Roger also did a sterling job of getting the new openSUSE 11.0 Live/Installable DVD into almost all the “NutSacks” (The bags attendees received when entering the event).  Those that didn’t get one in there pretty quickly came over to ensure they did get one.  Everyone agreed that we had the best mascot and the best swag, talking of which can anyone guess what this is?

Only a few folk were lucky enough to get one, and to be honest it is a much better one than what RedHat/Fedora were dishing out.  It is of course a USB stick

Another piece of openSUSE swag that was being dished out but not by us was the Linux Magazine openSUSE 11.0 Special.  This is actually quite a good issue and is a great companion for anyone new to the distro.  I have a couple that I can send to people (UK/Europe preferably due to cost) if requested.  The issue was created aimed predominantly at the US market where Linux Magazine is trying to get a foot hold:

Wandering around, I spoke to quite a lot of people about Linux in general and openSUSE and the feedback from people was tremendous.  Those that have actually tried 11.0 really really like it, and those that haven’t were adamant that they would.  So much so that one rather intimidating chap mentioned that “A friend of mine needed to re-install her machine and she was very scared of the process, I gave her a DVD of 10.3 and told her to ring me if she was stuck.  She rang me a short while later and exclaimed at how easy and straight forward it was.  She hasn’t looked back since!” The praise also came from a fair few die hards of other distros, which was pleasant to see and hear.  There was a friendly swag exchange with RedHat and Fedora, although their offering was pretty poor in comparison but still better than Ubuntu who had nothing but a type of crummy sticker and a million and one CDs of assorted variants of the same crud :-)  The Fedora guys took it upon themselves to try and sully the image and spirit of our beloved Geeko by hanging it by one of their lanyards

Thankfully the kind chaps from Debian rescued it, although I’m pretty sure it was for their own gains.  The atmosphere was light hearted and pleasent with no trolls in sight or in earshot.  This even extended to my lightning talk which was pretty well attended, around 30 people almost none of which were involved with openSUSE in any way.  You can get my slides here, and there will be a video of it shortly.

All in all it was a fairly good weekend, and from an openSUSE perspective a very productive one ;-)  I would like to thank Roger for his hard work in doing the stand, helping out and support as well as for the photos (some of which I used here).  I would also like to thank Zonker and Novell for arranging for the brilliant swag and DVDs, without which we could have looked like dull dorks.  Till next year!

For an overview what time this is in different timezones, use:

http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?day=17&month=07&year=2008&hour=16&min=0&sec=0&p1=0

Topics being covered are:

• Feature review
• Policy review
• Pattern review
• Patch tagging day
• Package submission changes

Remember EVERYONE is welcome, new/old, hacker/user etc.  So please come along and join the fun, fancy dress and fishing rods are optional.

It is also an event where I will be speaking about the openSUSE project and its great community (yes there’ll be a bit about Novell and how good they are too ) You can see the full schedule if you want to know what’s going on or just turn up on Sunday at 1500 to hear and see yours beautifully

I am planning on being helping Lord Whittaker who will be there with a Novell stand, so hopefully I can bring a dash of Green Geeko Goodness to the event. If you are planning on going, please say hello. It’d be good to meet other openSUSE users.

To quote the most casual programmers who just so happens to be our MC:

Hi all GNOME addicts,

The next openSUSE-GNOME project meeting will take place at the official
#opensuse-gnome IRC channel on freenode
(irc://irc.freenode.net/openSUSE-gnome) on

upcoming Thursday: 2008/06/19 18:00 CEST (16:00 UTC)

For an overview what time this is in different timezones, use:

http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?day=19&month=06&year=2008&hour=16&min=0&sec=0&p1=0

This meeting is meant to discuss the latest developments in and around
openSUSE-GNOME. Please review your topics on the meeting wiki page at:

http://en.opensuse.org/GNOME/Meetings/20080612

as soon as possible.

For general info about our IRC meetings read:

http://en.opensuse.org/Meetings/About

For a general technical introduction to IRC (Internet Relay Chat) see

http://www.irchelp.org/ ;(not affiliated with openSUSE) or enter “IRC
help” into your preferred search engine.

The network we use is freenode - for more information on this, including
how to find a server, visit http://freenode.net/;(not affiliated with
openSUSE either).

Have a lot of fun ..

Casual J. Programmer

(on behalf of the openSUSE-GNOME team)

So I’m interested in knowing if there are any others going that would be interested in helping man a booth run by community members for the greater community?  If there are please let me know either by e-mailing the Marketing Mailing list or by commenting here.  Idealy we would need at least three people to man the booth, this way it would give people that are helping a chance to enjoy the event and not be shackled.

