03.15.08
Do-No-Evil Saturday – Part I: OpenSUSE’s Week of Forum Merger Announcement, Xandros and Linspire
OpenSUSE
The most important news for the project this week has probably been a case of consolidation.
Several SUSE forums are being centralised (merged).
In order to provide a better service to the existing openSUSE Community and to our new users, we’re pleased to announce that suseforums.net, suselinuxsupport.de and the openSUSE support forums at forums.novell.com (the three largest English speaking dedicated SUSE forums) are joining forces to merge into the new official openSUSE Forums at forums.opensuse.org.
Francis Giannaros announces the weekly newsletter, which includes the above.
[opensuse-announce] openSUSE Weekly News, Issue 13
Issue 13 of openSUSE Weekly News is now out![0]
In this week’s issue:
* Announcing the Official openSUSE Forums
* Preparing for Board Elections
* openSUSE User-base Growing Nicely
* Firefox 3.0 Beta 4 Packages
* New YaST/ZYpp Build Service Repository Layout
* In Tips and Tricks: Creating a DVD from YouTube videos
[0] http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Weekly_News/13
Have a lot of fun!
The “People of openSUSE” series continues and this time it’s Detlef Reichelt’s turn.
Do you know who is behind the PackMan project? Then it’s time to we present you Detlef Reichelt – PackMan project maintainer and openSUSE Member!
Moments ago it was also Timo Hönig.
This week we feature Timo Hönig, openSUSE Mobile Device team member, mainly working on D-Bus, IAL, and KNetworkManager.
One of Novell’s greater contributions to all else is the open source driver for AMD/ATI cards. Here is the latest report from Phoronix.
Following a period of relative inactivity in the xf86-video-radeonhd git tree over the past few weeks, this afternoon Novell’s Egbert Eich had pushed forward 55 changes to this open-source R500/600 driver. The AMD Radeon HD 3400 and 3600 series are now supported and there are a number of other significant changes. The RV620/635 mode-setting support has required the most significant work since the R500 series, since all output blocks have been altered due to the introduced DisplayPort capabilities. We have already tested out this latest code and were left with a positive impression.
[...]
In addition to the RS780 support being on Novell’s near-term roadmap, they will also be exploring the DDIA for the RS690. DDIA is the now infamous TMDS block found on the RS690 IGP that the xf86-video-radeonhd developers had found that previously wasn’t mentioned by AMD as they didn’t believe it was in use. Since then, the Novell developers have received register specifications for DDIA.
The relationship between OpenSUSE and Novell is explained in this good post which sheds some light on misconceptions and unnecessary conflicts.
The relationship between openSUSE and Novell is pretty difficult to describe. Ideally openSUSE should be viewed 100% as a community project, where the people employed by Novell, who do the lion’s share of the work, are also seen as members of the openSUSE community on the same level as volunteer contributors. This works out pretty well, and keeps improving further. The volunteers and the Novell employees working on openSUSE generally get along great and in a very productive way.
Xandros
Xandros continues to focus on its Windows slant and this article from ECT provides an explanation.
“A lot of enterprises have moved to Linux because they’re moving off Unix and they find Linux lets them maintain their skills but move to lower-cost hardware — x86 boxes instead of Sun or HP Unix boxes,” said open source expert Bernard Golden, CEO of Navica. “HP’s philosophy is, ‘if you’re going to move off Unix boxes, why don’t you stay in the family and move to an HP Linux box?’”
A derivative of Xandros from ASUS will be reaching the desktop soon. The Eee family will no longer be limited to just sub-notebooks.
Hard specs on the devices are hard to come by, but ASUS notes that the device is much smaller than typical than typical desktops and that it has “good enough performance”. Other niceties include Hi-Fi Stereo and Dolby Digital Live support. Also noteworthy is the fact that the EP20 will soldier on with the Eee PC Linux operating system (which is based on Xandros Linux).
Linspire
It has been a collective yawn recently, but Linspire keeps beating the CNR drum with press releases.
Linspire, Inc. developer of CNR.com (http://www.cnr.com/), an easy-to-use, one-click digital software delivery service for desktop Linux software, and Fluendo S.A., a company specialized in delivering products and services on Unix and Linux multimedia platforms, today announced a partnership that will bring legal multimedia software to desktop Linux users worldwide. Immediately available and one-click accessible through CNR.com’s easy-to-use software delivery service, Fluendo’s multimedia software products are now available to Freespire 2.0, Linspire 6.0, Ubuntu 7.04 and 7.10 users and will soon expand to additional popular Linux distributions…
There are several other press releases that Linspire sends out nowadays. Most of them are about the availability of proprietary software from CNR, but they hardly generate any press coverage (articles), if any at all. █
