I’m back now from attending Linuxtag 2009 in Berlin. On Saturday I gave a presentation about openSUSE 11.2 and we had some good discussions about it.  I demoed WebYaST which will be an exciting addition to openSUSE.  WebYaST allows remote - and also local - administration of your system.  The participants of the talk mentioned also that  “zypper dup” to update from 11.1 to 11.2 is an important addition.

Btw. to learn more about openSUSE 11.2, check this wiki page which is regularly updated.

Adrian took some photos and uploaded them to the gallery.

It was great to see the momentum behind the education project, I talked a bit with Jan (and listened to his excellent talk) and Lars about it.

I’m back now for some days from my two months of parental leave and decided to get reacquainted with the openSUSE Build Service and the osc command line client.

I’ve checked which packages are failing in Factory on x86-64 (via this link) and checked the log files for some low hanging fruits that I could easily fix.

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I talked today with Frank and he mentioned that during openSUSE Community Week some people discussed improving the openSUSE Wiki.

He has written a first email on what he wants to do titled ‘RFC: Marking articles that have been “QA”‘ed‘ and now started going through the pages.  His progress report is available on the opensuse-wiki mailing list and titled ‘1st report on methodically checking pages on en.o.o.’

Frank would appreciate help with the task would be very much. If you like to help, please  join the IRC channel #opensuse-wiki on Freenode - it’s probably easier to coordinate via IRC than via email.

To see the current status, check http://en.opensuse.org/Wiki_Team/Checked_Pages

Next weekend we’re celebrating the first birthday of our daughter and that’s also the start for my two months paternity leave from Novell - and the openSUSE project.  I’ll be back on the 22nd of May.

During that time I plan not to  read my emails and plan not to be active in the openSUSE project, so don’t count on me getting involved or expect me to do anything.

I’m basically on a long vacation and my primary focus will be taking care of Jonna Ylvi - and also recharging my batteries, taking photos etc.

I see a lot of good changes in the openSUSE  project currently and look forward to engaging  fully again soon.

Our Wordpress instances have been updated to the latest release.  For readers of {news,zonker,lizards}.o.o nothing should be different.  People blogging will now see a new and improved interface which should  “take fewer clicks and be faster”.  Full details are available at the Wordpress blog

I’d like to say a big “THANK YOU” to Stephan Binner for his continued maintenance of these services and for the flawless update to the new version.  He drove this with some help from the Novell IS&T folks whom I’d like to thank as well!

Yesterday evening we had in Nürnberg the local release party which Martin announced a couple of days ago. I think we had around 50 participants, many from the local Novell office, but also people travelling by car for over an hour. The group was quite different: Developers, testers, users of openSUSE - also some people that just started using openSUSE and wanted to chat and celebrate with us. The youngest participant (my daughter) was 8 months old and sleeping most of the time.

We were fortunate to distribute openSUSE 11.1 DVDs and green hats.

I enjoyed talking with many that showed up and received as main feedback from many of those that I talked with: When will the presentation start? So, something to change for next time…

Thanks to Martin, Melanie and Jacqueline for the party - and thanks to all that joined us!

Phoronix has run some tests comparing the openSUSE 11.1 release candidate (RC1), Ubuntu 8.10, Fedora 10 and Mandriva 2009.0 on Intel Atom.

We have looked at the results and they are not good for openSUSE 11.1. I’ve talked with a few engineers and want to present below our first analysis.

While the benchmarks were done on a specific hardware, they might be relevant for other hardware as well.

Note that the numbers I cite below are not benchmark numbers comparable to the one Phoronix measured, they are measured on totally different machines by different engineers and not all are done as real benchmarks.  But they show some of the problems.

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Peter Pöml has created a dynamic list of our mirrors with accurate information about which repositories they mirror.  You can reach the link via the openSUSE wiki.  The data in the mirror list is used by our download redirector download.opensuse.org to point users automatically to mirrors close to them.

Btw. if anybody else wants to mirror openSUSE, please read these Instructions about it.  We love to increase our mirror infrastructure and there are some regions that could use additional mirrors.  Even if you only mirror parts of the openSUSE tree, you’re welcome!

Thanks a lot to all the mirror admins that mirror openSUSE - and to Peter for his continous improvements to the infrastructure!

During this week the so-called Contrib repository has been finally really started after the discussion come to a halt some time ago.  Contrib (see here for details) is a repository managed by community members that will be frozen at release time to make more packages available for openSUSE users.  It is a kind of “Universal” repository for third-party packages.

To see how it works, I updated today Greg KH’s smugbatch package that I put into my home project a couple of months ago and submitted it to contrib with the following command:

osc submitreq create home:a_jaeger smugbatch openSUSE:Factory:Contrib smugbatch -m \
"Add smugbatch to CONTRIB"

This produces an email to the opensuse-contrib mailing list and now my request gets reviewed by the maintainer team of Contrib.

Thanks a lot to Alexey for starting the contrib project a couple of months ago and to all volunteers that are driving it now!

Btw. smugbatch is a command line tool to manage photos on SmugMug - you can see some of my photos at my personal SmugMug page.

Coolo just announced on the opensuse-factory list:

Strictly speaking it’s not Factory, but I put the GMC live cds at the usual place: http://ftp.suse.com/pub/projects/FactoryLiveCDs/

It would be good to give the 11.1 kernel some testing.

GMC stands for Goldmaster Candidate - which means that these LiveCDs might be declared next week as goldmaster - and goldmaster is another name for the final release.

Note that we currently have no full repository for openSUSE 11.1 out - the one available contains RC1 and factory is not building at all, the sources are updated but not the binaries.  We use for building the distribution the 11.1 distribution in the openSUSE Build Service.