For folks not that used to web interfaces, the openSUSE Forums team provides a secondary interface to our forums – NNTP. The intention of this post is to raise your attention on this possibility.

What is NNTP?

Using our NNTP interface, you’re able to participate in forums discussions without accessing the web interface at all. You’re able to use any newsreader supporting the RFC standard to read and even write posts. Actually your user-id gets recognized in the web interface if you set up your newsreader properly.

From my personal experience especially developers are in general more familiar in using mailing lists instead of browsing a web interface. One of our desires is to get more developers to the board. On the one hand, developers can provide competent assistance especially to our new users – on the other hand, the forums are able to provide a lot of feedback back to developers. The advantages are obvious!

The NNTP interface to the forums provides a neat way to browse significantly more content with less effort. You can get a quick overview about forums content using NNTP. Certainly you’ll not be able to see the great template created by Robert Lihm, but every choice has its drawback – Good to have a choice at least, isn’t it?

For detailed instructions on how to set up your newsreader properly to participate in forums discussions, be sure to check out the NNTP section within our forums FAQ.

We’re really looking forward to your contribution!

It was quietly put up on the Novell store front page but openSUSE 11.0 is now available for pre-order! The boxed edition of openSUSE, which I have long been buying, has stayed the same, kinda bland looking white with a big lizard for a long time. But with 11.0 comes a new design that looks extremely slick and cool.

I also noticed the rather large notice on the American store page for openSUSE 11.0, which reads “Order to be shipped upon product release June 19.”

Hopefully that means they’ll try to avoid the tough time I and several others had getting a boxed edition in the United States (pre-ordering openSUSE, then getting it five weeks later, or four weeks after public release). They also don’t have the promotion from last year, where if you pre-ordered openSUSE 10.3 you got free shipping. Maybe that’s a trade-off for getting it at a reasonable time, if so I’m cool ;-).

UPDATE: According to an email Novell just sent out, free shipping is back if you pre-order, at least in the US. Also, a commenter said there is free shipping in Germany too.

With only like three weeks until openSUSE 11.0 is released to the world, now would be a good time to start the buzz around it. OK, so there’s already been a lot of buzz around 11.0, for example this article from Ars Technica which reached the front page of Digg, not to mention our own countdown and openSUSE 11.0 pages. But there’s many more ways you and I can help people know about openSUSE 11.0.

If your into the whole Web 2.0/Internet/Social Networking thing, you know how much of a help and marketing tool (aka timewaster) it can be. The trick is to not bother people and throw openSUSE in their face every day (sorry Twitter friends!). But there are many ways you can use these tools to help openSUSE. Our own community manager Zonker has talked about using Twitter to spread openSUSE, and it does work. In terms of Twitter, however, it depends on who your followers are. For example, many of my followers are Linux or SUSE users already. How does Twitter help with those people? I’ll answer that in a minute.

A few days ago, I started an event on Facebook: openSUSE 11.0 Public Release (you need to be logged into Facebook to view) as a type of meta-event. It doesn’t have a specific real world location (the location is set to opensuse.org; the city, which is required, was set to Nuremberg, Germany for obvious reasons) but it serves to bring the awareness of openSUSE 11.0’s release, and also encourages anyone else starting an actual release event (such as a openSUSE User Group or Linux user group) to add their event to Facebook and link it from the above event. Within 3 days, the number of people confirming their “attendance” is growing, and at least one person has mentioned that she plans on hosting a release party.

So, do you have any other ways to help share openSUSE 11.0? Are there openSUSE groups or 11.0 release events on other social networking websites the community should know about? Let me know through the comments!

Oh, and openSUSE 11.0 Release Candidate 1 should be out today!

BTW, this is my first post. I’m Kevin Dupuy, and instead of rehashing it all here, I’ve got my bio up on the wiki here.

Promoting openSUSE in Indonesia sometimes pretty hard and in another time is quite easy. Looks like a humor 😉 but it’s true. Why ?

Problem

There is a number of problem for promoting openSUSE. It’s not about openSUSE itself. In general it has a relationship with problem while promoting and implementing open source application in Indonesia. Most of the problem related with the point of view about open source. It’s about open source mindset. Some people usually asked, “is this quite easy to migrate our existing system into openSUSE ?”.

The piracy issue is the second largest problem. People used Windows application because they used it with piracy license. There is no license cost. It’s not for personal used only. Some of them are a company that should be used a legal license. In the past, I’ve found that various company, from small to medium company currently used piracy product for their system. If we asked them, “Hey, why don’t you buy a license for your commercial used ?”, the answer is, “It’s too expensive for us.”

(more…)