Distribution libzypp 12.6 got further improvements and bugfixes, while some more work in the package management area is coming for RC1 including an update to PackageKit and a solution to the PackageKit-blocking-zypper issues.

Note: as part of the SuSEconfig removal work, permissions now applies changes following installation or upgrade, to ensure new permissions are effective regardless of package installation order.

Have a lot of fun You can get the goodies at this page. Have fun – we think it’s already a pretty decent release and we’re working as hard as we can to make it even better. Whatever bugs you find, remember: even a Beta testing (with or without Pizza Party) is about having fun! It doesn’t matter what technical knowledge you have – as long as you are having fun. And don’t eat too much pizza, overeating tends to be unhealty.

Enjoy!

Source: openSUSE News


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Vs: Announcing openSUSE on ARM Release Candidate 1
« Vastaus #26 : 02.02.2013 - klo:00:33 »
The openSUSE Conference – a Few Months Later
21 January 2013, 11:00 pm

oSC Logo-700x400

This article attempts to give a bit of an overview of what happened at oSC 12. And that is lots and lots, as you can see in the Google Plus event page for oSC12 and LinuxDays. You can find a lot of CC licensed pictures here and of course in this article. Read on to get some idea of the feedback we’ve got, the number of visitors and results from the BoF’s!

Friday registration time!Friday registration time!

Feedback As many people noted, the first two days were clearly a ‘FOSDEM like event’ as Klaas Freitag and Richard Brown both noted in their blogs. Over 90% of our participants liked the co-location with LinuxDays, Gentoo and SUSE Labs according to our survey and this is what many people said on the spot as well. The University as venue was greatly appreciated: it was big, so big you sometimes would look at a seemingly empty booth area, despite the over 550 visitors! That was of course also partially due to the many concurrent sessions we had. Of course, we’re a bunch that likes to sit and get work done. That’s something which could be improved, as Wolfgang Rosenauer noted – especially the second location lacked a dedicated hackspace.

Blogs and such There has been a number of blogs about the conference, a few of which have been falling off quickly as the videos were also posted to the planet.opensuse.org timeline. For your convenience we’ve listed them here, if any are missing, let us know:

Tech TalkTech Talk



Part of the Booth area (Saturday)Part of the Booth area (Saturday) The press A number of magazines and websites reported on our event – including the Czech sites Linux Expresroot.cz 1, root.cz 2 and electrotrends. There’s a blog about Gentoo bing there too. Then there was a number of international sites covering the event, like the Var guy and more.

And of course our very own news.opensuse.org had articles about Day One, Day Two and Monday, the first ‘real’ openSUSE Conference day.

The program We had an amazing and stuffed program. Overstuffed, as some said – with 6 or 7 concurrent tracks (and shouldn’t we count the hallway and the booth areas?) it was quite crazy. openSUSE allows you the freedom to choose – that much is certain. The awesomely good news is that the main tracks were recorded by our awesome video team and most of the productive BoF sessions in the two ‘openSUSE only’ days have notes posted on the relevant mailing lists.

Videos You can watch video’s of the talks on the openSUSE TV channel (oSC 2012 playlist) and our blip.tv channel. During the event we usually had about 40-80 viewers per stream on our bambuser channel and as they also joined the chatter in IRC, this was very cool to have. Afterwards, the videos got hundreds to thousands of more viewers so it was very much worth recording the talks. Big thanks to our video crew, whose names you can find below reverse-ordered on length of their email address.

Training sessionTraining session

  • Marco Fleckinger
  • Jan Tomanek
  • Wolfgang Rosenauer
  • Theodoros Chatzimichos
  • Matthias Griessmeier
  • Dimitris Papapoulios
  • Petr Pulc (+ his team)
  • Christian Boltz
  • Gerhard Schlotter
  • Bernhard Wiedemann
  • Thomas Schmidt
  • Vit Pelcak
  • Robert Wawrig
  • Kilian Petsch
  • Harald Müller-Ney
  • Martin Caj
  • Christopher Hoffmann
  • Jürgen Weigert


Hallway HackingHallway Hacking Work done Events like these are useful in many ways and on many levels. Of course, it’s nice from a marketing point of view. We got news articles out, lots of video’s which got thousands of viewers, press visits us and interviews get done.

Then there is the social side: meeting your fellow hackers, sometimes after only having seen them online for a year or even ever. That’s awesome, fun, interesting, cool and what not. It’s why we had the opening party and other parties, but also the food in the evening, the ‘hallway track’ and group photo.

Last but not least, there is work being done. Problems get discussed, code and packages get hacked together and decisions get made, informally but also during BoF sessions. And most of these BoF sessions have a log send to our mailing lists, which allows us to recap the results of a few of them below.

Fancy DevicesFancy Devices

Project Meeting Our bi-weekly Project Meeting was organized as BoF at the conference. Not only the conference itself was discussed but also the progress on Summer of Code and the Google Code In, the openSUSE Summit and the future of Free Software in South America (and how we can help). You can find more details in the mail to the Project mailing list.

Landing Page BoF A handful of people had a BoF about the opensuse.org landing page and how to improve it. Notes were put into actions on a Trello board and since then, some progress has been made. See here for the report mail.

Future of the OBS BoF A well attended BoF was held on the future of the Open Build Service. There’s an overview of OBS at the event, talk about the future (mobile client for package reviews, native build hosts for ARM, user experience improvements for the webUI, adapting OBS for other personas than just ‘casual packagers’ and more), ideas for new features and much more in the overview of OBS at oSC here.

Project MeetingProject Meeting

A particularly cool idea is to add some Gamification elements to the webUI. Like badges for the Nth built package or the Nth submitrequest; top packager lists and stuff like that. This was partially inspired by this talk about Gamification in the Future Media track.

Admin BoF The admin@ BoF was more or less skipped (because we extended the www.o.o BoF). Instead Christian Boltz annoyed some people in the hallway track. Some notes from him:

  • the biggest problem is (surprise, surprise) time (to be exact: no/not enough time or a too big TODO list). This blocks several admin tasks that are considered “not too important” – at least in comparison with other items on the TODO list
  • one of the “not too important” things is the mailinglist merge/shutdown, but I’m sure there are more
  • someone stepping up as admin for a part of the infrastructure is always welcome, but there might be practical problems like “allowing external people access to $server is difficult”. Nevertheless – if you want to help, ask on admin@opensuse.org
  • some parts of the infrastructure don’t have a maintainer, but it seems we don’t have a list of the affected parts (and I’m not even sure if we have a complete list of the *.o.o infrastructure somewhere)
  • nobody knew something about the wiki update status (except the parts I already knew) – I’ll have to ask Scott on the -web ML about the status
openSUSE Development Discussions Of course there were discussions on openSUSE Development.

Live video steaming = hard work!Live video steaming = hard work!

Robert Schweikert brought forward the Maintainer Model cleanup (see his report here. His basic proposal, which got support at the conference, is to move forward changing the model as follows:

  • In the web UI one will no longer see inherited project maintainers on the package page, only the “true” package maintainers. (Inherited “maintainers” will be hidden in an expandable tree)
  • We will collect information about all packages in all devel projects that feed factory. We will generate a list of packages that have no maintainer, and a list of packages that need help, i.e. a package that has fewer than 5 maintainers. In addition we will list packages that have more than 5 maintainers and try to encourage maintainers from those packages (to get the number to 5) to take on packages that need help.
  • We want to clean up the devel project maintainer list to a ratio of 10/500 packages with a max of 25.
  • We would like to see a notification on the package page if the package fails to build in factory
  • Would like to see package build status information on the factory status page about the status of the package in it’s devel project.
  • Having the monitor page and the status page presented in the current form is confusing, we need to somehow merge the information.
  • It would be really nice if there were some kind of policy engine that could enforce the “no more than 5 per package” and the “no more than 25 project maintainers” policies.
  • We would like to have some kind of rating system on the devel projects
  • We will produce guidelines for package and product maintainers outlining what is expected.
These are the rough outlines of the “plan”. Obviously there is work to be done and the OBS team already has plenty to do. Robert will document these things and start a wiki page to define the various roles in the development process, up for discussion next.

