You, your friends and family are all invited to the double bonanza launch party of Ubuntu Karmic and openSUSE 11.2.
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.
People who follow the openSUSE Build Service (OBS) developments might know it already, we work on an attribute system for OBS. But what it is good for at all ?
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!
Yesterday i noticed that openal-soft on 11.2 is broken, it just locks up with current pulseaudio. It’s not surprising noone noticed as there are no packages in Factory that use it anymore. Even Chromium BSU which roughly has a 0% chance that it will ever need maintenance, security or otherwise was dropped from Factory and moved to the build service games dumpsi^Wrepo. Please, put your packages back to Factory. Chances that people find and use the software are much bigger if the distro has it rather than some random build service repo. Yes, there are some rules you have to follow then but that’s also a sign of quality for our users. Yes, it won’t be the latest and greatest version always but that doesn’t matter for most packages. So please put your packages back to Factory [unless they are full of security bugs ;-)], a distro without packages is not useful.
As Stephan Kulow announced recently openSUSE 11.2 is now build in a separate project and openSUSE Factory contains changes that will not go into openSUSE 11.2. Therefore if you followed so far openSUSE Factory via e.g. “zypper dup” and want to switch to 11.2, you have to change the repositories that you are using. If you installed openSUSE 11.2 RC1, you have already the right repositories for 11.2 setup.
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.
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.
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:
Key discussion points, suggestions:
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
Just a quick note to everyone using factory and wonder what patterns-openSUSE-kde4_basis is all about: our patterns install packages now.
Alright. Just out of curiosity, I felt like finding out what the numbers show for South America compared to other regions in the Ambassadors Program of openSUSE.
As a reminder, the goals of the Ambassador Program are:
So, checking out the Ambassadors List, I got for South America:
Brazil is doing great here, doubling any other country’s Ambassadors number in the region. No doubt it’s not just users who are pushing Open Source out there but also their government and enterprises (example:Fisl), and I am glad openSUSE is a real choice for them. Compared to Europe, I believe statistical numbers are still OK for us 🙂 since the truth is that openSUSE is just ranked in the top five of the most popular Linux flavours in Chile, maybe it’s the same in other South America countries. So, Ambassadors for Europe (some countries only):
As for North America, we have got:
I even did a “quick and dirt” chart with OpenOffice’s Calc so you can have a graphical idea of our numbers around the world:
For more information, please, visit the openSUSE Ambassadors section.
Have a lot of fun!.
Adrian Schröter (12)
Agustin Chavarria (6)
Alessandro de Oliveira Faria (13)
Alex Barrios (12)
Alexander Naumov (10)
Alexander Orlovskyy (3)
Alin M Elena (5)
Andrea Florio (27)
Andreas Jaeger (70)
Andreas Stieger (12)
Andrew Wafaa (31)
Arvin Schnell (9)
Atri Bhattacharya (3)
Bernhard Wiedemann (31)
Bonnie Kurniawan (1)
Bruno Friedmann (98)
Calumma Brevicorne (29)
Carl Fletcher (1)
Christopher Hobbs (17)
Ciaran Farrell (3)
Stephan Kulow (17)
craig gardner (2)
Stephan Barth (2)
Thomas Schmidt (2)
Dinar Valeev (1)
Dirk Mueller (2)
Dmitry Serpokryl (7)
Efstathios Iosifidis (21)
Fabio Mucciante (5)
Federico Lucifredi (9)
Greg Freemyer (1)
Holger Sickenberg (2)
Hubert Mantel (1)
Ilya Chernykh (5)
Ismail Donmez (1)
J. Daniel Schmidt (2)
James Tremblay (7)
Jan Blunck (4)
Jan Loeser (3)
Jan Madsen (1)
Jan-Christoph Bornschlegel (3)
Jan-Simon Möller (20)
Javier Llorente (12)
Jigish Gohil (85)
Jiri Srain (1)
Jiří Suchomel (3)
Johan Kotze (5)
José Oramas M. (6)
Josef Reidinger (16)
Juergen Weigert (1)
Julio Vannini (9)
Dinar Valeev (5)
Kevin "Yeaux" Dupuy (11)
Klaas Freitag (55)
Lars Vogdt (11)
Ludwig Nussel (13)
M. Edwin Zakaria (4)
Marcus Hüwe (39)
Marcus Meissner (2)
Marcus Moeller (3)
Marcus Schaefer (4)
Martin Lasarsch (8)
Martin Mohring (11)
Masim "Vavai" Sugianto (20)
Michael Andres (1)
Michael Löffler (7)
Michal Marek (7)
Michal Vyskocil (12)
Miguel Angel Barajas Hernandez (2)
P Linnell (2)
Nelson Marques (55)
Nenad Latinović (1)
Nikanth Karthikesan (2)
Przemyslaw Bojczuk (1)
Peter Pöml (4)
Petr Gajdos (2)
Petr Mladek (60)
Petr Uzel (5)
Ray Wang (1)
Raymond Wooninck (1)
Ricardo Chung (7)
Ricardo Varas Santana (7)
Richard Bos (11)
Robert Schweikert (16)
Rossana Motta (1)
Rupert Horstkötter (10)
Sascha Manns (66)
saydul akram (3)
Sebastian Siebert (6)
Shawn Dunn (2)
Stanislav Visnovsky (7)
Stefan Haas (1)
Stefan Hundhammer (5)
Stefan Schubert (7)
Steffen Winterfeldt (8)
Suresh Jayaraman (3)
Susanne Oberhauser (3)
Thomas Göttlicher (6)
Thomas Schraitle (26)
Togan Muftuoglu (3)
Tuukka Pasanen (36)
Will Stephenson (22)
YaST Team (90)