After a week of Thanksgiving and also a gentle break, quite a few things have happened which make interesting news to OpenSUSE users and developers. Here are some articles I've gone through and collected over the past week.

This one is a praise given to YaST.

I’ve been thinking this through, and the one thing I really liked back when using openSUSE, was YaST. It was actually a great tool for everything but installing software. Administration of a Linux-system has never been easier then when using YaST.

I can second that based on experience with other GNU/Linux distributions. Novell is still the centre of attention when it comes to the open source ATI/AMD driver, which many people anticipate.

Now that the RadeonHD 1.0.0 driver is out the door, the Novell developers are looking forward to adding more features again (hopefully this will be accompanied by additional AMD documentation being released to the public). More information is available on the RadeonHD Wiki.

Here are some OpenSUSE HOWTOs of interest:

• What to Customize in openSUSE After a Fresh Installation?



• "New openSUSE Packages: KDE 4.0 RC1, KOffice 2 Alpha5, Firefox 3.0 Beta



• PulseAudio: “Compiz for Sound” on openSUSE

Here is the latest announcement from Francis, who has apparently begun a steady series of weekly openSUSE news (just like these weekend posts :-) ).

[opensuse-announce] openSUSE Weekly News, Issue 1

We are very glad to be able to announce the first ever issue of the "openSUSE Weekly News" newsletter, available at http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Weekly_News/1. The aim of the newsletter is to summarise all the finer details occurring in and around the openSUSE Community. This issue covers:

* YaST documentation now in public SVN * Joint GNOME/KDE public packaging day coming up * PulseAudio in the works for openSUSE * KWIN Composite updates * Distribution, Build Service and Communication Status Updates * In Tips and Tricks: How to install openSUSE on a Mac Mini, and how to get Screenlets on openSUSE.

Regards, --- Francis Giannaros http://francis.giannaros.org

Here is Linux.org taking a good look at OpenSUSE 10.3, which impresses the reviewer. This reviewer can be harsh at times, but not this time.

I found openSUSE to be an excellent operating system. On a scale of 10, I would give it around a 9. I would take away that point for some glitches and minor annoyances that I have encountered. The worst of them was when I tried to install the Skype package that I had downloaded from the Skype website.

Here is a less positive look at OpenSUSE. It begs for developer attention.

It looks like I have succeeded to corrupt my OpenSUSE installation. For bugzilla reporting Open Source development teams want different kind of information about hardware construction, installation log, etc. I can’t provide anything like that, so I have ignored bugzilla and decided to write this document. Let’s hope that someone will tell OpenSUSE YaST team about those problems I encountered when I tried to upgrade OpenSUSE.

A profile is published for Klaas Freitag.

The ‘People of openSUSE’ team had the pleasure to interview Klaas Freitag - a Novell employee working as an architect in the department responsible for the Build Service, and an active KDE contributor being a KDE e.V. board member.

Lastly, here's an encouraging post for some OpenSUSE folks. Its title: openSuSE 10.3 ROCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!

openSuSE’s 10.3 was released on 4^th October 2007, 10 months after openSuSE 10.2. I’ve been using SuSE since its version 10 and its getting better and better. I think its the only OS that is so professional in its approach and that is a perfect contender from the Community driven GNU/Linux OS projects against the desktop OS’s like Windows and the OS X variants (yup I include the latest Vista and Leopard).

More on OpenSUSE next week. ⬆