Cafe allowed a sneak-peek into a talk roomCafe allowed a sneak-peek into a talk room

If you care about these things, agree or disagree – it is highly recommended to read Roberts’ full report and chime in.

Christian Morales Vega shared his ‘point of view’ on the Release Schedule discussion in this mail. To improve the development process and keep Factory in a more stable state, he proposes to make the openSUSE Factory status page more accessible so people more often start fixing issues from there. It’s currently slow to load (30+ seconds is not rare) and not easy to find.

Another change he proposed is that people need to be made to want to work on problems. Right now, the list shows problems which surely someone is working on (but no way to see if that is the case) and lots of issues a particular developer might not be interested in at all. It should be visible if someone is working on a problem and it is important that packages get dumped easier/faster if nobody cares about them, to keep the list short. In that regard, he also proposes to ping a developer by mail if his build breaks other packages – not everyone might care so much but some do.

Group Photo

The Awesome Greeko's Organizing oSC'13The Awesome Greeko’s Organizing oSC’13

Concluding In general, the survey we ran showed that almost half our participants noted that the conference exceeded their expectations and only a few were dis-satisfied, surely due to the high expectations! While there is always room to improve, this event turned out to be impressive and – and unique, as always. The ‘Bootstrapping Awesome’ theme, in which we tried to say that we like to start cool things, came to life: the FIRST Gentoo MiniSummit, the FIRST LinuxDays – and the first time we had Ubuntu, Fedora and other booths at our event… We’re proud of being not only the most Green but also the most Open Linux distro around! And as many of you might already know, the next openSUSE Conference will be in Greece, organized by our faithful Greek team in Thessaloniki.

At the end, we’d like to thank everyone who made this event possible. That includes the local team, especially Michal and Theo. Of course the Video Team, the people manning the registration, those taking care of the booth, Martin Stehno’s pictures, the openSUSE Team (former boosters) and everyone who was there or who we forgot for just being awesome.

See You Next Year under the Greek Sun!

Source: openSUSE News


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Vs: Announcing openSUSE on ARM Release Candidate 1
« Vastaus #27 : 02.02.2013 - klo:00:33 »
openSUSE 12.3 Hackathon in Nuremberg: Progress on ARM, Packagekit and Many Bugs Fixed
23 January 2013, 12:15 pm

group photoOver the weekend of Friday 19 to Sunday 21 January 2013, a group of openSUSE contributors braved heavy snowfalls all over Europe to come to the Nuremberg SUSE office. Following a proposal made to the Board, the openSUSE Team organized this openSUSE 12.3 Bug Squad Hackathon to squash as many bugs as possible during the hot phase of development on the project’s next release. A Google+ Hangout allowed remote community members to participate.

看板! (Kanban) It was decided to work using a Kanban board with tasks on sticky notes identifying what had to be done, what was in progress and what was finished. In addition, A bugzilla query of all 12.3 and Factory bugs was used to find tasks to work on, besides the things the team members had already decided in advance to work on.

chromebook with openSUSE

ARM progress We saw a surge of interest in openSUSE on ARM, as Michal Hrusecky and Tomas Chvatal worked on getting further software built for ARM: the recently released Enlightenment 17, and LibreOffice. Dirk Müller and Alexander Graf worked on getting the openSUSE kernel built for ARM (including the Samsung Series 3 Chromebook), setting up a native ARM build host in OBS as a backup for the default cross-builds used. Dirk also submitted a llvm-enabled Mesa, enabling basic 3D/compositing support on the ARM Chromebook and other devices. The options for GPU acceleration are not sorted yet but there might be news in the coming weeks on that. The ARM team also worked on preparing for the Linux 3.8 kernel as this offers further benefits for ARM hardware. The image build for ARM appliances got fixed and a new product tree will be available here in preparation of a milestone release. Good news is that KDE Applications and the Desktop workspace are built for ARM and should be usable by installing it on top of the JeOS image which is already build.

Several times during the Hackathon, Michal demoed the Samsung Chromebook, showing the OS booting and what was supported (and what wasn’t).

Here is a short video showing how to use openSUSE on the ARM Chromebook:

coordinating work

Fixing openSUSE 12.3 issues: PackageKit, KDE and GNOME A lot of effort was expended on integrating PackageKit 0.8 with openSUSE 12.3. Unhappy voices about PackageKit and its user interfaces have been heard in openSUSE for a long time.  Investigation showed that many of these resulted from the PackageKit backend which connects it to openSUSE’s native zypp package and repository management system.  This had been written several years ago for the SUSE Meego project and since then had seen only minimal maintenance. Since PackageKit 0.8 changes the API substantially, the rewrite this demands provided the ideal opportunity for Stephan Kulow to address these bugs with a complete rewrite of the backend for openSUSE’s needs.

The KDE team members had a lot of work to do on this topic, in testing and adapting Apper 0.8 to openSUSE’s requirements. Alin Elena and Ismail Dönmez tested Apper, while Will Stephenson cleaned up the user interface and changed some of the language it uses to match terminology elsewhere in YaST. Alin also worked on extending KInfoCenter to be a full replacement for kio_sysinfo, which is being dropped from openSUSE 12.3 due to lack of maintenance, and on bug triage. Will worked on updating the KDE Start Menu structure to match upstream Freedesktop.org adaptations, and made some graphical tweaks to KRunner. Besides the PackageKit heavy lifting, Raymond Wooninck worked on a Plymouth bootsplash and did a sweeping triage of KDE bugs reported vs. 12.3.

On the GNOME team front, Richard Brown worked on general Plymouth screen ratio issues, fixing fingerprint scanner configuration in YaST, fixing Mesa OpenGL dependencies for wine and for GNOME, adding the alternate status menu, fixing the default keyring failure, and GRUB on the GNOME Live image. Dominique Leuenberger fixed a number of GNOME integration bugs, including a GDM failure when hostname changes (bnc#538064), reviewed PackageKit-gtk for factory, and improved systemd support in chkconfig

Hangout participants

Online collaboration Online participants via the Hangout worked on testing the openSUSE Live images, quickly finding out that the md5sums used to verify the downloads were incorrect. After finding solutions for that, the GNOME and KDE Live images got tested in a variety of scenarios and some bugs were found and reported like a not working Synaptiks. Also discovered by the remote testers was a mysterious GRUB screen bug which shows up irregularly: a big, strangely animated geeko appears on top of the Grub screen, making it harder to pick a boot option. It lead to a frantic debugging and testing session by Richard Brown, who claimed he probably introduced it but had no idea why or how.

There was also collaboration by the KDE team with Jos Poortvliet (who joined over the Hangout) on creating updated “about openSUSE” messaging, to be used in the Greeter users see on first startup and possibly in other places on the openSUSE wiki for example.

Translations, MySQL and testing tools Tomas Chvatal worked on setting up weblate online translation for openSUSE, and adopting the summit technique for efficient translation used by  KDE. The results will be that all branches of a particular package can be translated in one place, and that contributors can translate more easily, using a web interface. Unfortunately, work was slowed down due to bugs in the upstream pology package responsible for creating the ‘summit’. He also fixed Festival, the text-to-speech system used by KDE 3, enabled tapping in Synaptics, fixed dependencies in the Calibre e-book tool, and put Datovka, a Czech eGov system into review for 12.3. Michal worked on fixing the Compiz build and announced the move to MariaDB as the standard MySQL implementation. He also fixed camsource, by adding a v4l1 wrapper (bnc#714439).

Bernard Wiedemann gave a short presentation on how to write test modules for the OpenQA system. The Hackathon attendees were surprised by how easy it actually is to test-drive a program automatically on every build of openSUSE images. Ludwig Nussel researched Secure Boot technologies. Ismail Dönmez provided an expedited Open Build Service request processing service to the other sprint members.

Hacking into the night

More than coding On Friday afternoon, we had a VIP visit when Ralf Flaxa, SUSE VP Engineering, dropped by the Hackathon to thank the community for their effort and solicit their input as to how SUSE can make life easier for the openSUSE community. Among other things, the openSUSE conference, the upcoming version of SUSE Linux Enterprise and what it meant for openSUSE, infrastructure like Bugzilla and openFATE, package maintenance and SUSE involvement in openSUSE were discussed.

