Summary: OpenSUSE news from the past week, as summarised above

Events

No major event has occurred, but looking at some SUSE blogs we find that Roger saw Novell presenting at UKUUG.

John Collins spoke on GNUBatch, and Matt Berringer of Novell did a great talk on SUSE Studio.

Wafaa writes about the OpenSUSE community or communities in general and an analysis of the OpenSUSE community is Russia has been published with some numbers.

The reason for the high popularity of this distribution in Germany is of course the fact that the German SuSE distribution and the main branch of development is located in Nuremberg. Popularity in the U.S. is due Novell – an American company, and of course the language is English. But why are so many people in Russia choosing openSUSE?

Releases

KIWI-LTSP has been updated, the second beta of OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 has been added to the repositories, and the fourth milestone of OpenSUSE 11.3 continues to receive some coverage [1, 2]. OpenSUSE Beego was also announced, but it's not used by many people yet.

...the openSUSE distribution is the perfect base for specialized projects focusing on a certain area of application. Today, I am happy to announce the start of the openSUSE Beego project and ask you to join in and help to bring it to a success, because we rely on your support and enthusiasm.

Reviews

The only thing close to being a review is this comparison of educational distributions. It includes LTSP and OpenSUSE Li-F-E.

At any rate, I was looking for the equivalent of the old Edubuntu distributions that included both a fully functioning and incredibly easy LTSP configuration and lots of great software for kids. LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project) is now included on the Alternate CDs for Ubuntu and a trial platform is included on the Live DVD of Li-F-E. Actually getting it running in production on OpenSUSE? That requires a bit more configuration. Edubuntu? It’s an add-on now that supplies quite a bit of educational software, much like the extra layers in Li-F-E. As with Li-F-E, the cool server-oriented software doesn’t work as well out of the box as the desktop applications.

Technical

Novell's Kohei Yoshida tests OpenOffice.org on OpenSUSE and meets a former colleague in the comments (involved in another part of another 'office suite'). Here is someone explaining how to migrate to OpenSUSE 11.3 Milestone 4.

This brief tuto€­r€­ial will show you one of the many meth€­ods to upgrade to open€­SUSE 11.3 Mile€­stone 4, but it is highly rec€­om€­mended that you do not upgrade a pro€­duc€­tion sys€­tem or your default work€­sta€­tion since the oper€­at€­ing sys€­tem is still being tested. The final release of the oper€­at€­ing sys€­tem will be some€­where around July of 2010.

Here is something about Kdump in OpenSUSE and also an insight into upgrades to the newly-released KDE 4.4.2.

Here i am with another tutorial of upgrading KDE in openSUSE11.2. KDE4.4.2 is released and available for installation in openSUSE Factory repo.

Masim has several more HOWTOs involving OpenSUSE or SLES as a server and there are few other HOWTOs we could find that are OpenSUSE specific [1, 2, 3].

Leftovers

The 116^th weekly newsletter is out and so is the audiocast. RadioTux is now celebrating its birthday and as people (volunteers) attempt to sort out the planet site after long downtime [1, 2], error pages are found which need a decent remedy.

Just posting this into the wild, as it seems that most people don't know about it: there is a wiki page where we try to concentrate/summarize all the contact addresses in case something goes wrong (e.g. IRC cloak, member email alias, Build Service down, etc...).

So, here it is: http://en.opensuse.org/FAIL

Most addresses there are @opensuse.org, but the site is "Founded by Novell". ⬆