Summary: OpenSUSE brings OpenFate, Hack Week is coming, and many new events take place

WE DELIVERED NO weekly news last week (summer break), so this week's aggregation will be larger than usual.

OpenFate

OpenSUSE introduces OpenFate, about which there is more information right here:

It was just announced that openFATE, openSUSE’s feature tracking system, will now be open to non openSUSE members.

Coding Rallies

Google's Summer of Code still supports OpenSUSE and here is just one report on the subject. Novell's next Hack Week (the fourth one) is coming pretty soon as well.

Novell is once again sponsoring a Hack Week, from July 20 through July 24th. This is an opportunity for Novell’s Open Platform Solutions developers to use their Innovation Time Off and hunker down and work on the projects that catch their fancy.

Zonker wrote about Hack Week very recently:

Novell is once again sponsoring a Hack Week, from July 20 through July 24th. This is an opportunity for Novell's Open Platform Solutions developers to use their Innovation Time Off and hunker down and work on the projects that catch their fancy.

Hack Week projects can be new features, new applications, or improvements to existing services and applications. Previous Hack Weeks have generated projects like Tasque, Giver, Debian package support in the openSUSE Build Service, and many others. Hack Week is also a chance for Novell employees to work with the openSUSE Community contributors if they wish on projects that help improve openSUSE.

You don't have to be a Novell employee to participate! If you'd like to hack on something cool and useful, you're welcome to join in!

We'll be collecting ideas in openFATE for Hack Week, so if you'd like to contribute an idea, just go to openFATE[1] and log in with your openSUSE account. Then select "Create" and add your feature, as well as any test or use cases.

If you'd like to help implement one of the ideas, check out the features that are already in openFATE for Hack Week IV. Go to "Browse" and select Hack Week IV as the Product, and you'll see all of the proposed features for Hack Week.

Have questions about Hack Week? Email Olaf Kirch[2] or ask in #opensuse-project on Freenode.

[1]: http://features.opensuse.org/

[2]: mailto:okir@suse.de

There are surely some interesting projects in store (hopefully not Mono related). Here for example is a welcomed improvement.

Installation: Resizing Windows before proposing Linux partitions

While “selling” openSUSE to a friend of mine, I tried to explain him all the steps of the installation and all the configuration options which I had changed. He was not any geek and it was his first time seeing Linux.

[...]

You can see it with 11.2 Milestone 2, where it is not enabled by default; to enable it, boot with start_shell=1 on kernel command line and uncomment the

OpenSUSE Factory

OpenSUSE Factory is said to be opening... opening up in the sense that other folks are invited to participate.

openSUSE Factory is open! That means that people outside Novell will have a chance to real participate on the openSUSE distribution. That is GREAT news!

The Build Service is being used to bring the latest KDE and LXDE is coming too.

What else is being built? Well, among the things that are announced more openly, there is work on Firefox 3.5 which is built for older versions of OpenSUSE as well. See this post about Mozilla news in OpenSUSE and the writings about another browser, Chrome, being built and tested on OpenSUSE. MySQL 5.4 is coming too and LenZ Grimmer writes about FlightGear 1.9.1. Novell's own iFolder was brought in very recently.

Good news, everybody! iFolder client packages are now available for openSUSE 11.1 from the openSUSE update repositories. This means you can install iFolder client on openSUSE 11.1 using YaST or zypper, without any modifications to your installed system.

Needless to say, many packages are added to OBS without special announcements or any fuss.

OpenSUSE Central

Brian Proffitt has just interviewed Zonker, with whom he did not work directly as a media person.

Linux.com: How are openSUSE, and Novell, approaching the big IT challenges in the current economic climate?

Zonker: Those are two very different questions, really. Novell is approaching the "big IT challenges" in the same way as many companies: Hunkering down and concentrating on the best way to meet customer needs and make sales in a very challenging environment.

The openSUSE Project doesn't really have the same pressures. We have no quarterly revenue targets and the downturn hasn't been a negative for use of FOSS. In fact, we may be seeing more interest by individuals and companies as a result of the downturn. It's hard to say.

OpenSUSE Forums claims 30,000 users now, despite growing pains.

Short but sweet post here: Getting a few numbers on community growth for the openSUSE Day introduction at LinuxTag, I noticed that the openSUSE Forums have now passed 30,000 users!

Events

There are many events this summer. There are heaps of photos from LinuxTag 2009, which took place in Berlin [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8].

Federico Mena-Quintero, who recently left the OpenSUSE Board shares some GNOME Hispano photos and Jack Wallen writes about another event that Novell attended.

I have a licence plate hanging in my office that I received from one of the last major Linux conventions I attended. The convention was in New York at the Jacob Javitz centre. It was huge. The convention was filled to rim with big business. IBM, Oracle, Compaq, Novell — many of the big guns were in attendance.

Looking at South America, many photos from Brazil's Free software conference can be found here.

Well.. I have some photos from International Free Software Conference in Brazil.

We have an openSUSE Users Group booth, with DVDs, T-Shirts and a lot of curious people about openSUSE.

Gabriel Stein from OpenSUSE took many more photos in later days and put a large number of them in Google's Picasa.

Chile too celebrated an OpenSUSE Day.

And the day came. After a six hours trip on bus, and a few minutes of sleep I got to Santiago de Chile. Francisco Toha picked me up so we headed to Universidad Andres Bello for the openSUSE Day. Huge building and plenty of room for everyone. The event started almost on time. I followed the first talk, a bit hoping to have a decent internet connection so I could show a live SUSE Studio test drive. OK, that didn’t happen. The internet traffic ratio was too slow like waiting 59 minutes to build an JeOS appliance was nuts so that was definitely the low aspect of the talk.

Releases

OpenSUSE 11.2 is now at milestone 3 and people take note. Stein posts a little reminder and the official announcement is here.

The openSUSE Project is pleased to announce the release of openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 3. Images are ready for download and testing. This release includes the 2.6.30 Linux kernel, KDE 4.3 beta 2, GNOME 2.27.2, OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 Alpha, and more!

Is SELinux going to be part of it? ⬆