Aside from the hacking, the group took time to visit the watering holes of the Nuremberg old town and make friends over well-known Franconian beers. You can find images from the event, on the Google+ hangout page. It was a fun and productive event with lots of late-night hacking, weird issues being found and fixed and interesting discussions about all kinds of geeky topics. The openSUSE team is looking forward to the upcoming Marketing and Artwork Hackathon!

Edit: 23/1/2013 13:27CET: Fix broken URL

Source: openSUSE News


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Vs: Announcing openSUSE on ARM Release Candidate 1
« Vastaus #28 : 02.02.2013 - klo:00:33 »
openSUSE 12.2: Brought to you by “an extremely talented group of people”
23 January 2013, 9:30 pm

social media logos

In September, the openSUSE community released openSUSE 12.2 all around the world. So what have the responses been since that Wednesday a little over three months ago, and what can we learn for openSUSE 12.3, which is just three months away?

Community feedback Everyone was very enthusiastic about the release. On the social networks we had hundreds of +1′s, likes and shares for the release announcement from the over 12000 Google+ users with openSUSE in their circle. With almost as many followers on Twitter and about 7K on Facebook, these networks were also full of discussions about the release and the sharing of the good news. The general vibe was a good one and there was lots of excitement.

On the various social media and in the article comments section, discussions about the release took place. Quickly after it was out, Will Stephenson first treated us on a picture of Geeko finishing an important download after which Rabauke told us openSUSE would soon see KDE SC 4.9.1 packages. This spread quickly to the other social media and as soon as packages were available, discussions about the merits of this release ensued. We also heard that GNOME 3.6 would have packages as soon as it is released, and GNOME 2 fork Mate and the GNOME Shell alternative Cinnamon were both packaged and built for openSUSE 12.2 as well!

Aside from these Open Build Service projects, the awesome Tumbleweed was update rebased on openSUSE 12.2 and the the Studio team let us know that openSUSE 12.2 was available for your customization.

facebook cover

Our channels also discussed the release itself. We informed our community about the features of openSUSE and availability of top technologies like LibreOffice and Firefox. People wrote about their first impressions and what they liked. On Facebook, many people posted screenshots of their new desktop like this, this, this and this. It was noted that the french hosting provider OVH already has a cheap hosting option (down to 15 euros a month for a dedicated server) with openSUSE 12.2 as beta available in the release week!

Troubleshooting and advice People of course asked each other for advice – is it time for btrfs on 12.2 or not yet? Is it any faster? And what is the hardware support of 12.2?

There was trouble shooting with wifi, vlc, java and more. A geeko as flexible as ours can never be absolutely perfect. Gertjan Lettink, one of the Facebook group administrators, pointed out that Facebook is not the right venue for support, we’ve got forums for that – but still, lots of help was asked and given.

To promote the release, the release team did a well visited google hangout (picture) and our artwork team provided you all with a twitter background and a facebook cover!

There was also a video made to show openSUSE install and boot to a KDE desktop compressed to 1 minute and 30 seconds – which got over 15.000 views until today!

Reception of the press We’ve seen a lot of positive feedback regarding openSUSE 12.2 via the press with over 60 articles and reviews recorded by us. It had the VAR guy saying he believes openSUSE is “an important force in the larger open source ecosystem” and serverwatch headlining “openSUSE 12.2 Stabilizes Linux”.  While those of us in the know recognize journalistic hyperbole when we see it, it’s great to have a pat on the back.

The most thorough review to date is the look at the Great Lizard from the Linux Action Show team. Not only did they love our release – they also encountered a few issues.

On the positive side, the guys absolutely loved the release in terms of stability. They greatly appreciate our focus on a longer release cycle and slightly more conservative package selections to provide something that does its job well. The attention to detail in the installer, offering a separate /home partition, detecting mount points (including Windows!) and the ability to do a headless install over a VNC connection raised eyebrows: impressive!

They also recognized openSUSE as having an absolutely awesome desktop experience, especially running KDE’s Plasma Desktop. openSUSE 12.2 boots fast, starts applications fast and in general brings a completely smooth desktop experience. It’s smart – too. They noticed openSUSE offering to create a separate /home folder upon installation (and even detecting your existing one) and responded with “finally, someone gets it!”. They also saw that openSUSE detects the windows D:\ drive and mounts it under /windows_d – which makes for a “seamless experience” according to the reviewers.

Lack of focus in openSUSE? Criticism came on the focus of openSUSE: is it a desktop or a server? The enterprise functionality on the server side is there – in openSUSE, you can click a domain controller ready in a few clicks. But it just can’t compete with CentOS which offers binary compatibility with its enterprise cousin – you can drop-in RHEL once you’ve tested on CentOS. Same in Ubuntu – support is always close to what you are running. From openSUSE to SLE is still a hurdle. The gentlemen felt that with the default KDE desktop “the most attractive I’ve seen”, openSUSE has by far the best Enterprise-ready desktop in hands, beating the Ubuntu and Red Hat competition. It is attractive, fast, responsive and easy, maybe openSUSE should focus on their desktop more?

PackageKit issues at LACPackageKit issues at LAC

But there were also some problems. Prime among those were issues with package management – the discrepancy between the native zypper tool & YaST for administration by root on one hand and the PackageKit side of things with Apper and gpk-tools on the other hand has a lack of consistency which creates some confusion. Patterns are cool but have dependency issues and are hard to discover. Also, YaST can be a tad verbose in listing and resolving package conflict and letting you handle it – sometimes this could be made a bit easier. They also felt that our handling of proprietary drivers (or rather, lack of handling that) was a bit surprising and last but not least, one of them bumped into a bug in our brand new boot loader GRUB2.

The openSUSE team worked with community members to fix the issues the gentlemen encountered (as well as many others) and we can now confidently say that the problems they LAS reviewers bumped into have been decisively fixed or will be, soon. Right now, for example, Release Manager Coolo is working hard on making sure PackageKit 0.8 is in shape and will not be blocking any zypper activity or the other way around. So, that, leaves us with their summary:

“openSUSE is a cohesive distro and it feels like it is being done by an extremely talented group of people.”.

What more can we say?

KTorrent-logo

Download numbers We again collected some statistics on the downloads of openSUSE. There’s quite a drop in downloads – our release manager attributed this to the delay. Many people were already running the latest RC, which was very stable, and just did a zypper dup on the release day. True or not, combined with a more and more popular Tumbleweed rolling release, it probably explains at least some of the difference. But at the same time – there’s surely work we can do to improve, both in terms of marketing as well as development.

The number of downloaded openSUSE installation DVD’s and Netinstall images within the first 24 hours totals over 42.000 with almost half (46%) of that 64 bit. On bittorrent, another 8.000 ISO images were downloaded. GNOME and KDE LiveCD’s did great too, with around 12K KDE and 8.5K GNOME downloads from bittorrent and download.opensuse.org combined. A complete breakdown for the first day on download.opensuse.org:

  • NonOss Addon CD BiArch: 2151
  • 32-bit x86: 48075 (total)
    • Net: 1481
    • DVD: 21352
    • GNOME-LiveCD: 3417
    • KDE-LiveCD: 4542
    • Addon-Lang: 2987
  • 64-bit x86-64: 44234 (total)
    • Net: 1809
    • DVD: 17483
    • GNOME-LiveCD: 3234
    • KDE-LiveCD: 4523
    • Addon-Lang: 1570
One contributor runs a server making pretty bittorrent graphs!

While these are a lot of downloads, as said, these numbers don’t show upgrades to 12.2 by our existing user base via the online upgrade method and those running Tumbleweed have also moved to openSUSE 12.2 now without any additional efforts.

Thank to all involved, especially to translators, social media and forum promoters, the artwork team, and many others who worked to make openSUSE 12.2 a success.

Lessons

Lessons for openSUSE 12.3 Of course this release did teach us a few things. While openSUSE 12.2 turned out to be a great release, there is room for improvement! Some of these thoughts you find below.

