So LUG Radio Live UK is over for another year, yes the event will be back next year but not the podcast.  openSUSE were represented by yours truly and Roger Whittaker (also representing the Big N), and to be honest I didn’t have to get my baseball bat out once to get people to come by - I was slightly disappointed with that as knocking some sense into some of those Ubuntu zombies would have been fun :-P  Part of the reason may have been the fact that the Furry Geekos were out in force

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!

It’s been two weeks since our last soirée, so without further ado The next openSUSE-GNOME project meeting will take place at the official #opensuse-gnome IRC channel tomorrow Thursday: 2008/07/17 16:00 UTC (18:00 CEST)

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.

Yes folks, it’s Thursday which means it must be time for us fun loveing GNOME people to have another meet.  I appreciate that openSUSE 11.0 is released today, but whilst you download why not join us in the fun (you can think of it as an on-line Release Party )

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)

Those folk from the UK based Podcast LUG Radio are holding their annual event LUG Radio Live on July the 19th and 20th.  I am attending and hopefully presenting a talk on openSUSE and our great community, but I would also like to see openSUSE have some other presence there.  The only problem is that LRL isn’t one of the big Open Source events, and as such the project can’t justify the expense of sending employees to the event especially as a fair few of them went to the US Show.

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

It’s that time in the week again where the openSUSE GNOME Team hold their weekly shindig.  So to quote our illustrious casual Team 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: 2008/06/12 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!

Last week, me and 2 Indonesian openSUSE members : Bonnie Kurniawan & M Herry Nurdin holds a training session at Grha Pemuda & Olah Raga (Youth Fellow & Sports Building), State Ministry for Youth Affairs and Sports of the Republic of Indonesia, Senayan, Jakarta.

Training focused on openSUSE server function and administration, with an overview about openSUSE 11.0 features and capability. There are totals 20 audiences on first and second day, and 40 audiences on third day, came from sub dept of State Ministry for Youth Affairs and Sports and they will administer openSUSE server on their office. Most of the audiences are newbie for Linux but they have no problem with openSUSE administration. They looks a quite bit worried when we got an introduction about Command Line Interface, but after a few minutes, they’re enjoy the training.

(more…)

Today, well actually yesterday, was the last day of Linuxtag in Berlin. I was a little bit worried because i had to make sure the openSUSE day and the booth running smooth. So sorry if i had kind of bad temper in the morning … Thanks to everbody who helped at the booth, when i went down from the conference room to look at it it ran perfectly!

We had again a mixed count at the talks … I’m not sure which talk was visited the most, probably the Laptop 2.0 talk from Timo, Holger and Helmut (yes, i got your papers …), or the Talk from Marcus about Wine. Very close follower was Henne with his Freevo talk. I taped all the talks, but to be honest i’m not sure if the recordings are that good … quite hard for me to tune the picture on a tiny display. We will see it on Monday …

At the booth we gave away approx. 1700 openSUSE 10.3 PromoDVDs if i counted correctly, there was just one box with 60 DVDs left, because it was hidden somewhere. We also gave away a lot of our new openSUSE Laptop stickers. The kind you can put over the one with the four color window/flag

So thanks again to all who helped: Moenk and his friends from Linux-club.de, Christian, Jan-Simon, the SUSE and Novell guys who helped also at the booth and of course the Linuxtag team! (sorry if i forgot somebody, i need sleep).

There will be more verbose mail on opensuse-project next week, stay tuned …

btw: no new photos today, my cam died … i managed somehow to break the display in my pocket. If you made photos at the Linuxtag, please add a link in the comments, thanks!

btw2: i hope everbody who drove home by train is home now. We heard there was a big problem with the trains in germany.

I’ll be in Berlin on Thursday and Friday. As this is my first LinuxTag i’m really excited and looking forward to meet as many people from the “openSUSE universe” as I can find .

See you at the openSUSE booth!

Martin Lasarsch looks quite busy with his project, preparing openSUSE booth on Linux Tag at Berlin , and so do with us here in Indonesia, preparing openSUSE booth for IGOS Summit 2 event. IGOS stand for Indonesia goes Open Source and IGOS Summit 2 dedicated for open source promo and community building.

(more…)

Today (Saturday, May 24, 2008), Indonesian openSUSE Community (openSUSE-ID) have a regular monthly meeting. Meeting for this month will be held on detik.com office, Jakarta.

We got about 30-40 registered members will be attending the meeting. It would reach more than 30 members because some of our regular meeting members didn’t submit their registration. The registration process itself only counted how much the attendees for better meeting room preparation.

This month, the agenda of meeting will cover up some discussion topics : openSUSE 11.0 features and highlight preview, presentation about zypper package manager, openSUSE on USB Live Stick demo, preparation for IGOS Summit 2 event (The event looks similar with FOSDEM in Europe. We have openSUSE booth at the event) and openSUSE 11.0 release party.

I’ll be update with some picts of our monthly meeting.