Li-f-e at iFest @ DA-IICT

openSUSE Education team from Baroda: Samyak Bhuta, Biswajyoti Mahanta and me, were all wearing either Li-f-e or openSUSE t-shirts, many students got the latest edition of Li-f-e based on openSUSE 11.2 installed on their USB sticks. DA-IICT will also be hosting iso image and presentations on their internal network for everyone on campus to download.

The sessions were interactive demonstrations of Li-f-e, http://susestudio.com, and Blender(by Biswa) the presentations openSUSE-Edu-Li-f-e.pdf and Blender.pdf used are available here.

We’ll do a launch party in our Nürnberg office on Thursday Nov 12, 7-10pm CET. We’ll try to attract people from the Nürnberg area and show them what’s new in openSUSE 11.2, hand out some media and show openSUSE 11.2 in action. Additional we’ll have a number of outstanding openSUSE folks from SUSE attending and looking forward having interesting discussion. With openSUSE 11.1 we opened up for the first time the “internal” release party to the public. This time we’d like to go one step further and having the launch party just for people interested in openSUSE. We appreciate and invite of course any buddies interested in openSUSE from the Nürnberg office.

What about doing a launch party in your area and share openSUSE 11.2 with others? Just add your party to the list of openSUSE launch parties.

Please understand this little report as usual as an invitation to ask, comment, suggest things and of course fire up your editor and contribute if you like.
You find us on IRC in channel #opensuse-boosters or on the opensuse-boosters mailinglist.

Discoverable centralised documentation driven by Lubos, Egbert, Henne, Petr and Federico.
This squad is working to provide a better discoverable developer documentation around openSUSE.

In the last sprint a lot of discovering “how things are usally done with wediawiki” has happened, such as how wiki content
is sorted or how portals are used. That went in parallel to the discussion Rupert started on the wiki mailinglist, good enough that both efforts go combined now – everybody is asked to join the discussion on the wiki list.

We also discovered that the media wiki update has not yet gone through, the problem was that our iChain plugin was broken with the new version of the Wiki. The squad will fix that.

Integrate all infrastructure under one Umbrella driven by Klaas, Robert, Darix, Michal, Pavol.

We were still very much individually sitting around and fiddle with the Ruby on Rails framework to get on speed with it. For example the way how to integrate several Rails projects under one umbrella project was investigated.

The plan for the next sprint is to come to a first draft on how the new web structure should look like. We’re very much bound to our artists work, so if you are a screen designer, please get in touch with Robert to support him to direct the poor developer souls.

factory.opensuse.org – website visualising Factory status driven by Tom, Vincent, Will, Coolo

this squad was a bit understrength because of vacation and the upcomming 11.2.

Nevertheless they discovered a lot of dependencies in the OBS which are needed to set up the factory.o.o page. Some not so nice corners in the OBS were cleaned a bit which came to light when tom and Will were working to set up a test instance of the OBS.

Our current driver is to enable every OBS user to do maintenance for packages in the maintained products (which are currently openSUSE 11.0, 11.1 and a few days 11.2). The maintenance concept itself is described in a very first draft here

However, the attribute system is way more powerful and can be used to store all kind of informations, attached to projects, source packages or even binary sub packages. The important thing here is that the attribute types have own permission rules. So it is for example possible to edit data in projects like openSUSE:11.1 or Fedora:9 which are usually read only.

A simple example is the OBS:Screenshot attribute, as you might guess you can attach references to screenshots to it. Every maintainer or bugowner has write access to it, this means if you are the bugowner of a package, you store this kind of informations not only in your projects, but also in the openSUSE:11.X project packages.

There is also the openSUSE:Playground attribute type created, just for you, when you like to play with this. Btw, the current available attribute types can be requested via “osc meta prj OBS”. And when you use the osc 0.123svn from svn trunk or openSUSE:Tools:Unstable Project, you can even check single attributes in different ways or create them.

For example:


osc meta attribute openSUSE:11.2 # Shows the attributes of the openSUSE:11.2 project
osc meta attribute home:adrianSuSE --attribute openSUSE:Playground --create # just creates the attribute in my home project
osc meta attribute home:adrianSuSE zphoto # returns empty, since the package hasn't the attribute.
osc meta attribute home:adrianSuSE zphoto --attribute-project # returns with attribute, since it falls back to the project


# stores two values (World Domination and fast) inside of the attribute:
osc meta attribute home:adrianSuSE --attribute openSUSE:Playground --set "World Domination,fast"
osc meta attribute home:adrianSuSE # shows all attributes in my home


osc search --attribute openSUSE:Playground # finds all packages in all projects with the openSUSE:Playground attribute
osc search --package zphoto --attribute openSUSE:Playground # finds all zphoto packages in all project with the openSUSE:Playground attribute


Okay, Okay, all that sounds not horrible sexy when you read it first. But imaging the possibilities. Each team or use case can get their own attributes. They decide what to store in which package, independend if they can modify the sources of project or not. So a team can easily mark packages for any kind of purpose (to fix bugreport 1234, to complete their product Z, to show the state of the packages on web page X, …).

The “osc mbranch” command from the maintenance concept shows also the power of this. You do not need to know where all instances of your package, just tell the server that you need to work on it and the server collects them all.

Please note that the API for the attribute system still might change until OBS 1.7 gets released, we may even need to remove the attributes (even though this is not planned). However, the version running at opensuse.org should be ready to play with this system. And I _really_ would like to hear any kind of feedback, ideas or requests. Can you please comment here, what you can imaging, what else you can use this system for ?

Thanks a lot !