  • We should be testing Live CDs during the development lifecycle so brokenness doesn’t build up. Help welcome! We have already done so during the hackaton last weekend and we urge you to help during the RC’s!
  • We need better coordination between packagers on the UsrMerge and similar projects and bug reports.
  • The openSUSE [Boosters] Team was mostly occupied doing marketing and promotion tasks during the final release phase of the distribution, so some fixable bugs slipped through and were seen by reviewers as negatives. We need to step up our marketing efforts, and it’s why we planned the openSUSE 12.3 marketing/artwork hackaton end of this month!
  • Since core members of the Marketing Team are moving on to other responsibilities, it’s important that the project builds this team up again now so that can promote the next release effectively, especially completing and distributing press kits and release announcements further ahead of the actual release. Again, the hackaton will help with this.
  • An openSUSE Build Service reboot in release week brought the completion of the Gold Master image down to the wire – the project needs better coordination with teams inside SUSE.
  • Since openSUSE follows a development strategy best described as “undirected hacking”, making an exciting story out of the release is harder.  We need to plan features and themes for upcoming releases more in advance – this will make development more attractive as well as the marketing team’s job easier.
As you see, some thought went into the lessons learned form this release. In some area’s we’re already working on improvements, in other places we can use help with that. Input, ideas and especially work are very much appreciated! A better 12.3 release means more fun for everyone and we’re looking forward to it!

Source: openSUSE News


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« Vastaus #29 : 02.02.2013 - klo:00:33 »
openSUSE Conference 2013: Geeko Gets Geared Up!
24 January 2013, 3:00 pm

oSC 2013 Conf Logo SingleToday, the openSUSE community is happy and proud to announce the openSUSE Conference 2013, oSC13. On July 18, the openSUSE Community will flock to the land where 2500 years ago, Philosophers started the Age of Reason. Humbly standing on the shoulders of these giants, we’ll work, enjoy the great climate and each other, developing the technology for the future of humankind. The Greek Philosophers were part of a revolution which changed the world. So are we, and thus, under the motto of “Power to the Geeko”, we will gather and work on our very own Free Software revolution!

About the conference From July 18 until July 22, 2013, Thessaloniki, the second largest city in Greece and home to no less than 15 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, will be host to the fifth openSUSE Conference. Once again, we’ll discuss topics related to our distribution, Free and Open Source technology and ‘open world stuff’ in general, inviting participation from people within as well as outside of our openSUSE Community.

Thessaloniki White Tower and promanadeThe slogan of the conference this year is ‘Power to the Geeko’, as we would like to emphasize the bottom-up nature of our Free Software movement (an excellent fit with the country where early democracies developed). Thessaloniki provides many opportunities to Have a lot of Fun! The city features beautiful beaches and a lively night life as well as good food and drinks. We expect plenty of socializing between the technical sessions and code.

About Thessaloniki and the Greek community Greece, or Hellas, is a southern European country, south of the Balkan Peninsula. It is located at the crossroads of Europe, Asia and Africa and it is surrounded by sea – Ionean Sea, Aegean Sea, Mediterranean Sea – with a plethora of islands, ideal destination for summer vacations.

Thessaloniki Thessaloniki is the second largest city in Greece and the capital of the Central Macedonia region. Air traffic to and from the city is served by the Macedonia International Airport for international and domestic flights. The city is renowned for its festivals, events and vibrant cultural life in general, and is considered to be Greece’s cultural capital. Events such as the Thessaloniki International Trade Fair and the Thessaloniki International Film Festival are held annually, while the city also hosts the largest bi-annual meeting of the Greek diaspora. In 2014 Thessaloniki will be the European Youth Capital. For 2013 National Geographic Magazine included Thessaloniki in its top tourist destinations worldwide. Thessaloniki is well known for the night life and the delicious food.

Community The Greek community, affectionately known as Greekos within the openSUSE community, coalesced in a semi formal way approximately 3 years ago. This group of dedicated local supporters meets on a regular basis and promotes the use of openSUSE and FOSS within and outside of Greece. With the repeated experience of organizing the openSUSE Collaboration Summer camps and the Greekos involvement in the orchestration of previous openSUSE conferences it was an easy decision for the openSUSE board to support Thessaloniki as the first openSUSE conference that will be organized solely by the community.

The local team of volunteers is working with great dedication to provide an awesome experience for everybody at oSC13.

Travel support The openSUSE Travel Support Program will once again offer help to those those openSUSE contributors that would like to attend the openSUSE conference but have financial limitations. Following the procedure at the Travel Support wiki you can send your support requests to the TSP team from April 23rd to May 3rd. Earlier requests are possible but note that the travel team will allocate travel funding according to the guidelines and inform all applicants by May 13th. This should allow a sufficient amount of time to make your reservations.

Sponsoring and supportive attendee registration The openSUSE conference is a very big event for the community to organize and orchestrate. While the countless volunteer hours make the event great, financial support by sponsors is invaluable and necessary. Sponsorship money is used to fund the event location, costs for keynote speakers, marketing material and other conference expenses. The openSUSE community is very inclusive and this shows at our events in the participation of many that are not directly involved in openSUSE. Thefeore, the openSUSE conference provides a unique opportunity for sponsors to not only reach the openSUSE community but also reach members of other FOSS communities.

Sponsorship opportunities for the openSUSE conference are available. For details please contact our openSUSE Conference sponsorship Manager with inquiries:

Izabel Valverde

Sponsorship manager

openSUSE Conference Organization


A sponsorship brochure with predefined options will be available in the near future. However, we encourage you to work with us to meet your sponsorship needs.

Registration and tickets As in previous years registration and attendance of the openSUSE conference is free of charge. Tickets to support the event may be purchased at the cost of $50 for supporter tickets and $250 for professional tickets. Buy your tickets from the SUSE Shop:

The money from the sales of these tickets is used to fund the event and help with the openSUSE Travel Support Program to allow as many openSUSE contributors as possible to attend the event. Supporters and professional ticket holders will receive a special thank you surprise upon check in. The support of the event through ticket sales is vital part of the funding of the event.

ChameleonBustPosterDraft

Website and call for help The conference web site can be found at conference.opensuse.org and it will be updated regularly with new information. The organization of oSC13 requires the close collaboration of many people who are distributed across the globe. This is an exciting environment and if you would like to participate in the organization of the event you are more than welcome. Please subscribe to to our mailing list and introduce yourself during one of our IRC meetings (announced on the mailing list).

The Greek Philosophers were part of a revolution which changed the world. So are we, and thus, under the motto of “Power to the Geeko”, we will gather and work on our revolution. Look for the Cfp and registration announcement in the near future!

Power to the Geeko!

Source: openSUSE News


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« Vastaus #30 : 08.02.2013 - klo:01:00 »
Heat Up Our Servers: 12.3 RC1 Is Ready To Download
7 February 2013, 11:13 pm

release counterAs winter refuses to relax its icy grasp on the northern hemisphere, the openSUSE project would like to announce the first release candidate of version 12.3 of its popular Linux distribution. Major updates include the desktop environment KDE to version 4.10, GNOME 3.6 and kernel 3.7.6. Help to iron out the last few bugs before the final release by downloading RC1 from software.opensuse.org.

What’s in there? This preview includes the large number of fixes made to Factory since the beta, as well as the last major set of version updates.  RC1 needs a real workout to ensure we fix any remaining issues in time, so don’t wait for RC2, put it on your spare disk and give it a try now. Major changes include:

  • PackageKit 0.8.7
    • Major release allows transactions to be parallelized for better performance. The libzypp backend used by openSUSE was completely rewritten around the new API, allowing a lot of old ugly bugs to be shown the door.
  • Apper 0.8
    • Rewritten around new PackageKit, and the software update notifier has been rewritten as a plasmoid.  The language used in the UI has been changed to match usage in YaST and zypper better.
  • fcitx 4.2.7
    • The input method has several UI improvements for more efficient international text entry, and better Qt integration
  • Linux kernel 3.7.6
  • MariaDB replaces MySQL, as widely reported.
  • postfix 2.9.5 fixes bugs in rule pattern matching and in IPv6 support
  • WebYaST finally works on 12.3, but needs more testing
  • Samba 3.6.12 (Samba 4 missed the feature deadline)
For the first time, openSUSE 12.3 features custom-developed theming for Plasma Workspace. This features a dark tone-on-tone colour scheme, controlled use of texture and fashionably monochrome tray icons that stand apart from application icons.  Coordinated colour palettes in dark and light variations should appeal all tastes. Feedback on the new theme is very welcome at the opensuse-artwork mailing list.

