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Archive for 2009

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Announcing Candidacy for the openSUSE Community Board

October 28th, 2009 by

Community,

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

Posted in Board, Elections | Comments Off on Announcing Candidacy for the openSUSE Community Board

Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften is over

October 27th, 2009 by

Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften is an event to show all kinds of science in a simple way to the public. Many education facilities and companies in the Nuernberg area participated. It took place last Saturday and we had a rather long but very successful night. Our room at Georg-Simon Ohm Hochschule (technical university) was pretty well visited over the whole evening. We could welcome visitors with all kind of technology level – from pure beginners, long time Linux users to developers with deep technical knowledge. We served them 4 different dishes:

  • 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.

    Will giving a desktop talk
  • 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.
Kid playing games on Linux

Kids playing games on Linux

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”.

Posted in Events, Marketing | Comments Off on Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften is over

Developing for openSUSE using Devel Projects

October 22nd, 2009 by

With the opening of the openSUSE distribution so that everybody can contribute to packaging, we introduced the concept of devel projects and I’d like to explain a bit more what they are and why they are important.

(more…)

Posted in Build Service, Distribution, Factory | Comments Off on Developing for openSUSE using Devel Projects

update from the openSUSE Boosters

October 21st, 2009 by

While openSUSE 11.2 gets closer and closer, all of the Boosters are mostly busy making sure RC1 and the final release are good.  But we’re finding some time to work on our Boosting projects.  On the umbrella site for all opensuse.org sites front, a design and user profiles are being developed .  The factory.opensuse.org status site concept is being developed in collaboration with the Maintenance team, so that it will be used for seeing the state of maintenance work (ie online updates) for released openSUSE versions.  We’re analysing the Build Service web client code for how to hook in there, and several team members are brushing up their Ruby skills.  The reorganize contributor documentation squad are discussing a new structure on the opensuse-wiki mailing list.

If you have any feedback on these ideas you can find us on the opensuse-project mailing list or on -wiki as above.  If you want to help out, we’ll be using opensuse-boosters@opensuse.org in future.

Busily,

The Propaganda Minister

Posted in Build Service, Documentation, Wiki | Comments Off on update from the openSUSE Boosters

Branching Contrib for 11.2

October 21st, 2009 by

As you might know, Contrib is a universal repository for third-party packages. Branching of this repository to openSUSE:11.2:Contrib is going to happen on October, 30, so if you want to have your favorite application or tool included in openSUSE:11.2:Contrib, please submit your request as soon as possible.

If you already maintain some package(s) in Contrib, please spend a few minutes by checking that the package builds fine, has properly set metadata (maintainer, bugowner) etc.

Posted in Build Service, Contrib, openSUSE 11.2, Packaging | Comments Off on Branching Contrib for 11.2

I am going to Encuentro Linux 2009!

October 21st, 2009 by

Yes, I am going to Encuentro Linux 2009, and so does openSUSE!. This year the most important Linux event in Chile will be held in Valparaiso and Viña del Mar at the same time. I’ll be giving a presentation on SUSE Studio (if you didn’t already know 😉 ) on Saturday 24th, 10:00 – 11:10 AM. Of course I am taking all openSUSE 11.1 DVDs I have left, and will be a great oportunity to show on my notebook  what’s coming for 11.2.

yovoy1

More information (in spanish only) here. See you there!.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Events, Marketing | Comments Off on I am going to Encuentro Linux 2009!

Kolab becomes available again for openSUSE

October 18th, 2009 by

Kolab on openSUSE made some very good progress since my last blog update on this topic. The most visible thing to the system administrator is that all Kolab required packages are available on the build service for openSUSE_Factory which will become openSUSE_11.2 very soon and its and predecessors.

