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Posts Tagged ‘Boosters’

It’s good to visit Conferences

October 8th, 2010 by

This post is about why one should visit a conference at all and hopefully is a good read for people who haven’t been on a FOSS conference yet. For oldtimers this might be unbelieveable, but I remember perfectly how I thought “This conference sounds interesting, but its probably only for checkers, long term contributors, not for me”. Thanks god I had somebody convincing me that that’s wrong and pulled me to my first Akademy which was a great experience as well as all the other conferences I have been later.

The main thing that happens on conferences is learning. While sitting in workshops and presentations you can learn so much about technologies, and since you take the time to really listen to it, it sticks very good in your mind. If questions remain open, you can be sure to immediately find people who can help to clearify.

Learning often results in motivation because if you learned something you want to try it out. Since you again have time after the conference presentations and you are surrounded by others who are interested in the similar topics, the motivation grows to really put the hands on the keyboard and try things out.

Another motivational factor can be that people adjust your opinion about your own contribution, if you already did some. You might think your contribution is only small, not comparable and not so important. After having three people met who were thanking you for your work and telling you how important it was for them, you will feel the motivation boost. But attention – that sometimes works the other way round as well 😉

But that guides us to the most important thing: Meeting people in person, get to know each other, make friends. I know so many people from visiting conferences, and the quality of “knowing” is so much higher if a face, a smile, a good presentation or other things like funny clothes can be put to a name. Even people I do not know know me because I visited a conference once.

Working for and with people you know in person is much more pleasant as if you only know their email addresses. And we’re not talking about conflict situations which are so much easier to solve if you have met before.

openSUSE Conference 2010

Last but not least the possibility of influencing things must not be forgotten. Often on conferences things move forward, because the right people are on the same spot and discuss things and come to decisions. Believe it or not, it happens quickly that you end up in the circle of people if you want.

Ah yes, there is another reason why people like to come to conferences: It’s called ‘having fun’. I am not sure what is that about, but it must be cool 😉

Very soon the second international openSUSE Conference takes place in Nürnberg, Germany. If you are interested in the openSUSE project, the distribution or upstream projects, I really like to encourage you to conferencing give FOSS conferencing a try if you had never done it before. If you had, you will be there anyway 😉

Please do not hesitate and register now.

openSUSE @ Chemnitzer Linux Tage 2010

March 18th, 2010 by

Last weekend, I was boosting at Chemnitzer Linux Tage where we ran openSUSE booth with Jan Weber, Kai-Uwe Behrmann and Sirko Kemter. Jan and Sirko already wrote reports at their blogs, so I’ll add just some personal thoughts and remarks.
It all started on Friday at the Greek restaurant. There was about ten of us, including all the guys mentioned above, invis-server people and others (sorry, I suck at remembering names). We had nice evening with some greek food (surprisingly), German beer and free ouzo refill. Yes free. Caused me troubles later…

On Saturday morning, we went to the TU where the event took place and finished the booth with table clothes I brought from Prague. I have to thank my girlfriend’s brother, who work in a restaurant, for providing these (I will rather not thank the restaurant – I doubt they are aware of their contribution). Both touchscreens were ready, running 11.2, one GNOME and the second one KDE 4.4.1 IIRC. We had also bunch of DVDs to hand out, some stickers and similar stuff.

The event officialy started at 9 o’clock. I was surprised that so many people showed up.  Many of them came to the our booth, either just to take the DVD or to ask for help with their openSUSE installation. It was a bit funny when somebody started to talk to me in German (which I have completely forgot since the secondary school), so I always had to ask for switching to English – about 95% of cases this was no problem, and in the rest of cases I simply Fwd:ed the people to Jan or Kai-Uwe.

I have talked to several people doing server solutions based on openSUSE and asked what’s their biggest issue with using openSUSE and what can we do better. There seemed to be a consensus that it’s packages dropped from the distribution without communicating it enough to the community. Perhaps we could think about some centralized place (mailinglist) where packages that are due to be dropped were communicated to the community, so interested people could step in and take over of their maintenance?

Late in the afternoon, I attended Frederic Weisbecker’s talk called Instrumentation with perf events and ftrace, which was AFAIK the only lecture held in English. Frederic gave an overview about recently included tracing subsystem in linux kernel and how can it be used to gather various information from the running system.

On Sunday, things were more quiet as not so many people as on Saturday came. It was quite funny when I talked with some guy from Fedora at our booth when internet connection at the touchscreens broke up. I suspect it was some problem at AP’s side, but he seemed to be quite amused by openSUSE’s “instability” nevertheless. Hmm…

I left at about 15:30 and headed back to Prague.

In general, I think it was nice event and our booth was quite successful, because we handed out about 800 DVDs and also managed to solve most of the problems people asked us to help them with (KDE 4.4 desktop appereance, non working internet connection and VirtualBox installation are just few of them). I was happy to meet new people as well as those I know from IRC or changelog entries.

I took few photos, which can be found at picasaweb.

Booster Sprint Results

November 6th, 2009 by

The boosters team promised to talk about what happens in our sprints – the two week time boxes in which we work on our projects. The last sprint ended on october 27th and we still owe you what happened.

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.