Get openSUSE 12.3 RC1 from the usual place.

How you can contribute to 12.3 Although the final release is only a month away, there are lots of ways you can make a difference.

Testers can find information on how to work effectively in the openSUSE Testing wiki.

You can find the current list of the most annoying 12.3 bugs here.

Help us shorten that list by re-testing the problematic areas or by fixing bugs, and we love it when you help us find new important issues!

The openSUSE 12.3 Portal has been set up but still needs lots of work. There are screenshots to take, release notes to write, and documentation to update. We also welcome help with translating it all. Right now, the openSUSE Marketing and Artwork teams are meeting in the Nuremberg SUSE office on finishing artwork and release notes in time for the final release.

Find the information portal for openSUSE 12.3 here.

Screenshots of 12.3 are here, Documentation and the Localization Guide.

You can help promote our release by adding a release counter to your website. Pick a size, then link to the image with the usual tags:

http://counter.opensuse.org/small.png

http://counter.opensuse.org/medium.png

http://counter.opensuse.org/large.png

Example tags:

release counter

You can also find social media backgrounds for g+, twitter and facebook here, website banners here, a cool release poster here and we’ve already got slide templates so you can present openSUSE at user groups, universities or workplaces.

Thanks! openSUSE would like to shout out to OortLinux for letting us use their video for the KDE first login greeter. Thanks!

We’d of course also would like to extend our gratitude to our regular contributor base who contributed to making openSUSE: the packagers, translators, document authors and everyone else.

Source: openSUSE News


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« Vastaus #31 : 23.07.2013 - klo:06:52 »
The certification value and the LPIC 1 – SUSE Certified Linux Administrator connection
2 July 2013, 3:00 pm

By derivative work: Wondigoma (Tux-gnu-dynamic-duo.jpg) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/), GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or GPL (www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html)

Introducing the Linux Professional Institute These were the reasons creating the need of certification in GNU/Linux. In 1999, in the midst of dot com bubble and just eight years after the first Linux Kernel came out, the Linux Professional Institute was founded to fill this gap in Free Software and networking professionalism. The great adoption of the LAMP stack by web servers during the dot com run led to high demand for Linux technicians, no matter if they were graduated or not. But employers are always happy having someone with proven knowledge of her skills, if not for them, than to prove to their customers that they employ skilled workers.

Having the LPI as vendor-neutral GNU/Linux certification helped make this proof of knowledge widely available. No matter what distribution the corporate server room runs or what is available in on the desktops in the cubicles, the LPI Certified professional is always capable of offering a solution fitting to the requirements.

Geeko cleans up the library.

LPI collaboration with SUSE Regardless of how fanatic we in the Free and Open Source world can be, calling-writing-arguing on terms like Free Software, Open Source, Linux or GNU/Linux, the painful truth is that there are not many widely used distributions which sport an enterprise solution besides the ‘community version‘, a place in computer history and the resulting reputation – bringing a certification to the table.

Actually, there are only two, one of them being SUSE. With roots in Slackware, SUSE has a dominant place in Linux distribution market but also a large piece of Linux Desktop & Server pies. For this reasons, LPI and then-Novell committed in 2010 on a still on-going partnership for granting SUSE Certified Linux Administrator (CLA) certification at no additional cost or exams to holders of LPIC-1. To further support this initiative SUSE Training Services has formally agreed to include the required LPIC-1 learning objectives in its CLA course training material, making this process work the other way around as well.

LPIC-1 SUSE CLA

Many people, after using SUSE and openSUSE, became dedicated users and later determined to continue this path professionally. In this context the LPIC 1 – SUSE CLA partnership is very important because is the first step of the certification path at SUSE. Having a full certification from LPI and one of the main Linux vendors, be it SUSE or Red Hat, is an important mark in the market place as professional specialization is what market needs today.

LPI at oSC If you are a dedicated SUSE or openSUSE user – power user – admin – magician, you should consider getting LPIC 1 certified. It might be the first step to a more successful career in Free Software. The upcoming openSUSE Conference in Greece will feature a LPI Exam room, where you can take your test and get going with these professional certifications. See the oSC LPI page for more details. There will also be a session by Konstantinos Boukouvalas on the subject of Linux certification. Be there, it’s a great place to start your Linux career!

Article contributed by Konstantinos Boukouvalas, Operations Manager LPI MA Greece

Source: openSUSE News


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« Vastaus #32 : 23.07.2013 - klo:06:52 »
openSUSE Conference Schedule ready!
3 July 2013, 3:10 pm

ChameleonBustPosterDraftWe’ve got great news for you: the openSUSE Conference Paper Committee has finalized the conference program! We’ve got inspiring keynotes, interesting talks, in-depth workshops and intensive parties all lined up! Read on to find out what we’ve got in store.

Tracks We gave you a preview of the three main subjects of our event, the Community and Project; Geeko Tech and OpenWorld. The conference website also has a taste of the program. And starting today you can check out the details of these and other talks. And plan what sessions you’d like to attend!

Recording Like last year, we plan on recording the main sessions at the conference and streaming them live for those who couldn’t make it to the event. We’ll edit them afterward and publish them as soon as possible.

The live streaming will be offered through the openSUSE Bambuser channel. Although the broadcast is live you may need to register with bambuser.com so that you can comment in the chat. The local team will try to make sure that the room chairs share questions from people joining remotely with the presenters.

Offering live streaming services for the conference is not easy and those attending are expected to participate in keeping the streams and post processing moving along. There is also a tentative idea of offering live translation from English to other languages. If you are one who can translate, don’t hesitate to contact the conference’s organizers and help with translation.

After the conference is over, the recording of the sessions will be posted in our openSUSE youtube channel. The video recording as well as editing cost a lot of time and we very much welcome help with this: our ambitious goal of publishing the video’s of the sessions within 24 hours of recording won’t be met without some help! If you’re interested in the tech behind these recordings, we use dvswitch, code here.

Please note that if you’re going to oSC you’re expected to be OK with us making and sharing these recordings with our remote audience.

Awesome party posterGeeko Parties Coming! Keynotes We already shared with you that Georg Greve, Founder of the Free Software Foundation Europe and CEO of Kolabsys, will open our conference on Friday with a keynote about the value of freeing our data from the sticky hands of governments and companies. As the schedule shows, Saturday the event will be introduced by Ralf Flaxa, head of Engineering at SUSE, who will talk about building openSUSE. The third day, Sunday, will open with community manager Jos Poortvliet, talking about hugs community values, governance and the awesomeness of Geekos.

Key Signing Party There will of course be the traditional keysigning party, taking place on the 21st at 18:00 in room Zeus and preceded by a talk about keysigning and security in the same room. There is no central key registry for this keysigning. Instead it will simply be a keyslip exchange.

What to bring:

  • Yourself
  • Paper slips with your key id, fingerprint, name & emails.
  • Something to identify yourself. Usually government-issued
  • identification, such as a passport. Multiple pieces of identification are preferred.
If you need to make new paper slips, this generator tool is suggested.

At this time, there are 50+ attendees expected at the keysigning event, so you should bring at least that number of slips. Doubling that may be advisable if the event ends up being very large.

Be there! We’ll also have a few social events, including of course the registration party on Thursday night. But for now, you can plan the sessions you’d like to attend by checking out the program!

Source: openSUSE News


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« Vastaus #33 : 23.07.2013 - klo:06:52 »
openSUSE Conference Registration CLOSING!
4 July 2013, 3:00 pm

We opened registration back in February and now we’ve just passed the mark of two weeks from the conference! If you have not yet registered, please hurry up: we need these numbers to plan for the event. You have until end of day tomorrow (Friday the 5th of July) to finish your registration! If you did plan on going but had to cancel, we’d appreciate it if you would make sure this is reflected in your registration status.

