Yesterday evening we celebrated the openSUSE 11.2 launch in the Novell/SUSE Linux offices. Around fifty people showed up – both openSUSE folks employed by Novell and externals.

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As Stephan Kulow announced recently openSUSE 11.2 is now build in a separate project and openSUSE Factory contains changes that will not go into openSUSE 11.2. Therefore if you followed so far openSUSE Factory via e.g. “zypper dup” and want to switch to 11.2, you have to change the repositories that you are using.  If you installed openSUSE 11.2 RC1, you have already the right repositories for 11.2 setup.

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With the opening of the openSUSE distribution so that everybody can contribute to packaging, we introduced the concept of devel projects and I’d like to explain a bit more what they are and why they are important.

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The last two weeks saw two improvements on speeding up the building of packages in the openSUSE Build Service: An ultra-fast scheduler and a binary cache for the worker. Both changes on its own should speed up the server that allocates jobs to the client – and the binary cache improves also the clients since they don’t have to download every package for every build.

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After running my laptop for some time already on openSUSE Factory, I decided to update my workstation now as well to openSUSE Factory – thus upgrading it to openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 8.

Instead of the “old” but still working way of burning a media, booting from it and upgrading my system, I did the “new” way of openSUSE 11.2: Updating in place with “zypper dup”.

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Sunday morning of the openSUSE conference I took part in the Lightning Talks which were short talks on a variety of topics.  I’ve took some brief notes of these:

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I found so far the following galleries of photos from the openSUSE Conference (osc09):

• gallery.opensuse.org
• flickr osc09 group
• Roger Whittaker’s photos
• Coly Li’s photos

The flickr photos are also shown on the osc09 twitterwall.

Please tell me about further galleries and I’ll update this blog post.

Update 2009-09-23:  Add Coly Li’s photos

Today at the openSUSE Conference I took the notes of the governance session.  We will continue the discussion tomorrow but let me just publish the raw notes as I took them at the meeting without much editing.

Notes below:

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I stumbled upon a little series of articles at the LinuxFoundation Developer Network explaining the openSUSE Build Service.

The articles are:

• openSUSE Build System: Building Binary Packages for Many Linux Distributions at Once
• openSUSE Build System: Building RPM Packages
• openSUSE Build System: Building DEB Packages

Ben Martin gives a short overview of the Build Service and then explains step by step how to build a binary package. If you’re interested in building binary packages, I advise to read his articles.

Magnus started recently a discussion on the openSUSE packaging mailing list (thread start is archived here) where he stated that it takes very long for him to build packages for openSUSE’s Factory distribution since the packages are only build once the complete distribution has been built.

The solution that was proposed – and which should be used in general – is to build against the snapshot repository of openSUSE:Factory. (more…)