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.

These three openSUSE posters have been up for a while, but I now have the SVG files up so people can edit them, add their LUG or openSUSE Local User Group name/logo & address to them, change the design, etc. They are up on the Miscellaneous Artwork page, so our community can use them for flyers, posters, or to spam their neighbor’s mailboxes*. Comments, questions, or suggestions about the posters? Use that comment box below, folks ;-).

*Neither Kevin Dupuy, the openSUSE Project, nor Geeko endorse plastering people’s mailboxes with a bunch of openSUSE flyers. Save the trees, use email instead ;-).

For folks not that used to web interfaces, the openSUSE Forums team provides a secondary interface to our forums - NNTP. The intention of this post is to raise your attention on this possibility.

What is NNTP?

Using our NNTP interface, you’re able to participate in forums discussions without accessing the web interface at all. You’re able to use any newsreader supporting the RFC standard to read and even write posts. Actually your user-id gets recognized in the web interface if you set up your newsreader properly.

From my personal experience especially developers are in general more familiar in using mailing lists instead of browsing a web interface. One of our desires is to get more developers to the board. On the one hand, developers can provide competent assistance especially to our new users - on the other hand, the forums are able to provide a lot of feedback back to developers. The advantages are obvious!

The NNTP interface to the forums provides a neat way to browse significantly more content with less effort. You can get a quick overview about forums content using NNTP. Certainly you’ll not be able to see the great template created by Robert Lihm, but every choice has its drawback - Good to have a choice at least, isn’t it?

For detailed instructions on how to set up your newsreader properly to participate in forums discussions, be sure to check out the NNTP section within our forums FAQ.

We’re really looking forward to your contribution!

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…)

It was quietly put up on the Novell store front page but openSUSE 11.0 is now available for pre-order! The boxed edition of openSUSE, which I have long been buying, has stayed the same, kinda bland looking white with a big lizard for a long time. But with 11.0 comes a new design that looks extremely slick and cool.

I also noticed the rather large notice on the American store page for openSUSE 11.0, which reads “Order to be shipped upon product release June 19.”

Hopefully that means they’ll try to avoid the tough time I and several others had getting a boxed edition in the United States (pre-ordering openSUSE, then getting it five weeks later, or four weeks after public release). They also don’t have the promotion from last year, where if you pre-ordered openSUSE 10.3 you got free shipping. Maybe that’s a trade-off for getting it at a reasonable time, if so I’m cool ;-).

UPDATE: According to an email Novell just sent out, free shipping is back if you pre-order, at least in the US. Also, a commenter said there is free shipping in Germany too.

With only like three weeks until openSUSE 11.0 is released to the world, now would be a good time to start the buzz around it. OK, so there’s already been a lot of buzz around 11.0, for example this article from Ars Technica which reached the front page of Digg, not to mention our own countdown and openSUSE 11.0 pages. But there’s many more ways you and I can help people know about openSUSE 11.0.

If your into the whole Web 2.0/Internet/Social Networking thing, you know how much of a help and marketing tool (aka timewaster) it can be. The trick is to not bother people and throw openSUSE in their face every day (sorry Twitter friends!). But there are many ways you can use these tools to help openSUSE. Our own community manager Zonker has talked about using Twitter to spread openSUSE, and it does work. In terms of Twitter, however, it depends on who your followers are. For example, many of my followers are Linux or SUSE users already. How does Twitter help with those people? I’ll answer that in a minute.

A few days ago, I started an event on Facebook: openSUSE 11.0 Public Release (you need to be logged into Facebook to view) as a type of meta-event. It doesn’t have a specific real world location (the location is set to opensuse.org; the city, which is required, was set to Nuremberg, Germany for obvious reasons) but it serves to bring the awareness of openSUSE 11.0’s release, and also encourages anyone else starting an actual release event (such as a openSUSE User Group or Linux user group) to add their event to Facebook and link it from the above event. Within 3 days, the number of people confirming their “attendance” is growing, and at least one person has mentioned that she plans on hosting a release party.

So, do you have any other ways to help share openSUSE 11.0? Are there openSUSE groups or 11.0 release events on other social networking websites the community should know about? Let me know through the comments!

Oh, and openSUSE 11.0 Release Candidate 1 should be out today!

BTW, this is my first post. I’m Kevin Dupuy, and instead of rehashing it all here, I’ve got my bio up on the wiki here.

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…)