Be nice, help us out by registering! Attending the openSUSE Conference is entirely free of charge, thanks to our generous sponsors but please respect our work and put in the little effort to register. It helps make our work easy – and that work is plenty. We won’t say no to anybody – registration is greatly appreciated but penalty for not doing so doesn’t include anything like torture. However, you might not be able to secure yourself a place at one of the social events and even the conference lunch could become problematic.

Please note that registering for an account and actually registering for the openSUSE Conference 2013 event are two distinct steps!

We’d also like to remind you that it is possible to support our event by purchasing supporter tickets ($50) or professional tickets ($250) during registration. Funds from these ticket sales are a very important part of the budget for the overall conference. The money is used to fund the event and help with the openSUSE Travel Support Program to allow as many contributors as possible to attend the event. You can also get them in the SUSE Shop:

As supporter or professional ticket holders you will receive a special thank you surprise upon check-in.

Last minute! We’ve got a few things for you to keep an eye on when joining us.

    • As you might have seen in the announcement of the schedule yesterday, we’re recording the main tracks of the event and there will also be plenty of people with camera’s. This is a open and public event and while we try to respect your privacy as much as reasonable, we can not in any way guarantee that you won’t get digitized and end up on the web. This does indeed mean that Obama can see you. Sorry.
    • Being in a public place does also mean you’ll have to behave at your best. We’d like to remind you of our Code of Conduct. In short: “We, as a community, value and respect people of all stripes – genders, orientations, races, abilities, shapes and sizes – and will not tolerate vilification, abuse or harassment in any form.” Note that this often requires you to be a tad more polite than you might be among friends at home: we’re an international community and with that come additional opportunities for misunderstandings. Bonus is that being smiling and being nice makes you happy, so it is no wasted effort!
We’ll be counting on the folks who have registered – and if you plan on coming but didn’t yet, you have until end-of-day tomorrow to add yourself!

Source: openSUSE News


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« Vastaus #34 : 23.07.2013 - klo:06:52 »
openSUSE Conference BoF sessions can be scheduled!
10 July 2013, 4:55 pm

oSC 2013 Conf Logo Single

Within two weeks, in thessaloniki, the openSUSE Conference will start off again. Like last year, we have not only an awesome program but also reserved time for small sessions to get work done. We’ve got a wiki page where you can schedule such sessions before the event and on the event itself we’ll allow scheduling more sessions Unconference style. Read on to learn more about the BoF session, based on an article from our famous RW conference in 2011!

Definition Wikipedia defines a BoF as ‘an informal discussion group’, ‘often formed in an ad-hoc manner’. It also describes a BoF as ‘an informal meet-up at conferences, where the attendees group together based on a shared interest and carry out discussions without any pre-planned agenda’.

The central concepts are informal, shared interests and ad-hoc. What is not mentioned are goals, the why of such a session. But based on the concepts, you can get an idea. The informal factor means everyone is equal and can and should voice their opinions. The shared interests mean you get together people who care about a particular subject. The ad-hoc factor merely re-inforces the other two. A BoF is very much like meeting for dinner: you talk as friends about whatever interests you! That is not to say a BoF can’t have goals. Often, BoFs have a number of things the participants want to discuss. The person organizing the BoF is usually the person who puts one or more topics forward, but everyone is free to bring up other issues. This is central to the concept of a BoF – discuss things.

Drupalcon 2008 Boston Birds of a Feather board Why? Free Software communities work online in a collaborative fashion. That’s marketing speak for: we work together, alone. While each of us sits behind his computer, either alone or with others in an office, we form one team. We communicate over mail, IRC and other online channels.

For asking questions, basic decision making or just getting work done, this is excellent. For socializing, it is less optimal, but you’ll still find plenty of social interactions especially in IRC channels. It gets much harder however, when complicated issues surface. If decisions have to be made about processes or fundamental technical directions, the online aspect gets in the way. You quickly run into misunderstandings and while our hacker culture compels us to fairly direct (‘rude’) communication, still emotions can run wild.

This is where face to face meetings help. Getting to know each other over dinner or during a party is a powerful enabler for future online communication. But it is also the perfect moment to make those hard decisions! And that is where the BoF comes in.

How? Discussions about future directions or day to day business like improving a review process or working together more efficiently – all things done better in person. In a BoF, a team working together on-line meets and discusses these things, face to face, in an open manner. Not completely unstructured, mind you, but still very open. The organizer of the BoF is there merely to start up the discussion and possibly facilitate it. Facilitate by making sure some decisions are actually taken. And recorded!

A typical BoF starts with a short ‘hi all, thanks for coming’, and if needed an introduction of the participants. Then, it is time to find the subjects of the discussion at hand. The organizer can coin a few things he or she things need to be discussed and others can chime in. From there on, it’s a matter of actually going over the subjects one by one.

Birds of a Feather The challenge now is to keep the discussion from going in all directions – something which is fine at a dinner but not productive at a BoF. Gently reminding the team of what the goal of the current topic is is usually sufficient. You all share the same goals, after all. The second challenge is to make sure decisions are taken and recorded. Creating the typical action list of who does what is the best way to go. It might make sense, with a large BoF team, to have one person lead the discussion while someone else takes notes.

Know that the person organizing the BoF does not have to be a ‘team leader’, nor a ‘great communicator’!  Every attendee is equally responsible for the quality and results of the discussion. Organizing the BoF is merely a technical detail – not a huge deal at all, and anyone can do it.

Responsibilities and tools Organizing a BoF is surprisingly simple if the right people turn up. For that, a clear description is usually enough. A title like “Factory review process discussion” will most likely attract those involved with review of packages in Factory and interested in improving the process. If the review process has had hickups in the last few months it is highly unlikely that the discussion won’t be attended or not attract the right people. Nor is it likely to not have ‘enough to talk about’. The problem is usually more one of getting sidetracked and not actually finishing discussing the topic with a proper todo list!

What do you need to organize a BoF? Almost nothing. Pen and paper (for the todo!) will usually suffice. A whiteboard might be nice for more complicated problems like mapping out a new API, creating a flow diagram of a process or simply noting down the agreed-upon topics for the BoF. Otherwise, just talk! Introduce the topic quickly and ask for opinions will fire it off easily.

Drupalcon Tuesday BoF Session Scheduling BoF’s Usually, BoF’s are scheduled ‘on the spot’ using a big whiteboard in the main hall of the conference or on an open wiki page. That can lead to two similar BoF’s or two BoF’s targeting the same team at the same time, however. It also means you might not have a spot at a decent time. Which might result in being forced to plan a BoF in the time slot of a talk about the same subject . This is why the openSUSE CfP team asks you to plan BoF’s in advance! We’ll also offer room to schedule BoF sessions at the event itself, of course.

The biggest perceived problem with planning a BoF is the inherent contradiction in ‘planning’ and ‘BoF’. Yes, you might not know now what will be an issue 3 months from now. However, you don’t have to nail the agenda down today, that would indeed run counter to the whole concept of a BoF. If you think your team will benefit from having a good, open discussion about what you do and how you (want to) do it, simply send in a quick proposal to the openSUSE Conference Paper Committee. It is no problem if something more urgent pops up and you discuss that instead of following the initial description. The main reason for ‘planning’ (part of) the BoF’s beforehand is to allow the CfP team to try and schedule things in such a way there is little overlap with talks and other BoF’s and to allow teams to reserve a room.

So go to the BoF wiki page and add a BoF! You’ve got until the day before the conference to do this – after that, we’ll schedule at the event itself using whiteboards.

Source: openSUSE News


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Announcing the openSUSE Summit 2013
15 July 2013, 11:09 pm

While everyone is certainly looking forward to the upcoming openSUSE Conference in Thessaloniki, Greece (only a few days away) it is not too early to cast our view just a bit into the future and also get excited about our second openSUSE Summit. Especially for those on the west side of the big pond, a.k.a. The Atlantic, that may not be able to trek to Greece to join fellow Geekos the openSUSE Summit offers a great opportunity to meet fellow Geekos, hang out, chat, hack and Have a lot of Fun…. As in the previous year the openSUSE Summit will immediately follow SUSECon.

