You might not know SUSE Labs beforehand, its the group of people who hacks on low level toolchain stuff like gcc (GNU Compiler Collection) , gdb (GNU Debugger) , binutils and others. So you can expect deep technical talks at the conference, starting with the Link Time Optimization (LTO) in GCC talk on Sunday by Jan Hubicka who works at suse.cz (SUSE Czech Republic) and is a prominent gcc hacker for quite a long time. LTO is a hot topic for any software project given the fact that it improves the overall application performance in most cases. So if you want to squueze more performance out of your own project(s), you shouldn’t miss Jan’s talk.

On Monday another member of suse.cz Jiri Slaby will give a talk titled Static Code Checking — the State of the Art . Recently static code checking got more exposure with the bugs found in projects like Apple’s clang C/C++ compiler, Google’s Chrome web browser and also id Software’s John Carmack praising the process for finding the bugs in their upcoming game title Rage. So if you are found of coding in a static language like C/C++ you should be attending this talk. Also during the day, visitors will also have a chance to attend the gdb workshop to teach some tricks to our beloved debugger gdb. Given that gdb is a powerful tool with an awkward interface I hope to learn more about using it like a pro.

If you are interested in the kernel development, you will be happy to know that two kernel debugging sessions Setting up and Analyzing Kernel Crash Dumps and Kernel Debugging / Instrumentation with Systemtap will be presented by Stefan Seyfried and Michel Rode from B1 Systems GmbH. Also yours truly, together with Vincent Untz will do a workshop titled How to contribute to Factory to get our hands dirty on the basic openSUSE Factory packaging and submission workflow. We hope to give a basic to intermediate introduction to openSUSE Factory packaging with solutions to common encountered problems.

Tuesday starts with another kernel debugging talk Linux IO Tracing by Jan Kara which will be followed by another talk from Jiri Slaby titled Automatic Regression Testing which hopefully will be interesting for all developers. In the evening there will an Advanced Packaging talk by Lars Vogdtand and Pascal Bleser which might teach you a packaging trick or two.

If performance is your thing, you shouldn’t miss Monitoring with Performance Co-Pilot talk by David Disseldorp on Friday. And just before we wrap up the conference Conny Seidel from AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) will give a talk titled Linux Testing – Complexity in a nutshell which will give an overview of Linux testing architecture used over in AMD. It will be interesting to learn about a real-world Linux testing setup.

So that was a small glimpse of what is coming. Remember that registration for openSUSE Conference is free, so hop over here for registration. We hope to see you there!

That said, I am very happy that we could issue the schedule for the openSUSE Conference 2011 today.

For conference organization there is tooling. Or should I say: Should be? Given the huge amount of FOSS conferences around, the number of free alternatives of conference organization systems is fairly small. We decided to go again with Indico, a python based system developed by CERN. It provides support for the whole conference life cycle such as the call for abstracts, the internal judging process, the scheduling and such. With nice help from the developers we got it running smoothly and integrated. Sometimes the interface is not really straightforward, but finally its a very feature rich yet flexible tool that feels like it has managed some large (CERN) conferences already.

For the openSUSE conference 102 contributions were scheduled into four rooms in four days, so it will be quite a exhausting event :-). Unfortunately we still had to reject quite some submissions as the program is stuffed already. Please bear with us.

This year we are really happy to have a joint event with the former SUSE Labs Conference for the first time. That not only brings a lot of high potential speaker to the event, but also much more low level topics around kernel, gcc and such. I think we lacked that a bit at the last conference. Also cool that Greg KH, well known kernel hacker, will enlighten us with a keynote.

Beside the low level topics, we will hear a lot about community affairs, such as social skills for geeks or impressions from our ambassadors work. Another big block is around packaging and the organization and management of openSUSE Factory, our next stable distribution. Some knowledge sharing is always appreciated, I personally look forward to “Working Effectively with GIT” as I am still dreaming of svn in the nights And what we need to continue to grow our identity as openSUSE project are contributions around our setup and the relationship to SUSE, the commercial offering of SUSE and the importance of openSUSE in that. Michael Miller, SUSE Vice President of Global Alliances & Marketing, will give a keynote here, and there are other talks in that space.

The motto of osc2011 is rwx³ which is a synonym of the idea of interactivity and creativity on the conference. That is a success already as more than the half of the contributions to the conference are BoFs, Workshops or hacking sessions. You do not have to fear to fall asleep in lengthy talks instead you will do stuff

And finally there is the venue. If you have been to the conference last year I need to say its different this year. Nobody will serve you Coke, instead with Zentrifuge you are at a place where usually artists work and do exhibitions. This spirit of hands-on work quickly jumped over on us as the orga team and we are sure that spirit is good for openSUSE

I hope you have registered for oSC 2011 already….

Volunteers needed!

As you know, the third international openSUSE Conference is happening in a couple of weeks. You already should be registered. For the organization teams that means they are really coming onto speed now and it starts to feel dizzy.

We had a couple of public meetings which resulted in a nice list of stuff to do, like organizing hardware for the venue, set up internet, foods and drinks and so on. This is all done by community members and open for your help. If you want to help, you’re more than welcome to contribute to the conferences success. A good start is to subscribe to the mailinglist opensuse-conference@opensuse.org .

If you prefer to give a hand during the conference days, also great, we are looking for volunteers. Many hands are needed to get the event going and it would be good if we could share the work so that it’s more fun for everybody.

Please go through the list on the volunteers page and find where you could jump in and help. Simply add your name or nick into the list where you feel comfortable to help.

Thanks a lot!