Summary: OpenSUSE events, a new project "milestone", and assorted bits from the past two weeks

AS we migrated the Web site last week, no posts were made that summarise Novell's progress (or lack thereof). The Easter vacation contributed to that. So today's summary embodies news from the past fortnight, not a single week.

The main news would probably be OpenSUSE 11.3 Milestone 5, but we'll start with a focus on events.

Events

Novell’s Brainshare is recalled in the following post about "Zypper Revolution"; it's about system/package management.

I have been going over customer feedback from Novell’s Brainshare conference for my internal “Systems Management Zeitgeist” report, and there are a couple of points I just had to share with you all as they are plain simply inspirational.

OpenSUSE conference 2010 is being planned with anticipation in India and over in Nicaragua something similar is being prepared.

The folks of the openSUSE Community in Nicaragua, are preparing a great event in the city of Granada, Nicaragua, in Central America.

In Indonesia there is this OpenSUSE Community Web site.

Indonesian openSUSE Community website has been activated since July 2007 and provide news update, information, tutorial, tips & trick regarding openSUSE using Bahasa Indonesia as main language. I think it would be better to provide a major changes & improvement for main site, especially for content integration and daily update.

From another conference come many videos, such as the talks from Lenz Grimmer, Zonker, Klaas Freitag, Benjiman Weber & Pascal Bleser, and Katarína Machálková (whom we mentioned earlier today). Here is how the OpenSUSE Web site explains it:

Well it’s been almost seven months since our inaugural conference, and there were a load of videos taken.

[...]

Currently only Day 1 of the conference is available, you can view online (flash) or download (ogg) the talks from the openSUSE TV channel on BlipTV. I am working on getting a channel on YouTube to enable a wider reach, as some people have bandwidth issues with Blip. You can also subscribe to the feeds in multiple formats – rss, miro, itunes.

Wafaa still blogs about the OpenSUSE community and communities in general [1, 2]. The OpenSUSE community is considered to be very cohesive.

Reviews

We have not found a single review of OpenSUSE, but someone who moved from OpenSUSE 11.2 to Kubuntu 9.10 wrote about this decision in comparative terms, such as:

Ubuntu also has local mirrors in Australia, and I have always found these to be very fast. Updates and package installs are handled with no fuss whatsoever. No lockups, no problems. It just downloads the files (several at a time) and then installs them. I am never left with a broken system, or if for some reason I am, I can select "fix broken packages" from within Synaptic and the problem is then rectified. I do not recall if zypper has such a feature.

A new review of CrossOver 9.0 for GNU/Linux was based on OpenSUSE:

All tests were run in an openSUSE 11.2 Virtual Machine with 1GB RAM.

Technical

In a new guest post, Rares Aioanei explains Linux inside OpenSUSE while another person from OpenSUSE writes about "openSUSE 11.3 and SELinux" as follows:

The first step was to bring the next milestone of 11.3 to the level of 11.2 by adding load_policy to the mkinitrd scripts. The patch was submitted to Base:System a few hours ago. This work-around was needed because we switched to upstart which does not contain native C API calls to libselinux to load the policy from within init.

The next step fixed the file permissions of /etc/selinux/config to be 644 and to add some functionality to the selinux-ready script. Both are in security:SELinux now and on their way to opensuse:Factory.

OpenSUSE was one of the earliest distributions to incorporate SELinux.

More OpenSUSE-hosted or OpenSUSE-specific HOWTOs from April would be:

1. openSUSE 11.1 / SLES11 and add-ons
2. How to Configure clear and smooth fonts (subpixel rendering) in OpenSuSe Linux
3. Install ATi Drivers on OpenSUSE
4. Installing VirtualBox on openSUSE 11.2
5. Installing Ruby 1.9 on openSUSE 11.2
6. Samba 3.5.2 SMBTA v2 enabled packages releasedRuby 1.9 on openSUSE and SLEx
7. Call for testing: unzip feature
8. Small script to monitor service/process

Leftovers

Issue 117 of OpenSUSE Weekly News has been released along with an audiocast [1, 2, 3]. The same goes for the 118^th issue [1, 2, 3], whose author, Sascha Manns, keeps packaging software for OpenSUSE [1, 2, 3]. Progress has generally been slow recently, but OpenSUSE 11.3 Milestone 5 is out, so the project carries on, regardless of Novell's fate (Novell is up for sale). ⬆