The openSUSE Summit will take place at the Disney Corronado Springs Resort in Buena Vista, Florida (just outside Orlando) from November 15 to November 17, 2013. Those registering prior to November 1st will get free access to the remaining session of SUSECon that take place on Friday November 15.

Registration and CfP Registration and CfP are now open, so head on over to OSEM and register and/or submit your Session/BoF/Workshop proposal. Yes, we are finally managing to use the same tool for two events, hurray. For those that did not register for oSC13, first you need to create an OSEM account and then register for the openSUSE Summit.

Sponsors Our primary sponsor is SUSE but to organize an event it takes more than just one helping hand. Thus, additional sponsors are needed and more than welcome. In the tradition of previous openSUSE events the openSUSE SUmmit is a free (as in beer) event and thus the financial support for the event and the openSUSE Travel Support Program soley depend on the sponsors of the openSUSE Summit. For sponsorship information please contact Izabel Valverde

Travel Support Program The openSUSE Travel Support program will once again have financial assistance available for attendees that are openSUSE contributors or are interested in contributing to the openSUSE Summit and need financial support to attend. An announcement will be made on the openSUSE Summit web site and the Summit mailing list when applications for travel support are accepted.

Article contributed by Robert Schweikert

Source: openSUSE News


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openSUSE Milestone 3
16 July 2013, 8:53 pm

Milestone 2 was released just a month ago and it is now time to get the newest milestone release of openSUSE. Please remember that there is only one more milestone before openSUSE starts beta testing. There is still time for you to submit your bugs and requests for the distribution to include. As it is generally with milestones the changes are not dramatic, but there are some highlights you can see next.M3

GNOME 3.9.3 (3.10 Beta)

KDE 4.10.90 (4.11 Beta)

gcc 4.7->4.8 Kernel changed to the final stable version 3.10.0.

Subversion also changed to the latest stable release accompanied by a few important changes that you can review here. Also, Mozilla Firefox is now updated to the latest version 22. Some improvements include WebRTC is now enabled by default! Meaning that anyone looking to have Firefox do more live communication through the browser, can now do so by default. We have not seen much of this in action other than the Facebook chat integration with Firefox but there should some new applications coming in the future. HTML5 audio/video playback rate can now be changed for all those looking to ditch flash.  Asm.js optimizations (OdinMonkey) is now enabled for performance improvements that have been benchmarked recently here.

openSUSE recommends that you download the DVD for testing purposes only. It is important to remember that the changes made in this version are not meant to be in your everyday computer, but rather that you used this version for testing purposes giving the community feedback on what bugs and problems you find. You can file your bugs in our forums, or bug tracking system bugzilla.

Source: openSUSE News


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openSUSE Conference Workshop preregistration of attendees
17 July 2013, 11:15 am

We at openSUSE team have been faced with one slight difficulty. We need to track people interested in the workshops so we can assure you can fit in beforehand, tell you some info from the workshop authors where they tell you what you should have with you or what is the workshop plan, and lastly even collect your suggestions.

For this purpose we created

ad-hoc-hacky google docs file.

Where you are interested in the parts “Attendees list” which is obviously list of interested people (green is done by  Tomáš Chvátal to the amount of expected people to be there, it is NOT a hard limit, on the registration later on there will be printed sheet with the workshops which have the hardlimit, so you can write in even if you are not sure right now). Other list is  “Atendees suggestions” which is just field where you can express your ideas what you expect from the event or what you wish from the author to do.

We would also like to apologise that we didn’t do this up-front during your registration, which we simply forgot (mea culpa) but for the next conference it is on the list and will be implemented in the OSEM tool which handles our sweet conference management.

See you all on the conference!

Source: openSUSE News


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openSUSE Conference 2013! The conference begins!
20 July 2013, 12:10 pm

Geeko at the venue The openSUSE Conference 2013 is being held in Thessaloniki, Greece at the Olympic Museum. Everything is set and the first day of the conference is now over! Last night, we kicked off with a party attended by about 100 visitors and at the end of today we counted almost 170 visitors, not bad for a Friday night. Everyone is happy and impressed about all the work that the community and the G(r)eekos have done for this conference so far. This is the first community-organized openSUSE conference. Read on for more about this spectacular conference!

#oSC13 Begins! The G(r)eeko conference team has been working all week to get the event ready. Networking, video recording, booth space and the ‘beach bar’ all had to be set up. Thursday night everything was ready and it was time for the pre-conference party! Starting around 18:00 arrived and registered themselves, exchanging cash for the awesome Geeko money (1000 geekos for 50ct), to be later exchanged for beer and refreshments at the venue. The party area was equipped with tables and chairs but there was enough room for dancing. When the DJ asked one of our Brazilian visitors (Carlos) for his favorite Brazilian music, we got Sepultura, kicking off a Metal and head banging trend which lasted for quite a while. The party continued until late but of course at some point our visitors had to find their beds in preparation of the first conference day. Many visitors actually arrived on time at the venue and started checking-in at the registration table if they hadn’t gotten their badges the day before. Every visitor receives a bag with a cool Green conference t-shirt so we can color our event.

Registration DeskBooths of openSUSE, ORACLE, Mozilla, KDE, Gnome, FSFE and LPI were set up. Keynote by Georg Greve Presentations started on time with Kostas welcoming the community to the event and the local team surprised us by shooting 20 or 30 big beach balls into the audience. The first keynote was from Georg Greve about Software Freedom. He spoke about how the disclosures around the PRISM surveillance project by the US and the many similar projects around the world gives us a huge opportunity to spread Free Software. People now realize that their privacy isn’t just easy to compromise in theory, but it happens in reality and on a massive scale. Companies can be forced to allow the US spying agency NSA access through backdoors (or access to found security issues before they become public) and of course especially Cloud providers in the US are forced, by law, to collaborate and give full access to their users’ data. It goes so far that the information gathered is used for political and economical gain. Georg pointed out that if you are negotiating with the US government about a trade deal between your countries or try to get a deal to buy airplanes from either Boeing or Airbus, the ability of the US representative to read every email you send and every call you make will probably not be beneficial to you. Using US cloud services, sending unencrypted mails, using social media – there are issues with these technologies. Open Source is a great way of staying away from this and keeping the eyes of governments and companies out of our private lives. The big issue we have is that it requires more than code. The code we have is great but we need to work on the supporting infrastructure. We need not just developers but artists, documenters, marketeers and many more. And here, the ecosystem of companies building businesses around supporting and helping customers implement Open Source is crucial. We need to move forward with this as much as possible. Questions brought up the importance of being collaborative instead of suing our governments or companies for their deceptive behavior. Confrontation should be used as a last resort, according to Georg. Another important point he made was about the demand for non-US run data centers. He hopes somebody with an entrepreneurial attitude will step up and provide this. He pointed out how independence is an important value and countries are getting this message. For example, Brazil paid back their debt to the World Bank so they can’t be told what to do anymore; India has its own space program; China invests in the production of CPUs locally. If the market doesn’t take care of our independence (perhaps, in part, manipulated by outside governments?), maybe our own governments have to protect the strategic interests of our people. In the end, he finished with the statement that “open source is not the perfect answer, but it is clearly the best and we owe it to our society to move it forward”. The day continued with awesome presentations about technology, community and open source. Workshops were interesting too! Puppet, Autotools and Icinga rocked!

BarThe day here in Greece doesn’t end without a party! A bar is set outside the venue with some pools to cool the feet and music to entertain the mind. Always time to relax and have good conversation Between talks there is plenty of space to relax and mingle. Inside, a booth area surrounds the registration, showing organizations like Mozilla, GNOME and Oracle to the audience. There is plenty of space to sit outside, where the local team has set up small pools to cool our feet (and play with the water). During lunch, the team organized the option of ordering some food (pizza, mostly) which was delivered. Some had not figured out the process and more food continued to be delivered until almost the end of the day. In the evening it was time for relaxation again and a Latin party took place with some professional fellow dancers who came here to dance for the people at conference. Lots of beers and fun and the creativity of the local team was greatly appreciated!

