ONE of the OpenSUSE repositories is pulling the plug, but this does mean deflation for the project. People of OpenSUSE, for example, is now back with its first profile in a very long time.

Sascha is active in many areas of openSUSE (Marketing, Feature Screening and using Build service for his projects)...

There is also Week of Geeko Love (the mascot of OpenSUSE) and some new raves about the distribution.

If you haven't tried OpenSUSE yet, you don't know what you're missing.

There are also criticisms of OpenSUSE. This new post is a followup to the Neowin rebuttal which was mentioned the other day.

This article is in response to a little incident that occurred between myself, chakkaradeep and Marshalus. It started when I challenged chakkaradeep as to why he was commenting about OpenSUSE Linux. I asked the question merely because chakkaradeep reports on Microsoft products on a Microsoft related site and out of all the Linux distros OpenSUSE is about the nearest thing to a Microsoft approved Linux that you can get.

[...]

1. What is the unique OpenSUSE “distro building” feature that Chaks implies and you seem to defend?

2. Why is it when Chaks cant answer you come along and help?

3. Does NeoWin recieve any “gifts”, review or free hardware/software from Microsoft and/or its affiliated companies for running a site dedicated to its products?

4. Would you like to retract the “tin hat” comment, or atleast quote me where I allege NeoWin is associated with Microsoft or indeed paid by them?

From now on I will not be challenging the remarks of the usual SUSEpects via their twitter, theres no point. Marshalus (IMO) doesnt appear to be adult enough to answer without trying to be insulting and Chaks doesnt seem able to answer properly at all. The dynamic duo are certainly not up to the task of coherent debate (IMO)

Technical

There were some technical, OpenSUSE-specific HOWTOs that we came across, namely:

1. ntop in openSUSE to probe & monitor Network Traffic



2. Grisbi Personal Finance Manager in openSUSE



3. How to enable quota on OpenSuse



4. Burning ISOs in CLI using OpenSUSE 11.1

ARM for OpenSUSE

Except for the news about the Linux Foundation and OpenSUSE, the most major development was to do with ARM, which Novell will support in OpenSUSE despite earlier denials.

Commercial Linux distributor Novell today announced that the openSUSE Project, which drives the development variant of its Linux, will support the creation and packaging of various Linuxes for ARM processors using the openSUSE Build Service version 1.6.

According to Novell, the support for building application stacks and Linux distros for 32-bit ARM RISC processors was donated to the openSUSE community by German software company DataSoft GmbH. DataSoft has created a set of applications, called 5e, for network operators and content providers that is stacked atop the openSUSE distro.

Here is a combined announcement/article about ARM and LDN.

The OpenSUSE Build Service was released in a 1.6 version that adds ARM support to the community distro. Meanwhile, the Linux Foundation (LF) announced that the service will be incorporated in its Linux Developer Network (LDN), enabling "software to be packaged for all major Linux distributions," says the LF.

Leftovers

For news about OpenSUSE from the previous week, there's lots to be found in the OpenSUSE newsletter.

In this Week:

* Google Summer of Code * Graphical Mode for YaST/Partitioning * KDE 4.2.2 is out * Mono 2.4 and MonoDevelop 2.0 released * The real antidote for Conficker

The next post will look mostly at sub-notebooks and SLED. ⬆