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Archive for May 16th, 2011

openSUSE on the Linuxtag 2011

May 16th, 2011 by

around thirty members of the openSUSE project are just back from a fife days visit of Linuxtag in Berlin, the largest Linux specific event in Europe. We were crowding the openSUSE booth and were giving fourteen talks, took part on a key note like panel discussion, the usual distro battle and delivered the well known Booster workshops on the booth. Here is a little very personal log.

A SUSE grafity bag made on LinuxTag 2011We had a very nice booth, large and at a nice place. We had the chance to tell lots of people about openSUSE and where it is heading to. I heard much good feedback, about the distribution on the one hand, but also for the project and how it evolves. Slowly we seem to get a good message out and users and peers from the FOSS community get and appreciate it. Very good to experience that.

Of course we also had good fun at the booth andgave some interesting workshops in pipe cleaner arts and grafity for example.

Some other specific things that stick to my mind:

I went to a talk about Icinga, a system for open source monitoring. A very good talk about an obviously great system with a very awake community. Good to see the hands on approach of them. Interestingly enough, after the talk somebody asked why they did choose PHP as programming language instead of something cool like rails. I could not resist to tell about that at least I often thought about if it hadn’t been better to do the OBS in PHP instead of Rails simply because more people know it. Not appreciated 😉

Another talk I liked was the fly over Qt and its recent past and future, delivered by Daniel Molkentin. Thoughts about Qt 5 were published a few weeks ago and Danimo outlined these again, also showing some nice demos of the upcoming Qt Quick and more.

From Vincent I saw a very good talk about collaboration between distros where he came up with an impressive list of activities where we’re already collaborate and proposals for more. Sad to see only few people in the audience. I missed Vincents other one about GNOME 3, but there is a nice Interview with him done at LT about that topic.

Apart from talks I saw KDE Active the first time real on a kind of Weetab on the KDE booth. Definetely cool, hopefully applications will catch up and being ported to this kind of platform. I am sure users will seek out for more than weather forecast apps sooner or later.

On saturday a collegue from the Gentoo Project approached me and told me that his team is actively working on a Smolt feature to also track the list of installed software of a system. We also use Smolt in openSUSE and we also have Feature #305877 asking for that kind of functionality, so I think we should jump on that train to support that effort. Nice idea, volunteers welcome!

Yes, and there also was some sports on Linuxtag: The Sportsfreunde der Sperrtechnik had a booth and were giving workshops on lock picking. I attended, but was not successful so far, need more practising 😉

Apart from that I have to say that I was a bit disappointed by this years LinuxTag. I had the feeling that the number of visitors did not meet the expectations of the most exibitors and presenters. The hallways were really relaxed most of the time. Furthermore, the number of not so impressive talks I saw was comparably high. The official numbers however do not support my feeling, so maybe I am wrong.

Anyway it was big fun again. I like to thank you all for your share which made Linuxtag 2011 a great success for openSUSE.

Have you BURPed yet today?

May 16th, 2011 by

Well, have you?  Not the satisfying expulsion of excess gas, but the simplest way you can materially contribute to openSUSE.

I was just hanging in the #active channel, watching my KDE chums make their new touchscreen interface (video), when somebody complained that shared-desktop-ontologies does not yet contain the latest release needed by KDE git master.  And instead of updating the package myself, I suggested they just BURP:

  • Branch,
  • Update,
  • Request,
  • the Package

And by doing so we all get the latest versions in the devel project and soon in Tumbleweed and openSUSE Factory.  So ambassadors, boosters and motivated contributors know how to do that right?  Now you can use this glib little acronym to persuade friends and colleagues to do the same.

Happy BURPing!

Wine on Linuxtag 2011

May 16th, 2011 by

As Christian Boltz and myself held a quite successful talk on Wine on the 2010 openSUSE conference, we decided to again hold a talk at Germanys largest Linux fair, Linux Tag 2011 in Berlin.

We again ran the pun talk “Wine” (not) the Emulator vs “Wine” the beverage, with Christian talking about life and work at a vineyard and his wine grower community at Deutsches Weintor.

Included in this talk was a Wine tasting of 4 different kinds of Wine, as grown in the area were Christian lives.

His stories on Vineyard activities and the processing from grape to wine interluded with myself talking about Wine the Emulator, its historical and statistical parts, game support and futures.

Around 70 people  enjoyed our light hearted wrap up talk of this Linux Tag conference.

Images: by hueck2342 at flickr.com, licensed as Creative Commons  – Share Alike, Attribute, Non Commercial http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/