#oSC13 Info You can find lots of pictures from #oSC13 on openSUSE Greek Fans on facebook or on G+. Also on twitter you can follow @openSUSEConf or search for the hashtag #oSC13.

If you missed the chance to be here with us and have fun you can attend the conference and all the fun online from the live streaming that is set up in the venue. Also if you have any questions for the presentation you attend online there is an IRC Channel set up in order to make your questions. Last but not least we have our local newspaper! Newspaper oSC13

Source: openSUSE News


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openSUSE Conference 2013 2nd day
21 July 2013, 4:48 pm

#osc13 Volunteers

After the first awesome day at #oSC13 and a more exciting night, we’re over 200 participants. Many more interesting presentations and workshops took place and everyone had fun! The schedule was printed and handed to our visitors letting them know about their options from the big variety of presentations, from technical to social.

#oSC13 Day 2 begins! Day two kicked off with a keynote (see below) and continued as Friday: people went to the talks,various workshop sessions and hang out and discuss technology in the premises. Throughout the day our conference theme music ‘geeko-greeko’ played, often resulting in a sing-along. Lunch break at 1 PM was welcomed by everyone. There was a queue for first ordering, later retrieving food and then there was a bit of relative quiet as everyone had food. The conference organization also provided snacks for in between session cravings. A wide selection of very sweet but tasty cookies and cookie-like snacks were always around.

A bit of great news is that video’s are beginning to appear on YouTube – check them out here!

Cheers from #osc13Cheers from #osc13 Keynote about SUSE and openSUSE The second day opened with the technical keynote by Ralf Flaxa, VP of Engineering at SUSE. He noted that he would talk from both a company and a community perspective about the evolution of the Geeko. He began with a short history lesson, showing how openSUSE went from tgz’s on floppy disks via CD and DVD to cloud computing.

“History we come from a single SUSE Professional box that everybody worked on to the model of an enterprise and a community edition. This change was prompted purely by money. If it was possible, SUSE would still be doing just ONE box. It was fun to do, but change came and the Geeko had to go with it. Today, SUSE does not make any money on the community product – and that is by design. The openSUSE contributions are paid for by a percentage of SUSE profit and that is how SUSE likes it. These changes of course resulted in more than openSUSE: the opening of processes and release of tools like OBS are outcomes as well. A major goal of SUSE was to give the community influence on the development and encourage a variety of derivatives and flavors of openSUSE.”

Results

Did it work out? From the SUSE point of view yes! SUSE is a profitable business and can and will continue to support openSUSE; and as we grow, SUSE promises to also grow their contributions. Our businesses’ need for SLE12 is, of course, driving contribution at the moment. In general, SUSE wants to see openSUSE successful.

And how did it work from the openSUSE side? Good too. Building on the infrastructure of OBS, openQA, Studio, Hermes and our other tools, the community grew with more contributors and maintaining more packages. A big proof of this success is the community-organized conference that we are reporting on. SUSE has also expanded the role of the openSUSE Board, started the TSP and other open projects and promises to continue to give the community more control, in a quest for a lasting “win-win” relationship.

However, just like in any organization there are also challenges to be faced, things to improve. Let’s review some of them.

Challenges

We have SUSE and openSUSE whose code bases have diverged. This has become a problem. Ralf wants his engineers to contribute to openSUSE and this is hard with vastly different code bases; it results in spending time on back porting or simply doing double work. The need for customers/users are different for each distribution but there are things which are the same. Both home users and enterprise users need stable and moving components. We need to think about how to bring things together. Then there is the upgrade path between openSUSE and SLE. There is none! We have customers using openSUSE who might want to move to SLE who cannot do so since the distributions are so different at this time.

Keynote by RalfKeynote by Ralf But there is more. We received feedback from the openSUSE community. Looking at Factory where you can get an openSUSE-of-the-day distribution image. It is a flexible tool, up to date and easy to hack on. However, it can be terribly unstable. It takes a lot of complicated work to maintain and has no lifecycle.

The openSUSE release, the product we send out, is stable with a nice, 8 month cycle and 18 months of maintenance and offers a lot of choice. But for some, 18 months is not enough and all the choice can be confusing and create problems in itself.

Suggestions

Based on SUSE’s own experiences and the feedback from the community there are a few suggestions Ralf shared. About Factory, Ralf suggested increasing the amount of automated testing and be “more picky” about what goes into the distribution. He also pledged further investment from SUSE and suggested that we should talk about improving our integration process itself as well. About our release we should work at the balance we have between the scope, quality and life cycle of our distribution. Perhaps by focusing on a more restricted set of packages we could increase our life cycle to improve quality. Last but not least, he stressed the importance of transparent governance and an open ecosystem. He made very clear that SUSE does not commercialize openSUSE but he is perfectly happy if other partners, be it commercial or not, come in and try to generate a revenue stream, building on openSUSE and contributing to it. The presentation video is online here.

Project Meeting at #osc13

Many More Talks After the keynote many community based presentations took place with presenters showing how the openSUSE distribution is released, openSUSE in numbers and how to share the Linux Desktop, the new local coordinator program. There were also presentations about the MATE project, Enlightenment and LibreOffice, MySQL and Linux I/O. Moreover, there were interesting workshops giving attendees an opportunity to get their hands dirty on OBS coding with Henne Vogelsang and on Rasberrt Pi with Bernhard Wiedemann.

Board meeting: oSC14 location!

At the end of the conference day the openSUSE Board chair Vincent Untz opened a session on project-wide issues. On Friday this session was used to have the various teams in openSUSE present on their work and progress.

On saturday a big announcement was made the: the next openSUSE Conference will take place in Croatia, in the city of Dubrovnik. You might not recognize the name Dubrovnik but you should. The popular HBO series ‘Game of Thrones’ is actually being filmed in and around many locations in this city! You can imagine that Dubrovnik is a beautiful, medieval-looking city. But it is not all old buildings there, there is change coming in the IT world. While the community is currently spread all over Croatia, the government is picking up on the Free and Open Source trend. The government has started supporting FOSS and the Croatia’s President recently opened the 20th local Linux/Open Source Conference. There is now a Linux Workgroup sponsored by the Croatian government in order to push for more open technologies!

The team pushing this local conference has now offered to take care of us “Geekos” next year! The conference will take place at the University of Dubrovnik, during the month April. An exact date will be announced later but the local Croatian team is already busy negotiating, pinning down the date, location, rooms and other details. On stage, Kostas (Greek conference organizer) gave Svebor Prstacic (Croatian community member) the official Conference Geeko and a bottle of Ouzo.

Board meeting

There was a big thanks to conf team and sponsors for their contributions and hard work. The board then gave a report on the work done in the last year. They made progress in increased visibility; worked on setting up new/improved ambassador program; and discussed the foundation and money handling. A report on that last point will come. Of course there is always more room for improvement, and the board welcomes feedback. During the Q&A there were questions about the strategic direction of openSUSE as a project, technical developments and discussions that are happening since Ralf’s keynote this morning; oSC organization work and involvement of the board.

Find the talks online here!

Geekos having fun at #oSC13

Party party party party! After a hard day of work a Greeko party was well-deserved rest. The conference atmosphere was excellent and everyone was delighted about the results of the conference so far. But it’s true that after the first day’s party outside the venue with lots of drinks and beers everyone was waiting for the main party and what ideas Greeks had about entertainment. Expectations were high and the Greeks met them!

After the conference everyone went for barbeque at a bar next to the venue! Steaks, souvlaki, sausages, Greek salad, beers, cocktails, shots and lots of drinks were available! Everyone ate, drinking danced and had fun! It was a night to remember!

#oSC13 Info You can find lots of pictures from #oSC13 on openSUSE Greek Fans on facebook or on G+. Also on twitter you can follow @openSUSEConf or search for the hashtag #oSC13.

If you missed the chance to be here with us and have fun you can attend the conference and all the fun online from the live streaming that is set up in the venue. Also if you have any questions for the presentation you attend online there is an IRC Channel set up in order to make your questions.

Last but not least we have our local newspaper!

Newspaper oSC13

Source: openSUSE News