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Andrew Wafaa

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openSUSE TV

August 5th, 2008 by

Some may know about the Geeko’s Tube, I’m not so sure that many do though.  There has been for a while now tube.opensuse.org, this is the official repository of videos by openSUSE people.  All the video is in .ogg format, and as such will play straight out of the box regardless of whether users are purists/pragmatists/whatever.

There are several services out on the web that offer video streaming in flash, one that caught my attention is blip.tv.  So why is blip different to YouTube et al?  Well for starters they openly use Open Source (they’re not ashamed of it), they support multiple formats for uploading and playback, and they provide multiple mechanisms to get your shows out there.

After some consultation on the mailing lists and IRC, I have created an openSUSE channel on blip.tv – http://opensuse.blip.tv The aim is for videos by the openSUSE Community for the openSUSE Community can get uploaded there and reach a much wider audience.  There are only a few videos on there at the moment but the content will grow (I’m just having a few ISP issues over here :-/ ).  So what content is able to go on there?  The short answer is any, yes there are only a couple of catches: they must preferably be clean (remember the audience is varied from young to old), have an openSUSE twist (the whole reason for the channel).  At present there are a few screencasts and some presentations by community members at events (granted they’re all employees, but that doesn’t make them any less a member of our community).

Just to show some of the ways you can watch the channel:

Banshee (out of the box openSUSE 11.0 install)

Browser (again out of the box openSUSE 11.0 install)

Miro which you can download, just look here.

As the channel is syndicated via RSS you can subscribe to it using Banshee/Miro and it will automatically download the latest episode for you (sorry I haven’t tried in KDE, but I believe it should work).  You can also add the RSS feed into your preferred reader and pull the attachments from there.

I would be really keen on getting people’s feedback and also if people have content they would like to get on there.

Tags:
Posted in Distribution, Marketing, Usability | Comments Off on openSUSE TV

LRL UK 08 – Not The Last

July 21st, 2008 by

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 😛  Part of the reason may have been the fact that the Furry Geekos were out in force

March of the Geekos

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?

Mystery Swag

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

Mystery Swag Revealed

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:

Linux Magazine openSUSE 11.0 Special Edition

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

Hung Geeko

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!

Tags: ,
Posted in Distribution, Events, Marketing | 5 Comments »

Meeting By The Pond

July 16th, 2008 by

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.

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Posted in Events, GNOME, Marketing | Comments Off on Meeting By The Pond

LRLUK08 – Freeing The Lizard

July 14th, 2008 by

Yes peeps, this weekend is the penultimate LUG Radio show and event.

LRL Speaker

It is also an event where I will be speaking about the openSUSE project and its great community (yes there’ll be a bit about Novell and how good they are too 😉 ) You can see the full schedule if you want to know what’s going on or just turn up on Sunday at 1500 to hear and see yours beautifully 😀

I am planning on being helping Lord Whittaker who will be there with a Novell stand, so hopefully I can bring a dash of Green Geeko Goodness to the event. If you are planning on going, please say hello. It’d be good to meet other openSUSE users.

Posted in Events | 1 Comment »

Garden Party

June 19th, 2008 by

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)

Posted in Events, GNOME | Comments Off on Garden Party

Carrying Community Radios

June 16th, 2008 by

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 🙂

Posted in Events, Marketing | 1 Comment »

Calling All Gardens

June 11th, 2008 by

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!

Posted in Events, GNOME, Marketing | Comments Off on Calling All Gardens

Garden Party

May 21st, 2008 by

Yet again the guardians of the garden are boogieing.

The GNOME Team are holding their meeting tomorrow Thursday 22nd May at 1600GMT/UTC/ZULU (or translate it into your local time). As always you can get sight of the agenda; the main themes for this week are Factory Testing, Bugs – under prioritised/bug voting/10.3 bug squashing, and a new item to the show Community Clinic.

“What pray tell is that last item?” I hear you ask (you did ask didn’t you?).  It is an item aimed at the code contributing challenged.  Basically we hope to be able to provide means for those that are unable to hack (for whatever reason) a way of helping out.  This could be packaging, documentation, pimping our wares and even HALO insertions behind enemy lines for guerrilla hit and run attacks.  Okay maybe not the last item but you get the idea.

So please come along and join the party, you don’t have to BYOB but the more the merrier we become 😀

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Posted in Events, GNOME | Comments Off on Garden Party

Help With Bug Hunting

May 20th, 2008 by

So far from what I’ve heard and seen, people really like the upcoming 11.0 release – yes it is now only a month away 🙂

To try and make sure it is even better come release date the guys and gals need good bugreports, and preferably not duplicate bugs. One handy tool for searching for your bug is Martin Vidner’s Bugzilla search tool. This has been formed into an OpenSearch plugin by the maestro that is Benji.

Basically all you need to do is head over to here and then select your search engine drop down menu and choose “Add openSUSE 11.0 Bug Search”. I have tried it in FireFox 2 and 3, but Konqueror should be pretty much the same.

Thanks to Martin and Benji for this lovely facility, and now there is no excuse for not filing correct bug reports 😉 Happy bug hunting.

UPDATE
Thanks again to Benji, he has corrected my mistake for adding the search option in Konqueror. Just do the following:
settings -> configure konqueror -> web shortcuts -> new
bnc search settings in konqueror

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Posted in Miscellaneous, Quality Assurance | Comments Off on Help With Bug Hunting

Discussing Garden Ornaments

May 14th, 2008 by

Well, it’s more the ornaments of the garden having a discussion 🙂

The GNOME Team are holding their meeting tomorrow Thursday 15th May at 1600GMT/UTC/ZULU (or translate it into your local time).  As always you can get sight of the agenda,the main themes for this week are PulseAudio, PackageKit, and installation patterns.

So if you have any suggestions, questions or complaints please join in on irc and get you voice heard.  Remember we are a community that like to work together.  If you want to try and influence anything within openSUSE then don’t be passive and sit in the background grumbling, stand up and join in.  This goes for all aspects of openSUSE, not just GNOME.  We won’t bite, but we may disagree.  From that disagreement we can hopefully get to an amicable compromise, or at the very least explain the decisions that have been made.

So please join use tomorrow and try and make GNOME even better under openSUSE 🙂  As it happens the KDE Team have their meeting today at 1800GMT/UTC/ZULU (translation to local).

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Posted in Events, GNOME | Comments Off on Discussing Garden Ornaments

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