Summary: Scraps of news about OpenSUSE, which is still looking for direction and organising an annual event

Greg Kroah-Hartman, allegedly one of the men behind OpenSUSE^*, recently gave this talk at a LinuxCon 2010 conference in Tokyo. Kroah-Hartman has not been closely involved in OpenSUSE for several years and his talks too have nothing to do with it (this one is about "The Stable Linux Kernel Tree, Delivering a Stable Platform on a Constantly Moving Base").

We have been struggling to find OpenSUSE news recently, with the exception of the anticipated OpenSUSE Conference (OSC), which will include keysigning, appliances (many new examples of that, e.g. [1, 2, 3]), and lots more. We wrote about the OSC some days ago and on October 12^th Michael Löffler made this call, amongst others:

Just one week to go untill the openSUSE conference opens its doors. We moved all Birds of a Feather (Bof) sessions and workshops out of the conference tool into the wiki.

OpenSUSE 11.4 is coming along all right but there is not much coverage and Andreas Jaeger is trying to establish a good board with new rules, for example:

Members of the openSUSE board shall act on behalf of all openSUSE contributors in the best interest of the openSUSE project. Although board members may be affiliated with companies or organizations that have an interest in the success of openSUSE, they will not be considered representatives of the companies or organizations with which they are affiliated.

Jos Poortvliet too is trying to sort things out while contributors seemingly grow more scarce and the project decreasingly organised, still with some isolated contributions [1, 2] like this audiocast. Back in the days Novell did a lot of exciting work on SUSE, especially before selling out to Microsoft. Examples included the 'start' menus for KDE and GNOME and even Compiz. Not much has happened since then, but the subject is still being kicked around:

This is the third part of the series of articles that analyse the possibilities of start menus and new ideas to do for the openSUSE project.

Well, not much has changed for a long time. Novell did most of the work around 2006 (maybe 2005) and since then the major contributions probably came from Lancelot and maybe Raptor, which did not quite materialise. Then there's GNOME Shell (which became more necessary when SUSE neglected its KDE tradition). ⬆ ___ ^* According to the OpenSUSE Web site, Kroah-Hartman is/was "the current maintainer of the 11.0 openSUSE kernel package." Readers have told us that it's him who came up with the idea of creating OpenSUSE about 5 years ago, but we cannot confirm this.