03.20.10
Novell News Summary – Part I: FLISOL 2010, Linux Tage 2010, and OpenSUSE 11.3 Milestone 3
Summary: Another restful week for “Geeko” and some news from events that featured OpenSUSE
THE coming week promises to be packed with events, but this week was a quiet one for OpenSUSE.
Events
FLISOL 2010 took place in Venezuela and OpenSUSE was there.
The Latin American Festival of Installation of Free Software (Festival Latinoamericano de instalación de Software libre) will be held this year in over 90 cities throughout the region, including at least 19 Venezuelan 19 cities, bringing together much of the community of users and developers of open technologies in the country.
Sirko writes about this event as well.
A few weeks ago as I did this comic here I wrote at the same time to all openSUSE Amabassadors from Latin America a mail to participate in Flisol.
More from Sirko (about another event):
For the openSUSE the event was good and not so good. First Jan asked me for the registration process and I answered him he can use me as the second person that is needed for the process.
Jan Weber was at Chemnitzer Linux Days representing OpenSUSE along with a few others.
This weekend, as mentioned in my previous post, I visited the Chemnitzer Linux Days to run the openSUSE booth!
Jan and Sirko are both mentioned in this other entry from Petr Uzel — an entry about Chemnitzer Linux Days (Linux Tage) 2010.
Last weekend, I was boosting at Chemnitzer Linux Tage where we ran openSUSE booth with Jan Weber, Kai-Uwe Behrmann and Sirko Kemter. Jan and Sirko already wrote reports at their blogs, so I’ll add just some personal thoughts and remarks.
There’s also this new Novell video from Open Source Days 2010 (in Danish). It’s mostly about virtualisation.
The “boosters” got busy with some other projects, but presence at public events is sometimes tied to them.
In January, the Build Service squad of openSUSE Boosters worked to improve the openSUSE Build Service web client experience.
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The Boosters’ sprint resulted in a fully-featured web frontend, where the reviewer can check if a submitted package actually builds, the differences in the request, accept or reject with comment, and also immediately submit the changes onward to openSUSE Factory.
Releases
The next release of OpenSUSE is now in its third milestone and there is also OpenSUSE-LXDE. For some reason, it gets treated badly in the OpenSUSE Web site. All the posts about OpenSUSE-LXDE are rated very poorly and contain angry comments. Then there’s OpenSUSE Xfce, which is another lightweight option.
Reviews
Not many people have shared their experiences with OpenSUSE, but here is one person who alludes to it. He looks for something lighter.
As you know I am currently running OpenSUSE 11.2 on my laptop. While I have enjoyed my time using it, I have noticed that this particular distribution tends to be on the heavy side of memory usage. This got me thinking. If OpenSUSE uses this much memory on my machine, how could it possibly run on a machine with 512MB of RAM (the lowest recommended amount)? If Ubuntu is the most popular distribution, but it is also, what I would call, a fully-fledged desktop distribution, then how does it manage given tighter memory constraints? And so the mini-experiment begins.
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Conclusion
Make you own! …well it is pretty obvious that some of these distributions would perform better than others given these low system specs. There are however other things to consider. For example which packing type you prefer, or for that matter which package manager.
Another blogger explains “why you should switch to OpenSuse”:
I can’t understand why some people are ‘afraid’ of using Linux. Few of them still think that it is command line based operating system used by programmers. But this is not true. Any popular Linux distribution (I recommend OpenSuse or Ubuntu for beginners) is a GUI based desktop operating system. In fact, the advantage is that you still have the command line if you want to perform advance level tasks.
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In this edition, I am also going to cover a simple installation guide for the latest release of OpenSuse so that beginners can easily switch to the Operating System (especially if you want to migrate from Windows platform to Linux). First of all, download the DVD image from this website and write it to a DVD.
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I have been using Linux for the past 7 years and I have tried many distributions (including the Damn Small Linux which comes in a CD image of size 50 MB). But, for the past 4 years I have been mostly using Ubuntu and Fedora. I liked Ubuntu very much since the community support for the project is very high. And it is based on another popular distribution Debian , which is very reliable.
Technical
Not much to see here this time. The beta of OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 has been made available to OpenSUSE users and someone explains how to install VLC. Another person has been having Okular problem in OpenSUSE.
Recently, poppler was having a bogus memory allocation bug. It had creeped into okular. Some pdf files were rendered okay; while some others flashed instantaneously and closed. The problem was on both of my systems openSUSE and Gentoo.
Speaking of KDE, Kraft 0.40 Beta 2 is available and OpenSUSE continues to receive decent treatment within the KDE community (it always did because of its roots, regardless of the default selection of a desktop environment in the installer).
Two days ago the KDE Plasma community announced that they are providing a live image of the Plasma Netbook Reference Platform. They provide this image to make it easy for all interested developers, users, journalists and geeks to check it out, work with, talk about and and improve it. The reference image is the result of an KDE effort utilizing the openSUSE Buildservice and it’s based on the openSUSE distribution.
What does that mean for us the openSUSE community? First of all it makes us very happy and proud.
Leftovers
The latest OpenSUSE Weekly News has been released and the OpenSUSE Web site is supposed to have universal search sooner or later.
During last two week I was among the other things investigating how to implement search through all openSUSE web pages.
It’s long overdue. The Wiki was getting overhauled as well. █
