We had a very nice booth, large and at a nice place. We had the chance to tell lots of people about openSUSE and where it is heading to. I heard much good feedback, about the distribution on the one hand, but also for the project and how it evolves. Slowly we seem to get a good message out and users and peers from the FOSS community get and appreciate it. Very good to experience that.

Of course we also had good fun at the booth andgave some interesting workshops in pipe cleaner arts and grafity for example.

Some other specific things that stick to my mind:

I went to a talk about Icinga, a system for open source monitoring. A very good talk about an obviously great system with a very awake community. Good to see the hands on approach of them. Interestingly enough, after the talk somebody asked why they did choose PHP as programming language instead of something cool like rails. I could not resist to tell about that at least I often thought about if it hadn’t been better to do the OBS in PHP instead of Rails simply because more people know it. Not appreciated

Another talk I liked was the fly over Qt and its recent past and future, delivered by Daniel Molkentin. Thoughts about Qt 5 were published a few weeks ago and Danimo outlined these again, also showing some nice demos of the upcoming Qt Quick and more.

From Vincent I saw a very good talk about collaboration between distros where he came up with an impressive list of activities where we’re already collaborate and proposals for more. Sad to see only few people in the audience. I missed Vincents other one about GNOME 3, but there is a nice Interview with him done at LT about that topic.

Apart from talks I saw KDE Active the first time real on a kind of Weetab on the KDE booth. Definetely cool, hopefully applications will catch up and being ported to this kind of platform. I am sure users will seek out for more than weather forecast apps sooner or later.

On saturday a collegue from the Gentoo Project approached me and told me that his team is actively working on a Smolt feature to also track the list of installed software of a system. We also use Smolt in openSUSE and we also have Feature #305877 asking for that kind of functionality, so I think we should jump on that train to support that effort. Nice idea, volunteers welcome!

Yes, and there also was some sports on Linuxtag: The Sportsfreunde der Sperrtechnik had a booth and were giving workshops on lock picking. I attended, but was not successful so far, need more practising

Apart from that I have to say that I was a bit disappointed by this years LinuxTag. I had the feeling that the number of visitors did not meet the expectations of the most exibitors and presenters. The hallways were really relaxed most of the time. Furthermore, the number of not so impressive talks I saw was comparably high. The official numbers however do not support my feeling, so maybe I am wrong.

Anyway it was big fun again. I like to thank you all for your share which made Linuxtag 2011 a great success for openSUSE.

openSUSE had a booth there (thanks Fedora for the picture) and we were lucky enough to have brand new 11.4 promo DVDs there which were handed to interested people. openSUSE 11.4 in general is very well received at most visitors, they were quite happy with our latest release. That is also true for the feelings for openSUSE all over: I heard so much positive feedback about what we do and how we do it, for example the OBS with the collaboration features, the distribution or the activity all over. People recognize our efforts.

I gave a talk about Kraft, as people hinted me that there might be the right audience for the topic of Linux in the small business. The interest was huge, the room was more than full and people seemed to like the way I was approaching the challenge. Unfortunately I had to fight with the notebook/beamer phalanx in the beginning (I apologize for that) so that I had to skip the live demo of Kraft in the end. But still I got a lot of interesting discussions afterwards and got some nice contributions already. Thanks for that.

On saturday noon there was a “Distribution competition” where I was pulled in to show openSUSE. It went ok for all distros taking part and was fun for us presenting

Booster Michal was giving a workshop about creating packages in the OBS for multiple distributions and a very well received “whats new in 11.4?” talk was given by Sirko in the beginners track.

It was a great event, even though I quite exhausted arrived home late on sunday night. I will be there next year again.

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.

On monday we had the pleasure of a public event with four highly interesting talks given by the Plasmas in our allhands area in Maxtorhof. Will Stephenson was sheding some light on the old days where SuSE already was hosting a sprint for KDE. I guess in that days we still called it “developer meeting”, but it was basically the same concept. It happened in an office building called Schanz which was still SuSEs but not in use these days. Will had some cool photos of well known KDE developers, partly with more hair and less bally than nowadays, hacking on KDE3. I think the meeting was in 2003, so it is great to see how many people are still around in the community.For me that was the first KDE meeting I participated, working on my scan application called Kooka. Fun.

After that Aaron Seigo was talking about Plasma as a cross device and cross form factor concept, Marco Martin was presenting very interesting stuff about KDEs Netbook shell and finally Sebastian Kügler was introducing Silk, the project to free the web from the browser. It was a very inspiring evening which closed with good discussion over some drinks. I like to thank the KDE guys for giving the presentations and our guests for showing up.

The rest of the week was full of concentrated work for the Plasmas, watch out on planetkde for various posts.

From the openSUSE perspective it was a pleasure to host the meeting, it was very nice to meet you all again. Thank you all for being our guests. It was fun and as a result we really want to continue the idea.

openSUSE is upstreams friend and we are convinced that personal meetings are the most effective way to make progress. So if your community is watching out for a place to meet, innovate and hack, let us know, I am sure we can arrange something.

Indonesian openSUSE Community (openSUSE-ID) monthly meeting will be held on Saturday, May 24, 2008, 09.00-13.00 am (GMT+7) at Detik.com head office Jakarta. Detik.com currently is the biggest online newspaper in Indonesia.

The monthly meeting called “Kopdar”, means “Kopi Darat” or offline/physical/face to face meeting.

This monthly meeting will be discuss some issue regarding openSUSE 11.0 release party on June 2008, preview about openSUSE 11.0 features, openSUSE remastering and share knowledge about zypper package manager.

Another topic is about our agenda on IGOS Summit 2 event. IGOS stand for Indonesia goes Open Source and IGOS Summit 2 is an event prepared by Ministry of Communication and Information Technology of Indonesia to encourage open source application usability in Indonesia. OpenSUSE-ID have a booth at the event. Well, it’s a small booth (2.75 m x 2.5 m with 1300 watt of electricity) but this booth is free of charge and we have a nice opportunity to promoting openSUSE.

We choose Detik.com as our place for monthly meeting to reached more user and (maybe) to get a nice publication about our activity. a friend of mine worked for Detik.com and he helped me to arrange this event. Thanks Andry.

So, if you are an Indonesian openSUSE lover, why don’t you join with us on Detik.com. Let share together !

If you are in Zürich, don’t miss it!

More information on the webpage: German, English