In the past Kolab depended on the project c-client for imap annotations, but about a year ago this project became less open source than it used to be. For this reason I started to look for an alternative, which was found by just removing the c-client project as a dependency for Kolab. This forces Kolab to use the php-pear-net_imap annotation code. It is perhaps not as fast as the c-client code, but I assume that this gives no problem on openSUSE based Kolab installations.

Getting rid of the c-client project has another very big advantage as it now no longer required to rebuild the php module php5-imap. This was always very very problematic, especially for the x86_64 architecture. So the current setup is really nice.

As usual with building packages, getting rid of the c-client looks easier than it actually was, as a bug in the php-pear-net_imap project resulted in a non working setup. It took quite some time, before the solution was found and Kolab started to behave correctly again 🙂

For openSUSE_11.2 the php package php5-pear-log was removed from the base distribution, which prevented many Kolab required php5-pear modules to be build. Once the package was added to the server:php:applications build repository all the required Kolab required php5-pear modules started to build properly.

So for the brave at heart, give Kolab on openSUSE-11.2 a try. For the less brave ones try Kolab on openSUSE-11.1.

Oh and don’t forget to vote for Kolab in openSUSE’s feature tracking system openFATE!

Posted in Server | Comments Off on Kolab becomes available again for openSUSE

Speeding up openSUSE Build Service

October 16th, 2009 by

The last two weeks saw two improvements on speeding up the building of packages in the openSUSE Build Service: An ultra-fast scheduler and a binary cache for the worker. Both changes on its own should speed up the server that allocates jobs to the client – and the binary cache improves also the clients since they don’t have to download every package for every build.

(more…)

Posted in Build Service | 1 Comment »

Making technology Previews succeed – OSC 09 Unconference session notes

October 9th, 2009 by

I did an Unconference at openSUSE Conference 2009 titled: Roads Less Travelled – Making Technology Previews succeed“.  More number of people than I had expected participated in the unconference session. I wanted to make the discussion notes (rough) available to a wider audience so that we could act on some of those:

Often Technology Previews are not solving their purpose. The objective of this session was to discuss, find out how we could get better feedback on Technology Previews and make them better.

The discussion is focused primarily on these areas:

  • Advertise the feature through proper channels, places
  • Make it easy enough for users to try out and provide feedback
  • Make it less risk-prone
  • What stops users from trying out?
  • Provide better documentation?

Key discussion points, suggestions:

  • Announcement in opensuse.org main page/wiki could grab the attention of community members who could help test Technology Previews.
  • Reduce hassles in providing feedback. For e.g Perhaps facility without authentication/Single-signon?
  • Easy ways/methods to provide feedback/input
  • Bug/Issue reporting made easy, command line tools?
  • Text area to provide feedback (as opposed a authentication based system).
  • Create a dedicated page for preview for e.g. previews.opensuse.org
  • irc channel for previews? (Discussion on all TPs, User testing one TP might get interested in another)
  • Announcement in openSUSE Weekly news could help
  • More Blogs, Articles, Whitepapers etc.. (blog entries should have provision for giving comments)
  • Perhaps, try to get some help from documentation team?
  • Provide instructions, mechanisms to safely try out without breaking things.
  • Additional information about new technology while the community tries to use the old technology For e.g. while a user tries to do nfsv3 mount providing an informational message that NFSv4 is available and can be used
  • Suggest using a VM
  • Caution about what might break and what might not (Make community feel less riskier to try out).

Please feel free to comment on what might work and if you have any more suggestion.

The short presentation I used to introduce the topic can be found here: http://files.opensuse.org/opensuse/en/d/de/Roads_Less_Travelled.pdf

Tags:
Posted in Distribution, Documentation, Quality Assurance | Comments Off on Making technology Previews succeed – OSC 09 Unconference session notes

About Patterns versus Packages

October 7th, 2009 by

Just a quick note to everyone using factory and wonder what patterns-openSUSE-kde4_basis is all about: our patterns install packages now.

(more…)

Posted in Distribution, openSUSE 11.2 | 9 Comments »

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