Summary: OpenSUSE and SUSE news from the past week, ranging from events to technical observations

SLE* was virtually out of sight this week, but OpenSUSE had some stories to tell. We shall go through them very quickly.

OpenSUSE 11.2

The final release candidate of OpenSUSE 11.2 was made available a few days ago, with an announcement coming from Joe Brockmeier in his personal Web site and also in the OpenSUSE Web site.

This is it folks! We’re almost there for openSUSE 11.2. Time to grab the final 11.2 release candidate and shake out any remaining bugs to get the lizard ready for release. This release includes an updated kernel, Samba, Firefox, and more.

Andreas Jaeger wrote about Factory and some issues have begun appearing, e.g.:

Yesterday i noticed that openal-soft on 11.2 is broken, it just locks up with current pulseaudio.

Amongst other posts about OpenSUSE 11.2 we apparently also have decreased development involvement. Wolfgang Rosenauer wrote about OpenSUSE 11.2 Web browsing.

Events and Board

Apart from some local events, there are the escapades of Joe Brockmeier, who represented OpenSUSE at the Ontario Linux Fest. Pascal from the OpenSUSE Board organises (or helps in organising) FOSDEM 2010, as usual. This time it's a "Miniconf" he'll be involved in. The OpenSUSE Board is also looking for new people and Rupert Horstkötter is among the early applicants.

Stephen Shaw (decriptor) and Bryen Yunashko (suseROCKS) have completed their tenure on the Board, and their seats are up for election. There is also a new seat available to be occupied by a non-Novell member.

Technical

All sorts of instructional blog posts have been published and Francis Giannaros published a tour of OpenSUSE 11.2, which looks good.

The KDE 4 experience in openSUSE has been enhanced daily, and while the desktop environment itself has matured significantly since the last release, there has been a constant focus to provide an outstanding delivery of it in openSUSE 11.2.

The highlights include: the openSUSE DVD preselected to KDE 4.3; new Firefox KDE integration; OpenOffice.org KDE 4 integration; consistent KDE artwork; all other standard applications fully ported to KDE 4, including KNetworkManager, Amarok, DigiKam, K3b, Konversation and more.

One blogger calls OpenSUSE 11.2 "the Perfect KDE Distribution."

OpenSUSE 11.2 comes with a lot of programs that support social networks (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, ...etc). Firefox is the king in the area. But if you do not like the default webbased interfaces, you can use other applications like:

* Choqok: New KDE twitter and identi.ca client. * Kopete: The KDE client now has additional support for Facebook IM protocol. * Social plasmoids: KDE 4.3 comes with plasmoids for Twitter/identi.ca and openDesktop.

Many major releases of GNU/Linux are coming shortly and this new roundup includes OpenSUSE.

Novell's Duncan Mac-Vicar writes about third-party repositories, Sascha Manns writes about Skrooge packages, and one less familiar blogger writes about wallpapers for the distribution.

openSUSE was not having rpms for this package. So I went ahead and created a build-service project for this. Go GRAB The RPM :-) (1-click install)

Katarina Machalkova finds OpenSUSE very easy.

More OpenSUSE

OpenSUSE Weekly News may contain a lot more information and there is now an accompanying audio. Sascha Manns is trying to grow the team and he also needs help with other projects, such as OpenSUSE-Medical. It seems somewhat new and rather similar to/reminiscent of the Linux for Education project, whose site says:

Welcome to the GNU/Linux Educational Server. Here you will find collections of useful courses to help you better use the applications found on the Linux distributions. There are also forums, chatrooms, courses, and help materials at your disposal.

At the front page it states: "This site is generously sponsored by openSUSE-Education project."

That's actually a positive contribution from Novell.

SUSE (SLES/SLED)

Here is a somewhat scripted and cocky new video from Ron Hovsepian, Novell's CEO. We've seen more of this type of videos recently -- ones where Novell seniors publicly suck up to Intel.



Last week we wrote about Novell and Teradata. This relationship still carries on in the following article:

The use of the Teradata software on EC2 is free and good for working with up to one terabyte of data. Teradata runs under Novell Suse Linux Enterprise Server 10.

There is also some chatter about SP3 of SLE*, despite being old news by now.

Samsung

Samsung, which signed a Microsoft patent deal similar to Novell's, is still receiving some press for its Microsoft-taxed Linux phones. Some reporters love comparing everything to Apple, which is the wrong thing to do because the target markets are very different.

The 360 service replaces the current Vodafone Live! service and also allows users to back up the entire contents of their phone online, configure the phone's home screen and manage contacts - in a similar way to Windows Phone's My Phone service or MobileMe on the iPhone. It will be available across the Vodafone range, and to users on other networks too. Vodafone also confirmed that an iPhone app is in the pipeline.

Apple/iPhone is currently being sued by a company that makes Linux-powered smartphones. ⬆