PS: New attribute types can be defined only by the administrator atm, but I am really happy to create any kind of attributes for you, even though you just want to play with it!

Designed and modeled by Samyak Bhuta

We will be proudly wearing this when presenting Li-f-e at ifest celebrating 125 years of innovation, imagination, implementation and engineering with IEEE at the DA-IICT, Gandhinagar, India on 2 November 2009.

The 11.2 repositories are only updated with a release, so they have just been updated with the RC2 version and the next version will be to the final version.

“zypper sl -d” shows on my system these repositories – and those are the ones you should have as well if you want to update to 11.2:

# | Alias                 | Name                  | Enabled | Refresh | Priority | Type   | URI
--+-----------------------+-----------------------+---------+---------+----------+--------+----------------------------------------------------------
1 | openSUSE-11.2-Update  | openSUSE-11.2-Update  | Yes     | Yes     |   99     | rpm-md | http://download.opensuse.org/update/11.2/
2 | openSUSE_11.2_Debug   | openSUSE 11.2 Debug   | No      | Yes     |   99     | yast2  | http://download.opensuse.org/debug/distribution/11.2/repo/oss
3 | openSUSE_11.2_Non-Oss | openSUSE 11.2 Non-Oss | Yes     | Yes     |   99     | yast2  | http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.2/repo/non-oss
4 | openSUSE_11.2_Oss     | openSUSE 11.2 Oss     | Yes     | Yes     |   99     | yast2  | http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.2/repo/oss
5 | 11.2-test-updates     | 11.2-test-updates     | No      | Yes     |   99     | rpm-md | http://download.opensuse.org/update/11.2-test/

The last repository is optional for now, once 11.2 gets released it will be used for testing of updates.

To change your repositories, you can either edit the existing ones using (as root) “yast2 repositories” or remove (with “zypper removerepo”) the Factory repositories and add the 11.2 ones with “zypper addrepo”.

Finally, just run “zypper dup” to upgrade your distro – if you run it today, it will update you to openSUSE 11.2 RC2.

Note that there are no mirrors setup for this  repository today, so update might be slow.  Once openSUSE 11.2 gets released, all mirrors will have it.

for everyone not subscribed (yet) to the opensuse-project mailinglist: here is my candidacy announcement for Board Member of the openSUSE Community Board once again.

Community, Election Committee,

I herewith announce my candidacy for Board Member of the openSUSE
Community Board.

My name is Rupert, I’m 28 and I’m currently on the home stretch of
studying business administration and electrical engineering at
Darmstadt University of Technology.

I have been involved with the openSUSE Project for several years. I
started using Linux with the release of SUSE Linux 9.1 and became an
active contributor to the Project during my Internship in Product
Management at Novell/SUSE in 2007/2008. In January 2008, I have been
approved as an official openSUSE member. As an employee and afterwards
as a community volunteer, I served as the Project Manager of the
openSUSE forums merge and contributed as a moderator to the openSUSE
community until May 2009. As a Workstudent for Community Architecture,
I worked on several forums-internal projects and contributed to the
openSUSE Weekly Newsletter in 2008/2009.

Currently I’m involved in the efforts to come up with a sufficient
usability concept for the openSUSE Wiki in co-work with the Wiki- and
Booster Teams.

My contributions to the openSUSE Project so far imho reflect clearly
that I’m an organizing and coordinating kind of person and that I’m
focused on the social components of building and growing an
Open-Source Community. From my perspective, having a strong marketing
focus and thus providing sufficient support- and documentation
resources to the end user is just as important to the success of the
openSUSE Project as contributing to the distribution in a developing
capacity actually is. Just to make clear where I’m coming from.

Thanks,
Rupert

Thanks a lot for listening,
Rupert

• openSUSE Education
  Lars showed the benefits openSUSE Education has for schools and students and got in contact with a Nuernberg school which now want to move 30 clients to openSUSE Education.
  
• Games on Linux
  Andreas and Marco from live.linuX-gamers.net project showed impressively what games they offer from a Live-USB stick and received pretty many “wows” and “ahhs”. To them a special thanks for supporting the openSUSE project.
• openSUSE 11.2/Desktop
  Here Juergen showed the strength of GIMP by merging two ancient city maps of Nuernberg into one. With that he was a real visitor magnet.
  Will demonstrated the latest KDE and GNOME desktops. People were impressed by Digikam’s photo management capabilities, and interested to learn how the default KDE 4 desktop can be customized to resemble a more traditional KDE 3 or GNOME desktop, and that you can install thousands of different programs with YaST instead of having to download them from some website.
• Build Service, Participation etc.
  Pretty many visitors asked how they can contribute to openSUSE and were happy that they don’t have to be a developer to contribute. Wiki edits, translation and bug reports is sufficient. The more technical audience were impressed by the opportunities the Build Service offers them for their daily work.

Our room in the university was well attended till 11pm or so and we gave a talk each hour about different topics like “Introduction to openSUSE 11.2″, “Open Source philosophy”, openSUSE Education, Games on Linux and others. We handed out more then 500 openSUSE DVDs and had way more than 500 people attending our room.

People are interested in Linux and Linux is very well received. After a few focused questions which all started with “Does this … work with Linux?” people left our room, taking a DVD and saying, “If its that good, I’ll give it a try”. Most frequent question that evening was “How do you earn money?”. As many people know at which cost a Windows license or Windows Word come its not easy to understand that our products come for free and we charge for maintenance and support.

With our room at the university where several other events took place we could take advantage of an attractive venue for visitors. Thanks to that and thanks to our people who spent a Saturday night supporting openSUSE this was a successful participation and we should continue participate at “Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften” to fill the saying “From the local to the Global”.