Please join in the fun and make sure people get the message that openSUSE is a real distro to contend with, this is an ideal opportunity for people who haven’t got much hacking prowess to help out

Hi all GNOME addicts,

The next openSUSE-GNOME project meeting will take
place at the official #opensuse-gnome IRC channel on
freenode (irc://irc.freenode.net/openSUSE-gnome) on
upcoming Thursday: 2008/06/12 18:00 CEST (16:00 UTC)

For an overview what time this is in different
timezones, use:
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?day=12&month=06&year=2008&hour=16&min=0&sec=0&p1=0

This meeting is meant to discuss the latest
developments in and around openSUSE-GNOME. Please
review your topics on the meeting wiki page at:

http://en.opensuse.org/GNOME/Meetings/20080612

as soon as possible.

For general info about our IRC meetings read:

http://en.opensuse.org/Meetings/About

For a general technical introduction to IRC (Internet
Relay Chat) see

http://www.irchelp.org/ ;(not affiliated with
openSUSE) or enter “IRC help” into your preferred
search engine.

The network we use is freenode - for more information
on this, including how to find a server, visit
http://freenode.net/;(not affiliated with openSUSE
either).

Have a lot of fun ..

Casual J. Programmer

(on behalf of the openSUSE-GNOME team)

So come one come all, and join the fun!

The GNOME Team are holding their meeting tomorrow Thursday 22nd May at 1600GMT/UTC/ZULU (or translate it into your local time). As always you can get sight of the agenda; the main themes for this week are Factory Testing, Bugs - under prioritised/bug voting/10.3 bug squashing, and a new item to the show Community Clinic.

“What pray tell is that last item?” I hear you ask (you did ask didn’t you?).  It is an item aimed at the code contributing challenged.  Basically we hope to be able to provide means for those that are unable to hack (for whatever reason) a way of helping out.  This could be packaging, documentation, pimping our wares and even HALO insertions behind enemy lines for guerrilla hit and run attacks.  Okay maybe not the last item but you get the idea.

So please come along and join the party, you don’t have to BYOB but the more the merrier we become

To try and make sure it is even better come release date the guys and gals need good bugreports, and preferably not duplicate bugs. One handy tool for searching for your bug is Martin Vidner’s Bugzilla search tool. This has been formed into an OpenSearch plugin by the maestro that is Benji.

Basically all you need to do is head over to here and then select your search engine drop down menu and choose “Add openSUSE 11.0 Bug Search”. I have tried it in FireFox 2 and 3, but Konqueror should be pretty much the same.

Thanks to Martin and Benji for this lovely facility, and now there is no excuse for not filing correct bug reports Happy bug hunting.

UPDATE
Thanks again to Benji, he has corrected my mistake for adding the search option in Konqueror. Just do the following:
settings -> configure konqueror -> web shortcuts -> new

The GNOME Team are holding their meeting tomorrow Thursday 15th May at 1600GMT/UTC/ZULU (or translate it into your local time).  As always you can get sight of the agenda,the main themes for this week are PulseAudio, PackageKit, and installation patterns.

So if you have any suggestions, questions or complaints please join in on irc and get you voice heard.  Remember we are a community that like to work together.  If you want to try and influence anything within openSUSE then don’t be passive and sit in the background grumbling, stand up and join in.  This goes for all aspects of openSUSE, not just GNOME.  We won’t bite, but we may disagree.  From that disagreement we can hopefully get to an amicable compromise, or at the very least explain the decisions that have been made.

So please join use tomorrow and try and make GNOME even better under openSUSE :-)  As it happens the KDE Team have their meeting today at 1800GMT/UTC/ZULU (translation to local).

Well the GNOME Team are holding their regular meeting tomorrow Thursday 08 May 2008 @ 1600UTC/GMT/ZULU - or for those not quite with the whole “foreign” time thing try this.  One of the themes is the BitTorrent client, why am I saying this?  Well for all those that have an opinion about it, please come along and let everyone know what that is, yes there may be a chance to get on your soap box and denounce the world and it’s dog,  and we can have a real-time discussion about it.  If you don’t tell someone (preferably someone that makes decisions) then no one knows and nothing happens, filing bugs also helps

A bit of background reading on why the choice of monsoon was made can be found here - yes I did indeed do the initial review of clients and made the recommendation, and I’m sticking to it!  I did however get others to test it to confirm I’m not 100% insane.  As with all applications your mileage may vary, but we are intent in trying to make your mileage be the same great journey as one would expect from openSUSE.  So if you care, join in and you never know you may bring something to the table that no one thought of